Thank Goodness

Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.

-- Edsger Dijkstra (1930 - 2002), Dutch computer scientist, mathematician, software engineer, and essayist, Dijkstra (1982) "A Letter to My Old Friend Jonathan" (EWD475) p. 101 

Meta 45

Meta.  Today it's been 45 years since the 24 February 1981 birth of Trvth.  I reflected on this a bit at the 40-year mark here.

I noted then that on 22 July 2019 I had counted 5450ish published Trvth entries.  Since that 2019 date another 1697 have been published, for a grand(?) total today, 24 February 2026, of 7147ish.

The most recent 4753 are all available at trvth.org beginning 3 March 2005 (more than 20 years on the Interwebs)

And, for your amusement, I present from the archives the original Trvth:

***** appearances ~appleman / chanute ~2/24/1981 ~13:50

While nothing may seem to be as it first appears, there
are in fact some things which appear to be as they are,
amidst the other things which only appear to be as they
aren't.

If We Don't Believe

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

-- Noam Chomsky (7 December 1928 -), American linguist, cognitive scientist, political analyst, and human rights activist, interview by John Pilger on The Late Show BBC Television (25 November 1992)

Arguably The Worst

President Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology -- to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself.  Mr. Trump doubtless won't offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.

This is the same Court that ruled Mr. Trump's way on presidential immunity, which was more personally consequential for this President.  Mr. Trump shouldn't have been surprised by the Court.  We warned from the start that this would be the result of his unlawful resort to IEEPA.  The fault doesn't lie with the Justices but with his own tariff obsessions.

-- The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, "Trump Demeans Himself as He Attacks the Supreme Court" (20 February 2026), regarding President Trump's rant in which he "lit into the Justices who voted against him as traitors bought by foreign interest" after the Court voted 6-3 to overturn his signature "emergency" tariff policy

No Difference

If the President can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet ... whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law -- his judgment, which means his pleasure being the sole criterion -- then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the President and those of ... the Czar of Russia.

-- Illinois Governor John Altgeld, in his State of the State address (9 January 1895), as quoted by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, in his State of the State address (18 February 2026) [h/t Heather Cox Richardson]

They Don't Ask Much

They don’t ask much of you.  They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

-- Boris Pasternak (1890 - 1960), Russian poet and writer, famous for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago; 1958 Nobel Laureate for Literature, On Soviet bureaucrats, in LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

RIP Jesse Jackson

America is not like a blanket -- one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size.  America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.  The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.

-- The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. (born Jesse Louis Burns; 8 October 1941 - 17 February 2026), American civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and politician, Address to the Democratic National Convention (1984)