AdamSmith

The expression one believes is "Dr Chadwick, i presume?"

'Everything old is new again, Just like the 'Long Long Trailor'"... http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1672-credences-of-summer

'Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have been with a loose girl.' The priest asks, 'Is that you, little Joey Pagano?' 'Yes, Father, it is.' 'And who was the girl you were with?' 'I can't tell you, Father, I don't want to ruin her reputation.' "Well, Joey, I'm sure to find out her name sooner or later so you may as well tell me now. Was it Tina Minetti?" 'I cannot say.' 'Was it Teresa Mazzarelli?' 'I'll never tell.' 'Was it Nina Capelli?' 'I'm sorry, but I cannot name her.' 'Was it Cathy Piriano?' 'My lips are sealed Father.' 'Well then, was it Rosa DiAngelo?' 'Please, Father, I cannot tell you.' The priest sighs in frustration. 'You're very tight lipped, and I admire that. But you've sinned and have to atone. You cannot be an altar boy now for 4 months. Now you go and behave yourself.' Joey walks back to his pew, and his friend Franco slides over and whispers, 'What'd you get?' 'Four month's vacation and five excellent Leads.'

Ahem...

Guess preloading at the rehearsal dinner the night before will have to suffice for John Courage.

Mm hm ... one of us, anyway.

Usually the nervous groom.

I don't understand it either. Should I ever get in position to need a tax haven, I will have to see into it.

TMZ reports... Paula Deen Wins Racial Lawsuit That Destroyed Her In one of the most supremely ironic court decisions in a long time, a judge just threw out the racial discrimination claim filed against Paula Deen -- the very lawsuit that destroyed the famous chef. A judge just ruled ... Lisa Jackson had no right to claim racial discrimination, BECAUSE SHE'S WHITE! Any comments that Deen or her cohorts may have made had no legal consequence to her, because she's simply not the right color. Jackson made a tenuous argument that someone in her family was bi-racial -- something that may not be true at all. But the judge said even if it were true, she was at best an "accidental victim." Short story -- Jackson ruined Paula with a bogus claim. The case goes on, because Jackson also claims sexual discrimination, and so far there's not basis to doubt that she's a woman. Read more: http://www.tmz.com#ixzz2bnKI4NtI

