SIVACRACY.NET

Well I answered 10 questions correctly, anyway.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:21 PM | Permalink

Is nothing sacred?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:42 PM | Permalink

Kenneth Ciongoli, head of the National Italian-American Foundation (NIAF), released the following statement, which, unsurprisingly, is being largely ignored by the MSM, always quick to avoid discussing how frequently Italian-Americans are the victims of crappy puns:

The NIAF is distressed by the attempts of some senators and the media (CNN,CBS) to marginalize Judge Samuel Alito's outstanding record, by frequent reference to his Italian heritage and by the use of the nickname, "Scalito." Appropriately, no one mentioned that Justice Breyer was Jewish or suggested that he was lock-step ideologically with the other Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it would have been outrageous to do so. We still do not know Justice Robert's ethnicity.

We are justly proud of Justice Alito's Italian heritage and his sterling academic and judicial records as well as his impeccable integrity. However, he should be considered as an individual. In honor of the memory of the just-departed Rosa Parks the Senate champions of civil rights should insist that Judge Alito be considered only on his extraordinary merits.

Sincerely,

A. Kenneth Ciongoli
Chairman of the National Italian American Foundation

And then David Corn goes ahead and writes this headline:

Can Dems Say 'Finito' to 'Scalito'?

As Sivacracy's resident Italian-American (I think! Any amici Italiani here?), I'd just like to say that I'm offended by the lack of cleverness in this headline, though I'm more offended by the NIAF's shameless promotion of Andrea Bocelli's Christmas concerts. Why is it that, as an Italian-American, I'm expected to love syrupy, mawkish, overly orchestrated versions of "Ave Maria"?

Posted by David at 05:53 PM | Permalink

Maureen Dowd should either be ignored or mocked mercilessly. As should any woman who ever spent one single second of her life wondering if she should "pick up the check."

Today, we live in country where very soon we may be required by law to ask our husbands/boyfriends/rapists/incestuous uncles for permission to control our own bodies.

Lipstick and padded bras are irrelevant, as is the shallow thinking of Maureen Dowd.

Posted by Melissa at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, I really thought that, like O'Connor, Harriet Miers would be unwilling to go down in history as the woman who virtually singlehandedly overturned Roe v. Wade.

With Alito on the Court, (which is all but a fait accompli as I read the tea leaves), I can picture a not-too-distant future in which either Congress has banned abortion outright, which the Supreme Court has found constitutional, or a handful of states continue to allow abortion, but the states that do not have made it a crime to obtain or assist others in obtaining an abortion, and the Supreme Court has found this to be constitutional. I hope I'm wrong.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:46 PM | Permalink

So I knew an article in the WaPo entitled "Scandal Overkill?" was probably going to annoy me, but I wasn't quite prepared for this sentence:

"The underlying issue in the Plame debacle -- the alleged manipulation of intelligence used to justify a war and retaliating against a critic, Joe Wilson, who challenged that effort -- is arguably more important than the Clinton-era debates over whether oral sex was sex."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:40 PM | Permalink

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:59 AM | Permalink

Here! Via Pen-Elayne.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:40 AM | Permalink

Apparently President Bush will announce his next pick for Supreme Court justice on Monday.

I think Justice Libby has a nice ring to it, and frankly, he's already won my vote as "Best Alleged Perjurer Ever!"

Most importantly, he's one justice who won't let little things like laws get in the way of destroying our nation's enemies, including those who have cleverly concealed their identities by working to safeguard our national security. And if Roe vs. Wade is going to be overturned, along with all those pesky Fourth Amendment protections, I want to see the opinions written in this type of prose:

"You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life.

Scooter, you've won my heart -- and my support. I mean, Justice Scooter. Come back to work -- at the Supreme Court.

Posted by David at 10:46 PM | Permalink

Maureen Dowd asks: "So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax?"

Me, I’m asking the same thing about the New York Times’ reputation for quality journalism. Apparently feminists have been letting Dowd down her entire life. For example, Dowd says a bunch of stuff I've put in italics below, to which I respond in plain old feminist-style type:

“I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner.”

