Quote city...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.  -- Mark Twain

Cheers...

Signs of the times...

A personal story by a Dallas-based freelancer in the Houston Chronicle underscores the importance of keeping a low profile when traveling, and not just for the purpose of avoiding the unwanted attention of criminals, but also to avoid the unwanted attention of The Powers That Be. The author of the story had apparently written some kind of innocuous remark in the margin of his newspaper that included the word "bomb," which had been spied by a neighboring passenger, who informed authorities.

The practice of spying on fellow passengers on airplanes is nothing new. Frankly, I find myself doing it, sometimes, not out of any feeling of mean spiritedness, but simply because sitting on an airplane is boring, and looking at what people are doing (and reading) is something to do, and is part of the people-watching process that I engage in normally. (Then again, motives vary. I recall reading a news item a few years ago about a flight that originated somewhere on the East coast (D.C.?) and went to San Jose, California, where spying and eavesdropping for the purposes of industrial -- Silicon Valley -- espionage was rampant and pretty much standard procedure.)

Increasingly, however, as government stakes ever-widening claims on what is acceptable speech (and this goes beyond joking about "bombs" at airports to include so-called "hate speech" provisions and Orwellian responses to what some children write in schools), we begin to accelerate toward the kind of society I saw when I first started working in the USSR so many years ago, in which you weighed carefully what you said to strangers and looked around the room before opening up to friends.

Cheers...