JPBlog

Take a look.

Any systems gurus that want to design a worldwide distributed search engine?

With Senator Russ Feingold's lonely filibuster against the renewal of the P. Act getting virtually no support from even the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, that obnoxious, oppressive turd of a law which still stinks in spite of the rhetorical perfume sprinkled over it by the Republican-dominated Congress, will shortly become law. Even Senate minority leader Harry Reid has indicated that he will vote for it, a clear sign that I had overestimated his devotion to the U. S. Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment. What is the Whitehouse holding over the heads of these lemmings disguised as senators and congresspersons? It makes me want to cry.

Update 2/18/2006 The Senate invoked cloture on the P. Act II with only three no's. You saw it right. Only three sensible, conscientious senators in the whole Senate who take the Fourth and fourteenth Amendments seriously. Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy and all the rest of the Democrats except the courageous three have shown their true colors. A pox on their house as well as on the Republicans. I'm totally disgusted.

Let us now praise true patriots: Senators Russ Feingold, Robert Byrd and Jim Jeffords



Recommended reading:

Plutarch's biography of Cato the Younger,
Plutarch's bio. of Pompey
Wikipedia on the Weimar Republic

Congress is now considering changes to the Telecommunications Act that would allow ISPs and other large Internet providers to provide preferential service to some customers instead of serving as a common carrier, neutral to the contents going through it. This is a vastly different model of the network than we have today. The pressure being put on Congress to make these changes is also a good example of the corporate tendency to seek profits at the expense of public good. It also is a good example of the corporate tendency to kill golden geese, the geese in this case being Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other providers of either free or inexpensive services that make the Internet worth what it is today.

In the early '90s, shortly after the Worldwide Web came into existence and the demand for dial-up service went through the roof, the telcos started demanding the right to charge a premium on phone lines used for data, reasoning that data lines were being used more hours of the day than voice lines, which cost them more to service. Fortunately, they got nowhere.

Now, the politicking is far more sophisticated and much of it is being done outside the glare of public scrutiny. The importance of what is being contemplated, however, cannot be over-stressed. The providers are willing to concede current technology in return for being allowed to lock up future technology. As Bill Thompson of the BBC puts it, it's like a transportation company conceding the dirt roads in return for owning and controlling the traffic on all paved roads and highways. If you don't play their game, you take the dirt roads. What's even worse, they will control the connections from the dirt roads into the paved roads, so if for some reason they find your existence inconvenient, they can simply build their system around you, much like the interstate system can destroy a small town by not providing an interchange.

It will only be a short jump from preferential treatment of some information providers to completely blocking access to any web site your ISP wishes. This, of course, would be done in the name of property rights. We own the net and therefore we get to control who uses the net. In the '60s the U. S. Supreme Court held that shopping mall owners could ban political activity in the common areas of their malls, not realizing that the traditional public areas--the downtown retail business districts--would soon be deserted except for office workers. Pamphleteering, one of the most effective methods of political organizing, has virtually disappeared. Had the justices foreseen these changes, it is conceivable that the decision would have been different.

The contemporary equivalent of the political pamphlet is the political web site, like this one. Blogs and podcasting are the equivalent of political rallies of the past minus the barbecued chicken (at least in the American South). What has made the Internet a positive force for political change has been its open structure, where anyone with a few bucks per month can stand up on his or her electronic soapbox and preach to the world. Blogs are like the town crier, spreading news to all who are willing to listen. That would change radically in the proposed regime.

What the providers want is the prerogative of medieval robber barons: they want complete control of the great river of communications, including its contents, and they want to fill it with their exclusive traffic.

Why the net should stay neutral (BBC)

Lawrence Lessig Blog

Lessig's Testimony Before the Senate committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation, February 7, 2006 Because of his audience, I assume that Lessig stressed technological innovation and economic gain as the principal benefit of a free Internet, whereas I believe that the greatest benefit will ultimately turn out to be the open political space made possible by inexpensive access.

Provocative article on metaphors in American politics.

Here's a sample:

Regardless of the rhetoric about what Hillary is supposedly up to, she is likewise perceived as a threat to the patriarchal family. She is the archetypal Easterner; she speaks in complete sentences and is married to someone who speaks so well it makes him slick. If we translate the Easterner values from the 1950s westerns into today’s terms, we encounter individuals who try their best to find the better argument, people who give the notion of brotherly love something more than lip service, people who are unafraid of criticizing their own government, people who in fact believe that it is their civic duty to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire. In other words, I am describing the metaphorical nemesis of the rugged individualist in western cinema: liberals. And this is why so many men, and some women, bristle simply at the mention of Hillary’s name. They know essentially nothing about her, and yet they believe that she is a threat to everything they care about. Among herdsmen, and in patriarchal societies in general, men are owners of the flock or the herd and all that goes with it, women and children included. This stuff comes right out of the Bible. It’s what George Lakoff characterizes as “the strict father morality” in his book Moral Politics.

