Ancient History

Historian Philip Jenkins on events in Iraq:

"We often read of the birth and growth of churches, very rarely of their deaths. In Mosul, however, we may be seeing the end of an astounding example of Christian continuity that lasted nearly two millennia."

Full article...

Behind the Curve

A beginner-level introduction to elliptic curve cryptography (which is what will be keeping your information safe online for the immediate future).  Nick Sullivan:

"Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use today. An increasing number of websites make extensive use of ECC to secure everything from customers' HTTPS connections to how they pass data between data centers. Fundamentally, it's important for end users to understand the technology behind any security system in order to trust it. To that end, we looked around to find a good, relatively easy-to-understand primer on ECC in order to share with our users. Finding none, we decided to write one ourselves."

Full article...

Quote Pack

An assorted bunch of quotes I've come across in the last week:


"The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law."

— Frédéric Bastiat

"Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."

— Richard John Neuhaus

"Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it." 

— ​Philip K. Dick

"[W]hen the officials trusted to execute law faithfully violate laws regularly, they lose their presumption of legitimacy."

— Andrew McCarthy

"Consequences that are not sufficiently painful or sufficiently scary aren’t consequences[.]"

— Jonah Goldberg

"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

— usually attributed to Lee Segal (Segal's Law)

Is it not a little one?

"Nonsense tolerated anywhere will metastasize, and the results are always ugly. 'When the people have got used to unreason they can no longer be startled at injustice.'"

— Douglas Wilson (that last bit from Chesterton)

The most important thing.

"Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities."

— Henry Kissinger

Protip:  you can replace "foreign policy" with "dealing with others".

Democratic Gospel Theory

"Woodberry's results essentially suggested that 50 years' worth of research on the rise of democracy had overlooked the most important factor."

Read more at CT...

(ht: Douglas Wilson)

404

"The data necessary for centralized decision-making is not available at all."

— Steven Hayward, summarizing a point by F.A. Hayek

The meatier version, with context:

"Hayek was emphatic that no matter how big and how fast our computing power got, it did not change the fundamental defect of all centralized economic control: the problem is not simply mastering or processing a large amount of raw data.  Information and circumstances change too quickly.  More fundamentally, the data necessary for centralized decision-making is not available at all."

..., he said (to your great-grandparents).

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government."

—  G.K. Chesterton

Taking the fork in the road.

"[Y]ou cannot build a federal system when the component parts belong to different civilizations. Neither can you do it when the component parts were once part of the same civilization but have been headed in different directions."

— Douglas Wilson

C.S. Lewis on Statism

David Theroux digs into C.S. Lewis's views on government.   He comes up with a great deal of source material, and some excellent quotes, such as:

• "We have on the one hand a desperate need: hunger, sickness, and dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnipotent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement?"
• "Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."
• "[the demon Screwtape:] Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden." 

Read on for more of the same...

Q202: Now you've done it.

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

 — often erroneously attributed to Voltaire

Q186: Public service

"It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government."  

— David Mamet

What kind of criminal are you?

Glenn Reynolds writes:

"Traditionally, of course, citizens have been expected to know the law.  But traditionally, regulatory crimes applied only to citizens in specialty occupations where they might be expected to be familiar with applicable regulatory law, while ordinary citizens needed no special knowledge to avoid committing rape, robbery, theft, etc.   But now, with the explosion of regulatory law, every citizen is at risk of criminal prosecution for crimes that [...] involve no actual harm or ill intent.  Yet any reasonable observer would have to conclude that actual knowledge of all applicable criminal laws and regulations is impossible, especially when those regulations frequently depart from any intuitive sense of what "ought" to be legal or illegal."

from a paper titled "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"....  

Q184: Ignorance may be an excuse.

"There is no freedom more essential than the right to know the laws you live under."

— A.J. Venter

Swartz: "How we stopped SOPA"

Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) — one of the names behind the movement to stop the SOPA legislation last year — remembers that campaign:

The heart of the matter...

"Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed.  The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people.  The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified."   

[...]  If the people are unhappy with the government performance it must be recognized that government is merely a reflection of an immoral society that rejected a moral government of constitutional limitations of power and love of freedom.  

If this is the problem all the tinkering with thousands of pages of new laws and regulations will do nothing to solve the problem."

— Rep. Ron Paul, from his farewell address

Q176: The minority that matters

"One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights, because the ultimate minority, the minority that matters, is the individual.   The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to mediate the hierarchy of different victim groups."

— Mark Steyn

Q175: No limit

"[T]here is no form of government more fundamentally anti-Christian than a government that recognizes, in principle, no limit to what it can require."

— Douglas Wilson  

Post-Christian Justice

Al Mohler on how "post-Christian" culture is confused about criminal justice (in light of the Breivik trial in Norway):

And yet, in another statement from his commentary on this text, Westermann points straight to the reason that a post-Christian culture loses its moral confidence in the punishment of murderers. He states: "A community is only justified in executing the death penalty insofar as it respects the unique right of God over life and death and insofar as it respects the inviolability of human life that follows therefrom." 

Once those convictions and moral intuitions are lost, the death penalty no longer makes sense. Eventually, even the idea of punishment itself loses all cultural credibility.

Full article...

ht: Vitamin Z

Everyone's a criminal

GW Law professor Orin Kerr's testimony before the Judiciary Committee on why the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is dangerous.    This and other carelessly written laws open almost everyone up to the possibility of Federal prosecution, just for doing what they do every day.    While this may or may not be a problem given current interpretations and enforcement, this is exactly the kind of thing that can do untold damage in the wrong hands.   If everyone is a criminal, then the decision to arrest or not arrest can be made based on other, more politically interesting criteria.

Full text (PDF) ...