If I am a shareholder in a corporation, why should the corporation be allowed to spend my money for political purposes without my specific consent?
Siri-ously Siri
All right, this Apple parody may be a little dated, but who could resist a second look!
Howard Kurtz on Station's Supreme Court Stumble
In retrospect, the easiest way to get a feel for which way the Court had ruled would have been to look at who dissented - Scalia, Alito, and Thomas were hardly going to vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act against Breyer, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Kurtz is withering in his assessment of Fox's refusal to apologize for (gleefully) getting the story wrong; he calls it Orwellian.
WMATA Whines
There probably is something more annoying than the empty anti-terrorist warnings of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, but at this moment I am not sure what.
PGP: Privacy for the People
See my latest post in the digital privacy series at the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition.
Arch Linux Tenth Anniversary
Arch Linux celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. While I use Debian for my desktop and home server, Arch's lean, clean installation and bleeding edge packaging is perfect for my laptop. For me, it's an enthusiast's OS of choice.
A Single Addressbook? Impossible, Apparently.
One of the minor frustrations of my cyber-life is the lack of a universal address book. My hypothetical requirements seem deceptively simple: a cross-device, cross-platform, and cross-application central address book. In other words, I could enter address, phone, fax, and email information once and then access it in any device in both my email clients and my word processors and text editors. Simple, right? Not so very.
As it stands, there seem to be three major alternatives, none of which is quite satisfactory: LDAP, Caldav/Carddav, and whatever the hell Microsoft Exchange has under the hood. LDAP is widely accepted and reputedly is efficient and scales well. However, it is a beast to configure, finicky, and seems to lack a consistent format. Carddav seems to be simpler and more uniform but is not as widely available — for example, Mozilla Thunderbird at least works partially with LDAP, but not at all with Carddav. And Microsoft, well Microsoft seems mostly to want to play only with Microsoft (although the iPhone admittedly integrates nicely with Exchange).
Even if I can mostly get my different email clients — Outlook, Horde, Evolution, Thunderbird, and Emacs — to share at least one of the above databases and to sync with at least some of the others, the word processor situation seems to be pretty hopeless. I would like to be able to click a mouse or tap a key and insert the relevant address information from my universal address book into whatever it is I am typing: an email, a fax, or a letter. At various times, I use Word, WordPerfect, Libreoffice, and Emacs, but I have yet to find a fully satisfactory solution for any of them, much less for all of them.
The Virtues of Conservatism
My favorite essayist, George Orwell, defended Rudyard Kipling, for all his faults, in part on the grounds that he was a poet of personal responsibility. He understood that actions have consequences, and he tried to imagine the life of those who had to take action and live with the consequences. A Socialist himself, Orwell was nevertheless able to appreciate the virtues of one of Britain's arch conservatives.
Today's political world seems more polarized than ever, and it is tempting for those of us on the left to conflate the American Right with its most odious representatives, such as the crude buffoon Rush Limbaugh. People like Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized a higher truth, however, when he said one had to love one's opponents. One thing that was remarkable about King is that he actually seemed to mean it. He made the distinction that love does not require liking, but it does require a fundamental recognition of the humanity of other people even if they disagree with you, sometimes in rather crude or brutal fashion.
I was reading today a discussion in which a lonely conservative was complaining about the certitude and self-righteousness of "liberals," which seems to be a common occupation of conservatives today. I would contend that history would vindicate the fact that many liberal criticisms of America's conservative politics are apt and justified. But this person's comments also got me thinking in another direction. What virtues, if any, could I think of that I would attribute particularly to conservatism? While my perspective may be somewhat circumscribed, my intent it is to be empathetic rather than patronizing.
Personal Generosity
It is well known that conservatives and religious people generally make more generous personal contributions of their time and money to charity, even if they may be opposed to governmental programs designed to help those in need. And I have a number of friends and relatives who are both conservative and very charming, despite the fact that on certain points I find their views objectionable or offensive.
Honor
I think it is perhaps fair to say that many conservatives have a stronger sense of honor, which is not to be confused with honesty, than liberals do. In general, my sense is that conservatives think about honor as a value, and that this is reflected in an interest in certain kinds of service such as the military.