Those horrid "hard-charging" feminists were grubby, ugly, druggy people who danced without touching their partners, so of course Dowd didn't want to hang out with them. But she still expected to benefit from any progess they made.

“In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."”

In the unlikely event that feminists are talking about "girl money" they probably are refering to gender equity in wages, or the concept of comparable worth. Men who vocally impute insubstantial earnings, or "girl money," to individual women without knowing their true circumstances are clods, not feminists. They are, however, evidencing accurate knowledge of a social phenomenon. If "girl money" talk is drowning out discussions about pay equity and comparable worth, maybe Dowd could look for clues about why this might be happening in the very pages of the New York Times.

“Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.”

Right, the Padded Bra Battles completely distracted feminists from the Big Economic Issues, which is the main reason women still earn less than men. If the feminists had only let men pay for dinner and worn those padded bras without complaint, we would surely have true equality by now, wearing our padded bras to boardrooms, courtrooms, elite medical practices, and banks.

“While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.”

“When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.”

Damn those ugly early feminists who did such an inadequate job of broadening the notion of female beauty. And then to get trumped by narcissism! Wrinkled losers!

"It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way."

So per Dowd the early feminists were naive and misguided because they didn't value or recognize the importance of shopping and make-up and sexy shoes and cute boyfriends. They were too busy ignoring the Big Economic Issues, trying to pay for dinner, and stupidly "demonizing" dolls and magazines that emphasize the cultivation of an unattainable standard of beauty using expensive and at times unhealthy clothing and beauty products. Encouraging women to feel comfortable and confident with their bodies is apparently just not a goal she can support. If only those feminsts had called her to find out how to more productively use their time and energy. Not that she would have actually taken their calls, of course. Early in the piece Dowd says:

"Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years."

Dowd takes no responsibility for the present status of women; it's so much easier for her to blame the feminists, whom she can only ever criticize, never support. Those feminists are not doing their jobs, depite the lofty salaries they receive, their high profiles with the mainstream press, and the ways they get elected to political offices and promoted to powerful corporate positions in such overwhelming numbers, and generally control the world. She may reject their methods, their goals, and their very looks, but dammit they owed it to her to make sure that she could have it all, but failed to deliver.

See also: Echidne, Rox Populi, Brutal Women (twice), Pandagon, Sisyphus Shrugged, Jonquil, Majikthise and My Amusement Park.

Update: And here is a quick note from Siva, who is having trouble staying fully on blog hiatus:

"To this: "... it's so much easier for her to blame the feminists, whom she can only ever criticize, never support."
I would add:"or quote." Who, exactly, is she talking about? What books are she quoting? What studies is she citing? Who are these mysterious feminists? None that I know. I hate it when anyone sets up a bogeywoman by saying "feminists believe ..." or "liberals want ..."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:09 PM | Permalink

Angry/calm, calm/angry optical illusion, via Alas, A Blog.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:14 PM | Permalink

You are a Revisionist Historian. You are the Clark
Kent of postmodernists. You probably want to
work in a library or in social services. No
one suspects you of being a postmodernist...
until they read your publications!


What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:04 PM | Permalink

I often enjoy Oliver Willis's blog, but see if you can spot the sexism, and racism, in this post.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:55 PM | Permalink

Stratfor, whose "World Terrorism Report" can probably keep safe anyone with the $350/year to spend on a subscription, helpfully reports that Al Qaeda has now become a misleading brand name used to describe any number of terrorist groups with Islamic leanings and only tangential connections to one another. Which is pretty much exactly what I, among many researchers, have been saying for a long time.

Most important, however, Stratfor (here's a link to the full story, reported on an email list) points out that the Qaeda name now leads to "hyper-confusion." As, of course, does the word hyper-confusion.

Posted by David at 11:12 PM | Permalink

Chapter 7
Removing A Malignant Brain Tumor

In This Chapter
Proper Tools For A Real Headcase
Having Fun With Cancerous Neuronal Tissue Removal
Where To Go From Here (Other Than The Bathroom!)

