The Genius Of Memory

The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.

-- Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), novelist

Ruined

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.

-- Lin Yutang (1895-1976), Chinese writer and translator, The Importance of Living (1937)

Bipartisan

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.

-- George Carlin (1937-2008), American stand-up comedian, social critic, philosopher, and satirist

Round 2

I'll vote against it.  But that will get us into Round 2.  See, we're going to start this all over again.

-- Representative John C. Fleming (R-LA), referring to the Senate plan to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling

Not Within Your Borders

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.  I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.  You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.  Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  You have neither solicited nor received ours.  We did not invite you.  You do not know us, nor do you know our world.  Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.

-- John Perry Barlow (3 October 1947-), American poet, essayist, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

Not Unpleasant

You may imagine that this is not unpleasant.

-- Francois Englert, after learning that he was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, New York Times, 9 October 2013

Deliver Us

We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness and our pride.  Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.

-- Barry C. Black, chaplain of the United States Senate, in a morning invocation during last week's budget battles, NY Times, 7 October 2013

Rene Cruz On Happiness

Happiness: If you are person i, your happiness function H(i) depends on both your "state of being," X(i), and on other persons' state of being, X(j), for all "n" persons in your social network:

H(i)  = H(j)  [X(1), X(2) ... X(n)]

-- Rene Leonardo Cruz (1959-2013), Network Calculus pioneer, UCSD Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Interest We Have To Pay

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher, Our Relation To Ourselves

Long Day(s)

Oops, upstream data corrupted the database.

So, yesterday I worked 13:20, starting at about 9am.  And today I went back and worked 11:35, finishing a little past 7:30pm.  So I think I just worked 24 hours and 55 minutes during a period that was only 34 hours and 35 minutes long.

I'll be back in tomorrow, and I expect the day to be much calmer.

Lemmings With Suicide Vests

Lemmings with suicide vests.  They have to be more than just a lemming. Because jumping to your death is not enough.

-- Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) on House Republicans who are willing to see the government shut down over their opposition to Obamacare, quoted on the Washington Post's "Post Politics" blog, 30 September 2013

Thinking

As I grow older, I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me.

-- H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), English writer of adventure novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885)

He Knows Already

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter III

Dangerous Gift

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift.  Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

-- Robertson Davies (1913-1995), Canadian novelist, Dangerous Jewels (1960)

Silence Is The Element

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, Sartor Resartus, Book III, chapter 3 (1833-1834)

The Eagle

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

-- Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968), American writer and social activist

Truth Burns Up Error

Truth burns up error.

-- Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), aka Isabella Bomefree, former slave, author, and social activist, in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Potential

It's too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments.  But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force.

-- President Obama, on a proposal for international monitors to take over and destroy Syria's chemical weapons, 10 September 2013

Defence Wanted

In International
    Consequences
        the players must reckon
            to reap what they've sown.

We have a defence
    against other defences,
        but what's to defend us
            against our own?

-- Piet Hein (1905-1996), Danish poet and scientist, "Defence Wanted"

Those Days

I haven't gone horseback riding in four years.  I haven't ruled that out entirely.  But water skiing, those days are over.

-- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 80, on concessions she has made to aging, though she remains healthy, New York Times, 25 August 2013

War Powers

But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I'm also mindful that I'm the President of the world's oldest constitutional democracy.  I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  And that's why I've made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.

-- President Obama speaking about Syria, 31 August 2013

Props To Diana Nyad

I have three messages: One is, we should never, ever give up.  Two is, you are never too old to chase your dream.  And three is, it looks like a solitary sport but it takes a team.

-- Diana Nyad (22 August 1949-), 64-year-old American endurance swimmer, author, and motivational speaker, after she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage or swim fins, swimming from Havana to Key West, 2 September 2013

Always Has Been

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones, and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it.  I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered.  And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

-- Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860-1961), American folk artist, Grandma Moses : My Life's History (1951)

The Same Boat Now

... We did go to jail, but we got the Civil Rights Act.  We got the Voting Rights Act.  We got the Fair Housing Act.  But we must continue to push. We must continue to work, as the late A. Philip Randolph said to organizers for the march in 1963.

And the dean of the civil rights movement once said, we may have come here on different ships, but we all are in the same boat now.  So it doesn't matter whether they're black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American, whether we are gay or straight -- we are one people, we are one family, we are all living in the same house -- not just the American house, but the the world house.

And when we finally accept these truths, then we will be able to fulfill Dr. King's dream to build a beloved community, a nation and a world at peace with itself.

