The Privilege To Concede

I have a privilege right now, a privilege, as someone who was the Democratic nominee, I have the privilege to concede this race to J.D. Vance.  Because the way this country operates is that when you lose an election, you concede.  And you respect the will of the people.  Right?  We can't have a system where if you win, it's a legitimate election, and if you lose, someone stole it.  That is not how we can move forward in the United States. 

-- Democratic senate candidate Tim Ryan, in his concession speech acknowledging the electoral victory of Republican J. D. Vance, 8 November 2022

Rock The Vote!

Rock the vote, people! 

What Has Gone Wrong

When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic.  When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers.  The reason for this pattern is simple.  Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power.  When wealth is highly concentrated -- that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money -- political power tends to be highly concentrated, too.  The wealthy few tend to rule.  Average citizens lose political power.  Democracy declines. 

-- Benjamin I. Page (born c. 1939 -), Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University, with Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 19

First Rate

I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking.

-- Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882 - 1956), English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, War with Honour, Macmillan War Pamphlets, Issue 2 (1940)

Poetry Of Words

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.

-- Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849), American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, The Poetic Principle (1850)

Each Opening Creating Another

The difference between an expert and a novice fighter is that the expert makes use of each opportunity and follows up on each opening.  He makes use of his sensitive and dominating aura and his imposing rhythm.  He delivers his blows and/or kicks in a well-planned series, each opening creating another, until finally a clean shot is obtained.

-- Lee Jun-fan (1940 - 1973), commonly known as Bruce Lee, Hong Kong American martial artist and actor, Tao Of Jeet Kune Do (1975), p. 208

[This sounds like business advice, pocket billiards, and martial arts all at once.]

Disorderly

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

-- Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882 - 1956), English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, Year In, Year Out, page 130 (1952)

Most American

In many ways, Halloween is the most American of holidays: secular, irreverent, and unashamedly consumerist.  And as with many American cultural products, it has become a wildly successful export.

-- Lisa Morton (1958 -), American horror author and screenwriter, in: Eugenia Williamson Böö! Halloween’s quest for world domination, The Boston Globe, 28 October 2012

It Didn't Take A Year

I don't think that that's something that baseball should really be proud of.  It looks bad.  It let's people know it didn't take a year or even a decade to get to this point.  But there is help on the way.  You can tell by the number of African American No. 1 draft choices.

-- Johnnie B. "Dusty" Baker Jr. (15 June 1949 -), American baseball manager and former outfielder who is the manager of the Houston Astros in Major League Baseball, currently playing the 2022 World Series, regarding the fact that the 2022 Series features zero U.S.-born Black players for the first time since 1950, 27 October 2022

Justice Is

I remember -- the interruption of the honorable Gentleman reminds me of the words of a great writer, who said that "Grace was beauty in action."  Sir, I say that justice is truth in action.  Truth should animate an opposition, and I hope it does animate this opposition.

-- Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (1804 - 1881), British politician, novelist, and essayist, serving twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, speech in the House of Commons (2 February 1851)

A Progressive Discovery

Sixty years ago I knew everything.  Now I know nothing.  Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-- William James Durant (1885 - 1981), American historian, philosopher, and writer, quoted in "Books: The Great Gadfly", Time magazine, 8 October 1965 (review of The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant)

The Last Fifteen Minutes

For the first half hour, you don't think of anything, the next 15 minutes you're thinking about how you can do something big and the last 15 minutes I wanted to fall off just to put an end to the agony.  I wanted to puncture, anything, and finish the bid there and then.  I just couldn't go on.

-- Italian cyclist Filippo Ganna who beat the Hour Record in Grenchen, Switzerland, pushing it to 56.792 kilometres, a huge jump on the previous total of 55.548, set by Brit Dan Bigham on 19th August 2022, also at the Tissot Velodrome in Grenchen.  Ganna spoke to El País newspaper in an interview made during the Ineos Grenadiers training camp in Nice, 8 October 2022

Warm-Heartedness

How we live from day to day affects our future.  Warm-heartedness is the key factor.  I think about it always because it’s warm-heartedness that brings us peace of mind.