Self-Reliance
The flip side of a certain skepticism about the efficacy of the government is confidence in the ability of individuals to affect their own destiny. This is an obvious incentive to individual effort and achievement, even liberals may believe that conservatives sometimes overstate the actual extent of personal self-reliance.
Faith
There is a positive side to faith in the sense that it inspires good conduct and generous actions.
Skepticism
This may seem odd coming right after faith, but fundamental to true conservatism is not only a sense of the limitations of government but a generally healthy suspicion of large systems, programs, and ideologies. Edmund Burke had a healthy sense of how practical application was often more important than theoretical consistency.
i am sure that my attempt at a list will be found wanting by both Left and Right, but more important than the list itself is that it is a healthy thing to think not only about the points on which we differ but also about the qualities we admire in our opponents. Even if one rejects my attempt at a list, I would encourage others to engage in the same exercise, perhaps with better results.
Gays and the Movement
I periodically hear people argue that the struggle for homosexuals to achieve full equality under the law is not comparable to the Civil Rights Movement, and even that a comparison of the two is offensive. The argument, which I believe is fundamentally rooted in prejudice, seems to take several forms.
One form is the argument that gay suffering is not comparable to African American suffering. While it may be true that, with the possible exception of Native Americans, no community has suffered in America to the degree that African Americans have, this does mean that we should overlook either the suffering of others or their right to equal treatment. And in a country where consensual sex between members of the same sex was long a criminal offense, one can hardly argue that gays have had an easy time of it.
It is worth noting also that the language of opposition to gay rights and gay marriage is not typically the language of tolerance, inclusion, equality, and love. Not all opposition is couched in the language of bigotry, but enough is to render suspect the motives of the opposition.
Some will argue that gays should be content with a lesser legal status in the form of "civil unions.". The problem with this argument, as we have seen ever since Plessy v. Ferguson, is that the majority will only protect the prerogatives of the minority when the minority's rights are coextensive with the majority's. Sauce for the goose. If gays want to be sure that their marital rights are identical in law and fact to those of other citizens, then their status needs to be the same: marriage.
I find the argument that extending the institution of marriage to the gay community will somehow ruin marriage for the rest of us to be absurd and disingenuous. If anything the desire of the gay community to participate in the institution only serves to validate marriage and affirm its importance as a foundation of modern society. The only reason for disagreement is an immature queasiness about gay sexuality that underpins a view that gays are not in every respect equal and deserving of equal rights.
Such intolerance sometimes takes the form of the argument that homosexuality is a matter of voluntary misconduct rather than immutable biology. Apart from the contrafactual nature of this argument, it is consistent with the hostility toward gay sexuality so often expressed by opponents of gay marriage. And one might easily conclude that proponents of this view who are loudest in their profession of their Christianity are the least Christ-like in their views.
Finally, if civil rights pioneer and former SNCC Chairman John Lewis, the hero of the Pettus Bridge, considers gay marriage to be a Civil Rights issue, who am I to disagree?
The Paris of the Mind
Amongst other books, I have been intermittently rereading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, induced perhaps by a recent viewing of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Doing so has once again fueled my vision of my imaginary Paris, where one sits across from Joyce at the cafe or debates Gertrude Stein at her apartment or borrows books on credit from Shakespeare & Company. Of course, it is the Paris not merely of the Lost Generation, but of their great antecedents as well: Zola, Proust, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Voltaire, and so on.
By the time one reaches my age, one is pretty well reconciled to falling short of Eliot and Hemingway. There is, however, still the nagging question of whether, even if one cannot play the lead, one could not still be a bit player, a Pound or a Stein. What a privilege to find oneself immersed in such a milieu, to observe and perhaps even to assist the great literary endeavors of one's time. Perhaps the ultimate lesson, however, is to make the most of the minds around us while we have the time. After all, Paris is a moveable feast . . . .
RIP Andrew Breitbart
As a lawyer, I am in the business of levying accusations against powerful institutions and trying to prove them. Although Andrew Breitbart was on the opposite side of the political spectrum, to the extent that he was trying to do the same thing, I have some sympathy for him.
I aspire to differ from Breitbart, however, in a couple of key ways. First, I try to be guided more by compassion than by rage. Second, however zealous I may be to uncover wrongdoing, I hope to maintain a respect for truth and fairness that I did not discern in Mr. Breitbart, particularly with respect to his treatment of Shirley Sherrod. Whatever his personal disposition may have been, his public actions seemed to be motivated more by malice than by probity. His means smacked of deliberate dishonesty. However one might feel about him personally, his contributions to American journalism will not be missed.
