Thought for the Day...

"The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don’t-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy,...

Thought for the Day...

"These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the...

Thought for the Day...

 "If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds."

— Mortimer J. Adler

Birthdays:

1616 John Wallis 

1729 Antonio Soler:  Fandango L'Arpeggiata

1753 Samuel Crompton

1924 John Backus

Thought for the Day...

"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

— Milton Friedman

Birthdays:

1667 Michel Pignolet de Monteclair: La Mort de Didon

1835 Samuel Butler,

1913 Robert Adler

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED: Collateral Global

Thought for the Day...

"Most people are fairly compassionate and have good intentions (this is good)

As a result, most people deeply struggle to understand that some people, including our 'leaders', CAN have malicious or perverse intentions (this is bad)."

— Zuby

Birthdays:

1687 Francesco Geminiani: Sonata No. 5, op. 4 (1739): Andante-Presto

1848 Edwin Blashfield

1895 Elbert Frank Cox 

1946 José Carreras

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE,...

Thought for the Day...

"DON’T HURT PEOPLE, AND don’t take their stuff. That’s it, in a nutshell. Everyone should be free to live their lives as they think best, free from meddling by politicians and government bureaucrats, as long as they don’t hurt other people, or take other people’s stuff."

— Matt Kibbe

Birthdays:

1550 Orazio Tiberio Vecchi: Leva la man di qui

1642 Johann Christoph Bach: Lamento: Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte

1805 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin

1841 Frédéric...

Thought for the Day...

"Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work."

— Booker T. Washington

Birthdays:

1598 Gian Lorenzo Bernini 

1637 Bernardo Pasquini: Misero cor, and Sonata in do maggiore

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED: Collateral Global

TODAY IS DECEMBER 7. That Such Men Lived

Thought for the Day...

"A full belly is little worth where the mind is starved."

— Mark Twain

Birthdays:

65 BC Horace

1724 Claude-Bénigne Balbastre:  La Lugeac

1765 Eli Whitney

1861 Aristide Maillol

1865 Jean Sibelius: Finlandia

1926 Joachim Fest

1948 Jimmy Lai

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED: Collateral Global

Thought for the Day...

"Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society."

— Garry Kasparov

Birthdays:

1508 Gemma Frisius

1608 John Milton

1837 Émile Waldteufel: Les patineurs/The Skaters Waltz (op. 183)

1886 Clarence Birdseye 

1906 Grace...

Thought for the Day...

"Never leave a marine behind. Never."

— Elon Musk

Birthdays:

1691 Cornelis Pronk

1815 Ada Lovelace 

1822 César Franck: Panis Angelicus

1830 Emily Dickinson

1884 Zinaida Serebriakova

1907 Rumer Godden

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED: Collateral Global

Thought for the Day...

"In 1486, Torquemada sentenced the Spanish mathematician Valmes to be burned at the stake because Valmes had claimed to have found the solution of the quartic equation. It was the will of God, maintained the Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Office of the Inquisition Against Heretical Depravity, that such a solution was inaccessible to human understanding."

— Petr Beckman

Birthdays:

1566 Manuel Cardoso: Lamentatio

1676 Johann Georg Weichenberger: Suite ( d-...

Thought for the Day...

"I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well."

— Alexander the Great

Birthdays:

1685 Lodovico Giustini: Sonata number 6

1715 Gennaro Manna: Lezzione Terza del Venerdi Santo

1799 Karl Briullov

1821 Gustave Flaubert

1853 Johan Petter Johansson

1927 Robert Noyce

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and...

Thought for the Day...

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."

— Lao Tzu

Birthdays:

1797 Heinrich Heine

1836 Franz von Lenbach

1877 Mykola Leontovych: Shchedryk, shchedryk

1887 George Pólya

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED: Collateral Global

Thought for the Day...

"If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized."

— Lysander Spooner

Birthdays:

1546 Tycho Brahe

1640 Aphra Behn

1681 Giuseppe Valentini: Concerto grosso op. 7 Nr. 11 a-Moll, Largo - Allegro

1789 Maria Szymanowska: Nocturne in B flat Major

1824 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

1916 Shirley Jackson 

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington...

Thought for the Day...

"The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster."

— Ludwig von Mises

Birthdays:

1567 Christoph Demantius: Passion (21:40)

1610 David Teniers the Younger

1657 Michel-R...

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 –1827

Thought for the Day...

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

— Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Birthdays:

1770 Ludwig van Beethoven: Romance for Violin...

Thought for the Day...

"Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine."

— Ludwig van Beethoven

Birthdays:

1706 Émilie du Châtelet

1749 Domenico Cimarosa: Oboe Concerto in C minor: I- Introduzi, and "Il maestro di cappella"

1797 Joseph Henry

1807 John Greenleaf Whittier

1853 Émile Roux 

1881 Jan Sluyters

1908 Willard Libby

1920 Kenneth E. Iverson

1929 William Safire

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The ...

Thought for the Day...

"Moreover, in the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would never be, as it is now, on "society's" jailing the criminal; the emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim of his crime. The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed but instead has to pay taxes to support the incarceration of his own attacker — would be evident nonsense in a world that focuses on the defense...

Thought for the Day...

"Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he'll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister."

— Su Tung-p'o, 1036 - 1101 AD

Birthdays:

1036 Su Tung-p'o

1676 Louis-Nicholas Clerambault:  Grand plein jeu

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declarati...

Thought for the Day...

"The road to wisdom?
-- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less."

— Piet Hein

Birthdays:

1594 Giovanni Battista de Gagliano: Pupille Arciere

1629 Pieter de Hoogh

1729 Franz Xaver Thomas Pokorny: Clarinet concert n. 1

1868 Harvey S. Firestone

1906 Irving Krick

Miscellany:

FOCUSED PROTECTION: The Great Barrington Declaration+

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE: Declaration of Canadian Physicians...