Minted by Franklin

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The Yale Book of Quotations has named its most memorable quotes of 2007. The winner is “Don’t tase me, bro”–the plea University of Florida student Andrew Meyer made in September, before police removed him from an event featuring Senator John Kerry. (Watch the video.)

Now, “Don’t tase me, bro” may get a million YouTube downloads, but it doesn’t really sum up that many human truths. So, having just spent a day with the notably quotable Benjamin Franklin, we couldn’t resist making our own list–of Franklin favorites with the real ring of truth. Judge for yourself. As old Ben himself once said, “a lie stands on one leg, the truth on two.” (Unless it’s getting tased.)

One-Liners

• “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
• “Poverty wants some things, luxury many things,
  avarice all things.”
• “Most people dislike vanity in others,
  whatever share they have of it themselves.”
• “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
• “He that can compose himself is wiser than he
  that composes books.”
• “Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones.”

Rhymes

• “He that would live in peace and at ease,
  Must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.”
• “If thou dost ill, the joy fades, not the pains;
  If well, the pain doth fade, the joy remains.”
• “If what most men admire, they would despise,
  ‘Twould look as if mankind were growing wise.”
• “Each year one vicious habit rooted out,
  In time might make the worst man good throughout.”

Deep Thoughts

• “Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for such consequences.” (Because, as Ben also said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”)
• “We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

What would Ben Franklin think?

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Friends, America’s Federal Communications Commission voted on Tuesday to let media companies own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the nation’s 20 largest media markets. The controversial decision reverses a longstanding ban on such cross-media conglomeration.

Opponents of the change say the old rule helped prevent major media companies from becoming too dominant. Supporters say the new rule simply recognizes a changing media landscape, in which newspapers are struggling to find readers and more folks find the information they need online.

Either way, we say it’s a good time to look back at American media’s roots–to a time when local voices like Ben Franklin’s dominated. After all, before he messed around with lightning or charmed French royalty, old Ben was a newspaperman.

An Ink-Stained Wretch

Back then, printers did it all–interviewing recently arrived ship captains for out-of-town news, writing articles, plagiarizing stories from other newspapers, selling ads, printing the pages, and distributing the final product. In fact, most colonial newspapers sprang from small printshops that employed just the owner and his teenage apprentice.

Ben Franklin started in the printing trade as an apprentice to his older brother, James, who ran a small printshop in Boston. Working there exposed the young Franklin to different kinds of writing and gave him a chance to borrow books on the sly from booksellers’ apprentices.

In those days, printers had to be smart and strong. Composing the pages was a mental feat–type was set letter by letter, using little blocks of metal, and for the page to appear correctly when printed, every line had to be composed in reverse. (Many printers were as adept at reading backward as forward.) After the pages were made, the printer personally pulled the lever on the heavy wooden press to stamp the image–one page at a time. No wonder few colonial newspapers had a press run of more than 300.

The Life and Times of Silence Dogood

James Franklin wanted his publication, the New-England Courant, to be more than the usual collection of 6-month-old news that appeared in other colonial newspapers. So he solicited articles. In 1722, 14 letters appeared in the New-England Courant signed by “Silence Dogood.” The middle-aged widow had a lot to say about the clergy, fashion, and political matters, and people loved it–even if they didn’t know who the Widow Dogood really was.

Using a pen name was common at the time, so everyone knew “Dogood” wasn’t her real name. But no one knew that 16-year-old Ben had actually written the letters, sliding them under the printshop’s door at night.

A year after the Silence Dogood letters were published, Ben ran away from his brother’s employ. (Things got rough for James after he was thrown in jail for suggesting the local authorities were in cahoots with pirates.) Still in his teens, Ben apprenticed with a Philadelphia printer before sailing for London and working there for two years. By 1729, he was back in Philadelphia and publishing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.

All the News Ben Could Print

The Gazette was like most newspapers of its day–no headlines, few illustrations, and it ran only four pages. What set it apart was Franklin’s lively version of local news. He filled the columns with anecdotes like this one: “And sometime last Week, we are informed, that one Piles a Fidler, with his Wife, were overset in a Canoo near Newtown Creek. The good Man, ’tis said, prudently secur’d his Fiddle, and let his Wife go to the Bottom.” The Pennsylvania Gazette became one of the most successful newspapers of its time.

Colonial newspapers had no separate editorial pages, but they were packed with opinions. Just as he had done in his Silence Dogood days, Franklin often wrote an article in the voice of a fictional citizen. In 1735, he printed a letter purportedly written by an elderly gentleman, who encouraged his fellow Philadelphians to establish a volunteer fire department. The imaginary old man described leaping out the window of a burning house. By the end of the year, the Union Fire Company of Philadelphia had formed.

“Poor Richard” Makes Ben Wealthy

Franklin’s most successful editorial alter ego was “Poor Richard” Saunders, the pen name Franklin used for the 25 years he published Poor Richard’s Almanack. In the colonies, practically every printer published an annual almanac. These thick pamphlets, showing the phases of the moon and predicting the weather, were moneymakers because most literate households purchased one every year.

In 1732, Franklin threw together a 24-page publication with a first-person preface signed by Richard Saunders. The “author,” a destitute stargazer whose shrewish wife threatened to burn all his books and astronomy instruments if he didn’t “make some profitable use of them,” admitted the reason he wrote the almanac was to make a little money and get her off his back.

