that's true (that you won't like it). I do find this an enormously stimulating environment, and I do enjoy examining the assumptions here, and examining my own assumptions, and trying to understand why I'm on the wrong side of every issue here. I also enjoy trying to formulate my thoughts to my own satisfaction if not to yours. Therefore this is an extraordinary learning environment, and so long as I can keep ego out of it (wanting to convince somebody, anybody of something) and just keep writing I get better and better at saying what I mean and at formulating long arguments. I've still got a lot of learning to do, but it's like a writers workshop here in a "take no prisoners" sort of way. I've started the book, and I'm feeling kind of high because I've got two big subjects the history of Physics and particularly its development in the twentieth Century, and a biography of Nathan Isgur which are two strands that I plan to tackle in parallel moving back and forth between the two. It has the wonderful benefit of making use of my expensive education and doing something worthwhile. The story is great and learning about Physics in detail is fascinating.
Nathan was a student of Richard Feynman at CalTech, and occasionally went camping with him and Feynman's family and sometimes others including other physicists. On one of these trips at a gas stop Feynman and Nathan were debating the mechanism that causes the gas pump to shut off automatically when the tank gets full. Each of them had their own theory and didn't agree with the other's idea. So they asked the gas jockey. The guy in the greasy red baseball cap looked at them like they were children and said "Sure I can tell you how it works. You lock it on fill and as soon as the tank gets full it shuts off." He then walked away shaking his head at how stupid some people can be.
There are now several hundred, if no several thousand people who have heard that story. Its a story of perspective I guess, some people are satisfied with a less detailed understanding of how things work than others.
Thanks for helping me hone my chops everyone, and thanks for helping me get out of a big hole of depression caused by what is effectively the development of a disability that interferes with conventional work by preventing me from having a regular sleeping pattern along with the Sleep Apnea. Sorry if I'm a bear when I haven't had enough sleep. It's not personal. My animus toward George Bush is as personal as a dislike of someone I have never met but whose politics and personality I really despise, but my feelings here are mostly focussed on expressing myself.
All the best
Rob
the NSA's wiretapping
ON NSA SPYING: A LETTER TO CONGRESS
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650
By Beth Nolan, Curtis Bradley, David Cole, Geoffrey Stone, Harold Hongju Koh, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Laurence H. Tribe, Martin Lederman, Philip B. Heymann, Richard Epstein, Ronald Dworkin, Walter Dellinger, William S. Sessions, William Van Alstyne
Dear Members of Congress:
We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration's National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in The New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department's December 22, 2005, letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration's defense of the program.[1] Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.
The basic legal question here is not new. In 1978, after an extensive investigation of the privacy violations associated with foreign intelligence surveillance programs, Congress and the President enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Pub. L. 95-511, 92 Stat. 1783. FISA comprehensively regulates electronic surveillance within the United States, striking a careful balance between protecting civil liberties and preserving the "vitally important government purpose" of obtaining valuable intelligence in order to safeguard national security. S. Rep. No. 95-604, pt. 1, at 9 (1977).
With minor exceptions, FISA authorizes electronic surveillance only upon certain specified showings, and only if approved by a court. The statute specifically allows for warrantless wartime domestic electronic surveillance?but only for the first fifteen days of a war. 50 U.S.C.
Chowhound
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