Encouraging viewpoint. Systematic Surveillance Will Eat Itself Natasha Lomas TechCrunch As the digitally connected world grapples with the dystopic reality that our overreaching governments are using technology tools ostensibly designed to increase our convenience to up their own — by peeking into our business, apparently regardless of whether they have probable cause to lift the lid — it’s worth taking a step back from current snowballing concerns about technology eroding privacy. That’s not to say there are no reasons to be concerned; there absolutely are. But there is reason for positivity too. New technologies typically trigger moral panics. Whether it’s the invention of the printing press; the telephone or radio and TV; high speed travel; the electrification of homes — you name it, new inventions have been marshalling societal doomsday merchants for centuries. Probably forever (let’s not forget Socrates’ concerns that written words would degrade our ability to remember and intelligently interrogate knowledge). Likewise the increasingly pervasive interconnectness afforded by the Internet and the proliferation of connected device types has led to plenty of concerned social commentary already — whether it’s fear that social networking is making us more narcissistic; or kids more vulnerable to bullying; or encouraging the rise of misogynistic or racist or extremist viewpoints. The scaremongering goes on. And now we can apparently add mass government surveillance programs to the file ‘bad stuff technology is doing’. But like most of the things on that list, that’s a simplification which ignores the fact technology is merely a tool that supports multiple applications. Now there’s no doubt that the traceability and stackability of digital communications and interactions has and is enabling mass surveillance of citizens — making it easier for governments (and of course companies like Facebook — which are now, in any case, effectively the outsourced, data-harvesting arms of government agencies like the NSA) to spy on the stuff we do online. Our digital traces can be captured and stored – apparently ad infinitum — because storage has become so cheap, and is only getting cheaper. Technology allows even the most apparently incidental/trivial data-points to be siphoned off and joined to all our other dots, to flesh out dynamic maps of our digital lives — just because it’s possible to do that. You could even argue that technology’s recording abilities/capacity encourage a ‘just in case’ mind-set which says ‘store now, data-mine later if the need arises’. (Or, in the business context, ‘grab everything now, figure out what’s needed to monetise later’.) That of course skews the relationship between the state and the individual – apparently allowing for an individual to be held to account in perpetuity, regardless of whether they are justifiably under suspicion. We are all pre-emptively judged sinners if surveillance is systematic. Judgement Day has been digitally reimagined as an all-day recurring calendar event. How quaint — by comparison — appears the Biblical equivalent which only occurs once, as a final reckoning, at the very end of time. But there’s something else to remember here too. Just as our digital interactions and online behaviour can be tracked, parsed and analysed for problematic patterns, pertinent keywords and suspicious connections, so too can the behaviour of governments. Technology is a double-edged sword – which means it’s also capable of lifting the lid on the machinery of power-holding institutions like never before. In the case of technology-enabled mass surveillance, the spy becomes the spied upon – as happened the moment Edward Snowden leaked data on the NSA’s surveillance programs. Ok, so it required a human whistleblower to decide to step forward and shine a light on those dark goings on. And each such reveal is typically only a snapshot of extant processes – i.e. which the whistleblower had access to up to the time the leak was made public. So it’s far more partial than the data which flows, blood-like, through the pipelines of the surveillance systems apparently monitoring us. But the point stands: the same infrastructure that allows government agencies to capture data on any digitally connected person, also allowed Snowden to comprehend the extent of the NSA’s surveillance, and take away enough evidence to put that knowledge in the public domain. Technology allows for bigger, more significant data leaks; makes whistleblowing easier too. Wikileaks is another (obvious) example of how technology-enabled data leaks can hold the powerful to account by making their actions and processes more transparent than they would otherwise be (whether Wikileaks has overreached its own power-debunking role is a whole other debate, however). Another smaller example would be the data leaked on UK MPs’ expenses in 2009 – data that was ultimately sold to journalists, who then made the story public. In that case journalists had previously tried to legally obtain MPs’ expenses information under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act and had their attempts rebuffed. The establishment closed off sanctioned avenues of journalistic investigation. Circumventing that required two things: a human whistleblower, and cheap and easy digital storage technology that allowed enough data to be taken out of a closed system to reveal systematic abuse of a taxpayer-funded expenses system. The wider point is that if governments are (mis)using technology to spy on us, they can’t escape the countervailing reality: the omnipresent risk of that same technology-powered all-seeing eye being turned back on them – spilling their secrets for us to judge. And there’s the cause for hope. Technology can certainly allow governments (and companies) to overreach and infringe on our rights as citizens (or users) – it is a powerful tool, after all. But, in the right hands, this tool can also reveal in microscopic detail what governing institutions and powerful companies are up to. The NSA’s extensive apparatus of surveillance may thus ultimately reach so far it ends up checking its own advance by forcing a publicly shamed government to avoid democratic censure by policing itself. In other words, so long as there are whistleblowers like Snowden — people of conscience — then surveillance systems will end up eating themselves. Or that’s the hope. Snowden’s leaks have led directly to Obama publicly announcing a review of the NSA’s processes. The President can deny it all he wants — and of course he has – but there is no doubt these reforms have been announced as a direct result of the NSA’s processes being made public, which in turn has piled domestic and international pressure on the Obama Administration. And thrown a negative cloud of suspicion over U.S. technology companies — the collateral damage of a policy that lumps the rest of the world into a catch-all category labelled ‘potential terrorists’. Bad for business means bad for government — a situation that cranks up the pressure for a policy rethink. Likewise, in the commercial context, the rise of ephemeral sharing and pro-privacy movements like do-not-track — powered by startups like Snapchat and free-thinkers like DuckDuckGo — puts disruptive business pressure on the overreaching excesses of data-harvesting giants like Facebook and Google that want to grab and store every little thing we do. Startups can and do play a role in checking inroads into our privacy by offering alternatives that don’t demand we give up so much — which in turn can help to amend the behaviour of dominant players. So, while digital technologies can be press-ganged into the service of totalitarianism, and used to trample the rights of free societies, it only takes a few free-thinkers to apply technology’s reach and capacity in the opposite direction to fight the creep of Stasi-like systems. Snooping and leaking are really just flip sides of the same coin. Snowden is therefore much more than a patriot; right now he’s the better angel of America’s nature. http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/11/snooping-vs-leaking/

