Genuine Courage

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.  Wouldn't life be more interesting that way?  And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they?  Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year?  Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day.  People would be so much easier to talk to -- like talking to dogs.

-- Douglas Coupland (1961-), Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator, in The Gum Thief: A Novel, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, (2011) p. 23

Born Or Naturalized

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

-- Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, proposed by Congress in 1863 and ratified in 1868

Screw Your Optics

HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.

I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.

Screw your optics, I'm going in.

-- Final post of Robert Bowers, @onedingo on Gab, who is accused of murdering 11 at the Tree Of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, in which he refers to a right-wing conspiracy theory regarding the so-called "immigrant caravan" now crossing Mexico and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, posted 2 hours before the shooting on 27 October 2018

Yi Dan

Tonight I was awarded my second-degree black belt (Yi Dan) in Tae Kwon Do after testing earlier this  month.

I was originally scheduled to take this test in February 2017, but I tore the ACL in my right knee two weeks before the test.  As a result, it was about 19 months before I was finally able to take the test.

Whew!  Glad to get that behind me.

Excess Value

The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use value, or his personal consumption.  The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it.

-- Karl Marx (5 May 1818 - 14 March 1883), German political philosopher and economist, in Das Kapital (Capital: Critique of Political Economy), Volume III, edited by Friedrich Engels (1894), Chapter II, The Rate of Profit, p. 41

Act Or Threats

[A]cts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.

-- President Donald Trump, in a statement after explosive devices were mailed to a number of Democrats including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, 24 October 2018

Plutocracy

The central issue is we're developing into a plutocracy.  We've got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they're rich because they're smart and constructive.  And they don't like government, and they don't like to pay taxes.

-- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, in an interview with Andrew Sorkin, New York Times, 23 October 2018

What We Make

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

-- Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969), American Baptist and Presbyterian minister, On Being a Real Person (1943)

Big Bird And Oscar The Grouch

I always thought, How fortunate for me that I got to play the two best Muppets?  Playing Big Bird is one of the most joyous things of my life. ...  I don't get to play him -- I get to live his life.

-- Caroll Spinney, who leaves "Sesame Street" this week after nearly 50 years of playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, New York Times, 17 October 2018

First Legal Gram

I came out tonight to be the first person in Canada to purchase the first legal gram of recreational cannabis, to help see the end of prohibition in Canada finally.

-- Canadian Ian Power, who with Nikki Rose completed the first legal marijuana sale in Canada, shortly after midnight in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easternmost province, Reuters.com, 17 October 2018

Tribal Affiliation

Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.

-- The Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, Chuck Hoskin Jr., in a statement Monday in response to a DNA test showing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American, Washington Post, 16 October 2018

Are You Surprised?

When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?

-- Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi (13 October 1958 - ?), missing Saudi journalist and author.  He is currently missing amid allegations that he was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on 2 October 2018.  "Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive.  Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

Disasters

This is what disasters look like.

-- Former FEMA Chief W. Craig Fugate, on the damage in Florida from Hurricane Michael, New York Times, 12 October 2018

Distance

If you can repair your future child's myopia with preemptive genetic tinkering, you might also want to increase her I.Q. by a few dozen points. Will it lead to a world as utopian as Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average? Of course not. It will just add genetic manipulation of embryos and child cloning to the means by which affluent, fussy people try to distance themselves from bad luck, disappointment, menial work, death, and poor people.

-- David Quammen (1948-), award-winning science, nature and travel writer, "Clone Your Troubles Away: Dreaming at the Frontiers of Animal Husbandry", Harper's Magazine (February 2005)

Thanks, Mark

I don't have a clever quote tonight, just the fading reverberations of a "China Grove" encore as the Doobie Brothers wrapped their set at State Farm Center in Champaign, IL tonight.

Cheers.

Girl With(out) Balloon

LONDON -- The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.

The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby's "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art sale.  After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.

-- New York Times, 6 October 2018



A few years ago, I secretly built a shredder into a painting in case it was ever put up for auction ....

