When the Titanic vanished beneath the Atlantic in the early hours of April 15th, 1912, she left a terrified mass of over sixteen hundred people behind her, gasping for breath and thrashing around helplessly in water temperatures well below zero. It was almost an hour before their cries were drowned out by silence. Yet the Titanic disaster raised voices that have yet to be silenced to this day.

“We have absolute faith in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.” This was the response of the White Star Line’s Phillip Franklin to a crowd of frenzied news reporters in New York. During the night, all sorts of sensational rumours had begun to surface about the new liner, and Franklin was in full damage control mode.

The people shivering in the half filled lifeboats could hardly believe their eyes and ears. In front of them, the largest moving object ever built was sagging helplessly into the ocean like some puppet with its strings cut. Row upon row of lights blazed at a madly slanted angle on the dark black mirror of the Atlantic. Up above, a string of pathetic distress rockets soared skywards, exploding in showers of pale white sparks that no one heeded. And, incredibly, from across the water came the sound of jaunty, upbeat music.

The luckiest ones died without even knowing it. A torrent of surging, ice cold seawater roared through the forward cabins containing the single men, drowning many of them in their bunks. Others were awoken by the long, grinding jar that shook clothes hanging on coat hooks and made glasses fall from nightstands. Stepping out of their bunks and reaching for the light switch, many men found a terrifying trickle of incoming water flowing across the cabin floor.

In the entire emotional roller coaster that is the Titanic disaster, few stories have aroused more anger and indignation than the departure of company chairman, Bruce Ismay, from the sinking ship. He left a foundering ship in a lifeboat, while literally hundreds of men, women and children were still left on the decks. In light of recent events in the Mediterranean with the Italian cruise ship captain, his story still has the power to simultaneously engage and enrage people; it remains a heavily charged emotional lightning rod to this day.

Consider the following scenario. You have a sinking ship, four hundred miles from the nearest land. The only responding rescue ship will not arrive for four hours, and the ship will not stay afloat for half that time. The water temperature is twenty eight degrees Fahrenheit. Anyone attempting to swim for it will freeze to death within minutes.

It is the late evening of Sunday, April 14th, 1912, and the North Atlantic is as still as the surface of a darkened mirror. The clear, moonless night sky up above is packed with millions of twinkling, benevolent stars. In short, it is a beautiful evening.

It was the biggest single building project on the planet since the pyramids of Giza. For three years, more than fifteen thousand sweating, swearing Irishmen laboured to bring it to life from the very mud of Belfast. It grew through freezing winters and searing hot summers. As it grew, it loomed over the entire city skyline.

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The now notorious ban of incandescent light bulbs, mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is about to make 100-watt traditional incandescent bulbs a thing of the past with the ban taking effect beginning January 1, 2012.

Ironically, it was on December 31, 1879 that inventor Thomas Edison gave the first public demonstration of his revolutionary incandescent bulb.

Importantly, Edison wasn’t the first inventor to work on such a lamp. British chemist and inventor Humphrey Davy demonstrated the principle of incandescent lamps as early as 1802 by passing a current through a strip of platinum. But while this set the stage for future development, the Davy lamp was expensive, produced only weak light for a short time, and was not practical.

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Putting up a stove is not so difficult in itself. It is the pipe that raises four-fifths of the mischief and all the dust. You may take down a stove with all the care in the world, and yet that pipe won’t come together again as it was before. You find this out when you are standing on a chair with your arms full of pipe, and your mouth full of soot. Your wife is standing on the floor in a position that enables her to see you, the pipe and the chair, and here she gives utterance to those remarks that are calculated to hasten a man into the extremes of insanity. Her dress is pinned over her waist, and her hands rest on her hips. She has got one of your hats on her head, and your linen coat on her back, and a pair of rubbers on her feet. There is about five cents’ worth of pot-black on her nose and a lot of flour on her chin, and altogether she is a spectacle that would inspire a dead man with distrust. And while you are up there trying to circumvent the awful contrariness of the pipe, and telling that you know some fool has been mixing it, she stands safely on the floor, and bombards you with such domestic mottoes as, “What’s the use of swearing so?” “You know no one has touched that pipe.” “You ain’t got any more patience than a child.” “Do be careful of that chair.” And then she goes off, and reappears with an armful more of pipe, and before you are aware of it she has got that pipe so horribly mixed up that it does seem no two pieces are alike.

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The receipt was on the floor of an Angeli’s County Market parking lot, located in the greater Denver area of Colorado. An alert fan of this columnist passed it along. This particular item got the desired attention. It speaks volumes about today’s cavalier attitude toward “public assistance,” what we used to call simply welfare — not only for the extravagances bought with other people’s tax dollars, but for the sheer arrogance of allowing such a blatant illustration of inappropriateness to slip through a customer’s fingers:  six cold-water lobsters, two porterhouse steaks, and five cases of Mountain Dew, the only purchases on the ticket, are shown paid for in food stamps.

Irrespective of party affiliation, most Americans today simply accept welfare. Many families are so addicted to government handouts, they scarcely are aware how much largesse comes to them from the labor of their fellow citizens. Somewhere along the line, “government money” lost its logical connection to “the people’s money.”

Constitution Day is celebrated on September 17. It is a day to reflect upon the rule of law, the nature of government, and its proper role. Famously, the Founding Fathers adopted the U.S. Constitution "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...."

Since the adoption of the Constitution, and especially since the beginning of the 20th century, the intent of the Constitution itself has been questioned, its continuing relevance examined and doubted, and, among politicians, its restrictions often ignored. Yet, it continues to be a vital force and a touchstone for those who seek to maximize liberty and restrict the tendency of government to grow in power at the expense of the individual.

August 18 marks the birthday of Virginia Dare, the first European Christian to be born in the Americas.

Virginia was born to parents Eleanor and Ananias Dare in North Carolina’s Roanoke Colony on August 18, 1587.

Dare’s presumably short life is intimately tied to the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colony. Shortly after her birth, her grandfather, governor John White, left the colony to return to England with the aim of obtaining additional aid for the settlers.

By the time he returned three years later, the colony was gone. All that remained was a mysterious carving of the word CROATOAN in a post. The letters CRO were carved in another. The number of colonists lost, including Virginia, was 90 men, 17 women and 11 children. Adding to the mystery of the colony’s disappearance was the unnerving fact that there was no sign of a struggle at the colony site.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

Monticello, August 30, 1823

Dear Sir, ... The committee of five met; no such thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit before presenting it to the committee.... Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress. This personal communication and consultation with Mr. Adams, he has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee.

Pickering's observations, and Mr. Adams' in addition, "that it contained no new ideas, that it is a common-place compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis' pamphlet," may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge. Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke's treatise on government. Otis' pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I only know that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before. Had Mr. Adams been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of Revolution. For no man's confident and fervid addresses, more than Mr. Adams', encouraged and supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day. Yet on the same ground, we may ask what of these elevated thoughts was new, or can be affirmed never before to have entered the conceptions of man?

A Declaration of the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, and to assume among the powers of the earth the equal and independant station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change.

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles and organising it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. the history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.