Dohiyi Mir

De consulatu suo

No idea where I can find a decent English translation, but I like the imagery of this fragment:

Principio aetherio flammatus Iuppiter igni
vertitur et totum conlustrat lumine mundum
menteque divina caelum terrasque petessit,
quae penitus sensus hominum vitasque retenta[n]t,
aetheris aeterni saepta atque inclusa cavernis.
Et si stellarum motus cursusque vagantis
nosse velis quae sint signorum in sede locatae...

Cicero.

ntodd

Scalia Would've Tossed Out Jay's Treaty

House Journal, March 1, 1796:

A message, in writing, was received from the President of the United States, by Mr. Dandridge, his Secretary, as followeth:

Gentlemen of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:

The treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, concluded between the United States of America and his Britannic Majesty, having been duly ratified, and the ratifications having been exchanged at London on the twenty-eighth day of October, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-five, I have directed the same to be promulgated; and herewith transmit a copy thereof for the information of Congress.

G. WASHINGTON.

United States, March 1st, 1796.

I find this of interest because this was a leap year. The treaty didn't stipulate that it would go into effect on Leap Day, or any particular date, but rather that it would when ratifications were exchanged and its effect was proclaimed.  Thus it just so happens that Washington filled out the paperwork on February 29, then informed both houses of Congress.

And even then, a constitutional question about separation of powers cropped up, thanks to Jemmy.  These guys whose minds Scalia could read never really agreed on any damned thing.

ntodd

Brave Predictions For Town Meeting Day

In no particular order:

• Most primary ballots cast will be for Bernie.
• Trump will get at least 4 votes.
• Our proposal to increase the road budget will be shot down.
• People will complain about the condition of our roads.
• School budget will require paper ballots, as usual, because people against it never want a voice vote.
• School budget will pass 2:1, as usual.
• I will consume a significant number of baked goods.

I love direct democracy!

ntodd

Grant that we may lie down in peace

Awaken us to life.

ntodd

We Abide

The Seeking Of Self:

Dying, the seed will discover the self it finds in the losing.
That is, oh, Nature, thy law! That is thy lesson, oh, Man!
Hearing dark music, the poet knoweth no rest; he abideth—
Purer and purer the sound, clearer the fore-uttered word.

Vyacheslav Ivanov.

ntodd

Scalia's Real Legacy

Hateful, and lasting:

Since coming out as trans a few years ago, [physicist Mischa Haider] has suffered a debilitating depression. Partly from the transphobia she encounters daily at the allegedly enlightened Harvard; from the constant stares in public; from the indignity of worrying about things the rest of us take for granted, like walking in the street or using a public bathroom without fear of taunts or violence, or taking her children to the park without fear of being humiliated in front of them.  And from the pain of rejection by family and former friends who, despite her prodigious achievements, are somehow ashamed to be associated with her.

Beyond all that, it’s her knowledge of what the “culture war” means for trans women across the country, women who are shunned by their families, who are often unable to get jobs and therefore live in poverty, who face shocking levels of assault and murder (2015 was a record year), who attempt suicide at a rate greater than 40 percent. Who are generally excluded from the protection of antidiscrimination laws. Who, on the contrary, are at this moment the subject of dozens of pending pieces of transphobic legislation around the country, such as bills to stigmatize trans children by forcing them to use separate locker rooms at school or to jail trans women for using public bathrooms that match their identity. The drumbeat of organized hatred, calling to mind yellow stars and separate drinking fountains and worse, makes my friend feel like a nonperson, unwelcome in her own country. All this, for the crime of not matching someone else’s idea of how women are supposed to look.

She’s decided to leave academic physics after finishing the doctorate. She has become too absorbed in the struggle for equality – for being accorded the most basic human dignity – to think of anything else. She could not live with herself, she tells me, if she did not devote her talents to helping the many trans women whose lives are decimated by the bigotry and ignorance of those around them. Bigotry and ignorance inflamed by demagogues like Antonin Scalia, whose toxic rhetoric has done so much to incite and legitimate fear of gender nonconformity and elevate it to the level of constitutional principle. She is resolved to become a trans rights activist.

