Homer Simpson:

Can't someone else do it?

Frank Furedi:

Almost every single virtue that makes for public spirit is stigmatized by our society.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn't do volunteering because it looked good on your CV. So, while volunteering certainly has a virtuous potential, it has been turned into a process that you adhere to much in the way that you clock on to a job.

Machiavelli and other humanists feared the professionalization of public duty. If you look at their writings, time and again they point to the danger of their city states relying on mercenaries instead of the services provided by citizens. From their perspective, the employment of mercenaries absolved the people from taking responsibility for the future of their community and served as instruments of the corrosion of public duty. That's more or less what the bureaucratization of public life has achieved today. It leads to a world where even family responsibility can become outsourced to 'carers'. In such circumstances the public can't do anything until a bureaucrat ticks the right box.

I think politicians are in a very difficult situation. It's not their fault.

What I do have a problem with is the fact we don't recognize that ordinary people have been silenced, that we've forced people to censor themselves in terms of what they actually believe and what they think.

Decius:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

Wil S. Hylton:

On the campaign trail, Obama had blasted torture as illegal, but as president he had little incentive to prosecute the crime, which would be distracting and politically costly.

Just a few years earlier, the Bush team had ignited a national scandal when political operatives tried to influence U.S. attorneys, yet the Obama administration had gone a step further, allowing operatives to apply political pressure on the attorney general himself. What's more, the pressure would continue for months.

In the months since Holder lost custody of the KSM trial, his place in the administration has only become more conflicted. On national security, in case after case, he seems to have reconciled himself to policies that he would have once condemned.

Of the fifty-seven habeas hearings that have taken place at Guantanamo, some thirty-eight prisoners have been set free by a judge. Yet the Holder Justice Department is denying habeas hearings to the prisoners at every other US facility, including more than 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Despite clearly promising to grant habeas to enemy combatants, Holder and Obama now insist that they never intended to do any such thing. Only the prisoners who happen to be housed in Guantanamo, they say, have a right to court. Prisoners who were shipped anywhere else have an entirely different set of legal rights -- which is to say, none at all.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Ira Glass:

Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

Judith Hertog, in Exquisite Corpse:

I find other people's errors very reassuring. It makes me feel better about my own deficiencies. I'm always on the lookout for mistakes, and when someone who's supposed to know better slips up, my heart does a little victory jiggle.

Frank Sandoval:

My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh,
I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

David B. Sparks:

Isarithmic maps are essentially topographic or contour maps, wherein a third variable is represented in two dimensions by color, or by contour lines, indicating gradations. I had never seen such a map depicting political data -- certainly not election returns, and thus sought to create them.

The isarithmic depiction does an excellent job of highlighting several broad patterns in modern U.S. political history. First, it does a good job of depicting local "peaks" and "valleys" of partisan support clustered around urban areas. Comparison of these maps across time also underscores well-known political trends, but offers more resolution than state-level choropleths and greater clarity than county-level choropleths.

Interpolating support between elections, I have generated a video in which these maps shift smoothly from one election year to the next. The result is the story of 20th century presidential politics on a grand scale, condensed into a little over a minute of data visualization.

From the archive:

The "Gospel Temperance Railroad Map" is an example of an allegorical map.

The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election. We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.

On Stefanie Posavec:

Posavec's approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces. It's not often that I am so thoroughly impressed by the depth of an artist's work, but somehow, for me, these pieces do it all.

On religion:

There are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource.

Roger Ebert:

We're great in this country about doing things that are "good" for children.

I think on this day, for the first time in my life, I can speak for all of America and perhaps for all of mankind, when I say that if proctological examinations ever become part of airport security, that's where I draw the line.

Annie Lowrey, on Peter Kant, of Rapiscan:

I hope Rapiscan is paying him extra for this.

Paul Graham:

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Lisa Belkin:

There is often a mismatch between what we see when we look at our children, and what is really there.

Marc Lacey:

In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Cormac McCarthy:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Garrison Keillor, quoting you:

I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?

Theodore Dalrymple:

Resentment never lets you down, because it is powerful in its capacity to stimulate the imagination.

Resentment allows you to dream on about all you would have achieved if things had been different (better, of course, for no one dreams of how little they would have achieved had things been worse).

But the real reward of resentment is that is changes the polarities of success and failure, or at least of the worth of success and failure. The fact that I am a failure in a certain regard shows that I am not only more sensitive than a vulgar success in that same regard, but really I am morally superior to him. To become a success, he has not had to contend with all that I have had to contend with to become a failure. Really, I am better than he, if only the world would recognize it.

