A Web Undone 2

Which Side Are You On?

2012-02-05T19:40:58Z

It is one of the ironies of our time that the last vicious efforts to put the final nail in the coffin of American unions should be followed by news of the appalling labor practices of the Asian manufacturers upon whom our high tech companies depend. (And,yes, I am writing this post on an iPhone.) Rather than allowing the misplaced envy of the right wing to reduce all of our workers to poverty and serfdom, we should be pursuing a National Industrial Policy aimed, in part, at improving the lot of Asia's slave laborers to the point where working people in all of our countries can lead a decent life. This idea is neither original nor new, but perhaps its time has finally come.

MLK and the American Dream

2012-02-04T04:34:14Z

I stepped off the subway today basking in the glow of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s American Dream speech. Among the most memorable lines from that speech are "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,' and "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I am free at last," which would late be inscribed on Dr. King's tomb. The thirty-minute speech is a wide-ranging discursion on the meaning of the rights of humanity, embracing meditations on the words of Jefferson, Plato, Aristotle, Donne, and Jesus, and calling for justice in all parts of the world from Jackson, Mississippi to Calcutta, India. King outlines his strategy of nonviolence and calls for love of our oppressors in the highest sense. Perhaps surprisingly, his greatest applause line was the statement that black supremacy was as much to be feared as white supremacy. He is unequivocal in his call for unity, humanity, and brotherhood even as he is clear eyed about the reality of beatings, jail, and lynching. Those who doubt that this was the most powerful voice of the twentieth century need to listen to this speech.

Darrow For the Defense

2012-02-03T04:46:13Z

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am haunted by the ghosts of the breaker boys. At the beginning of the twentieth century, little boys of 10 and 12 worked six days a week for ten-hour days perched over coal chutes from which they plucked bits of rock. Clarence Darrow, at the time the most famous attorney for the coal miners, described the fate of one such boy as follows:

One day his little companion who always sat beside him leaned too far over as he picked the slate. He lost his balance and fell into the trough where the lumps of coal ran down. He plunged madly along with the rushing flood into the iron teeth of the remorseless breaker.... It took a long while to stop the mighty machine, and then it was almost an hour before the boy could be put together in one pile. Several days thereafter a man in a little town in Massachusetts thought that he saw blood on some lumps of coal that he was pouring into the top of his fine nickel-plated stove — but still there is blood on all our coal — and for that matter on almost everything we use, but a man is a fool if he looks for other people's blood.

Darrow was labor's lawyer early in his career, until his defense of the McNamara brothers for blowing up the Los Angeles Times building collapsed in a guilty plea, albeit one that saved the brothers from the gallows.

At the other end of his career, one of Darrow's more notable cases, tried in the wake of the famous Scopes monkey trial, was the defense of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American physician who moved with his family into a white neighborhood in Detroit, where they soon found themselves surrounded by a lynch mob numbering hundreds of angry white people. Sweet had taken the precaution of seeing that his family was well armed, however, and they fired repeatedly into the crowd, killing and wounding several people. In the subsequent murder trial, Darrow took on the defense and won a remarkable acquittal.

It was said of Darrow that he was cynical in everything, except that he lacked real cynicism. An atheist, a champion and practitioner of "free love," a lawyer who would defend the most depraved criminals and take on the most hopeless causes, Darrow earned his sobriquet "attorney for the damned" honestly. Convinced that human beings were the products of their circumstances and that free will was a myth, the only thing Darrow truly believed in was mercy. And he was perhaps the century's greatest exponent of mercy, a quality that was all the more remarkable in the astonishingly brutal and corrupt Chicago of his day. Though he was willing to defend the most depraved of criminals if the price was right, he was also highly unusual in his willingness to take up such hopeless causes as those of the breaker boys and Ossian Sweet.

This fine biography by John A. Farrell not only evokes Darrow in all his brilliant, Byronic splendor and fallibility, but also provides a keen insight into America's crippled psyche.

View all my reviews

Email Encryption

2012-01-21T22:24:41Z

I added a new post on encrypting email with S/MIME to my series on digital privacy at the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. It reminded me of the difficultry in striking a balance between providing enough information to be useful and accurate but not so much as to discourage or confuse, particularly since the series is aimed at sophisticated people who are nevertheless complete novices when it comes to encryption. Of course, not being a cryptanalyst, computer programmer, or mathematician myself, I also try to keep within the bounds of my own limited, practical knowledge.

