Zephyr Dear

I am now prepared to state without reservation that the ongoing NSA/surveillance story ranks among the more momentous and nauseating charades perpetrated on a frighteningly gullible public. Any remaining doubt I had on this question -- and, in truth, no substantial doubt remained in my own mind -- has been obliterated by this story concerning the remarks of Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor, to the home affairs committee of Parliament.

All of it is shocking, but this is the worst:

Rusbridger said the leak amounted to about 58,000 files, and the newspaper had published “about 1 percent” of the total.

“I would not expect us to be publishing a huge amount more,” he said.

Some years ago, I remarked that professional (and even semi-professional) apologists for the Democratic Party, such as Digby, offer a credo which amounts to the following, once you strip away the endless, and endlessly dishonest, rationalizations: "We're 2% less shitty than Pure Evil! It's all we've got!"

I can adapt this credo with full accuracy for the actual role of the so-called "adversarial" press: "We're 1% less shitty than the evil State! It's all we've got -- and it's all we're going to give you!"

I'm sure we're all prepared to storm the barricades of the murderous surveillance State with this rousing call to arms as our inspiration. C'mon, baby, let's get it on!

I'm also reminded of my observation about "dissenting" journalists like Chris Hayes: "The ruling class loves dissent like this. It's not 'dangerous' in the smallest detail. If 'dissenters' like Hayes didn't exist, the ruling class would have to invent them." Ditto for the Guardian, and, yes, ditto for the Greenwald/Omidyar venture.

In the short time I've reflected on this latest article, I realized that the 1% figure actually tracks what we already knew about the extent of the Snowden documents compared with the number of pages from those documents which have been published. But to see it stated so baldly -- especially when coupled with Rusbridger's additional comment, "I would not expect us to be publishing a huge amount more" -- truly does take my breath away. If we add in the pages that have been published in outlets other than the Guardian, under the ever-watchful, "responsible" eyes of the information controllers (primarily Greenwald and Poitras), what total figure would we come up with? Perhaps 2% of the Snowden documents have been offered to the public?

In this latest story, Rusbridger repeats all the usual "justifications" for the refusal to disclose more, including this:

Rusbridger denied placing intelligence agents at risk, saying the Guardian had “made very selective judgments” about what to publish and hadn’t revealed any names.

"Very selective judgments" -- yeah, no shit. And it's a decidedly odd "adversarial" press that adopts the State's rationales with such enthusiasm (Greenwald completely adopts them, too). Why such concern with "placing intelligence agents at risk"? I suppose you wouldn't want to endanger the next coup, or throw a monkey wrench into plans for the next invasion. We're talking about "intelligence agents" who work at the direction and on behalf of a criminal, murdering, brutalizing Death State. One might argue that we don't need to protect such agents: to the contrary, we need to protect ourselves -- and other innocent people around the world -- from them.

But that's just me and my cranky, nutty old man routine. I clearly fail to appreciate what the exercise of power requires, or the eager self-censorship engaged in by those who make themselves indispensable handmaidens to power.

It is certainly true that the 1% or 2% of the Snowden documents that our betters have decided it is "responsible" to share with us have provided additional details of various governments' surveillance activities. While the details may be new (and sometimes valuable), we haven't learned anything in general terms that many of us hadn't already figured out. And the severely restricted focus on the NSA represents a very dangerous shifting of focus to one agency, when the threat is far more widespread.

As for the Guardian doing the State's bidding (and Greenwald/Poitras/Omidyar as well, since they are all using the same rule book, which is the one devised by the State), additional details are mentioned in this Guardian piece:

During an hour-long session in front of the home affairs select committee, Rusbridger also:

• Said the Guardian had consulted government officials and intelligence agencies – including the FBI, GCHQ, the White House and the Cabinet Office – on more than 100 occasions before the publication of stories.

• Said the D-Notice committee, which flags the potential damage a story might cause to national security, had said that nothing published by the Guardian had put British lives at risk.

Consider the enormous value of the hugely restricted publication of the Snowden documents to the various States involved. Rusbridger, Greenwald, et al. all trumpet the great triumph represented by the "debate" publication has engendered -- the clamor of public voices demands "reform," so committees will be formed, investigations will be undertaken, and when the dust has settled, life for the States involved will go on almost exactly as before (remember: if the NSA were disbanded today, identical surveillance would continue via other agencies and institutions of power) -- and the States will be able to claim that the public knows the "truth," and their activities now have the full blessing of informed public consent.

This is the dream script written by the States themselves -- and it's playing out in blood-drenched, high definition video before the willingly unseeing eyes of the world.

In his remarks, Rusbridger refers to his government's efforts to "intimidate" the Guardian. I do not underestimate that intimidation, and I think Rusbridger's comments must be viewed in part against that backdrop. It's impossible to know to what extent Rusbridger emphasizes how few of the Snowden documents the Guardian has published -- and how few additional documents it ever intends to publish -- because of his desire to protect various individuals and the Guardian itself from government reprisals. But even if we appreciate this aspect of the charade being performed for us, it doesn't make any difference in the end. Think of it this way: when you do the bully's bidding -- when you follow the bully's orders -- because you fear even worse results if you do not, you are not resisting the bully any longer. You are making the bully's grip on power still stronger, and you have made the task of those who genuinely wish to challenge the bully's stranglehold on power infinitely harder.

And that is precisely what all these "adversarial" journalists are doing: they have internalized the State's demands almost completely (as I've detailed from the beginning of this saga, the journalists' arguments against disclosure track the State's justifications at every point of significance), and they continue to willingly submit their decisions to the State for its review before publication. The governments involved have made clear that they are not seriously concerned about any of the disclosures thus far -- and all the grandstanding about dangers to "national security" and the like, together with the efforts at intimidation, are designed primarily to discourage anyone who has even a stray thought about more far-reaching disclosure.

So I return to the 1% or 2% of the Snowden documents that have been made public. What would be the effect of publication of 20% of the Snowden documents -- or 50%? Now that might likely cause serious disruption of the States' operations, even at the 20% disclosure rate -- and it is painfully obvious that none of the journalists involved have any intention of allowing publication on that scale. So whose side are the "dissenting" journalists actually on? It's not the side of "the public," despite all the blather about publication of what is in "the public interest." No: they're finally on the State's side. But the charade allows the interested parties to pretend that a meaningful "debate" is occurring, and that "reforms" are in the offing that will make a serious difference. And everyone can sigh with relief that we finally know the "truth."

On the basis of 1% or 2% of the total number of documents? We don't know anything close to the truth and, with this cast of characters, we won't in the foreseeable future.

Rusbridger's comments also raise some important questions. Two of them should be answered by the journalists involved immediately. I have followed the NSA stories fairly closely since they began, and I have to state that, at this point, I have absolutely no idea who actually controls the Snowden documents, or various parts of them. Does the Guardian have its own copy(ies) of the entire Snowden trove? Rusbridger's remarks seem to imply that. But it had appeared that only Greenwald and Poitras now have complete sets (see here for more on this, and this Update as well). And what happens when Greenwald and Poitras work with reporters at other newspapers on stories? Do those reporters get to keep their own copies of the documents about which their stories are written? Or do they only review copies temporarily provided to them? And so on. Since these particular journalists ceaselessly herald the virtues of transparency and accountability, how about some transparency and accountability on this question, especially since it's now become hopelessly muddled? It should be easy to answer: these people -- x, y, possibly, z, a, b, etc. -- have complete sets; these people have partial sets (indicating in at least general terms the categories of documents held by additional individuals). As things stand now, except for knowing that Greenwald and Poitras have complete sets, we don't know who has control of the documents. It seems to me that is of considerable importance. Isn't it in "the public interest" to know which particular people control this allegedly world-shattering information?

My second question is of equal importance. Since it seems that, at most, a very, very small percentage of the Snowden documents will ultimately be made public, we are entitled to know why 98%, or 90%, or 50%, of the documents will never be made public. What percentage of the documents name names, and would therefore supposedly endanger "innocent" people? Can't the names be omitted, and the redacted documents then published? Which percentage might endanger "national security"? How are these journalists determining what endangers "national security" (or what "national security" is?) or how much "danger" is permissible, if any? Is there some percentage of the documents that the journalists have determined to be not "newsworthy"? How is that determination made? What are the factors involved? As I noted in one of my earliest posts about this, we are offered only vacuous phrases devoid of specific content when it comes to the reasons for non-disclosure. In fact, we have no specific idea how any of these judgments are being made. Thus, we are reduced to the identical posture with regard to both the State(s) and the "dissenting" journalists: we just have to trust them.

To which, I have only this response: Fuck, NO.

