Tunguska

One hundred years ago today, the so-called Tunguska Event, apparently a mid-air explosion of a meteor, levelled the trees across an area of more than a half million acres (~830 square miles).

500 Year Flood

I'm not sure how much wisdom there is in staying because these are floods that are supposed to come every 500 years and they're coming every 15 years.

-- Joe Behounek, whose house in Chelsea, Iowa, was flooded this week and in 1993

Fryer Grease

Fryer grease has become gold. And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.

-- Nick Damianidis, an owner of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., on grease thefts, New York Times, 30 May 2008

Code For The Maintainer

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

-- From theC2 Wiki Page, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeForTheMaintainer

Only God Who Appointed Me

Only God who appointed me will remove me -- not the [opposition party] MDC, not the British. ... We will never allow an event like an election reverse our independence, our sovereignty, our sweat, and all that we fought for, all that our comrades died fighting for.

-- Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980, regarding his presidential run-off vs. MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai

RIP George Carlin

I love and treasure individuals as I meet them; I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

-- George Carlin (12 May 1937 - 22 June 2008), Grammy-winning American stand-up comedian, actor, and author, "Ready or Not, Here Comes Another Book", Georgecarlin.com, 2007-01-19

Windshield Vs. Bug

Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.

-- Captain Phillip Ash, commander, Company K, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, Ramadi, Iraq, New York Times, 23 October 2005

Eight To Twelve Minutes? No Way

The Unhealthiest Drink in America
Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake (32 oz)
2,310 calories
266 g sugar
108 g fat (64 g saturated)

Let's look at America's Worst Drink in numbers:

73: The number of ingredients that go into this milkshake.
66: The number of teaspoons of sugar this drink contains.
11: The number of Heath Bars you would have to eat to equal the number of calories found in one Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake.
8-12: The average number of minutes it takes to consume this drink.
240: The number of minutes you'd need to spend on a treadmill burning it off, running at a moderate pace.

-- Mens' Health Magazine, via health.yahoo.com,
19 May 2008

Earlids

The best thing about radio is that people were born without earlids. You can't close your ears to it.

-- Anthony Schwartz (19 August 1923 - 15 June 2008), American sound archivist and advertising creator, best known for the controversial Daisy TV ad for the 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaign

Habeas

The test for determining the scope of this provision must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.

-- From the Supreme Court's decision restoring the writ of habeas corpus to prisoners at Gitmo

Worst?

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.

-- John McCain, NBC 13 June 2008, regarding the recent "Habeas" ruling by SCOTUS

Oh No!

I've been doing everything I can to kill him off for 30 years, but he seems to be coming back.

-- Walter Williams, on Mr. Bill, the character he created for "Saturday Night Live" who will appear in a MasterCard ad campaign, New York Times, 3 June 2008

Cheaper Oil

The greatest thing to come out of [the Iraq War] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in the any country.

-- Rupert Murdoch, Guardian newspaper, 11 February 2003, when oil sold for $34.53 per barrel (it's $134.31 today)

Burden Of Proof

Any curtailment of freedom has a burden of proof.

-- Noam Chomsky, Media Matters, 6 June 2008

Ridiculous

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

-- Sam Harris, author (1967- )

HRC Bows Out

The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion and our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States.

-- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, bowing out of the presidential race, NY Times 8 June 2008

Violence

Victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. ... [W]hen you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color, or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who are different from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies. Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great. But we can perhaps remember, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness. Surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common roles can begin to teach us something, that we can begin to work a little harder, to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

-- Robert Francis Kennedy (20 November 1925 - 6 June 1968), American politician, "On the Mindless Menace of Violence", speech, City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, 5 April 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated

Tetris In Real Life

I got a job at Fed Ex and it is like playing tetris in real life.

-- Kim Compton, Champaign, IL, 22 May 2008

269m

Eddy Merckx: 49.431km in 1 hour.

In 1972 Eddy Merckx flew to Mexico City to attempt one of the most challenging monuments in sport: the hour record.

