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The text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." My first comment is that in Boolean Algebra (granted, something the Founding Fathers didn't know much about), AND takes precedence over OR. That's something that should at least be discussed. It's possible that in 1791, a string of ORs was ended by an AND - whatever was common practice at the time must be honored as intent. My first question is: Are the last two items ("the right of the people peaceably to assemble" and "to petition the government for a redress of grievances") more strongly linked (because of the AND) than any of the other two items? Or are they all considered equal members in a list? My second question is: What about the separation of church and state? Does the second clause ("prohibiting the free exercise thereof") mean that Congress is not allowed to pass a law, for example, making human sacrifices illegal, should a new religion be established (see the first clause) that calls for them? The Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, is *very* poorly worded - I'm sorry to say that, but it's true. These people may have known how to fight, but they didn't know how to write. Yet, here we are, slavishly following a poorly conceived and poorly written document. The Founding Fathers just weren't all that smart.
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It's probably inevitable that we have a thread here on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Whenever someone refers to a piece by Mozart, it's with a number ranging from 1 to 626, preceded by the letter K. The "K" stands for Köchel (pretty much rhymes with Herschel), and refers to a catalogue of Mozart's works issued by Ludwig von Köchel in 1862, during our Civil War. Köchel attempted to catalog the works in chronological order, but as could be supposed, much of it - particularly the early works - is a guessing game. Nevertheless, the Köchel Catalogue remains the reference standard for listing works of Mozart, and has been revised several times, most recently in 1964. Some pieces also have an Opus Number, but that's a different system altogether, and for Mozart, is nowhere near as complete - the Köchel system is what you want to be using. K1 through K5 are a series of Minuets written for the fortepiano when Mozart was 5 and 6 years old. They're not particularly important or interesting except for academic reasons, but here they are (I'm assuming the copyright has expired). EarlyPianoMusic.pdf