Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
bad parenting........................
However, government's responsibility for the depression was not recognized—either then or now. Instead, the depression was widely interpreted as a failure of free market capitalism. That myth led the public to join the intellectuals in a changed view of the relative responsibilities of individuals and government. Emphasis on the responsibility of the individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control. The view that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent individuals from coercing one another was replaced by the view that government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of coercing some to aid others.
-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement
He is pretty focused..................
The central focus of this book is to explore another set of pathogens that are potentially as dangerous to the human condition: parasitic pathogens of the human mind. These are composed of thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, and mindsets that parasitize one's ability to think properly and accurately. Once these mind viruses take hold of one's neuronal circuitry, the afflicted victim loses the ability to use reason, logic, and science to navigate the world. Instead, one sinks into an abyss of infinite lunacy best defined as a dogged and proud departure from reality, common sense, and truth.
-Gad Saad, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
deprivation......................
Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Checking in with...........................
...................................Edward Gibbon:
Conversation enriches understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.
The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself
There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.
Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
Checking in with Will.......................
Toby. Approach, Sir Andrew. Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes; and "Deliculo surgere," thou know'st.*
Andrew. Nay, by my troth, I know not, but I know to be up late is to be up late,
Toby. A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not our lives consist of the four elements?
Andrew. Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
Toby. Th' art a scholar! Let us therefore eat and drink. Marian I say, a stoup of wine!
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III
*Ed. Note: Those of Shakespeare's time would have recognized Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est as "it is most beautiful to rise early.
Finding good advice where you can..........
The popularity of health books or "dietaries" attested to people's concern bout personal health, as did the sections on home remedies for the sick to be found in many cookbooks. The dietaries were comprised largely of advice on diet as related to health. Every edible thing was analyzed with relation to its effect on health. Those with "melancholicke" nature were advised to eat certain foods and avoid others; those of "cholericke" temperament were warned against foods that might increase their choler. Some foods were dangerous because they caused "bad blood"; still others could fill the body and head with "evil vapours." And some foods could "increase man's seed," a desirable thing, it may have seemed to many, since so many children died young.
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