The Weird Sense of Deja Vu

My dad says it’s something that happens naturally after you’ve worked in a field long enough: you start to feel like you’re looping back and forth on yourself. He used to say he’d find himself going to American Historical Association meetings as an “emeritus professor” that he had gone to as a newly-minted professor: some things had changed, some things hadn’t, so the changes and the gaps in the change were what really jumped out.

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A Canary

I keep a few canary accounts. Those are email accounts that I don’t use to send anything, but I use to sign up to various sites. I used to do this so I could track which conferences sold their contact databases to spammers or marketers. On my ranum.com server, I set up forwarders that push most of the flood into my inbox, which uses bayesian spam classifiers to sort out the gunk.

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Monday Meslier: 170 – Confession, That Golden Mine For The Priests, Has Destroyed The True Principles Of Morality

Jean Meslier Portrait

Jean Meslier

He who first proclaimed to the nations that, when man had wronged man, he must ask God’s pardon, appease His wrath by presents, and offer Him sacrifices, obviously subverted the true principles of morality. According to these ideas, men imagine that they can obtain from the King of Heaven, as well as from the kings of the earth, permission to be unjust and wicked, or at least pardon for the evil which they might commit.

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