Worth The Struggle

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals -- this alone is worth the struggle.

-- Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet (1849 - 1919), Canadian physician, Sir William Osler : Aphorisms (1950) p. 89, aphorism 178

Leisure Moments

Leisure moments: each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live.

-- Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour (1903 - 1987), Belgian-born French novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) p. 43

No Path

We know of no path that will take us from where we are now, in terms of computing and AI technology, to the singularity.

-- Michael John Wooldridge (1966 -), professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence (2021)

A Line Of Demarcation

When the government kills, it has an obligation to demonstrate that it has acted in the public interest.  Instead, the Trump administration is once again engaged in a perversion of justice.

The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.  Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths.  They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.

Truth is a line of demarcation between a democratic government and an authoritarian regime.  Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good are dead.  The American people deserve to know what happened.

It is premature to reach conclusions about what exactly happened on that Minneapolis street.  The Trump administration should not have done so, and we will not do so.  What is clear, however, is that the federal government needs to re-establish public faith in the agencies and officers who are carrying out Mr. Trump's crackdown on immigration.

-- Editorial board of the New York Times, "The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces.  Congress Must Act." (25 January 2026)

Desensitization

Can I make an insane, possibly totally true claim, which is that, when your officials, from the president on down, lie about what happened in a shooting in the middle of the street, and therefore force everybody to go watch a shooting in the street -- my guess is there's desensitization that happens.

-- John Dickerson (6 July 1968 -), American journalist, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and past co-anchor of CBS Evening News, speaking on the Slate Political Gabfest podcast (8 January 2026)

Infamy

This is an attack on our democracy, our way of life, and not just by the criminals who assaulted our Congress today.  The good news is our Constitution is strong, and our people are overwhelmingly devoted to the rule of law.  What we need to do going forward -- what we have to do as a people -- not as Democrats, or Republicans, or independents, but as Americans, is to ask ourselves how did we ever get to this place.  We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect to any office in our land.  At the office seeker's character, at their morals, at their ethical record, their integrity, their honesty, their flaws, what they have said about women, and minorities, why they are seeking office in the first place, and only then consider the policies they espouse.

-- General John Kelly, USMC, retired (1950 -), former U.S. Marine Corps general who served as White House Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump from July 31, 2017, to January 2, 2019; he had previously served as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, "Statement from General John Kelly, USMC (ret.)", at American Security Project (7 January 2021)

At Least For A While

I maintain that AI CAN be a very useful tool for someone who is experienced and knows what they are doing.  However, this idea that it can replace people OR drastically reduce the learning curve for inexperienced people seems perilous to me.  Someone who doesn't really know what they are doing yet would not be able to select the best options from the AI, but a lot of the folks in charge don't see it that way.  They think AI is magic and is going to replace all sorts of people.  It probably will, at least for a while. 

-- Susan Tiss via Facebook, 16 August 2024

Next-Token Predictors

Never would have guessed that decision leaders at huge companies would be so incompetent to actually think that stochastic next-token predictors incapable of causal reasoning are a replacement for human capital, who possess a cognition that took hundreds of millions of years to get to this point, and is still unmatched by all modern AI tools. 

-- Lucas Deschamps, Contract Senior Software Engineer from Mexico, in a discussion on LinkedIn, observing that LLMs are not AI, since they have no understanding, and function by sequentially selecting a statistically likely next word to follow each previous word of output (3 December 2025)

Opposed By Watchful Men

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear.  Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs.  The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

-- Elwyn Brooks (E.B.) White (1899 - 1985), American essayist, columnist, poet, and editor, best known today for his work in a writers' guide, The Elements of Style, and for three children's books: Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, generally regarded as classics, Letter to the New York Herald Tribune (29 November 1947)

Uncontainable

"The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day." Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 594 (opinion of Frankfurter, J.).  But "[i]t does come," "from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."  Ibid.  By needlessly granting the Government's emergency application to prohibit universal injunctions, the Court has cleared a path for the Executive to choose law-free action at this perilous moment for our Constitution -- right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law's constraints.  I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends.  Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.

-- Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting in Trump v CASA, in which the majority ruled that federal district courts cannot be allowed to enter nation-wide injunctions (27 June 2025)

Retreating

To give meaning to our Constitution's bedrock equal protection guarantee, this Court has long subjected to heightened judicial scrutiny any law that treats people differently based on sex.  If a State seeks to differentiate on that basis, it must show that the sex classification "serves important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the achievement of those objectives."  Such review (known as intermediate scrutiny) allows courts to ascertain whether the State has a sound, evidence-based reason to distinguish on the basis of sex or whether it does so in reliance on impermissible stereotypes about the sexes.

Today, the Court considers a Tennessee law that categorically prohibits doctors from prescribing certain medications to adolescents if (and only if) they will help a patient "identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex."  In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition "identify with" an identity "inconsistent" with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient's sex.  Male (but not female) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like boys, and female (but not male) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like girls.