-- British street artist Banksy, in a video explaining how he did it, posted to his Instagram, 6 October 2018

I Will

Mr. President, I will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.

-- Final line of remarks by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) on the Senate floor to announce her decision to vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 5 October 2018

His Performance

At that time, I thought [Kavanaugh] had the qualifications for the Supreme Court should he be selected.  I've changed my views for reasons that have no relationship to his intellectual ability ....  I feel his performance in the hearings ultimately changed my mind.

-- Lifelong Republican and retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who was nominated by Gerald Ford and unanimously confirmed, speaking to a small group of retirees at The Institute for Learning in Retirement in Boca Raton, FL, when asked about praise of Brett Kavanaugh in his 2014 book "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.", Palm Beach Post, 4 October 2018

Presidential alert

Presidential alert

THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.

Oct 3, 13:18

-- Text of the first test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System, 3 October 2018 at 13:18

Weakness

The greatest weakness of all weaknesses is to fear too much to appear weak.

-- Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627 - 1704), French bishop, theologian, and court preacher. Bossuet was one of the first to advocate the theory of political absolutism; he made the argument that government was divine and that kings received their power from God, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (1709)

Talking

Look at me when I'm talking to you.  You're telling me that my assault doesn't matter!

-- An angry sexual assault survivor berating Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake as he steps into the elevator after a break in hearings on Supreme Court Candidate Brett Kavanaugh.  Flake subsequently forced a delay and an investigation, 28 September 2018

Intercede

I don't believe it's possible to be neutral.  The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on.  And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world.  I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.

-- Howard Zinn (1924 - 2010), American historian, political scientist, playwright and social activist, in Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004) documentary film

The Difference Between The Two

Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell.  It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do.  Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same -- to prevent trade.  The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading.  What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.   

-- Henry George (1839 - 1897), American economic and social philosopher who popularized the economic policies which have become known as Georgism, Protection or Free Trade? (1886)

That's OK

Didn't expect that reaction, but that's OK.

-- President Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, after attendees openly laughed in response to his assertions of record accomplishments by his administration, 25 September 2018

Fastest Human On A Bicycle

Denise Mueller-Korenek became the fastest human to ever ride a bicycle, hitting an average 183.932 miles per hour for one mile on a custom bicycle.  This shatters a record set in 1995.  They were only aiming for 175 miles per hour, tops, but ended up obliterating the 167 mile per hour record set by Fred Rompelberg.

-- Bill Chappell, NPR, via Numlock News, 20 September 2018

The Pleasure Of Hating

Scolding bad people makes us feel better about ourselves.  In his essay "On the Pleasure of Hating," William Hazlitt wrote, "There is no surfeiting on gall: Nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen.  We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."  We hate other people as a way to love ourselves.

-- Windsor Mann, quoting William Hazlitt (c. 1826), in The Week, "You'll miss Trump one day", (17 September 2018)


http://theweek.com/articles/795704/youll-miss-trump-day

What Happens

But fortunately, we had a good saying that we've held firm to to this day ... which is: What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep.  That's been a good thing for all of us, I think.

-- Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in a 2015 speech at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law

Hereinafter Referred

This letter sets forth the full and complete plea offer to your client Paul J. Manafort, Jr. (hereinafter referred to as "your client" or "defendant") from the Special Counsel's Office (hereinafter referred to as "the Government" or "this Office").  If your client accepts the terms and conditions of this offer, please have your client execute this document in the space provided below.  Upon receipt of the executed document, this letter will become the Plea Agreement (hereinafter referred to as the "Agreement"). 

-- Opening paragraph of the plea agreement between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, filed 14 September 2018

Complexity And Uncertainty

Accepting and respecting neurodiversity is the key to surviving the transformation driven by the internet and AI, which is shattering the Newtonian predictability of the past and replacing it with a Heisenbergian world of complexity and uncertainty.