It is a fairly well-established fact that the incidence of depression among the American population has increased dramatically since the early '90s. There are several possible explanations for this increase, including better diagnosis, more public awareness, mass marketing by giant pharma of profitable new anti-depressants and even the increased consumption of junk food. My pet candidate is increasing environmental contamination of one kind or the other. That humans evolved over a period of thousands of years without these chemicals in the environment should be enough reason to seriously investigate the long-term effects of low concentrations of, say, anti-cholesterol medicine, birth-control hormones or bovine growth hormone.

Yesterday, I went to a seminar for lawyers (Yes, I am a lawyer) on the subject of stress in the law profession and how to cope with it. Since I occasionally give seminars on lawyer stress and impairment, I was familiar with most of what the speaker had to say, but he identified one stressor that I had long suspected: a lack of control over one's life.

Research has shown that we generally feel less stressed by situations we choose or create ourselves than by those situations that we believe are imposed upon us by other people. It follows that when members of a society either have or believe they have fewer options and therefore less control over their lives we can expect a higher rate of stress-related disorders, including depression, among the general population.

Because of political and economic changes over the past 26 years, the average American has fewer options. The American family works approximately six weeks more per year for the same income. Americans have gone deeply into debt, which restricts their spending options. The protection of labor unions and the labor laws have been gutted by successive anti-labor governments. The desires of the American people with respect to national policy decisions has been increasingly ignored by both Republican and Democratic politicians, although it is Republicans that have carried this trend to audacious extremes. Most people feel that their voice is not heard where it matters and have withdrawn from any form of political participation into either cynicism or fundamentalist premillinarinism.

The War on Drugs^® and the War on Terror^® have been used to shred the provisions of the Bill of Rights and create militarized police forces right in our own cities, equipped with military weapons and trained in military tactics. Even though Americans might feel that some of their rights might be profitably sacrificed for a little more security, it is hard to believe that these losses do not contribute to the general mood of despair for the future, even if unconscious. A descent from freedom into slavery or serfdom, even if voluntary, must inevitably have devastating psychological effects.

Depression has its political uses, as well. A depressed people are far less likely to challenge the ruling elite, since depression is almost invariably characterized by the loss of hope. Depression also makes people blame themselves for their troubles, rather than policy decisions made in Washington or in their own state houses. Depression impairs judgment and often expresses itself in psychosomatic illnesses. Because their judgment is impaired, depressed persons are apt to seek simple solutions handed down by demagogues rather than to pick their way through the complexity and moral ambiguity that has always been at the heart of the human condition.

Creationism instead of evolution solves the problem of who we are. Premillinarianism solves two problems. First, it absolves us from responsibility for the future by eliminating an earthly future. Global warming isn't a problem if the Earth isn't going to be around much longer. Second, it absolves us from moral obligations to anyone else but "us" as opposed to "them," meaning by "them" not only moslems, Hindus and Buddhists, but also non-premillinarian Christians. When the eschaton arrives, we "saved," dressed in white robes, will look down from the heights of Heaven with righteous pleasure on the sufferings of the damned far below and rejoice in our good fortune that we are not they. War and pestilence become merely signs of the second coming, which will end all suffering for the elect.

Apocalyptic beliefs, as reflected in history and literature, usually become widely adopted when people who are oppressed have lost hope that they can end their oppression by their own efforts. They withdraw from participation in what they see as a fundamentally evil and doomed society. When apocalypticism becomes a mass movement it frequently betokens the disintegration of a civilization and the beginning of a dark age.

What is to be done? Warn of the dangers but embrace hope, because there is hope. Comfort those who despair, but teach responsibility, because we cannot escape our responsibility for the way our behavior affects the rest of the world. Resist those who trade in lies and desire power above all else, but love them nevertheless, because evil thrives where love is gone. Lastly, remember that nothing of any real value has been done in this world by people concerned exclusively with protecting their own ass.

According to the New York Times, a commission on higher education consisting of -- you guessed it -- businessmen appointed by Bush has started pushing standardized testing for colleges.

