Amidst all the fuss over the misdeeds of Murdoch's minions, lets remember that the people most interested in neat and tidy rules for journalists are the people with information they would prefer not make the news. Journalism is sometimes a bit like dumpster diving; people with too nice a palate come back with nothing. I believe that journalists are subject to the same criminal code as anyone else; and if a journalist does something any other person should be prosecuted for, the journalist should likewise be prosecuted. But beware of taming the appetite of the press for information; in general the press is too tame already. We need hell hounds not lapdogs.
Big Brother Is Watching, But He Needn't Look Far
The New York Times profiles a company today that exists to perform background checks on potential employees by searching social media sites such as Facebook. As the company points out, all it seeks is public information, much of which has unwittingly been made public by naive users. The Beast does not have to come looking for our most private information; we have been feeding it all along. The article does point out that the EEOC cautions potential employers and investigators from delving into information that could give rise to claims of unlawful discrimination.
The Trouble with Atheists
The trouble with atheists is not that they are wrong. After all, as
they are fond of pointing out, the existence of God is not susceptible
to proof. Occam's razor being what it is, we do not normally assume the
existence of things that have not been shown to exist. And the world's
religions have no shortage of grotesqueries, barbarities, and absurdities, from
genital cutting to symbolic cannibalism, from the insistence that the
world is a few thousand years old to the quaint and touching belief that
we will somehow carry on after our mortal bodies expire.
No, the trouble with atheists is that they are antisocial; they are all
too often cranks, weirdos, and fanatics. In my favorite book by George
Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, he spends the first half of the book
describing in heart-wrenching detail the plight of miners in the North
of Britain in the 1930's. He spends the second half despairing of any
change because the only people who care about the issue, Britain's
Socialists, are, well, all too often cranks, weirdos, and fanatics.
Just today I read a story in the New York Times about a woman who was
suing a Florida sheriff for harassing her because she is an atheist. Of
course, she had also been arrested for public simulated sex and
possession of marijuana, neither of which may be major offenses but
neither of which has much to do with atheism. To give her her due, most
of the progress toward greater religious tolerance throughout world
history has been accomplished through the willingness of cranks,
weirdos, and fanatics to speak out, and even sometimes to be jailed,
tortured, or immolated. However, while such stands may eventually prick the
conscience of the complacent majority, they are not well calculated to
induce emulation.
Marginalization works both ways, of course. Large, complacent,
comfortable religious institutions are not likely to accept an
existential challenge to the core beliefs justifying their existence
anytime soon. And the fact is, large religious institutions are likely
to remain quite popular for the foreseeable future because they are
socially useful, performing many good works, and provide some valuable
and comforting moral instruction amidst the spiritual claptrap they
peddle. The Sermon on the Mount will always be an inspiring speech
regardless of whether one buys the claim that Jesus sits at the right
hand of the Father, or even the that there is a Father.
For those who accept the Church as socially useful, even if empirically
risible, the best hope is a continued appeal to the civil, secular,
legal tradition in the country and its generally tolerant social and
religious climate. I believe in a maximum of personal
freedom, but I also recognize that one does not need to be outrageous to
be irreligious.
Encryption
I started a collection of links on encryption.
The Fragility of Life
When the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind after Job complained of his suffering, He asked Job "Hast thou entered into the
springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?
38:17 Have the gates of death
been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
38:18 Hast thou perceived the
breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all." Job 38:17-18. Like Auden's Old Masters, the ancient Hebrews understood suffering. They were keenly aware of how tenuous man's hold on life is. And they were keenly aware that there was no clear or comprehensible explanation for suffering: God says to Job, in effect, you cannot understand.
In one word, the Arabs express the inexorability of fate. "Maktib": it is written. God has foreordained the moment and the manner of every person's death, and there is no escaping. (A famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia elaborates on this notion. Lawrence saves a man from the desert; only to have to execute the same man for murder in order to keep peace among the tribes.)
There is a moment in Flannery O'Connor's short story The Displaced Person when the main character's spine "pops" as he is run over by tractor. Death always seems particularly horrible when it is violent. That is why, for me at least, the idea of being trapped on a burning skyscraper with a choice of incineration or joining hands and leaping to my death is so intolerable to contemplate.