Before the advent of advanced carbon materials, disc wheels and lightweight components, the hour record stood as the ultimate measure of man-powered machine.

The day's effort has only been topped twice by traditional bicycles as recognized by the UCI. In 36 years the distance traveled in one hour has grown only 269 meters.

-- Spoke 'N' Word blog

Extent To Which You Resist

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. Freedom is something you're born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.

-- Bruce "Utah" Phillips (1935 - 2008), labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet; "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest"

Fat Chance

But if it's true that the only true life I had was the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that, at the end of the day, they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!

-- Bruce "Utah" Phillips (1935 - 2008), labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet; "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest"

RIP Utah Phillips

It takes a long time just to plain shut up and listen.

-- Bruce "Utah" Phillips (May 15, 1935 - May 23, 2008), labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet, and self-described "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest", 2004 Democracy Now interview, on the difficulty of learning the lessons of life

If You Want To Feel Proud

If you want to feel proud of yourself, you need to do things of which to feel proud. Feelings follow actions.

-- Oseola McCarty (1908-1999), washerwoman in Hattiesburg, MI, famous for her bequest to Southern Miss

Test The Depths

When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet.

-- Chinese Proverb

Take It As It Happens

You have to take it as it happens, but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.

-- German proverb

Best Way To Give Advice

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

-- Harry S Truman

Dying?

Somebody ought to tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit every minute of every day. Do it, I say, whatever you want to do, do it now.

-- Michael Landon (1936-1991), American actor, director

Begin Now

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake.

-- Marie Beyon Ray

We Hate Change

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

-- Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986) British-born U. S. journalist and author

Risk Anything

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

-- Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) New Zealander modernist writer

And Yet

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are -- that is the fact.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French existentialist philosopher, dramatist & novelist

Abstinent

People can be abstinent, and it's not weird.

-- Jami Waite, a teenager in Hallsville, Texas, New York Times, 18 July 2007

Ethanol Gold Rush

This is a bit like a gold rush. There are unintended consequences of this euphoria to expand ethanol production at this pace that people are not considering.

-- Warren R. Staley, chief executive of Cargill, the multinational agricultural company, New York Times, 25 June 2006

Probably Not Food

I'd probably give up my cellphone. Probably not food. That's really tough. I like food.

-- Ryan Holt, 21-year-old student at the University of Northern Colorado, on the sacrifices he would make to buy a great video game, NY Times, 29 April 2008

Irony

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

-- Bill Nye, Interview with Wired.com, April 2005

No Regrets

We should have no regrets. The past is finished. There is nothing to be gained by going over it. Whatever it gave us in the experiences it brought us was something we had to know.

-- Rebecca Beard, physician, speaker, author

Wasted

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

-- Ruth E. Renkl

Not How Old You Are

It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

-- Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)

Impenetrable

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

-- William G. Golding, novelist (1911-1993)

Make Them Laugh

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise, they'll kill you.

-- Oscar Wilde

RIP Albert Hofmann

Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.

-- Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 - 29 April 2008), Swiss scientist best known for first synthesizing Lysergic acid diethylamide, "LSD: My Problem Child" (1980) Foreword

Laugh At It

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

-- Bill Nye (the science guy), Interview with Wired.com, April 2005

Maturity

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

A Skeleton In Your Closet

If you have a skeleton in your closet, take it out and dance with it.

-- Carolyn MacKenzie

Consider Every Day Lost

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once, and we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German Philosopher

Tax Freedom Day

Congratulations, you're now working for yourself. The Tax Foundation declares that today is Tax Freedom Day. From January 1 to today you were working for the government. From today through the end of the year, you'll be working for yourself.

-- Downsizer Dispatch, 23 April 2008, http://www.downsizedc.org

You Can Dance

If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.

-- Zimbabwean Proverb

The Art Of Living

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

-- Marcus Aurelius

Make Sense Of Change

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

-- Alan W. Watts (6 January 1915 - 16 November 1973), philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion

Right Reasons

Some people are lonely for all the right reasons.