-- The Dalai Lama, via Twitter as @DalaiLama, 3 October 2022

Not An Act But A Habit

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions"; we are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

-- William James Durant (1885 - 1981), American historian, philosopher, and writer, The Story of Philosophy (1926) p. 87.  The quoted phrases within the quotation are from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7

A Golden Rule

A golden rule is never to use more complex movements than are necessary to achieve the desired result.  Start with simple movements and only introduce compound ones when you cannot otherwise succeed.  To hit a worthy opponent with a complex movement is satisfying and shows one's mastery of technique; to hit the same opponent by a simple movement is a sign of greatness.

-- Lee Jun-fan (1940 - 1973), commonly known as Bruce Lee, Hong Kong American martial artist and actor, Tao Of Jeet Kune Do (1975), p. 200

Causal Role

Generally, people have been very resistant to attributing a causal role in history to stupidity.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006), Canadian-American economist and author, Washington Post interview (1994)

Gifted

If you start with around a million coins and flip them, removing any coin that comes up tails, after another 20 tosses or so you'll be down to one coin.  That coin is going to think it is so much better and more gifted than the other coins.

-- Long-time friend and former bowling partner Patrick O'Halloran, replying to @KendraWrites as TheRealPatrick @TheRealPOH on Twitter, 17 October 2022

More, Not Less

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

-- Arthur Asher Miller (17 October 1915 - 10 February 2005), American playwright, essayist, and author, commenting on After the Fall (1964) in The Saturday Evening Post (1 February 1964)

Something Happens

Something happens to a man when he puts on a judicial robe, and I think it ought to.  The change is very great and requires psychological change within a man to get into an attitude of deciding other people's controversies, instead of waging them.  It really calls for quite a changed attitude.  Some never make it -- and I am not sure I have.

-- Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892 - 1954), US Solicitor General (1938-1940), US Attorney General (1940-1941), and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941-1954), reported in Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, 4 The Justices of the United States Supreme Court 1789-1969, 2563 (1969)

Application To Vacate

Trump, Donald J. V. United States

The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals of the Eleventh Circuit on September 21, 2022, presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the Court is denied.

-- The Supreme Court, declining former President Trump's request to intervene in the dispute over documents with classified markings taken from Mar-a-lago, 13 October 2022

RIP Nick Holonyak Jr

It's a good thing I was an engineer and not a chemist.  When I went to show them my LED, all the chemists at GE said, "You can't do that.  If you were a chemist, you'd know that wouldn't work."  I said, "Well, I just did it, and see, it works!"

-- Nick Holonyak Jr. (3 November 3 1928 - 18 September 2022), American engineer and educator.  He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED) that emitted visible red light instead of infrared light while working at General Electric's research laboratory in Syracuse, New York.  After leaving General Electric in 1963, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics, as quoted by the Illinois News Bureau, "Nick Holonyak Jr., pioneer of LED lighting, dies" (18 September 2022)

Composite Nationality

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.

To those who doubt and deny the preponderance of good over evil in human nature; who think the few are made to rule, and many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity; who attach more importance to ancient forms than to the living realities of the present; who worship power in whatever hands it may be lodged and by whatever means it may have been obtained; our Government is a mountain of sin, and, what is worse, its [sic] seems confirmed in its transgressions.

-- Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895), American abolitionist, orator, author, and statesman during the American Civil War, born a slave in Maryland, in a speech in Boston, MA ,"Our Composite Nationality" (7 December 1869)

Initiative

The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one thing.  And that is Initiative.  What is Initiative?  I'll tell you: It is doing the right thing without being told.  But next to doing the right thing without being told is to do it when you are told once.

-- Elbert Green Hubbard (1856 - 1915), American writer, publisher, and philosopher, Love, Life and Work (1905)

Historic Move

Today was a huge step in the right direction and really a historic move to see coming from a sitting president of the United States.

-- Erik Altieri, executive director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, speaking after President Biden pardoned thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana possession charges, NPR, 7 October 2022

Aaron Judge Stands Alone

A little over 100 years ago, a charismatic and portly slugger named Babe Ruth began swatting balls over outfield fences by volume, helping establish the home run as one of the most coveted individual achievements in sports, and the Yankees as the most honored franchise.

Ruth's records, including 60 home runs in 1927, became sacred milestones, cherished for decades by millions.  In 1961, Roger Maris, as humble and retiring as Ruth was gregarious, broke the single-season record when he hit 61 homers, also for the Yankees.