No Pain, No Loss

2011-12-31T05:33:20Z

The New York Times reports that taking weight off and keeping it off is likely to be even harder than previously imagined. People who lose 10 percent or more of body weight suffer a metabolic change that causes them to burn food more slowly, develop more efficient muscles, and suffer from increased food cravings. In other words, once you have put on the fat, it is very hard to go back to being skinny. And even when you take off weight, it is hard to keep it off. The Times describes the kind of vigilance that is necessary as follows:

There is no consistent pattern to how people in the registry lost weight — some did it on Weight Watchers, others with Jenny Craig, some by cutting carbs on the Atkins diet and a very small number lost weight through surgery. But their eating and exercise habits appear to reflect what researchers find in the lab: to lose weight and keep it off, a person must eat fewer calories and exercise far more than a person who maintains the same weight naturally. Registry members exercise about an hour or more each day — the average weight-loser puts in the equivalent of a four-mile daily walk, seven days a week. They get on a scale every day in order to keep their weight within a narrow range. They eat breakfast regularly. Most watch less than half as much television as the overall population. They eat the same foods and in the same patterns consistently each day and don’t “cheat” on weekends or holidays. They also appear to eat less than most people, with estimates ranging from 50 to 300 fewer daily calories.

The challenge may not be insuperable, but it clearly is a challenge.

Why Hitch Is Still Winning the Debate

2011-12-23T16:25:13Z

Christopher Hitchens:

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather then sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

From: a program at Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture on "Moral Emancipation":

Faith, Culture, Skepticism, and the “New Atheism”

--Patrick Flynn, Benedictine University

[In the wake of 9-11, five best-selling authors became known as New Atheists and their arguments, movement, the New Atheism. It is my contention that there is much epistemologically objectionable with these highly equivocal and misleading New Atheist arguments.]

Farewell to Barnes & Noble

2011-12-21T14:42:22Z

I made my last trip yesterday to what used to be our local Barnes & Noble bookstore. There was still a small cluster of fiction, war history, foreign language and diet books in the center of the store, along with some bestsellers on display. But the front of the store had been taken over by a simulacrum of an Apple Store pushing the "Nook," and the rest of the store seemed largely devoted to toys for small children. Even the music section had been gutted and turned over to video sales. The incredible shrinking book selection is so limited that it no longer presents a credible alternative to shopping on line. My prediction: within five years, Barnes and Noble, if it exists, will be a virtual operation: the brick and mortar stores will have gone the way of Borders.

Love and Glory: Last of the Lymond Chronicles

2011-12-21T14:37:59Z

Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is not often that the final course of a six course meal is as satisfying as the first, but Dorothy Dunnett serves up a banquet in the Lymond Chronicles that pleases more with every volume.

The violence of the sixteenth century court and battlefield sometimes reaches almost cartoonish levels, and the level of intrigue is such that, did we not have a record of such (later) historical events as the Gunpowder Plot, it could hardly be credited. Nevertheless, the novels are beautifully paced and plotted, and Dunnett weaves a rich tapestry depicting the pageantry, poetry, music, literature, and science of the era immediately preceding the cultural explosion of Elizabeth's reign. Indeed, while the novels deal principally with France and Scotland, looming in the background throughout is the rise of English greatness following the ascent of her most illustrious monarch.

To borrow a phrase from As Time Goes By, in the end, it's "the same old story, a tale of love and glory." But what a tale, and how beautifully told!

View all my reviews

Organizational Challenges

2011-12-18T03:17:41Z

I have always greatly admired people with a natural flair for organization; unfortunately I am not one of them. For the rest of us, there is org-mode. And what might that be? I hear you say.

Org-mode is a customization of the powerful, and programmable, text editor Emacs. Don't be misled by the "text editor" label; Emacs is to text editors as Ferrari is to cars; except that Emacs is free. More aptly, perhaps, it could be characterized as the Swiss Army Knife of the digital world, being adapted to everything from software development to playing music to composing email.

For me, however, the killer feature is org-mode. Org-mode takes simple text files and turns them into a full-fledged personal planner, and it is completely customizable! The down side is that, while org-mode is simplicity itself to use, it can be the very devil to configure (the price of complete customizability). Forturnately, there is plenty of help online, such as Bernt Hansen's excellent web page. So if you have the time, patience, and determination necessary to assemble a first-class organizational tool, download a copy of Emacs and org-mode and have at it!

Privacy Series Update - WiFi

2011-12-09T03:34:48Z

I have published a fourth update to my series on digital privacy for the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coaltion. This installment deals with securing your WiFi connection at home and on the road. It includes a dicusssion of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and the Tor Project.