Friday Filosophy v.07.15.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.07.15.2022

Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, OM, GCMG, GCVO, KCB, KStJ, DL  22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941 was a British Army officer, writer, founder and first Chief Scout of the world-wide Scout Movement, and founder, with his sister Agnes, of the world-wide Girl Guide/Girl Scout Movement. Baden-Powell authored the first editions of the seminal work Scouting for Boys, which was an inspiration for the Scout Movement. 

Educated at Charterhouse School, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell successfully defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. Several of his books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training in his African years, were also read by boys. In August 1907, he held a demonstration camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp, which is now seen as the beginning of Scouting. Based on his earlier books, particularly Aids to Scouting, he wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Sir Arthur Pearson, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Scout Association.

The first Scout Rally was held at The Crystal Palace in 1909. Girls in Scout uniform attended, telling Baden-Powell that they were the “Girl Scouts”. In 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell started the Girl Guide and Girl Scout organization. In 1912 he married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to the Scout and Girl Guide movements until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. His grave is a national monument. 

  • Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.
  • Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.
  • The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.
  • Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.
  • Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.
  • Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one.
  • If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.
  • My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life – that is, to be happy.
  • If you make yourself indispensable to your employer, he is not going to part with you in a hurry no matter what it costs him.
  • The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.
  • Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.
  • An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.
  • When you want a thing done, ‘Don’t do it yourself’ is a good motto for Scoutmasters.
  • Erudition – that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic – is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.
  • It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

The Time is Now

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Friday Filosophy v.07.08.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.07.08.2022

Jacques-Yves Cousteau known as Jacques Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He helped create the Aqua-Lung, helped marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. He was also known He was also known as “le Commandant Cousteau” or “Captain Cousteau”.

He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau attended Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École Navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. After an automobile accident cut short his career in naval aviation, Cousteau changed to studying the sea.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).[source?]

On 12 July 1937 he married Simone Melchior (1919-1990), with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1991, after his wife Simone’s death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982), born during Cousteau’s marriage to his first wife.

On the morning of 25 June 1997, Jacques-Yves Cousteau died at his home in Paris, aged 87 from a heart attack. Despite rumors, encouraged by some Islamic publications and websites, Cousteau did not convert to Islam, and when he died he was buried in a Roman Catholic Christian funeral. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac in France. A street was named “rue du Commandant Cousteau” in a street which runs near his native house, where a commemorative plaque was affixed.

  • The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
  • Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
  • From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
  • When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.
  • No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
  • What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.
  • If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.
  • The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
  • However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.
  • I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.
  • If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.
  • It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.
  • Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
  • We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about – farming replacing hunting.
  • I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.
  • A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.

The Time is Now

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Friday Filosophy v.07.01.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.07.01.2022

John Maynard Keynes was born at 7 Melville Road, Cambridge, England. His father was John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at Cambridge University. His mother was Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. His younger brother, Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a surgeon and bibliophile (book lover). His younger sister Margaret (1890–1974) married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill.

Keynes first went to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1902. At first, he studied mathematics. Later he studied economics under A.C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall. People think Professor Marshall prompted Keynes to change his studies from mathematics and classics to economics. Keynes received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1908.

When Keynes was young, he had romantic and sexual relationships with men. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908. Keynes was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War. In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina. Keynes and Lopokova married in 1925. 

Keynes was a successful investor and he built up a big fortune. He nearly lost all of his money after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Later he re-built his fortune. He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton‘s papers. Bertrand Russell said Keynes was the most intelligent person he had ever known. Lord Russell said: “Every time I argued with Keynes, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool“. 

Keynes accepted a lectureship at Cambridge in economics funded personally by Alfred Marshall. Soon he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, where he was able to put economic theory into practice.

During World War I he worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions.

Keynes also attended the Conference on the Versailles Treaty to end World War I. He wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, and A Revision of the Treaty in 1922. In his books he said that the reparations which Germany was being made to pay would ruin the German economy and would lead to further fighting in Europe. These predictions were shown to be true when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Reparations were only completed in 2010.

Keynes’s magnum opus (Latin for “Great Work”, meaning his most famous book) was the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The General Theory was published in 1936. The ideas in that book were very different from classical economics.

Historians agree that Keynes influenced U.S. president Roosevelt’s New Deal, but disagree as to what extent. Spending more than the government earned in taxes (called deficit spending) was used in the New Deal from 1938. But the idea had been agreed to by President Herbert Hoover. Few senior economists in the U.S. agreed with Keynes in the 1930s. With time, however, his ideas became more widely accepted. 

