Homeland

I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?

Start at the beginning,” he said. “Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don’t need a plan, you need a vector.

Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs. And then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. But there were always emergencies, weren’t there?

It was like finding Attila the Hun at a yoga class. Like finding Darth Vader playing ultimate Frisbee in the park. Like finding Megatron volunteering at a children's hospital. Like finding Nightmare Moon having a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn’t given a damn.

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

[T]hat little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn’t going to ever pay consequences for her action, it wasn’t because “the system” failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solution from now on.

But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.

Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn’t a utopian is a shmuck.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo," which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.

Beef is just a highly processed form of vegetable matter.

No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --

These guys are the world’s biggest welfare queens, after all—suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I’m guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.

Without exception. It’s easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face every day—how could one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices.

Just grind coffee—keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt—and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar. Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation). In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter. What you’ve got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste—I go about half and half. If you’re feeling fancy, serve it over ice.

After all, wasn't the system the problem? No matter who we voted for, the government always seemed to win. What was the point of living out my little fantasy of democratic change and Justice when the real action was being fought out in secrecy, with Anonymous envelopes of cash, encrypted Whispers, secret bunkers, and secret deals?

I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.

It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.