And I feel the same horror at the thought of watching a wall of water as high as a small building and as long as the horizon devour the land before me until I and thousands more are smothered and crushed. It is not to be borne. And yet for thousands in Japan there was no escape. They were as blameless as Job, unsuspecting of their fate, only to suffer a swift, violent death that caught them completely unprepared. Our civilization, our technology, our modernity, our sophistication were helpless before the brute force of nature, and neither the consolation of religion nor the insight of poetry is really adequate to address nature's random cruelty.
All we can really do is suppress a guilty shudder of relief that we were not in the path of the wave, and try to help the survivors pick up the pieces.
Digital Retro - No Love for Tablets
Image via Wikipedia
When it comes to computers, I know how the owner of a late-seventies classic Cadillac must feel about modern automobiles. Faced with the tablet revolution, I am putting computer makers on notice that they will pry my wide, clicky, hard keyboard from my cold dead fingers before they take it away, and I am not even that good a typist. I realize that I am part of dying breed, the last generation that spent the eighth grade pounding out "f j f" on Ms. Wells' manual typewriters. By law school, I had graduated to a self-correcting electric for my exams. (The school still did not allow computers for exams, although I had been using my trusty Mac IIsi at home for a number of years.)
A tablet is too big to be as portable as an iPhone and too small to be a laptop. And try typing on one! Even my normal slow pace is reduced to an erratic crawl. Besides which, while I prefer to do as much as I can from the keyboard, the touchscreen is only a marginal improvement on the mouse, unless one is drawing on the screen.
Finally, there seems to be little defense to the charge that tablets are the new TV, that they exist primarily for the consumption of content rather than its creation or exchange. Every time I bring up the iPad, I hear that it is not a tool for "sheeple."
Steve Jobs is no fool, however, and I can see the writing on the wall. Welcome to the brave new world of the tablet.
The Vices of Its Virtues
For all its vaunted power and flexibility, and notwithstanding the fact that it is free (in both senses) Linux is sometimes a real pain. I run two distributions of Linux: "Arch Linux" on my laptop and "Ubuntu" on my desktop. I have a neat little program called "Unison" that synchronizes my documents between them. Unison is a wonderful program, but one installation of Unison will only talk to another one if it is the same version. Unison 2.36 does not talk to Unison 4.0.
Arch Linux is usually a little more up to date than Ubuntu, particularly since I use Ubuntu's "long term support" version (a topic for another time). As I tried to synchronize my files between my laptop and my desktop before I ran out the door today, my laptop reminded me that I had updated it to Unison 4.0 so it wouldn't synchronize with Unison 2.36 on my desktop.
Check to see if Ubuntu has a prepackaged update: No.
Check to see if I can download the Unison source code: Yes.
Uninstall old prepackaged version on Ubuntu.
Untar Unison source code.
Oops, Unison requires the Ocaml compiler, which I do not have on my system.
Install Ocaml compiler from Ubuntu software repository.
Brew a pot of tea while liblabldgk2-ocaml unpacks . . .
(Divert my attention to fix a problem with the iPhone's hogging the processor. See also PortbleDevicesiPhone)
Consult Unison manual.
Consult user group when the instructions in the manual do not work.
# ocaml mkProjectInfo.ml > Makefile.ProjectInfo
# make
# make install
Move unison-2.40 binary to /usr/local/bin and create symlink "unison" in /usr/bin
It launches on the Ubuntu box!
Will Arch Linux connect? No.
(Slight fiddle with ssh connection.)
Will Arch Linux connect? Yes - success
Time elapsed 1 hour 26 minutes.
Bet ya can't wait to try Linux!
The great thing about Linux is that you can do all these things. (When Windows is broken, all too often your hands are tied.) The unfortunate thing about Linux is that every once in a while you have to do all these things.
America the Small
The United States has once again proven itself to be a land of narrow-minded petit bourgeois in thrall to rapacious corporate plutocrats. President Obama has been criticized for his comments on "God and guns" on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, but it does seem that recently adversity has caused a shrinking of the American soul. Cases in point:
- Union Busting
- Yesterday the Wisconsin legislature deprived public employees of their collective bargaining rights under the pretext of balancing the budget. In reality the vote was a naked power grab to prevent employees from having a voice in their compensation and working conditions. American business is no doubt well pleased with this initiation of an effort to smash the last vestige of the labor movement.