One of the key pillars supporting the pretense of a "responsive democracy" is the belief in a "free," "adversarial" press. But as described above -- and there is much, much more that could be said on the subject -- it is difficult to imagine how the NSA/surveillance story could redound more fully to the benefit of the States involved while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of "adversarial" journalism. It is a propaganda coup for the State of notable proportions. I, for one, am sickened by this deadly charade. It's past time for it to end.

P.S. Before I saw this latest story this morning, I had already begun planning a new article (probably the first of several). The general subject is indicated by my provisional title: "Reflections on Power, Responsibility and Obedience." The NSA story will be one example of the issues I intend to discuss, but perhaps not even one of the major examples. Nonetheless, the NSA story captures some of the dynamics that concern me with particular clarity. I hope to publish the first of those articles toward the end of this week.

Academia is funny.  At the beginning you keep asking yourself, “What if I am not really any good?”  Then once people finally start admitting that you are good you ask yourself, “What if I’m not really as good as they are finally admitting that I am?”  Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not judging — I used to ask these questions too.  A lot.  My own favorite version was always, “Why am I so much more famous than I deserve to be while not being nearly as famous as I want to be?”  But then I got over it and stopped giving so much of a shit, which makes me cured.  Here are six things that helped, in case you’re interested.

How I Cured My Impostor Syndrome

1.  I got Tenure.  Let’s just get that out of the way, shall we?  When you don’t fit the mold or look the part and you constantly get messages saying you don’t belong, there is no Earthly substitute for a piece of paper that says you can never ever be kicked out.  The people who say that tenure should be abolished because it doesn’t mean anything anymore are both full of crap and without exception white men who’ve never been anywhere near the wrong side of the line.  My only quibble with tenure is that the people who have it don’t exploit it nearly enough to take new risks and generally agitate the system.  But that’s a whole other and more bitchier post.

2.  I took a good, hard look at my stuff.  And some parts of it ain’t pretty.  Particularly my early stuff.  Some of that was just bad bad bad bad bad.  If it came my way now I would reject the shit out of it.  I would use Microsoft Paint to scrawl “Your proposal is bad and you should feel bad” across the summary page and then upload it to Memebase.  No friggin wonder there are people out there who think I’m way overrated.  But you know what?  My science has gotten a lot better over the years.  A LOT.  So while I don’t have any confidence that what I am doing now is good enough, I have tremendous confidence in my ability to fix whatever inadequacies are shown to me.  I’ve also accepted that some of the poor bastards who had to review my early crap will never respect me.  Others are just plain prejudiced.  I can’t do anything about either, so why stress over it?  By the way, the folks telling you that you should just grow a thick skin and not care what people say are not your real friends.  A thin skin is the way to go.  Only if you let the criticism cut to the bone can you fully examine the wound and clean it up so it can heal.  But promise me that you’ll also let the praise in, and absorb it just as deeply.

3.  I worked myself to and through exhaustion.   I could tell you the details, but they would make you question my sanity even more than you already do.  I will say that it involved years of high doses of nicotine, maltodextrin, lorazepam and prednisone, along with a lot of other things, and not always in that order.  And while I can’t in good conscience recommend it, it did accomplish something important for me: I don’t have to wonder if my Science could be improved if I just tried harder or put in a few more hours.  It might make me a lot deader than I am now, but aside from that nothing would meaningfully improve, and I have the data to show myself.  So Merry F*cking Christmas, because whatever you’re getting from me is the very best I can do, and we’re all just gonna have to live with that whether we like it or not.

4.  What I am is separate from what I know and how I perform.  I’ll even go you one better: I believe that my carnate self is necessarily and inescapably an imperfect approximation of my truest self.  Yea verily I say unto thee that I am one of those poor sorry sonsabitches who actually believes all that crap.  And you know what?  I lean pretty hard on this belief every goddam day.  Ok Dr. Bozo, you think that my science is garbage.  Well DUH!  Of course it is, you dumbass.  It is merely one rotten brick within this great subcelestial City of Shit that we are collectively tasked to remake for a better purpose.  So shut your hole, pick up a shovel and help me out.

5.  I lost interest in the question, How good do people think I am?  I wondered and wondered but I never came up with a satisfying answer.  It was like trudging around one of Dante’s circles minus even the companionable presence of other wretched souls.  I eventually realized that endlessly interrogating my intellectual worth was akin to weighing myself three times a day, which I also used to do and which was an equally pointless exercise.  When I finally conceded to myself that, well, f*ck it — maybe I’m not as good as people say I am.  Maybe I’m not as good as I should be.  Maybe I’m just actually as good as I am – then a more interesting question presented itself: What now?  What now.

6.  I realized why I the hell I am doing Science anyway.  And you know what?  It turned out that I am not doing this to please the Academy.  I don’t covet the approval of people who will never respect a face like mine.  I’m not even doing this in the hope of recognition, though should fame come my way I will unctuously welcome it with greedy open arms.  I confess that when Science is fun it feels like I am doing it for me, but in reality that’s not true either.  I am doing this because I am too small and the world is too big, and so I need to be part of something that is bigger than I am.  I am doing this for the women in my family who told me that they wanted to be scientists but never had the chance.  I am doing it for my grandmother who couldn’t have imagined the luxury of thinking for a living.  And I am doing it for the women who will come after me.  Each day I will deal with a little more of this shit in the hopes that they will someday deal with a little less.  I will roar like a dangerous Pekinese at my male colleagues, laugh in their faces as they twist the knife, and then go back to my office and cry into my blistered hands.  I will postpone lunch, then dinner, then pissing, then the dentist because I need Science now.  I will pound on the door of one funding agency after another until something finally opens.  And I will always keep doing too many things.  I will want too much, say too much and go too far.  But I will not wonder whether I am as good as I appear to be.  Because I am far too distracted with the fond labor of making myself into what I want to be.  Because I know that I am good enough.  For that.

What separates those with a criminal record from the rest of the population?  According to lawyer Emily Baxter, not a whole lot.  Baxter’s new project “We Are All Criminals” examines the illegal activities committed by people without a criminal record.  In Minnesota, 1 out of 4 residents has a criminal record, but Baxter’s project, she says on her website, is about the 75% that “got away, and how very different their lives may have been had they been caught.”

By emphasizing the crimes of the unconvicted, Baxter blurs the lines between criminal and noncriminal and draws attention to the detrimental effects that a criminal record has on the lives of those who are convicted.  Many of the undocumented and unpunished transgressions confessed through her project were committed when the perpetrators were juveniles, many of whom are now lawyers, doctors, and professionals.

Executive director of the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis Michael Friedman is intrigued by the project, saying:

“I don’t think I’ve come across anybody who has not committed crimes as a juvenile,” Friedman said. “Allowing society to use juvenile criminal records as a marker for someone’s potential success, or risk for employment or opportunity, is not scientific. It’s dangerous and discriminatory.”

The most intriguing part of her project lies in its look at society as a whole.  Imagine if we had all been prosecuted for every crime we committed, even as a juvenile.  What would the crime rate look like then?

The author, Kat Albrecht, is an editorial assistant for The Society Pages. She is currently an undergraduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota. The artist, Emily Baxter, is the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the Council on Crime and Justice.  Cross-posted at Citings and Sightings.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

“The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students,” writes Eduardo Porter for the New York Times.  This is because a large percentage of funding for public education comes not from the federal government, but from the property taxes collected in each school district.  Rich kids, then, get more lavish educations.

This means differences in how much we spend per student both across and within states.  New York, for example, spends about $19,000 per student.  In Tennessee they spend $8,200 and in Utah $5,321.  Money within New York, is also unequally distributed: $25,505 was spent per student in the richest neighborhoods, compared to $12,861 in the poorest.

This makes us one of the three countries in the OECD — with Israel and Turkey — in which the student/teacher ratio is less favorable in poor neighborhoods compared to rich ones.  The other 31 nations in the survey invest equally in each student or disproportionately in poor students.  This is not meritocracy and it is certainly not equal opportunity.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

“Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

Words of wisdom from William Zinser. And so true. The very idea that we might have something to say in a story is an expression of ego.

Creativity emerges from the “I”. A story is a unique expression of who we are and what we have experienced.

So don’t run away from that dynamic. Rather embrace. Use it to sustain you from FADE IN to FADE OUT. As Zinser says, “Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

A good reason to remember…

Writing is an act of ego.

I encourage you to head to comments to discuss today’s questions. And for a related discussion on The Black Board, check out these topics:

• The Dunning-Kruger vs Imposter Syndrome divide
• Even William Blake needed a little prompting
• How do you get past waiting for permission?

The Quest” has entered Week 22! And so did Go On Your Own Quest, an opportunity for anyone to follow the structure of “The Quest” to dig into screenwriting theory [Core - 8 weeks], figure out your story [Prep - 6 weeks], and write a first draft [Pages - 10 weeks]. It’s a 24-week immersion in the screenwriting process and you can do it here – for free!

