“The thing to know about cameras and government is, if the camera is rolling, nothing really important is happening. What you’re watching is the theater. The governing will not be televised.” – Lawrence O’Donnell, “The Last Word,” February 21, 2024
Category: Politics & Law
“The five Pillars of Aristocracy are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius, and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.” John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813 (capitalization and punctuation in original)
“Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in the Constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.” – John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, December 19, 1813 (capitalization and spelling in original)
“The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.” – Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, June 27, 1813
“I am 60 years old and can give you some advice. Never commit a crime against anybody whatsoever. That’s how you’ll grow old with clean hands.” – Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog (trans. Avril Pyman)
“At the end of the day, it’s cheaper to be a good person.” – Justin King, “Let’s talk about Tennessee, the ACLU, and $500,000 . . .,” February 10, 2024
“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harrassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy, I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.” – Zoe Leonard, “I want a president”
“In recognition of the fact that wartime military planning was inextricably involved with foreign policy, the Army planners intensified their efforts from the spring of 1943 onward to improve liaison with the White House and State Department. By and large, the Army remained preoccupied both before and after the spring of 1943 with the more strictly military aspects of national policy. This reflected staff acceptance of the code, on which it had been working since before the war, that civilian authorities determine the ‘what’ of national policy and the military confine themselves to the ‘how.’ Yet it is also apparent that the fine line between foreign policy and military policy was becoming increasingly blurred as the war went on. The President felt compelled to take an active part in military affairs, and the Army staff found more and more that it could not keep foreign and political affairs out of its military calculations. It had become painfully clear to the staff since the summer of 1942 that political policy might not permit the armed forces to follow the quickest and most direct road to victory according to its lights.” – Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944
“To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals.” – Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
“If a country can be said to possess a soul, then America’s is the patent system: the simple, fair method of staking claim to a new idea and getting the chance to make money from it.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel
“Presidents have the power to make things worse, not really make them better on their own. They need Congress for that.” – Justin King, “The Roads to a Jan Q&A,” January 18, 2024
“Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” – J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
“The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different sort of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.” – J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
“Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list. Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce. The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps.” – J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
“The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” – Jim Vance (as quoted by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy)
“What the American public doesn’t know is what makes them the American public.” – Justin King, “The Roads to Aid and Foreign Policy Dynamics”
“Stalemate is not armistice or ceasefire. It is a condition in war in which each side conducts offensive operations that do not fundamentally alter the situation. Those operations can be very damaging and cause enormous casualties. The World War I battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele were all fought in conditions of stalemate and did not break the stalemate.” – Frederick W. Kagan, et al., “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 19 [2023]” Institute for the Study of War
“We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.” – Dr. Kate Marvel, “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m not Screaming Into the Void Anymore”
“Extreme poverty and homelessness exemplify ways in which American society fails to provide minimal support for many of its citizens and, as a result, indirectly maltreats large numbers of children.” – John M. Briere, Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects
“An army is an army. It is not a political group. It is not a citizens’ meeting.” – General George C. Marshall (in testimony before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, 77th Congress, 1st session)
“The irreducible constitutional minimum of standing under Article III consists of three elements. First, the plaintiff must have suffered an injury in fact, an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, rather than conjectural or hypothetical. Second, there must be a causal connection between the injury and the challenged action of the defendant. Third, it must be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury would be redressed by a favorable decision.” – Judge Hamilton, United States of America v. Funds in the Amount of $239,400, et al. (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, July 28, 2015)(internal cites and quotations omitted)
“ ‘It is well settled that a party named in a contract may, by his acts and conduct, indicate his assent to its terms and become bound by its provisions even though he has not signed it.’ ” – Justice Pucinski, Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Fourth Division, November 1, 2012, Asset Recovery Contracting, LLC v. Walsh Construction Co. of Illinois
“A vagrant is anybody a cop don’t like.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“One of the largest difficulties in adjusting a peace-minded people to the temporary pursuit of war is that the facts of war are often in total opposition to the facts of peace. An industrialist trained in economy will employ for a given job just enough means to perform the job. He will avoid all excessive use of manpower and material alike. Nothing could be more rational than this instinctive economy of force. But war is irrational and war is waste, fundamentally; likewise its processes are appallingly wasteful of the less important—and sometimes wisely so, the peacetime economist is astonished to learn. Unlike the industrialist just mentioned, the efficient commander does not seek to use just enough means, but an excess of means. A military force that is just strong enough to take a position will suffer heavy casualties in doing so; a force vastly superior to the enemy’s will do the job without serious loss of men and (often more important still) with no loss of the all-important commodity, time; it can thereafter plunge straight ahead to the next task, catching the enemy unaware and thus gaming victory after victory and driving a bewildered enemy into panic.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“A democracy is not ruled by warriors, even in wartime, but by civilian authority.” – Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Vol. 1-1, United States Army in World War II
“Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template . . . a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a morass of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war. . . . The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness . . . . The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian,
and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces—often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation—is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict.” – Mark Galeotti, “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-Linear War”
“Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man; he had such and such mistresses and such and such ministers and he ruled France badly. His descendants were weak men and they too ruled France badly. And they had such and such favorites and such and such mistresses. Moreover, certain men wrote some books at that time. At the end of the eighteenth century there were a couple of dozen men in Paris who began to talk about all men being free and equal. This caused people all over France to begin to slash at and drown one another. They killed the king and many other people. At that time there was in France a man of genius—Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere—that is, he killed many people because he was a great genius. And for some reason he went to kill Africans, and killed them so well and was so cunning and wise that when he returned to France he ordered everybody to obey him, and they all obeyed him. Having become an Emperor he again went out to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. In Russia there was an Emperor, Alexander, who decided to restore order in Europe and therefore fought against Napoleon. In 1807 he suddenly made friends with him, but in 1811 they again quarreled and again began killing many people. Napoleon led six hundred thousand men into Russia and captured Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and the Emperor Alexander, helped by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe to arm against the disturber of its peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies and their forces advanced against the fresh forces he raised. The Allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the title of Emperor and showing him every respect, though five years before and one year later they all regarded him as an outlaw and a brigand. Then Louis XVIII, who till then had been the laughingstock both of the French and the Allies, began to reign. And Napoleon, shedding tears before his Old Guards, renounced the throne and went into exile. Then the skillful statesmen and diplomatists (especially Talleyrand, who managed to sit down in a particular chair before anyone else and thereby extended the frontiers of France) talked in Vienna and by these conversations made the nations happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomatists and monarchs nearly quarreled and were on the point of again ordering their armies to kill one another, but just then Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who had been hating him, immediately all submitted to him. But the Allied monarchs were angry at this and went to fight the French once more. And they defeated the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent him to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the beloved France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction occurred and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their subjects.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“Where there’s law there’s injustice.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification. All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)