- Muslim Baiting
- The egregious Rep. Peter King, an avowed IRA terrorist sympathizer, held hearings on a non-existent alleged threat from American Muslims in a transparent attempt to pander to American bigots.
- Gay Rights Denied
- Today, the Maryland legislature defeated a bill to provide for gay marriage in Maryland. The hypocrisy of straight people who can't keep their own marriages together denying gays the right to marry in the name of the "defense of marriage" is nauseating.
Americans have an insufferable tendency to preen themselves on their tolerance, openness, and freedom, and some even go so far as to preach a doctrine of American "exceptionalism," as though we were somehow better than other people. Yet we allow the brave citizens of the Arab world to twist in the wind as they seek to escape their oppressive masters. This country talks a good game, but sometimes it seems that the only value to which we are truly committed is profit.
Your Hedge Fund Is More Important Than Your Kid
Jon Stewart showcases in his March 3, 2011 episode Fox News' explanation of why Wall Street bankers are far more deserving than teachers. Interview with Diane Ravitch follows.
Five Things I Hate About The Washington Metro
1. Bag searches.
2. Announcements from Janet Napolitano.
3. Announcements from Police Chief Michael Traborn.
4. Single tracking.
5. Broken escalators.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Moglen Speech on Software Freedom
The Future of Social Networking Is Not Here Yet
Social networking is a matter of absorbing interest for more reasons than just a popular movie. Facebook currently boasts of 500 million users. It is credited, along with Twitter, with playing an instrumental role in the ongoing Arab revolt, while at the same time consistently being dogged by privacy concerns.
A recent speech by Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen, covered in the New York Times, highlighted the real dangers of centralized control over networks and data upon which people depend not only for information but sometimes for their lives. Moglen observed, "Friends of ours, people seeking freedom, are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured, and eventually killed somewhere on earth because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom on technology we know is built to sell them out." In Egypt, he pointed out, the Egyptian government was neither sufficiently ruthless nor sufficiently in control of the network to turn the protesters' reliance on Facebook and Twitter against them. But no revolutionary movement is safe if the confidentiality of their communications is entirely at the disposal of one corporate executive easily susceptible to government pressure.
The answer, Mr. Moglen posits, is federated not centralized computing, in which, in lieu of the massive central servers that drive Facebook and Google today, people are able to access the Internet with cheap, portable, individual servers on which their data is stored under their control.
As a step in that direction, a number of developers have launched federated social networking software. Two I have tried, One Social Web and Diaspora, are both still in their infancy. However, they have advanced to the point that with some ingenuity and persistence, it is possible to set up a personal server on your personal computer and exchange information with your friends. As yet, they are still a long way from the promise of cheap, secure, decentralized, private communication. But at least the promise is there.
Emacs As A Blogging Tool
Because I have used xml-rpc to post blog entries before (from my iPhone,
for example), I am not wholly surprised that there is an Emacs mode that
allows me to create and post blog entries. Emacs is good for almost
everything else, after all.
However, this is the first time that I have gotten the Emacs package
weblogger.el to work, so I am modestly pleased at having been able to
add a feature to my favorite text editor/mini-os. To do so, I followed
instructions from Knut Haugen's blog All About the Code.
Eat Fat to Get Thin
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My new motto is "145 by July," meaning I would like to trim 50 pounds of fat accumulated over 20 years in approximately six months. In the process, I am hoping to see a reduction in my blood pressure and the level of triglycerides in my bloodstream to a more acceptable level. For anyone who subscribes to the conventional wisdom about dieting, this is a truly Quixotic aspiration.
Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories, attempts to turn the conventional wisdom on its a head. A historian of science and a writer for Science magazine, Taubes argues trenchantly that the fundamental assumptions driving popular wisdom about diet in the United States are based on bad science, and that the studies necessary to draw truly scientific conclusions about diet have not been performed.
Taubes assails the notion that every extra calorie consumed adds to the bulge on the waistline, and that the only way to lose weight is semi-starvation. Rather, he suggests, the root of our modern obesity epidemic is more likely to be found in our consumption of refined grains, refined sugar, and high fructose corn syrup, all of which are comparatively recent phenomena in evolutionary terms.
Taubes posits that weight gain has more to do with hormonal regulation of energy storage than with the simple addition of calories. In simple terms, heavy carbohydrate consumption causes an insulin rush that halts the body's use of fat for energy and encourages the conversion of glucose into fat, which both contributes to weight gain and encourages overconsumption.