In 1942, Keynes was raised to the House of Lords. He became Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex. When he sat in the House of Lords, he was a Liberal member.

During World War II, Keynes wrote a book titled How to Pay for the War. He said the war effort should be paid for by higher taxes. He did not like deficit spending because he wanted to avoid inflation. 

Keynes died of a heart attack at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex. His heart problems were made worse by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain. Keynes’ father, John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) outlived his son by three years. Keynes’s brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (born 1919) a physiologist; and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes did not have children.

  • The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
  • Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. 
  • By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. 
  • The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. 
  • For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. 
  • Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. 
  • Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. 
  • The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods. 
  • The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion. 
  • If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. 
  • I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. 
  • It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. 
  • Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. 
  • There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.06.24.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.06.24.2022

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an Anglo–American atheist, writer and debater. He wrote for various magazines including The Nation, Free Inquiry, Slate, and others. He was a supporter of the philosophical movement humanism.

Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation in 1970, he became a magazine writer. In 1982, he moved to Washington, D.C. In 1988, he learned from his grandmother that his mother was Jewish, but had kept her religion a secret. Hitchens remained an atheist and did not adopt any religious faith. He did not write about his religious views until his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. 

Hitchens tried to write from first-hand experience. To write his essays, he braved gunfire in Sarajevo, he was jailed in Czechoslovakia, and in 2008, he was brutally beaten in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2009, Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded. He wrote in Vanity Fair magazine, “If waterboarding does not constitute torture then there is no such thing as torture”.

Hitchens died of esophageal cancer. 

  • Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God. 
  • I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. 
  • Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy. 
  • I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat. 
  • One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? 
  • A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue. 
  • My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either. 
  • The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation. 
  • Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
  • You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can’t be English American. Why not? 
  • The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it. 
  • When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time. 
  • In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. 
  • I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators. 
  • Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So, when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‘Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.
  • My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.

The Time is Now

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Friday Filosophy v.06.17.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.06.17.2022

Alice O’Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum Russian: Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум .February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American writer, screenwriter, playwright and philosopher. 

She published several popular books in the United States during the mid-1900s, including her two best-selling novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, plus We the Living and Anthem. Her novels promoted a viewpoint of laissez-faire capitalism as a political and social goal. It is a kind of political philosophy known in the U.S.A. as libertarian conservatism. She called this philosophy ‘objectivism‘. 

Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and grew up during the Russian Revolution, in the years after World War I. She left Russia to visit relatives in Chicago in the United States when she was 21 years old. She did not want to return to live under Communism, and stayed in the US. She changed her name, partly to protect her family in Russia. Rand moved to California to become a movie writer.

Movies at the time did not have sound, and stories were mimed on camera. Dialogue was not important, so Rand could write simple stories while she improved her English language skills.

Rand met Frank O’Connor on a movie set, when they both appeared as extras. When O’Connor married Rand in 1929, she could live permanently in America. She later became an American citizen. O’Connor gave up his acting career, to work full-time so Rand could write full-time. Later he retired, when Rand’s work made a good income. He began painting late in his life. He died in 1979.

Rand was a longtime tobacco smoker. She had lung cancer, but she recovered from the disease after surgery. She died of cardiovascular disease in New York City on March 6, 1982.

  • A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
  • Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. 
  • The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. 
  • Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. 
  • The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity. 
  • We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. 
  • Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. 
  • Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. 
  • The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. 
  • Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
  • Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. 
  • Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. 
  • Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. 
  • Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
  • Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. 
  • Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason. 
  • Do not ever say that the desire to ‘do good’ by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. 
  • When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.06.10.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.06.10.2022

