Speaker for the Diodes

5:26AM - QotD

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1791

"It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1797

[To my fellow Americans and anybody else here joining in the celebrations: happy Independence Day!]

5:26AM - QotD

"God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them!" -- Anonymous

12:07PM - Semantics, Gender, and 'Cis'

An Important Message About Vocabulary

While I do have a particular instance in mind, this little epistle is really in reaction to several comments, essays, loaded questions, and diatribes I've seen over the past three or four weeks in various places (though I hadn't seen it blow up into a shouting match anywhere until a couple of days ago). Note that if you don't know what the verb 'to other' means, or how the umbrella term 'transgender' is used, you may have some homework to do before getting into this. I expect that most of my readers already know those concepts.

Folks, 'cisgendered' (or 'cisgender'¹) and 'cisssexual' really are intended to be neutral terms and will be so until/unless some sort of general stigma gets attached to the concept of living / identifying / presenting as the gender society always expected of you because it was on your birth certificate. I don't see that ever being likely. (I have a hunch that I'll be responding to a lot of criticisms of this essay by pointing back to this very pragraph, starting at that "until".)

It's important to note that there's no reclaiming of an old slur involved, nor repurposing of a word with other baggage, because 'cisgendered' was coined specifically for this meaning and this purpose, and wasn't a word before that. Any baggage the word has now has to have accrued entirely over the last decade and a half.

('cisgendered', from 'cis-', "on the same side", + 'gender'; in contrast to 'trans-', "crossing over"; both from Latin, and both prefixes used in Chemistry with similar meanings.)

The reason it feels jarring -- "naming"? "marking"? -- to you, and gets your hackles up is quite simply that y'all are accustomed to being the unmarked class, and giving you any concise name is going to feel like an imposed label that, because you're not used to having to acknowledge a label at all, some of you start to suspect is somehow insulting or denigrating.

Stop a minute and ponder for a moment the magnitude and type of privilege that is contained in not having to think about or acknowledge a label. Compare that to TVs, TSes, DQs, DKs, GQs, and all other subgroups of transgendered people. You don't like it? Pick and popularize a different label, but pick one that doesn't stigmatize everybody else in contrast to it. That you now have a label doesn't 'other' you; it merely makes you like everybody else who has a label. If one group gets to insist on not having a label, that 'others' everyone else. If we remove the "default class" from you, that loss of privilege you have a gut reaction to isn't because you're being insulted; it's because the field just got a tiny (tiny!) bit more level.

(Here's a big hint: 'normal' and 'real' fail the doesn't-stigmatize-everyone-else condition spectacularly. Prefixing 'man'/'woman' with 'bio-' or 'genetic' or 'born' to denote not-trans, 'others' the rest of us slightly more subtly, but only slightly, and no less problematically. Either respect us, be an ally, and use non-othering language; or admit up front that you don't respect us -- that holding on to your privilege is more important than supporting us -- so we can classify this as a variation on the "tone argument" and write you off as Part Of The Problem.)

[1] While I learned 'transgendered' as having '-ed' on the end to make it an adjective (and applied the same pattern to 'cisgendered'), within the trans community you will find many who use 'transgender' and 'cisgender' as adjectives, without an '-ed' suffix. Some other time, I'll post a poll about that and solicit grammatical arguments. For now, if you're not already used to doing so, just consider the two forms, with and without '-ed', synonymous when used as the same part of speech.

Othering And Non-Othering Labels

This table illustrates othering combinations of labels, and non-othering or at least less othering pairs.

Note that it is generally the name for the unmarked state, and its implications of being normal/default/good/real, rather than the name for the marked state, that makes the unmarked/marked pairings problematical and othering. 'rightie'/'southpaw' would be fine, because the problem with the first example isn't the word 'southpaw', it's the claiming of right-handedness as the unmarked state. The problem with 'normal'/'regular'/'real' should be obvious; the flaw with 'straight' may be less so. If that's the case for you, consider how many different layers of meaning there are on the word 'straight': pure (unadulterated), honest (not crooked), undamaged (not bent), sober (not using drugs), clear (not confusing or obfuscating). Now reconsider what message you're sending by defining your class as 'straight' and some other class as not-straight. (I did not get this myself until a stranger took me to task for using 'straight' to mean 'het', and even then my first instinct was to get defensive about it instead of thinking about what his point was.)