Which Side Are You On?
It is one of the ironies of our time that the last vicious efforts to put the final nail in the coffin of American unions should be followed by news of the appalling labor practices of the Asian manufacturers upon whom our high tech companies depend. (And,yes, I am writing this post on an iPhone.) Rather than allowing the misplaced envy of the right wing to reduce all of our workers to poverty and serfdom, we should be pursuing a National Industrial Policy aimed, in part, at improving the lot of Asia's slave laborers to the point where working people in all of our countries can lead a decent life. This idea is neither original nor new, but perhaps its time has finally come.
MLK and the American Dream
I stepped off the subway today basking in the glow of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s American Dream speech. Among the most memorable lines from that speech are "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,' and "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I am free at last," which would late be inscribed on Dr. King's tomb. The thirty-minute speech is a wide-ranging discursion on the meaning of the rights of humanity, embracing meditations on the words of Jefferson, Plato, Aristotle, Donne, and Jesus, and calling for justice in all parts of the world from Jackson, Mississippi to Calcutta, India. King outlines his strategy of nonviolence and calls for love of our oppressors in the highest sense. Perhaps surprisingly, his greatest applause line was the statement that black supremacy was as much to be feared as white supremacy. He is unequivocal in his call for unity, humanity, and brotherhood even as he is clear eyed about the reality of beatings, jail, and lynching. Those who doubt that this was the most powerful voice of the twentieth century need to listen to this speech.
Darrow For the Defense
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am haunted by the ghosts of the breaker boys. At the beginning of the twentieth century, little boys of 10 and 12 worked six days a week for ten-hour days perched over coal chutes from which they plucked bits of rock. Clarence Darrow, at the time the most famous attorney for the coal miners, described the fate of one such boy as follows:
One day his little companion who always sat beside him leaned too far over as he picked the slate. He lost his balance and fell into the trough where the lumps of coal ran down. He plunged madly along with the rushing flood into the iron teeth of the remorseless breaker.... It took a long while to stop the mighty machine, and then it was almost an hour before the boy could be put together in one pile. Several days thereafter a man in a little town in Massachusetts thought that he saw blood on some lumps of coal that he was pouring into the top of his fine nickel-plated stove — but still there is blood on all our coal — and for that matter on almost everything we use, but a man is a fool if he looks for other people's blood.
Darrow was labor's lawyer early in his career, until his defense of the McNamara brothers for blowing up the Los Angeles Times building collapsed in a guilty plea, albeit one that saved the brothers from the gallows.
At the other end of his career, one of Darrow's more notable cases, tried in the wake of the famous Scopes monkey trial, was the defense of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American physician who moved with his family into a white neighborhood in Detroit, where they soon found themselves surrounded by a lynch mob numbering hundreds of angry white people. Sweet had taken the precaution of seeing that his family was well armed, however, and they fired repeatedly into the crowd, killing and wounding several people. In the subsequent murder trial, Darrow took on the defense and won a remarkable acquittal.
It was said of Darrow that he was cynical in everything, except that he lacked real cynicism. An atheist, a champion and practitioner of "free love," a lawyer who would defend the most depraved criminals and take on the most hopeless causes, Darrow earned his sobriquet "attorney for the damned" honestly. Convinced that human beings were the products of their circumstances and that free will was a myth, the only thing Darrow truly believed in was mercy. And he was perhaps the century's greatest exponent of mercy, a quality that was all the more remarkable in the astonishingly brutal and corrupt Chicago of his day. Though he was willing to defend the most depraved of criminals if the price was right, he was also highly unusual in his willingness to take up such hopeless causes as those of the breaker boys and Ossian Sweet.
This fine biography by John A. Farrell not only evokes Darrow in all his brilliant, Byronic splendor and fallibility, but also provides a keen insight into America's crippled psyche.
Email Encryption
I added a new post on encrypting email with S/MIME to my series on digital privacy at the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. It reminded me of the difficultry in striking a balance between providing enough information to be useful and accurate but not so much as to discourage or confuse, particularly since the series is aimed at sophisticated people who are nevertheless complete novices when it comes to encryption. Of course, not being a cryptanalyst, computer programmer, or mathematician myself, I also try to keep within the bounds of my own limited, practical knowledge.