This procedure, like any complex surgery, can get pretty difficult. Since your patient’s life is in your hands, you want to be sure that you are fairly familiar with this material before getting started. It is suggested that you read through this chapter at least twice.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:24 PM | Permalink

Many more here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:11 PM | Permalink

Story here. Be sure and read the P.P.P.S. at the bottom if you have trouble discerning satire.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:58 AM | Permalink

Every one who reads this blog knows what an extraordinary person Siva is; thoughtful, smart, energetic, open-minded and imbued with an outstanding value system. He is the heart and soul as well as the namesake and driving force of this blog. So it is with great regret that I announce I will be relentlessly cheapening the tone of the discourse in his absence. Luckily the other contributors will continue to add gravitas, balance, and diversity of thought, as they always do. I haven't posted much about the Google Print case so far, but as with so many topics, I have opinions, and they will surface soon. Meanwhile, best of luck to Siva and Melissa with all their wonderful projects.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:08 PM | Permalink

Dear Friends:

I am way behind on a couple of major projects. My tenure file is under review by my department right now. And I have a bunch of other things going on in my life (all good).

I really can't blog for a while. It's too draining and distracting to do battle so publicly. It might actually be risky. NYU is in the midst of some serious union busting and the grad students are about to go on strike. And there is a chance that NYU will chicken out on the most serious gay rights and first amendment case in a generation: whether to continue to ban the military from recruiting on campus as long as it discriminates against good patriotic Americans.

And the Google Print/Library things has taken over my life.

I usually can't help mouthing off on all this stuff. But it's not wise.

So I must refrain from blogging until the semester is over. I might announce a few things (papers, etc.). But I can't post like a maniac.

The other folks should be able to pick up the slack for me.

Thanks for understanding.

Siva

PS -- Go Longhorns!

Posted by Siva at 11:35 AM | Permalink

ACRLog:

Tony Sanfilippo Says: October 20th, 2005 at 4:36 pm

What about the effect this will have on the non-profit university press community? Mr. Lessig is free to give away all the content he wants, as long as it's his. Google is giving away our content. I'm not talking about snippets, I'm referring to the complete digital copies they are turning over to the participating libraries. Those libraries are among our best customers. They have most, if not all of what we've published in our 50 year history. They have all bought or subscribed to our digital content in the past. Now they won't need to. We are attempting to digitize our own out of print content so we can bring it back into print and offer digitally. Google is causing irreparable damage to that endeavour.
We have a mandate from the university-Be sustainable. Make less money, then publish fewer books. It wouldn't benefit ARLs or scholarship to have those books published by the for-profit sector instead. We work hard to make all of our content as affordable as possible. What Google is proposing is a wonderful thing, how they have chosen to do it is wrong and will ultimately hurt scholarship.
Tony Sanfilippo, Marketing and Sales Director, Penn State University Press
October 20th, 2005 at 5:54 pm

Barbara Fister Says:

October 20th, 2005 at 8:50 pm

Tony, I have huge respect for university presses - and my last question was a barbed one meant to make people think but honestly I was thinking more in terms of the AAP's approach to these issues rather than that of the AAUP - though that organization, too, has expressed concern about the Google project. I personally (though not a lawyer) thought Google's approach was likely not legal, but given general reluctance of publishers to join Google Print, I found it a bold and interesting move.
Here's a question: say publishers win this round. Will it make UPs any more financially viable than if Google were to win? The library whose copy was digitized will own one digital copy, just the one, and other libraries won't presumably have access to it. Google having a copy on which they base their searchable version won't cut into revenue since it won't be possible to read much of anything online (less, in fact, that in Amazon's Search Inside). There's potentially some sales to be gained through readers discovering books. So while on principle it may make sense to say this is illegal, and a big, rich company shouldn't throw its weight around, I don't follow an argument that libraries will buy fewer books as a result.
I am concerned we're buying fewer books - because we are spending more on other things. I wrote a rather tongue-in-cheek piece for Library Journal about it when Northeastern announced it was closing. I'm not sure it shows, but I was enormously angry when I wrote it because I wasn't hearing much concern from academic librarians. And we need the university presses more than ever.
Barbara

Once again, it's not about selling books. It's about selling electronic copies, access, and indexing functions. Google is crowding out that market. That's what courts will consider. That's how the fair use argument falls.

