June 6, 2024

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:

”The first gas chambers were constructed in 1939, to implement a Hitler decree dated September 1 of that year, which said that “incurably sick persons should be granted a mercy death.” (It was probably this “medical” origin of gassing that inspired Dr. Servatius’s amazing conviction that killing by gas must be regarded as “a medical matter.”) The idea itself was considerably older. As early as 1935, Hitler had told his Reich Medical Leader Gerhard Wagner that “if war came, he would take up and carry out this question of euthanasia, because it was easier to do so in wartime.” The decree was immediately carried out in respect to the mentally sick, and between December, 1939, and August, 1941, about fifty thousand Germans were killed with carbon-monoxide gas in institutions where the death rooms were disguised exactly as they later were in Auschwitz—as shower rooms and bathrooms.”

― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

BIRTHDAYS:

1599 Diego Velázquez, Spanish painter

1606 Pierre Corneille, French playwright, often considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists alongside Molière and Racine.

1625 Domenico Guidi, Italian sculptor.

1661 Giacomo Antonio Perti, Italian composer, and Maestro di Cappella. Adoremus te, Christe

1756 John Trumbull, American painter.

1799 Alexander Pushkin, Russian writer and poet.

1844 Konstantin Savitsky, Russian painter.

1850 Karl Ferdinand Braun, German inventor, co-developed wireless telegraphy.

1851 Angelo Moriondo, Italian inventor (patented earliest known espresso machine.

1903 Aram Khachaturian, Armenian composer. Uzun-Dara – from Gayaneh, and Waltz from Masquerade

MISCELLANY:

DOES ANYONE REMEMBER? 35 Years Later: A Retrospective of Our Work on the 1989 Tiananmen Protests and Crackdown

HARSH BUT FAIR. Fauci is the single most destructive force of the 21st century, and he must be held accountable.

A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND BEFORE THE NEXT LOCKDOWN DECREE: