April 2004 Archives

Yahoo! News - Bush: Disgusted by Abuse of Iraqis, Vows to Act

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) said on Friday he was deeply disgusted by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops . . . .

The President has done the only decent thing by denouncing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by our troops. The news that our troops would be engaged in that kind of abuse is sickening, however. It also raises questions about whether there is an attitude in the government and the Army that would encourage such abuse. The fact that these kinds of acts can be perpetrated on prisoners supposedly protected by the Geneva Convention makes it all the more urgent that "enemy combatants" not protected by the Geneva Convention be afforded at least some recourse to judicial review. The test of our respect for human rights is not only how we treat our friends and our citizens, but how we treat our enemies. The abuse in Iraq has already tarnished our human rights record, particularly in the eyes of the Arab world; let us not become a new byword for disregard of human rights.

Smithsonian Magazine reconsiders Lord Nelson's place in history after a new discovery of letters from his long suffering wife.

Yahoo! News - Last Oldsmobile to Roll Off Assembly Line

I can't help feeling a little nostalgia at the news that Oldsmobile is no more. I spent a summer working on the Olds account as a production assistant for a video company, and I remember vividly delivering correspondence and tapes to the Olds plant in Lansing.

Yahoo! News - Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials

Apparently, the oxymoronic intelligence services have decided that Blogs represent the latest open source of intelligence. So remember, Big Brother is watching us type (or even paranoids have enemies).

The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific > The Hostages: Freed From Captivity in Iraq, Japanese Return to More Pain

The New York Times reports that the recently freed Japanese hostages have returned to Japan in disgrace for "causing trouble" by attempting to set up charities and report the news from Iraq. Apparently, the hostages' return to their homeland, which would have been celebrated with a hero's welcome in this country, was greeted with such hostility that it is worse than being taken hostage in the first place. Condemnations of courage are not limited to Japan, however; Andrew Sullivan points out that the University of Massachusetts' Daily Collegian has run an op-ed piece stating that Pat Tillman deserved to die for serving in Afghanistan.

A good chess player who has lost a game is genuinely convinced that his failure resulted from a false move on his part, and tries to see the mistake he made at the beginning of the game, forgetting that at each stage of play there were similar blunders, so that no single move was perfect. The mistake on which he concentrates his attention attracts his notice simply because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more complex is the game of war, which must be played within certain limits of time and where it is a question not of one will manipulating inanimate objects but of something resulting from the inevitable collisions of diverse wills. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Rosemary Edmonds (Penguin 1982), p. 843

The game might not prove much about the intelligence of the players, but it provided certain evidence that Jagiello's virtue or at least his kindness was greater than Stephen's: Stephen, playing to win, had launched a powerful attack on the queen's side; he had launched it one move too early — a vile pawn still masked his heavy artillery — and now Jagiello was wondering how he could play to lose, how he could make a mistake that should not be woundingly obvious to his opponent. Jagiello's chess was far beyond Stephen's; his power of dissembling his emotions was not, and Stephen was watching his expression of ill-assumed stupidity with some amusement when the boat was heard to return. Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate, p. 200.

And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The long needle began to swing at once, and stopped, moved on, stopped again in a precise series of sweeps and pauses. It was a sensation of such grace and power that Lyra, sharing it, felt like a young bird learning to fly. Farder Coram, watching from across the table, noted the places where the needle stopped, and watched the little girl holding her hair back from her face and biting her lower lip just a little, her eyes following the needle at first but then, when its path was settled, looking elsewhere on the dial. Not randomly, though. Farder Coram was a chess player, and he knew how chess players looked at a game in play. An expert player seemed to see lines of force and influence on the board, and looked along the important lines and ignored the weak ones; and Lyra's eyes moved the same way, according to some similar magnetic field that she could see and he couldn't. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, p. 151.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City has a discussion of free speech rights of public employees.

unbillable hours

I have just learned that TPB has shut down comments on his site, after Ernie the Attorney did the same. TPB states

You know, I hate to do this, but I was just comment spammed over thirty times in the past ten minutes. It fills up my inbox, it distracts me, and it forces me to go post-to-post, deleting comments and blocking IP addresses. Ernie the Attorney responded to this by blocking comments on his site, and I think I may have to do the same.

