Pun Salad

At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the ones I have so far posed. That I can pose many others is of no consequence; either you are sick of them by now or you are scribbling down your own as I speak. The bigger question is this -- how much security do we want?

A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.

… [Liu and Hanauer] offer rigorous standards for what patriotism should be. "True patriots," they write, "believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice; freedom from tolerance is prejudice; freedom from stewardship is exploitation; and freedom from compassion is cruelty."

Welch is even less enamored with the tactic:

Lord, how I despise every inch of this conversation. There is something juvenile yet creepy−not unlike watching Uncle Todd wave his penis−with the spectacle of people who wake up in the morning dreaming up new ways to draw the precise boundaries around what it means to be sufficiently patriotic. Especially when the definition of patriotism is in opposition to enumerated freedoms.

… she sees her grandfather’s goofy-smiled carousing with terrorists and parries back with a small solo exhibit of paintings at Fake Estate in Manhattan entitled Casualties of Beauty, described in an accompanying press release as a “provocative collision of buoyant breasts, carnivorous plants, topographic flesh, oil slicks, and roadside IEDs” which “simultaneously depict phoenix totems of creation and destruction with a hint of irony.”