A Brief History of the Hawaiian Islands

  • 1,500 years ago:  Polynesians arrive in Hawaii after navigating the ocean using only the stars to guide them.
  • 1778:  Captain James Cook lands at Waimea Bay on the island of Kauai, becoming the first European to make contact with the Hawaiian Islands. Cook names the archipelago the “Sandwich Islands” after the Earl of Sandwich. A year later, Cook is killed at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii.
  • 1790:  The Battle of Kepaniwai was fought between forces from the island of Hawaii and Maui.
  • 1795:  Battle of Nuuanu takes place on the southern shores of Oahu. It was a key battle in Kamehameha’s campaign to unite the islands.
  • 1795-1874:  The Kamehameha dynasty reigns over Hawaii. 
  • 1810:  Kamehameha I unites the Hawaiian Islands. – See comments at the end. 
  • 1819:  Liholiho, son of Kamehameha, defies the tradition of men and women eating separately during a feast, which leads to the abolishment of the kapu (taboo) system. 
  • 1820:  The first missionaries arrive in Hawaii. 
  • 1820-1845:  Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom
  • 1835:  The first sugar plantation opens on Kauai. The Hawaiian Islands garner recognition for their prime agricultural land. Agriculture becomes a dominant economic force. 
  • 1836:  The “King’s Band,” is created by King Kamehameha III, becoming a staple of daily life. The band, presently called the “Royal Hawaiian Band,” continues to entertain audiences in Hawaii and around the world today. 
  • 1830s-1848:  The Great Mahele Kamehameha III sought to keep the land in Hawaiian hands by adopting a western allodial system with a new system that would divide the land into thirds – one-third to the Hawaiian crown lands, one-third to the chiefs, and one-third to the people.  In the end, the people received less than 1% as the law required land claims to be filed within two years under the Kuleana Act and many Hawaiians made no claim. This was largely because ownership of land was not a common concept. 
  • 1845:  Honolulu becomes the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom
  • 1850s:  With Hawaii’s plantation production on the rise, a need for more labor is realized. The first workers are recruited from China. Workers also make their way to the islands from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal. 
  • 1874:  William Charles Lunalilo dies leaving no heirs. The Kamehameha dynasty comes to an end. David Kalakaua is elected as Lunalilo’s successor. 
  • 1878:  Lydia Kamakaeha (later Queen Liliuokalani) pens “Aloha ‘Oe”
  • 1881:  King Kalakaua becomes the first monarch in history to circumnavigate the globe.
  • 1882:  Iolani Palace, the official residence of the Hawaiian monarchs, is completed. The Palace was ahead of its time outfitted with the most up-to-date amenities, before even the White House and Buckingham Palace, including the first electric lights in Hawaii, indoor plumbing and even a telephone. 
  • 1887:  The 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii is signed stripping King Kalakaua and therefore the Hawaiian monarchy of much of its authority, empowering the legislature and cabinet of the government. This became known as the Bayonet Constitution due to the force used to gain the King’s cooperation.
  • 1889:  Joseph Kekuku from Laie, Oahu invents the steel guitar. He later moves to the US Mainland to share his music with the rest of the world. Steel guitar becomes incredibly popular with country music and is still heard today.
  • 1891:  King David Kalakaua dies and Queen Liliuokalani takes the throne. 
  • 1893:  The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii begins. Queen Liliuokalani is placed under house arrest at Iolani Palace in Honolulu. 
  • 1898:  Hawaii is annexed by the United States through the Newlands Resolution.  
  • 1900: The Organic Act establishes the Territory of Hawaii.
  • 1901:  The first Waikiki hotel, The Moana Hotel, opens on March 11. The resort is affectionately named “The First Lady of Waikiki.”
  • 1917: Queen Liliuokalani, the last sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, passes away.
  • 1941:  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Oahu during World War II. 
  • 1945:  On September 2, 1945, Japan signs its unconditional surrender on the USS Battleship Missouri. Although the signing didn’t take place in Pearl Harbor, the ship is now part of museum and memorial complex at Pearl Harbor, offering activities and tours to visitors from all over the world
  • 1959:  August 21, 1959 – After a popular vote, Hawaii becomes the 50th State of the United States of America. 
  • 1966: Don Ho releases his signature song, “Tiny Bubbles.” The album makes the Billboard Top 20 and stays in the charts for nearly a year. His music and style become synonymous with Hawaiian leisure. 
  • 1978: The Hawaii State Constitutional Convention makes Hawaiian the state’s official language (the only state in the U.S. with a non-English official language).
  • 1980: Hawaii becomes the home of the NFL Pro Bowl when the AFC-NFC all-star game lands in Oahu’s Aloha Stadium. The Pro Bowl is hosted in Hawaii for 26 years, until 2017 when it moved to Orlando, FL. 
  • 1990: Kīlauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes located on the island of Hawaii, erupts sending lava through the town of Kalapana. While it destroyed the town, it also created a new coastline that extends nearly 1,000 feet farther into the Pacific Ocean.
  • 2009:  Senator Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Obama, who was the first African American to have served as president, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. 
  • 2011: Hawaii hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
  • 2013:  The Malama Honua Worldwide Voyage begins. The four-year voyage covered over 60,000 nautical miles, 100 ports, and 27 nations, including 12 of UNESCO’s Marine World Heritage sites. The mission was to take Hawaii’s iconic cultural sailing canoe Hokulea around the world and her sister canoe Hikianalia around the Pacific and the Hawaiian Islands, to grow a global movement toward a more sustainable world. The voyage sought to engage all – practicing how to live sustainably, while sharing Polynesian culture, learning from the past and from each other.
  • 2017:  Malama Honua Worldwide Voyage completes its journey. 