I agree that this is a real shame, since one of the prime attractions of a weblog is the interaction between readers and writers. I hope that TPB and Ernie have called this situation to the the attention of Six Apart, the makers of both TypePad and Movable Type. As an interim measure, Movable Type users can install a copy of the MT Blacklist plugin, and I would have thought there might be something similar for TypePad. The next iteration of Movable Type (3.0) is supposed to include a somewhat controversial comment registration system designed to deal with spam. From the note of desperation in TPB's post, it sounds as though he might well be willing to trade off the potential inconvenience and loss of anonymity of a comment registration system in order to retain the comment feature without subjecting himself to a flood of spam.

Note: A quick check suggests that Ernie the Attorney, like TPB, is still allowing comments for some posts.

Rachel and I had our first Easter Egg hunt together this morning, after Gayle — I mean, the Easter Bunny — colored and hid a dozen beautiful eggs. Breakfast was, of course, eggs.

I would be more impressed by Halley Suitt's commentary on how cold it is in New England if my brother had not lived four years in North Dakota, and then moved to Alaska!

New sites from the PC Magazine Top 100 that I want to look at:

• FilmAffinity
• Musicplasma
• Turner Classic Movies
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
• FlipDog.com
• RealEstateABC.com
• DailyCandy
• Capitol Hill Blue
• Arts & Letters Daily
• Google Alert
• Paul Thurott's Internet Nexus

A mid-twentieth century translation of a nineteenth century classic Russian novel is perhaps the last place one would expect to run across the N-word, much less in the following bizarre context:

A soldier on the march is as much shut in and borne along by his regiment as a sailor is by his ship. However far he goes, however strange, unknown and dangerous the regions to which he penetrates, all about him — just as the sailor sees the same decks, masts and rigging — he has always and everywhere the same comrades and ranks, the same sergeant-major Ivan Mitrich, the same regimental dog Nigger, and the same officers.

Tolstoy,
, tr. Rosemary Edmunds, p. 313. I found the name of the dog to be a minor but shocking revelation in its apparent casual equation of people of African descent with dogs, its casual use of a pejorative for people of African descent as the name of an Army unit's mascot. Although I have heard of such practices in this day and age, they do not generally go unremarked or unchallenged.

In one of the few other references to people of African descent in War and Peace, Natasha and Nikolai engage in an odd reminiscence about having encountered a possibly imaginary Black man at their house:

"And do you remember," Natasha asked with a pensive smile, how once, long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the study — that was in in the old house — and it was dark. We went in and all at once there stood . . . "
"A Negro," Nikolai finished for her with a smile of delight. "Of course I remember! To this day I don't know whether there really was a Negro, or if we only dreamt it, or were told about him."
'He had grey hair, remember, and white teeth, and he stood and stared at us . . . "
"Sonya, do you remember?" asked Nikolai.
"Yes, yes, I do remember something too," Sonya answered timidly.
"You know, I've often asked papa and mamma about that Negro," said Natasha, "and they declare there never was a Negro." But you see, you remember about it."
"Of course I do. I can see his teeth now."
"How strange it is! As though it were a dream! I like that."

It seems bizarre that Tolstoy would have introduced these two anomalous references into a 1400-page novel. One of his few other references to the African continent, in which he deplores Napoleon's barbaric slaughter of the Egyptians, does not suggest any particularly strong animus toward people of color. Id. p. 1402. Moreover, he does not comment at all on the American South, which at the time was the other great imperial slaveholding state, along with Russia. (Unlike the American South, however, the Russians did not, as far as I know, import people of color to be slaves.) Still, it is worth remembering that the elegant lives of Tolstoy's Princes and Counts are made possible by the subjugation of thousands of their fellow countryman. (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is regarded as notably enlightened because he is one of the few aristocrats to liberate his serfs.) Although Tolstoy goes to some length to humanize serfs such as Platon Karayatev, throughout the novel one has the sense that Russian society is able to function only by assuming that the serfs are not fully human. And if the serfs in the novel seem to be not fully human, the Blacks seem even less so. Tolstoy's pair of anecdotes are symptomatic of how deeply ingrained in European (and American) society racial stereotypes have been for centuries, and suggest reasons why we have so much difficulty overcoming them even today.

