Author: Tetman Callis
“To accomplish the ends of Society by being equal to Contingencies infinite, demands the deposit of power great and extensive indeed in the hands of Rulers. So great, as to render abuse probable, unless prevented by the most careful precautions: among which, the freedom & frequency of elections, the liberty of the Press, the Trial by Jury, and the Independency of the Judges, seem to be so capital & essential; that they ought to be secured by a Bill of Rights to regulate the discretion of Rulers in a legal way, restraining the progress of Ambition & Avarice within just bounds. Rulers must act by subordinate Agents generally, and however the former may be secure from the pursuits of Justice, the latter are forever kept in Check by the trial by Jury where that exists ‘in all its Rights’. This most excellent security against oppression, is an universal, powerful and equal protector of all. But the benefit to be derived from this System is most effectually to be obtained from a well informed and enlightened people. Here arises the necessity for the freedom of the Press, which is the happiest Organ of communication ever yet devised, the quickest & surest means of conveying intelligence to the human Mind.” – Richard Henry Lee, letter to Edmund Pendleton, May 26, 1788, Debate on the Constitution, Part Two (ed. Bailyn; emphasis in original)
“In a free government, the voice of the people, expressed by the votes of a majority, must be the rule, or we shall be left without any certain rule to determine what is politically right. To depart from it, is establishing tyranny by law. It would be a solemn renunciation of the forms and substance of liberty; and our affairs, on this dangerous principle, must rapidly hasten to an oligarchy—the most dreadful of all governments.” – Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, May 21, 1788 (emphases in original)
“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored, by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is every action and transaction to be registered, stamped, taxed, patented, licensed, assessed, measured, reprimanded, corrected, frustrated. Under pretext of the public good it is to be exploited, monopolized, embezzled, robbed and then, at the least protest or word of complaint, to be fined, harassed, vilified, beaten up, bludgeoned, disarmed, judged, condemned, imprisoned, shot, garroted, deported, sold, betrayed, swindled, deceived, outraged, dishonored. That’s government, that’s its justice, that’s its morality!” – Pierre Proudhon, Idée générale de la révolution au vingtième siècle (as quoted by Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower)
“The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The role of the State would be replaced by voluntary cooperation among individuals and the role of the law by the supreme law of the general welfare. To this end no reform of existing social evils through vote or persuasion was of any use, for the ruling class would never give up its property or the powers and laws which protected ownership of property. Therefore, the necessity of violence. Only revolutionary overturn of the entire malignant existing system would accomplish the desired result. Once the old structure was in rubble, a new social order of utter equality and no authority, with enough of everything for everybody, would settle smilingly upon the earth. So reasonable seemed the proposition that once apprised of it the oppressed classes could not fail to respond. The Anarchist task was to awaken them.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower
“They came from the warrens of the poor, where hunger and dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boiling cabbage and stale beer, where babies wailed and couples screamed in sudden quarrels, where roofs leaked and unmended windows let in the cold blasts of winter, where privacy was unimaginable, where men, women, grandparents and children lived together, eating sleeping, fornicating, defecating, sickening and dying in one room, where a teakettle served as a wash boiler between meals, old boxes served as chairs, heaps of foul straw as beds, and boards propped across two crates as tables, where sometimes not all the children in a family could go out at one time because there were not enough clothes to go round, where decent families lived among drunkards, wife-beaters, thieves and prostitutes, where life was a seesaw of unemployment and endless toil, where a cigar-maker and his wife earning 13 cents an hour worked seventeen hours a day seven days a week to support themselves and three children, where death was the only exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter’s Field.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower
“So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower
“Are we to consider men entrusted with power as the receptacles of all the depravity of human nature? By no means. The people do not part with their full proportions of it. Reason and revelation both deceive us, if they are all wise and virtuous. Is not history as full of the vices of the people, as it is of the crimes of the kings? what is the present moral character of the citizens of the United States? I need not discover it. It proves too plainly, that the people are as much disposed to vice as their rulers, and that nothing but a vigorous and efficient government can prevent their degenerating into savages, or devouring each other like beasts of prey.” – Dr. Benjamin Rush, Columbian Herald, April 19, 1788
“Friends, let me tell you: Sitting outside and reading is not a difficult art to master.” – Matt Bell, Facebook, June 25, 2014.
