Category: History

“At twelve o’clock we went below, and had just got through dinner, when the cook put his head down the scuttle and told us to come on deck and see the finest sight that we had ever seen. ‘Where away, cook?’ asked the first man who was up. ‘On the larboard bow.’ And there lay, floating in the ocean, several miles off, an immense, irregular mass, its top and points covered with snow, and its center of a deep indigo color. This was an iceberg, and of the largest size, as one of our men said who had been in the Northern ocean. As far as the eye could reach, the sea in every direction was of a deep blue color, the waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light, and in the midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and valleys thrown into deep shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun. All hands were soon on deck, looking at it, and admiring in various ways its beauty and grandeur. But no description can give any idea of the strangeness, splendor, and, really, the sublimity, of the sight. Its great size;—for it must have been from two to three miles in circumference, and several hundred feet in height;—its slow motion, as its base rose and sank in the water, and its high points nodded against the clouds; the dashing of the waves upon it, which, breaking high with foam, lined its base with a white crust; and the thundering sound of the cracking of the mass, and the breaking and tumbling down of huge pieces; together with its nearness and approach, which added a slight element of fear,—all combined to give to it the character of true sublimity. The main body of the mass was, as I have said, of an indigo color, its base crusted with frozen foam; and as it grew thin and transparent toward the edges and top, its color shaded off from a deep blue to the whiteness of snow.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“The customs as to the allowance of ‘grub’ are very nearly the same in all American merchantmen. Whenever a pig is killed, the sailors have one mess from it. The rest goes to the cabin. The smaller live stock, poultry, etc., they never taste. And, indeed, they do not complain of this, for it would take a great deal to supply them with a good meal, and without the accompaniments, (which could hardly be furnished to them,) it would not be much better than salt beef. But even as to the salt beef, they are scarcely dealt fairly with; for whenever a barrel is opened, before any of the beef is put into the harness-cask, the steward comes up, and picks it all over, and takes out the best pieces, (those that have any fat in them) for the cabin. This was done in both the vessels I was in, and the men said that it was usual in other vessels. Indeed, it is made no secret, but some of the crew are usually called to help in assorting and putting away the pieces. By this arrangement the hard, dry pieces, which the sailors call ‘old horse,’ come to their share. There is a singular piece of rhyme, traditional among sailors, which they say over such pieces of beef. I do not know that it ever appeared in print before. When seated round the kid, if a particularly bad piece is found, one of them takes it up, and addressing it, repeats these lines:
‘Old horse! old horse! what brought you here?’
—‘From Sacarap to Portland pier
I’ve carted stone this many a year:
Till, killed by blows and sore abuse,
They salted me down for sailors’ use.
The sailors they do me despise:
They turn me over and damn my eyes;
Cut off my meat, and pick my bones,
And pitch the rest to Davy Jones.’
There is a story current among seamen, that a beef-dealer was convicted, at Boston, of having sold old horse for ship’s stores, instead of beef, and had been sentenced to be confined in jail, until he should eat the whole of it; and that he is now lying in Boston jail. I have heard this story often, on board other vessels beside those of our own nation. It is very generally believed, and is always highly commended, as a fair instance of retaliatory justice.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“A live dog is better than a dead lion, and a sick sailor belongs to nobody’s mess.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“The sailor’s songs for capstans and falls are of a peculiar kind, having a chorus at the end of each line. The burden is usually sung, by one alone, and, at the chorus, all hands join in,—and the louder the noise, the better. With us, the chorus seemed almost to raise the decks of the ship, and might be heard at a great distance, ashore. A song is as necessary to sailors as the drum and fife to a soldier. They can’t pull in time, or pull with a will, without it. Many a time, when a thing goes heavy, with one fellow yo-ho-ing, a lively song, like ‘Heave, to the girls!’ ‘Nancy oh!’ ‘Jack Cross-tree,’ etc., has put life and strength into every arm.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“An overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of seafaring men, or, rather, of life on board ship. This often gives an appearance of want of feeling, and even of cruelty. From this, if a man comes within an ace of breaking his neck and escapes, it is made a joke of; and no notice must be taken of a bruise or cut; and any expression of pity, or any show of attention, would look sisterly, and unbecoming a man who has to face the rough and tumble of such a life. From this, too, the sick are neglected at sea, and whatever sailors may be ashore, a sick man finds little sympathy or attention, forward or aft. A man, too, can have nothing peculiar or sacred on board ship; for all the nicer feelings they take pride in disregarding, both in themselves and others. A thin-skinned man could not live an hour on ship-board. One would be torn raw unless he had the hide of an ox. A moment of natural feeling for home and friends, and then the frigid routine of sea-life returned.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“It has been said, that the greatest curse to each of the South Sea islands, was the first man who discovered it; and every one who knows anything of the history of our commerce in those parts, knows how much truth there is in this; and that the white men, with their vices, have brought in diseases before unknown to the islanders, and which are now sweeping off the native population of the Sandwich Islands, at the rate of one fortieth of the entire population annually. They seem to be a doomed people. The curse of a people calling themselves Christian, seems to follow them everywhere.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“The American has no national religion, and likes to show his independence of priestcraft by doing as he chooses on the Lord’s day.