On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as the more famous Paul Revere’s.
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Sibyl’s Ride
Author: Redactor
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William J. Locke
We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.
William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905).
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Freedom Day
April 25 is celebrated as Freedom Day in Portugal.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists — I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
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Townhall: Bailed. Out?
A serious blow to Obamacare?
Over at Townhall, the prospect of a major U.S. government program self-destroying in front of out eyes.
What will we make of it? Click on over. Then come back here. For a few more assays:
- Obamacare Failures On the Rise by Michael Shannon | Friday, Apr 15, 2016 09:08 AM
- UnitedHealthcare Leaves Obamacare, Stock Rises (UNH) by Deborah DSouza | April 19, 2016
- Obamacare is in better shape than you think by Rick Newman | April 21, 2016 11:00 AM
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Congress’s Library
On April 24, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Eight years later to the day, the United States Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress.
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Harriet Tubman
I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in de old cabin quarter, wid de ole folks, and my brudders and sisters. But to dis solemn resolution I came; I was free, and dey should be free also; I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere.
Harriet Tubman, as quoted in Sarah H. Bradford, The Moses of Her People (1886).
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Video: Repeat the Failures of Somalia?
Not all talks need visual aids or a declamatory style. Here a scholar calmly looks at Somalia and sees repeated failure and cluelessness … on the part of our government, especially.
And now our foreign policy geniuses want to export from Somalia the very same policies that worked so poorly there!
CAUTION: The speaker here appeals to the facts and to reason. There is none of that excitement of the denunciatory spirit, so common on YouTube. No cheap thrills. This is for reasonable people.
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A Student Protest
On April 23, 1968, students at New York City’s Columbia University held a demonstration to protest military research and the condemnation of part of the neighboring Morningside Heights section of Harlem to make way for a new student gymnasium. The protest escalated into a week-long occupation of five campus buildings before police moved in. Some 712 students were arrested, and over 100 injured during the forcible eviction. After the university-ordered police response, a student strike shut down the campus for the rest of the semester.
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Immanuel Kant
On April 22, 1724, philosopher Immanuel Kant was born.
Aside from being the pre-eminent modern philosopher and originator of transcendental idealism, Kant was also a major figure of Enlightenment thought, a classical liberal, and the originator of the notion of the Categorial Imperative. He was an early and important astronomical theorist in his early career, but produced his greatest works towards the end of his life, including The Critique of Pure Reason and The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. He was also author of the 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.”
Arthur Schopenhauer is widely known as an admiring and astute critic of Kant’s thought, while philosophical opponents include Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. Kant’s approach to ethics continues to excite interest today, with some of the revival a result of the work of John Rawls.
Kant died on February 12, 1804, in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where he had lived the bulk of his life.