The Light Bulb: April 28, 1986

Friday, April 28, 2006

April 28, 1986

Today is not the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. That was two days ago, on April 26, 2006. Instead, today is the 20th anniversary of the Tass News Agency report announcing the disaster to the people of the former Soviet Union and confirming what the world had already discovered.

An accident has occurred at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant - one of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being undertaken to liquidate the consequences of the accident. Those affected are being given aid, and a government commission has been created.

Can you imagine something like that happening today? I can't. Too many freedoms have been unleashed in the former Soviet Republics that make keeping such an event secret, even for a few hours, a Herculean task. The world saw that a few years ago with the Kursk submarine incident. Certainly, many more freedoms need to be unleashed in that part of the world, but between that date and today, the United States won the Cold War. Those freedoms can grow in fertile ground.

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FAVORITE QUOTES

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Thomas Jefferson

Every immigrant makes America more American. You can't become an Englishman by going to live in England, or a Frenchman by going to live in France, but anyone can become an American.
Ronald Reagan

Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government.
Daniel Webster

While capitalism and socialism exist side by side, they cannot live in peace. One or the other will triumph — a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet Republic or over world capitalism.
Lenin, On Peaceful Coexistence, 1920

The family, however, has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a world devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful. When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, page 57, 1987

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now ... Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.
John F. Kennedy

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our national prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence they had for the things that are holy.
Calvin Coolidge

The issue as regards judicial activism is not whether there shall be "change” since no one is against generic "change" but who shall wield the enormous power of prescribing the particular nature and direction of change and by whose authorization? More specifically, shall it be done openly by officials assigned this task by the Constitution and responsible to the voters, or shall it be done furtively by unelected judges using verbal sleight-of-hand to attribute to the Constitution things that the Constitution never said? The issue is preemption of power, not "change."
Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, page 230, 1995

America, is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.
Joseph Stalin

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.
George Washington, Farewell Address

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Friday, April 28, 2006

April 28, 1986

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