It was a busy day today – I’m bushed.
When I excavated for my shop, I put the spoil pile along the fence row behind the shop.
In the last update, I had started hanging the plywood walls in the workroom. It was rapidly taking on a ’70s vibe by the time I got the last of it up.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”
~Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I.
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and, of course, became poorer. And on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many almshouses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor. Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful? And do they use their best endeavors to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burden? On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent [England in 1766].”
~Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin
“One day you will get to an age that you will wonder what your parents were really like and how they thought and you will want to really understand why they did what they did and how their experiences taught them to view the world in the way that it did. You would like to talk things over as you face problems to see how they might have approached it.
But you can’t. Because they are not there anymore.”
~seen online
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
~President Eisenhower, 1961 Farewell Address