Today and every Monday through Friday for 10 weeks, I’ll use this slot to post something inspirational as GOYOQ participants pound out their first drafts.

Why not use the structure of this 24-week workshop to Go On Your Own Quest? That was an idea that gathered energy among many members of the GITS community which I described here.

For more information on Go On Your Own Quest, go here.

Plus you can join The Black Board, the Official Online Writing Community of the Black List and Go Into The Story, another free resource to help keep you inspired and on target at you Go On Your Own Quest from FADE IN to FADE OUT on the first draft of your original screenplay.

The labor movement has a lot of challenges forced upon it by economic conditions. Rigid, entrenched leadership is one that it's brought upon itself.

That's what appears to be the case with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which will have to re-run its elections after the Department of Labor found it guilty of failing to adequately notify members that nominations for leadership positions were underway earlier this year. It's very rare for the Labor Department to have to intervene in elections; the IAM is the only re-run for top officers in 2012. This wasn't an aberration for the IAM, though: The last time someone got enough nominations from local chapters to land a spot on the general election ballot was 1961.

And this time, the Grand Lodge — also known as the "International," since it represents workers in Canada as well — has finally drawn some serious challengers.

Jay Cronk, who had been a staff member at the International headquarters for 21 years — he was fired a week after announcing his run — is heading up a slate calling itself IAM Reform, with a platform of a shrunken and more responsive Grand Lodge. Karen Asuncion, a 30-year United Airlines employee who works as a ramp service worker at Reagan National Airport and who filed the election complaint that prompted the investigation, is running for one of the union's nine vice president spots; they say they'll have a full slate by the time nominations are due at the end of January.

"We proudly promote ourselves as the most democratic union in America," Cronk says in his campaign video. "When in reality, it is a select few who have chosen to decide who leads the IAM, without benefit of membership input."

There's a lot at stake. The Machinists' U.S. membership has declined precipitously in recent years, and the race carries overtones of the central challenge facing the labor movement: How can you bring more people under the umbrella, while maintaining legacy benefits for those that remain?

——

Thomas Buffenbarger, who's worked at IAM headquarters since 1986 and been the international president since 1997, came into office at a much better time for the union. In June 1998, it was coming off its 20th month of membership growth, driven by a burgeoning airline industry and recruitment of women and more educated workers. Buffenbarger, the youngest president in the then-110-year-old union's history, put money into field staff and building alliances with labor groups overseas.

But then came 9/11 and the airline retrenchment that followed, cutbacks in defense spending, and the contracting out of airline services like baggage handlers and ground controllers (the "fissuring" thing). IAM spokesman Rick Sloan ticks off some of the triumphs the union has had in spite of those headwinds: Signing up workers on military bases in the mid-2000s, organizing the lobstermen in Maine, and adding 4,600 US Airways employees last July, for example. They also merged with the 48,000-strong Transportation Communications Union in 2004, which will show up in next year's membership numbers. But it hasn't been enough.

"When you lose those kinds of numbers, it's really hard to come and find organizing victories," Sloan said in an interview. "There have been lots along the way, but not at the kinds of numbers that we had before those four hits."

Sloan has nothing but disdain for the challengers.

"Anybody can say any damn fool thing, and anybody can purchase a Godaddy.com Web site for about 9 bucks a month and put anything they want onto it, but that doesn't translate into effective communications with the membership," he says. "If your strategy is to trash your own organization, not many are going to look to you for leadership."

The IAM has given them lots of fodder, though. Despite declining revenue, the Grand Lodge hasn't cut back on expenses, like a Learjet that costs $1 million a year to maintain. Instead, it's added executive positions and paid them more, topping out at $304,114 for Buffenbarger, according to filings with the Department of Labor:

Sloan points out that salaries and perks are approved by the membership at each convention, but Cronk says that the gatherings are referred to even at headquarters as a "controlled democracy," since local unions can often only afford to send their district representatives, whose salaries are funded in part by the International.

Meanwhile, the union has also been investing more in lobbying, working alongside the defense industry to avert spending cuts, and mostly holding the line on elections spending:

That's created something of a rift with the rank and file, which don't hear from the International all that much.

"The Grand Lodge, really as far as the local, is so far removed that we have no contact with them," says Darlene Williams, vice president of Chicago's Local 1487. "I think they should be more visible, more accessible."

"There's a pretty huge disparity between what I make and what some of these officers make at the Grand Lodge," says a local president who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution. "It's almost like they're corporate executives and we're paying their salaries."

The tensions came to a head last month over contract negotiations at Boeing, when a committee composed of delegates from the local and the International presented the union with a proposal that would have cut deeply into pensions and slowed salary growth for new hires. Boeing wanted the concessions in exchange for an assurance that it would make its new 777x model at its plants in Washington state, but the local membership voted it down by a 2 to 1 margin, and blasted the International for not getting something better. Buffenbarger defended the offer, saying it was the best Boeing could do in a newly competitive world.

“This was an opportunity to secure some work,” Buffenbarger told the Seattle Times. “It was unusual. It was a gamble.”

Airline analyst Richard Aboulafia says that's a fundamental misunderstanding of Boeing's situation, which suggests that even if the company was truly intransigent, Buffenbarger might not have wanted to sympathize quite so much. "The idea that this was the best Boeing could give, and that Boeing could easily move out of the state at a flip of a switch, that's complete nonsense," he said. "There's also a strong advantage to designing and building in the same place, which means you're not going to throw a Hail Mary here and say 'we're moving to South Carolina!' "

——

Even if the IAM Reform slate makes it to a vote, there's no guarantee they'll be any more successful in gaining back membership than the entrenched incumbents. Organizing airline and transportation workers is inherently more difficult than janitors and healthcare aides, for example, who are concentrated in cities; the IAMAW's membership is more spread out in different suburbs. The reform ticket's main proposal to grow membership is to overhaul the dues structure so it's cheaper for workers with lower salaries to join — especially considering the growing workforce of contractors who are paid less than the union members they replaced.

"If you're trying to organize a new group, it's usually a low-paid group, and how are you going to tell them they have to pay $70 a month, and they don't know what for?" Asuncion said in an interview. "It's the dues structure that's killing us."

That may help some, on the margins, and real organizing gains among contract work forces would send a message that airlines can't simply cut costs by outsourcing union jobs. But regardless of the IAM leadership's substantive performance, it may have shortened its lifespan by — as Cronk and Asuncion allege — going too far to maintain control. It's easier these days, Asuncion points out, to run a nationwide campaign on a shoestring budget through email and social media and make people aware of what's going on.

"It's so different," she says. "If this were 50 years ago, we'd have no chance in hell."

“Everyone has their price.”

That’s the prevailing economic theory, especially in Startuplandia.

That’s something I hear pretty often, an unsubtle jab — hey, you’re a person, therefore you are part of ‘everyone’, get it??

When I say I’m not at all interested in selling, they assume I’m being coy. Oh, they say. The numbers just aren’t high enough. Maybe your number is a ridiculous number. But you still have a price.

But they’re wrong. Not everyone has a price. Nor should they.

I normally leave it there, but I realized: How often is this discussed? Just this side of never. So instead of letting it pass by this time, as always, I decided to write out my thinking.

Yep, most sentences in this post start with “I” — because it’s about me. But maybe you’ll find it applies to you, too.

(And yes, this essay is long… it takes a lot of different angles to fully explore a topic people pretty much never talk about. But it’s easy to read, I promise.)

Yes, I would sell my product.

My product has a price, yes.

There is a number where I would sell Freckle, yes — but to represent my opportunity cost, what I would lose, it would be so high that it would never be offered to me. I might sell it for $10 million, but at half a mil a year in current revenue, who would offer that to me? No rational actor. (Whether businesses are rational actors is neither here nor there; an irrational actor wouldn’t, either.)

Thoreau wrote, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” Add in what you lose, the future life you would spend on it, or replacing it, and you have opportunity cost.

A purchase price has to do a lot:

• ensure everybody is taken care of
• compensate for the loss of nearly guaranteed yearly revenue
• compensate for the loss of the precious feeling of momentum
• compensate for risk to reputation after acquisition
• “hurt” the acquirer enough that they intend to keep the app, vs screw over the customers
• hire money managers (which btw is a fucking pain)
• pay taxes

It has to pay enough to be worth giving up something I spent 5 years of my life on. To disrupt my groove.

And it has to be insurance against us never being able to create the same kind of success again. To be fair, I’ve launched product after product with good success — books, workshops, etc. We’ve done it with software, too — and it grew just fine, thank you, and then it turned out we hated running an infrastructure product and we shut it down.