So that is Antonin Scalia’s contribution to physics. To drive a woman with a luminous mind from the study of quantum theory and statistical mechanics and condensed matter, and into the urgent project of safeguarding vulnerable people from the inhumanity he dedicated his life to spreading. An inhumanity that survives as his true legacy, safeguarded by deluded acolytes and admirers.

(via Mustang Bobby)

ntodd

В средней Азии

In the silence of the monotonous steppes...

ntodd

the sword is the worst argument than can be used

Song for the Luddites:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Brought their freedom, and cheaply with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings by King Ludd !When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding sheet
O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd !

George Gordon Byron.

ntodd

Hunting Scalia

Huh, I wrote this 3 years ago about Vaffanculo:

I think Tony's just freaking out because he realizes he's getting on in years, he hasn't been able to gut everything he'd have liked to in the last few decades, and there's a probability getting closer and closer to one that Obama will get to fill his seat.  So he can't finesse things and just has to come out swinging.

That, and heart disease, might explain a lot about his dissents.

ntodd

You Can Run On For A Long Time

Sooner or later...

ntodd

Give Us, Again

Rainbow Signs:

They will appear
in the moist air
after the earth
has been primed
with rain,
these gossamer
rainbow signs.......
water, water everywhere
but where is the cup to drink?
Hater, water everywhere
sky turning from blue, mauve, to pink.

Yeah--
they're almost
anywhere you look
spreading prisms
0f light
around the noon
at night,
arching the sun
in the afternoon,
eclipsing dark clouds
at daybreak.
Look for then and
they are there
about you everywhere.
He who are on the ark,
our being; singed by fire,
ask for the cooling waters,
ask for the calling rain;

take away the fire-lust,
take away the fire,
send down the cooling waters,
send down the cooling rain,
give us, again, the rainbow sign,
give us, again, the rain.

Sarah Webster Fabio.

ntodd

Thou The First Martyr For The Common Good

In 1770, John Adams wrote in his diary:

Monday. February 26, or thereabouts. Rode from Weymouth;—stopped at my house, Veasey’s blacksmith shop, my brother’s, my mother’s, and Robinson’s.

These five stops took up the day. When I came into town, I saw a vast collection of people near Liberty Tree; inquired, and found the funeral of the child lately killed by Richardson was to be attended. Went into Mr. Rowe’s and warmed me, and then went out with him to the funeral. A vast number of boys walked before the coffin; a vast number of women and men after it, and a number of carriages. My eyes never beheld such a funeral; the procession extended further than can be well imagined.

This shows there are many more lives to spend, if wanted, in the service of their country.

It shows, too, that the faction is not yet expiring; that the ardor of the people is not to be quelled by the slaughter of one child and the wounding of another.

At club, this evening, Mr. Scott and Mr. Cushing gave us a most alarming account of Otis. He has been, this afternoon, raving mad; raving against father, wife, brother, sister, friend, &c.

It is a little remarkable that no notice is taken in the Diary of the case of Captain Preston and the soldiers, for several years after the time at which it occurred.

I find it interesting that Adams apparently made no mention of the Boston Massacre in his diary.  Wonder if he was too busy at the time to record details, and his later writings about it were reconstructed from memory and perhaps his legal notes.

Anyway, Adams refers to a man named Ebenezer Richardson, who was reportedly an unsavory character, an informant and after his cover was blown, became a Customs employee.  Such officers were not very popular in Boston.  Much of the unrest in the early 1770s was about not only "taxation without representation" but also involved a bit of mob rule regarding non-importation agreements (boycotts, more than a century before the term was invented) and their enforcement.  

So here's what went down:

Bostonians, in January 1770, voted to deny “not only all commercial dealings, but every act...of common civility” from merchants who were especially flagrant violators. Four merchants — John Taylor, William Jackson, Nathaniel Rogers, and Theophilus Lillie — were singled out for special abuse. Schoolboys taunted them, their houses and shops were pelted with dirt, and potential customers suffered intimidation. Defacecl shop signs were replaced with placards warning against buying from them. Three February Thursdays in a row, market day in Boston and a school holiday, crowds gathered at the merchants’ homes. 