As William Patry has pointed out, it's that extra copy to libraries that could complicate the fair use claims beyond reach.

Posted by Siva at 10:09 AM | Permalink

Overheard in New York:

White guy: God! This is taking forever!
Black guy: Hey man, you don't like it then go back to Omaha or Ohio or whatever square state you're from.
White guy: But I'm from Brooklyn.
Black guy: Then act like it!

--Whitehall Staten Island Ferry terminal

Posted by Siva at 06:58 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post.

Posted by Siva at 04:56 PM | Permalink

Someone named a baby after Google.

Posted by Siva at 04:53 PM | Permalink

Ok. This is puzzling.

Is this not abuse of the powers of copyright? Can the AAAS really use its copyright powers to restrict a state agency that is using its material while publishing "standards?"

Now, of course, you would expect me to cheer for the scientists against the anti-education kooks who run the Kansas School Board. But think about it. By publishing "standards," the board is merely referring to, quoting from, or abstracting copyrighted material. What part of copyright law forbids a state government from being stupid?

This is copyright as censorship, plain and simple.

Read the whole story:

2 Science Groups Say Kansas Can't Use Their Evolution Papers.

October 27, 2005 2 Science Groups Say Kansas Can't Use Their Evolution Papers

By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, Oct. 27 - Two leading science organizations have denied the Kansas board of education permission to use their copyrighted materials in the state's proposed new science standards because of the standards' critical approach to evolution.

The National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association said the much-disputed new standards "will put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they take their place in the world."

The stinging rebuke came less than two weeks before the state school board is expected to put the science standards into effect. The new standards have also received a lukewarm review from an external education company.

While the copyright denial could cause delay in their adoption, as the standards are rewritten, it is unlikely to derail the board's conservative majority in its mission to require that challenges to Darwin's theories be taught in the state's classrooms.

"Kansas students will not be well-prepared for the rigors of higher education or the demands of an increasingly complex and technologically-driven world if their science education is based on these standards," Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy, and Michael J. Padilla, president of the teachers' group, said in a joint written statement today. "Instead, they will put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they take their place in the world."

In the statement, as well as in letters to the state board, the groups opposed the standards for singling out evolution as a controversial theory, and also for changing the definition of science itself so that it is not restricted to natural phenomena.

A third organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, echoed those concerns in a news release supporting the copyright denial, saying: "Students are ill-served by any effort in science classrooms to blur the distinction between science and other ways of knowing, including those concerned with the supernatural."

The president of the state school board, Steve Abrams, who is the leader of its 6-4 conservative majority, said members could approve the standards on Nov. 8 as planned - but with a caveat directing a copyright lawyer to remove direct references to the groups' materials.

"The impact is minimal - it won't change the concepts," Dr. Abrams said. "They obviously don't have copyrights on concepts."

But the chairman of the standards-writing committee, Steve Case, said copyrighted material appears on almost all of the document's 100 pages, and predicted it could take two to three months to revise them.

"In some cases it's just a phrase, but in some cases it's extensive," said Dr. Case, an assistant research professor at the University of Kansas, who opposes the criticism of evolution that conservatives inserted into the standards. "You try to keep the idea but change the wording around, the writing becomes horrifically bad."

The copyright skirmish is not a surprise: the two groups took a similar step in 1999, when the Kansas board stripped the standards of virtually any reference to evolution, a move that was reversed when conservative members were ousted from office.

A board member who supports evolution, Sue Gamble, said the science groups' strong statement would not block the standards' adoption but could have a longer-term effect.

"Nothing is going to stop these six members from doing what they're going to do," Ms. Gamble said of the board's conservative majority, four of whom are up for re-election in 2006. "It won't make any difference, but I think it will make a difference next year in the election."

Posted by Siva at 04:48 PM | Permalink

The new boss at CBS News gave money to Bush-Cheney.

Back when I was a reporter (not so long ago), contributing to a political campaign would get you fired. I guess all rules are out the window now that conservatives run everything.

Posted by Siva at 03:14 PM | Permalink

This is a hilarious video.

