This is from Seth Godin’s blog. This is also why you will almost never hear me discuss politics. WASTE OF TIME. When my friends get worked up over politics, and begin arguing, I check out and go play with my kids. Not a waste of time. Here’s Seth:
The most frustrating thing for me in the SOPA/PIPA debate now winding down is how unnecessary the whole thing should have been. It occurred to me that we learned a lot about what sort of behaviors make for great leaders and careers. The short version: do the opposite.
“Successful people form the habit of doing what failures don’t like to do. They like the results they get by doing what they don’t necessarily enjoy. ” – Earl Nightingale
From time to time, my students ask me how I learned Latin. Who taught you, Mr Thomas?
I first thought of learning Latin in 1996. I was done with high school and almost finished with college. I had never opened a Latin textbook.
“One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that it was conquered by the Romans in ancient times — a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.
“Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages’ centuries earlier head start.
“Even the educated elites of Eastern Europe were often educated in Western European languages. None of this was due to the faults of one or the merits of the other. It is just the way that history went down.” – Thomas Sowell, An Ignored Disparity (emphasis mine)
“One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I’m absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.” – David McCollough (Author of 1776 and James Adams)
If you want to read the entire interview (it is long, but worth it), here you go.
Here is the first in a series of videos from Hans Orberg’s ColloquiaPersonarum. These videos were developed by Wyoming Catholic University. They are using the text Colloquia Personarum verbatim. If you have the book, you could follow along. It is available from Amazon here. This book accompanies the famous Lingua Latina series. I have written about that series here.
In 1945, America ended World War 2 abruptly and dramatically. America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered. The country was crippled.
For years, Japan struggled to recover. In the 1960′s Japan rose to prominence in the steel industry. In the 1970′s Japan surged ahead in automobile production. And in the 1980′s Japan raced ahead in the electronic and gaming industry. Just as Henry Ford pioneered the mass production of cars, Japan lead the way in the mass production of electronics and video games. [click to continue…]