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“Revolutions are matters of constant occurrence in California. They are got up by men who are at the foot of the ladder and in desperate circumstances, just as a new political party is started by such men in our own country. The only object, of course, is the loaves and fishes; and instead of caucusing, paragraphing, libelling, feasting, promising, and lying, as with us, they take muskets and bayonets, and seizing upon the presidio and custom-house, divide the spoils, and declare a new dynasty. As for justice, they know no law but will and fear. A Yankee, who had been naturalized, and become a Catholic, and had married in the country, was sitting in his house at the Pueblo de los Angelos, with his wife and children, when a Spaniard, with whom he had had a difficulty, entered the house, and stabbed him to the heart before them all. The murderer was seized by some Yankees who had settled there, and kept in confinement until a statement of the whole affair could be sent to the governor-general. He refused to do anything about it, and the countrymen of the murdered man, seeing no prospect of justice being administered, made known that if nothing was done, they should try the man themselves. It chanced that, at this time, there was a company of forty trappers and hunters from Kentucky, with their rifles, who had made their head-quarters at the Pueblo; and these, together with the Americans and Englishmen in the place, who were between twenty and thirty in number, took possession of the town, and waiting a reasonable time, proceeded to try the man according to the forms in their own country. A judge and jury were appointed, and he was tried, convicted, sentenced to be shot, and carried out before the town, with his eyes blindfolded. The names of all the men were then put into a hat and each one pledging himself to perform his duty, twelve names were drawn out, and the men took their stations with their rifles, and, firing at the word, laid him dead. He was decently buried, and the place was restored quietly to the proper authorities.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“No one has ever been on distant voyages, and after a long absence received a newspaper from home, who cannot understand the delight that they give one. I read every part of them—the houses to let; things lost or stolen; auction sales, and all. Nothing carries you so entirely to a place, and makes you feel so perfectly at home, as a newspaper.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“Some of the first vessels brought dogs out with them, who, for convenience, were left ashore, and there multiplied, until they came to be a great people.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“On Monday morning, as an offset to our day’s sport, we were all set to work ‘tarring down’ the rigging. Some got girt-lines up for riding down the stays and back-stays, and others tarred the shrouds, lifts, etc., laying out on the yards, and coming down the rigging. We overhauled our bags and took out our old tarry trowsers and frocks, which we had used when we tarred down before, and were all at work in the rigging by sunrise. After breakfast, we had the satisfaction of seeing the Italian ship’s boat go ashore, filled with men, gaily dressed, as on the day before, and singing their barcarollas. The Easter holydays are kept up on shore during three days; and being a Catholic vessel, the crew had the advantage of them. For two successive days, while perched up in the rigging, covered with tar and engaged in our disagreeable work, we saw these fellows going ashore in the morning, and coming off again at night, in high spirits. So much for being Protestants. There’s no danger of Catholicism’s spreading in New England; Yankees can’t afford the time to be Catholics. American shipmasters get nearly three weeks more labor out of their crews, in the course of a year, than the masters of vessels from Catholic countries. Yankees don’t keep Christmas, and ship-masters at sea never know when Thanksgiving comes, so Jack has no festival at all.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“The more you drive a man, the less he will do.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“Poincaré made the following statement of the principle of relativity: ‘According to the principle of relativity, the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a fixed observer as for an observer who has a uniform motion of translation relative to him, so that we have not, nor can we possibly have, any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.’ When this idea descended upon the world, it caused a great stir among philosophers, particularly the ‘cocktail-party philosophers,’ who say, ‘Oh, it is very simple: Einstein’s theory says all is relative!’ In fact, a surprisingly large number of philosophers, not only those found at cocktail parties (but rather than embarrass them, we shall just call them ‘cocktail-party philosophers’), will say, ‘That all is relative is a consequence of Einstein, and it has profound influences on our ideas.’ In addition, they say ‘It has been demonstrated in physics that phenomena depend upon your frame of reference.’ We hear that a great deal, but it is difficult to find out what it means. Probably the frames of reference that were originally referred to were the coordinate systems which we use in the analysis of the theory of relativity. So the fact that ‘things depend upon your frame of reference’ is supposed to have had a profound effect on modern thought. One might well wonder why, because, after all, that things depend upon one’s point of view is so simple an idea that it certainly cannot have been necessary to go to all the trouble of the physical relativity theory in order to discover it. That what one sees depends upon his frame of reference is certainly known to anybody who walks around, because he sees an approaching pedestrian first from the front and then from the back; there is nothing deeper in most of the philosophy which is said to have come from the theory of relativity than the remark that ‘A person looks different from the front than from the back.’ The old story about the elephant that several blind men describe in different ways is another example, perhaps, of the theory of relativity from the philosopher’s point of view. But certainly there must be deeper things in the theory of relativity than just this simple remark that ‘A person looks different from the front than from the back.’ Of course relativity is deeper than this, because we can make definite predictions with it. It certainly would be rather remarkable if we could predict the behavior of nature from such a simple observation alone.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphasis in original)