The Story of King Kamehameha I

A great warrior, diplomat and leader, King Kamehameha I united the Hawaiian Islands into one royal kingdom in 1810 after years of conflict. Kamehameha I was destined for greatness from birth. Hawaiian legend prophesized that a light in the sky with feathers like a bird would signal the birth of a great chief. Historians believe Kamehameha was born in 1758, the year Halley’s comet passed over Hawaii.

Given the birth name Paiea, the future king was hidden from warring clans in secluded Waipio Valley after birth. After the death threat passed, Paiea came out of hiding and was renamed Kamehameha (The Lonely One). Kamehameha was trained as a warrior and his legendary strength was proven when he overturned the Naha Stone, which reportedly weighed between 2.5 and 3.5 tons. You can still see the Naha Stone today in Hilo. 

During this time, warfare between chiefs throughout the islands was widespread. In 1778, Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii, dovetailing with Kamehameha’s ambitions. With the help of western weapons and advisors, Kamehameha won fierce battles at lao Valley in Maui and the Nuuanu Pali on Oahu. The fortress-like Puukohola Heiau on the island of Hawaii was built in 1790 prophesizing Kamehameha’s conquest of the islands. In 1810, when King Kaumualii of Kauai agreed to become a tributary kingdom under Kamehameha, that prophecy was finally fulfilled.

Kamehameha’s unification of Hawaii was significant not only because it was an incredible feat, but also because under separate rule, the Islands may have been torn apart by competing western interests. Today, four commissioned statues stand to honor King Kamehameha’s memory. Every June 11th, on Kamehameha Day, each of these statues are ceremoniously draped with flower lei to celebrate Hawaii’s greatest king.

Downtown Honolulu, Oahu 

The most recognized Kamehameha statue stands in front of Aliiolani Hale (the judiciary building) across from lolani Palace and a short walk from the eclectic art galleries and restaurants of Chinatown. Dedicated in 1883, this was actually the second statue created after the ship delivering the original statue from Europe was lost at sea.

Kohala, Island of Hawaii

The original statue was miraculously recovered and in 1912, the restored statue was installed near Kamehameha’s birthplace at Kapaau on the island of Hawaii. Visit North Kohala to see some of Hawaii’s most sacred places like Puukohola Heiau

National Statuary Hall, Washington D.C

In 1969, the third Kamehameha statue was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall where statues of historic figures from all 50 states are on display. A statue of Molokai’s Saint Damien joins the Kamehameha I statue in this amazing collection of art.

Hilo, Island of Hawaii

Hilo was Kamehameha’s first seat of government and the statue of Kamehameha, dedicated in 1997 at Wailoa State Park, is the tallest of the four statues at fourteen feet. Hilo is also home to the Naha Stone, which a young Kamehameha was said to have overturned in a feat of incredible strength. Legend said that whoever had the strength to move the Naha Stone would rule the Hawaiian Islands. Today, the Naha Stone is located in front of the Hilo Public Library.

The Time is Now.

 

Friday Filosophy v.06.03.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.06.03.2022

Sitting Bull (Lakota: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake(c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him, at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement.[

Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw many soldiers, “as thick as grasshoppers,” falling upside down into the Lakota camp, which his people took as a foreshadowing of a major victory in which many soldiers would be killed. About three weeks later, the confederated Lakota tribes with the Northern Cheyenne defeated the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer on June 25, 1876, annihilating Custer’s battalion and seeming to bear out Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision. Sitting Bull’s leadership inspired his people to a major victory. In response, the U.S. government sent thousands more soldiers to the area, forcing many of the Lakota to surrender over the next year. Sitting Bull refused to surrender, and in May 1877, he led his band north to Wood Mountain, North-Western Territory (now Saskatchewan). He remained there until 1881, at which time he and most of his band returned to U.S. territory and surrendered to U.S. forces.