Tennessee's law expressly classifies on the basis of sex and transgender status, so the Constitution and settled precedent require the Court to subject it to intermediate scrutiny.  The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise, inexplicably declaring it must uphold Tennessee's categorical ban on lifesaving medical treatment so long as " ‘any reasonably conceivable state of facts' " might justify it.  Thus, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to mere rational-basis review.  By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.  In sadness, I dissent.

-- Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join, dissenting in US v Skrmetti, Attorney General for Tennessee, in which the majority upheld a Tennessee law denying gender-affirming care to minors (18 June 2025)

Foolish People

Foolish people -- when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way I mean people who entertain different opinions to mine.  If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859 - 1927), English author, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Economic Reality

Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs -- and by Mr. Trump's own hand.  Witness the agreement Monday morning to scale back his punitive tariffs on China -- his second major retreat in less than a week.  This is a win for economic reality, and for American prosperity.

One tragedy of Mr. Trump's shoot-America-in-the-foot-first approach is that he's hurt his chances of rallying a united front of countries against Beijing's mercantilism.  By targeting allies with tariffs, Mr. Trump has eroded trust in America's economic and political reliability.

Beijing now also has the benefit of concrete experience to reassure the Communist Party that Washington would struggle to impose economic sanctions in a crisis such as a Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan.  

If there's a silver lining to this turmoil, it is that markets have forced Mr. Trump to back down from his fever dream that high tariff walls will usher in a new "golden age."  The age didn't last two months, and it was more leaden than golden.  White House aide Peter Navarro, the main architect with Mr. Trump of the Liberation Day fiasco, has been repudiated.

Mr. Trump will not want to admit it, but he started a trade war with Adam Smith and lost.  He's not the first President to learn that lesson.

-- The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, "The Great Trump Tariff Rollback" (12 May 2025)

The Ideal Strong Person

As I become Strong, Strength gives me Autonomy.  Now that I have Autonomy, I must act with Integrity so that I do not infringe on other individuals acting autonomously and with integrity.  This forbearance from interfering with the autonomy of others is Justice, which I expect from them in return.  In choosing among goals with Integrity, I must willfully embrace Right Prioritization, choosing to choose with Integrity.  A society of individuals acting in this way will be Interdependently Effective.

-- Don Appleman, in my essay "The Ideal Strong Person", submitted with my application to test in April for 4th Dan in Taekwondo (8 February 2025)

Tuning Our Opinions

[W]e consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor's pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound.

-- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), known as Mark Twain, American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer, "The Privilege of the Grave" (1905), published in 2010, the author having requested it not be published until 100 years after his death

Ultracrepidarian

ultracrepidarian
ul·tra·crep·i·dar·i·an
/ˌəltrəkrepəˈderēən/

adjective

expressing opinions on matters outside the scope of one's knowledge or expertise.

noun

a person who expresses opinions on matters outside the scope of their knowledge or expertise.

-- Definition from Oxford Languages via Google.com

Everyday Life

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.  You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

-- Erma Bombeck (1927 - 1996), born Erma Fiste, American humorist who achieved great popularity for a newspaper column that depicted suburban home life in the second half of the 20th century, as quoted in 50 Ways to Stand Up for America : Put the Spirit of July 4th Into Everyday Life (2002) by W. B. Freeman

A Dollar In The Hands

The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours.  The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different.  It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes.  And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market.  For the "promise of freedom" is an empty one if the Government is "powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a[nother]." Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U. S. 409, 443 (1968).  Because the Court today retreats from that promise, I dissent.

-- Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, in which the majority found a free speech right for a business to deny service, 30 June 2023

In A Wind Tunnel

Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them.  And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.  Well, that's horsepuckey, of course.  We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions.  Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing.  It's just bibble-babble.  It's like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.

-- Harlan Jay Ellison (1934 - 2018), American writer known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction, and for his outspoken, combative personality, Commentary on Sci-Fi Channel's Sci-Fi Buzz

Basic Bargain Of Democracy

In concise summary, on Wednesday the leader of the executive branch incited a crowd to march on the legislative branch.  The express goal was to demand that Congress and Vice President Mike Pence reject electors from enough states to deny Mr. Biden an Electoral College victory.  When some in the crowd turned violent and occupied the Capitol, the President caviled and declined for far too long to call them off.  When he did speak, he hedged his plea with election complaint.

If Mr. Trump wants to avoid a second impeachment, his best path would be to take personal responsibility and resign.  This would be the cleanest solution since it would immediately turn presidential duties over to Mr. Pence.  And it would give Mr. Trump agency, a la Richard Nixon, over his own fate.

We know an act of grace by Mr. Trump isn’t likely.  In any case this week has probably finished him as a serious political figure.  He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate.  Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it.  He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.

It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly.

-- Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, "Donald Trump's Final Days" (no pay wall - they want you to read it), 7 January 2021