Two for One Quote of the Day

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." - Jorge Luis Borges

    I am still looking for the current unofficial exchange rates for Argentine pesos. I have not found anything new since the end of August. I read something yesterday about some big shot down there (Minister of Finance, maybe?) making it a crime to discuss the exchange rate. I thought it was a joke, but maybe not.
    Anyway, I'm poking around on the net looking for info, and I come across a story about one Wade Hicks who got kicked off an airplane because he was on the no-fly list. This happened in the middle of his flight from Travis Air Force Base (55 miles Northeast of San Francisco) to Japan when the plane stopped to refuel in Hawaii. I was thinking about telling Jennifer about this, I mean this is her meat and potatoes, but then I came across the above quote on the same page and I said 'this is too good to pass up'.
    It gets better. A little farther on in the discussion I found this little story:

When governments become authoritarian I don't think they necessarily think logically, for example they don't care  that punishing someone for criticizing may create a more enraged enemy.  The man mentioned here may be the victim of a mistake or maybe someone with a little authority decided to exercise / abuse that authority.  Often these things are related to personality and a misuse of power by a petty official.  Long before 9/11 I had the worst airport immigration incident of my life.  I was polite, conservatively dressed with nothing to hide.   For some inexplicable reason the US official who took my passport at Toronto airport treated me like the worst criminal - threatning, arrogant and really gaestapo like.  Why?  Maybe I reminded him of someone he hated.  I'lll never know but it was so bad that I thought he might have me detained.  Now that these officials have post  9/11 security concerns to back them up they can be insufferable. - sergio

Which brings us back to the quote at the top.
    This story has one more weird angle. The date on the Russia Today story is October 14, 2012. The date of the forum post is October 17, 2012. Google Wade Hicks and the top news story is from Wired, two hours ago. What does is tell you when a Russian outfit scoops the American 'press' by over a week?

Update: Realized Google would show the most recent news first, not the oldest, but a new search turned up nothing older than a day or two.