After working as a performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota. Due to fears that he would use his influence to support the Ghost Dance movement, Indian Service agent James McLaughlin at Fort Yates ordered his arrest. During an ensuing struggle between Sitting Bull’s followers and the agency police, Sitting Bull was shot in the side and head by Standing Rock policemen Lieutenant Bull Head (Tatankapah, Lakota) and Red Tomahawk (Marcelus Chankpidutah, Lakota: Čhaŋȟpí Dúta), after the police were fired upon by Sitting Bull’s supporters. His body was taken to nearby Fort Yates for burial. In 1953, his Lakota family exhumed what were believed to be his remains, reburying them near Mobridge, South Dakota, near his birthplace.

  • Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!
  • Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children. 
  • They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. 
  • Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. 
  • If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place. 
  • Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country? 
  • When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? 
  • What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief. 
  • It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land. 
  • The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it. 
  • There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose, they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them. 
  • If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people, I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children’s mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean. 
  • What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. 
  • What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. 
  • What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? 
  • Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? 
  • God made me an Indian.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.05.27.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.05.27.2022

Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian–British economist and political philosopher. He became known because he strongly defended liberalism and free-market capitalism. He was against too much central control of the economy and society. He thought that forms of government like socialism were not good for the economy, and damaged freedom of the individual. Hayek’s signature work, The Road to Serfdom, refers to the consequences of socialism.

He was one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the 20th century. He was one of the most important members of the Austrian School of economics. He also had many ideas in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with his rival Gunnar Myrdal. The award was for their work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations; also for their analysis of the inter-dependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He is thought to be one of the major causes of change from the Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century. Instead of governments handling the details of the economy, they went back towards classical liberalism in the 1980s and later. This happened most clearly in the 1980s in the U.S.A. (under Ronald Reagan) and the U.K. (under Margaret Thatcher).

  • From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time
  • The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
  • If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.
  • Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.
  • The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.
  • Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.
  • It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.
  • While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
  • Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.
  • Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.
  • It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
  • Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
  • Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.
  • Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a job which has been chosen for us, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, at some sacrifice, to achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.
  • We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage…. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.05.20.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.05.20.2022

Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, historian, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University‘s Hoover Institution. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics, and political science.

Born in poverty in North Carolina, Sowell grew up in Harlem, New York. Due to financial issues and deteriorated home conditions, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. Upon returning to the United States, Sowell enrolled at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1958. He earned a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University, Amherst College, University of California, Los Angeles, and, currently, Stanford University. He has also worked at think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he serves as the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy. Sowell writes primarily from a libertarian perspective, though he dislikes being labelled ideologically. Sowell’s libertarian-leaning philosophy made him particularly influential to the new conservative movement during the Reagan Era, influencing fellow economist Walter Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Sowell was offered a presidential position in the Nixon Administration and as Federal Trade Commissioner by the Ford Administration in 1976, but declined both offers. Similarly, he was offered the position as head of the U.S. Department of Education as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, but refused to take the position. Sowell is the author of more than 45 books.

  • It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
  • It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
  • The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
  • The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’
  • It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.
  • If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
  • If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
  • What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
  • Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
  • The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
  • Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
  • Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
  • One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.05.13.2022

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Friday Filosophy v.05.13.2022

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist. He believed in monetarism. Monetarism is the theory that how much money the government prints each year has a huge effect on the economy. He supports the government printing the same low rate of money each year rather than a different amount each year.

Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Hungarian–Jewish family. He was raised in Rahway, New Jersey. Friedman studied at Rutgers University, at Columbia University, and at the University of Chicago. He worked thirty years in Chicago with George Stigler as a leader of the Chicago school of economics.

During the 1970s, Milton Friedman’s idea of monetarism gained popularity and he became an economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Friedman believed that the government control over the economy should be limited. He supported cutting taxes, lowering government spending, getting rid of government rules that limited the economy and letting parents choose which school their taxes paid for. His political views were libertarian. He was against forcing people to join the army, and said that getting rid of United States military conscription was the thing he was most proud of doing.

Throughout several decades, Friedman made many documentaries, books, and interviews to express his views to the public. The main books he wrote were Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose.

  • When government – in pursuit of good intentions – tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
  • Inflation is taxation without legislation.
  • Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
  • We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
  • There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
  • I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash – a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.
  • I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
  • Governments never learn. Only people learn.
  • Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
  • The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties’ benefit.
  • Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it… gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
  • Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
  • The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.
  • And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you’ll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?
  • I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
  • Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

The Time is Now

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