^[1] Of course, it says volumes about Sonya's status as the poor relation to Nikolai and Natasha that she does not really remember this odd incident, and yet feels compelled to pretend that she does.

Some years ago, I started a web page devoted to collecting information about Moroccan Villages. Over the years this page has undergone a number of iterations, but it gradually fell by the wayside both because it was too much work to maintain and because users could not contribute easily enough. For a long time, I have hoped to revive this page as a forum to which users could easily contribute with relatively little oversight by me. Since my current hosting configuration allows me to do this, I am pleased to offer the Moroccan Villages Forum.

Rachel, Gayle, and I spent the morning at the Noyes Library's Born to Read program. One of the best features of the Montgomery County Library, the program is led by a librarian who sings, plays and reads stories with the babies and their parents. Not only do the children love it, particularly since they have an opportunity to see other babies, but the parents also get to commiserate a little bit and come away with new energy and ideas. Afterward, we stopped by Cafe Monet for a latte and a macaroon. Once again, our baby's champagne tastes were confirmed as she tucked into Gayle's smoked salmon.

The Scranton Times Tribune also thinks that the University of Scranton overreacted when it shut down the school newspaper over a parody of the Passion of the Christ. In an earlier story the paper reported that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Student Press Law Center had also voiced opposition to the University's suppression of its student press. The Washington Post, meanwhile, in its round up of student papers shut down over April Fools' editions, seems to have unfairly characterized the Scranton story by placing it in the same context as two papers who published racially offensive stories or cartoons. In all of these case, while it is appropriate for the staff of the papers to be accountable for what they publish, it does not seem that the appropriate response is simply to shut down the paper. Even when speech is offensive, the cure is more speech -- further debate and articulate criticism. Only in this manner is the public educated about the value of free speech and the values that those opposed to the offensive speech seek to uphold.

I have been looking forward for some time to Gene Santoro's new book,
, a sweeping account of modern music due out in May.

Unbillable Hours has a lengthy and thoughtful essay on the mutations of the Blog form into journalism, criticism, scholarship, and literature. What his essay suggests to me is that Blogs are subject to a kind of natural selection. Out of the thousands, perhaps millions of Blogs, many are little read and quickly abandoned. Of the smaller number that persist and survive, many qualify as journalism. A few devote themselves to serious criticism or scholarship. The handful that will endure as literature represent the evolutionary apex of the form. As with life or literature in print, it is almost impossible to tell in advance which these will be. I share TPB, Esq.'s confidence that there willl be some, however.

One more thing for which Srijith is responsible. Eight years after they were hip, I've finally got a geek code:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version 3.12
GJ$/L d++ s: a C+ UL P+ L+(++) E W++ N o-- K- w !O M(+) !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP>+ t 5 X-- R- tv-- b++ DI D- G e+++ h r+++ y++++
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-------

To decode, see Decoded Geek Code.

Eric J. Heels notes that the University of Scranton has shut down a student newspaper over a parody of Georgetown University and the Passion of the Christ. Heels notes that Scranton is private, and that not everyone thinks all parodies are funny. As far as the question of whether you believe in free speech is concerned (i.e. from a moral not a legal perspective), whether an institution is private or public is irrelevent, and it is precisely the parodies that do not amuse powerful institutions that are in the most need of protection. Even though a private university may be beyond the reach of the First Amendment, a university of all places should uphold the values of free inquiry and free speech.

