Things I Know I Know

Eye Level from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

which is really cool.

...Except, can I say one thing...full feeds, people! I mean it.

Posted by debco at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Not even the virtual kind, looks like:

An official monitor in the online role-playing game Second Life told BBC News in April that he knows of spouses of game players who have actually paid money to online-game detectives to learn whether their mates are committing ''virtual adultery'' with other players' characters in the course of the game. (Second Life encourages players to create a character and live out a made-up existence, which can of course include having an affair with another player's made-up character.)

Posted by debco at 06:47 PM | Permalink

Way back in March I did a post about the Mo Movie Measure, which talks about movies where 1) there are at least two female characters with names, who 2) talk to each other sometime in the course of the movie, about 3) something other than a man.

Jaibe has posted in comments to that thread that the cartoon itself has now been posted on Alison Bechel's blog.

Love the web!

Though it turns out Mo isn't actually involved in Mo's Movie Measure at all:

Julie from Portland, OR, kindly emailed us to let us know that lefty blogs like Pandagon have been discussing the Mo Movie Measure a film-going concept that originated in an early DTWOF strip, circa 1985. We were excited to hear that someone still remembers this 20-year-old chestnut.

But alas, the principle is misnamed. It appears in "The Rule," a strip found on page 22 of the original DTWOF collection. Mo actually doesn't appear in DTWOF until two years later. Her first strip can be found half-way through More DTWOF. Alison would also like to add that she can't claim credit for the actual "rule." She stole it from a friend, Liz Wallace, whose name is on the marquee in the comic strip, reprinted below.

And I just want you to know (because I'm like that) that my blog comes up as the number two hit in the Google search for Mo Movie Measure. Higher than Pandagon. So even though they clearly work harder, post more stuff, and have more readers, I have totally beaten them in this important area.

Posted by debco at 03:48 PM | Permalink

To continue--and, yeah, SPOILERS, Spoilers, spoilers....

In The Butterfly Effect, Evan keeps returning to the past to change it and make it all better. In one of his first trips he ends up saving his girlfriend from her pedophilic abusive father (sort of), while turning her brother into a sadistic criminal. Saving the sister turned her (and apparently by association) Evan into preppies, she a member of the most popular sorority and he a frat boy who dresses in bright yellow jackets.

While it's interesting to speculate why she would be able to watch her father constantly beating her brother and be unaffected (or maybe that's why she's in a sorority--to have the perfect life and learn to ignore bad stuff), that's not relevant to our thoughts today. Back in the ‘present' Evan is happily dating Kayleigh (though apparently before he came back from the past he was a boorish, cheating, jerky frat guy, happily dating Kayleigh). The returned-from-the-past Evan prepares a beautiful dinner for Kayleigh (which she says is not at all like him) but it's ruined by the destruction of his car and the news that Tommy, the sadistic, evil brother is out of prison. As Evan is walking Kayleigh home (and if they're as worried about the brother as they say they are--why are they walking alone through the woods), Evan is attacked by baseball bat wielding Tommy. Evan gets the bat away from Tommy and defeats Tommy. Then, after he's defeated, Evan deliberately beats him to death.

Eventually after several more trips back in time, Evan makes everything more or less all right. We're supposed to forget, I think, that out of four main characters in the story, three of them have been, in one reality or another, murderers.

So here's the question: if you're willing to kill someone in one timeline or alternate reality does that make you a killer in this one? I think the answer is yes. If you did it, and you remember it, you're a killer. Circumstances matter, of course, and the circumstance for Evan is that he meant to kill Tommy. At this point in the movie, Tommy had done some horrible things--killed a pet dog and beat up innocent bystanders and, of course, Evan remembers bad things from other time lines, too. But he still deliberately killed him, not in self-defense, not in panic, by bashing his head in with a baseball bat.

Obviously, you're never going to be punished for killing someone in an alternate timeline that doesn't exist any more. In the ‘real' or final timeline the person is alive. So, is it really murder or is it more like wishing they were dead. Well, it's really murder. You really did it. And it counts.

The more important questions are what does it mean and what do you do about it? This, to me, is more interesting than the question the movie actually asked, which is how do I ‘fix' my life and my girlfriend's life so they're just right? Maybe someday I'll write that story--if I can make it sufficiently unlike The Butterfly Effect. It would also have to incorporate the premise that women are people too and not just objects that men rescue or love or improve the lives of without asking

Posted by debco at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This (and the post following) are ones I wrote about a year ago and never posted because that was about the time I quit blogging for awhile.

SPOILERS ABOUND

And, if you want to read an actual good article about morality and choices and fictional characters, you should read Creating the Innocent Killer by John Kessel, instead of this one, which is just stuff I made up off the top of my head.

So, I just watched (most of) The Butterfly Effect. This is the story of a kid who blacks out in his youth when certain terrible things happen. It turns out that he has the ability to go back to these points in time and change what happened. It's grim and occasionally mean-spirited though it has a happy ending, which, coupled with its grimness makes the feeling of the movie very uneven. The blackouts are never explained--you think it's because that's when his adult self is possessing his child body, but the event really happens unchanged in at least one reality and so the first time it must have been just him, the child, standing there seeing it.

The central story is that Evan can return to these moments in time by reading his journal. He takes over the body of his younger self and ‘fixes' the situation. Of course, the way the situation is handled turns out to affect way more than Evan expects because although Evan is book-smart and majoring in psychology he's not really that bright about how the world works. It's not really the Butterfly Effect (which says that the flutter of a butterfly's wings can cause a typhoon in China--or something to that effect--and is a simplistic explanation of chaos theory). Because for one thing the effects are always clear right there in front of us in the event. They happen at the moment Evan makes the change. A child murders another child; a boy hears something so horrible he is compelled to become that thing; a girl dies; a boy loses his arms and the use of his legs. Those things don't happen because of a ripple effect; they happen right then and there. How life turns out from there is, of course, mighty different.

There are two issues with the movie--quite different issues that affect different factors. It takes Evan an enormously long time to figure out that what he does matters. He wants to just make one person's life ‘right' and he always winds up screwing everyone's life up (and, of course, making one person's life really, really bad) but it takes him probably four trips into the past before it even seems to occur to him that this is happening. He wants to do heroic things without paying any prices. And it's clear (though we are never given the details) that his father, who had the same talent never got beyond this stage. Evan eventually does but it's repetitious and doesn't speak well of Evan's character. It's possibly a weakness of the limits of movie-making, but I think it's more likely a flaw in the story. Evan needs someone in the world to talk to and plan with and process. Of course, that wouldn't have allowed him to get into all those grim, life-threatening, sexually perverted situations.

The other issue that the movie walks away from and never addresses at all is that at least three of the main characters whose lives Evan is playing with (including Evan himself) are completely capable of murder. Evan (and of course no one else since they don't know what's going on) never face up to this. He never questions what kind of person he is--a boy his father tries to kill, who continues to play god for the sake of one woman's life, who would kill a childhood friend because he (Evan) was holding a bat in his hand.

Posted by debco at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Year that the trustees of Social Security expect their program's trust fund to run out: 2041

Percent of benefits that would still be paid through the program's other sources of income in 2041: 74

Year that the trustees of Medicare expect their program's trust fund to run out: 2020

Percent of answers about billing provided by Medicare customer service representatives that were wrong: 96

Percent of wrong answers that a toad, through random leaps, provided to the same questions: 50

Posted by debco at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...or why economists will always be wrong.

This ought, of course, to be a full-blown essay, but it'll be a long time before I get around to that so think of this as the skeleton of an essay and you can fill in the blanks yourself.

I read way too often the idea that it's puzzling and irrational for people to cooperate, but it isn't. Cooperation and altruism only look irrational if you assume that emotion holds no value. Read 'Don't Shoot the Dog' by Karen Pryor and learn why 'might' only sometimes kind-of rules. Every example that appears to be such a mystery to economists and researchers can be explained very simply--because we are capable of love.

Cooperation and trust are (for the logical crowd) the way we get repeat business and one of the best ways to get things done.

But cooperation and trust also happen because:

--We want to think well of ourselves
--We care about people in general
--We want others to think well of us (for reasons other than making money off them)
--We want to be worth loving
--We want others to be worthy of our love

But because we won't recognize these things or include them in 'rational' analyses, we are vulnerable to free riders, those who take more than their 'fair share,' (well, we rationalize, they're just being rational. How can we fault them for that?').

Posted by debco at 08:43 AM | Permalink

...via BoingBoing:

Posted by debco at 01:35 PM | Permalink

There is no social security crisis:

Social Security is America's promise that those who work hard and play by the rules will retire with dignity. Even the most pessimistic of economists agree it will remain solvent for decades. There is no crisis.

Posted by debco at 06:17 PM | Permalink

Here's an interesting account by Avi Rubin about being an election judge in a precinct with electronic machines. Rubin was one of the authors of a paper on the inherent insecurity of the Diebold electronic voting machines:

I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy. I fundamentally believe that we have thrown our trust in the outcome of our elections in the hands of a handful of companies (Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S) who are in a position to control the final outcomes of our elections. I also believe that the outcomes can be changed without any knowledge by election judges or anyone else. Furthermore, meaningful recounts are impossible with these machines.

I also believe that we have great people working in the trenches and on the front lines. These are ordinary people, mostly elderly, who believe in our country and our democracy, and who work their butts off for 16 hours, starting at 6 a.m. to try to keep the mechanics of our elections running smoothly. It is a shame that the e-voting tidal wave has a near hypnotic effect on these judges and almost all voters. I believe that after today's experience, I am much better equipped to make the arguments against e-voting machines with no voter verifiability, but I also have a great appreciation for how hard it is going to be to fight them, given how much voters and election officials love them.

Posted by debco at 10:16 AM | Permalink

I like the number 12. I have this short story entitled, 'Twelve.' It's not finished because I don't know exactly why it's called 'Twelve.' But 12...good number.

So, naturally, I'm drawn to GatorGSA at the University of Florida and their 12 Reasons Gay Marriage will Ruin Society, including:

• Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are always imposed on the entire country. That's why we only have one religion in America.
• Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people makes you tall.
• Children can never succeed without both male and female role models at home. That's why single parents are forbidden to raise children.

Posted by debco at 03:46 PM | Permalink

Arguments rage in the Buffyverse, even now that the show is no longer on the air--Is it Buffy and Angel 4ever? Did Buffy ever really love Spike? Did Willow pay a deep enough price for her Dark Willowiness? Was Spike redeemed only after he got his soul? From what I've seen and read--and I admit there's much I've neither seen nor read--Joss Whedon and the writers would answer, 'no,' to this latter question. Spike was still evil before he got his soul back, he just couldn't act on his evilness.

Now, if the writers say it's so, it's so--or at least they intended that it be so. But let me see if I can explain why I--and, I think, a lot of other viewers--thought that what actually played out in front of us on-screen told us a different story.

In his book, Good Business, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, says this about soul:

Perhaps the best way to explain what the word "soul" connotes is that, no matter how complex a system is, we judge it as having no soul if all its energies are devoted merely to keeping itself alive and growing. We attribute soul to those entities that use some portion of their energy not only for their own sake, but to make contact with other beings and to care for them.

This definition actually works pretty well in the Buffyverse.

Angel--cared about people; had a soul
Angelus--cared about nothing; had no soul

Vampires in general--care about nothing except their next meal and a little violence

You can apply these criteria to the humans, and the ex-demon, Anya, as well.

When Anya was a demon, she didn't care about anything except vengence. When she first become human, she didn't care about much except getting her powers back and staying alive. But then, she started to care about Xander. Gradually, though she didn't always like it, she started to care about Xander's friends and even about saving the world. When Xander dumped her at their wedding and she got her vengence demon-ness back, she was a lousy vengence demon because she wasn't willing to give up her soul.

Willow was all about soul through the first five and a half (okay, maybe the first five) seasons. She cared about the world, she cared about her friends, she was brave and smart and her career choice when she graduated from high school was to help save the world. But she put her soul in danger when she started to care more about power than about her friends (though she fooled herself into thinking it was about them). And she lost it entirely when Tara was killed. She didn't care about anything then except destroying the world. She got her soul back because Xander cared about her.

Spike cared about Drusilla right from the start. He cared about Dawn, and a little bit about Joyce, in season five, though he didn't really want to and I don't think he liked it much. He thought he cared about Buffy, but he didn't until maybe the end of season five or possibly the beginning of season six. By then, I think he did care about her (though it was also very mixed up with the things Spike didn't know much about--like being human--and with obsession and sex and violence).

So, by my reckoning, Spike already had his soul when he went to Africa, though I'm not sure he knew it. I think the demon gave him what he wanted, sort of like the Wizard gave the scarecrow and the tin man and the cowardly lion the things they wanted--things they already had, but hadn't realized yet.

Posted by debco at 04:40 PM | Permalink

One of my peeves is when someone thanks me for doing something that I absolutely, postively don't want to do (or had already said I wouldn't do) in the first place. I've been thinking about this lately. Sometimes, sure, you do things you don't want to do or said you wouldn't do or, at work, have clear policies that say 'we don't do that,' and it doesn't make me angry either to do it or to be thanked for it. But the difference is whether it's my choice or not. If it is my choice, then, yes, I chose to do it even though I didn't want to and it's something I appreciate being thanked for--I went the extra mile, I did something I didn't have to, I excercised my own autonomy and authority to take care of the problem, whatever it was.

But, if I didn't decide, if my boss (for example), tells me I have to do it or it's something that just comes--a sudden tsunami of incredibly careless, uncaring people--then don't thank me for it. It wasn't my pleasure, it wasn't nothing. And it's the 'thank you' that irritates me way more than the 'you have to do this' in the first place. It's a reinforcer--someone else had the power and I did not and now they want to pretend it was just a friendly transaction.

On the other hand (and just to confuse the issue completely) being recognized for those efforts in some broad sense...well, that gives power back to me again so, okay.

Posted by debco at 01:05 PM | Permalink

Rick Munarriz at Motley Fool has a column on the record companies recent attacks on small-time file sharers:

Amidst enough mixed signals to freeze up a recording studio mixing board, we're down to a bloody battle that no one wanted. In filing suit against 261 citizens who have downloaded free music files from the Internet, the fortified music industry has essentially started shelling a galleon manned by 60 million pirates that look like you and me. As a result, the attackers have a daunting challenge on their hands. How do you sink the ship while saving the passengers? And, while we're at it, does anyone know how many olive branches it takes to craft a makeshift lifeboat?

...

In a great thread within our Fool Community (subscription required) some of our members were debating whether or not the term "piracy" is an appropriate tag for MP3 swappers. You're welcome to share your thoughts if you'd like to, but I'm not much in the mood to pass judgment. Unlike the RIAA, I have no interest in cultivating 60 million enemies in an industry in which platinum success is measured a million fans at a time.

My point is that, regardless of what you brand it or where it falls within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, does any of it matter if the collateral damage smells of hara-kiri? Alienation may have merit on an artistic level, but it's certainly not a welcome trait for an industry that is banking on the disposable income of the masses.

...

Yes, traffic to the P2P file-trading networks fell over the summer as consumers learned to respect RIAA's long arm of the law. However, the decline in music CD sales actually accelerated during the same period. The industry killed the pirate, but in so doing ripped out the soul of the once-ardent music fan inside. While the notion of 60 million people ripping off the industry was painful, at least they valued music as something worth pilfering.

I'm reading a book right now on distruptive versus sustaining technologies and eventually I'll probably blog something here. mp3s and file sharing are disruptive certainly, and disruptive technologies have killed more than one established company (in fact, that's very often what kills well-run established companies), but it's hard to feel as much sympathy as one might when the record labels are so busy killing themselves off. And it's really hard to have much sympathy when they're mucking with long-running copyright laws and, particularly, with the critical balance between creators and consumers of creative works.

Posted by debco at 02:38 PM | Permalink

David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor have launched Word Pirates, designed to help us take back our language from:

Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours. For instance...

For instance, the word "pirate" itself has been taken over by the Big Content companies. They mean "anyone who shares files." Real pirates murdered, raped and stole. They didn't share music, rightly or wrongly.

You go!

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:27 AM | Permalink

A lot of blogs have already pointed to this weblog, Baghdad Burning, from a woman in Iraq, but I wanted to cite it as well, if only just for this passage:

The Myth: Iraqis, prior to occupation, lived in little beige tents set up on the sides of little dirt roads all over Baghdad. The men and boys would ride to school on their camels, donkeys and goats. These schools were larger versions of the home units and for every 100 students, there was one turban-wearing teacher who taught the boys rudimentary math (to count the flock) and reading. Girls and women sat at home, in black burkas, making bread and taking care of 10-12 children.

The Truth: Iraqis lived in houses with running water and electricity. Thousands of them own computers. Millions own VCRs and VCDs. Iraq has sophisticated bridges, recreational centers, clubs, restaurants, shops, universities, schools, etc. Iraqis love fast cars (especially German cars) and the Tigris is full of little motor boats that are used for everything from fishing to water-skiing.

I can't tell you how many people I've encountered who seem to have the impression that Iraq existed just one step above the stone age before we invaded and even that somehow invasion improved their technology level.

Posted by debco at 09:53 PM | Permalink

In another round of the RIAAs new marketing plan of increasing record sales by jailing customers, Pac Bell has filed suit against the RIAA saying that "the subpoenas served against it by the Recording Industry Association of America are overly broad in scope and should have been issued from a California district court, not the District of Columbia. The complaint also seeks a jury trial to have the constitutional issues addressed."

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 10:32 AM | Permalink

Having seen more than one well-published author claim in recent weeks that copyright must be vigorously defended or else the copyright holder will lose all their rights (something that is, in the broad sense, an issue for trademarks, but not copyrighted material), I figure almost everyone could use more information about copyright and what it means.

Mark Rausch, a Security Focus columnist and formerly head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit has an informative write-up in The Register:

But technically, file sharing is not theft.

A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The Supremes did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked.

So "copying" is not "stealing" but can be "infringing." That doesn't have the same sound bite quality as Valente's position.

Complicated matters further, copying is not always infringing. If the work is not copyrighted, if you have a license to make the copy, or if the work is in the public domain, you can copy at will. Also, not all "copies" are the same. Say you buy a CD and play it on your computer -- technically, you have already made a "copy" onto the PC in the process of playing it, but that's not an infringement.

Making an archive copy is okay too, as long as your retain the original. What about a transformative copy -- say, making an MP3 out of a CD? You can do that, so long as you retain the original work. If the original CD get scratched, damaged or lost, you can probably burn the MP3 back to a CD (sans the really "sucky" titles), but this is not entirely clear.

Posted by debco at 03:08 PM | Permalink

TalkLeft writes about why it's important not to get bogged down in Republican-induced depression:

As criminal defense lawyers, we toil every day in the trenches known as courtrooms. We can't give up. We remember to stand erect (male lawyers would say "we puff up our chests,") and we repeat to ourselves, "I am proud to be a criminal defense lawyer," and we go in there and fight the good fight. We lose more than we win, but we know the scales of justice function like a pendulum, and someday, the scales again will tilt in our favor. Until then, staying silent is not an option.

Every person we fight for, no matter how heinous their alleged crime, is a human being. A human being with the right to dignity and with a past and a present, a person who can claim at least one person who loves him or her unconditionally, even if it's only their mother. We stay in the trenches and we fight for that client's ounce of dignity and spark of humanity.

The message here: Get out of bed. We don't have the luxury of being depressed. There is too much work to do. We have battles to fight and wars to win. We need you, Kevin, and those feeling the same way, to recognize there is power in numbers, and if you all go to sleep instead of hanging in here to fight the good fight with us, then all of us have lost.

Posted by debco at 01:59 PM | Permalink

According to this BBC article, six monkeys, one typewriter and one month's 'writing' time were not enough to produce the monkey-equivalent of 'Romeo and Juliet' (Okay, they didn't actually even produce a word--but I think they weren't clear on the assignment).

Now, if they had each had their own typewriter....

Posted by debco at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I finally finished Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. It's very good and I highly recommend it.

Here are a few last quotes on diverse topics to leave you with:

Referring to a letter Ellsberg and other Rand analysts wrote protesting Nixon's Vietnam war policy:

At one point Konrad Kellen relayed to me a conversation he had just had with an unnamed "High Rand official" (a vice president, it turned out). "He said that if one Rand secretary lost her job because of this letter [through a budget cut], we didn’t have a right to send it." Ironically, the only Rand employees who were going out of their way to congratulate me on the letter were secretaries, all women. They didn’t write memos, but unlike the men who had started cutting me in the hallways or frowning angrily when they saw me, the secretaries would nod warmly or stop me to shake hands in the hall, whispering, "Godo job! Great letter!" More than one said, "It makes me proud to be at Rand." One of the two or three memos that defended both our right and our decision to send the letter was by one of the few women professionals at Rand, Kathy Archibald.

In response to a student who asked him what he thought about the burning of an ROTC building:

I said that I had been trained in the Marine Corps to do violence and that I had seen a lot of it in Vietnam. Its effectiveness, which was ultimately its justification, wasn't just a hypothetical question for me. I had had a good deal of experience on which to judge that, and I was no longer so impressed with it, and I knew much more about how it could go wrong than when I had been a marine. I very well understood, and shared, the frustration of the students at their inability to stop the war. But it seemed to have a lot in common with the frustration of the troops in Vietnam, who were the same age as the students in this audience, at their inability to win the war. And the response I had seen in Vietnam was very similar....I told them of the soldiers in Rach Kien, burning down every hut they came to, for no real reason than to leave some mark that they had passed that way, that they were not just plowing the sea....

It was very American, I said, to think that to be willing to use violence was to show seriousness and to be effective, but that was not what I'd learned in Vietnam. I said I could see that many people in the audience felt proud of what had just happened on their campus but that I couldn't tell them I believed that burning down ROTC buildings would be any more productive for ending the war than burning down villages in Vietnam. It would take commitment, courage, and tenacity to end this war, but not an imitation of the government’s own destructive tactics.

During an interview with Walter Cronkite after the Pentagon Papers were released:

Cronkite: Isn't this correcxting of this problem of public information more in the character of the leaders of Washington than it is in anything that can be legislated?

Ellsberg: I would disagree with that. It seems to me that the "leaders"--by whom, I think, you're referring to the executive officials, the Executive Branch of government--have fostered an impression that I think the rest of us have been too willing to accept over the last generation, and that is that the Executive Branch is the government, and that indeed they are leaders in a sense that may not be entirely healthy, if we're to still think of ourselves as a democracy. I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson's reaction to these revelations as "close to treason," because it refected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying, "I am the state." And I think that quite sincerely, many Presidents, not only Lundon Johnson, have come to feel that. What these studies tell me is we must remember this is a self-governing country. We are the government. And in terms of institutions, the Constitution provides for the separation of powers, for Congress, for the courts, informally for the press, protected by the First Amendment....I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions....

Posted by debco at 08:25 PM | Permalink

I've always been a big defender of faculty, academic freedom, and tenure.

After today, they are all bloody on their own.

I expect this will be a huge blow to them.

Posted by debco at 10:42 PM | Permalink

Serenity of A Life Less Ordinary is married to a soldier and is against the current war in Iraq. She gets questions (no surprise), to which she has graciously supplied answers:

2.) How do you think it makes your husband feel to know you don't support him?
Now here is where I have the biggest bone of contention with folks. Don't support my husband -- are you insane? I left the relative security of my old life, and everything I owned behind when I moved here to live with my husband; although it was painful, I did it willingly, and I did it because I support my husband. There is no one else who stays up until 1 am polishing my soldier's boots or ironing his uniforms. I do that, and I am happy to do it. I work a full-time job to help support our household, and make it possible for my soldier to have a more comfortable life. I put aside a portion of my check every payday to create a savings from which we will have money for the items he needs when he deploys to Kuwait -- to include a new laptop computer, which, while not on the packing lists given to him by his unit, was something he wanted to take with him to Kuwait.
Real support in this household does not mean going to a support-the-troops rally, siding with the President, smashing my Dixie Chicks CD, refusing to watch West Wing or even wearing a yellow ribbon. It means taking the time and doing the big and little things it take to make my husband's life a comfort and a joy while he is here, and helping him to be more comfortable when he is away. It means seeing that his needs are met, his wants and desires are fufilled to the extent that I can do so, and I do all those things -- willingly, happily and with pride. I don't have to be a warmonger or supporter to do that.
Of course, if you feel I am not doing a good job of supporting him, then by all means, I invite you to come over here and do better. His day starts at about 4:30 am, and he likes at least two cups of coffee before he goes to PT. Good luck.

...via ReachM High Cowboy Network Noose

Posted by debco at 03:33 PM | Permalink

Brad DeLong gets to the heart of the strategy issue:

The point is clear. Even if, as Mr. Yglesias says elsewhere, it might be that "the cakewalk scenario, though wrong in retrospect, was the best reading of the available evidence," Rumsfeld's force planning was still lousy. It's not his job to plan for the most likely case, or for the best case, or for a good case. It's his job to plan for all cases: so that there is not just a path that leads to victory, but all (or almost all) paths lead to (rapid, nearly bloodless, and decisive) victory.

Posted by debco at 09:23 AM | Permalink

Oh, look, big surprise, drug treatment programs are more effective and cost less than prison:

Prosecutors can reduce drug crime more effectively by sending nonviolent drug offenders to a strict treatment program instead of prison, according to sponsors of a study released Tuesday.

Participants were 67% less likely to return to prison and the program costs about half as much as housing a person in prison for an equivalent amount of time.

Why don't we do more of this? Two reasons, we keep asking these methods to be perfect. Someone can make great political hay out of someone who went through a program like this and then went right out and did something heinous. But, guess what? Nothing's perfect. The question shouldn't be, were we decent to someone and they betrayed us. The question should be is it more effective than the alternative?

Second, we are a punishment culture. It doesn't feel right in some awful way that strikes at the core of what many of us believe, to change people who have done something wrong through positive rather than negative means. But really, in the end, what matters is they changed. Not whether they know they were wrong, not whether they had enough bad stuff done to them to make up for it. Is society better off with people who are brutalized or people who have changed? The answer is simple, although sometimes getting to the question isn't simple at all.

...via TalkLeft

Posted by debco at 08:41 AM | Permalink

Ftrain.com has something to say about the current idiotic idea to label the poor 'lucky duckies' and suggest they should pay more of their meager income to support the rest of us.

When I hear that poor folks aren't taxed enough, I think back to those years when, suddenly, unexpectedly reduced to poverty from the middle class, my mother and I ate so much canned tuna that we would swell up during the hot summer because of all the mercury in our bloodstreams. After the 10,000th tuna fish sandwich, I began to identify with the fish. I started taking baths instead of showers. I would see a fisherman and start crying.

...

But if someone had come in back in the day and wanted to take away some money, if we didn't get that refund out of Mom's taxes, then forget it. No Ftrain, possibly no Paul. Seriously. It was that tight. And even if it wasn't that tight, goddamn it, we deserved a monthly trip to Dairy Queen too, you fuckers, and maybe even a few nice shirts. It just makes me wonder at the inhuman lack of empathy of the person who would tax the poor. I know such a proposal will not get through the House, I know someone has erected a windmill at which I can tilt, but how can anyone lack empathy to that point? How can someone be that awful to even suggest that?

...

But what I'm saying is, I hope you will remember to be kind to the poor, even when they are annoying and unattractive, and to those who do not have as much power as you, and even more than kind, fair, and even more than fair, generous. Because whether you believe in Jesus or Allah or no one, whether you believe in a strong market economy or collective farms, there's ideology, and then there's decency, and if you can't have decency, then fuck ideology, you're no friend of mine or anyone, and I hope Pete Seeger comes to your house and sings "Little Boxes" until you, too, want to exercise your second amendment rights.

Posted by debco at 03:44 PM | Permalink

TalkLeft asks :how do you prove your innocence?

How difficult would it be for you to prove your innocence, particularly if you were in a foreign country and the FBI said it was after you? For this 72 year old Englishman, on a wine-tasting vacation in South Africa, it was pretty tough--he spent 20 days behind bars in Durban, due to the FBI's mistake.

There's an update on this story here.

The concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' is an important one and we've been whittling away at it for years, from prosecutors who say they don't care if a man is innocent to the Bush administration's unrelenting attacks on due process and free speech. Even worse, Bond was left to rot in jail because no one could be bothered to do the basic routine checking required to see that he wasn't the person they were after.

The FBI say it's Bond's own fault really for being cooperative and not kicking up a big enough fuss: "One of the problems was that Mr. Bond waived his right to an extradition hearing, part of which would have included a check on his identity," said Nancy Harrera a spokes[woman] for the US attorney in Houston.

Posted by debco at 03:19 PM | Permalink

Lost Labor.com contains:

a selection of 155 photographs excerpted from a collection of more than 1100 company histories, pamphlets, and technical brochures documenting America's business and corporate industrial history This collection has been assembled over the last 20 years and many of the titles are rare and difficult to find. Since the images document factories, machinery, and jobs that no longer exist, LOST LABOR provides an unusual visual and historical record of work in 20th century America.

...via Metafilter

Posted by debco at 08:27 PM | Permalink

Atlantic Monthly March, 2003 issue includes Caring for your introvert by Jonathon Rauch.

Posted by debco at 07:42 PM | Permalink

The BBC has a report on a small island nation in the Pacific, Nauru, which has basically lost contact with the outside world:

Nauru's telephone system collapsed on 8 January amid political chaos, and since then the island has only been contactable when ships equipped with satellite telephones made stops there, the AFP news agency reported

Nauru once had the highest per capita income in the world. Then, phosphate mining collapsed, an attempt to provide off-shore banking turned into money laundering for the mob and a current effort at interning asylum seekers for Australia has collapsed:

Late last year, Australian immigration officials admitted that the asylum seekers, mainly Iraqis, had been running their own detention centre since officials abandoned the site following a riot.

It feels post-apocalyptic, this report of a tiny nation almost completely cut-off from the rest of the world and sinking deep into chaos. It can't happen here, in our world, right now. But it does.

Posted by debco at 02:54 PM | Permalink

CNN reports:

Police in London, England, said turnout Saturday was 750,000, the largest demonstration ever in the British capital. The organizers put the figure at 2 million. In Germany, 500,000 protested, and 300,000 gathered in 60 towns and cities across France.

The biggest demonstrations seen in Europe for years were part of marches by millions across the globe, from the Antarctic to Iceland.

Yahoo says:

More than four million protesters took to the streets around the globe on Saturday to send a message to President Bush (news - web sites) not to attack Iraq and to give peace a chance.

In a huge wave of demonstrations not seen since the Vietnam War, anti-war marchers in more than 600 towns and cities from Canberra to Cape Town and Chicago called on Bush to back off his hawkish stance toward Iraq, which his administration accuses of hiding weapons of mass destruction that pose a global threat.

On Stand Down, Philip Leggiere shares some first-hand observations:

A cynic might try to describe the throngs as a cacophony of special interest groups, but as one who's been (periodically) to large peace demonstrations since the mid-70s (and is predisposed in many ways to cynicism about political demonstrations) this one feels qualitatively different. Less politically sectarian and far more widely gauged in terms of age and social groups.

Other first-hand reports can be found here and here.

Update: Reuters (via Yahoo news) has upped the worldwide estimate to 6 million participants in today's protests.

Posted by debco at 06:22 PM | Permalink

According to an AFP report (German derivative work thereof), the Finnish music industry is asking kindergardens to pay about 20 €uros per month in royalties for singing and performing copyright-protected songs.

...you know, sometimes you just have to wonder how people can manage not to be totally embarassed by the things they do.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:16 AM | Permalink

Talkleft reports on an ex-prosecutor who is trying to overturn the conviction of two men he put behind bars in the 1970s.

The prosecutor, Thomas Breen, says:

I would rather [this case] come back 25 years later and find out I'm dead wrong than those guys spend one more day in jail," he said in an interview. "I don't see anything wrong with correcting your errors when the errors are shown.

"If these guys didn't do it--and all the evidence seems to indicate we are dead wrong--then it's devastating."

Posted by debco at 07:36 PM | Permalink

MaxSpeak reports on the anti-war rally in Washington yesterday:

First, self-identified vets were much in evidence. The organized contingent had posters showing individual mug shots of the War Party luminaries (Cheney, Bush, Lott, Wolfowitz, etc.) with the legend underneath: "Never Served!" They worked the chicken-hawk thing hard. An unaffiliated vet had a sign that said "Remember Pearl Harbor: the U.S. doesn't start wars." Not literally correct, but you get the idea.

Second, lots of church ladies and church guys. I realize this is not new to a peace movement, but there seemed to be more than usual.

Third, what I call the lone wonks. Guys who looked like they were on lunch break from a job at State, bookish types with succinct signs like "Deterrence works" and the like.

Four, high school kids. Lots of them.

Five, a combined, organized (with sound effects) Korean/Filipino contingent. Maybe 75 people.

Six, anti-communists for peace. A couple of signs here and there against war and in support of Cuban political prisoners. In the same vein, 'Libertarians for Peace.' I met up with a small contingent of Stand Down participants, including the Niels[e]n[ ]Haydens, Matt Hogan, and my neighbor, the dean of real libertarian bloggers, Jim Henley. He had a sign that said "Peace Now, Socialism Never." If he was trying to provoke people, the results were negligible.

Seven, and my favorite: "Fighting Scots for Peace." This was not, as I thought, some Euro-Social-Dem type. This was some people from a midwest college whose mascot was the "Fighting Scots." I'd say when such people are turning out at anti-war rallies, the War Party has a problem.

A comment to this entry notes that in Bozeman, Montana 750 protesters turned out. In a conservative state, in a city of 30,000, that's noteworthy.

Posted by debco at 05:45 PM | Permalink

I actually already blogged this elsewhere so it seems a bit redundant to me, but in the interests of completeness (I've talked about the issue here before) it ought to go here too:

The Supreme Court decided 7-2 to uphold the Copyright Extension Act passed in 1998. This act extended copyright 20 additional years and was applied retroactively, removing some works from the public domain on which copyright had already expired.

Dan Gillmor has an excellent journal article on the decision:

Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.

The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.

At the end of the article he also has links to Lawrence Lessig's blog (the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme court) and the court documents, including dissenting opinions from Justices Stevens and Breyer.

Posted by debco at 01:41 PM | Permalink

Inflata-church....for those last minute religious emergencies

...via BoingBoing's guest blog

Posted by debco at 11:05 AM | Permalink

A recent article in The Nation by Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins talks about the estate tax:

There is a stunning disconnect between the terrible budget shortfalls facing states and localities and the priorities of federal tax-cutters. States face budget deficits of more than $60 billion for the coming year--and the ax is falling on mental health, education and children's healthcare. Libraries are being shuttered, tuitions increased and parks closed. Governors of all political persuasions talk about the need for massive federal relief to the states in the form of block grants and Medicaid subsidies.

and

Today, the estate tax affects less than 2 percent of the richest households, those with wealth exceeding $1 million. A reformed estate tax, with wealth exemptions boosted to $3.5 million, would still generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year. Under such a reform, an estimated 6,000 estates a year, averaging $17 million each, would pay the tax. In Maine, Montana, Alaska and Mississippi--states where both senators have voted to completely eliminate the tax--the estimated number of estates paying the tax every year would be fewer than twenty-five.

Proposals to reform the tax have been blocked since 2000 by the "all or nothing" repeal lobby, which understands the peril of not having smaller estates as camouflage. Once exemptions rise above $3 million, it becomes impossible to find a credible and photogenic farmer or restaurant owner who will complain about what opponents call the "death tax." It's hard enough to find them now. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau was asked to produce an example of a farmer who had lost a farm because of the estate tax. It could not identify a single one.

There is no reason to repeal the estate tax, no benefit to anyone but the very richest among us, and, as this article points out, much to be lost. There are people who allow themselves to get tied up in knots about the fact that rich people pay more in taxes than you or me or the 'lucky duckies.' But remember, they have most of the money.

...via The Rittenhouse Review

Posted by debco at 09:06 AM | Permalink

Working for Change has a year-end article listing the most overhyped and the most underreported stories of the year.

Overhyped stories include:

Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: Nobody -- except the Bush Administration and Tony Blair -- believes they exist. Seldom have so many words been wasted on weapons that, if they did exist, would be few in number, poorly made, and impossible to deliver more than a couple hundred miles. Instead, Bush's obsession becomes our obsession. Worse, constant repetition of "Iraq = Saddam = Terrorist" has successfully shifted post-9/11 focus -- and blame -- away from the very real threat posed by Islamic terrorists, most of whom seem to come from countries we consider allies.

The Economic Recovery: It's coming, remember? And coming, and coming. It's just around the corner. Who'd have guessed this funhouse had so damned many corners?

Under-reported stories include:

White House Power Grab: Occasional flurries, like Dick Cheney's noisy refusal to release information on who wrote his energy policy, made the news. But on endless fronts, this White House and its Congressional allies have reserved for themselves an unthinkable array of powers -- everything from keeping details of legislation secret until the last moment to imprisoning Americans without charges or counsel on nothing more than the President's say. A full list of the ways in which our unelected president is becoming emperor would be useful. We're still waiting.

Shredded Safety Nets: Beyond all the false cheerleading and Greenspan-worship, the one piece of the rotten economy that did, in fact, make news -- beyond tanking 401(k)s -- was budget crises. But these were inevitably painted as local stories. As their legislatures convene in January, forty-six states -- almost all of them -- face severe budget shortfalls. The feds send less money to the states, the states send less to the counties and cities, and at every level revenues suffer as politicians (or Eyman figures) rail against taxes. The first thing to get cut, at every level, is the safety net. The much-vaunted welfare-to-work programs mean there's even less help for people who work full time (sometimes two or even three jobs) but still can't make ends meet. And thanks to the aforementioned global warming, the winters will get colder on the street, too.

Posted by debco at 11:05 AM | Permalink

Okay, listen up. Torture doesn't work. It is pure punishment culture of the worst kind. First of all, why would it work? Just think about it. You're hurting me. I have two options--1) do anything to make it stop, including lying my head off about anything you want to know or 2) shut down completely, in which case you might as well kill me now because I'm done.

You may get information, but you have no way to know that it's accurate. After all, you might be torturing someone WHO DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING!

What do I mean by punishment culture? Well, we're living in one. We're completely caught up in the idea that people doing wrong must know they're doing wrong (it's never enough just to Stop Doing Wrong Forever), that pain is important and inflicting it is 'tough,' that humane treatment is weak, and that the only reason anyone ever Does Good is because they're afraid they're going to be punished (you can see how well this last bit works by observing how few people are currently in our nation's jails, she said sarcastically).

Calpundit has a really excellent, passionate post on torture from a alightly different and critically important perspective:

...Alan Dershowitz, who has gotten a bunch of press lately for his suggestion that torture is sometimes permissible, uses as his basic example the "ticking bomb" scenario: if a bomb is about to go off and someone knows where it is, it's OK to torture the person in order to extract the information.

This is profoundly wrong, and a perfect example of an intellectual being too clever for his own good. It's one of those situations where you need to turn off your higher intellect and just let your basic sense of right and wrong guide you.