No Pain, No Loss
The New York Times reports that taking weight off and keeping it off is likely to be even harder than previously imagined. People who lose 10 percent or more of body weight suffer a metabolic change that causes them to burn food more slowly, develop more efficient muscles, and suffer from increased food cravings. In other words, once you have put on the fat, it is very hard to go back to being skinny. And even when you take off weight, it is hard to keep it off. The Times describes the kind of vigilance that is necessary as follows:
There is no consistent pattern to how people in the registry lost weight — some did it on Weight Watchers, others with Jenny Craig, some by cutting carbs on the Atkins diet and a very small number lost weight through surgery. But their eating and exercise habits appear to reflect what researchers find in the lab: to lose weight and keep it off, a person must eat fewer calories and exercise far more than a person who maintains the same weight naturally. Registry members exercise about an hour or more each day — the average weight-loser puts in the equivalent of a four-mile daily walk, seven days a week. They get on a scale every day in order to keep their weight within a narrow range. They eat breakfast regularly. Most watch less than half as much television as the overall population. They eat the same foods and in the same patterns consistently each day and don’t “cheat” on weekends or holidays. They also appear to eat less than most people, with estimates ranging from 50 to 300 fewer daily calories.
The challenge may not be insuperable, but it clearly is a challenge.
Why Hitch Is Still Winning the Debate
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather then sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
From: a program at Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture on "Moral Emancipation":
Faith, Culture, Skepticism, and the “New Atheism”
--Patrick Flynn, Benedictine University
[In the wake of 9-11, five best-selling authors became known as New Atheists and their arguments, movement, the New Atheism. It is my contention that there is much epistemologically objectionable with these highly equivocal and misleading New Atheist arguments.]
Farewell to Barnes & Noble
I made my last trip yesterday to what used to be our local Barnes & Noble bookstore. There was still a small cluster of fiction, war history, foreign language and diet books in the center of the store, along with some bestsellers on display. But the front of the store had been taken over by a simulacrum of an Apple Store pushing the "Nook," and the rest of the store seemed largely devoted to toys for small children. Even the music section had been gutted and turned over to video sales. The incredible shrinking book selection is so limited that it no longer presents a credible alternative to shopping on line. My prediction: within five years, Barnes and Noble, if it exists, will be a virtual operation: the brick and mortar stores will have gone the way of Borders.
Love and Glory: Last of the Lymond Chronicles
Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is not often that the final course of a six course meal is as satisfying as the first, but Dorothy Dunnett serves up a banquet in the Lymond Chronicles that pleases more with every volume.
The violence of the sixteenth century court and battlefield sometimes reaches almost cartoonish levels, and the level of intrigue is such that, did we not have a record of such (later) historical events as the Gunpowder Plot, it could hardly be credited. Nevertheless, the novels are beautifully paced and plotted, and Dunnett weaves a rich tapestry depicting the pageantry, poetry, music, literature, and science of the era immediately preceding the cultural explosion of Elizabeth's reign. Indeed, while the novels deal principally with France and Scotland, looming in the background throughout is the rise of English greatness following the ascent of her most illustrious monarch.
To borrow a phrase from As Time Goes By, in the end, it's "the same old story, a tale of love and glory." But what a tale, and how beautifully told!
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Organizational Challenges
I have always greatly admired people with a natural flair for organization; unfortunately I am not one of them. For the rest of us, there is org-mode. And what might that be? I hear you say.
Org-mode is a customization of the powerful, and programmable, text editor Emacs. Don't be misled by the "text editor" label; Emacs is to text editors as Ferrari is to cars; except that Emacs is free. More aptly, perhaps, it could be characterized as the Swiss Army Knife of the digital world, being adapted to everything from software development to playing music to composing email.
For me, however, the killer feature is org-mode. Org-mode takes simple text files and turns them into a full-fledged personal planner, and it is completely customizable! The down side is that, while org-mode is simplicity itself to use, it can be the very devil to configure (the price of complete customizability). Forturnately, there is plenty of help online, such as Bernt Hansen's excellent web page. So if you have the time, patience, and determination necessary to assemble a first-class organizational tool, download a copy of Emacs and org-mode and have at it!