Note also that some of the marked/unmarked pairs have problems of inaccuracy as well! Many people who do not identify as polyamourous, are not in explicitly polyamorous relationships, and even sneer at poly folk for being immoral, cheat on their partners. And many members of polyamorous N-ads are faithful to the promises they've made to each other. A "genetic woman" (an older usage that I don't hear as often nowadays) usually only knows her exact chromosomal makeup if something goes wrong that leads to a test -- we just assume that babies who look female and grow up to be women are XX because that's most likely, but we don't check ... and a few transsexual individuals discover along the way that they aren't the XX or XY their parents had assumed they were (for a particularly well known example, see Caroline Cossey, who is chromosomally XXXY).

Another set of terms, the cumbersome 'FAAB' and 'MAAB' meaning "female-assigned at birth" and "male-assigned at birth", attempt to sidestep that problem by digging down to what we usually mean to refer to anyhow: whether the parents were told, "congratulations, you have a daughter," or, "congratulations, you have a son," when the individual was born. Even "bio-" isn't a very meaningful label, since all humans are still biological, trans or not. Note that while 'FAAB' and 'MAAB' are useful in certain contexts when discussing the ideas of sex and gender abstractly, when used casually outside of that context they still reveal too much emphasis on the idea that initially-apparent biology = destiny, and can be used as sneakier ways of saying "real man" or "real woman" for cisgendered in order to exclude trans individuals from gendered spaces.

Finally, note that in most everyday contexts -- that is, normal social encounters and conversations and most policy matters, not specific medical or research or rights-activism contexts -- an even better version of the last two rows of the table would look like this version to the right --->

... but alas, I know there'll be a lot of pushback on that, from various quarters. Some of which really ought to know better. (There are some valid concerns there, and the conflict between different sets of rights and needs can be tricky to resolve, but more often the opposition to this idea stems from simple, conscious or unexamined cissexism.)

About Neutral vs. Non-Neutral Terms:

This started off with my observation of some same-gender-the-delivery-room-doctor-thought-they'd-be people's objections to being called 'cisgendered', and complaining that it felt like a pejorative term (and one they hadn't chosen for themelves). So let's compare some value-neutral terms to some negative ones.

The examples I'm giving here may become dated as language shifts, and may even already be subject to differences in regional usage. There is a sort of euphemism treadmill for some terms so that the more-polite phrase gradually accrues all the negativity of the original epithet and needs to be discarded for a new euphemism; and there's 'reclaiming', by which some terms lose their stigma and become mostly neutral barring tone-of-voice cues. (Also, at least with the T* community, when the community was much younger and still discovering/inventing apropriate and useful language, it embraced terms that were later realized to be troublesome. So if you read older texts, you may see trans folk casually phrasing things in ways that would attract flames today. We were -- are -- still learning and evolving.) Bear in mind that even some of the neutral terms can be suspect if used when there was no reason to bring them up in the first place. But in my dialect at this time, I think this is a useful illustration.

Here's the thing: if we meant to be insulting or disparaging in our choice of word for people who are not transgendered/transgender, you'd know. It wouldn't be this nagging discomfort over finding yourself in a marked class and worrying about having a label at all for a change. It'd be a proper insult. (And as people have noted elsewhere, expressing exasperation with an individual member of a class does not make the name for that class into a derogatory term. It's possible for a T* person annoyed at a cis person's abuse of cis privilege to call them a thickheaded, bigoted cis person without making 'cis' the insult; it's the adjectives that are negative, not the noun. In the same way, someone can refer to "an evil man" without making 'man' into a derogatory term, because the negativity is in 'evil', not 'man'. So just because you've heard a trans person complain about a cis person, that is not enough to serve as an example that "'cis' is used pejoratively".)

Similarly, I've seen plenty of men try to argue that a woman who has said anything negative about one man or an identified subset of men must hate all men (therefore her opinion can be ignored), white people who've cried 'reverse racism' when a person of colour has called them on their bullshit (therefore PoC are "just as bad" and their complaints can be disregarded), and countless cases of would-be allies complaining they feel attacked when a disprivileged person has complained about specific actions of some members of the group the would-be ally is a member of (and therefore the minority group is about to "lose an ally" because they were "mean"). Tone Argument, "it's all about me", and strawman "you people are just as bad", are derailing. Fifteen yards and loss of down. Don't go there.

And yes, some of the negative words can be used by members of the communities they're applied to, either as an early stage of reclaiming or because they have different connotations when used ironically by people who have a stake in those words. That's really a large enough matter on its own to warrant a separate essay. For our purposes here, consider uses of the words by a random cashier, cop, or passer-by who is not a member of the described group and isn't already a friend of the listener who is a member of that group. If you pull out the "Well, I heard some _____ people saying ______ once so it doesn't belong on the bad list," in this context, that'll be a five yard penalty for distraction. That is, it'll put you farther away from making your case, not closer. We can have the discussion specificaly about that phenomenon elsewhen.

(I should probably note discussions elsewhere regarding 'person with attribute' vs. 'adjectived person' vs. 'just a noun' labelling styles -- e.g. "person of colour" vs. "coloured person" vs. "black" (or other 'racial' marker used as a noun); or "person with diabetes" vs. "diabetic person" vs. "diabetic". Even a cursory examination of that topic would be too much of a distraction right here, but it's something that folks preparing to discuss labels should at least be aware of.)

If this sounds like I'm saying you have to agree with me to be allowed to speak, do a Google search for privilege bingo card and see how many of these "clever" arguments have been used so many times, regarding sexism, racism, ablism, poverty, and pretty much every other topic that involves a group struggling to be treated decently, that the very existence of these tactics has become a bitter joke. The rule isn't that you have to agree with me; it's that you have to fight fairly and argue in intellectually honest ways, rather than adopting the tactics of oppressors while claiming to be on my side.

A Significant Distinction:

An argument I've heard is that since we transgendered people get to tell others what labels to use for us and which words are unacceptable, cisgendered people should not have a label forced upon them. But we never got to choose whether to have a label; we only got to argue about which labels we didn't find insulting. The 'cis' debate appears (so far) to be about whether cis-folk should be given a label at all, which is hard to see as anything other than default-class privilege.

You don't get to hold on to being "just plain [unmarked] men" and "just plain [unmarked] women" and not have a label for your class, because that continues to promote the idea that trans men and trans women aren't really men and women. I sure hope that you can understand why trying to stop that meme is important enough to risk pissing off some folks we'd been on good speaking terms with before they started insisting on turning back the clock.

So here's the deal. I obviously do not speak for transgendered people as a whole -- to be precise, I speak for nobody but myself -- but if instead of complaining about having a label, you propose a label you like better than 'cis'/'cisgender', a label that doesn't start with 'a-', 'an-', 'un-', 'non-', or 'im-' and doesn't simply translate as "real" or "normal", and you get a significant portion of the not-transgendered people who are engaged in conversations with trans folk about language to agree that the word is a candidate worth discussing (I'm not asking for a majority of that group, just enough that we're not having the same conversation eighty zillion times with a different word that has only one supporter each time), I'll listen, and I think some other T*people will as well -- we I may still have criticisms of the label you choose, and/or helpful feedback; I may wind up pointing out that you've still left in 'othering' aspects that demean trans people; but I'll listen and discuss and you really do have a shot at convincing me to try to get others in the community to use your word instead of 'cis' if it really is a neutral term (i.e., not just a sneakier way to reassert cis privilege). Oh, there'll be pushback from some quarters even if its a great word, because some people just hate having to learn new words and habits (just look at the number of people who've used, "we don't need a new word" as an excuse to oppose 'cisgendered' over the years! Or to step back farther in time, the men who used similar excuses for not wanting to use 'Ms.' when asked to), but bring labels you find respectful and acceptable that don't just go back to denigrating trans folk in contrast, that don't cast us as 'other' to your 'real', and there'll be a real conversation and maybe -- I hope -- a meeting of the minds.