-- Representative John Lewis (D-GA), speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary, 28 August 2013, at the Lincoln Memorial

Civilization Requires Slaves

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

-- Oscar Wilde (1853-1900), Irish essayist, novelist, playwright, and poet, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)

Forced Exposure

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.  There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.  What to do?

What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad.  But it's good to be realistic.  And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don't know how to function in such an atmosphere.  I don't know how to do Groklaw like this. ...

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible.  I'm just an ordinary person.  But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible.  I find myself unable to write.  I've always been a private person.  That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.

Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world's economy would collapse, I suppose.  I can't really hope for that.  But for me, the Internet is over.

So this is the last Groklaw article.  I won't turn on comments.  Thank you for all you've done.  I will never forget you and our work together.  I hope you'll remember me too.  I'm sorry I can't overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can't.

-- pj of Groklaw in a blog post announcing the closing of the site, "Forced Exposure" 20 August 2013

Lose It

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.  Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go.  Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.  Practice resurrection.

-- Wendell Berry (5 August 1934-), American philosopher, author, farmer, and social activist, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)

What Can I Do Through Government

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.  He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?  Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.  Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.  Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom.  Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

-- Milton Friedman (1912-2006), American Nobel laureate in Economics, in Capitalism And Freedom, Introduction (1962)

Sleep Is God

Sleep is God.  Go worship.

-- Jim Butcher (26 October 1971-), American author, Death Masks: Book Five of The Dresden Files (2003)

Privacy Seppuku - Do You Trust Them Now?

The Privacy Seppuku pledge is simple: if a company is served with a secret order to become a real-time participant in ongoing, blanket, secret surveillance of its customers... it will say no.  Just say no.  And it will shut down its operations, rather than have them infiltrated by spies and used surreptitiously to spread the NSA's global spook malware further.  You can't force a company to do something if there's no company there to do it.

... That one that went thru with the seppuku?  She'll likely have a new service up and running in a few days or weeks.  The customers who got dinged by the shutdown?  They'll all get up and running on her new service. This is all 1s and 0s, remember?  You don't have to demolish a car manufacturing plant, after all - you're just wiping some VMs and reincorporating elsewhere.  Lease new machines.  Call it "lavabutt" on the new corporate docs, in Andorra.  Sign on to the Privacy Seppuku pledge, as lavabutt, again.  Off you go.  Do you think it'll be hard to get customers - old ones migrated over, and new ones alike?  Think on that: a privacy company that shut down rather than be #snitchware... do you trust them, now?

http://seppuku.cryptocloud.ca/

Laws That Say Otherwise

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.  After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.  I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision.  I cannot.  I feel you deserve to know what's going on -- the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this.  Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.  As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

...  This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

-- Lavabit Owner Ladar Levison, on shutting down the encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden in response to government demands, 8 August 2013

Too Many For Too Long

Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason ....  We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.

-- Attorney General Eric Holder on a change to Justice Department policy so that minor drug offenders will no longer face mandatory minimum prison sentences, in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, 12 August 2013

40 Years Of GNotes on PLATO

Trvth acknowledges the early miracle that is gnotes on PLATO, without  which there would be no trvth.


* announce / nova  8/7/73  11:07 pm  CST  pjt / s *
Since you got here, you will undoubtedly note that we now
have a new system of user/system notes.  We hope that they
will greatly speed up your browsing...and provide us much
greater protection from note-destroyers!

Please direct any comments about these new notes to
Dave Woolley.

Old notes are obtainable by editing files -notes1- through
-notes19-.

Espionage

Only ten people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama.  The effect of the charge on a person's life -- being viewed as a traitor, being shunned by family and friends, incurring massive legal bills -- is all a part of the plan to force the whistleblower into personal ruin, to weaken him to the point where he will plead guilty to just about anything to make the case go away.

-- John Kiriakou, Op Ed in The Guardian, 6 August 2013

MiniTri 2013

Champaign Park District MiniTri Triathlon trvth:

43:57.2 to cover 400 yards swimming (7:05), 6 miles bicycling (18:34), and 2 miles running (15:13), plus transitions.

Overall 29th out of 192 finishers, 5th in my (relatively fast) age group, 50-54; I would have been 3rd had I been 1:09 faster.

Interestingly, the fastest age groups were 40-44, 15-19, 50-54, and 20-24. The 40-44 group had 6 in the top 20, finishing 2nd, 4th, 6th, 12th, 16th, and 19th.  Apparently going through your first mid-life crisis is key to taking triathlon seriously.