-- Joi Ito, in Wired Magazine, The Educational Tyranny Of The Neurotypicals, 6 September 2018


https://www.wired.com/story/tyranny-neurotypicals-unschooling-education/

Original Thought

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

-- Henry Louis (H. L.) Mencken (12 September 1880 - 29 January 1956), journalist, satirist, social critic, and freethinker, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

RIP Burt Reynolds

We're only here for a little while, and you've got to have some fun, right?  I don't take myself seriously, and I think the ones that do, there's some sickness with people like that.

-- Burton Leon "Burt" Reynolds (11 February 1936 - 6 September 2018), American actor, director and producer, "Burt Reynolds Has Made Mistakes. But He Regrets Nothing" in The New York Times (23 March 2018)

A Spark

We have been through much darker times than these.  And somehow each generation of Americans carried us through to the other side.  Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something, but by leading that movement for change themselves.  And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.  Change happens.  Hope happens.  Not perfection, not every bit of cruelty and sadness and poverty and disease suddenly stricken from the Earth.  There will still be problems, but with each new candidate that surprises you with a victory that you supported, a spark of hope happens.

-- Former president Barack Obama, in a speech at Foellinger Hall on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana, 7 September 2018

Resistance

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It's not just that the special counsel looms large.  Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump's leadership.  Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma -- which he does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know.  I am one of them.

-- New York Times Op-Ed by a senior official in the Trump administration, published anonymously, 5 September 2018

2018 Mindset List

The 2018 Mindset list For the Class of 2022

* Human beings have always been living -- not just traveling -- in space.  The United States has always been in Afghanistan.  Same-sex marriage has always been legal somewhere and the once revolutionary "You've got mail" is almost forgotten.

* They have always been able to refer to Wikipedia.

* People loudly conversing with themselves in public are no longer thought to be talking to imaginary friends.

* They’ve grown up with stories about where their grandparents were on 11/22/63 and where their parents were on 9/11.

* There have always been space tourists willing to pay the price.

* There have always been more than a billion people in India.

* Films have always been distributed on the Internet.

http://themindsetlist.com

My Takeaway

My takeaway on this is there are a lot of idiots on the internet who come to conclusions over no factual evidence.

-- Reddit user Ravenchamps, after his account was incorrectly identified by far-right websites, including Infowars and Gateway Pundit, as belonging to the Jacksonville, FL video game tournament shooter who sometimes used the handle Ravens2012champs, NBC News, 28 August 2018

RIP John McCain

On the banks of the Ho Truc Bach Lake in downtown Hanoi.  Monument A stone sculpture of a person with arms raised and head lowered.  To the right of the person is USA and a star.  To the left of the person is the text in Vietnamese.

Approximate translation: "On 26 October 1967 near Truc Bach Lake in the capital, Hanoi, the citizens and military caught Pilot John Sidney McCain.  The US Navy Air Force Aviator was flying aircraft A4, which crashed near Yen Phu power station.  This was one of ten aircraft shot down that same day."

-- Description of the Vietnamese memorial to Senator John Sidney McCain III (29 August 1936 - 25 August 2018) at his Vietnam War crash site, courtesy of uswarmemorials.org

Murdered Your Best Friend

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics.  You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

-- Stanley Hauerwas (24 July 1940-), Christian theologian and ethicist, currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law, from The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life (1999, with William H. Willimon). Page: 89

Life Is

Life is a long lesson in humility.

-- Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860 - 1937), Scottish novelist and dramatist, more commonly known as J. M. Barrie; author of the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up;  in The Little Minister (1891), Ch. 3 : The Night-Watchers

Billionaires

$126 on opening day

Kevin Spacey’s latest film, "Billionaire Boys Club," earned $126 at the box office on its opening day this past weekend.  And no, there are no digits or words missing from that sentence.  Spacey has been mired in accusations of sexual assault since the fall.  The film opened in eight theaters, for an average of $15.75 per theater, or less than the price of a single small popcorn (give or take).