Taubes' response is to encourage a high fat, low carbohydrate diet. To critics who suggest that such an approach is fraught with peril in that it increases the risk of heart disease, Taubes argues that the best science suggests that the risk of heart disease has far more to do with being overweight than with the consumption of fat or cholesterol. And, he argues, being overweight has more to do with carbohydrate consumption than fat consumption.
In one sense, Gary Taubes is the Robert Caro of diet writers. His book is so thoroughly researched, tightly written, and copiously annotated that it hard for a layman to contest his assertions. If you find a better explanation of the origin of obesity and effective strategies to counter it, read it.
Linux Software: Code to the Beat
My friend Moises Blanco has a couple of new software reviews on music players and HTML editors on his blog Tech Review: One User at a Time.
John Brown Remembered
John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sentimentality is not an appropriate reaction to the life and career of John Brown. When the question of whether "Bleeding Kansas" would become a slave or a free state hung in the balance, Brown's gang tipped the balance against Missouri's pro-slavery marauders by hauling five of them from their beds and hacking them to pieces with broadswords. As a result, "Old Brown" not only terrorized the pro-slavery forces, mostly invaders from Missouri who were not above such tactics themselves, but also transformed the the stereotype in the South of Northern abolitionists from "cowardly pacifists" to "murderous fanatics."
In John Brown: Abolitionist, David Reynolds draws a straight line from John Brown's massacre at Pottawatomie through the Emancipation Proclamation to William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea and the tactics of total war that ultimately led to victory for the Union.
Brown was unusual among Northern Abolitionists in his willingness to employ violence against slaveholders; he was virtually unique in his radical passion for complete equality and full integration into American society of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. Brown lived what her preached, spending many of his later years as a member of a largely African American community in North Elba.
In the famous raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, Brown gave the ultimate expression to his devotion to the cause of liberation of the slaves and full equality for African Americans. With a small company of whites and African Americans, Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry and held off several hundred state militia until he was finally overwhelmed by Col. Robert E. Lee in command of some 60 United States Marines.
In staging the raid, Brown was inspired in part by past slave revolts led by such figures as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. That a white Northern Abolitionist would attempt to raise such a revolt on Southern soil horrified and terrified the South, giving a major impetus toward secession.
In the North, initial reaction was largely negative, as Brown's raid was derided as "suicide" and "folly." So it might have remained, were it not for the perhaps surprising response of New England Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a lengthy Plea for Captain John Brown, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who proclaimed that Brown's execution would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross." In the event, Brown became a hero to the North, thousands of whose troops marched South singing, "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave." If Brown assumed an almost Christ-like status in the North, in the South he was regarded as the devil incarnate.
Reynolds' history is particularly effective as "cultural history." He deftly explores the religious antecedents to Brown, who was often characterized as an old-style Puritan in the mold of Oliver Cromwell and whose favorite sermon was John Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He persuasively explains how the influences of the New England Transcendentalists helped shape public perceptions of Brown that hardened the nation's attitudes toward war. And he has a thoughtful coda on Brown's influence on such prominent African American figures as Frederick Douglass (a friend), W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X.
White opinion of Brown reached its nadir after the collapse of Reconstruction, and it is no surprise that Southern revisionist historians derided him as a lunatic. Books such as Reynolds', however, suggest that while Brown may have been capable of great brutality (albeit also great kindness), he was far from being insane, and that the nobility of his conduct during and following the raid on Harper's Ferry was a crucial element in galvanizing public determination to end the evil of slavery.
John Brown Day
Hon. Bob McDonnell
Governor of Virginia
Dear Governor McDonnell:
In light your enthusiasm for Civil War history and your desire to perpetuate the memory of the conflict, I propose the official commemoration of one of two memorable days in Virginia Civil War history (the other being April 9, 1865, the day of the surrender at Appomattox). For those who truly wish to recall the significance of the Civil War, let us declare December 2 a holiday in memory of the death of the patriot John Brown, who gave his life that this country should live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence that "All men are created equal."
Respectfully yours,
Bill Day
The Perversion of Adam Smith
Image via Wikipedia
The name of Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, has unfortunately been reduced in modern times to a cliche for a sexual kink. Spinning out his fantasies of sex and power, mostly from within prison walls, as France's corrupt ancien regime crumbled, de Sade had a clear-eyed view of the implications of the pursuit of self-gratification without restraint; not only did he see it, but he exalted it into a philosophy.