But as long as what I'm hearing is, "Waah, I don't want to have to have a label," or, "I don't like 'cis' but won't suggest something better," you can shut the [expletive] up. Because that's not a polite request for the right to choose your own nomenclature, it's just incredibly privileged whining about suddenly being treated like everybody not of the default class. And clinging to your privilege at my sisters' expense doesn't make you much of an ally. And my transgender brothers and sisters (and bi-gendered, agendered, and polygendered siblings-in-arms) can hear that too, and most aren't just going to roll over and say, "Oh sure, unmarkedclass, we'll other ourselves just because you say it's impolite to try to be equally valid to you." While y'all are feeling butthurt about being handed an adjective (and not knowing which pocket to put it in), there are a lot of trans people busy just trying to get consistently recognized as human instead of being considered piñatas/targets, fetish objects, scapegoats, and comedy props.

Bring it. Bring the suggestions. Get a real conversation about this rolling. Until then, I'm going to continue using 'cisgendered' unapologetically unless someone can show me why it really is offensive beyond existing as a label at all. This essay is a rant rather than a conversation, a shout at a bunch of whiners-for-privilege, but it's also an invitation to start a conversation if there really is a meaningful conversation to be had. I'm not saying, "Here's your label, like it or suffer" -- rather, I'm saying "If you don't like it, suggest something better." Show me there is a real basis for a conversation. Or quit complaining. Either way works for me.

Some people will read this who have already progressed beyond this stage, with or without input from me. You should be able to figure out whether you're one of the people I'm yelling at or not. If you're offended because I yelled at all, then even if I wasn't yelling at you when I started, I might be once I find that out.

5:26AM - QotD

-- from the ABC television program, Castle ( ABC, IMDB ); episode, "A Death in the Family", written by Andrew W. Marlowe and Barry Schindel, directed by Bryan Spicer, aired 2009-05-11

7:39PM - Whoops :-(

Crap. Social thing I wanted to go to half an hour drive from here starts at 19:30, and it got to be 19:20 before I managed to get my head unstuck from the project I was working on (for a small amount of money, not just one of my notions, but I'd still meant to take a little break from it), and I still need to shower before I'm fit to be around others (warm day, not running AC, planned to rinse off right before leaving). Feh. Not feeling great, but feeling well enough to drive, so this one I did to myself by losing track of time, rather than having my body screw me up.

(Then again, I also need to go to rehearsal an hour away tomorrow night, and being unable because I spent all my spoons tonight would be bad. But I still wanted to go. Might just show up late, depending on how much sense that seems to make once I'm clean and dressed. In light of message from hostess, will scramble to get there as soon as I can. So evening not entirely blown.)

I've been getting way more blogspam in the last two weeks than I used to, by a factor of twenty or so, and a surprising number of the attempted spam comments (they're getting screened, so y'all don't see 'em) are coming to one particular entry (mostly the DW copy of it, but a couple other sites as well). It's QotD for 2009-06-22. I wonder whether that one is extra-Googlable or something.

5:26AM - QotD

"[T]here are many reasonable human beings who disagree with me - but they're opponents. No, this is The Enemy, who says I'm not human." -- Zoe Brain, 2009-06-14

2:39PM - Thinking About Power On Too Little Sleep

[Alternate title: "Didn't Sleep, So Footnotes Ate Me"]

Managed to get one hour of sleep before leg cramps woke me; haven't managed to get back to sleep since. Not expecting this to be one of my better days.

But I did manage to post an explosive photo to Flickr last night, so that's something.¹

Confirmed (alas) that when you use about three times as much virtual memory as there is physical RAM in the system, a Mac with a gig and a quarter gets really sluggish, much the way a less memory-full Windows or Linux system does when you get to a little over twice as much VM as RAM. Bleah. (Okay, okay, not the least bit surprising, I know. Nonetheless: bleah.) Still, it takes longer for me to get that far into torture-the-hardware mode on this computer than on any others in the house. And once I get a couple of the projects I'm in the middle of to easy "save, quit, and come back later" points, the machine will be nice and zippy again.