-- Meg Rosoff (1956-) American author, "How I Live Now"

Liberty

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

-- Walt Whitman ("Notes Left Over" 1881)

Ready To Cope

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

-- George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

Torch Of Truth

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)

Out The Window

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.

-- Dr. Martin Henry Fischer

New Questions

The New Questions to ask your physician:

1. If I don't have any symptoms, how are you going to keep me healthy?

2. How would you treat me if you didn't have your prescription pad?

3. How are you going to find and treat the cause of my disease, not just the symptoms?

4. Will changing my food habits and life style contribute to healing me faster?

5. Do you keep records of the treatment prescribed by you to me?

-- Dr. Amit K. Saiya, 2 April 2008, blog excerpt

http://dailymusingsofamit.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-questions-to-ask-your-physician.html

Should We Wander

Should we wander [from the essential principles of our government] in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

-- Thomas Jefferson, upon repealing the Alien and Sedition Acts

Political Rights

Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the in-grown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life; it has always been the same in political life as well.

The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength.

-- Rudolf Rocker (25 March 1873 - 19 September 1958) anarcho-syndicalist writer, historian, social activist, "Anarcho-Syndicalism" (1938)

RIP Charlton Heston

Take your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty ape!

-- Charlton Heston (4 October 1923 - 5 April, 2008) as astronaut Colonel George Taylor in "Planet of the Apes" (1968)

Equal Before The Law

We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it.

-- Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

Duck Rape

So there are these ducks that live along the Boulware Trail, a walking path near my office that runs parallel to a creek. The ducks are Mallards, and there are two pairs (that I know of) that live along the creek on the 1/2 mile or so of path that I occasionally walk as a break from work.

Today there was quite a ruckus. One of the pairs of Mallards was being attacked by a third, male Mallard. As I watched, the interloper tried again and again to copulate with the one female. She resisted by trying to fly away, but was overpowered. Her mate resisted by attacking the interloper, biting him on the head and pushing him underwater.

After a few minutes of this, the attacking male apparently got what he came for and broke off. The original pair then swam away together. And it turns out this isn't so rare. Mallard rape is well documented, and male and female duck genitalia have evolved to address this problem.

See "Duck genitals locked in arms race" (with pictures!)

Google has 1.37M results for "duck rape", including YouTube videos.

Keep It From The American People

The OLC Torture Memo as a Failure of the Classification System
Date:Thursday 03 April 2008 09:55
Author:Steven Aftergood

The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo on interrogation of enemy combatants that was declassified this week "exemplifies the political abuse of classification authority," Secrecy News suggested yesterday. J. William Leonard, the nation's top classification oversight official from 2002-2007, concurred.

"The disappointment I feel with respect to the abuse of the classification system in this instance is profound," said Mr. Leonard, who recently retired as director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which reports to the President on classification and declassification policy. "The document in question (pdf) is purely a legal analysis," he said, and it contains "nothing which would justify classification."

Beyond that crucial fact, the binding technical requirements of classification were ignored.

Thus, he explained: There were no portion markings, identifying which paragraphs were classified at what level. The original classifier was not identified on the cover page by name or position. The duration of classification was not given. A concise basis for classification was not specified. Yet all of these are explicitly required by the President's executive order on classification.

"It is not even apparent that [John] Yoo [who authored the memo] had original classification authority," Mr. Leonard said.

"All too often, government officials simply assert classification. To enjoy the legal safeguards of the classification system, you need to do more than that. Those basic, elemental steps were not followed in this instance."

"Also, for the Department of Defense to declassify a Department of Justice document," as in this case, "is highly irregular," Mr. Leonard said.

[snip]

Violations of classification policy pale in comparison to the policy deviations authorized by the Justice Department memo, which was ultimately rescinded. Nevertheless, such classification violations are significant because they enabled the Administration to pursue its interrogation policies without independent scrutiny or accountability.

