New York Trip: Day 3

Posted April 25, 2010, 11:55 p.m.

Another good day today. First we went to Mass at the nearby St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was pretty cool. It’s a beautiful church with ornate shrines and statues and gorgeous architecture. I also had a pleasant and unexpected surprise; the Our Lady of Czestochowa Shrine (which is in the St. Patrick’s sanctuary) has relics from six Polish saints, including my patron: St. Maximilian Kolbe!

We also got some emergency umbrellas from a street vendor; stupid rain!

After changing out of church clothes, we made our way by subway to the ferry terminal in lower Manhattan for an afternoon out at Liberty and Ellis Islands. That was a lot of fun too. That’s one big statue. Unfortunately we couldn’t go up in the crown, but we were able to go up to the top of the base.

We headed back uptown to Times Square (with a nice musical intercession along the way) where we had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. As I had heard, the food was overpriced and mediocre . . . but the atmosphere was awesome, and there was all kinds of cool rock & roll memorabilia around. After a bit more walking around Times Square, we headed back to the hotel. Here are my pics:

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

[The] confederated national government . . . should be one which would have a control over national and external matters only, and not interfere with the internal regulations and police of the different states in the union.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

And every prophet who teaches the truth, but does not do what he teaches, is a false prophet.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

In manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything.

Science doesn’t purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. . . . It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.

We know on seeing smoke there must be fire, and cause and result are ever classed together thus. We are forbidden, then, to say an unthinking cause can make a thing that has intelligence.

Like Judaism, but unlike most other religions, Christianity is not mythical, in that it is based on events that took place not in a timeless realm but within human history itself.

I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized—and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent.

On the whole, it is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity.

It is not industry, but idleness, that is degrading.

Literally speaking, there exist no mysteries, there are only truths; but truth becomes a mystery to him who does not understand it.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten.

The middle of the road is where the white line is—and that’s the worst place to drive.

How is it possible for us to retain the advantages of simplification, without falling prey to the accompanying blindness? The answer is to be found in the constant dialogue between genuinely different types of people.

If you call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? The answer is four, because calling a horse’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake.