Author: Redactor

Charles Ives

There is a moral in the ‘Nominalist and Realist’ that will prove all sums. It runs something like this: No matter how sincere and confidential men are in trying to know or assuming that they do know each other’s mood and habits of thought, the net result leaves a feeling that all is left unsaid; for the reason of their incapacity to know each other, though they use the same words. They go on from one explanation to another but things seem to stand about as they did in the beginning ‘because of that vicious assumption.’ But we would rather believe that music is beyond any analogy to word language and that the time is coming, but not in our lifetime, when it will develop possibilities unconceivable now, — a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.

Charles Ives, in Essays Before a Sonata (1920).

Today

“Lord Mountjoy”

The American taxpayer has always been deceived: it is his birthright.

Lord Mountjoy, in Mouse on the Moon. The passage in the original Leonard Wibberley novel runs as follows:

The American taxpayer’s government has been deceiving him for years, lending money to South American dictators, for instance, which the taxpayer thought was being spent on South American peasants. Besides, his own Secretary of State agrees with the deceit. He knows that it is good for the American taxpayer. And it is good for him.

Today

Remember the Maine

On Feb. 15, 1898, the USS Maine, a battleship, exploded in the Cuba’s Havana harbor, killing 260 American sailors. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March 1898 that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly blaming Spain. Nonetheless, Congress declared war and, within three months, the U.S. had decisively defeated Spanish forces. On December 12, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed between the U.S. and Spain, granting the United States its first overseas empire with the ceding of such former Spanish possessions as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine or act of sabotage.

links

Townhall: Aspirational Involuntary Servitude

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 14, 2016
No Comments on Townhall: Aspirational Involuntary Servitude

Equality of rights under the law is no excuse for equality of tyranny. Click on over to Townhall.com for the full column. Come back here for more information and opinion:

ABC News: GOP Debate Question on Draft Registration for Women
Politico: Cruz – Drafting women is ‘nuts’
VIDEO: 2008 Campaign – Clinton FOR Registering Women
VIDEO: 2016 Campaign – Clinton Unsure on Registering Women
VIDEO: The George W. Bush You Forgot (2000 Debate)
San Diego Union-Tribune: Carter urges Congress to reconsider draft registration
New York Times: Draft Registration for Women Would Stir a Sleepy Government Agency
The Hill: Lawmakers offer bill requiring women to register for draft
The Hill: Bill introduced to end the draft
Townhall: “Draft the Congress and Leave My Kid Alone” – Paul Jacob
United States of America v. Paul Jacob
Washington Post: “Don’t make women register … end draft registration for everyone” – Christopher Preble
Liberty.me: “End, Don’t Extend, Draft Registration” – Sheldon Richman
Hoover: “Time to End Draft Registration” – David R. Henderson
Garrison Center: “Just Say No to Draft Registration for Women — and Men” – Thomas Knapp
FEE: “Generals Want Women to Register … Let’s Abolish It” — Ilya Somin
Anti-War.com: “End Draft Registration – Now!” – Justin Raimondo
VIDEO: Julie Browoski — “Less Oppression, Not Equal Oppression”
VIDEO: Ron Paul on Conscription
Common Sense: Junk the Law
National Review: Senator Mike Lee Pushes to Definitively Bar Women from the Draft
The Hill: Most women oppose registering for the draft
National Review: Only a Barbaric Nation Drafts Its Mothers and Daughters into Combat

Thought

Walter Bagehot

“[T]here is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to differ from their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork — part resemblance, part contrast. In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it suits them or not. In that case the community feel that this custom is the only shelter from bare tyranny, and the only security for what they value.”

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

Today

St. Valentine’s Day

On Feb. 14, 278 A.D., Valentine, a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. In order to facilitate the raising of an army for his unpopular military campaigns, the emperor outlawed all marriages and engagements. Valentine defied Claudius’s order and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. Once discovered, Valentine was arrested and condemned by the Prefect of Rome to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14. Valentine was named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church after his death.

Though February 14th is celebrated as “St. Valentine’s Day,” in today’s vernacular, the 14th of February, 278, was, ahem, “not his day.”

video

Video: Less Oppression, Not Equal Oppression

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 13, 2016
No Comments on Video: Less Oppression, Not Equal Oppression

Julie Borowski on registering for the draft:

Today

Galileo’s Heresy

On Feb. 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In April, Galileo pled guilty before the Roman Inquisition in exchange for a lighter sentence. Put under house arrest indefinitely by Pope Urban VIII, Galileo spent the rest of his life at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, before dying in 1642.

Thought

Walter Bagehot

“The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.”

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

Thought

Irving Fisher

“[T]here are three great disturbers of monetary standards: Governmental policies — especially but not exclusively in war time; banking policies usually linked with the Governmental; and fluctuations in gold production.”

Irving Fisher, The Money Illusion (1928).