Quote of the day

'The Master said, "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."' - The Analects of Confucius

Quote of the day

"Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically - never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don't ever forget that." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Quote of the day

"That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth." - Friedrich Nietzsche, praising Montaigne

Via How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

Living in fear

In the home of the brave, where the Bill of Rights supposedly guarantees inviolable rights that the government can not abrogate, the national security state continues to eat those very liberties.

In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy).

But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.

Yes, I am so very proud to live in such a "brave" country.

Terrorists flew planes into building in 2001, and the fear of that is used in 2012 to justify the oppressive harassment of citizens and violation of rights that those terrorists themselves would never be able to take from us.