Dipping into Justine on my subway ride into work, I am continually struck by the elegance and simplicity of the creed of le bon Marquis. It might be crudely rendered, "Good guys finish last," but that would be incomplete. The Marquis spells out the full implications of that little phrase, and maybe his spirit is better captured in P.T. Barnum's credo, "Never give a sucker an even break." For de Sade, this is not merely a maxim, but a principle. Not only do the strong oppress the weak in de Sade's writings, but the strong should oppress the weak. To do otherwise would be frankly irrational.
The weak are not wholly helpless, of course. They can volunteer as the minions of their oppressors in the hopes that they will be spared so long as they are useful or entertaining. And even strong personalities need allies; so prudential considerations sometimes temporarily restrain the impulse to dominate and exploit. Or, finally, the weak can resort to crime:
"Think it over, my child, and understand that nature has placed us in a situation where evil is necessary, and that she gives us at the same time the means to employ it, so that evil obeys its own laws just as good does, and natures gains as much from one as the other; we were created equal, but what changes this equality is no more culpable than what seeks to reestablish it."
Justine, 467 (my translation).
De Sade was a contemporary of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. In a way, de Sade is a bit like Smith with the gloves taken off. Smith postulated a world of perfect competition in which the invisible hand of the marketplace would regulate men's affairs as each person pursued his own self-interest. De Sade turns Smith's orderly marketplace into a carnival in which self-interest runs amok. The invisible hand does not cease to order the mechanism of society, but the social consequences are poisonous. De Sade has a clear-eyed view of the real consequences of unrestrained self-interest, in which the strong prosper and the weak go to the wall, and he glories in it. De Sade sees people prosper by rapine and murder, so he concludes that this is the natural order, and "virtue" but a fantasy of the weak or a deceit of the strong. In his lawless dystopia, everyone is free and no one is safe; self-interest reigns supreme, and we are once again microbes brewing in Jack London's "yeasty ferment." De Sade is the anti-Kant: Kant cautioned that people should always be viewed as ends rather than means; de Sade retorts the people should always be exploited as means rather than ends, and that Smith and Kant are sentimental ninnies.
Image via Wikipedia
If those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, then perhaps the bankers and brokers of today's ancien regime should dust off the history books and remind themselves that the Place de la Concorde once went by a very different name. We teeter on the abyss, but we can save ourselves yet if only we take heed.
HST calls it on 9 12
Via Glenn Greenwald, a reminder of how one of America's underrated writers foresaw the havoc that 9/11 would wreak on American institutions, as the country hunkered down for an endless war against an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who could be our own citizens or mysterious men in caves abroad, in which privacy was a luxury and Big Brother was watching. Hunter Thompson didn't wait long enough to see how it will all play out before he blew his brains out, but his canny take on the day after gives us a pretty good clue.
Lest we forget . . .
I yield to no one who did not personally lose a loved one in his sorrow over the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Thousands died horrible deaths, and that is a genuine tragedy. We cannot bring them back. We cannot alleviate their suffering or undue their pain. But we can honor their memory best by the way we choose to live.
The events of September 11 were a national tragedy. But it was not a national catastrophe. In terms of lives, we lost 3,000 to 4,000; more die in traffic accidents every year. In terms of property, two and half highly symbolic office buildings were destroyed. In comparison with the last great attack on American soil, our chief naval base in the Pacific and most of our Pacific fleet was not destroyed. Our overseas bases and territories were not overrun. We were not immediately embroiled in a global conflict on two continents that threatened the very survival of the free world and measured civilian casualties by the millions.
In response to 9/11, we laid waste two countries. Our airports require us to go through a series of gymnastics that would daunt Nadia Comeneci. Our computer records are an open book to the government. When we are not paralyzed by fear of foreign terrorists, we are tormenting domestic immigrants. We will not long remain the land of the free, if we become the home of the craven.
Our country's first war produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Patriot Act is not a worthy successor.
Let us honor our dead and protect our country. But let us also remember that we strive be a country of openness, tolerance, courage, and freedom. Let us not be so scarred by the memory of one terrible day that we are unable to carry on the cause of freedom with the fearlessness of our ancestors.