“No kind of Accusation is so readily made, or so easily believ’d, by Knaves as the Accusation of Knavery.” – Benjamin Franklin, letter to Philadelphia Federal Gazette, April 8, 1788
“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
“The supposition of universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude. The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence. And experience justifies the theory: It has been found to exist in the most corrupt periods in the most corrupt governments.” – Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist LXXVI”
“There are some, who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community, or in the Legislature, as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted. The republican principle demands, that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breese of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator, who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They know from experience, that they sometimes err; and the wonder is, that they so seldom err as they do; beset as they continually are by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men, who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess, rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited, in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men, who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.” – Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist LXXI” (emphases in original)
“The internet is, in effect, a library of unimaginable size—full, as all libraries are, of news, gossip, archive material and other stuff which may to varying degrees be irrelevant, wrong or mad. It has made the best and worst of such information more freely available than ever before. Search engines should be like library catalogues—comprehensive and neutral, and without fear or favour of what the contents may reveal, or how they may be used. It should be up to individuals, not governments, to distinguish what is right or wrong, useful or immaterial. People should be wary of ceding the power to make that judgment, even to a court that thinks hard about it and backs the underdog. As James Madison said, ‘I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.’” – The Economist, May 17th, 2014
“An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons: The one is, that independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desireable on various accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy: The second is, that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion, or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world, may be the best guide that can be followed.” – James Madison, “The Federalist LXIII”
“All writers on government agree, and the feelings of the human mind witness the truths of these political axioms, that man is born free and possessed of certain unalienable rights—that government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men—That the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community.” – Mercy Otis Warren, “A Columbian Patriot”
Gravel Magazine’s November 2014 issue has been published, and includes one of my stories — “Guys Come in Three Sizes.”
http://www.gravelmag.com/tetman-callis.html
“When patriotism is discountenanced and publick virtue becomes the ridicule of the sycophant—when every man of liberality, firmness, and penetration, who cannot lick the hand stretched out to oppress, is deemed an enemy of the State—then is the gulph of despotism set open, and the grades to slavery, though rapid, are scarce perceptible—then genius drags heavily its iron chain—science is neglected, and real merit flies to the shades for security from reproach—the mind becomes enervated, and the national character sinks to a kind of apathy with only energy sufficient to curse the breast that gave it milk.” – Mercy Otis Warren, “A Columbian Patriot”
“Metaphor and metonymy both, it strikes me, are devices of the lover; they are the devices of one who seeks to render or capture the other. What are the devices of the beloved? We don’t know, because it always the lover, never the beloved, who speaks. Why? Perhaps it’s the orientation toward unhappiness of literary work — the orientation toward trouble. If you were happily loved, literature implies, you would have nothing to say. Ask: why do you always write of unsatisfied desire? Where do you find such a continual source for that lack?” – Lightsey Darst, “The Anne Carson Workout”
“The beloved is sleeping. The trivial, intimate things that you find out as a matter of course one night and from then on cannot help treasuring: how the other one sleeps, with this arm here or there, with a deep athletic breath or as if dead. Dreams — visible, like a cat’s, or sunken. How expression falls from the face and what it leaves there. Dressed, undressed, with the covers kicked off in the heat or twined around one leg. Nothing like these closed eyelids and slightly open mouth. Nothing like the soft notch in the throat, undefended, or the dream-sweaty scattered hair.” – Lightsey Darst, “The Anne Carson Workout”
“An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once by all prudent people as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him; but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his; and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his. One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other. Every nation consequently whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbours.” – James Madison, “The Federalist LXII”
“A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained. Some governments are deficient in both these qualities: Most governments are deficient in the first.” – James Madison, “The Federalist LXII”
“It is a misfortune incident to republican government, though in a less degree than to other governments, that those who administer it, may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust. In this point of view, a senate, as a second branch of the legislative assembly, distinct from, and dividing the power with, a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one, would otherwise be sufficient.” – James Madison, “The Federalist LXII”