Now Aaron Judge, as physically imposing as Ruth and as modest as Maris, has passed them both, homering against the Texas Rangers at Globe Life Field on Tuesday to reach 62 for the season, setting a new American League record.

From Ruth to Maris and now Judge, the A.L.'s single-season home run record is stitched together in pinstripes.

-- David Waldstein, "With His 62nd Home Run, Aaron Judge Stands Alone in A.L.", New York Times, 4 October 2022

The Same Way

It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity.  I’m an optimist.  In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist.  You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good.  But I’m not so sure about human institutions ....  Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business.  I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

-- John Perry Barlow (1947 - 2018), American poet, essayist, and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "John Perry Barlow 2.0", interview by Brian Doherty in ReasonOnline (August 2004)

RIP Loretta Lynn

Sometimes I think some people were disappointed when they met me and found out I wasn't any smarter or happier than they were.  I'm proud and I've got my own ideas, but I ain't no better than nobody else.  I've often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that's the reason.  I think I reach people because I'm with 'em, not apart from 'em.

-- Loretta Webb Lynn (14 April 1932 - 4 October 2022), iconic country singer, Coal Miner's Daughter (1976) Ch. 19 : Performer

Wars Cannot Be Fought

As a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose.  Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons.  Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated.  There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept -- if you desire peace prepare for war.  This is absolute nuclear nonsense.

-- Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC (1900 - 1979), British admiral and statesman, Speech in Strasbourg (11 May 1979), quoted in The Times (8 March 1980), p. 13

Like A Vampire

I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.

-- Dame Hilary Mary Mantel DBE FRSL (6 July 1952 - 22 September 2022), British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs, and short stories, Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

Success Depends

Success depends on what you choose to ignore.

-- Bola Adesola, Nigerian accountant, Senior Vice-Chairman at Standard Chartered Bank Group, medium.com (10 October 2020)

A Global Endeavor

We are showing that planetary defense is a global endeavor, and it is very possible to save our planet.

-- Clarence William Nelson II (1942 -), American politician and attorney serving as administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), congratulatory message to NASA teams, after the successful impact of the DART spacecraft into the moonlet Dimorphos of the asteroid Didymos, (26 September 2022)

Tinier Even Than Science

Still among the myriad microwaves, the
infra-red messages, the gigabytes of ones
and zeroes, we find words, infinitesimally
small, byte-sized now, tinier even than
science lurking in some vague electricity
where, if we listen we can hear the solitary
voice of that poet telling us,

"We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the show."

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on:  nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."

"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare;
Tomorrow's Silence, Triumph or Despair:
Drink!  for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink!  for you know not why you go, nor where."

-- Irma St Paule (1926 - 2007), as "Poet" in the movie Twelve Monkeys (1995), quoting Omar Khayyam's The Rubaiyat (1120), stanzas LXVII, LXXI, and LXXIV

All Houses Are Haunted

You come to this place, mid-life.  You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face.  When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.  The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners.  You think of the children you might have had but didn't.  When the midwife says, "It's a boy," where does the girl go?  When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind?  You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.

-- Dame Hilary Mary Mantel DBE FRSL (6 July 1952 - 22 September 2022), British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs, and short stories, Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

Life Is Heaven

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work.  With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.  Without this -- with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need -- this life is hell.

-- William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 - 1963), American civil rights activist, educator, and author, To His Newborn Great-Grandson, address on his ninetieth birthday (1958)

Structure Is Everything

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else.  We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words.  I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related.  There really is little else to meaning.  The structure is everything.  There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons?  Just cells.  The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons.  All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

-- Tim Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development, Weaving The Web : The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (1999)

We Conclude That He Would Not

Here, we analyze whether Plaintiff would be "substantially injure[d]" by a stay.  Largely for reasons we have already discussed, we conclude that he would not. 

First, as we have explained, Plaintiff does not have a possessory interest in the documents at issue, so he does not suffer a cognizable harm if the United States reviews documents he neither owns nor has a personal interest in. 

Second, we find unpersuasive Plaintiff's insistence that he would be harmed by a criminal investigation. "Bearing the discomfiture and cost of a prosecution for crime even by an innocent person is one of the painful obligations of citizenship." Cobbledick v. United States, 309 U.S. 323, 325 (1940). 