Be a user, not a consumer: how capitalism has changed our languageCapitalism is altering our language – and Raymond Williams saw it coming more than 50 years ago Owen Hatherley The Guardian, Sunday 11 August 2013 16.30 EDT According to a report by researchers at the University of Los Angeles, English has become a peculiarly capitalist language – though they don't quite put it like that. They used the somewhat blunt instrument of feeding 1.5m English-language books into Ngram Viewer, a tool that catalogues phrase usage, in order to count the frequency that words were used. The results proved that over the last 200 years there has been an ever-increasing use of particularly acquisitive words: "get", "unique", "individual", "self", "choose"; while over the same period "give" and "obliged" decreased. The pattern was only broken briefly in the relatively egalitarian years between the 40s and 70s. For the researchers, this shows the results of the English-speaking countries moving from "a predominantly rural, low-tech society to a predominantly urban, hi-tech society". Some academics would rather not use the c-word. What has happened over those 200 years was the rise to dominance of capitalism, which obviously changed, and changes, our language and thinking. The researchers discovered a more algorithmic and superficial version of something that the Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams had already tried to uncover – the way that English had become a class language, where loaded words (and, as he often pointed out, pronunciations) were accepted as "standard". In Culture and Society (1958) Williams forced the reader to think about certain keywords whose meaning was usually assumed: "class", "democracy", "art" and "industry" were old terms which had acquired almost entirely new meanings. Over the same 200 years studied by the LA researchers, "artist", for instance, had gone from meaning "a skilled person" to signifying "a special kind of person", working in the "imaginative" or "creative" arts. In The Long Revolution (1961), Williams left literature behind to find the roots of class discourse in the English language itself, where French and Anglo-Saxon words were always weighted differently: "we can trace the minor relics of class prejudice in the lasting equation of moral qualities with class names: base, villain, boor and churl for the poor" – mostly terms suggesting "low" birth – while "gentle", "proud" and "rich" were aristocratic terms of French origin (from gentil, prud and riche). In Communications (1962), Williams looked more closely at the use of martial metaphors in the press – "bomb", "hit", "battle", "bout" – macho terms that immediately attempt to determine the reader's opinion on a given subject without explicitly doing so. In The Long Revolution, Williams also took a closer look at the word "consumer", a word we now use entirely unthinkingly to describe the "consumption" of everything from shoes to food to health care. "It is clear why 'consumer' as a description is so popular ... a considerable and increasing part of our economic activity goes to ensuring that we consume what industry finds it convenient for us to produce. As this tendency strengthens, it becomes increasingly obvious that society is not controlling its economic life, but is in part being controlled by it." Other terms, seemingly equivalent, would not actually mean the same thing – if we were "users" instead of "consumers", he argues, "we might look at society very differently, for the concept of use involves general human judgments – we need to know how to use things and what we are using them for… whereas consumption, with its crude hand-to-mouth patterns, tends to cancel these questions, replacing them by the stimulated and controlled absorption of the products of an external and autonomous system". Williams expanded this into Keywords (1976), an entire "vocabulary" of political English. What would a contemporary edition of Keywords look like? I suspect it would find "consumer" used to an even more all-encompassing degree, and a menagerie of strange positive terms, appearing unquestioned in the language without their implications being obvious. Nowadays we use words like "regeneration", "social network", "social enterprise" frequently and often without thinking – all of them bestow particular moral qualities as soon as the word has been said. Even a word as central to the current debate as "austerity" comes with its own bias: originally from the Old French austerite meaning "harshness or cruelty", it carries in Britain also a positive meaning, being associated with the self-restraint at the expense of the public good which was required by the wartime economy, when nowadays it is used to justify policies that effect the exact opposite. But to reveal the pernicious assumptions behind these professedly innocuous words will take more than a sophisticated search engine. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/capitalism-language-raymond-williams

P.S. That second Osprey was not operated solely for the benefit of the pooch. It also carried staff and Secret Service. Did the weight of one canine really add $35,000 to the flight cost?

Yeah, I recall we discussed here when it came out how Isaacson's book read that way: amateurish and patched together, as you say somewhat like an undergraduate rush job. Odd, as his Franklin book read a lot better, I thought.

Well, was there much, or effective, hue & cry when W. started some of the snooping programs? Hard to think of a time since Watergate when the executive has been effectively checked. The example of Clinton's impeachment proceedings only served to make the notion even less credible, a pity for the public welfare.

