Above the Law and Above the Truth

(Click here for the article containing this quotation.)

A Magna Carta for America

Refreshing the Magna Carta for America¹

“The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history … It was written in Magna Carta.”  —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1941 Inaugural address

1. We believe that truth is morally central in our personal and public lives. There can be neither justice nor democracy without truth. The People have a right to truth from those in public office.

2. We believe that nobody, not even one of the very highest status, is above the law. Any notion of “sovereign immunity” provided in law for those in positions of public trust applies to what they do with honor in the course of their duties but not to any criminal conduct in which they may engage.

3. We call for all of those holding public positions, most especially those in executive, legislative, or judicial roles, to be required to desist from all conflicts of interests and all appearance of such and to desist, under penalty of perjury, from false official statements. Placing partisan allegiance above duty is a conflict of interests.

4. We hold that the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is essential for all the other rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. We reject the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation,” and we reject the idea that any nation, state, or locality should have a religious identity in law. We hold that, always and everywhere, religious coercion is abuse and should never legitimately be seen as free exercise.

5. We hold that individual medical privacy² is among the most important of the unenumerated rights under the U.S. Constitution. We hold that rights under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and historical rights in English law and U.S. law from the time of the statutory English Magna Carta of 1297 that remain reasonably applicable today are also unenumerated rights.

6. We hold that provisions in federal, state, and local laws lacking clear secular purpose³ must be regarded legally as religious in nature and therefore unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

7. We believe that every human being on our planet is our neighbor deserving of justice and our respect.

8. We believe that every human being is entitled to basic essentials for survival: food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education.

9. We stand against oppression based on race, color, creed, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ability, age, or difference, and we call for all non-criminal strangers to be treated with welcome while in our land.

10. We call for leaders at all levels to learn once again to work together, particularly toward economic imperatives, economic justice for all, and equal opportunity for all.

11. We hold that judicial interpretation of the law may not extend so far as to be tantamount to the writing of new law. We believe that Congress should provide for accountability of the U.S. federal judiciary.

12. We call for reason in the interpretation of the law, including the U.S. Constitution: Where the meaning of the text is plain and applicable to the context at hand, that meaning should govern. Beyond that an interpretive construction of the text, including the widely discernible history of legislative intent, to which all can agree by force of reason should govern. Consistent with the above, judicial precedent must be honored.

---

Footnotes

1. * Version of January 8, 2025. There is a PDF version for printing (8.5x11 inches).
2. * Medical privacy is required by the Oath of Hippocrates.
3. * Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 US 602 (1971)

Remembering Civil Rights Champion Alice Green

Remembering Civil Rights Champion Alice Green: Paul Grondahl remembers Albany’s social justice icon.

Disturbances in the Force Ahead for Wordle

Comment on Wordle No. 943

January 19, 2024

Some of you may recall that I wrote software that can play Wordle, the online game owned by and housed at The New York Times. At the outset such software must know what words are accepted by Wordle as guesses and what words might be used as the solution in a game. Thus, the software must employ two word lists.

There is one game every day. The first game in history (before acquisition by The New York Times) was conducted online June 19, 2021. Yesterday (January 18, 2024) was the day of game no. 943. As that game is over, I may reveal its solution, which was "stole". My favorite first guess is the word "roate". After making that guess yesterday, I saw this:

R

O

A

T

E

It's relative rare for me to determine three of the five letters with my first guess. My software, using a list of what I think are words that might reasonably appear as solutions, reported that the possible solutions among the words on my list were "stoke", "stole", "stone", "stove", and "those". At first glance it appears that I have a 20% chance of guessing correctly on my second guess by picking one of those 5 words at random. But I can dig deeper. For each of those words I can hypothesize that that word is the solution, use any one of the words as a guess for that solution, and find the number of words that would still be in play. In this way I can determine for each of those words as a guess the number of words still in play following that word as a guess, and select for my next guess a word for which the number of words still in play is minimum. With this example -- and using my word lists -- each of the four words beginning with 's' is a better second guess than the word "those".

There are two further wrinkles, one helpful and one not helpful. The unhelpful wrinkle is that the solution may not be on the list of words that I imagine as possible solutions. For that list I had a good start because the early game of Wordle had semi-public lists of allowed guesses and possible solutions. As time went by, the list of allowed guesses was significantly expanded but remained semi-public. But the list of possible solutions dropped out of semi-public sight, and, more to the point, there have been four solutions over time -- in games 646 (guano), 659 (snafu), 720 (balsa), and 730 (kazoo) -- that were not on the early list of possible solutions.

The helpful wrinkle is that up through today -- game 944 -- no word has been used as a solution more than once. Quite obviously, unless Wordle is discontinued before, say, its 10th anniversary in 2031, sole use solutions cannot continue forever.

Why do I call that a helpful wrinkle? I expect that the Wordle editor at the New York Times is aware of the history of sole use and is aware that at some point sole use must be discontinued. But for the meanwhile a player can gain advantage by assuming that sole use is still in effect. With game 943 the assumption of sole use narrows the list of 5 words in play to 2, "stoke" and "stole", which means that a random second guess among those has a 50% chance of being correct.

One more example. Suppose the first guess is "least". Then

L

E

A

S

T

That is a remarkably lucky guess yielding 4 letters. The words in play -- using my list of possible solutions -- are "steel", "stole", and "style". The "deeper dig" procedure flags "stole" and "style" as optimal second guesses, but assuming sole use, there is only one optimal second guess, which is "stole".

Yellow vs. Green in "Wordle"

For Wordle haven't we always thought that green was better than yellow?

I find it rather strange that this scored word

S

L

I

M

Y

matches a single word on the purported official list of 2315 possible secret words in original Wordle, but this scoring of the same word

S

L

I

M

Y

matches a dozen.

A Puzzle

This is a Wordle-like puzzle. You are looking at a word evaluated the way Wordle evaluates words. With this one evaluated word you should have all the information you need to deduce the secret word.

A

D

I

E

U

I've posted several of these on Facebook. The thing is that I create the evaluated word in HTML using HTML's ability to provide background coloring. But Facebook seems not to want to accept the snippet of HTML. So I've been posting screenshots of the HTML there. The question as I write this is whether Blogger will accept the HTML for an evaluated word.

It seems to work here. Well, almost. The HTML is coded so that the squares containing the letters should all have the same width, as well as the same height. I guess it's close enough.

From the System Manual

VERB(1) VERB(1)

NAME

verb — Convert any noun to a verb

SYNOPSIS

verb [ -a ] [ -d dictionary ] word

DESCRIPTION

verb generates a dictionary entry for any English noun located in the dictionary as an English verb. By default the dictionary is the system dictionary.

With the -a switch the generated dictionary entry is entered in the dictionary if the user has write permission for the dictionary. Normally the system is configured so that members of the group sysdict have write permission for the system dictionary.

With the -d switch the specified dictionary is used instead of the system dictionary.

EXAMPLES

Generate a dictionary entry for the noun “street” as a verb:

verb street

To perform an action that involves a street. E.g., “Honey, did you remember to street the garbage?”

SEE ALSO

american-english(1), adjective(1), adverb(1), conjunction(1), english-english(1), expletive(1), expletive-deleted(1), grammar(5), noun(1), preposition(1), syntax(1), sysdict(1), sysdict(5), sysdict-daemon(8)

BUGS

There is no guarantee that system dictionary verb entries generated by verb are correct.