Robert X. Cringely Quotes
If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, "If I answer that honestly they'll arrest me," then you already have your answer.
What oven gets overlooked in the history leading up to the Civil War was the terribly repressive atmosphere that developed in the South itself over the issue of slavery. There were some abolitionists in the South, and most of the slaves were held by a relatively few wealthy men. Many with no slaves or only one or two, might go either way on the slavery issue and the various fugitive slave laws. And Northern abolitionists sometimes would come South to investigate and report on the conditions of the slaves of the South. While still in the Union, many Southern areas made a mockery of the Constitutional protections of freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Censorship and repressive activities invaded privacy, and the South, for both Northerners and English travelers, no longer had the charm of the past. Note the use of the term “reign of terror”. Bunch was a seasoned diplomat experienced at reporting on conditions.
Referring to an Order-in-Council forbidding any discussions of the Canadian Cabinet's secret uranium deals:
This is the kind of search and seizure to determine who was practicing which religion with which out Founding Fathers were very much aware and which were eliminated in the Bill of Rights.
Robert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.
