September 11, 2001

In the picture on ABC News, the North Tower largely blocked their view of the plane hitting the South Tower. Still, they were able to see an enormous blast of smoke behind the North Tower and debris from the explosion falling to the ground below.

"We knew then it was terrorism," Cheney recalls.

p 331, Cheney by Stephen F. Hayes

THE STEPS - CLOSED

Today, the fundamental divisions in American society are not regional or religious but ideological. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito were not appointed because they were Catholic but because they are conservative. The base of the Republican Party -- from James Dobson and Jay Sekulow among the evangelicals to Ted Olson and Leonard Leo among the Federalists -- recognized that they could use their influence to shape the Court. They organized more, mobilized more, and cared more about the Court than their liberal counterparts. And when their candidate won the presidency, these conservatives demanded more -- a pair of justices who were precisely to their liking (and the ejection of one nominee, Harriet Miers, who was not). With admirable candor, and even greater passion, conservatives have invested in the Court to advance their goals for the country.

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote, almost mindless task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases. As Richard A. Posner, the great conservative judge and law professor, has written, "It is rarely possible to say with a straight face of a Supreme Court constitutional decision that it was decided correctly or incorrectly." Constitutional cases, Posner wrote, "can be decided only on the basis of a political judgment, and a political judgment cannot be called right or wrong by reference to legal norms."

p 338, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

Our Executive Doesn't

After American and Cuban forces evicted the Spanish from Cuba in 1898, the United States military remained on forty-five square miles along the southern coast of the island. The American presence became official with a treaty signed by the two nations in 1903, eventually setting an annual rent at $4,085. To this day, the American government offers payment to the Cuban government every year, but during the nearly five decades that Fidel Castro has been in power, his government has accepted it only once.

p229, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

What You Do Not Know

Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. Something else might have taken place. What? I don't know.

Isn't it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen?
What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential.

This extends to all businesses. Think about the "secret recipe" to making a killing in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic. The next killing in the restaurant industry needs to be an idea that is not easily conceived of by the current population of restauranteurs. It has to be at some distance from expectations. The more unexpected the success of such a venture, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea. The same applies to the shoe and the book businesses - or any kind of entrepreneurship. The same applies to scientific theories - nobody has interest in listening to trivialities. The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Consider the Pacific tsunami of December 2004. Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did - the areas affected would have been less populated, an early warning system would have been put in place. What you know cannot really hurt you.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Keith Olbermann - Special Comment: Rudy Guiliani

"Never, ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for [terrorists] to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!" - R. Guiliani

There is no room for this. This is terrorism, dressed up, as counter-terrorist. It is not warning, but bullying, substituted for the political discourse now absolutely essential to this country's survival and the freedom of its people. No Democrat has said words like these. None has ever campaigned on the Republicans' flat-footedness of September 11, 2001; none has the requisite, irresponsible, all-consuming ambition; none is willing to say 'I accuse' rather than recognize that, to some degree, all of us share responsibility for our collective stupor. And if it is somehow insufficient - if it is somehow morally, spiritually and politically wrong to screech as Mr. Guiliani has screeched - there is also this: that gaping hole in Mr. Guiliani's argument that Republicans equal life, Democrats equal death.

Not only have the Republicans not lived up to their babbling on this subject, but last fall, the electorate called them on it - as, doubtless, they would call you on it, Mr. Guiliani. Repeat: Go beyond Mr. Bush's rhetorical calamities of 2006. Call attention to the casualties on your watch and your long, waking years of slumber between the two attacks on the World Trade Center. Become the candidate who runs on the 'vote for me or die' platform. Do a Joe McCarthy. Do a Lyndon Johnson. Do a Robespierre. Only, if you choose so to do, do not come back surprised nor remorseful if the voters remind you that terror is not just a matter of casualties. It is just as certainly a matter of the promulgation of fear. Claim a difference between the parties on the voters' chances of survival, and you do Osama bin Laden's work for him. And we, Democrats and Republicans alike, and every variation in between, we, Americans, are sick to death of you and the other terror mongers trying to frighten us into submission - into the surrender of our rights and our reason - and is a betrayal of that for which this country has always stood.

Franklin Roosevelt's words ring true again tonight, and clarified, and amplified. They are just as current now as they were when first he spoke them seventy-four years ago. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and those who would exploit our fear for power, and for their own personal, selfish, cynical gain."

Values

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn't enough. After all, talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I'd tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the we legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives,w e have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words.

To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Dependence

1

The master foresees, says Aristotle; the slave works accordingly. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave. Slavery is natural; slavery is normal. After all, it is out of the association formed by men with those two, women and slaves, that the first household was formed. (By the way, nature has distinguished between female and slave; they have different functions). In either event, men are naturally fitted to rule them both. Should affection exist among the various parties, that may be advantageous, but slaves (and women, I infer) exist to be used; affection therefore equates to guarding the tool against rust.
But what I see as the exploitative instillation of dependence, Aristotle presents as interdependence. The slave belongs to the master, he says, just as the foot belongs to the body.
If what I originally interpreted as the exploitative instillation of false consciousness in Sunee's situation might actually be adaptive or even humane, how can I be sure that slavery in Aristotle's epoch was wrong? I turn this question over on my tongue, and decide that I do not care to taste it.

2

All the same, I will not come out against patriarchal Middle Eastern families. Therefore, what right do I have to reject the proposition that authority might theoretically be absolute, personalized and benevolent? Certainly an evil institution can be mitigated or even rendered benign by a sufficiently virtuous master. The Roman father had the right of life and death over his children. We do not thereby deduce that all Roman fathers were evil, or even that the Roman system was necessarily evil.

3

On the other hand, we ourselves, spoiled, emancipated children, might not wish to be children in ancient Rome.

4

How can poverty not entail dependence? Self-reliance is a luxury of the rich. (Thoreau, you'll recall, defined himself as rich.) A poor person is someone who cannot be sure of gaining or holding the resources to meet his necessities. Therefore, he is unfree, in peril of humiliation and servitude, and certainly dependent on circumstance if not necessarily on any fellow human being.
Montaigne refers to the common run of men today, stupid, base, servile, unstable and continually tossed about by the tempest of the diverse passions that drive them to and fro; depending entirely on others. Doesn't this include most of us? It certainly includes the poor.
In Columbia a street vendor told me: Police took my merchandise, although they gave me a receipt for it. I have to sleep in the street. There's no place for me to stay.
Can the guerrillas help you?
Nobody helps nobody today. The guerrillas took everything from my family.
In one sense this man was less dependent than I. He existed without a home and now lacked even his former modest capital -- yet he declined to die! Wasn't that a triumph of self-reliance? I for my part have my house; but, as Thoreau remarked, my house also has me. Sometimes I wonder how to pay next month's mortgage.
This being duly noted, the fact remains that this Colombian was a tightrope-walker and I a comfortable spectator. He had put on a good show by not falling yet. What would happen when he got tired? His self-reliance temporarily sustained him on the rope. In and of itself, it showed him no way to dance to safety.

Poor People by William T. Vollman