Also may have figured out why the Mac wouldn't charge from the inverter in the car (which is also the inverter I use at Pennsic²). It turns out that the reason the little square box with ears on it that gets so disturbingly hot does get so disturbingly hot is that it's rated for 127-182 VA according to the decal on the side, and the inverter's sticker says it only puts out 100 W (and ISTR that being a peak value, with a continuous rating more like 85 W, but that info was on the original packaging which I no longer have). I'm a little fuzzy on exactly how to convert between VA and W, but I can see that 100 is enough lower than 127 that if the Mac's power supply has a power factor as high as the first Google hit on "convert W to VA" found me suggests, 100 W is just not enough. Feh.

Oh, but wait, a decal on another side of the power ... (do I still call it a 'brick' if it's not brick shaped but still has cords on both sides?³) ... declares that it's a 65 W unit. Oh, right, that's probably the output after subtracting all the power that goes into making Very Warm White Square Thingie so very warm. (Hmm. 24.5 V @ 2.65 A = 64.925 W, so okay, I'm not entirely brain-scrozzled from only sleeping one [expletive] hour [whiiiiine].) So I guess I need a slightly bigger inverter or a DC-DC converter that can go from 12 V to 24.5 V more efficiently than the 12 VDC --> 115 VAC --> 24.5 VDC route. Uh, or I can take the Vaio with XP on it and try not to bore my campmates with whining about how XP isn't OS X. I'll make that an all too likely 'plan C' due to financial constraints.

(Uh ... putting two 12 V lead-acid batteries in series and sticking a voltage regulator between the battery battery⁴ and the computer ... good idea, bad idea, or "might be a good idea if Glenn knew enough electronics to get the regulator right but a bad idea under the actual circumstances"?)

Okay, let's see whether I can at least get a nap, or convince myself I'm alert enough to get something useful done despite the brain-fuzzies.

[1] Yes, I know about the deflagration/detonation distinction. :-þ And yes, it's closer to black than silver under normal light, but it's also very, very shiny and I used a flash.

[2] Yeah yeah, I know, but a computer comes in handy for the photography, and gives me something to do on the days when I'm not feeling well enough to get out of my tent and up the hill. I'm also more likely to want it for transcribing/arranging music during Pennsic than any randomly selected other fortnight of the year.

[3] I feel funny calling it a wall-wart even though I know it can be configured as one, because I don't have the little folding plug module that replaces the AC power cord, so at present, this one isn't a wall-wart.

[4] Intentional, though if I were feeling more obscure I could've just said 'battery' and let folks wonder whether the singular was accidental or I was thinking of the two heavy black boxes as one 24-cell battery; and if I were feeling less smartassy I could've just said 'batteries'. But then I wouldn't have this excuse for yet another footnote, would I?

5:26AM - QotD

"Just talked to a girl named Alison. When it first started she went up to a cop and said thank you for coming out to keep us safe. This is a rough neighborhood. He said that's not why we are here. She asked why they were there and he said a disgruntled employee had said that the bar was overserving people. She told him she had been drinking but that she had a designated driver. He told her that she was fine. She said they only arrested men and seemed to be targeting effeminate men" -- Tammye Nash, 1969-06-28 (whoops, my bad, but I'm sure you can understand my mistake) 2009-06-28, regarding a raid on a gar bar just coincidentally on the 40th anniversary of that more famous gay-bar raid

More at ONTD-politics, Daily Kos, and, of course, Twitter

I had a different quote in mind for today, before news of this weekend's raid came across Twitter.

4:36AM - Earworm

Earworm. Beatles. "I Will".

5:26AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-02:

"The story of English spelling is an improbable one in every sense. It is a tale of a process of evolution that contains so many curious accidents and bizarre twists of fate that the end result -- how we spell English today -- must be regarded as one of the most absurd, ridiculous, and protracted (1,500 years and counting) accidents of human culture.

"Yet no matter how accidental and ridiculous the story of English spelling is, and no matter how many suggestions have been made for "improving" English spelling (which is normally taken to mean making it more consistent), the ridiculous accident of English spelling has continued on its merry path much as before, and it's the would-be reformers who have, largely, been forgotten."

-- James Essinger: Spellbound - The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling.