Businessmen are experts in education. That's why they run school local boards: they know better than teachers.

Now that the Federal government has, by the way it finances education, made it more and more difficult for families of modest means to send their children to college without burdening them with mountains of debt, it proposes to dictate through high-stakes testing what college students should know when they graduate. Considering the incredible diversity in curriculums and academic programs now existing, a single high-stakes test that all students would have to pass to graduate would radically change our universities into assembly-line factories of learning, with the shots all called by the feds.

We should have expected this development sooner or later. He who pays the piper calls the tunes. Really open and free inquiry frightens businessmen and especially Republican ones. This is a perfect opportunity to bring into line one of the last bastions of free thought.

I promised a few weeks ago that I wouldn't mention the intelligent design controversy again, but this is too good an article not to pass it on:

Eden and Evolution from the Washington Post 1/6/2006

Richard Kim writes an interesting post in The Notion, entitled Freedom's Imperial March. He asks an important question that all progressives ought to be thinking about:

A hard question the left has yet to take up fully is: What came before and what comes after this particularly noxious imperial presidency?

The question is two-fold, the first being concerned with an evaluation of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton succession and how it brought us to Bush II, and the second being concerned with planning and then articulating a vision for a post-Bush nation.

Although the writer is not a Platonist in the strict sense, he has used the logical and rhetorical techniques of The Republic in many debates and arguments with right-wingers with great success. In Plato's universally-acclaimed masterpiece, his character Socrates, after having demolished the arguments of the sophist Thrasymachus--that justice is the will of the powerful--arrives by a process of dialectic at a definition of justice and then constructs before our very eyes the idea of a just state, together with its individual counterpart, the just individual. Plato proceeds in this manner because his theory of forms held that all objects of perception are inferior copies of true forms. The chair in my kitchen is an imperfect copy of the chair form. All chairs share the quality of "chairness" and participate more or less in the ideal form. The highest form was the good. The form of a just state was the ideal state, of which all states are inferior copies.

In The Republic, Plato attempted to define the ideal state, one that would serve as both as a model and a benchmark for actual states. If you want to know how just a state is, compare it to the form of a just state. If you want to establish a just state, then make it as close as possible to the form of a just state.

Plato is the father of a family of philosophies collectively described as realist, all of which hold, in one way or another, that forms are real. Red things partake of "redness." Bad men partake of "badness." The other powerful philosophical current in western thought, descending from Heraclitus and Aristotle, is nominalism, which holds that what the realists call forms are merely names without an independent existence. Alfred North Whitehead once observed that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Mortimer Adler later added that Aristotle wrote most of the footnotes. Indeed, it is difficult to find serious arguments in any field that do not involve, at their core, the opposition between realism and nominalism.

How does this apply to debates with right-winger? Simple. I ask them to tell me in detail they kind of country they want the United States to be. In other words, I am asking them to define for me the form of a nation. It is a perfectly logical and reasonable question. People who want to change things ought to be able to answer where they expect those changes to take us. Plato's idea of a just state might seem totalitarian to us, but at least Plato was ruthlessly honest; he tells us just where he wants us to go.

Don't expect this kind of ruthless honesty from the typical right-winger. Usually, they will do everything they can to change the subject, because either they haven't thought about where their program is likely to take us, or worse, wish to conceal their true objective because they know it is unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

Conservatism is profoundly anti-democratic; at its very heart, it is a belief that only a few are intelligent and wise enough to rule the nation and that the overwhelming majority of people are unworthy to participate in the political process. Conservatism in twenty-first century America is a faith in plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, there has been a significant shift of wealth and income from the lower and middle classes to the upper crust with very little protest from the people most affected. The Bush administration has accelerated this process by its irresponsible tax cuts and its current efforts to "balance the budget" by reducing public services, educational support and public relief, all of which benefit the middle and lower classes.

No conservative activist can admit that the end result of the conservative movement will be the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of nearly everyone save the favored few, so the entire conservative establishment of think tanks, non-profits, cable networks and political operatives must necessarily be continually engaged in perpetrating one monstrous lie--the lie that the goal of the conservative movement is to promote the general welfare of the American people.

That, dear reader, is why the conservative right-wingers will scatter when you ask the Platonic question. They also will realize that, whatever their answer may be, they will be asked next to tell us why their current policies and proposals will bring us closer to the nation they have just described.

One further caveat: Are we as progressives ready to answer those two questions without trying to change the subject? Can the Democratic Party answer those questions? Until they can, the American people have little reason to turn the future of their country over to them.