Brunelleschi

Architecture was also revived during the Renaissance. The initiator of the revival of the great principles of the Roman architect Vitruvius was Fillippo Brunelleschi. He lived from 1377 to 1446, a native of Florence, as with so many of the Renaissance greats. Brunelleschi's great masterpiece was the completion of the cathedral dome in Florence. This was a rival in greatness to Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome 1400 years before. The cathedral in Florence revived the art of dome building that had been lost after the fall of Rome in the West.

Da Vinci and Michelangelo

The 15th century was the great age of achievement in the Renaissance of Italian art. The most notable geniuses of this period were Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo lived from 1452 to 1519 and Michelangelo from 1475 to 1564. Da Vinci's art was characterized more for quality than quantity. He was a sporadic genius whose great work was the "Mona Lisa."

Michelangelo was a prolific eclectic artist producing enormous quantities of sculptures and painting characterized by supreme creativity and genius. His most famous work was the painting of the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel.

Da Vinci and Michelangelo were the vanguard of a movement of artistic genius the proved that the individual, given the means and the freedom, could achieve a level of vision and beauty thought previously reserved only for the ancients. Before the Renaissance the idea was prevalent that civilization was still declining from the time of the Roman Empire. The great achievements of the Renaissance were visual proof that Man, while not perfectable, was truly a noble being.

Greece

Greece invented the prose style of writing. Before that it was common to write poetry. However, writing to convey a message, to represent a reality either physically or mentally, had not been invented before the ancient Greeks. Herodotus, the first historian of about 450 BC, was also one of the first prose writers.

This invention of prose, coupled with a related increase in literacy, must have had a liberating effect on the common man. To be able to read and write well is to be able to think well. One can then use discernment and judgement. This use of discernment and judgement by the common citizen is essential for the proliferation and maintanence of participatory government. These two qualities added to courage makes up the Free Citizen.

Ancient Egypt

It is interesting that in ancient Egypt images and words were often conjoined with one another. Hierglyphs were picture-words usually used to represent certain sounds. The proportional grid used to form Egyptian art to ensure uniformity of design derived from those proportions used to write hierglyphs. Therefore, for the ancients, there was no sharp dividing line between the image and the word.

There is no division or difference in textual learning and visual learning. A deficiency in one leads to a lack in the other, even if one is more developed. A picture might say a thousand words, but a word can conjure up a thousand pictures.

Monotheism

One of the most important creations, revelations or discoveries was that of monotheism. It began with the most historical of peoples, the Jews. One cannot, however, resist the temptation to imagine that the Jews originally came to monotheism from the monotheistic ideas of Pharaoh Akhenaton, "the heretic Pharaoh, who introduced the world's first monotheistic religion around 1350 BC. The experiment was short lived but extremely impactful at the time.

Journal entry June 30,2009

The genius of the American political system of government was that it never tried to settle the great debate among citizens. To be an American one simply had to agree that everyone had the right to debate and that the government was the guarantor of Liberty under law. The government was there to assure the continuence of the flow of the great river of debate, not to enforce its will to gain a result. A great tragedy of the last 100 years of so is that the federal government , especially in economics, has attempted to settle the great debate about economics around what may be called "corporatism." This is the idea that all levels of society must be smoothed over and amalgamated so as to make greater and greater centralization possible. It favors the strong over the vulnerable and the big over the nimble.

The wedding of vast corporate wealth to largely unchecked federal power solidifies into time and space a governing system which is highly undemocratic, largely unrepresentative, and always and completely unjust. The dispensing of enormous federal contracts to corporations and the construction of vast beauracratic systems called entitlements have ceded our government to someone else. The legislature has become a meek, miniscule emasculated little speck between the corporate lobbyists who trek to Washington to write the bills and the nameless, faceless, employees of the leviathan of boards and agencies that infest the body politic and practically become unelected legislators through their interpretation of laws and writing of regulations for bills the size of phone books full of details that will effect thew lives of thousands or millions. Is this not undemocratic, unrepresentative??

Many large corporations become dependent on federal or state contracts to the point that they become arms of the government that hires them and conduits by which that government can exert power and influence. The "private" firms become not "public" firms, designed for the general welfare, but public/private sources of largess, patronage and corruption for the governing class in Washington.

Vast entitlement programs funnel revenues to particular groups of people without having to endure the legislative process of appropriating money. Money is in effect appropriated one time by congress for all the time the program exists. Theoretically the program can be ended by legislative democratic means. However, practically, on the level that politics operates, the programs become so large over time that their abolition would mean the collapse of an entire system, be it of health care, retirement insurance or the like. So the systems are undemocratic in their nature in that to oppose them sets one up as the advocate of collapse and chaos.

Therefore the vastness of these programs perpetuates them. In a democratic society nothing should ever be perpetual except Liberty, Justice and the enduring spirit of the People in their political capacity. The increasing centralization and corporatism of our government runs counter to this trinity of democratic virtues.

Journal entry April 29,2009

One of the chief fallacies of our age is that we live in an age of science. Science today is used by both the Left and the Right to promulgate half-truths and falsehoods that advance their political agendas. The Right finds the few scientists who greatly question Darwinian evolution and use that to promote their ideas. The Left ignores the many scientists who question man-made global warming in order to advance a political agenda of centraliztion cloaked as enviromentalism.

Science is too often willing to prostitute itself to political patrons to gain public funding.