Fourth of July

Democracy: how else can so many unqualified and irresponsible persons decide how other people, nearly all of them complete strangers, must live their lives?--Higgs


Archer is beginning to really bother me. That said, the Pirates have been really fun lately.
Chris and I had dinner at Mineo's.
Big sky with Jupiter and Saturn last night.
Beautiful 1950's morning but the clouds are moving in.

Trump is going to militarize the Fourth in D.C. in an effort to shore up the poignancy that has been lost.
."Donor-advised funds" provide an immediate, supercharged tax write-off for donors who have some assets that have appreciated, allowing them to avoid paying a capital gains tax while also providing a deduction as if they had donated their money to a charity directly. The donations are housed at either Wall Street institutions like Fidelity or community foundations like SVCF — and these institutions technically control the fund, but there’s no legal requirement that the money actually be spent in the donors’ lifetimes.
There is some fuss about these but most looks to be sound and fury. It doesn't look much different from most directed charities to me.

Saudi Arabia said Wednesday that hip-hop star Nicki Minaj will perform in the ultraconservative kingdom as it sheds decades of restrictions on entertainment and leaps from oppression to bad taste in one month.

Mike Godwin coined an adage that stated: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Since then Godwin’s law has served as a useful reminder that whenever a comparison to Hitler or Nazis is made, the discussion is over and the one making such comparison loses. 

When did "homeless" become a synonym for "crazy" and "addled?" 

It is the distinction between the public and the private spheres of life. On this distinction, freedom depends. About this, progressivism says: Never mind. Government should undertake to “level the playing field.” This recurring phrase is revealing: Playing fields are leveled by bulldozers, which are not nice emblems of government. The result of government’s equalizing aspirations is a paradox – power wielded by elites claiming expertise in the manufacture of equality.--Will 

Question of the day: Do compasses work in Faraday Cages?

Insects race humans to extinction! "Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, a review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century. “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,”study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian."

Justin Amash (R–Mich.) has left the Republican Party and become an independent. He said this in explanation: "The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions." He acts as if this is some new and provocative insight. This concern has been around since the Federalist and the Anti-Federalists. Of course parties are in self-centered opposition to the nation's interests. Everyone knows this. If he thinks this is a new thought, he's too dumb to offer an opinion.
Here's another of his insights: "The founders envisioned Congress as a deliberative body in which outcomes are discovered. We are fast approaching the point, however, where Congress exists as little more than a formality to legitimize outcomes dictated by the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader."

                              Fourth of July

America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please.--Will

Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος would make them equal. --Arendt

The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.--Thacher



Jay Leno had a recurring skit where he asked questions to passers-by on the street--questions most people think are rather simple and obvious. He asked several people what the Fourth of July celebrated, when independence was declared and who the country separated from. Of course the results were embarrassing to most of those interviewed. One was particularly interesting. A college instructor knew nothing about the Revolution at all, thought it occurred in the 1920's and thought China might have been involved.

A survey published recently said that 27% of people questioned did not know the American Revolution was waged against the British.

When I was a child in the 50's, the Fourth of July was a great event. The kids decorated their bikes, small local parades were held--every community had some commemoration and the larger communities had fireworks. It was unlike other secular events like Thanksgiving which were delightfully family oriented; this was a commonly held social event. It was a birthday party. And it was heartfelt. Everyone felt that years ago something of value had been accomplished, something special in the world created. There was a glow.

When Obama was first campaigning he was asked about American Exceptionalism. (The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.")

The phrase has been used since by those who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) Obama saw a trap--it would not do to talk of "exceptionalism" when we want all people to be the same, all nations indistinguishable. So he hedged and said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He, unlike those Americans of just a generation or two ago, does not think that America is unique.

Unique. If that element is lost in this country a lot has been lost. So, buy a small flag. Decorate your bike.