-- The Hollywood Reporter, via FiveThirtyEight's Significant Digits newsletter, 20 August 2018

Because I Had To Use It

Truth isn't truth.

-- Presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani, in a from-the-hip effort to explain the risks of a perjury charge in a he-said / he-said dispute, NBC's Meet The Press with Chuck Todd, 19 August 2018

RIP Aretha Franklin

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me

-- Aretha Louise Franklin (25 March 1942 - 16 August 2018), American singer, songwriter, and pianist, known as The Queen of Soul

Unleashing Demons

Programming is like magic.  You write very specific instructions in arcane languages to invoke commands, and if you get it even a little bit wrong you risk unleashing demons and destroying everything.

-- Diana Carrier, writing on Twitter as @artemis_134, 23 June 2018

Deny Myself

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

-- Christopher Hitchens, (1949-2011), Anglo-American author, essayist, and social critic, Hitch-22: A Memoir (1976)

Every 10 Seconds

Pay-television subscriptions are down to 93.7 million from just shy of 101 million in 2011.  About 6 Americans cancel their paid television every single minute.

-- Gerry Smith, Bloomberg, via Walt Hickey's NumLock News, 10 August 2018

Tendency To Miss Lunch

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

-- Tim Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development, in an interview by Kris Herbst for Internet World (June 1994)

Not For Itself

The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior.   

-- Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845), English clergyman, critic, philosopher, and wit, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

Wisdom And Efficiency

A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

-- Primo Levi (1919 - 1987), Italian chemist and author of memoirs, short stories, poems, and novels; he joined an anti-Fascist group at the start of The Second World War but was captured and taken to the German concentration camp at Auschwitz.  Levi survived the Holocaust and returned to Italy, If This Is a Man (1947)

This Shit Is Expensive

My health is good.  And I've just reached a milestone or two. 

As many of you know, in late 2015 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and since I drew the short straw, I received multiple modalities of treatment.  First there was surgery, then radiation, and finally hormone therapy, which is slated to end after 6 more months.  The first milestone is 2 years of zeroes on tests where I hope to score zero (knock wood).

But this isn't really a post about my health, it's more about the cost of treatment.  I maintain a spreadsheet breaking down the costs for my treatment as submitted to insurance (not necessarily as paid).  This shit is expensive.  Here are some totals, by category:

Diagnosis   :  $16,000
Surgery     :  $79,000
Radiation   : $236,000
Hormone Tx  : $174,000

The final category, hormone treatment, will continue to accrue at ~$5500 per month for another 6 months.  With my most recent treatment, I hit my second milestone, the half million dollar mark.

Grand Total : $504,930.64

Apple Hits $1,000,000,000,000

How do you like them apples?

Apple just became the first American public company to cross $1 trillion in value.

The iPhone maker achieved that big number on Thursday when the stock passed $207.04 a share.  Its new all-time high is $208.38.  Apple is now up more than 20% this year.

-- CNN Money, 2 August 2018

Improbity

Origin of improbity (wickedness or dishonesty)

The English noun improbity comes from Latin improbitās (stem improbitāt-) "dishonesty, unscrupulousness," a derivative of improbus "inferior, improper."  The parts of improbus break down fairly easily: the prefix im- is a variant of the Latin negative prefix in- used before labial consonants (e.g., b, p) from the same Proto-Indo-European source as Germanic (English) un-, Greek a-, an-, and Sanskrit a-, an-.  The element pro- is from the very common (and complicated) Proto-Indo-European prefix and preposition per "forward, through, in front of, early, first."  The -bus is the same ending as in the Latin adjective superbus "proud, haughty" (the ultimate source of English superb) from the Proto-Indo-European root bheu- "to be, exist, grow," source of Germanic (English) be, Latin fuï "I was, have been" (the perfect of esse "to be"), and Slavic (Polish) być "to be."  The original sense of probus would be "going well, growing well," and improbus "not going well."  Improbity entered English in the late 16th century.

-- From dictionary.com