“Science is the one culture that’s truly global — protons, proteins and Pythagoras’s Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths too. The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.” – Martin, Lord Rees (interview in Wired)
“In America, like most of the civilized world, we do not just go through the motions of legal process in a fast and cursory manner. Court systems are not just an empty charade. The heart of law as we know it is due process. We decide cases on the merits, on the facts, on the evidence, not just on the whim of judges or juries. That is what justice means to us.” – Ralph C. Losey, “Predictive Coding and the Proportionality Doctrine: A Marriage Made in Big Data”
“Once upon a time, or so the story goes, the American military were developing a computer system that they could train to identify tanks on the battlefield. The approach involved connecting a ‘neural network’ to a camera. The training was to be done using photographs. So the design team went out into the field and took 100 photographs of scenes with tanks in various orientations – out in the open, hiding behind trees, and the like. They also took 100 photographs of scenes with no tanks present. The system would be taught using both positive and negative cases. They split all the photographs into two sets, one for training and one for testing the system after training had taken place. Using the training set, they showed the system pictures of tanks and said, ‘Tank’. They also showed the system pictures without tanks and said, ‘No tank’. Each time the system would first have a guess, and if shown to be wrong would adjust itself. A keen understanding would emerge, it was hoped, of the key features it needed to consider in making the right judgment. From entirely random beginnings the system’s performance improved. It got so proficient that it could give a correct answer most of the time. The next step was to test the system on the remaining photos—the set that it had not yet seen. It behaved extremely well—perfectly in fact, categorizing every photo as either ‘tank’ or ‘no tank’ correctly. The designers decided to commission a further set of photos for more testing. The pictures came back and they were shown to the system. Only this time its performance was abysmal—no better than flipping a coin. It took the designers a while to work out what was going on. It turned out that the original photographs with tanks and without tanks had been taken on different days. The ‘tank’ days happened to be sunny. The ‘no tank’ days had been cloudy. Each time the system was shown a photograph with a tank, it saw bright sunlight, blue skies and shadows. Each time it saw a photograph without a tank, it saw grey skies and an absence of shadows. This was the meaning of ’tank’ it inferred. The designers had developed a sunny day detector, and a good one at that.” – Lawrence Chapin, et al., “Predictive Coding, Storytelling, and God: Narrative Understanding in e-Discovery”
“What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to controul itself.” – James Madison, “The Federalist LI”
“In a state of nature, each man is free and may do what he pleases; but in society, every individual must sacrifice a part of his natural rights; the minority must yield to the majority, and the collective interest must controul particular interests. When thirteen persons constitute a family, each should forego every thing that is injurious to the other twelve. When several families constitute a parish, or county, each may adopt any regulations it pleases with regard to its domestic affairs, but must be abridged of that liberty in other cases, where the good of the whole is concerned. When several parishes, counties or districts form a state, the separate interests of each must yield to the collective interest of the whole. When thirteen states combine in one government, the same principles must be observed. These relinquishments of natural rights, are not real sacrifices: each person, county or state, gains more than it loses, for it only gives up a right of injuring others, and obtains in return aid and strength to secure itself in the peaceable enjoyment of all remaining rights.” – David Ramsay, “Civis”
“If it be true that all governments rest on opinion, it is no less true that the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself is timid and cautious, when left alone; and acquires firmness and confidence, in proportion to the number with which it is associated. When the examples, which fortify opinion, are antient as well as numerous, they are known to have a double effect. In a nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be disregarded. A reverence for the laws, would be sufficiently inculcated by the voice of an enlightened reason. But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage, to have the prejudices of the community on its side.” – James Madison, “The Federalist XLIX” (emphases in original)
“Three thousand years ago, David, according to the tradition, was the poet who wrote the Psalms. Even if you can’t believe that someone named David literally wrote the Psalms, the fact is that someone wrote them.” – Zachary Lazar, “In the Presence of My Enemies”
“The design of civil government is to protect the rights and promote the happiness of the people. For this end, rulers are invested with powers. But we cannot from hence justly infer that these powers should be unlimited. There are certain rights which mankind possess, over which government ought not to have any controul, because it is not necessary they should, in order to attain the end of its institution. There are certain things which rulers should be absolutely prohibited from doing, because, if they should do them, they would work an injury, not a benefit to the people. Upon the same principles of reasoning, if the exercise of a power, is found generally or in most cases to operate to the injury of the community, the legislature should be restricted in the exercise of that power, so as to guard, as much as possible, against the danger. These principles seem to be the evident dictates of common sense.” – Brutus IX, “The Dangers of a Standing Army,” New York Journal, January 17, 1788