So, to start over? From scratch? To be a newb again? Well. Been there, done that. Don’t feel the need to do it again.

$10 million would be enough to cover all that.

But it’s not my number.

But not even for $10 million, or more, would I ever go along as an acquihire. My product may have a price, but I do not have a price.

Here’s why:

• Most weeks I work less than 20 hours/week.
• We can live anywhere.
• We take tons of vacation.
• My work life can be as easy or as challenging as I choose to make it.
• With very few exceptions (administrative stuff, mainly), I get to choose exactly what to work on, too.
• As the boss, I get to pick every single person I work with. (Firing blows beyond description, but that’s my prerogative.)
• Finally — and this is no small matter, but this is the order in which it matters — we have all the money we need to do what we want.

Why would I trade in such a sweet setup for… what?

The fantasy that, after I bust my hump for somebody else for a few years, I could… what… not work?

No thanks. I already can be “mini-retired” if I want. And, bee tee dubs…

Money doesn’t make people happy.

I don’t need to be rich… er. (By most accounts, we already are quite wealthy.)

I grew up middle class, with some extreme — and cripplingly stressful — swings of poor fortune… but by several interesting quirks of fate, I’ve known a bizarre amount of honest-to-god rich people over my life.

Of the folks who were executives, or other high-paying professions: Mostly they were more constrained, and less happy, than we are today. Even though they had more, and made more, than we do. Money has a way of trapping you. A treadmill’s a treadmill, even if you Bedazzle it in real jewels.

Of the “startup people”: I got in on the Rails rocket so early that I’ve had an insider’s view into many now-huge startups, founders and early stage employees.

Some of them are happy; usually they’re the ones who maintained control of their own businesses. And they’re the ones who aren’t total workaholics. The rest, well, they’re usually different stripes of miserable.

Even the happy ones work way more than I want to work, ever again. And the unhappy ones, well, so many are always chasing the next high.

They always want more.

Don’t I want more?

Sure, I’d like more money. But that’s just icing. We have — I have — more than enough.

That’s a word we don’t hear enough in the startup world: Enough. Enough money. Enough impact. Enough recognition. Enough self-respect.

Simply… enough.

And that’s such a critical concept, because…

Money never comes without consequences.

There’s another word we don’t hear enough of: Consequences.

@StartupLJackson thinks I have a price:

@amyhoy I will give you $1bn for your company. You spend 2yrs working on the product, for me. You hire 5 ppl & all get 2x crnt salary. Deal?

— Startup L. Jackson (@StartupLJackson) December 8, 2013

Obviously it’s a thought experiment, with a ludicrous number. And I sincerely thought about it. And the answer would be “No.”

First of all, above a certain amount, extra money becomes meaningless. That amount is not super high, either. So really, a $1b offer — to me — is equivalent to like, a $20m offer. Maybe even less.

Secondly, I wouldn’t be an employee again for $250k. Or for $500k. Or $750k. Yeah, that’s rich — in money, and in gall. So be it. I’ve tried to stuff an emotional hole with money before, and you know what? It didn’t work.

Is employment so bad? For me, it is. I suck at “buying in.” I suck at playing nice-nice. I have to fake it. And I suck at faking it.

The idea of putting on a face — for someone else’s agenda — makes me deeply want to hurl.

I can’t even bear to talk shop with people I disrespect… for a potentially large upside.

Is that super precious and delicate? Maybe. I don’t care. Riding roughshod over my own needs would violate the most ethical sense that I have: I would not ask anyone I love to do something so against their will for money, so I would never ask myself to do it, either.

Giving is not “set it and forget it”

Next, I thought seriously about the actual face value of the money: $1 billion. It’s incomprehensible.

The only thing to do would be to give it all away, to keep a tiny rounding error.

What I’ve learned from experience, and observation, is this:

• Simply throwing money at problems rarely helps and often hurts, and
• the best way to make a difference is to pick a few small things and do them.

And frankly, I don’t have the energy or the inclination to be a full-time philanthropist.

So, to steward that kind of money, I’d have to hire somebody. Somebodies, really — a bevy of managers and minders. But oh, that kind of money badly applied could cause a lot of damage. Which means that those somebodies would have to be overseen… by who? More managers? But then how could I trust them?

No. If you have a heart and a conscience, that kind of money makes you its bitch.

I’d rather not have it to start with.

Maybe it’s selfish of me (to… not want a lot of money?) but there you go.

Also:

Fame is awful.

One of the many things I love about the Indy Hall community, and Philadelphia in general, is that they don’t think I’m special for doing what I do, and I agree.

Because… you know what sucks? Walking through an industry event, and instead of being able to simply meet people, hearing them whisper in your wake, “That’s Insert Your Name Here!”

This happened to me repeatedly at the last RailsConf I attended. And, because I suck at faking it (see above), I turned around and said, variously, “Excuse me? I can hear you,” and “I’m a person.”

Then there were the people who didn’t whisper behind my back, the people who wanted to interact with their preconception of who I was. These people struggled to work up the nerve to talk to me. They were nervous. Because of me! Me who dresses like a slob, overuses the word “fellating” in random conversation, who trips on the sidewalk, who takes too many cat photos, who is addicted to chairs.

They felt they needed to be special, different, because I was special and different. They wanted to get something from me — my blessing, or even just my attention.

It was exhausting.

This is why celebrities hide in the green rooms of the world.

And big acquisition dollars are awfully hard to keep under your hat. So… fuck that.

Ummm… passion and a great team?

I’ve got all the passion I need and a pretty great team already, thanks.

No, really, you could work with world’s best at … !

What would that get me, really? Bragging rights? An education? A partner who is my equal, or better?

Me, I learn from books, and my friends (internet and real world), and observation; and I have partners who are my equal, or better, already. Not all of them even know they’re my partners, but they’re challenging and guiding me nonetheless.

Or maybe it’s about…

Um… Impact! HUGE IMPACT!

A friend once told me how much contempt she had for those people who stroll so purposefully down the jetway, with their roll-along luggage, conveying with their very hip swings that Things Can Get On Now, I Am Here, Look At Me.

While I thought her point was a little silly, I know exactly what she means:

I’ve done some important-sounding things in my life, and the entire time, I and everyone involved were all dressed up in our mental Serious Business Suits. Everything was so momentous. The power-walking. The debating. The bikeshedding.

In the end, did any of it matter? Did it make the world appreciably better? Did it endure? No; that’s why I wrote “important-sounding.” With startups. And senators. And famous charities. And stuff!

We acted as if it mattered a lot. It didn’t, though.

I’m over it.

Call me cynical — you wouldn’t be the first — but I see a lot of greed in the word, and the idea, of “impact.”

Absolutely, some people do create a huge impact. It takes great endurance, and you have to constantly navigate in an ocean of shit. I know people who fall into this category, and I admire them, but like hell could (would I) ever be them.

Even if I had the temperament and the inclination, very few people in this world can make an outsized, larger-than-life impact. That’s simple physics at work; not everyone can be “The Great Man.” It’s not just what you do, or what you say, but the magical alchemy that comes when the world pays attention. You can’t force that.

But everyone can help the people around them in small ways.

What I’ve seen, over & over, is that the more a person strives to create some kind of huge, special legacy, the less they will actually achieve.

So I focus on the small stuff I can actually complete. I donate, I write, I teach, I encourage a few people at a time. And that works:

• 4 other people depend on our business for their main source of income.
• I ensure their career is as rewarding, fun & flexible as possible.
• I help my customers run better, more profitable, more sane businesses.
• I teach my students how to achieve the same for themselves.
• For all of the above… Their health benefits. Their families benefit. Their local economies benefit.

That’s what I do. (Plus donating to proven charities staffed with people who have the passion, the energy, and the know-how, who simply need the money.)

So, what really gets me?

What persuades me to do what I do?

Spending time with my loved ones. Helping people. Work I enjoy. Enough money to make life pleasant.

In that order.

These were not always my priorities; for a long time, in fact, my priorities were very “startup traditional.”

But time, experience, reflection, and a life-disrupting illness has taught me what is really important. (There’s nothing quite like believing your life is over to show you how much of it had been bullshit.)

So, yes. I’d sell Freckle alone for above a certain dollar amount. No, I would not go with it.

Given a ludicrous offer, I would back away because I’d be more concerned than excited.

Is it easy to say this about an imaginary offer? Yeah, totally. But I feel confident writing this down, because this is the way I have acted for years. There are so many “amazing opportunities” that I’ve already said no to, or that I gave up, or that I let go, because of these principles.

