Posted on 03/24/2018 6:31:14 AM PDT by MNDude
Yes, categories come into play. There are types. Some live notable lives, others are notable for a single act, etc.
If there is something common to them all, it might be that they inspire us with a human quality that of immense benefit and they encourage us to do the same—we are like them.
Nowadays anyone considered significant is eulogized for sake of race, sex, or gender or religion/secularism. As Hungary’s Prime Minister put it: “[The globalists] want to strip people of their religious, national, family, and even sexual identities so that they are no longer able to recognise, express or enforce their own interests.”
Great choice, but for adults.
Bush’s greatest mistake was not granting Todd Beamer a commission in the unorganized Militia of the United States, so that he could receive the Medal of Honor.
No volunteer deserved it more.
DEFINITELY HIM. Thanks.
Will Rogers
Thomas Jefferson
Patrick Henry
Gen. Patrick Cleburne
Martin Luther King
Benjamin Franklin
Clara Barton
Henry Ford
Winston Churchill (Honorary Citizen)
A very interesting case. In reality the Wright Brothers - tho they did fly first, were in an ironic sense captives of the Supreme Court. SCOTUS had held (based on no legislation) that there was such a thing as a super patent which - because it was for an invention of such transcendent novelty/value - never expired. And the Wright Brothers thought that being able to fly qualified - but it motivated them to maximal secrecy about their experiments.The upshot was that when people got serious about flight, the Wright brothers had already accomplished it at Kitty Hawk, but they didn’t have photos and witnesses proving that they had actually done it. They relied on testimony of people who the Wrights had, at the time, wanted to suppress their reports of accidental sightings.
And ultimately the techniques the Wrights used - such as wing warping for roll control - fell by the wayside and nothing you can point to on a modern plane is something the Wrights had invented. Unlike Glen Curtis, for example.
Walt Disney
Howard Hughes
Wernher Von Braun
Robert McNamera
John Browning
Walt Disney
Howard Hughes
Wernher Von Braun
Robert McNamera
John Browning
Booker T. Washington
Samuel Morse
Jack Kemp
Willis Carrier
Andrew Carnegie
John D. Rockefeller
Benjamin Tyler Henry
John Browning
Bravo on the topic!
George Washington
Abraham Lincoln
Hitler
Winston Churchill
Steve Jobs
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Chuck Yeager.
There are, of course, millions from which to choose, but those five are some of the most interesting lives I know. Gotta keep the kiddies' attention.
Hmm...throw Booker T. Washington into the mix then.
I was neighbors with an old guy back in New Jersey. After mowing his yard each week he would offer me a beer and we’d chat. He talked about his life. He used to work down at the Edison Cement Factory that was about 3 miles from our country homes as a child. (It is just a ruin now, surrounded by farms).
After about the third visit it finally dawned on me that the “Tommy” he was non-chalantly talking about (”My job was to bring Tommy the cement samples” - “Bringing in a sandwich to Tommy and he was ...”) was Thomas Edison!
“Wait - ‘Tommy’. Do you mean Thoma Edison!!??”
“Well who the hell did you think I was talkin’ about!?”
I don’t think Chuck Yeager was ever president, do you even know who he is?
Elias Howe (patented the first US sewing machine)Basically, reach back and identify the corporations which ever were important in the US economy, and identify their founders.
Their names are legion, of course. The point would never be to require schoolchildren to know them all - just to understand that people did things. Mostly quite apart from what government thought was “the public interest.”
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. The burden of the article is how diffuse are the inputs to make a simple item like a pencil. Of course a particular company - Eberhard Faber, in the example instance - made the pencil. But Mr. Eberhard and Mr. Faber did not simply speak the pencil into existence; the company has to have buildings housing machinery, and workers to operate the machines. But beyond that, the Eberhard Faber workers have to have food, shelter, and normal amenities - including those required by their families.And the same is true of the vendors who supply Eberhard Faber with the machinery they require, and all the obvious materials - wood, graphite, rubber, and the ferrule material and the enamel. All those vendors have their own equipment, workers, and supply chain. And in all cases the workers need food, shelter, and normal amenities. So although the pencil certainly does not exist without Eberhard Faber, society works together to make pencils - and everything else.
So, “You didn't build that? Somebody else made that happen?” Yes - but that “somebody else” was not government. The “somebody” was more like everybody - mostly very indirectly. It is not the government but society - as Thomas Paine points out in Common Sense, a very different thing - which makes the pencil.
Government planning is merely interference in society’s subtle workings by people who have nowhere near the competence needed to make such large decisions and be responsible for them. It is nothing more than the irresponsible separation of responsibility from authority, in violation of the first principle of good management. Improvement in efficiency via government “planning” is a paper tiger.
George Mason
Patrick Henry
Fredrick Douglass
Alvin York
Audie Murphy
Special mention
442nd RCT
Mercury 7
Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.