"To learn that such a document is classified has the same effect for me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years there is a 'secret' Article IV to the Constitution that the American people did not even know about," said Mr. Leonard.

"There is no information contained in this document which gives an advantage to the enemy," he said. "The only possible rationale for making it secret was to keep it from the American people."

Copyright 2008 Secrecy News.

Nott Was Shot And Shott Was Not

A duel was fought in Texas lately, by Alexander Shott and John S. Nott. Nott was shot and Shott was not. In this case it was better to be Shott than Nott. There was a rumor that Nott was not shot, but Shott swears he shot Nott, which proves either that the shot Shott shot at Nott was not shot, or that Nott is shot notwithstanding.

-- Rootsweb Review, January 2001, submitted by Horst Reschke, who writes "I found [this] item in the April 1867 issue of 'Printers' Circular'"

Cannot Be Reversed

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

-- Cesar Estrada Chavez (31 March 1927 - 23 April 1993) Labor organizer, social activist; Speech, 9 November 1984

No Place For Doubt

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

-- Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)

Not The Will To Believe

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

-- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

Satellite TV Networks, Cell Phones, and GPS, Oh My!

As you may know, my main interest in [communications] is in the use of satellite relays, which I think may revolutionise the pattern of world communications. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first to suggest this possiblity (see "Extraterrestrial Relays", Wireless World, October '45). ... My general conclusions are that perhaps in 30 years the orbital relay system may take over all the functions of existing surface networks and provide others quite impossible today. For example, the three stations in the 24-hour orbit could provide not only an interference AND censorship-free global TV service for the same power as a single modern transmitter, but could also make possible a position-finding grid whereby anyone on earth could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch. (A development of Decca and transistorisation.) It might even make possible world-wide person-to-person radio with automatic dialling. Thus no-one on the planet need ever get lost or become out of touch with the community, unless he wanted to be. I'm still thinking about the social consequences of this!

-- Arthur C. Clarke, anticipating international TV networks, GPS, and ubiquitous phone access, letter to Andrew Haley, August 1956

Cynicism

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're led to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.

-- Ken Burns, American Historian

Endorsement

I talked to Senator Clinton last night. Let me tell you: we've had better conversations.

-- New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, endorsing Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, New York Times, 22 April 2008

The Truth Was So Implausible

In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible.

-- Former CIA Director George Tenet, regarding Saddam Hussein possessing unconventional weapons; cited in Scott Shane & Mark Mazzetti "Ex-CIA Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq" (New York Times, 27 April 2007)

Sane And Happy

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.

-- Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008), British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, "3001: The Final Odyssey" (1997)

Taxpayer

The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

-- Ronald Reagan

No Greater Gift

There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population.

-- Paul Rusesabagina (1954-), humanitarian, subject of the film "Hotel Rwanda"

Final Exam

I kind of feel like the student who's getting ready for the final exam but they didn't attend any classes.

-- David A. Paterson, who takes over as governor of New York on Monday, NY Times, 14 March 2008

Spam Nation

I use Google Mail (gmail) as a simple way to get ubiquitous access to my email with good spam filtering. They leave stuff in the "spam" folder for 30 days. And they display how many messages are in your spam folder, so it's easy to tell (roughly) how many spam messages were received per day over the past 30 days

I'm just guessing here, but I seem to get a lot of spam, and I'm awfully glad gmail is good at catching it. For the first time today, my spam folder hit >10,000 messages. It currently stands at 10,251 (it was 10,249 when I started typing this), for an average of 341.7 spams per day, which works out to 14.2 spams per hour, or one spam every 4 minutes, 12 seconds.

Now it's at 10,254, up about 300 since yesterday, which indicates a *lot* of spams in the last 24 hours.

Spitzer

There has been a decline in ethics and we've got to turn it around.

-- Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned 12 March 2008 after being taped by the FBI arranging a $4300 tryst with a prostitute

Who Breaks The Thread?

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

-- James Richardson, poet, professor (b. 1950)

Voice Of Protest

The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press, and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.

-- Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), American writer, editor, and educator

Try To Persuade

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

Marijuana

Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

-- William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 - February 27, 2008), American author and conservative commentator

XLink ITC-BT Bluetooth Gateway

Last night I installed the XLink ITC-BT Bluetooth Gateway. It works as advertised, which is very cool. And I got it from TheNerds.net for just $124.99, which is also very cool.

Here's the deal -- I ditched my land line ($65 per month) for an additional cell phone on my Family Share Plan with Verizon Wireless ($9.99 per month). Now, this creates the problem of having a two-storey house plus basement with a single cell phone ringing somewhere inside it when someone calls the house line.

This device is the solution. It connects to your cell phone via bluetooth. It has a phone jack on the back. You connect your house phone(s) to the jack on the back of the device. It delivers a dial tone for calling out via house phones, rings the house phones when a call comes in, and passes through Caller ID, all using the cell phone for connectivity (remember, I dropped my land line).

As a bonus, it can connect to as many as 3 cell phones at once, provides differential ring tones for those cell phones, and allows you to switch among the cell phones as if on a multi-line phone system. It also implements call waiting on your house phones in case of multiple incoming calls to different cell phones.

Seize It

With each game I play, with each season I play, I'm running out of chances ... You're never guaranteed next year. You're never guaranteed the next game. You have to seize the opportunity when it's there in front of you.

-- Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre, The New York Times, 29 January 2004 (Favre announced his retirement today, 4 March 2008)

What The Terrorists Want

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

[...]

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

-- Security Consultant Bruce Schneier, "What the Terrorists Want"

Crush The Bourgeoisie

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Quotations

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poems and short stories

RIP William F. Buckley, Jr.

I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven't just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.

-- William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 - February 27, 2008), American author and conservative commentator

Price We Pay For Money

The price we pay for money is paid in liberty.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)

Vulgar And Prurient And Dumb

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble
interests.

-- David Foster Wallace, from his essay "E Pluribus Unum", cited in Ubiquity, "End Laptop Serfdom", Espen Andersen, 5 Feb 2008

Few Men

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

-- George Washington (22 February 1732 - 14 December 1799), first President of the US

Disturbed

Rule #1: Disturbed and/or violent individuals will continue to risk their own lives in ways that risk public lives, sometimes many more than we expect.

Rule #2: People cannot change Rule #1.

All we can do is mitigate the effects as much as we can.

-- Comment at http://www.schneier.com/blog/, by clvrmnky, February 20, 2008 08:29 AM

Ancient Egypt

It's too bad Cuba isn't ancient Egypt where the kings were sometimes buried with their full retinue.

-- NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu on the ceding of power by Cuban leder Fidel Castro to his brother Raul, 19 February 2008

Bill Of Rights

... The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a "compelling interest" in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.

-- Harry Browne (1933-2006) author, two-time presidential candidate, co-founder of Downsize DC

Is It Obvious?

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

Is it obvious, that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.

-- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, interview on BBC Radio, 12 February 2008

Hard To Believe

It's hard to believe you, sir. I hate to say that because you're one of my heroes, but it's hard to believe you.

-- Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, to Roger Clemens after his testimony before a Congressional panel

No Map

You're asking me to tell you how we're going to get to a place we've never been, with a map I don't have.

-- Col. Steven David, military defense lawyer, when asked for details on the capital case against 6 Guantanamo detainees, NY Times, 12 February 2008

Those Who Deny Freedom

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US President, "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Letter To Henry L. Pierce and Others" (April 6, 1859), p. 376.

A Foolish Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, "Self-Reliance", 1841

To Set A Limit

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

-- Bertolt Brecht (10 Feb 1898 - 14 Aug 1956), German socialist dramatist, stage director, and poet, in "Science"

Fear Of Freedom

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

-- Germaine Greer (January 29, 1939-) Australian academic, writer, broadcaster, and feminist

Silly

Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.

-- Mike Myers

History We Make Today

We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

-- Henry Ford (1863-1947), American Industrialist, Founder of Ford Motor Company