THOUGHT OF THE DAY:

”And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

BIRTHDAYS:

1560 Annibale Carracci, Italian painter, born in Bologna, Papal States.

1587 Samuel Scheidt, German baroque composer, born in Halle, Archbishopric of Magdeburg, Holy Roman Empire. Galliarda la Battaglia, and Christe qui lux est et dies, and Pavan from Ludi Musici, and Benedicamus Domino à 6 voc.

1801 Vincenzo Bellini, Italian opera composer (La Sonnambula, Norma). Casta Diva

1872 Wilfred Trotter, English surgeon, a pioneer in neurosurgery. He was also known for his studies on social psychology, most notably for his concept of the herd instinct, which he first outlined in two published papers in 1908, and later in his famous popular work Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, an early classic of crowd psychology.

MISCELLANEOUS:

SAFETY FIRST. Squirrel!

SOME LIGHT READING FOR THE NEXT LOCKDOWN:

RECENTLY PUBLISHED (2006). Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza

WHAT IF ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL?: The Great Barrington Declaration

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND THE NUREMBERG CODE (YES, THAT NUREMBERG): Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth

RELATED. Nuremberg Code

“The Nuremberg Military Tribunal’s decision in the case of the United States v Karl Brandt et al. includes what is now called the Nuremberg Code, a ten point statement delimiting permissible medical experimentation on human subjects.”