A crucial point made in a lecture on computer heuristics by Richard Feynman, two years before he passed away in 1988, is knowledge shouldn’t be treated like competition:
Category Archives: History
Homeland isn’t an American Word
The British Government has announced their Home Office will have a Director General for Homeland Security.
Some in the UK reacted by saying it sounds American.
Nice try.
I thought everyone knows that America most definitely gets most of its English terminology for security from… wait for it… England.
I mean who has a Home Department, or a Home Secretary for the Home Office? Not America.
The Voice of America (VOA) explained this exact problem years ago in a story called “Are You in the Homeland Generation?” on their “Learning English” channel:
Historically, the Old English word hamland meant “enclosed pasture” — a protected field for animals. The word homeland first appeared in Modern English in the 1660s. It combined the nouns “home” and “land.”
But a deeper look at how the word homeland was used outside of the U.S. shows why some people are not comfortable with it. The government of South Africa used the word homeland for areas it created for only African peoples during the period of apartheid. These “homelands” separated the Africans from white citizens.
Friederike Eigler is a professor of German at Georgetown University. She said that in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people used a similar word to homeland – heimat – to express intense national pride.
“It became more and more a political term because it was sort of meshed up with ideas of the nation and nationalism. And then that kind of came to a head during World War II. It became very much tied up very much with notions of the German race, and the nation, nationality or national socialism, and so in that sense it got very discredited as a result in the postwar period.”
In the early 2000s, when the U.S. government created the Department of Homeland Security, some objected to the name. Peggy Noonan writes for the Wall Street Journal. She thought the Bush administration should change the name. She said homeland “isn’t really an American word.”
James A. Bartlett blogs for The Ethical Spectacle. He thinks the problem is that the word homeland has to do with the idea of being a native. He quotes the second Merriam Webster definition of homeland: “a state or area set aside to be a state for a people of a particular national, cultural, or racial origin.”
Mr. Bartlett believes the word homeland does not describe the United States well. The U.S. is a diverse country of immigrants. Are those immigrants also able to call the U.S. their homeland?
Speaking of people being confused about where words come from, machines are also pretty terrible at this.
A simple query for the word “homeland” using Google’s algorithm on British government archives brings up this hilarious example: “Home Secretary” [many paragraphs later] “Auckland”
KGB Spy in 1961 Used X-Ray to Crack U.S. Top-Secret Lock
In 1961 the U.S. used their top spy in Moscow to deliver extensive details of the Soviet nuclear program:
In tandem with the CIA, MI6 were in the midst of running their most successful espionage operation to date. A colonel in Soviet military intelligence, Oleg Penkovsky, was working for them as an agent-in-place, photographing thousands of top-secret documents with a miniature camera, and delivering the resulting microfilm in disguised packs of cigarettes and boxes of sweets to Chisholm’s wife Janet, at cocktail parties, parks and other locations around the city.
Some describe these massive disclosures from deep within the Soviet military (by a man who turned on his country after being denied a promotion) as a primary explanation for averting disaster in the Cuban missile crisis:
The CIA’s chief analyst during the crisis, Ray Cline, later told historian Christopher Andrew that Penkovsky’s intelligence was vital to its resolution, as it allowed the agency to “follow the progress of Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba by the hour.”
Just as the global nuclear missile crisis ended on October 22, 1961 Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB.
The next chapter to this story isn’t what you might think.
It actually becomes how the Soviets at that time had established a top spy in Paris, who was delivering extensive details of the U.S. nuclear program in Europe. In October 1961, as Penkovsky was shut down, the Soviets pushed an American mole for deeper access.
In late 1961 [Robert Lee Johnson] received the top-secret clearance and was admitted into the vault as a clerk. At long last the KGB was in. […] Over the following weeks the infiltration began in earnest as he successfully copied the vault keys using clay molds supplied by KGB operatives. In October of 1961 he received a specially manufactured X-ray device from Moscow that he was instructed to place over the final lock in the vault; KGB technicians could then deduce what combination unlocked the vault by studying the cogs inside the locking mechanism.
This spy was from within the U.S. military; “an embittered bureaucrat with a grossly inflated sense of self-worth”, and like Penkovsky a man who turned on his country after being denied a promotion (not to mention being named after a traitor in the military who defected and fought to destroy the U.S. — Robert Lee).
On 15 December 1962, Johnson accessed the vault for the first time and looted its contents. The operation, extensively rehearsed beforehand, went exactly as planned and by 03:15 the following morning some of America’s most sensitive cryptographic and military information—some of it classified higher than top secret—was on its way to Moscow. The treasure trove of information proved so valuable that the KGB decided to reward Johnson with a bonus of $2,000 and the rank of honorary Major in the Red Army. The information—rumored to include the numbers and locations of US nuclear warheads in Europe—was deemed so important that it was presented to Comrade Khrushchev himself.
While there are plenty of stories of Johnson using a vaguely described radioactive device, I’ve found so far almost no documentation or details. Explanations of the Soviet portable X-ray design that cracked a top-secret lock seems obscure, and probably intentionally.
Allegedly the first lock was cracked by making a wax impression of the key, the second lock had a combination written on paper that someone left in a trash can. These are routine weaknesses. The development in October 1961 of an X-ray to crack the third and final lock for U.S. top-secret files is by far the most interesting, especially given the timing, and yet very little record at all has been made available.
BBC Claims Americans Think of Presidents as Demigods
I’m really struggling to get through a BBC article called “Who truly was the most dishonest president?”
This section in particular is really hard to read.
Once upon a time Americans placed an almost childlike trust in their commanders-in-chief. They were venerated as demigods. When did it change? Many historians date this rupture to Lyndon Baines Johnson, though he was far from the first president to deceive.
That seems so backwards as to be completely laughable. Which historians?
To begin with, LBJ became president when JFK was assassinated.
Would assassination count as a rupture? I mean saying public change in trust dates to LBJ as president kind of misses at least one big prior rupture event, no?
I would think JFK immediately disproves such a theory of American public rupture and distrust dating to LBJ. And on that note there were assassinations and attempted assassinations long before JFK.
Consider the 1881 assassination of Garfield, for just one obvious example:
Like most presidents up to that point, he was not accompanied by bodyguards or a security detail. As Garfield’s carriage pulled up outside the Baltimore and Potomac, Charles Guiteau paced the waiting room inside, ready to fulfill what he believed was a mission from God. […] In his pocket Guiteau carried a letter addressed to the White House. “The president’s tragic death was a sad necessity,” it read, “but it will unite the Republican Party and save the Republic. Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little when one goes.”
The whole point of the American system used to be that President would be a citizen and not someone “venerated as demigods” or dare I say someone… monarchical.
Garfield literally ran for office on the premise of being a plain farmer who would roll his sleeves up to cut the “weeds” of “calumny, falsehood, fraud, venom, hatred, defamation and malice”.
The bar is low to become a President, with many running on the premise of being common, so on what basis would anyone mistakenly shift that in their mind to a high one?
Who was venerated? Who was given childlike trust?
The author should perhaps prove these assertions, or at least detail them, first before ironically waxing on about deception.