And every time, life got better.

me when i am mildly inconvenienced: thIS IS THE WORST THING THAT'S EVER HAPPENED TO ME
me when i am legitimately hurt/distressed: no no it's fine i've had worse

We often have to work on code that doesn’t have good test coverage. This creates a number of problems. The first problem is that if you don’t have good test coverage, it’s hard to know whether your code changes will break other parts of the application, so you need to have a strategy for handling regressions.

The second problem is even more troublesome. Generally, code that doesn’t have good test coverage is also badly designed. One of the big benefits of test driving your code is that it moves you towards a range of good practices. Most of the time, when you test drive code you’ll write your code “outside in” - focusing on the interface that the test needs to validate before thinking about the implementation you’ll need to deliver. It also makes it more likely that you’ll create classes with a narrow responsibilities that are loosely coupled, as the excessive setup required for testing tightly coupled code will quickly move you towards reducing your coupling. So if you’re working with code that doesn’t have good test coverage, most of the time it will be harder to write tests for and more tightly coupled than test driven code.

Finally, because of the the first two issues, the chances are that when changes have been made to the project in the past, developers will have made the smallest possible changes consistent with getting their new feature working rather than refactoring and cleaning up the code every time they touched it. Because of this it’s likely to have a high degree of technical debt, making it even harder to work with.

Moving forward step-by-step

When confronted with code that doesn’t have good test coverage, it’s important not to try to “boil the ocean” with unit tests. It never makes sense to take a couple of weeks (or months) to try to get the code coverage up across the entire app. So, what is the answer? When you need to work with a big ball of mud, where should you start?

A good starting point is to take some time with the product owner/business analyst/business stakeholder to really clarify the key user journeys. Ask, “what are the most important things that your key audiences need to be able to do through the app?” Then create a handful of concrete scenarios for each user journey and write automated acceptance tests for them. For a web app you’d probably use a tool like Cucumber, RSpec and Capybara or Selenium to create these “smoke tests”. They don’t guarantee that your app is working correctly, but they should catch most of the large, systematic problems.

Next, test drive all of new code. That way you have confidence in the new functionality that you are adding to the system. If necessary, you might need to write a thin anti-corruption layer to provide a clean interface to code against for integration level testing.

Finally, whenever you find a bug, start by writing a failing test at an appropriate level (ideally a unit test). Then confirm that once the bug is fixed, the test passes.

If you’re working with a team that is not used to test driving code, take the time to make sure that they’re able to run the test suite locally and pair with them to get them used to test driving new functionality. Also make sure to set up continuous integration to your version control system so you’ll quickly get notified if any of the tests break.

Working with legacy code with limited test coverage is hard, but by following the ideas above it should be easier to get to grips with the code base. And over time, you’ll notice that the test coverage in the areas you care about - where you make most of your changes - will start to become reasonable. Usually within 6-12 months you end up with pretty good coverage in the parts of the app that really matter.

Peter Bell is Founder and CTO of Speak Geek, a contract member of the GitHub training team, and trains and consults regularly on everything from JavaScript and Ruby development to devOps and NoSQL data stores.

Bob Herbert on Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013) | Jacobin:

"Unlike King, Mandela accepted violence as an essential tool in the struggle. He led the armed wing of the African National Congress, explaining: “Our mandate was to wage acts of violence against the state… Our intention was to begin with what was least violent to individuals but most damaging to the state.” Ronald Reagan denounced him as a terrorist and Dick Cheney opposed his release from prison."

American men’s hidden crisis: They need more friends!:

:c “But, at about age 15 to 16 — right at the same age that the suicide rate of boys increases to four times the rate of girls — boys start reporting that they don’t have friends and don’t need them.”

I was talking to my brother about women’s attitudes towards their bodies, especially regarding weight/fat, and when he said “most guys don’t notice/care about that kind of thing,” I tried to explain why it was a lot more complicated than that. I ended up telling this story.

Body image is something that’s so hard to talk about, and it’s hard to express body positivity without sounding cheesy, false, or overly simplistic. But I’m gonna try. This is only my own experience, and it didn’t magically cure me of all my body image issues - but it was a major turning point for me nonetheless.

Elizabeth Warren says she will serve out her term, i.e. will not run for President in 2016.

On January 1st, 2009, we billed the very first customers for our brand new app, Freckle Time Tracking. That day, we grossed $288. The first month, $1,500.

On Dec 1, 2008, we launched to the world.

A few weeks prior, we started teasing posts on our blogs, and put up a squeeze page with a mailing list signup.

For the previous 3 months, we’d been building — one, sometimes two, days a week.

I had wireframed the most critical, core interactions on paper, one hungover day in late June, 5 months before.

The previous February, in a moment of clarity, I finally resolved to fucking finally create a product business, and kick consulting the curb.

In 2004, I decided that software as a service was the key to the business I wanted, after seeing what Basecamp was doing for 37signals.

In 1998, when I was 14, I came to the conclusion that my ideal career would be to found and sell a bunch of companies in a row, because I loved starting projects and hustling and making money.

Back to the present…

Three days ago, Freckle turned 5 years old.

It’s been a twisty, long-ass road, my friends.

That first year, Freckle grossed $27,334. Really kind of pathetic. It earned so little, we struggled to focus on it. We had to fill in the gaps with consulting and ebooks and workshops, a la Be Your Own Angel.

This year, Freckle will cross $1,000,000 in lifetime gross revenue. (In 10 days, we project!) In November, we beat our best month ever by 11.1%. Six people rely on our business for their main source of income.

On the one hand: I can hardly fucking believe it. On the other hand, it seems inevitable, unsurprising, even boring. Maybe I’ll hit up the liquor store later for some champagne because, weirdly, we forgot to celebrate.

So what should I write about it?

For weeks, I’ve been asking myself that question. Five years! A 5th birthday. At my & Thomas’s wedding, in September 2008, our friend Patrick wished for us to “Have many beautiful brain babies.” Well, Freckle isn’t our first brain baby — but if it was a real baby, it’d be going to kindergarten now.

That’s crazy. Crazy.

How on earth could I distill all the crap I’ve learned — good crap, bad crap, surprising crap, boring crap — into one little post? It defies possibility. (Not least because I’m famously long-winded.)

Well, in my writer’s block I asked for help — and my friend Nick offered me a guiding question:

What’s the most important thing you wish your readers would understand?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is: You need to create something people actually want, by focusing on customers who pay for value, and understanding them, and serving them. But derrrrp, I write about that all the time.

And, in fact, that — these steps — are actually sub-parts of what really matters the most of all:

• The willingness to do “the same thing” for years.
• The investment mindset.
• The maturity to avoid the twisted and self-punishing satisfaction of the adrenaline rollercoaster.
• Learning, and remembering, that it’s not about you.

The will to let go of your fantasized Entrepreneur as Hero! movie, to ditch the 4-act dramatic structure, and let the reality of your experiences unfold as they will, and take them as they come.

These are the absolute rarest ingredients of success.

Because they’re the opposite of what the tech industry tells us.

The more you soak in the tech industry, the more you’re absorbing the idea that novelty, thrills, tough problems are what make life worthwhile.

When I was that 14-year-old, dreaming of a string of businesses started then sold… well, that said a lot about me. I loved to start new projects all the time. I rarely finished anything. The thrill was in the start… and in the fantasizing. The newer, the harder, the better.

Later, I had many new clients each year; and after that, I took and then quit 3 jobs in less than 27 months.

I was a hummingbird, and the world was a sea of incredible flowers. Flit flit flit.

But flower-hopping won’t reliably get you to $1,000,000 in lifetime revenue.

Building a real business takes endurance. And when I say “endurance,” don’t you conjure up that tired & busted caricature of Entrepreneur As Ironman. Don’t you believe it.

Stress and overwork are the Farmville model of building a business. Endurance isn’t about working extra hard, or extra long, it’s about incremental progress.

When people write dramatically about the struggles of starting up, they get it all wrong. The most deadly struggles aren’t external — the things that are hardest are not “the market” or “the money” or “the tech” or “the infrastructure.” Nope.

The real struggle, and the real reward, is internal:

• the struggle against emotions and beliefs that will cripple and sabotage you
• the struggle to separate overwork from results, and stress from importance
• the struggle to repeatedly turn the focus to your customer, and not yourself

When you do the math on our lifetime $1,000,000 mark — well, looking backwards, our yearly average revenue is nearly 8 times that first year’s sad little take. That’s the power of compound growth.

That’s the reward of making mistakes, but learning from them, and coming back to the boring, important stuff.

Yeah, we took our simple little software for granted. Yeah, we distracted ourselves with more “fun” projects, a second, more “ambitious” SaaS. Yeah, we tried to make things artificially hard so we could feel that sense of accomplishment. Yeah, we thought we wanted to grow fast, and we planned for it and made decisions to support it, only to get there and realize we hated it.