On the last of those Thursdays, February 22, a crowd collected at Lillie’s home. A placard painted with the features of importers was erected pointing toward the house. According to one account of the event, Richardson, who lived nearby, became enraged by the sign. He urged others to knock it down with their wagons. Unable to convince anyone, he seized a cart and attempted to do so himself. Richardson and the crowd traded insults. Retreating to his home, he vowed to defend it with a seaman, George Wilmot, who appears to have had connections with the customs commission.

Despite the danger, there was a theatrical, almost farcical, touch to the riot. Richardson and his wife repeatedly went into the street and men- aced the schoolboys who had gathered. When the boys began throwing light rubbish, Richardson responded by pointing a gun out his door. The crowd, angered by this threat of violence, pelted the house with stones. Windows were broken. According to a sympathetic source, Richardson used his weapon only after being struck quite hard with a rock. He fired a volley of bullets, wounding two schoolboys. Eleven-year-old Christopher Snider, struck in the chest and pierced by almost a dozen bullets, would die later that night.

With that backdrop, one can understand the tensions leading up to the Massacre a couple weeks later.  One also appreciates John Adams' involvement in the British soldiers' defense, given the potential for vigilante justice:

After the shooting, the mob seized Richardson and Wilmot. More people gathered as the bell at the New Brick meeting house was rung. The riot and shooting demonstrated that civil authority had broken down in Boston. What should be clone with Richardson? “The first thought was to hang him up at once,” [Lieutenant-Governor Thomas] Hutchinson claimed, “and a halter was brought and a sign post picked upon.” Although Hutchinson had sent a sheriff to impose order, he was afraid to interfere. Patriot leaders were not.

William Molineux rescued Richardson from hanging, and other Bostonians, acting like a sheriff or posse comitatus, captured him and brought the prisoner before Justice of the Peace john Ruddock. Richardson also understood this as the popular usurpation of police power. Denying the crowd’s right to arrest him, Richardson threatened to resist. He demanded that he would only “resign himself to a proper officer.”

The justice of the peace consigned Richardson to constables, who escorted him to Faneuil Hall. They had to contend with “the mob endeavoring to put a rope around his neck and take him from the con- stables to execute him themselves.”" At Faneuil Hall, Richardson was examined by a panel of iudges — Richard Dana, Samuel Pemberton, and Edmund Quincy — and sent to prison for his own safety. Here, too, the public interjected itself in iudicial proceedings. More than a thousand people, according to one newspaper's count, were present at the examination. Popular justice and official justice were not distinct and separate spheres...

The child's memorial was a big deal:

There were 500 school boys and 1,000 people. According to Hutchinson, not a sympathetic observer, the funeral was “perhaps the largest ever known in America.” Six youths supported the coffin from the Liberty Tree, where Snider’s corpse was displayed, during the procession to the burial ground.

The funeral was grand political theater. An inscription in silver letters at the foot of the coffin read: “Later aguis in berba — the serpent is lurking in the grass,” a reference to Richardson and other political opponents. On the Liberty Tree a placard was hung with the threat that “thou shall take not satisfaction for the life of a murderer - he shall surely be put to death.” While the Latin motto underscored the fact that the Liberty Tree, like the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, was surrounded by serpents, the placard borrowed its authority from an apodictic Hebrew scriptural code. The Bible provided a touch of official legality to what might be called law out-of-doors.

An excellent example of Method: 45. Demonstrative funerals, and there would be more.  I also suspect there might be more in the coming years...

ntodd

Trump Is An Orange Alien Who Hates Sedition

Trump, Defender of Freedoms:

“One of the things I’m gonna do, and this is only gonna make it tougher for me, and I’ve never said this before, but one of the things I’m gonna do if I win… is I’m gonna open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re gonna open up those libel laws.”

