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[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.
But while property is considered as the basis of the freedom of the American yeomanry, there are other auxiliary supports; among which is the information of the people. In no country, is education so general – in no country, have the body of the people such a knowledge of the rights of men and the principles of government. This knowledge, joined with a keen sense of liberty and a watchful jealousy, will guard our constitutions and awaken the people to an instantaneous resistance of encroachments.
–Noah Webster, On Education of Youth in America, 1790
We have lost our knowledge of our rights and how our government is supposed to work. We have fallen asleep.
Those gentlemen, who will be elected senators, will fix themselves in the federal town, and become citizens of that town more than of your state.
–George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
Prescient.
There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong…. In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right.
—James Madison, letter to James Monroe, 1786
We are a nation of laws, a republic. Not a mob-rules democracy.
Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.
A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression … that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.
There is one big truth that used to hold from sea to shining sea and is now most keenly apprehended here: an argument against the individual right to bear arms is an argument that the average American is incompetent to contend with the most fundamental moral questions of life, death, and justice. It is an argument that assumes ordinary people cannot be entrusted with democracy.
We’re learning more about the dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. It seems he amassed about $2 billion in personal fortune while president – and he was a socialist. Imagine how rich he could have been if he didn’t believe in redistribution of wealth.
Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. … Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? It is feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. …[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
I don’t mean to be dismissive of Blackberry’s efforts as a company but I know where my loyalties are, and it’s not with android or apple or any company. It boils down to this–I would never ever tell anyone I care about to consider these phones. So, that’s what I think about Blackberry’s new stuff.
For anyone under the age of 18, a stamp was used to send real paper letters from one place to another. They are not required for e-mail.
Postal Rates Increase for Stamps, Postcards | NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
Actual tagline from actual news story.
(via tbridge)
So it’s come to this, apparently.
A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves … and include… all men capable of bearing arms. … The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle.
Richard Lee, Federal Farmer LIII
The militia the Founders envisioned had nothing to do with the National Guard or Reserves.
Books as physical objects matter to me, because they evoke the past. A Métro ticket falls out of a book I bought 40 years ago, and I am transported back to the Rue Saint-Jacques on Sept. 12, 1972, where I am waiting for someone named Annie LeCombe. A telephone message from a friend who died too young falls out of a book, and I find myself back in the Chateau Marmont on a balmy September day in 1995. A note I scribbled to myself in “Homage to Catalonia” in 1973 when I was in Granada reminds me to learn Spanish, which I have not yet done, and to go back to Granada.
None of this will work with a Kindle. People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, not merely an electronic version, believe that the objects themselves are sacred. Some people may find this attitude baffling, arguing that books are merely objects that take up space. This is true, but so are Prague and your kids and the Sistine Chapel. Think it through, bozos.
If I wrote a story about an apprentice-wizard farmboy, an old wizard, a princess, a pirate, a dark knight and a talking bear, and there’s a dark castle and a mission to save the princess, the audience reaction to it is going to be based on how well executed the story is, not on how tired people might think the common plot elements are. Done wrong, it’s some bit of horrible pulp that rots on an assistant editor’s floor. Done right, it’s Star Wars.
Jim Butcher.
Just a reminder that it’s the story that matters, people. So, yes, count me in on Lucasfilm + Disney. Because maybe, just maybe, the movie of Colonel Indiana Jones of the OSS gets made now.
(via tbridge)I have money ready to spend RIGHT NOW on such a film.
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“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” Wisdom from Oscar Wilde, hand-lettered by Lisa Congdon (previously), who knows a thing or two about illustrating timeless life-advice.