So we stopped distracting ourselves. We shut down the other app. We brought our attention back to what mattered, and what made us, and our customers, happy.

We remembered that things could be so good without being hard. That it’s about our customers, the impact we can help them create, the way we can support and spend time with the people we care about.

How did we ever forget?

It’s the boring stuff, the daily stuff, that makes it all worthwhile

I agree wholeheartedly with with Steve Jobs on this point:

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

On the surface, this stuff looks and sounds boring — Drudgery? Repetition? But it’s not. It’s really, really not.

Getting to watch the business grow, and make happy customers, to know that you shaped it, you gave it life, you made something that helps people, and that means you can live a comfortable life, provide for and spend time with your family, create jobs for likeminded people… that’s a bigger reward than any momentary thrill of the Tech Du Jour.

The business itself, the relationships with its customers, becomes something you love, and want to protect, to see continue.

In the years since we launched, Freckle has touched and helped people all over the world, from huge NGOs to itty bitty freelancers to Belgian construction companies to the dev & design shops I designed it for. We help make their work lives a little less stressful, and a little more profitable. If you multiply those “little” improvements by the thousands of people who use Freckle, it really adds up.

Freckle has given us, and the people who depend on us, financial comfort and peace of mind.

We don’t win awards. We don’t get on “30 under 30″ lists. Nobody “important” cares about us, or our “little” app. And that’s just how we like it. We’ve got no obligation to anyone but our customers and our consciences.

When you’re in it for the long haul, you’ll find that prestige is empty. All the notoriety in the world matters less than one happy customer email in your inbox.

And, when you do it right, nearly every business problem is a chance to not only become a better business owner, but also a better person.

Happy Birthday, baby.

Like what you see? Well, maybe with a lil more pep and sparkle-stabbing narwhals? Follow me on Twitter.

PS — If you want specific steps & tactics…

If you’re ready to find joy in the “boring” stuff, and make this for yourself, I’ve spent the last 3 years developing an action-packed class to help you make and ship your first paying product.

And then there will be a book!! And then there will be another comic! And another book! Truth be told, I’m a little jealous of creators who’ve had their webcomics going for years and years, indefinitely, and never have to say goodbye - but at the same time, I don’t think that kind of format would really serve NIMONA, since there’s only like 3 characters, and I’m looking forward to trying something new with a new story and new characters. It’ll be nice in the long run to have a definite end for my first story.

…not that that means that I have to let go as soon as the comic ends, though. I’m still planning on doing some short NIMONA ministories once I have the time. I’ve halfway convinced myself that I’m going to draw the Gay-Dads-Adopt-a-Baby AU as soon as I’ve finished the main comic…

Johanna does not have time for this Hunger Games nonsense

she’s just one of those contestants who is constantly having her mouth, hands, and other parts blurred out on television.

sandetiger:

mygorgeousbeasty:

equinellie:

unhappyhorses:

I hear a lot of equestrians who are suspicious of training away aggressive behavior with positive reinforcement, because they believe you’ll just reward the aggression and make it worse. This is one example of why that isn’t the case.

Here’s a video of an aggressive jack russell terrier being trained with counter conditioning.

This dog reacts aggressively to having his face blown on. Without even waiting for desirable behavior and rewarding that, the trainer pairs blowing on his face with treating him. Aggression begins to dwindle almost immediately, and by the end of the video (a few days of work), his reaction is 100% transformed.

Remember that you can’t reinforce fear, no matter how much you reward it.

i really like this! definitely worth a watch guys.

I don’t get it so much, cause your rewarding him for being bad, that’s what it seems to me….
How does it work?

Hi! I don’t think anyone responded to you, so I can answer that :3

What’s actually happening, is:

• Dog begins by getting aggressive when people blow on his face
• Trainer treats the dog whenever she blows on his face
• Dog is food-motivated, and enjoys getting the treats
• Dog comes to associate getting his face blowed on with getting treats
• Blowing on his face becomes a nice experience for the dog because he knows he’s getting a goody afterward
• Dog gradually becomes less aggressive (you see this at the end of the video c: )

A similar concept might be deworming horses — the dewormer tastes weird for many horses, and they generally don’t like having the tube stuck in their mouth. My boss found a solution for that, though, and dipped the wormer tubes in molasses and then rolled it in brown sugar, and now all the horses that she raised practically dive for the wormer tube, whereas a lot of the older horses that she’s bought or that are being boarded, raise their head and twist their neck to evade the unpleasant experience.

Also, it bears saying that aggression is normal, and it’s not “bad” — it’s just a natural behavior that you just don’t want him to exhibit when this particular , and it’s always better to teach an animal an alternative rather than a strict “NO.” That’s really important, and a really good example of why is, for example, horses that have a lot of go. Especially if you’re group riding on a trail with slower horses and you don’t want to leave them behind, they start to get antsy when you keep telling them “No” “No” “No” “No.” When I was younger I had a mare rear up on me because of that, and I’ve found that it’s better to give them alternative behaviors: doing lateral movements, changing stride length within the gait, working on walk/go transitions, etc.

Hopefully that makes sense.

sofriel:

I dunno I like to think of myself as bilingual

One does not simply sail into the Pacific Garbage Patch and clean it up like convicts on the interstate. For one thing, those pieces of plastic are much smaller than you're imagining. For another, when the plastic is that small, any attempt at filtering inevitably sucks up tiny sea life, as well.

Phil writes, "Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project is doing a fantastic job of reporting on-site from Ibrahim v. DHS, the first legal challenge of United States government's no-fly list that has ever seen a courtroom. On the first day of trial, the judge learned that the plaintiff's daughter, scheduled to testify, was delayed because she had been denied boarding of her flight because she was put a Department of Homeland Security no-fly list. DHS staff deny this. The government's lawyers told the judge that the daughter is lying. The airline provided documentation of the DHS no-fly order. The subject matter of this trial is intense---restriction of movement based on blacklists---but there's no sign of an end to the jaw-dropping entertainment."

“None of that was true,” Ms. Pipkin told the court this morning. “She didn’t miss the flight. She was there in time to check in. She has not been rebooked on another flight.” And most importantly, it was because of actions by the DHS — one of the defendants in Dr. Ibrahim’s lawsuit — that Ms. Mustafa Kamal, was not allowed to board her flight to SFO to attend and testify at her mother’s trial.

Ms. Pipkin said that Ms. Mustafa Kamal had sent her a copy of the “no-board” instructions which the DHS gave to Malaysia Airlines, and which the airline gave to Ms. Mustafa Kamal to explain as much as it knew about why it was not being allowed to transport her. Ms. Pipkin handed Judge William Alsup a copy of the DHS “no-board” instructions to Malaysia Airlines regarding Ms. Mustafa Kamal.

Major props to Malaysia Airlines for providing a copy of the DHS instructions to Ms. Mustafa Kamal. Other airlines receiving similar instructions have acquiesced to DHS orders to keep the instructions from the DHS, and the reasons for the airlines’ actions, secret from the would-be travelers whose rights are affected. So far as we know, this is the first time an actual no-fly order has been disclosed to a would-be traveler or potentially to the public.

Archive of Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim posts (Thanks, Phil!)

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

Well, after Sarah Palin, another scholar of Catholicism has weighed in on Pope Francis. Rush Limbaugh has a truly gold-star hathos alert in a recent diatribe, brilliantly titled:

It’s Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It’s a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)

Does it get more awesomely hathetic than that?

In some ways, of course, Limbaugh is onto something. The Pope of the Catholic Church really is offering a rebuttal to the Pope of the Republican party, which is what Limbaugh has largely become. In daily encyclicals, Rush is infallible in doctrine and not to be questioned in public. When he speaks on the airwaves, it is always ex cathedra. Callers can get an audience from him, but rarely a hearing. Dissent from his eternal doctrines means excommunication from the GOP and the designation of heretic. His is always the last word.

And in the Church of Limbaugh, market capitalism is an unqualified, eternal good. It is the ever-lasting truth about human beings. It is inextricable from any concept of human freedom. The fewer restrictions on it, the better. In that cocooned, infallible context, of course, Pope Francis is indeed a commie:

Listen to this.  This is an actual quote from what he wrote.  “The culture of prosperity deadens us.  We are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase.  In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle.  They fail to move us.”  I mean, that’s pretty profound.  That’s going way beyond matters that are ethical.  This is almost a statement about who should control financial markets.  He says that the global economy needs government control.  I’m telling you, I’m not Catholic, but I know enough to know that this would have been unthinkable for a pope to believe or say just a few years ago.

Really? Limbaugh specifically invokes the great anti-Communist Pope, John Paul II, as an alleged contrast with this leftist gobbledegook. So let us look at John Paul II’s discussion of capitalism and communism in his 1987 Encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis:

The tension between East and West is an opposition … between two concepts of the development of individuals and peoples, both concepts being imperfect and in need of radical correction … This is one of the reasons why the Church’s social doctrine adopts a critical attitude towards both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism.