Meh, if he were really bold, he'd propose renewing the Alien & Sedition Acts.

ntodd

Somebody's Homesick

They just got to Grandma and Grandpa's, but Sadiecake needed to talk to Daddy first thing this morning.

ntodd

George Was Always My Favorite

It's like The Matrix meets Harry Turtledove.

ntodd

Надежда

Hope:

No freedom have I, my good fortune has flown,
A lone hope is left, the one thing that I own,

   The hope of returning once more to Ukraine,
   To feast longing eyes on my homeland again,

To feast longing eyes on the Dnipro’s rich blues,
Add there live or perish, whatever ensues;

   Feast my eyes on the steppe and the grave mounds I love,
   Recall ardent thoughts and the dreams I once wove.

No freedom have I, my good fortune has flown,
A lone hope is left, the one thing that I own.

Lesya Ukrainka.

ntodd

#throwbackthursday

Was September '14 the last time we flew West together?

ntodd

At Least The Senate Gave Andrew Johnson An Up Or Down Vote

In the Senae on Tuesday, February 25, 1868:

A message from the House of Representatives, by Mr. McPherson, its Clerk:

Mr. President: The House of Representatives has passed the following resolution, which I am directed to communicate to the Senate:

Resolved, That a committee of two be appointed to go to the Senate, and, at the bar thereof, in the name of the House of Representatives and of all the people of the United States, to impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors in office, and acquaint the Senate that the House of Representatives will, in due time, exhibit particular articles of impeachment against him, and make good the same; and that the committee do demand that the Senate take order for the appearance of said Andrew Johnson to answer to said impeachment.

Ordered, That Mr. Thaddeus Stevens and Mr. John A. Bingham be appointed such committee.

Then the bullshit started.

ntodd

Who Needs The Republicans?

Didn't I suggest this?

Here’s [a] suggestion, which I heard from a former Judiciary Committee staffer: shadow hearings. Once President Obama names his choice, as he insists he will do, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee should plan to hold televised, gavel-to-gavel public hearings, to which the Republicans on the committee are invited. The Republicans will decline. The Democrats could then proceed without them, asking thoughtful and probing questions about the role of the judiciary, theories of interpretation, and why the law and constitution matter.

I’d watch.

This isn’t a new concept. As Professor Neal Devins notes here, “When Republicans controlled Congress from 1995 to 2006, for example, Democratic lawmakers—shut out of the formal hearing process—held so- called ‘shadow’ hearings to protest their inability to call witnesses or otherwise define the hearing agenda.” There were shadow hearings after 2006, too: Nancy Pelosi held them in 2011 to showcase Democratic views on green energy. And when they didn’t control committees at the beginning of the Obama era, Republicans held a series of shadow hearings during the 111^th Congress.

Yes, this might look like nothing more than a political stunt. But it could also come off looking like a somber, serious discussion of the courts and the Constitution with an unimpeachable expert.

Yes, yes I did.

ntodd

La favola d'Orfeo

The tucket...

ntodd

a. d. VI Kal. Mart.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca:

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.

But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. 

Is it too much of a leap to suggest that Trump hasn't read much Seneca the Younger?

ntodd

Military Keynesianism...IN SPACE!

LATimes (March 10, 2011):

Feb. 25, 1942: Searchlights converge on an unknown object in the skies over Los Angeles. During the early morning air-raid alert, more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells are fired.

The incident, now referred to as the Battle of L.A., occurred less than three months after the Pearl Harbor attack and two days after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil facility near Santa Barbara.

Ominously, our military could not damage the alien craft.  Perhaps our Terran germs killed the pilots.

ntodd

A Single-Issue Candidate

Politics! Politics? And do women not live politics, John Adams? When I go to the cupboard and I find no coffee, no sugar, no pins, no meat, am I not living politics?

 - Abigail Adams (kinda)

My guy is a simplistic dipshit:

Hillary has really backed him into a corner with this point. Hey Bernie, why don’t you try broadening your horizons? Seriously, the only thing this guy cares about is the stupid economy, and how it affects manufacturing, crime, drugs, health care, agriculture, climate change, trade, youth unemployment, immigration, energy, real estate, banking, civil rights, race relations, poverty, education, criminal justice, financial and corporate regulation, voting rights, equal pay for women, national infrastructure, social security, veterans’ rights, and, sure, foreign policy too.

