and starved by employees of the State of New York end the government of the United States of America. In the years that followed, the State of New York would send bulldozers into the prison yard to wipe out any evidence of wrongdoing. It was one of the most shameful events in the history of American law enforcement.

I think of this now, in this very scray time, in this country I love. I see us giving virtually unchecked powers to law enforcement officials to question, arrest and detain those "suspected" of illegal activity. I see us willing to look at whole swaths of Americans as potential criminals and I'm reminded of Dostoyevsky, a prisoner himself, who said that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judgedto dinner with several of their friends, many of whom were webloggers I knew pretty well, some not as well, some I hadn't seen in ages, and a few I really wanted to meet. We hooked up at the Sticking Rose in my hood in North Beach where hilarious conversation spiced up the pathetically flat food. I sat next to Evan Williams who invented this whole thing called Blogger. Few minutes into dinner, he got a page indicating something was awry with the Blogger servers. I had already mentioned that I lived up the street when he said he had gotten a similar warning earlier in the evening. I let him use my laptop and perched on a stool while things got fixed. He worked fast.

So I'm saying