From the top of the towers,
    you could see past the narrows,
        past our lady of the harbor,
      to the broad, open sea.
See the curve of the earth
    on the vast, blue horizon
        from the world’s greatest city,
      in the land of the free.

All the brave men and women
    that you never would notice,
        from the precincts and fire halls---
      the first on the scene.
Storming into the buildings
    on the side of the angels,
        they were gone in an instant,
      in the belly of the beast.

We are children of slavery,
   children of immigrants,
      remnants of tribes and their tired refugees.
As they tumbled down,
   we were stronger together—
      stronger than we ever knew we could be—
         as strong as that statue that stands for the promise
of liberty here in this city of dreams.

All the flags on front porches
    and banners of unity
        spanning the bridges
      from the top of the fence—
as we heal up the wounds
    and take care of each other,
        there’s more love in this nation
      than hate and revenge.

We are children of slavery,
   children of immigrants,
      remnants of tribes and their tired refugees.
As the walls tumble down,
   we are stronger together—
      stronger than we ever knew we could be—
         as strong as that statue that stands for the promise
of liberty here in this city of dreams.

(City of Dreams © David Wilcox; cover image © SOM)

If you hadn't heard: A group that was almost certainly Russian military intelligence stole almost 20,000 emails from the DNC and Wikileaks published them on Saturday. Personally, I doubt that there's anything in them, but---

---what's that?---

---they're literally the smoking gun of a plot to steal the nomination for Hillary Cl---

---no, no, I'm certain that they're not---

---um---

---okay, okay, I'll take a look and see what's there. Here we go.

(1a)

Before we do this, I want you to ask yourself what you expect to find in the emails. Obviously you clicked this link because you expected to say something bad. I expected them to show bad things happening. Some of the bad things that I expected were there, some weren't, and there were some bad things that I hadn't expected.

But, just as an exercise, write down a list of things that you expect to find in the very worst of those 20,000 emails. Hard evidence of primary-rigging? Wink-wink references to "Plan H"? Gleeful gloating at Bernie's downfall? PG-13 language? Plots about new ways to insult Donald Trump?

We'll check back in at the end to compare your predictions to reality.

In a conversation with an acquaintance about the political ethics of voting for Jill Stein, I realized that I had very little idea what the Green Party stood for. (Um...the environment?) So I spent a few hours today reading the Green Party platform. I can't say it was an exciting experience, but now at least I feel like I have some sense of what it means to be Green. I liked a good deal of what I read, but in the end, there were a few things that I just couldn't stomach.

(1)

1. There's actually a good deal to like about the Green platform. It's pro-UBI, (mostly) pro-immigration, pro-space, pro-Land Value Tax, and generally promotes its environmental agenda through disincentive taxes, rather than hard regulation. These are pretty incredible ideas, and I'd be overjoyed to see any of them move into the Overton Window of American politics in the near future. Good on the Greens for getting behind them.

Also in the list of good -- though less revelatory -- ideas are pro-LGBT, anti-prohibition, anti-incarceration, and pro-infrastructure planks.

2. There's a great deal more cloying utopianism that doesn't even mean anything on a policy level. There are pages upon pages that just read like "...and we will have better schools, and we will have stronger communities,

(1)

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that at one stage in my life, my favorite book was Ender's Game. This is, as I understand it, downright conventional for intellectually gifted children of a particular age, if not actually a rite of passage. As Orson Scott Card writes in the foreword to the 1991 edition of Game:

[A] woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender’s Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it... [T]he criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that.

...

The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, "The only reason you don’t think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you"... Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. (...)

And just so,

What you did was done in our name, at our request. We cannot bear your physical wounds, or psychological scars, but we can bear the moral responsibility with you. Your transgressions in war, they are our transgressions, too. We confess this together, and seek forgiveness together.

(1)

Let's talk about what happened yesterday in the Senate. No, not that filibuster; the 85-13 vote on the National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA re-authorizes $602B of military spending for the 2017 fiscal year. But it also includes an amendment (added in committee by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), chair of the Armed Services Committee, and supported by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)) which expands the Selective Service registration requirement to women.

Meanwhile, in the House, something incomprehensible happened:

During the House Armed Services Committee review of this year’s defense-funding bill late last month, California Republican Duncan Hunter introduced an amendment that would, for the first time ever, include women in the draft. It was a curiouser episode than it first appears: Hunter, a vocal opponent of women serving in combat, offered the amendment as a dare, confident that progressives on gender equality in the service were all talk. He voted against his own proposal.

In theory, anyway, this was a clever ploy. A 1981 Supreme Court decision had specifically linked women’s exemption from the draft to their ineligibility for combat, and with that ineligibility gone, Hunter saw the draft issue as a way to cut to the heart of the whole matter of women warriors. He gambled that liberals would balk when faced with the reality that women might have to, as he said, “rip the enemy’s throats

Amongst all of the large transitions happening in my life about now, I found it necessary to move my blog server from "some borrowed machine on the Harvard network" to a real-adult location, like "the cloud". After asking a few friends for recommendations, I decided to rent server time from Digital Ocean, at least as a stopgap measure until the end of the summer, when I'd be able to pick out my own internet plan.

I'm glad to report that I couldn't be happier with DO's service. Spinning up a new virtual server and migrating Faults to it was probably the easiest piece of system administration that I've done. I gave them my credit card number, told them that I wanted a $5/mo Ubuntu box, and within two minutes, I had an IP address and login details in my email inbox. Then it was a simple matter of copying RSA keys, an rcp on ~/web/, a separate rcp to handle /etc/nginx/sites-available/, a few apt-get installs and npm installs, a call to node ~/web/ghost/index.js, and a DNS edit at Namecheap (my domain registrar)...and I was done. No gotcha problems. No Google searches that ended up in random Linux users' forums. The experience felt exactly like DO's billing: Simple cloud computing, built for developers.

10/10; would use again.

(It's worth noting that Ghost

(1)

To my parents, in whose footsteps I couldn't be prouder to follow.

To my grandmother and late grandfather, who have been working for this moment for the past fifty years.

To my grandmother, who sewed my dance costumes.

To Lucian, the first friend I met here, without whom I would not have found the path I did. I'm so glad we're doing this next thing together.

To Christina, without whom I would not have survived with sense of humor intact. Thank you, friend.

To Ava, who was always there to lend an ear and set my heart true. You're still a klutz and a derp.

To Julia, who could be counted on to be in the audience whenever her blockmates were sweating under the lights. I can't say in words how much I appreciated it.

To Miriam, the stalwart rock of our blocking group.

To Grace, who lit up the room. Smartypants.

To Claire, who had the kindest words. I'm glad I got to know you in the end.

To Joy, who kept being there when I turned around.

To Michael, for wonderful conversations.

To Ben, who set me on the path to make the world better.

To Keno, who weathered the absolute worst with me.

To Rob, who I have liked more the more I've gotten to know him, and who has more than repaid any debt between us with fast friendship.

To Olivia, who put up with my shit for so long, as we struggled and grew together as dancers and leaders. Harvard Ballroom is going great places under you.

To Cyndia, who is the best single thing that happened to me