Is it OK for a doctor to torture prisoners if the end result is a medical therapy that could save thousands? No.

Is it OK to torture a scientist's family in order to coerce him to work on an invention that could predict earthquakes and save millions? No.

Is torture ever OK in a decent society? No.

Still not sure? Just ask yourself this: would you be willing to perform the torture yourself? After all, it's easy and requires no technical skill. If you approve of torture but your answer is no, then you are a coward and a hypocrite. If your answer is yes, you are a barbarian. In either case, I don't want to know you.

Posted by debco at 03:50 PM | Permalink

Time Magazine's Persons of the Year are all whistleblowers: Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins who brought forth important information on WorldCom, the FBI, and Enron, respectively.

...also via BoingBoing (really you should just go there and read everything...)

Posted by debco at 02:33 PM | Permalink

I'm really only blogging this so I can include this description from BoingBoing:

Laid-off New York executives are enrolling in charm school to learn how to treat with the little people without coming off as badly socialized, overly entitled assholes.

Posted by debco at 02:13 PM | Permalink

Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly publishing has some salient points about the copyright/intellectual property issue in a column at OpenP2p.com:

• Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy
• Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
• Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
• Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy
• Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
• Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
• Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it

Posted by debco at 09:42 AM | Permalink

From an LATimes article (registration required, but free):

In a feather-brained brief, the administration argued that conservationists should consider the upside of bird deaths at a remote Navy live-fire range. "Bird-watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one." Besides, the government added, Navy bombardment keeps away people who might otherwise disturb the birds.

I am rendered speechless....

via See the Forest

Posted by debco at 03:06 PM | Permalink

Also via TalkLeft

Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide trends in the U.S.

Posted by debco at 06:20 PM | Permalink

Via TalkLeft:

One People's Project- contains links, timelines, and summaries on the Central Park jogger case.

Posted by debco at 06:15 PM | Permalink

Nathan Newman tells us why single payer is better health care:

...read this Economist article that cover's France's health care system, one that still spends less than the US but is more comparable. (See the graph to the left comparing spending between countries. The comparable number for Canada is 9.3%)

"By any measure, France's health service is among the best in the world. Life expectancy for women (despite a collective reluctance to stop smoking) is second only to Japan, and the men are not far behind (despite, or because of, a continuing love of wine). There are no waiting lists for hospital treatment; general practitioners are prepared to make home visits, even at night and during the weekend; and the poor get their treatment free.

Posted by debco at 08:31 PM | Permalink

From Yes!:

Americans want action taken on climate change, contrary to Bush administration policies. Ninety-seven percent believe the US should increase the use of new technologies that improve fuel efficiency and conserve energy. Sixty-seven percent of us think the federal government should guarantee health coverage for every American. Seventy percent think corporations have too much power, and 79 percent of us say it should be illegal to sell genetically modified fruits and vegetables without labeling.--Sarah Ruth Van Gelder

We have elected officials. Perhaps it's time they did their jobs and actually represented us--the people.

Posted by debco at 08:12 PM | Permalink

Where I work there are upper level people who chafe constantly at purchasing and hiring rules. It restricts us, they say. And sometimes the rules do. Sometimes we don't get to hire perfectly good people because they don't have the right piece of paper. Sometimes we spend extra money buying from a more expensive source when a cheaper one's available. But sometimes, more often than we like to admit, the rules keep some, particularly ambitious, high-level 'somes,' from giving contracts to their friends, from setting up projects that can't be completed because the people brought in for the project are friends and favor-payoffs, and cronies, from giving this contract in return for that contract or adding this 'sweet' deal into the pot. Rules exist because people forget what they've signed on for and particularly because they forget that the world isn't All About Them.

Found via TalkLeft, Sydney Schaumberg has an excellent article in the Village Voice about the Central Park Jogger case, how it came about and where it stands now.

Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see--before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down--is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal, and through it all inevitably influenced by issues of race and class and economic status. In short, it's a lot like other big, unwieldy institutions. Such a moment of clear sight emerges from the mess we know as the case of the Central Park jogger.

I hope this doesn't turn into a 'blame this on a scapegoat and then it goes away' incident. Because it isn't about one person who 'did wrong,' although it is partly about the specific and individual wrongs that people who were involved in the case may have done.

But it is also very much about who we are and what we value and how we pay attention. There's alot going on right now that requires this kind of attention from all of us. It's a time for reading the Constitution and remembering that it even applies to people we don't like, consider insignificant, and wish were invisible.

Posted by debco at 04:15 PM | Permalink

PubScience has been shut down.

I am so furious about this I have trouble finding the words. FOS however, says it pretty well:

SIIA [who led the lobbying campaign to shut down PubScience] spokesman David LeDuc said...as paraphrased by Matthews, "it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free." (PS: Let's get this breathtaking assertion straight. When the research is funded by the government and the articles donated by authors, then taxpaying readers should have to pay a second levy to read them, and pay it to a third party with no role in the research? The cost of a running a government web site is a greater burden on taxpayers than the cost of paying profiteers standing between authors and readers?)

Does everyone have it straight now? Write ups of public research done with public funds are not available to you and me--the public--because someone stole them from the public domain. They stole it right out from under us and then had the unmitigated gall to say, 'well, the government shouldn't pay for that.' That's exactly what the government should pay for! That's one of the important reasons why it's here! To make knowledge available to all, equally. To promote the spread of knowledge and wisdom. To provide for the public good. Not for private profit. Private profit has to take care of itself. The public good is why we have a country at all.

Public good. Public good. Public good. Say it three times and it's yours. We have a right to say that some things are held in common for all of us. We. The People. It's why we're here.

Posted by debco at 06:42 PM | Permalink

I am totally appalled by this article in the Washington Post, though it makes it perfectly clear (if it wasn't already) why arresting a few CEOs and staging show trials won't 'fix' what's wrong with American business.

Let me give you the quick and simple facts:

Ethics go with you wherever you go, whatever you do.

You don't get a free pass because you're in business. My god, when did share holders outweigh all other human beings? This stuff isn't rocket science, equivocating professors not withstanding.

It's dead simple--

• Don't lie
• Don't cheat
• Don't steal

Making money for yourself (because this is really what we're talking about) and for the shareholders cannot be the most important thing. Being a complete human being is what we're here for. If the business can't survive honest business men and women, then what the heck's it in business for...

Posted by debco at 08:40 PM | Permalink

This quote comes originally from a commencement address by John Jay Chapman at Hobart College in 1900. I lifted it from the Cluetrain Manifesto (2000):

...I have see ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messsages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

Posted by debco at 06:12 PM | Permalink

As you know, Bob, Eldred v Ashcroft is the legal challenge to the copyright extension act (passed in 1998, I think), which extended copyright on both previous and future works another twenty years. There's been a lot of discussion of the upcoming case and the entire issue of copyright and the rights that copyright law attempts to balance over the last months all across the blog-o-sphere.

