Bertrand Russell Tossed me a Life Preserver in 1943, Before I Was Born

As a 17-year old boy, I was incredibly lucky to find a book by Bertrand Russell at the local public library.  This was a key time in my development--I was skeptical about many things back then, but I felt alone. The people in my life were earnestly telling me things about life, politics and religion that didn't make any sense to me and discussions with them mostly resulted only in strange and condescending lectures.

I remember the joy and relief I felt when I first started reading the first paragraph of Russell's 1943 essay, "AN OUTLINE OF INTELLECTUAL RUBBISH," which was a chapter in a book I found at the library.

Man is a rational animal-so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster.


Russell's full essay is much longer than this excerpt and it is filled with many other pointed observations, permeated throughout with Russell's wry sense of humor. Until the teenaged version of me saw this essay, I thought I was alone in my skepticism. That's a difficult place to be trapped for a teenager. This was in the 1970's, long before the Internet. I sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with me. I didn't think so, but when I would express doubts about religion, for example, everyone else got quiet and started to look nervous The only exception was my mother, who often had the courage to ask simple questions. As I am writing this article, my mother is a vibrant and independent-living 87 year old.  How lucky I am in that regard, too. I sometimes thank her for her unbridled curiosity and "blame" her for the fact that I became somewhat subversive.  She laughs and says she doesn't know what I'm talking about.

Reading this essay was a joyride for the 17-year old version of me. I discovered that I was not alone. I learned that it is critically important to speak up, even when you are the only one in the room taking a controversial position. When I first read Russell's essay, I learned that I was not crazy. This was the beginning of a whole new way of thinking for me, and it gave me the courage to take stronger stands on my own against things that made no sense to me.

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The Big Things that Aren’t Obvious, Until They Are

Rather than staring at the things in front of you, it’s sometimes better to step back and ask yourself what is missing in order to understand what happened. Sometimes, the things that you can directly see and hear simply don’t add up.

My favorite illustration of this process involves one of Charles Darwin’s epiphanies:

On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the 'Philosophical Magazine' ('Philosophical Magazine,' 1842.), a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.


Sometimes it takes the first person to recognize a two-step process and only then does it become always obvious for everyone who follows. Sometimes the person who first "gets it" is you. You might have tried to figure something out for a month or more before you finally saw it for what it was. And then, of course, it's obvious for you and for everyone else you mention it to, whether it be a puzzle solution, how to make your software do a task or figuring out a person's secret motivation.

"The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply." Khalil Gibran

Because I work as a trial lawyer, this also reminds me that many people assume that circumstantial evidence is "second rate" evidence; that it is not as persuasive as the things and events that people observe directly. There is no basis for believing this. Some circumstantial evidence is sometimes much more persuasive than some direct evidence. A well-known example of powerful circumstantial evidence is a “smoking gun.” Circumstantial evidence is often sufficient to convict a criminal defendant even when the burden of proof for guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt." A multi-step puzzle involving circumstantial evidence can evoke such an "A-ha!" moment that it can even leave you no doubt at all.

If you want a great example of how something can suddenly become obvious, go to Andy Clark's Edge video on Predictive Processing, Minute 11:30, and listen to the sine wave speech pattern examples. It will hit you like a ton of bricks. The entire lecture is phenomenal, but the examples will only take a couple minutes and it's worth your while.

The (obvious) take-away: Don't give up, even where the solution is not obvious.

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Homeland Security Border Suspicionless Searches of U.S. Citizens Ruled Unconstitutional

You might be surprised to hear that U.S. federal government has been demanding to inspect the digital content of the phones, computers and other devices of many U.S. citizens re-entering the U.S. even though the government lacked any suspicion of wrong-doing by the U.S. citizen. That's insane, right?

Now after a long battle by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a federal judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security has been acting illegally when it does that. This is a big victory against our own government, which was acting unreasonably and oppressively.

Common Dreams reports:

"This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices," EFF senior staff attorney Sophia Cope said in a statement.

The lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, was filed by EFF, the national ACLU, and ACLU of Massachusetts on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident who had their devices searched without warrants. The suit named as defendants the Department of Homeland Security and two agencies it oversees—Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Law in the Trenches: A Warning that the Practice of Law is Not Always Glamorous

My friend Joe Jacobson has often regaled folks on Facebook with his stories from the legal trenches. I love how Joe keeps an even keel and works hard to give others the benefit of the doubt, even when things get thorny.

I usually get along swimmingly with opposing counsel. The better they are at trial law, the easier it tends to be to get along (a lot of people find this surprising). Today, however, I had a long difficult conversation with a young opposing attorney and I struggled to give the opposing attorney the benefit of the doubt. Here’s what happened. I hope you find this somewhat entertaining and doesn’t simply come across as whining.

Here’s the background: A federal judge appointed me to take over legal representation for a man who filed his own lawsuit alleging that he had been physically abused by prison guards. For technical reasons, only the guards are parties to the lawsuit, not the prison. I’ve taken a few depositions of individual witnesses, but I decided I needed a Rule 30(b)(6) “corporate representative” deposition of the prison to finish my discovery. This rule (30(b)(6) can be a power and powerful technique for learning information lodged in the inner belly of big organizations like prisons. Therefore, I sent out my subpoena and notice of corporate representative deposition last week, listing about 25 topics I wanted to discuss. The government attorney’s job is to fill the deposition chair with one or more witnesses who can answer my questions about those topics under oath.

Today’s phone call was from the government attorney, who was complaining about the way I set forth my topics. He annoyed me from the start with his know-it-all tone of voice. Here’s how the conversation went:

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Connecticut AG files suit against numerous generic drug manufacturers for price fixing

The pharmaceutical companies sued in this case are not merely greedy. Many people who desperately need these drugs can no longer afford them, and they are going without, resulting in pain, sickness and even death. We need to stop mincing words. These defendant pharmaceutical companies are functionally assaulting and murdering innocent people through their predatory policies and their lies that there are "markets" when they have illegally destroyed any semblance of markets. Thank goodness that the Connecticut AG has brought this suit (now joined by 43 states). Shame on the U.S. Antitrust Department for not vigorously filing this suit a long time ago. Here is a key quote from the lawsuit:

For many years, the generic pharmaceutical industry has operated pursuant to an understanding among generic manufacturers not to compete with each other and to instead settle for what these competitors refer to as "fair share." This understanding has permeated every segment of the industry, and the purpose of the agreement was to avoid competition among generic manufacturers that would normally result in significant price erosion and great savings to the ultimate consumer. Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share, competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices. This "fair share" understanding was not the result of independent decision making by individual companies to avoid competing with one another. Rather, it was a direct result of specific discussion, negotiation and collusion among industry participants over the course of many years.

Try and give me a better example of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. In short, thousands of ordinary-seeming people, many of them like you and me, work for these corporate entities that have been illegally inflicting pain and death upon innocent people.

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