“The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on—his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as to cowhide and to logroll, or such adjectives as no-account and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that “in these five moneths of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic; the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.” – H.L. Mencken, The American Language (emphases and spellings in original)

“If there is anything that irritates sailors and makes them feel hardly used, it is being deprived of their Sabbath. Not that they would always, or indeed generally, spend it religiously, but it is their only day of rest.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“The American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.” – H.L. Mencken, The American Language

“Monday, Nov. 10th. During a part of this day we were hove to, but the rest of the time were driving on, under close-reefed sails, with a heavy sea, a strong gale, and frequent squalls of hail and snow.
Tuesday, Nov. 11th. The same.
Wednesday, Nov. 12th. The same.
Thursday, Nov. 13th. The same.
We had now got hardened to Cape weather, the vessel was under reduced sail, and everything secured on deck and below, so that we had little to do but steer and to stand our watch. Our clothes were all wet through, and the only change was from wet to more wet. It was in vain to think of reading or working below, for we were too tired, the hatchways were closed down, and everything was wet and uncomfortable, black and dirty, heaving and pitching. We had only to come below when the watch was out, wring out our wet clothes, hang them up, and turn in and sleep as soundly as we could, until the watch was called again. A sailor can sleep anywhere—no sound of wind, water, wood or iron can keep him awake—and we were always fast asleep when three blows on the hatchway, and the unwelcome cry of ‘All starbowlines ahoy! eight bells there below! do you hear the news?’ (the usual formula of calling the watch), roused us up from our berths upon the cold, wet decks. The only time when we could be said to take any pleasure was at night and morning, when we were allowed a tin pot full of hot tea, (or, as the sailors significantly call it, ‘water bewitched,’) sweetened with molasses. This, bad as it was, was still warm and comforting, and, together with our sea biscuit and cold salt beef, made quite a meal. Yet even this meal was attended with some uncertainty. We had to go ourselves to the galley and take our kid of beef and tin pots of tea, and run the risk of losing them before we could get below. Many a kid of beef have I seen rolling in the scuppers, and the bearer lying at his length on the decks. I remember an English lad who was always the life of the crew, but whom we afterwards lost overboard, standing for nearly ten minutes at the galley, with this pot of tea in his hand, waiting for a chance to get down into the forecastle; and seeing what he thought was a ‘smooth spell,’ started to go forward. He had just got to the end of the windlass, when a great sea broke over the bows, and for a moment I saw nothing of him but his head and shoulders; and at the next instant, being taken off of his legs, he was carried aft with the sea, until her stern lifting up and sending the water forward, he was left high and dry at the side of the long-boat, still holding on to his tin pot, which had now nothing in it but salt water. But nothing could ever daunt him, or overcome, for a moment, his habitual good humor. Regaining his legs, and shaking his fist at the man at the wheel, he rolled below, saying, as he passed, ‘A man’s no sailor, if he can’t take a joke.’ The ducking was not the worst of such an affair, for, as there was an allowance of tea, you could get no more from the galley; and though sailors would never suffer a man to go without, but would always turn in a little from their own pots to fill up his, yet this was at best but dividing the loss among all hands.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“To enhance the value of the Sabbath to the crew, they are allowed on that day a pudding, or, as it is called, a ‘duff.’ This is nothing more than flour boiled with water, and eaten with molasses. It is very heavy, dark, and clammy, yet it is looked upon as a luxury, and really forms an agreeable variety with salt beef and pork. Many a rascally captain has made friends of his crew by allowing them duff twice a week on the passage home.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