Third, because of the nature of the classified materials at issue here and based on the record, we have no reason to expect that the United States's use of these records imposes the risk of disclosure to the United States of Plaintiff's privileged information. 

-- United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruling in Donald J. Trump v United States of America, USCA 11 Case: 22-13005 (21 September 2022), staying a lower court ruling that denied the FBI access to classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago

I Am Patient

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. 

-- Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), English poet and critic, The Last Years of a Rebel (1967)

Fleeting Instant

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.  Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.

-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 - 180), Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher, Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book III, 10

After Silence

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

-- Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 - 1963), British author, Music at Night and Other Essays (1931), "The Rest is Silence"

Old Men Delight

Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples.

Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples.

-- François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, le Prince de Marcillac (15 September 1613 - 17 March 1680), French author of maxims and memoirs,  Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665-1678), Maxim 93

New Form Of Capitalism

Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn't end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people.  We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.

-- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, 83, in an interview announcing the transfer of the $3 Billion company to the Holdfast Collective, which will donate 100% of future profits to combat climate change, New York Times, 14 September 2022

As Few Lies

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

-- Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924), Bohemian-Jewish novelist, The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918), p. 58

Providence For Us All

Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all -- as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.

-- Charles Reade (1814 - 1884), English novelist and dramatist, A Simpleton (1873)

Sent From My iPad

From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad

-- Steve Jobs, in an email to himself (2 September 2010), from the Steve Jobs Archive, which was just announced by Laurene Powell Jobs as "a repository of historical materials relating to Steve, some of which have never before been made public"

The Queen Is Dead

The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon.

The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.

Thursday, 8th September 2022

-- Pronouncement placed today on the gate of Buckingham Palace, announcing the passing of Queen Elizabeth II (21 April 1926 - 8 September 2022), Britain's longest-serving (70 years, 214 days) monarch, and the ascendance to the throne of King Charles III

Upside Down

There is something intrinsically upside down and counter-intuitive in the relationship between money and happiness.

-- David John Orrell (born 1962 in Edmonton), Canadian mathematician and author living in Oxford, England, The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 2, Odd Versus Even, p. 70

Amendment 14, Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.  But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

-- Section 3 of Amendment 14 to the US Constitution, as cited in State of New Mexico v Couy Griffin, wherein Judge Francis J. Mathew ruled, "Mr. Griffin Became Constitutionally Disqualified from Any Federal or State Office, Including His Current Office, Effective January 6, 2021." (6 September 2022)

Bookends

Back in 2001, I was in my 8th year of working for NovaNET, the descendant of CERL PLATO.  Each year the company hosted a national gathering of its customers and employees in Phoenix.  As a long-time Cardinals baseball fan, I noted that the Cardinals would play the Arizona Diamondbacks, in Phoenix, during the conference.  I bought a ticket for the Diamondbacks home opener, Friday April 6th 2001.  

At the game that night, the Cardinals fielded a much-heralded rookie right fielder (later first baseman) by the name of Albert Pujols, who, at 21 years old, was playing in what I think was just his third MLB game.  In the 4th inning, facing Armando Reynoso on a count of 1 ball and 2 strikes, Albert Pujols hit his first career home run, a 2-run shot that tied the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUvUUQfYdRo

Fast forward to this weekend, and my daughter (who was 2 when that first home run was hit) treated me to a Labor Day Sunday game at Busch Stadium, as the Cardinals faced their arch-rival Cubs.  The game started more than an hour late due to rain, and it drizzled off and on, but it was well worth it.  Albert Pujols didn't start the game, but in the bottom of the 8th inning of a scoreless game, he emerged from the dugout to hit a pinch-hit, 2-run home run, and the Cardinals went on to win 2-0.  It was Pujols' 695th career home run as he aims for 700 before retiring at the end of this season.  There's a lifetime between those 2 home runs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqcLl9QSJgU

This post made possible by my daughter.  Thanks, kid!

That I May Learn

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

-- Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853 - 1890), Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, in a letter to Anthon van Rappard (18 August 1885)

What To Do Next

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

-- David Starr Jordan, Ph.D., LL.D. (1851 - 1931), leading ichthyologist (the study of fish), educator, and peace activist; he was president of Indiana University (Bloomington) and Stanford University. "Ideals of Stanford", quoted in The Land of Sunshine: A Southern California Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Los Angeles, June 1898), p. 11