Good morning.
Sunshine returns to Whitewater, with a partly sunny day and a high of sixty-three. Sunrise today is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:58 PM. The moon is a waxing crescent with twenty percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Training makes a difference, sometimes a critical one:
It’s Machiavelli’s birthday:
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Italian: [nikko?l? makja?v?lli]; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his masterpiece, The Prince, after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence.
I’ll contend that Machiavelli’s greatest work wasn’t The Prince, but his Discourses. The full-text of that greater work is available online and at Amazon.
It’s also, from 1898, Golda Meir’s birthday:
1898 – Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir Born
On this date, Golda Meir (nee Mabovitch) was born in Kiev, Russia. Economic hardship forced her family to emigrate to the United States in 1906, where they settled in Milwaukee. She graduated from the Milwaukee Normal School (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and joined the Poalei Zion, the Milwaukee Labor Zionist Party, in 1915. In 1921, she emigrated to Palestine with her husband, Morris Myerson, where they worked for the establishment of the State of Israel. Meir served as Israel’s Minister of Labor and National Insurance from 1949 through 1956 and as the Foreign Minister until January of 1966. When Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly in 1969, Meir assumed the post, becoming the world’s third female Prime Minister. She died in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978. [Source: Picturing Golda Meier]