“There is nothing more beautiful than the dolphin when swimming a few feet below the surface, on a bright day. It is the most elegantly formed, and also the quickest fish, in salt water; and the rays of the sun striking upon it, in its rapid and changing motions, reflected from the water, make it look like a stray beam from a rainbow.” – Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

new orleans (september, 2005)new orleans (september, 2005)

new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and i sit in a coffeeshop
new orleans drowns and i sit in a plastic wicker chair
at a dark green table on the patio of a coffeeshop in a city in new mexico
new orleans drowns and the cries go up for help
please help us god we are drowning
we are forsaken, stranded, dying of thirst
water everywhere but none to drink
we are awash in the poisoned sea

new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and the faces and voices on the television news
are black if they are in new orleans
raising their voices and their hands to plead for help and deliver us into their rage
new orleans drowns and a black man sits at a table just to my right and reads the paper
and i am a white man and i am afraid to look at him
damn straight i am afraid

new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and i have no boats
no emergency supplies
no heavy lift capacity
no politicians in my pocket all wound up and set to dance
set to make their crazy sounds, they smile, they look concerned
new orleans drowns

new orleans drowns and people sitting at a table just to my left talk about
the wine festival last weekend, it was fun
there was plenty of wine, lots of cheese
someone even got to be interviewed on television
new orleans drowns

(Copyright 2005, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

“[T]he requisitioned civilians. This concerns a category of witnesses, often children or adolescents at the time, of whom one finds no trace in official reports or archives. Neither victims nor executioners, these people were often requisitioned at their homes on the morning of the execution by an armed man; sometimes they were requisitioned because they had a wagon, a shovel, cooking utensils, a bag, or a sewing needle. This invisible group, undoubtedly, make up one of our principal discoveries, all the more so as they appear nowhere in written documents. At most, they are referred to in the passive form: ‘The graves were dug,’ ‘the clothes of the Jews were taken off,’ and so on. But by whom and how? These requisitioned civilians were not hiding at their windows watching the columns of victims marching toward the graves. Neither were they perched on trees in the distance. They were at the place of the crime, very often well before the Jews were brought there. And this anonymous labor assisted the executions from start to finish, beside the victims and their murderers, sometimes sitting on the grass, only several meters from an open and screaming grave. A vital point is that these requisitions were not simply improvised. They were made an integral part of the implementation of the crimes. At times more than 150 children were used. Forced actors, these requisitioned locals shine a light on these dark events and allow us to gain an accurate understanding of what happened.” – Father Patrick Desbois, “The Witnesses of Ukraine or Evidence from the Ground: The Research of Yahad-In Unum” (collected in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 2013) (emphases in original)

“What was your reaction when you saw the blood? This simple question can stimulate the witness to describe the scene to us, adding new elements. In a general way, during all the interviews, it is a question of keeping the focus on what the person saw or heard. To that end, an inalterable rule: to remain fixed on the objects of everyday life, all the while respecting the viewpoint of the witness in such a way that does not bias the witness’s account. That, incidentally, is the irreplaceable contribution of oral history, which offers precisely the possibility of “looking” through previously unseen points of view.” – Father Patrick Desbois, “The Witnesses of Ukraine or Evidence from the Ground: The Research of Yahad-In Unum” (collected in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 2013) (emphasis in original)

“Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Lynn. I am a hundred years young. I’m here to protest our school district’s book-banning policy. My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II, at a very young age, he was only 26, defending our democracy, Constitution, and freedoms. One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned. They stopped the free press, banned and burned books. The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth. Banned books, and burning books, are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control. My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this. Thank you very much. Thank you.” – Grace Lynn, at Martin County, Florida, school board meeting, March 21, 2023 (quoted by Brandon Gage, in AlterNet, March 22, 2023)

“The maiden voyage of the newly recommissioned USS Pueblo in January 1968 was not a well-planned operation. The ship’s preparation was hurried, and the crew was not adequately trained to meet the emergency that confronted them. The SIGINT detachment did not know how to conduct aspects of its mission and, more importantly, did not train in emergency destruction measures. There were numerous highly classified documents aboard the ship that were outdated, some were not needed to carry out the mission, and still others were in unnecessary duplicate copies. When the destruction order finally came, the Pueblo crew was thrown into complete disorder. By at least 20 January, North Korean military authorities were aware of the Pueblo‘s presence off North Korea. Visual reconnaissance of the Pueblo began shortly thereafter. Once the Pueblo was confirmed by the North Koreans as an American vessel and as an intelligence collector, the North Korean purpose was to force the ship into submission and to seize it.” – Robert E. Newton, The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on SIGINT Operations

