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April 11, 2019 588 × 694 Attacking the past for failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.

Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité

A walk on the beach

Josée Delcroix, Drawing, Paris 1954

The Constitution and its Articles were adopted into the United States on September 17, 1787 during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The Articles of The Constitution work to establish the branches of the federal government and describe what powers they have.

Article 1 gives Congress its powers and limits. Congress is the branch of the government who can make laws for the country. Article 1 also creates the two sections of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Article 2 makes the executive branch of the government. The Executive branch has the responsibility and authority for the administration on a daily basis. In the United States, the executive branch is made up of the President and executive officer

Article 3 creates a judicial branch in the United States. The Judicial branch is the court system that interprets the law. In the United States, the judicial branch includes the Supreme Court and the lower courts which are made by Congress.

Article 4 talks about the states. Article 4 talks about what responsibilities and duties the states have along with what responsibilities the federal government has to each States.

Article 5 says that the only way the Constitution can be changed is by adding an amendment.

Article 6 says that any debts or engagements that the country had before adopting the Constitution are still valid. Article 6 also says that the Constitution is the highest law and that all officers and judges have to uphold the Constitution.

Article 7 is the final article of the Constitution. This article explains how many states need to ratify the Constitution.

The Cosmos as seen from an observatory in Hawaii.

The map shows roughly 800 million stars in the neighborhood of the Milky Way. At first, it looks like a planet: dark, snow-speckled and slashed down the center by a deep red scar. But zoom in a little closer, and you realize you’re looking at something much larger than a planet — larger even than 100 billion planets. Hidden within this mosaic image of the Milky Way (that’s the big, red smear in the middle) and its near cosmic neighborhood are the more than 800 million stars, galaxies and roving interstellar objects visible from the Pan-STARRS mountaintop observatory in Maui, Hawaii.

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. And because everyone has always died, we live under the “death and taxes” assumption that death is inevitable. We think of aging like time—both keep moving and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. But that assumption is wrong. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. The fact is, aging isn’t stuck to time. Time will continue moving, but aging doesn’t have to. If you think about it, it makes sense. All aging is is the physical materials of the body wearing down. A car wears down over time too—but is its aging inevitable? If you perfectly repaired or replaced a car’s parts whenever one of them began to wear down, the car would run forever. The human body isn’t any different—just far more complex. —Richard Feynman

The Free Trade of Ideas

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States :. “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he wrote. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.

Hokusai, Japanese Artist, (1760 – 1849)

In a postscript to his work, Hokusai writes: “ From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. ”

Free Trade in Ideas

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States is a touchstone. “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he wrote. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

The United States, now a segregated class society.

I now believe that the United States is evolving into a segregated class society in which the remaining remnants of the original American project—limited government, free people running their own lives, communities solving their own problems—will soon have been lost altogether. Charles Murray. 10/15/2014

We’re just one among millions

There are thought to be somewhere between 5 million and 100 million species of plants and animals on Earth, of which 2 million have been identified. We're one of these.

Umberto Eco, If I were to rule the world

Men are religious animals. Dogs are not religious. It’s true they bark at the moon but it’s probably not because of religion. Humans have the tendency to search for the reason in their situations. There is a beautiful sentence attributed to GK Chesterton: “When men don’t believe in God any longer, it is not that they believe in nothing; they believe in everything.”
The ruler of the world can’t eliminate religion. You can be an atheist or a non-believer, but you have to recognise that the great majority of humans need some religious beliefs.

Prospect Magazine, December 2015

“Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi

The Earth is Weeping

They came on horses and with guns, a martial culture overrunning a more peaceful one unprepared to meet the fight. It was a stunning and successful invasion over a short period of time. The invaders treated the indigenous people as barely human. They committed unspeakable acts of brutality. Those not massacred fled from their homeland, never to return. The invaders were the Lakota, a Siouxan tribe who swept west in the 1700s, taking for themselves the most prized hunting grounds throughout the Great Plains. Or, to put it in the words of one of their chiefs, “These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of Indians.” Peter Cozzens, NR, 1/17

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow.” Mahatma Gandhi

‘DARWIN’S THEORY IS THE SINGLE GREATEST IDEA ANY HUMAN BEING HAS CONCEIVED, Daniel Dennett

Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998

You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.

“now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell”

“I SEEM to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Those words, ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction for sex, by any scientist today.

The discipline of natural science that Newton helped found in the second half of the 17th century has extended humanity’s horizons to a degree he could scarcely have envisaged. Newton lived in a world that thought itself 6,000 years old, knew nothing of chemical elements or disease-causing microbes, believed living creatures could spring spontaneously from mud, hay or dirty bed-linen, and had only just stopped assuming that the sun (and everything else in the universe) revolved around the Earth.

Yet even today, deep problems and deeper mysteries remain. Science cannot yet say how life began or whether the universe is but one of many. Some things people take for granted—that time goes forwards but never backwards, say—are profoundly weird. Other mysteries, no less strange, are not even perceived. One is that 96% of the universe’s contents pass ghostlike and unnoticed through the minuscule remaining fraction, which solipsistic humans are pleased to call “ordinary matter”. Another is how, after billions of years when the Earth was inhabited only by single-celled creatures, animals suddenly popped into existence. Perhaps the deepest mystery of all is how atoms in human brains can consciously perceive the desire to ask all of these questions in the first place, and then move other atoms around to answer them.
The Economist, August 7, 2015

Anti-Intellectualism ion American Life

One of the major virtues of liberal society in the past was that it made possible such a variety of styles of intellectual life—one can find men notable for being passionate and rebellious, others for being elegant and sumptuous, or spare and astringent, clever and complex, patient and wise, and some equipped mainly to observe and endure. What matters is the openness and generosity needed to comprehend the varieties of excellence that could be found even in a single and rather parochial society. Dogmatic, apocalyptic predictions about the collapse of liberal culture or the disappearance of high culture may be right or wrong; but one thing about them seems certain: they are more likely to instill self-pity and despair than the will to resist or the confidence to make the most of one’s creative energies. It is possible, or course, that under modern conditions the avenues of choice are being closed, and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another. It is possible; but in so far as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it is not to be so.
Richard Hofstadter, 1963

No Longer a Center-Right

Thomas Friedman would ask the candidates:
“Would you agree to raise the gasoline tax by 5 cents a gallon today so we can pay for our highway bill, now stalled in Congress over funding?”
Why, he asks, is this such a key question? And he answers because it cuts to the core of what is undermining the Republican Party today and, indirectly, our country: There is no longer a Republican center-right that would have no problem raising the gas tax for something as fundamental as infrastructure. Sure, there are center-right candidates — like Jeb Bush and John Kasich. But can they run, win and govern from the center-right when the base of their party and so many of its billionaire donors reflect the angry anti-science, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-minorities, anti-gay rights and anti-immigration views of the Tea Party and its media enforcer, Fox News? NYTimes, August 5, 2015

NATURAL SELECTION

The process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

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Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité