"A Time for Leadership"
***This speech was given by Lady Margaret Thatcher at the Hoover Institute in 2000. She is one of my heroes. Some excerpts:
Read the whole thing, it's worth the time.
***Previously unknown works by Van Gogh discovered. I like Van Gogh's style.
***I joined Stash this morning. It's an inexpensive way to dabble in the stock market. We have our bank invest for us, but this is something we can do on our own on a much smaller scale. I know very little about the stock market, so this should be a good learning experience.
***
***Joe always went to his local barber for a monthly shave and haircut. But one day the barber was ill. So the barber’s wife, Grace, took over. Joe noticed over subsequent weeks that his hair was not growing.
The barber, an evangelical Christian, explained the mystery. “When you’re shaved by Grace,” he said, “you’re once shaved, always shaved.”
ar ar ar...
***Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self. ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Since the end of the Cold War, politics, journalism and academe have been heavily preoccupied with debating what happened and why. That is only natural. But we have also seen a rather unsubtle attempt at revisionism - the claim that contrary to what appeared the case at the time, the Cold War wasn't really won, or if it was, it wasn't won by the Cold Warriors but in spite of them. Perhaps I should say "in spite of us".
But the revisionists are wrong, and the Right was right. We know that the Soviet Union in its heyday was an expansionist, hostile and lethal power. We also know, from what the last Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union himself has said on the matter, that the Reagan defence build-up in general, and the SDI programme in particular, did have a decisive role in forcing the Soviets to alter course.
Doubtless, it is also true that the Soviet system was doomed to ultimate failure by its own internal contradictions. But then it had been doomed ever since 1919, and it was still controlling much of the globe seventy years later. It took Ronald Reagan, with a little help from his friends, to exert the pressure which made the system finally crack.
This debate is important, not so much because of individual reputations but rather because of the consequences now. Simply put: if we learn the wrong lessons from the Cold War, we shall also risk the peace. If we come to believe that the best way to avoid danger is to evade rather than confront it; if we think that negotiation is always the statesmanlike option; if we prefer empty multilateral gestures to powerful national responses, then we shall pay a heavy price - and our children, and grandchildren, will pay it too. (emphasis mine)
Read the whole thing, it's worth the time.
***Previously unknown works by Van Gogh discovered. I like Van Gogh's style.
***I joined Stash this morning. It's an inexpensive way to dabble in the stock market. We have our bank invest for us, but this is something we can do on our own on a much smaller scale. I know very little about the stock market, so this should be a good learning experience.
***
***Joe always went to his local barber for a monthly shave and haircut. But one day the barber was ill. So the barber’s wife, Grace, took over. Joe noticed over subsequent weeks that his hair was not growing.
The barber, an evangelical Christian, explained the mystery. “When you’re shaved by Grace,” he said, “you’re once shaved, always shaved.”
ar ar ar...
***Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self. ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon
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