My italics. The church has long opposed market capitalism as the core measure of human well-being. Aquinas even taught that interest-bearing loans were inherently unjust in the most influential theological document in church history. The fundamental reason is that market capitalism measures human life by a materialist rubric. And Jesus radically taught us to give up all our possessions, to renounce everything except our “daily bread”, to spend our lives serving the poverty-stricken takers rather than aspiring to be the wealthy and powerful makers. He told the Mark Zuckerberg of his day to give everything away to the poor, if he really wanted to be happy.

Limbaugh has obviously never read the Gospels. He has never read the parables. His ideology is so extreme it even trashes, because it does not begin to understand, the core principles of capitalism, as laid out by Adam Smith. Market capitalism is and always has been a regulated construction of government, not some kind of state of nature without it. Indeed without proper regulation to maintain a proper and fair and transparent market, it is doomed to terrible corruption, inefficiency, injustice, and abuse.

But let us return to Limbaugh’s hero, John Paul II, this time in Centesimus Annus, written in the wake of Soviet Communism’s demise:

The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution.

Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.

My italics again. Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?

Sorry, Rush, but if you think this critique of capitalism is something dreamed up by the current Pope alone, you know nothing about Catholicism, nothing about John Paul II, and nothing about Christianity. But I guess we knew that already, even though the ditto-heads still believe, like that particularly dim bulb Paul Ryan, that Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ are somehow compatible, when they are, in fact, diametrically opposed in every single respect.

Notice, however, as I noted yesterday, that the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing. I hesitate to think, for example, what Limbaugh would have made of Saint Francis, the Pope’s namesake. Francis, after all, spurned the inheritance of his father’s flourishing business to wash the bodies of lepers, sleep in ditches, refuse all money for labor, and use begging as the only morally acceptable form of receiving any money at all. In the Church of Limbaugh, there is no greater heretic than Saint Francis. Francis even believed in the sanctity of the natural world, regarding animals as reflecting the pied beauty of a mysterious divinity. Sarah Palin, in contrast, sees them solely as dinner.

Which gets to the deeper issue of materialism.

Nothing better demonstrates the antipathy of the current Republican right to Christianity – indeed its constant, relentless war on Christianity – than the following refreshingly candid confession of spiritual barrenness from Limbaugh:

I want to go back to this quote from the pope again, from his — there’s the name for the document.  I can’t think of it and I don’t have it in front of me.  “The culture of prosperity deadens us.  We are thrilled in the market offers us something new to purchase.  In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle.  They fail to move us.”  I’m not even sure what the connection there is.

We are thrilled if the market offers us something new to buy?  I guess there’s something wrong with that.  We’re not supposed to be thrilled if there’s something new to buy.  That’s how I interpret it.  Now, let me give you a fascinating stat I just learned today.  The iPhone 5S, which is the top-of-the-line iPhone, was announced way back in September, and has been in shortage ever since.

They have been unable to meet the demand, for whatever reason.  They have just recently caught up, and would you like to know how they did it?  They have put one million people on different assembly lines, 600 employees per assembly line at the factory in China at the one factory, where they are making 500,000 iPhones a day, and they still haven’t caught up to demand.

That’s a lot of people who are thrilled with something new to buy.

Er, yes, Rush. But the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all. And that’s a lot for Limbaugh to chew on. And if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction. There’s something almost poignant in Limbaugh’s inability even to understand that material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness. Something poignant because it reveals a profound ignorance of one of the West’s deepest cultural inheritances in Christianity.

Limbaugh’s only recourse when faced with actual Christianity is to conspiracy theories about translations of the Pope’s words. Perhaps it’s the commies who have perpetrated a massive lie through their control of the media. That was Sarah Palin’s response to, when confronted with, you know, Christianity for apparently the first time. But you sense that even Rush is beginning to realize there is something more to this, something that could be very destructive to his sealed, cocooned, materialist ideology of one. Hang on a minute, you almost hear him saying to himself …

Yes, Rush, hang on a minute. Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism. And it’s now coming – more plainly and unmistakably in our lifetimes – to a church near you.

(Painting: “Christ and the Rich Young Man” by Heinrich Hofmann.)

Rush accuses Pope Francis of preaching "pure marxism."

AUSGEZEICHNET!!!!

These two German nerds dressed up in Victorian TNG cosplay for the Star Trek movie. I’m not totally sure why - I read German (poorly) and the post explains that they went to the sneak preview, talks a little bit about her hair and that’s kind of it. No mention of “this is why we are in old-timey dresses.”

BUT DOES IT MATTER? IT’S SO GOOD.

Thank you Amy W. for the heads up!

For the second half of the 1990s, my standard advice to people buying computers was to max out the RAM as the cheapest, best way to improve their computers' efficiency. The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks. Operating systems, though, were still being designed for RAM-starved computers, and when you dropped a gig or two of RAM in a machine, it screamed.

It's still good practice to max out your RAM, but it doesn't get you much of a dividend. The turbo-charger of the 2010s is solid-state disk-drives, and they're screaming up the same price/performance curve that RAM traversed twenty years ago. Two years ago, I traded my laptop drive for a 400GB SDD, spending as much on the drive as I had on the machine, and it was worth every penny. My laptop battery-life nearly doubled, and I stopped getting watch-cursors altogether; no matter what task I performed, it was done instantly.

In October, I bought a one terabyte SDD for a ridiculous $435 -- about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! -- and having run it for two months now, I'm prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn't familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine -- a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 -- chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I'm rough on my computer, and it's taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive.

To accompany the new drive, I bought a pair of $78 Toshiba USB3 1TB drives (one for backing up at the office, the other for my travel bag). They're nothing near as fast as the SDD, but combined with the USB3 bus, they're plenty quick for daily incremental backups, which take less than five minutes.

If your storage needs aren't as massy as mine, there's a whole line of Crucial SDDs, 480GB for $269, 240GB for $140 and so on. They all come with three year warranties, though I haven't had cause to get service for my drive yet (knock wood). The drive is 7mm high, and comes with an easy-to-fit adapter for 9mm enclosures.

I was less impressed with the adapter I bought to copy the files over; it was fiddly and prone to losing its connection. Ultimately, I slapped the new drive into a case in order to make the transfer.

Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1

Hi everybody.

You have all sent so many kind messages asking if I'm all right, I figure the least I can do is say something. For the past two months, I have been very, very depressed. I keep hoping it will break, and it hasn't. I am talking to my doctor about adjusting my medication, but these things take time. My depression is treatment-resistant and I have struggled with it for over ten years. It never really goes away, but it is rarely as bad as this. We are having money problems, which is I think what has set this off. I am sorry I've been gone. I love running this blog, and I miss all of you. Boggle is the first thing I want to get back to when this weight lifts.

I guess this is sort of the trade-off you get for following a blog about mental illness from somebody who actually suffers from mental illness; I'm not always well enough to run the blog. I wish I could be more reliable for you all. I want to be there for you, and maybe make things feel a little bit brighter for you, even if things aren't very bright for me right now. 

I know, when I am doing better than this, that I believe in people, and life, and the chance of recovery, and--on my best days--even myself. And I know that depression is a state of delusion, so anything I think now that I don't think when I'm feeling better is certainly untrue. But right now that is something I have to take on faith, and that faith is all I have. I am sorry I don't have more to give you. I will be back the minute that I do.

I hope you're taking care of yourselves out there.

So, then, media tycoon, televangelist and fabulously successful grifter Paul Crouch is dead.

Adelle M. Banks provides the straight-news story for Religion News Service, “Prosperity gospel televangelist Paul Crouch dead at 79“:

Paul Crouch, the religious broadcaster who co-founded Trinity Broadcasting Network and was known for his prosperity gospel messages and lavish lifestyle, died Saturday (Nov. 30). He was 79.

… Crouch and his wife, Jan, started the network in a rented facility in Santa Ana, Calif., in 1973. Now based in Costa Mesa, it grew to include a “family of networks” and became the largest and most-watched Christian broadcast company in the country.

Your basic rags-to-riches story, then, leading to your basic Behind the Music-style tales of debauchery:

When Jim Bakker and another 1980s televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, both were felled by scandals, Crouch was able to reap the benefits of their losses.

Like them, Crouch also shared in controversy. In 2004, the network denied allegations of his involvement in a homosexual encounter after the Los Angeles Times reported that he reached a $425,000 settlement with a man who made the claims. Three years later, the ministry defended itself after ABC News’ 20/20 reported on luxurious living by the Crouches, including private jets and mansions.

