While down on the Mall after the ride, we also visited the Natural History Museum. I thought the dinosaur displays were fun, but my comrades inexplicably wanted to spend all their time in the fossils and gems section. Rocks are not nearly as exciting to me.
I will note that both of these museums had what they were pleased to call a "full security screening," which entailed me having to be front-and-back wanded after emptying my pockets at both locations -- even though I had fully disarmed before entering the building. These practices serve no purpose, I think, except to accustom citizens to the idea that they have to accept being subject to being treated as a potential criminal according to the demands of authority even when they are suspected of no crime, no warrant is possessed against them, and so forth.
What did they think I was going to do? Rob them at gunpoint and walk out with the Space Shuttle or a Tyrannosaur on my back? If you're worried about me shoplifting the Hope Diamond, you need to search me on the way out, not the way in.
You might say, "Well, they are worried about mass shootings," and perhaps they are; however, the data show that armed citizens are much more effective at stopping such shootings than police, with fewer wrong people getting shot to boot. There's no rational reason for the government to treat American citizens as a threat except to accustom citizens to the idea of subjugation.
More impressive to me than the planes, rockets, gyrocopters and other flying machines was listening to my son talk about them. I had no idea he knew so much about, well, anything at all. But he would lecture freely about almost every plane we passed, and with such knowledge that at one point a listener asked him about the contents of the collection as if he were an employee. "Oh, look! That's Fw 190, one of the 20mm variants. They..."
He went on for four hours like this. I've never seen him so excited. I was exhausted by the end but he seemed as fresh as when we first arrived.
President Trump’s Memorial Day address opened by reflecting on the power that drives sacrifice—not politics, but something far deeper.“Great poets have written that it's love which moves the sun and the stars,” he said.“But here on the sacred soil, right where we are, we're reminded that it's love which moves the course of history and moves it always toward freedom. Always.”
Emphasis added. Great poets may have written that, but a great philosopher certainly did: the concept is from Aristotle's Metaphysics.
We know that God cannot cause movement by moving (Metaphysics 1072a26). If God did cause movement in this way, God would be susceptible to change, possess potentiality, and would not be the pure the energeia that Aristotle believes God must be. [Also, following Aristotle, Aquinas etc. -Grim] This is why God must cause movement through desire (Metaphysics 1072a27). An object of desire has the power to move other beings without itself moving....
The notion of movement through desire is straightforward. Which one of us has not been excited to move here or there by our desire for this or that? We might even suppose that desire is the primary source of all movement. Such an idea is entertained by Aristotle in De Anima: “It is manifest, therefore, that what is called desire is the sort of faculty in the soul which initiates movement” (De Anima, 433a31-b1).
Aristotle's basic account is that the soul that motivates the heavens has some capacity to perceive the eternal divine, and therefore loves it and longs to imitate it. The heavens cannot persist eternally in the same way, but they can move in a way that imitates eternity. This sort of motion is circular, because it begins and ends and begins again in the same place and continues in the same way. Thus, the way the stars and sun reel about forever in the heavens is motivated, he thought, by their longing to be like the divine they could perceive.
The insight the President is citing here wasn't meant as a kind of beautiful metaphor. Aristotle meant it quite literally: it is love that moves the sun, that moves the stars.
Good turnout this year.
UPDATE: AMVETS, one of the organizing groups for this event, sent this out: "To be clear, we had it in writing from the National Parks Service Permit Office that riders would be allowed the option at the end of the ride to continue on Independence Avenue and circle back behind the Lincoln Memorial to Henry Bacon Drive by the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial for a closing ceremony. We had crew on the ground at the intersection of Independence and 14th St. to ensure a roadblock was not erected before the run began. As our lead element in the run approached 14th, the escort police motor units turned wide and created a blockade, once again forcing everyone to turn left on 14th St.... We have requested, through the White House, a meeting with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who is responsible for the NPS."
Asquith was known for her outspokenness and acerbic wit. A possibly apocryphal but typical story has her meeting the American film actress Jean Harlow and correcting Harlow's mispronunciation of her first name – "No, no; the 't' is silent, as in 'Harlow'."
"Because I bow down to the sceptre, and because I take the words 'honour and obey' quite literally, you say that I am the slave of the symbol. But I bow down to the sceptre because I believe in the power that lies behind it. I keep to the smallest details of the marriage service because I believe in marriage. If you believe neither in the sceptre nor in the service, and yet bow down to them, then you are the slave of the symbol."
* * *
[As he was leaving the debate hall:] "A time will come--very soon--when you will find that you want this ideal of marriage. You will want it as something hard and solid to cling to in a fast dissolving society. You will want it even more than you seem to want divorce to-day. Divorce ..." and here, with a sort of groan, he thrust his second arm through his mackintosh--"the superstition of divorce."
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[9]
There's a little bit of ambiguity, but not much. "Killing members of the group" doesn't mean, say, two members: the DC shooting wasn't an act of "genocide" even though the shooter explicitly targeted these two Jews for their group-membership.
This can extend to very large numbers in cases of war in which two ethnic groups or national groups are fighting each other, because their intent is not to destroy each other as a group, only to win their war aims. I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.
Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.
The three royals are allowed to wear white in front of the Pope because they are Catholic Queens and Princesses.They are each one of only seven women in the world who have 'the privilege of the white' Рor the ability to wear white when meeting with the Pope.Called le privil̩ge du blanc in French or il privilegio del biacno in Italian, the special tradition is extended solely to designated Catholic queens and princesses and is reserved for important events at the Vatican, such as private audiences, canonisations, beatifications, and special masses.Normal protocol for papal audiences requires that ladies wear a long black dress with a high collar and long sleeves and a black mantilla.
An American woman can, of course, wear whatever she wants.