Posted by Siva at 03:01 PM | Permalink

This is important:

We should be concerned about Google Print's contractual restrictions on holders of its scanned works. But we should not fear Google simply for being the first entrant into the market. Google turns out to be evil? Implementing DRM, gathering and exploiting private personal data, indexing our DNA, imposing restrictive licensing agreements on its source material holders? Fine, criticize the evil practices (and Google too). Some other entity turns out to be evil, and wants to restrict copyright such that only Google's database is valid? Criticize them, too. But I want to recommend that we resist the conflation of evils. If we're concerned that Google is going to have a big huge really valuable database, then the answer is, in First Amendment terms, more speech. More databases, more indexers, more more more.
And by the way, you publishers, authors, and copyright-holders. You want to cash in on this market? Why don't you consider selling the electronic texts to the aggregators and indexers for cheaper than they can scan them in and with reasonable licensing terms? There's your market, right there. In fact, technology has made that market available to you for MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS. Dialog, Lexis, WestLaw, and other database vendors could have been using the full text of books for a really long time. Libraries would have killed to have full-text access to books.

On Laura's first point: Google will use its patents to ensure there is no real competition. We are talking about the next Microsoft here. Why would Google allow competition? I am afraid "more speech" is wishful thinking here.

On Laura's second point: Publishers have been doing exactly what she prescribes here. They have been doing it for almost a decade. I know this because I was involved in discussions among unversity presses on how they might offer this very service (and more, including full-text access). They are suing because Google is undermining that very market before it matures. This is why Google's fair use claims are flimsy. It's not about the book market. It's about the index and electronic text market.

Posted by Siva at 10:36 AM | Permalink

Derek's post title is "Google is not a library, but so what?" This, frankly, saddens me. It means that somehow the understanding of the role and nature of libraries has decayed to the point of being "information warehouses." Ugh.

There are some very heavy "so whats" about libraries. I can't go through them again. Search back on the posts about Google and libraries over the past four months and you can get them. Meanwhile, can I get a shout out from some more librarians on this issue? Let's get control of this debate, please. We can't let the technologists and lawyers tell librarians what their job is and keep making facile comparisons between a company that merely ranks things and the process of effective and ethical information organization and management.

Bluntly: Librarians have ethical codes. Libraries have public duties and oversight. Is that enough "so what?"

Ok. Here is part of Derek's response:

... In fact, it's my hope that others will - so far as I know, the libraries have cut a non-exclusive deal, and other companies are interested in getting into this space.� Google's responsible to its shareholders, but it's also responsive to consumers and the market.� Other companies will compete to provide consumers with the most useful version of this service.� Siva seems to worry about the interaction between Google Print and Google's closed search algorithm, privacy policy, and potentially restricting some uses. But if consumers don't like that, a competitor can hopefully offer them a different service.

I'm more concerned with copyright holders having such an extensive exclusive right that they get to control who can to create a Google Print-like service.� A Google loss will choke off competition.� In many cases, the economic inefficiencies of copyright as monopoly are worth the trade-off for greater production of creative works.� But not in all cases, and I'd say not in this one for several plausible reasons, most importantly because the potential injury to copyright holders is minute, the potential benefit to them is significant, and the potential public benefit is even greater.

Can the market satisfy all our public policy concerns?� No.� But Google can be a private company and still fufill public policy objectives.

First, let me assert once again that Google of 2025 most certainly will not resemble the Google of 2005. It might not even exist. Think about it.

Ok. I will go farther than Derek on one point: copyright holders would suffer absolutely no harm from Google Library. But that's not the point. Courts don't care about real harm. They care about potential harm to potential markets and they take the word of the plaintiff to be the last word on the question. The exclusive right to copy is the exclusive right to copy. The only exception to that right that courts would consider demonstrates a clear public benefit. The public benefit here is not so clear to courts (although it is to Derek and me and most Sivacracy readers). The private benefit of free-riding is.

Saying "where is the harm?" (the Google corporate refrain) reveals an unwillingness to recognize the extent to which real-world effects influence most federal judges in copyright cases: not at all. Congress has made it clear that it does not care about real-world effects. Courts have as well (see the 9th Circuit in Napster or the Supreme Court in Grokster). All Congress cares about is the trump cards it can deal out to copyright holders. And courts tend to respect that even if it makes no sense or harms the public (see Eldred).