Most recently, Crouch’s ministry has been embroiled in litigation since his granddaughter and former chief financial officer, Brittany Koper, was fired in 2011 after questioning its high-cost personal expenditures. The Times said they included the purchase of a $100,000 motor home for Jan Crouch’s dogs.

Crouch built TBN into a money-making machine, leasing out time on an international network of networks, including “84 satellite channels and over 18,000 television and cable affiliates around the world.” Those other televangelists you see on TV? Most of them are leasing that airtime and paying TBN for the privilege.

But that’s just the legitimate side of Crouch’s business model. The far bigger share of TBN’s revenue comes from viewer donations, as William Lobdell reported for the Los Angeles Times back in 2004:

Much as Ted Turner did for TV news, the Crouches have created a global infrastructure for religious broadcasting. But that is just one element in their success. Another is a doctrine called the “prosperity gospel,” which promises worshipers that God will shower them with material blessings if they sacrifice to spread His word.

This theme — that viewers will be rewarded, even enriched, for donating — pervades TBN programming.

“When you give to God,” Crouch said during a typical appeal for funds, “you’re simply loaning to the Lord and He gives it right on back.”

Though it carries no advertising, the network generates more than $170 million a year in revenue, tax filings show. Viewer contributions account for two-thirds of that money.

Lower-income, rural Americans in the South are among TBN’s most faithful donors. The network says that 70 percent of its contributions are in amounts less than $50.

Those small gifts underwrite a lifestyle that most of the ministry’s supporters can only dream about.

Paul, 70, collects a $403,700 salary as TBN’s chairman and president. Jan, 67, is paid $361,000 as vice president and director of programming. Those are the highest salaries paid by any of the 12 major religious nonprofits whose finances are tracked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

TBN’s “prayer partners” pay for a variety of perquisites as well.

The Crouches travel the world in a $7.2-million, 19-seat Canadair Turbojet owned by TBN. They drive luxury cars. They have charged expensive dinners and furniture to TBN credit cards.

Thirty ministry-owned homes are at their disposal — including a pair of Newport Beach mansions, a mountain retreat near Lake Arrowhead and a ranch in Texas.

… Overseeing these expenditures is a board of directors that consists of Paul Crouch, Jan Crouch and Paul’s 74-year-old sister, Ruth Brown. Control resides primarily with Paul.

Predatory, corrupt and decadent, yes, but the details get even more baroque:

[Jan] and Paul project the image of a happily married couple. But off the air, they lead separate lives and rarely stay under the same roof, according to former TBN employees and others who have spent time with the couple.

The Crouches also present themselves as thrifty and budget-conscious. During one telethon, Paul said his personal $50,000 donation to TBN had wiped out the family checking account. He often says that he and his wife live in the same Newport Beach tract house they bought 33 years ago for $38,500.

But nowadays, neither of the Crouches uses that home much. Whether in Southern California or on the road, they live in a variety of other TBN-owned homes. In all, the network owns 30 residences in California, Texas, Tennessee and Ohio — all paid for in cash, property records show.

These include two Newport Beach mansions in a gated community overlooking the Pacific. One of them was recently on the market for an asking price of $8 million. A real estate advertisement said it featured “11,000 square feet of opulent European luxury with regulation tennis courts and a rambling terraced hillside orchard with view of the blue Pacific.”

In Costa Mesa, the ministry owns 11 homes in a gated development adjacent to Trinity Christian City International.

In Sky Forest, a resort community in the San Bernardino National Forest, the network owns a four-bedroom, five-bath home.

TBN officials say the real estate purchases were consistent with the network’s charitable mission, because the homes serve as venues for broadcasts and provide lodging for the Crouches and fellow televangelists as they travel across the country.

These 30 residences are “charitable” only in the sense that they were paid by TBN — which is, of course, a tax-deductible “charity” organization. Oh, and TBN has tried — not always successfully — to have many of them designated as “parsonages” because cha-ching!

It’s hard to know what’s more shocking — the vast amount of money the Crouches spent on luxury items, or the chutzpah of their explanations for those indulgent purchases:

Credit card receipts show that in December 1994, TBN bought about 40 items from Cool Springs Antiques in Brentwood, Tenn., including a three-piece wine cabinet for $10,000, a $2,800 candelabrum, a $350 birdbath and a seven-piece bedroom suite that cost $3,995.

At Harris Antiques and Imports in Forth Worth, Texas, TBN spent $32,851 in a single day in 1995. The purchases included two French chests for about $1,900 each, a $1,650 brass planter and a $1,095 bronze urn.

TBN officials said the items were reproductions, not antiques, and were used to furnish studio sets and network-owned houses. They said [a] tanning bed was used to darken the skin of 25 actors cast in TBN stage productions set in Biblical times.

Paul Crouch was a grifter. And he took pleasure in being good at it:

Credit card receipts also offer a glimpse of the Crouches’ dining habits. In Nashville in the mid-1990s, Paul Crouch hosted dinners with TBN employees in a private room of Mario’s, an upscale Italian restaurant, spending $180 or more per person for parties of up to a dozen, the receipts show.

A former top TBN official described heavy consumption of wine and liquor at a dozen such dinners. The ex-official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a fear of retaliation.

… In separate interviews, [former TBN employee] Whitmore, the former TBN official and a third person who traveled and socialized with ministry leaders said that at the end of a dinner, Paul Crouch would sometimes hold up a TBN credit card and say: “Thank you, little partners!”

Wonder why a former TBN official would still express a “fear of retaliation”? Because Paul Crouch was a viciously litigious man. Consider the story of Sylvia Fleener, who won an out-of-court settlement after the Crouches swiped the plot of her book The Omega Syndrome for their movie The Omega Code. (I saw that movie — Michael York should’ve sued his agent.) Years later, after she sold her house, the new owners sued her for misrepresentation:

John Casoria, TBN’s in-house attorney, served Fleener the papers for this lawsuit in Nashville, Tennessee. A check reveals that TBN paid for the filing of the lawsuit.

That tidbit, remarkably, is from an article on the right-wing Christian Post. Even stranger, that Post article was prompted by Terry Firma’s post at The Friendly Atheist, “Televangelist Paul Crouch Leaves a Dirty Legacy; Evangelical Christians Look the Other Way.” And here’s the really surprising part — the Post’s Barry Bowen mostly agrees with Terry Firma.

Sensitivity is appropriate because family and friends are in mourning. Last year Brittany Crouch Koper, the former chief financial officer for TBN, revealed … that she cared deeply for her grandfather Paul Sr.

I pray that Brittany and her family will be comforted by the Holy Spirit during their time of mourning.

But what about TBN’s critics and victims? How should they respond?

No sense trying to deny that Paul Crouch has left behind many “victims.”

That long list of victims would include Brittany Koper. And her sister.

(Trigger warning: The following involves a discussion of rape and the intimidation of a young rape victim.)

Koper may have cared deeply for her grandfather, but that didn’t stop her from a whistle-blowing lawsuit against TBN where she accused him of “company-paid luxuries that she said appeared to violate the Internal Revenue Service’s ban on ‘excess compensation’ by nonprofit organizations as well as possibly state and federal laws on false bookkeeping and self-dealing.” Paul Crouch responded by treating his granddaughter just like any other whistleblower: He counter-sued, accusing her of embezzlement and generally threatening to use his deep pockets to keep her in court until she was too broke to continue.

That’s from Sarah Posner’s fine tramping down of the dirt, in which she also reminds us of this:

Koper’s sister, Carra Crouch, also sued the network, claiming her family covered up her rape by a TBN employee when she was 13 years old.

The details there are also even worse, as Teri Sforza reported last year for The Orange County Register:

A granddaughter of Trinity Broadcasting Network founders Jan and Paul Crouch filed a lawsuit Monday alleging that she was plied with alcohol and raped by a TBN employee when she was just 13 — and that her family covered up the incident, rather than report it to authorities, to protect TBN’s reputation.

Carra Crouch, now 19, was distraught after the 2006 assault by a 30-year-old man, and told her grandmother what had happened. “Jan (Crouch) became furious and began screaming at Ms. Crouch, a 13-year-old girl, and began telling her ‘it is your fault,’” according to the suit.

Carra Crouch then told John Casoria, TBN’s in-house counsel and her second cousin; he became agitated and told her that he didn’t believe her, it says. “He elaborated by stating he further believed she was already sexually active ‘so it did not really matter’ and he ‘believed she may have propositioned him,’ ” the suit alleges.

“Ms. Crouch, a 13-year-old girl, had not been sexually active and was absolutely devastated about what happened and about how John and Jan responded to her.”

So, then, like I said, Paul Crouch is dead.

“When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the wicked perish, there is jubilation.” Proverbs 11:10