Author: Redactor

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Townhall: The Democrats’ Domino Approach to Rights

In the face of terrorism and mass murder, some reach for their weapons — in self-defense.

Others reach . . . to take away our rights. Expanding on Friday’s thoughts, Your Column Sense columnist essays a new domino cascade, at Townhall.com. Click on over, then come back here, for more reading:

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Today

Slavery, Finland, Lolita

On December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, banning slavery in all states and territories.

In 1917 on this date, Finland declared independence from Russia.

Vladimir Nabokov completed his controversial novel Lolita on the Sixth of December in 1953, and would soon find himself embroiled in censorship and related publishing difficulties, though with no trouble in the United States when it was eventually published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958.

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Thought

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878-1886.

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video

Video: Dating, Demographics and Economics

What happens to civilization partly depends upon . . . dating?

Could be.

If successful men and women find themselves at an impasse in “the mating market,” and not producing children, the habits of success do not get passed to the next generation along with capital in the most natural and efficient way. And civilization itself can suffer. So, the perennial comedy of mate selection is no laughing matter:

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Thought

C. S. Lewis

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Preface, 1942.

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Today

Prohibition Ends

On December 5, 1933, nationwide alcohol Prohibition in the United States ended after Utah became the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75 percent of states needed to enact the amendment that overturned the 18th.

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Today

A Farewell to Arms

On December 4, 1783, at Fraunces Tavern in New York City, General George Washington formally bade his officers farewell.

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Thought

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.
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Today

Cold War Ends

On December 3, 1989, the leaders of the two world superpowers, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, declared an end to the Cold War, at a summit in Malta. A little over two years later not only had the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union was itself dissolved.

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Thought

Bono

“Aid is just a stop-gap. Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid. Of course we know that.”

Bono, at Georgetown University, reported by CBS News (see also this at Common Sense)