From 1732 to 1757, Poor Richard’s grew in popularity as readers found more than the usual astronomical charts and tidal tables. Tucked into this almanac were proverbs such as “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Franklin said he saw the almanac as a way to educate folks who might not buy any other books and so “filled all the little spaces that occurred between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality.”

Some years Franklin sold 10,000 copies. Combined with good investments and lucrative printing contracts, the profits from the almanac allowed him to retire from printing at the ripe old age of 42. Of course, Franklin’s “retirement” was more active than many a person’s working life. And though he was hailed as a scientist, diplomat, patriot, and philosopher, at the end of his days, Franklin was still proud of his printshop roots. When he wrote his will at the age of 82, he began: “I, Benjamin Franklin, printer, . . . “

Americana

Yesterday, while snooping around America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), we noticed something important. Though the CIA gets more press, the National Security Agency (NSA) actually “employs more people and consumes more cash.” Several readers wrote in to ask if that could possibly be true. It is.

So why does the CIA get all the attention? Because that’s exactly the way the NSA likes it. For decades, the U.S. government didn’t even admit that the NSA existed. It did its work secretly, governed only by executive order. The joke for those in the know was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” Today, let’s snoop around this cryptic intelligence group.

Civilian vs. Military Intelligence

The NSA got its start in 1952, when President Harry Truman created it with a secret stroke of his executive pen. Congress had already created the CIA five years earlier, with the National Security Act of 1947. But the civilian CIA didn’t eliminate the various military intelligence services, nor did it focus on doing what the military services did best: intercepting and reading an enemy’s mail, overhearing its private conversations, and cracking its secret codes.

To consolidate the military’s intelligence gathering for the Cold War, the NSA put all the military’s eavesdroppers and codebreakers under one general or admiral, who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. It’s been that way ever since. While the NSA employs tens of thousands of civilians–including more math PhDs than anyone else–it remains inside the Defense Department. It even has its own troops, in a special branch called the Central Security Service.

HUMINT vs. SIGINT

To avoid superfluous spying, the civilian CIA sticks to what spymasters call HUMINT, or human intelligence. When James Bond makes contact with a double agent inside enemy territory, or gives a bad guy the back of his hand, that’s HUMINT. The NSA’s bailiwick is SIGINT, or signals intelligence, and while it doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous, many think it’s far more powerful.

The NSA uses a worldwide web of state-of-the-art satellites, listening posts, and intercept stations to capture and record huge volumes of the world’s communications. It then runs these communications through some of the world’s most powerful computers, scanning for keywords or patterns that require an analyst’s attention. An unofficial agency motto: “In God we trust. All others we monitor.”

Domestic vs. Foreign SIGINT

Officially, the NSA performs its SIGINT sweeps only “against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers.” But that doesn’t mean the communications of U.S. citizens aren’t sucked into NSA computers. NSA officials point out that, in today’s world, there is no clear and easy distinction between domestic and foreign communications.

“The networks have collapsed into one another,” said one official, “and many of our targets are on the same network that we use. It is now just ‘the network’–the global telecommunications infrastructure.” So, when U.S. citizens do appear in NSA data, analysts withhold their names from intelligence reports. But the information remains in the files, and there are exceptions that allow for its release.

–Michael Himick

Time for the “Festival of Lights”

Hanukkah, the Jewish “Festival of Lights,” begins again tonight. Time to tell the Hanukkah story.

Imagine it’s around 165 BC, in the ancient land of Judea–and Judea is a pawn in a series of squabbles between Egypt and Syria. The Syrian king, Antiochus IV, is trying to control Judea by appointing the high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem. At first, he appoints a man named Jason, but later he switches to a rival named Menelaus (reportedly because Menelaus’s bribes are bigger than Jason’s).

When Jason musters troops and throws Menelaus out, Antiochus decides to put an end to Jerusalem’s fractious politics. Descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Antiochus sends in his army and begins a campaign of persecution against the Jews. He goes so far as to set up an altar to Zeus inside the Temple of Jerusalem. It’s just too much for the Jews to take–so they fight back.

Hammer Time

The Jewish revolt is led by a priest named Mattathias and his sons, who take to the hills and embark on a three-year war against the Syrians. Soon Mattathias’s son Judas Maccabeus (a.k.a. “The Hammer”) takes command and repeatedly frustrates Syrian soldiers with guerrilla tactics.

Eventually, Judas chases the Syrians out of Jerusalem and sets about purifying the Temple. He dedicates a new altar and institutes a new holiday–Hanukkah (Hebrew for “dedication”), an annual eight-day celebration to commemorate the victory over the Syrians.

But if Judas originally intended Hanukkah as a sort of ancient Veterans Day, it quickly became the “Festival of Lights”–thanks to a miracle told in the Talmud. On first entering the Temple, the Talmud says, Judas found only enough ritually pure oil to burn for one day. Miraculously, that oil burned for eight days, until replacement oil arrived.

Light My Fire

Hanukkah now mainly commemorates God’s miracle, not Judas’s military victory. Not surprisingly, Hanukkah’s most important ritual activity involves lights. There’s a special menorah–the hanukkiya–for the occasion, with branches for eight candles (or pots of oil), plus a ninth, called the shammash (”servant”), in the middle.

At sunset on every night of Hanukkah, candles are placed in the hanukkiya from right to left, and then lit from left to right (one for each day, so that the lights grow with the holiday). The shammash is used to light the other candles.

It’s traditional to give gifts on Hanukkah, to inspire the gratitude that’s at the heart of the festivities. A special Hanukkah prayer thanks God for delivering “the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands of the pure, and the wicked into the hands of the righteous.”