Last week, Eldred v Ashcroft was argued before the Supreme Court.

Lawrence Lessig, one of the primary attorneys on the case, provides a post mortem on his Supreme Court appearance and the case itself. He writes not only with great clarity about the case and what's at stake, but also about his own hopes and fears:

...as someone who believes this the rare case where the law, properly and carefully read, yields one right answer, there is no way I will ever be able to escape the thought that if we lose, it is because I am not the advocate that some could have been. It is the particular hell for lawyers that after an argument, we live in the purgatory of constantly reliving the argument. Every night since Wednesday I have awoken in the middle of the night, to spend the rest of the night reanswering Justice Ginsburg, or asking Chief Justice Rehnquist just how he could distingiush Commerce from Copyright. The kind words of so many notwithstanding, I know and have always known I am not Larry Tribe, or Kathleen Sullivan. And if, after getting this so close to the right result, I have lost this by not being them, then I am not quite sure how I will live with that fact.

All around the net there are reports from people who were there.

Some of them waited in line to get in:

from Lisa Rein:

I thought there would be a ton of people in line, but it has turned out to be just us for the first few hours (from 7pm till around 10 or 11pm). So we may have overdone it a bit showing up at 7pm, but there was just no way to know for sure and we didn't want to risk it. (As it turns out, only 25 members of the general public were admitted!)

Jace Cooke got there first at 7pm (right when I asked him too!) -- I was still packing up my friend Doug McVay's car with the blankets and things I was bringing, so that made me second in line when I got there around 7:30.

[...]

So now it's 3:00am in front of the Supreme Court and I can't sleep. Jace, Kevin and Seth have gone for a walk around the Capitol, and most of the others are bundled up in blankets sleeping or trying to sleep. (I can hear snoring so I know somebody's sleeping.) It's extremely quiet and beautiful here out in front of the Supreme Court. I'm taking video of it so you can all see for yourselves when I get back home next week.

from Seth Shoen:

At about midnight, a group of about eight law students from Virginia showed up. People trickled into line gradually after that. After looking around the Court, we sat down to play a round or two of Set. Next, after dropping my suitcase and suit off in Lisa's hotel room a few blocks away, Aaron and I went off for a while to use some wireless net access he'd discovered on a corner. We must have been a funny sight, standing together on a residential street corner after 1:00 in the morning, intently working on a couple of laptops. (Aaron's laptop backlight was also dead, so, when his laptop's display became too hard to read, he started up a VNC server on the laptop, I started a VNC client, and we used the wireless network to allow him to use my laptop as an interface into his laptop so he could run software there. However, in order to make the wireless reception work right, I had to walk about thirty feet away and hold his laptop up in the air!)

from jewishbuddha.org:

After they let the first 50 in, the rest of us stayed in line. They had to see if all of the invited guests showed up. There might be more seats. Hope springs eternal and all that. But the guests kept coming. "Yes, I have a ticket reserved. I think I'm supposed to go to the Marshall's office to pick it up. This is Congresswoman Bono. She has a ticket also." "Hi, I have a ticket reserved from Justice Kennedy." and so on. Then the clencher:

"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. I'm on Scalia's list." Not "Justice Scalia." Not "I have a ticket reserved by Justice Scalia." No deference whatsoever. Just "I'm on Scalia's list." Whether or not the security guards knew or cared that he was the president of the MPAA didn't really matter. After he went in, those of us at the front of the line mocked him...

"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. I bought a ticket from Scalia."
"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. Antonin said to stop by here."
"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. The VCR will destroy the movie industry."

But really, we were just jealous.

And others:

Mr Swartz goes to Washington

One Justice asked how extending the copyright of a dead person by twenty years would give them extra incentive to promote science and the useful arts. "Was [famous classical dead author] sitting there and thinking, well I'd write some more if only copyright lasted another 20 years after my death? (Laughter from the crowd.)" Olson said that the publisher would be able to distribute more. Ah, one Justice joked, I guess we should give someone the copyright to Shakespeare, since there apparently is no incentive to distribute his works.

Lawmeme

My impression of the argument itself is hazier still. Lessig went first, and I thought he got a good drumming from the Justices. But then Solicitor General Olson made his argument, and I thought he received a worse beating. Because of the difficulties hearing, seeing, and staying awake, I honestly wasn’t able to follow Lessig’s arguments. I was awed that the facts surrounding the Statute of Anne were cited and precedent in 2002. I thought we learned history just for the sake of knowledge. I would never have guessed that events of almost 300 years ago would be as relevant as they seemed in that courtroom Wednesday.

See Copyfight for a pretty good roundup of even more reports and reporting from around the Web.

I just think this is is SO COOL.

The web isn't just information. It's people and voice and experience laid out for us in ways we've never had access to before. Eldred v Ashcroft is something that affects us all. Reports from regular people as things happen are something that newspapers and CNN and sound bites and live action don't give us. Contact with people with different life experience and different perspectives and motivations helps us see that it's not just us, that it's not just showboating or esoteric subjects beyond our reach. It's us out there standing in line and getting excited about obscure points of information and caring about the way government and the law works.

It's hanging suits on trees and getting pizza delivery information from security and oversleeping at a crucial moment and random acts of generosity and discovering the sheer exhilaration of history in the making.

It's da bomb.

Posted by debco at 04:26 PM | Permalink

Here's a page that tells you how to use lasers to neutralize spy cameras.

Posted by debco at 10:13 PM | Permalink

In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash and others do some of their most brilliant work when they are working at places whose sole purposes are to make it easy for them to do and learn and talk--no monthly reports, no project management, no weekly staff meetings, no prioritizing or what-did-you-do-for-me-lately.

In his book, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger says:

The computer-based view of knowledge [that we think like computers compute] that leads us to think of decision-making this way is just the latest--and most extreme--version of our culture's knowledge anorexia; it seems that every time we look at knowledge and see something that isn't purely fact-based and objective, we feel bloated and go on a stricter diet.

Charles Dickens has a novel, Hard Times that deals in part with the idea that education should be all about the facts and never about the fantastic:

"You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. you are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact...You must use," said the gentleman, "for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste."

Facts are not knowledge. Knowledge doesn't exist without people and people are not just mind but heart and body and soul and feelings.

Here's another quote from Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, because he says what I'd say, if I were better at saying it:

Realism is strong medicine that must be used cautiously because it suspends ways of thinking that are essential components of human existence such as dreaming, imagining, supposing, wishing and ho