So just as the widespread worship of Google baffles me, the widespread faith in the reasonableness of courts (especially SDNY and the 2d Circuit) baffles me more. Have we not learned any hard lessons from the last few years? How often since Feist has a federal court shown that it "gets it?" Certainly, in Kelly. But Kelly is no longer settled law. Google Print/Library might kill Kelly. If we get a very different indexing/cacheing decision out of the 2d Circuit then the Supreme Court (wild cards all around) will have to choose between them. And must I remind everyone that Ginsburg is now the most dominant copyright voice on the court? I suspect the courts are exhausted by all the hard thinking we have made them do over the past few years and they are in fact more rigid, more fundamentalist, than in the recent past. The copyright moral panics have made a difference. And this one is no different.

And have we not learned not to count on private industry to stand up for principle and the public good? Where is the consumer electronics industry now in the DRM fight? Derek seems to have faith in something called "competition." I have not seen this mythical beast for many years. Google can only do this project because it has this amazing super-secret patented scanning machine. It controls the patents on it. There shall be no competition unless some other firms actually licenses the electronic files from publishers (a market that would dry up if Google continues).

I can't believe I have to remind anyone of this: DRM, nondisclosure, and patents destroy competition. That's why we have them. They are what Google depends on to do its job. These are not trivial problems. These are not neutral technologies. There are great complications and problems here. We should not be blind to them.

Again agreeing with Derek -- "a Google loss would choke off competition." Exactly. Before Google loses, there is a crowding-out effect. After it loses, there will be a chilling effect. Meanwhile, publishers fear that a market that Amazon created for them: "search inside the book" licensing, will evaporate. Worse, of course, is possible. A bad loss threatens everything we hold dear about the Internet.

And I am still waiting for anyone (Derek, Michael, Larry?) to come to terms with the privacy problems here. As Julie Cohen and Sonia Katyal have shown us, digital copyright and surveillance are intricately linked. What is Google doing to prevent anyone from snooping on our reading habits? Please read the Google privacy policy. I promise it will send chills up your spine. Check out the part about law enforcement. Then go ask your librarian if he would go to jail to protect your confidentiality. I know many librarians who would. Google: promises to turn you over to the Feds. Libraries: promise to do everything they can to protect you from the Feds. You decide who you trust.

So to review: a Google win (unlikely as it is) would choke off competition. A Google loss would choke off competition. And we are unlikely to get the really cool public library text-search index we deserve in any case.

This remains a good dream and a bad deal all around.

Posted by Siva at 10:04 AM | Permalink

No way I can do this justice through excerpting or description, just go read it yourself.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:24 AM | Permalink

From Fark.com:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:20 AM | Permalink

WNBA Star Opens Up About Being Gay:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- Houston Comets forward Sheryl Swoopes is opening up about being a lesbian, telling a magazine that she's ''tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about.''

Swoopes, honored last month as the WNBA's Most Valuable Player, told ESPN The Magazine for a story on newsstands Wednesday that she didn't always know she was gay and fears that coming out could jeopardize her status as a role model.

''Do I think I was born this way? No,'' Swoopes said. ''And that's probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are.''

Swoopes, who was married and has an 8-year-old son, said her 1999 divorce ''wasn't because I'm gay.'' She said her reason for coming out now is merely because she wants to be honest.

''It's not something that I want to throw in people's faces. I'm just at a point in my life where I'm tired of having to pretend to be somebody I'm not,'' the 34-year-old Swoopes said. ''I'm tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love.'' ...

Swopes is one of the finest athletes and competitors I have ever seen in person. I had the honor of seeing her play many times when she starred for Texas Tech back in the early 1990s. I had the displeasure of seeing her frequently defeat the University of Texas Lady Longhorns. Sigh.

The only sad thing about this story is that she did not feel confident enough to come out when she was 18 (not that many people from Texas do). Back then, rumor has it, she rebuffed recruitment efforts from the Longhorns because she met a few lesbian players in Austin. Had it not been such a big deal, Swoopes might have led Texas to a couple of more National Championships and the world would be a better place.