“It is a vast achievement, the surest ideal, perhaps, to render the condition of men a little less servile, a little less painful; but let the mind detach itself for an instant from material results, and the difference between the man who marches in the van of progress and the other who is blindly dragged at its tail ceases to be very considerable.” – Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee

the split-nuclear agethe split-nuclear age

my son has a sister who is not his
mother’s daughter and another who is
not his father’s little girl. the first of
these two half-sisters has herself two half-
siblings in virginia, while the second
is closely related to several
persons in hawaii. we progenitors
(several inter-breeding mothers and
fathers) are, or may be, closely related
to people in colorado
texas
ohio
tennessee
scotland
france
germany
the netherlands
and possibly viet nam

now that we’re so many of us closer
cousins than we may suspect, sex seems not
quite so advisable, at least not for
procreation (pace his eminence
the holy father, with his children of
a different sort). the bunny-rub feels
so good, this is true, and there is nothing
to match a good orgasm (is there any
other kind?), but we could accidentally
generate to follow in our wayward
footsteps an even stupider gener-

ation than our own, unless we decide
to hell with the consequences, dub ourselves
royalty, and set to interbreeding
like the kings and queens whose offspring were
hemophiliacs and at least one world war

(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)

“According to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General [pre-2005], 19 percent of the general population of the United States has a diagnosable mental illness, 6 percent have an addictive disorder, and 3 percent have both a mental illness and an addictive disorder. Most of the sufferers continue to function more-or-less well outwardly, despite the internal turmoil: only between a third and a quarter of these illnesses result in diagnosable functional impairment or are severe enough to interfere with social functioning. The others may or may not be detectable by an untrained observer, even though they can seriously compromise the sufferer’s judgment.” – Major Laura J. Heath, USA, “An Analysis of the Systemic Security Weaknesses of the U.S. Navy Fleet Broadcasting System, 1967-1974, as Exploited by CWO John Walker”

“The personnel security system appeared to be a solid, workable solution to the need to keep classified information out of untrustworthy hands. However, on closer inspection, the system was far less comprehensive than it seemed. The process for investigating personnel for Secret-level clearances was extremely cursory—it was incapable of uncovering the great majority of criminal convictions, and it made no effort whatsoever to check any other security-relevant areas, such as finances. Even such a minimal vetting process was routinely undermined by people with vested interests in concealing information. Granting Top Secret clearances involved a more elaborate series of checks; however, the results were still highly untrustworthy. DIS [Defense Investigative Service] and the adjudication system were chronically underfunded and undermanned, there was virtually no reliable scientific information on which to base decisions, and the Navy allowed commanding officers to override the adjudicators’ decisions anyway. Periodic reinvestigations were almost always backlogged by several years and could, in any event, be easily avoided by tampering with personnel records. Policy existed that required supervisors and coworkers to report suspicious behavior to the authorities, yet almost no one did; however, the policy makers apparently made no effort to find out whether their policies were being followed, or even if sailors knew the policy existed. Even if sailors had reported suspicious behavior, the law enforcement agencies charged with investigating and prosecuting espionage were divided, distracted by political meddling, and had few good legal methods available to them for collecting and presenting evidence in court. The official government policy towards espionage made covering up the crime more important than punishing criminals; the result was a climate of minimal deterrence for potential spies. All of these facts should have been known to decision makers who were designing FBS [Fleet Broadcasting System] in the mid-1960s, if they had looked into the matter.” – Major Laura J. Heath, USA, “An Analysis of the Systemic Security Weaknesses of the U.S. Navy Fleet Broadcasting System, 1967-1974, as Exploited by CWO John Walker”

“A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?” – Marilynne Robinson, “What Are We Doing Here?”

“By June 21 [1915], the eight JN–2 airplanes, eight sets of spares, and twelve engines had arrived at San Diego. The new airplanes were quaint by today’s standards; but compared to the awkward-looking pushers and clumsy early tractors, they were beauties characterized by low rakish lines, staggered equal-span wings, and a long, narrow fuselage. Their appearance, however, hid serious defects. ‘They looked like airplanes,’ [Captain Benjamin D.] Foulois later wrote. ‘But we were to find that an airplane that looks like an airplane may be something less.’ ” – Roger G. Miller, “A Preliminary to War: The 1st Aero Squadron and the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916 ”