Decius:

If the key is weak enough and the resentment high enough, you might fall victim to a public cracking effort.

Dr. Nanochick:

Liking Canadians is a way to identify with what you like about American culture without having to sacrifice your resentment.

Paul Krugman:

The main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn't.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

John Jacobs:

The Department of Homeland Security must put into place evolving technology and procedures to protect our citizens. This is done in order to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm. Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated.

Mark Foulon:

We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Timothy Naftali:

There's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them.

"People In Government":

The fine is mostly a deterrent so that terrorists cannot back out of a security check once it starts.

Jordy Yager:

TSA head John Pistole told reporters Monday that he rejected the advice of media aides who advised him to publicize the revised security measures before they took effect. Terrorist groups have been known to study the TSA's screening methods in an attempt to circumvent them, he said.

AQ:

Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist.

Bruce Schneier:

It's not much of a threat. As excess deaths go, it's just way down in the noise. More than 40,000 people die each year in car crashes. It's 9/11 every month. The threat is really overblown.

[But] you have to be seen as doing something, even if nothing is the smart thing to do. You can't be seen as doing nothing.

A Little Punk Staffer, commenting on the TSA hearings:

They shot themselves in the foot.

Michael Tomasky:

When the other side is shooting itself in the foot, stand close by and keep handing out bullets.

David Foster Wallace:

Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/1... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

An ABC News employee:

It was embarrassing. It was demeaning. It was inappropriate.

George F. Will:

Disproportion is the common denominator of almost all of life's absurdities.

Bureaucracies try to maximize their missions. They can't help themselves.

Tyler Cowen:

My question is: what is the wife maximizing?

Decius:

Our job is to apply our well-earned cynicism and fail to follow the baby boomers off a cliff in their pursuit of some idealistic agenda.

Randall Stross:

The T.S.A. is much more talented in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems.

An exchange:

Launcelot: "We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril."

Galahad: "I don't think I was."

Launcelot: "You were. You were in terrible peril."

Galahad: "Look, let me go back in there and face the peril."

Launcelot: "No, it's too perilous."

Decius:

Someone recently told me that they wanted me to look at something in order to understand it, not hack into it. I'm a security vulnerability researcher. I don't understand the difference.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Tom Friedman:

I think we're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Decius:

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained?

Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

This thing is not a game. There is no winning. There is only mattering.

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith:

Obama asked: "What's the endgame?" and did not receive a convincing answer.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Angus McCullough:

The only way to end your game is to lose.

Rahm Emanuel:

We have to play the game.

Sen. Claire McCaskill:

The game that's played around Washington is find something little that you can complain about and see if you can magnify it.

Stringer Bell:

There are games beyond the game.

An American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry:

It's like a game of cat and mouse. It's just a really, really smart mouse.

James Reston:

A health director ... reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat ... Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Games Beyond The Game

Peter Eckersley:

COICA gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be "central" to the purpose of the site.

Instead of passing dangerous anti-innovation bills like COICA, Congress should be working to clear the licensing roadblocks that make it hard for new businesses and new models to emerge, thrive, and pay creators.

Senator Leahy is leading the government into the swamp of trying to decide which websites should be blacklisted and which ones shouldn't, and they're going to discover that the line between copyright infringement and free political speech can be awfully murky.

Decius:

We should be screaming at Leahy. I'm so disappointed to see him backing something like this. He is usually computer literate. I used to think he was one of the few people in Congress whose positions I could trust. Unfortunately I'll have to view him with suspicion from now on. He has consorted with the devil.

It could be worse:

The Hong Kong government has unveiled a plan to use 200,000 young people from organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides as watchdogs for internet copyright infringement. Many civil liberties advocates question the use of teenagers in state-sponsored law enforcement.

Mark Kingwell:

What is the only thing worse than un-civil discourse? No discourse at all.

Noteworthy:

Oh, wait, is copyright protection preventing you from accessing the work of an author who died 99 years ago?

Vint Cerf:

The Internet is for everyone -- but it won't be if Governments restrict access to it ...

The Case Against COICA | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tim Wu:

The government has conferred its blessing on monopolies in information industries with unusual frequency. Sometimes this protection has yielded reciprocal benefits, with the owner of an information network offering the state something valuable in return, like warrantless wiretaps.

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Charlie Savage:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.

US-China Economic and Security Review Commission:

Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic -- including data from the Pentagon, the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other US government websites -- was briefly redirected through computer networks in China last April.

Computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

FBI Seeks Wider Wiretap Law for Web