Amash

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to execute a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order pursuant to section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861) that does not include the following sentence: "This Order limits the collection of any tangible things (including telephone numbers dialed, telephone numbers of incoming calls, and the duration of calls) that may be authorized to be collected pursuant to this Order to those tangible things that pertain to a person who is the subject of an investigation described in section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861).".

-- Amendment to H.R. 2397, as Reported Offered by Mr. Amash of Michigan (R-MI), narrowly defeated (217-205) in the House of Representatives, 24 July 2013

Connecting Things

Creativity is just connecting things.  When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.  It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.  And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

-- Steve Jobs (1955-2011), American technology entrepreneur

Remember The Ladies

I long to hear that you have declared independence -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.  Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.  Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.  If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

-- Abigail Adams (1744-1818), wife of John Adams, second President of the United States, in a letter to John Adams, 31 March 1776

We And They

All the people like us are We,
And everyone else is They.
And They live over the sea,
While We live over the way,
But -- would you believe it?
They look upon We,
As only a sort of They!

-- Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), English author and poet, We And They

Snow For Rodrigo

A couple of years ago I had a foreign exchange student from Brazil stay at my house for about a year.  Rodrigo was from Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, and had never seen snow until November of that year at our house.

Yesterday it snowed in Curitiba for the first time in 38 years.

Could He Have?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I'd just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?  And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?  And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

-- President Obama's statement after the acquittal of George Zimmerman on charges related to the killing of Trayvon Martin, 19 July 2013

I Alone

I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom.  I am free, no matter what rules surround me.  If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.  I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

-- Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Undismayed

A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.  He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.  But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.

-- Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Whistleblowing

Whistleblowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What's important here are government programs and methods, not data  about individuals.  I understand I am asking for people to engage in illegal and dangerous behavior.  Do it carefully and do it safely, but -- and I am talking directly to you, person working on one of these secret and probably illegal programs -- do it.

If you see something, say something.  There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you.

For the rest of us, we can help by protesting this war on whistleblowers. We need to force our politicians not to punish them -- to investigate the abuses and not the messengers -- and to ensure that those unjustly persecuted can obtain redress.

Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country.  That needs to change.

-- Bruce Schneier, Government Secrets and the Need for Whistleblowers, The Atlantic (6 June 2013)

Trading Privacy For Convenience

If the government demanded that we all carry tracking devices 24/7, we would rebel.  Yet we all carry cell phones.  If the government demanded that we deposit copies of all of our messages to each other with the police, we'd declare their actions unconstitutional.  Yet we all use Gmail and Facebook messaging and SMS.  If the government demanded that we give them access to all the photographs we take, and that we identify all of the people in them and tag them with locations, we'd refuse.  Yet we do exactly that on Flickr and other sites.

Ray Ozzie is right when he said that we got what we asked for when we told the government we were scared and that they should do whatever they  wanted to make us feel safer.  But we also got what we asked for when we traded our privacy for convenience, trusting these corporations to look out for our best interests.

We're living in a world of feudal security.  And if you watch "Game of Thrones," you know that feudalism benefits the powerful -- at the expense of the peasants.

-- Bruce Schneier, Trading Privacy for Convenience (13 June 2013)

Inconvenient Minorities

The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion.  The law is no protection.  Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

-- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950), English novelist and journalist, Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945

Dissent

Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness.  The same cannot be said of the Court's opinion today.  The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled.  Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story.  See supra, at 18-19.  Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on "data from the record," and declines to enter the "debat[e about] what [the] record shows".  One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation's signal piece of civil-rights legislation.

-- US Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent of the SCOTUS decision invalidating a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 25 June 2013

Half

Five-mile training run gets out of control, turns into my first half marathon ever. Kept it under two hours, barely.

Ran 13.16 mi on 07/08/2013
Distance: 13.16 mi, Duration: 1:58:59, Pace: 9:03 min/mi

The Other Shoe

In sum, that Court which finds it so horrific that Congress irrationally and hatefully robbed same-sex couples of the "personhood and dignity" which state legislatures conferred upon them, will of a certitude be similarly appalled by state legislatures' irrational and hateful failure to acknowledge that "personhood and dignity" in the first place.  As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.

-- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent to the Court's decision on the Defense Of Marriage Act, 26 June 2013

Change

Our country has changed.  While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions. ...

Congress -- if it is to divide the states -- must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.  It cannot simply rely on the past.

-- US Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the majority, invalidating a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 25 July 2013