Wait, going to war is really about economics?  Next you'll tell me that the charge of being a single-issue candidate makes about as much sense as complaints about politics, which of course has nothing at all to with real life...

ntodd

Fifty Percent Of The Lieberrians In My Childhood Home Were Women

Hope she gets equal pay for equal work:

President Obama has nominated the first woman and African American as Librarian of Congress.It’s Carla D. Hayden, who currently serves as the CEO of Baltimore’s public library.

Hayden’s nomination is significant on multiple levels. As president of the American Library Association, she fought against provisions in the Patriot Act that allowed the government to access library patron records. She has also embraced the role technology can play in improving library systems...

All past librarians have been men. This is at odds with the gender breakdown of librarians in the nation at large, who are overwhelmingly women.

No word from Mitch McConnell as to whether she'll be allowed to take the job...

ntodd

Don't Vote For A Cuban!

Robocall received tonight at this domicile.

ntodd

God Bless Activist Judges

Americans have acknowledged the right of judges to found their decisions on the Constitution rather than on the laws. In other words, they have permitted them not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional..

 - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Book I, Chapter 6)

Happy birthday, dear old pal, Marbury:

It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret the rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Court must decide on the operation of each.

If courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

From this I think flows much good in America.  Other folks seem to believe that the ruling enables "activist judges".  They are, of course, wrong. 

I certainly acknowledge that SCOTUS and the Judiciary are potential--in some cases, very real--threats to individual rights.  Given Madison's fears of tyranny at the state level, however, which is very much more pronounced today, the Court has proven to be a significant firewall against the spread of some injustice.  And the branch really is checked fairly easily when contrasted with the Imperial Presidency.

Granted, some limiting mechanisms have a high bar.  Only one life-tenured Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached, and Chase wasn't successfully removed at that.  FDR's Court Packing plan fizzled, though it has been given credit in some circles for putting the fear of God into the Nine Old Men and saving New Deal programs subsequently.

That said, the fact remains that SCOTUS can't actively change law, but by design is passive and reactive, waiting for cases to be brought before it.  Congress can more effectively write new law to overcome constitutional objections, and even change the Court's jurisdiction.  The President can sign such legislation and ignore rulings.  And yes, even though it's hard, we can amend the Constitution, explicitly repudiating what the Supremes have decided (the 14th Amendment a glowing example).

I have no love for Andrew Jackson (who is famously misquoted responding to Marshall's ruling in Worcester v Georgia regarding my Cherokee ancestors), but he was close to home in his message on vetoing the Second Bank of the US:

The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.

We do tend to treat SCOTUS as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality, but everybody is responsible for interpreting the supreme law as they execute their duties.  And they all ought to be jealous of their powers.  There is no final step, so even if SCOTUS strikes down, say...the ACA, or VRA, or climate regulations, that's not the end of the process.

I'm not wholly in the departmentalist camp, but checks and balances aren't supposed to be super easy.  You can work to limit expansion of power in one arena, but it comes with a cost (political or otherwise).  If it were too easy to stomp on another branch, we'd have no government.  As Justice Jackson said:

While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity.

The Judiciary is not democratic, and that's part of the point.  We've seen examples in the last few years of direct democratic action wherein the People in their collective wisdom voted to deny basic civil rights to their fellow citizens.  Even the Roberts Court (with or without Tony Vaffanculo) can mitigate some problems of mob rule.  Judicial review is a necessary power to check other branches and other levels of sovereignty to preserve liberty, and functions in concert with the other branches to foster working governance.

Review is also a logical component of the courts' role in our republican system, as I think the Framers really understood.  While Justice Marshall might have made this more explicit than our Constitution--though he didn't use the phrase "judicial review" either--he didn't really assume any power the Court did not already possess.