(submitted to the mailing list by thom newlin)

5:26AM - QotD

"The great thing about Photoshop is that you can senselessly butcher your models for the sake of composition without getting blood all over the place." -- Cosmo7, Photoshop Disasters, 2009-04-28 [site as a whole pointed out by sabotabby]

5:26AM - QotD

[Story of a young cancer patient facing diffucult choices follows.]

-- from the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-04-01

8:20PM - Feeling Especially American Today[*]

Someone posted some questions to the abcusers mailing list, that had the side effect of alerting me to a tool I have a use for. First problem: I can't get it to work for any chords that have sharp signs in their names (either as the root or as an added bass note; e.g., F#m7, E/G#). Second problem: while the file has extensive comments, including an explanation of the syntax to use, the comments and the (Postscript) variable names are all in a language I don't know. I think it's Italian.(Babelfish seems to think it's Portugese) So there's a pretty good chance I just need to RTFM, but Google Translate didn't help. (I'll try Babelfish next.) (Got an intelligible translation but the clues I sought are not in the documentation.)

Worst case, I dive into debugging in a programming language I only almost kindasorta know, with cryptic-to-me variable names and no readable-by-me comments. Best case, the file's author pops up on the mailing list and tells me a really simple fix before I get into the headache zone.

Had a plan for the day, until I stayed awake all night tossing and turning nd trying to uncramp my right calf and finally crashed at 9 AM. Slept a few hours at last, but not enough, so I'm not at my clearest-headed this evening. Big plan for tonight: try to manage to sleep at such a time that tomorrow I'll be awake during the hours when folks at City Hall answer the phone. Big plan for next year: be well enough (and be able to afford) to go to Baitcon and Conterpoint (unless their dates overlap), and more than one evening of Balticon.

In the meantime, I'm already focussed on not letting Pennsic get screwed up for me.

If I'm going to bother shaving my legs, I need to get some shorter skirts. (Or lose enough weight to fit into the short skirts I used to wear, tens of pounds ago.)

[1] The European riddle goes, "If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one languge?" -- and the expected answer is, "American". I know a few phrases in Greek and can make a little sense of really simple written Greek on a good day, et je parle Francais un petit peu,, but today I'm feeling painfully stereotypical-American.

5:26AM - QotD

"There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state's control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves." -- Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party's executive board, "Filesharing is not theft" [editorial published in two Swedish newspapers, I don't have a link to a copy of the entire editorial], as reported on TorrentFreak 2008-02-09

7:25PM - From square one I'll be watching all sixty-four

I have "The Arbiter", from Chess, stuck in my brain.

HCB rehearsal will probably knock it out though.

5:26AM - QotD

"The typical left-wing person knows as much about weapons as the typical right-wing person knows about being nice to people not of his own kind." -- fidhle (aka fidhle), 2009-06-20 (private conversation, quoted with permission)

[Happy birthday to starmalachite!]

7:04PM - Weeoo Thumpa Thumpa Weeoo Thumpa Thumpa Weeooo

Earlier, I heard a THUMPA THUMPA car stereo go by, and from as near as my ears could tell the same direction, moving at the same rate (higher than the speed limit), a siren.

So I wondered which is more likely: a cop trying to pull over a speeder with a big-ass car stereo, or was it a cop with too-big subwoofers in his or her cruiser, groovin' on some tunes on the way to a call?

Alas, I couldn't see, so I have to guess.

5:26AM - QotD

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
 It's a wonder I can think at all
 And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
 I can read the writing on the wall"
  -- from "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon (b. 1941-10-13), on There Goes Rhymin' Simon, 1973

[My big question: will I manage to scrape up the money to get my last several rolls of Kodachrome developed before Kodachrome processing entirely goes away? The clock is ticking.]

5:26AM - QotD

"Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country." -- Bill Moyers (b. 1934-06-05), 2005-05-15, speech at the National Conference on Media Reform

[via WikiQuote]

5:26AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-03-10:

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry Truman, U.S. President, from his Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, delivered August 8, 1950.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=836&st=&st1=]

(submitted to the mailing list by BK Read)

[Happy Solstice, and happy Fathers Day!]