David Giacalone has a thoughtul entry on the absurdity of law school rankings. (Yes, I was pleased to see that my alma mater ranked in the top 20, barely). He focuses on the importance that professors — even more than prospective students — attach to these ratings. I would wonder, however, whether it is not appeal to the alumni — and their money — that drives the frenzy of deans and faculty over ratings.

I released my first book — All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren — through Book Crossing today. I put a label and a bookmark in it and left in on a table at the Caribou Cafe on 17th and L, N.W. in Washington, D.C. When I came back at lunchtime, it was nowhere to be seen. Now I am just waiting to see whether whoever picked it up will make an entry on the Book Crossing site.

Attention Deficit Linked to TV Viewing (washingtonpost.com)

Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.

I admit that I park the kid in front of the TV when I am alone and I need to take a shower. Otherwise, we try hard to stimulate the baby in other ways. Even at 10 months, however, she loves Sesame Street.

Andrew Sullivan has a poignant tribute to Alistair Cooke, from one naturalized Englishman to another.

These days, it is not surprising to walk into the cafe at an urban Borders and find a homeless man seated at a table drinking coffee. It is still surprising, however, to see that the homeless man is using a laptop.

Flipping through PC Magazine, I came across Book Crossing. I was immediately enchanted, not only out of a love of literature but because it reminded me of watching one of my favorite childhood movies, Paddle to the Sea (based on the book by Holling C. Holling). On the bottom of a wood carving of an Indian in a model canoe, carefully ballasted, a boy carved, "Paddle to the Sea - Please put me back in the water." He then cast the canoe into the local river. The movie was about all the people who found the canoe on its journey to the sea, many of whom lovingly repainted and marked the canoe before they put it back into the water. I never knew how much was true, but I loved the movie. Book Crossing, which asks people to "release" books after marking them with an identifying label and number, has the same idea. People who find the book can log onto the Book Crossing web site and leave their comments about the book before giving the book to someone else or leaving it for a stranger to pick up.

As an intellectual exercise, more than for any practical reason, I implemented OpenPGP Signing of Movable Type Comments on my weblog. As Krishnan Nair Srijith, the author of the Movable Type plugin, points out, "installing Crypt::OpenPGP's prerequisites is no easy work :)" So much so, that if I had know how much work it would be, I might not have attempted it. Nevertheless, I am glad that I did, if only because I learned a little bit about Perl in the process, perhaps enough to pique my curiosity to learn more.

My experience installing the prerequisite local Perl modules for Crypt::OpenPGP in my home directory can be summed up as follows:

Create the following directories in your home directory:

mkdir usr

mkdir usr/local

Set the environment variable (my shell is "/bin/bash")

export PERL5LIB="/home_directory/usr/local/lib/perl/5.6.1:\
/path_to_home_directory/usr/local/share/perl/5.6.1:" You may eventually want to add this line to your .bash_profile so that it will set the variables every time you log in.

You can see if you have properly set the environment variables by typing the command

perl -V

(Note that the flag is a capital "V"). Your library path (path_to_home_directory/usr/local/lib/perl/5.6.1) should be listed under @INC.

Download the required modules from http://www.cpan.org. The README in Crypt:OpenPGP lists the prerequisite modules, although some of these may also have prerequisites on your system.

Unpack the module with:

tar -xvzf module_name.tar.gz

cd module_directory

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/path_to_home_directory/usr
make test
make
make install

Repeat until all the modules are installed without errors, and finally install Crypt::OpenPGP. You then need to edit your Movable Type templates to take advantage of the new plugin. Be sure that you have put an ASCII copy of your PGP Public Key (e.g. http://www.williamsonday.com/pgp.asc on your site so that you can test the key verification feature of the plugin.

I found that once I had properly set the environment variable (which took me some time to get right), most of compilation errors that I experienced resulted from my having not yet installed a prerequisite to the prerequisite module.

NOTE: Although installing the local modules manually rather that automatically through CPAN was somewhat tedious and time-consuming, I found that it was the only way that I was able to make the local installation work properly.

Also, Srijith suggests that it may be a good idea to edit OpenPGPComment.pl to set the variable called DEBUG to 0.