When you look at the Council of Revision that was proposed which was proposed in Convention on June 4, 1787, you can really get the context.  Basically it was a vetoing body that included the Executive and members of the Judiciary.  Objections were raised from the start:

Mr. GERRY doubts whether the Judiciary ought to form a part of it, as they will have a sufficient check agst. encroachments on their own department by their exposition of the laws, which involved a power of deciding on their Constitutionality. In some States the Judges had actually set aside laws as being agst. the Constitution. This was done too with general approbation. It was quite foreign from the nature of ye. office to make them judges of the policy of public measures. He moves to postpone the clause...

Mr. KING seconds the motion, observing that the Judges ought to be able to expound the law as it should come before them, free from the bias of having participated in its formation.

When Madison later proposed having a Federal veto on State laws:

Mr. Govr. MORRIS was more & more opposed to the negative. The proposal of it would disgust all the States. A law that ought to be negatived will be set aside in the Judiciary departmt. and if that security should fail; may be repealed by a Nationl. law.

And when the Council was again debated:

Mr. L. MARTIN. [A]s to the Constitutionality of laws, that point will come before the Judges in their proper official character. In this character they have a negative on the laws. Join them with the Executive in the Revision and they will have a double negative. It is necessary that the Supreme Judiciary should have the confidence of the people.

Mr. RUTLIDGE thought the Judges of all men the most unfit to be concerned in the revisionary Council. The Judges ought never to give their opinion on a law till it comes before them. He thought it equally unnecessary. 

There were more discussions of this nature on August 15 and 27.  I'd also like to quickly point out that one of my heroes, John Dickinson, wrote as Fabius in support of ratification later on:

Our government under the proposed confederation, will be guarded by a repetition of the strongest cautions against excesses. In the senate the sovereignties of the several states will be equally represented; in the house of representatives, the people of the whole union will be equally represented; and, in the president, and the federal independent judges, so much concerned...in the determination of [the laws'] constitutionality, the sovereignties of the several states and the people of the whole union, may be considered as conjointly represented.

A couple years after that, Madison said when he introduced the original Bill of Rights for consideration:

[I]ndependent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the constitution by the declaration of rights.

And finally, when the Judiciary Act of 1789 was passed, Elbridge Gerry told the House:

[The courts] will, in this elevated and independent situation attend to their duty--their honor and every sacred tie oblige them.  Will they not attend to the constitution as well as your laws?  The constitution will undoubtedly be their first rule; and so far as your laws conform to that, they will attend them, but no further.

The point being that "expounding" the law inherently involves deciding constitutional questions, and if the highest court in the land rules something is repugnant to the supreme law of the land, all lower courts have to follow suit.  Then the other branches will have to figure out whether and how to respond.

By themselves, yes, a handful of people with lifetime jobs in charge of our fate would be extremely dangerous.  Fortunately, there are 2 other co-equal branches also doing their jobs (well, at least when the Senate GOP doesn't obstruct all Executive appointments).  On the flip side, I'm glad that those other departments don't have the final word, either.

ntodd

the music catches breath and disturbs the memory

Turns out Handel wrote a lot of stuff, not just...you know.

ntodd

I can’t refuse therefore I am

After:

Over treasure and land some texts will say it had

Little to do with slavery or the newly

Discovered yellow planet

 

Few men watched the glaciers recede

From shuttles they had built

During the hemorrhage years

When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges

 

I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree

Or without hands

 

By then doctors and poets

Would have found a cure for prayer

Fady Joudah.

ntodd

Any SQL Experts Out There?

Let's say I have a Firebird SQL database, and on occasion I want it to automatically grab some table data from a PostgreSQL database.  Anybody know how I might build a query or script do that?  Bueller?

ntodd

PS--Be gentle.  I'm just a caveman and your SQL world frightens and confuses me.

Do You Believe In Miracles?

I'll never forget the game, nor the aftermath. A couple of my classmates passed me a note the following day that said, "Fuck you, Todd, Russia sucks."  Because I was kind of a Russophile, you see, given (and despite) my family background.  I thought it was a great contest.  Kids suck.

ntodd

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

Dirge Without Music:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

ntodd

Off Bog Road

Had some work to do in Middlebury today.

Churches kept jumping out at us.

Let us commit the autograph of this sole to our memory.

Good thing I brought my novice.

ntodd