'Nobody is listening to your calls': Obama's evolution on NSA surveillanceA brief history of the president's position on NSA reforms since first commenting on the surveillance revelations in June Adam Gabbatt in New York theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 17.46 EDT Barack Obama insisted on Friday that the NSA reforms he has proposed would have happened all along and that his views on surveillance programs had "not evolved". But since the president first responded to Edward Snowden's revelations in June he has rejected any suggestion that more safeguards were required. Friday 7 JuneIn his first remarks since the Guardian and the Washington Post's revelations, Obama gave a frank rebuttal to privacy concerns. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president said when asked about the NSA. He said surveillance programs were "fully overseen not just by Congress but by the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". He said the NSA programs made "modest encroachments on privacy" and were under "very strict supervision by all three branches of government". "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said. "And if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the constitution, due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Obama added: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential, you know – you know, program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance." Monday 17 JuneObama defended the NSA program in an interview with Charlie Rose. The president insisted the NSA was "transparent". "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not," Obama said. Asked by Rose if the method of telephone and data collections "should be transparent in some way", the president responded: "It is transparent. That's why we set up the Fisa court." The president said he was confident the necessary system of checks and balances was in place, but conceded the public might not fully be aware of this. "What I've asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program." Speaking to Rose he revealed he had set up an "oversight board" to examine issues of privacy, compiled of independent citizens and "including some fierce civil libertarians". Obama said he would be meeting with the oversight board, but did not give any further details. Tuesday 6 AugustTwo months after the initial NSA revelations, Obama accepted the NSA had "raised a lot of questions for people" in an interview on NBC's Tonight Show, but insisted surveillance programs did not target US civilians. "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful." He said the NSA was "a critical component to counter-terrorism". Friday 9 August"It's not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well," Obama said in a speech at the White House, hours after the Guardian revealed that an NSA loophole did allow for warrantless searches of databases for US citizens' emails and phone calls. The president said he had consulted with Congress, the privacy and civil liberties oversight coard and had directed his national security team to "be more transparent and to pursue reforms of our laws and practices". "And so today I'd like to discuss four specific steps, not all-inclusive, but some specific steps that we're going to be taking very shortly to move the debate forward." Obama pledged to re-examine section 215 of the Patriot Act, potentially reigning in bulk surveillance, and suggested appointing a privacy advocate to monitor to the doings of the Fisa court. He also announced a new website to "inform" Americans about bulk surveillance and pledged greater transparency. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/obama-evolution-nsa-reforms

The book review linked above: Books of The Times The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas By JANET MASLIN Published: April 9, 2007 EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE By Walter Isaacson. 675 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32. The story of Albert Einstein’s life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled. Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that “this Einstein will one day be a great man.” Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein’s earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson’s confidently authoritative “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. “You will stop talking to me if I request it,” this document asserted. “You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way.” Mr. Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein’s life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in the area of science. Mr. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene’s) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him. But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein’s life and times, and Mr. Isaacson acknowledges that. “O.K., it’s not easy,” he writes, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.” In his introduction to “Einstein,” Mr. Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society,” he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. (“Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”) But over all this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core. “Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire.” That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” did. But in Mr. Isaacson’s artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.” Mr. Isaacson does a similarly graceful job of integrating Einstein’s science with his broader philosophical concerns, especially the global worries that plagued him with the approach of the Second World War. Even as a committed pacifist he remained primarily a scientist and revised his opinions as fate required. “For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness,” Mr. Isaacson underscores. And the man who had once listed his religion as “Mosaic” when applying for a professorship in Prague became much more thoughtful about Judaism in later years. Whatever Einstein’s precise faith, Mr. Isaacson says, “his beliefs seemed to arise from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work.” With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom. Among the headlines that appeared in The New York Times: “Unintelligible to Laymen” and “Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.” Mr. Isaacson is also keenly attuned to the intellectual crises hidden by the hoopla. As Einstein aged, he changed from a fierce young iconoclast to a pillar of science, resistant to advances in the very quantum ideas that he himself had brought forth. “The intellect gets crippled,” he said of growing older, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.” Here as throughout the book Mr. Isaacson asks the right questions. (“So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?”) And he answers them with the clear, broad grasp of complex issues that make this book an illuminating delight. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/books/09masl.html

By 1932 he was pretty well decided that it was past time to get out of there (see among many sources Ronald Clark's majesterial bio Einstein: The Life and Times, also of course Walter Isaacson's more recent Einstein: His Life and Universe). During a visit to the U.S. in Feb. 1933 he decided not to return to Germany, went to Belgium where he turned in his German passport to the German embassy and renounced his citizenship, lived temporarily in England, then came to the U.S. permanently in October.