But that's my thing. The important thing is that she is being strong and honest now. And she will inspire thousands of young women to be proud of themselves instead of ashamed.

Bravo.

Posted by Siva at 01:45 PM | Permalink

From Cindy Adams:

SCHWARZENEGGER is furious. Furious at Bush. Furious GOP fund- raisers have been sanctioned in Ar nold's area. Furious because he himself is up for re-election. Furious on account of he wants to cover the state passing the hat. Furious because he his own personal self sent word Washington must stay out of California for now. Furious because the White House as much as showed him he knows what he can do with this hat. The gov is so furious at the prez for invading his territory that he's toying with pickpocketing the Dems. So furious that he's raising the specter of perhaps...

Do we really need the least popular governor in America to become a Democrat? I think not.

Posted by Siva at 12:21 PM | Permalink

From gnuosphere: Is Google The Right "Person" For The Job?

I couldn't agree more. Google's informal corporate motto of "Don't Be Evil" is irrelevant. Google is a for-profit corporation. This means neither good nor evil as Google's capacity for "personhood" exists merely in a legal sense. It's not that conscience is ignored, it's that it simply does not exist. This means an exclusive obligation to Google shareholders without any regard to stakeholders (i.e. the public). Google is driven - by law - to maximize profit for its shareholders. The question of "good or evil" entirely misses the point. That is, Google's actions will be driven by the legal commandment to increase profit. We are looking at a corporation structured to maximize profit yet in control of the largest digital database of knowledge and culture to ever exist.Personally, I'm not against having an institution be granted the right to create such a database. But I'm wary about handing over such privilege and control to a body that is not working for the people. Should a corporation control what could potentially become the world's first digital library? What is the purpose of a library? Why do libraries exist? For who do libraries exist? If this project is to become a globally accessible library, should there be someone controlling your right to read?As the database of books increases in size and therefore scientific and cultural value, is an unregulated for-profit corporation the best choice to manage and control that database?

Posted by Siva at 12:17 PM | Permalink

From Madisonian.net:

When the Copyright Clearance Center/Blackboard deal was announced recently, I posted a glib, cynical observation about what it means for fair use. Tarleton Gillespie has gone me one better, with a succinct explanation in Inside Higher Ed of why this is a bad deal for copyright.

First, it's a bad deal because it reduces copyright to a brutal transactions costs essence. If a professor posts material on Blackboard, the CCC permissions process automatically kicks in. No more wasting valuable time wondering about "educational" or "teaching" or "critical" uses of copyrighted works. Just pay the man.

Second, it's a bad deal because the technological combination hides that point. The posting and clearance process is supposed to be seamlessly integrated, not only making the transaction itself effortless but completely eliminating the thought process that goes into the fair use equation. Is it permitted or is it not? The machine will literally do the teacher's thinking, and no one -- not the institution, nor the teacher, nor the student -- will be the wiser. Copyright history teaches that copyright is about more than transactions costs. Sometimes, copyright means never having to say you're sorry. But you do need to have the choice.

There is much more in Michael's eloquent post. If you teach at a university, this is a must-read.

Posted by Siva at 11:15 AM | Permalink

From USATODAY.com:

Iran's president: Israel must be 'wiped off the map

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's hard-line president called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.

Great. We lose 2,001 good Americans (as of this morning) so that the murderous Mullahs of Iran can run Iraq via their cronies and thugs.

Good job, Mr. President. Way to go.

As I have said all along, radical and violent fundamentalists have no better friend in power than George W. Bush. He gives them everything they want: chaos, hopelessless, poverty, humilation, torture, and a "crusade." It's a dream come true for Islamist recruiters!

Too bad W can't recruit American soldiers nearly as well.

Posted by Siva at 11:06 AM | Permalink

How about truth and justice:

... In many ways the Fitzgerald investigation is a sideshow; we have plenty of evidence showing what happened. The secret Office of Special Plans, the "stovepiped" intelligence, the Pentagon's war against State and the CIA -- it has all been reported, and new evidence and accusations keep coming in. Just in the last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, blamed the war on "a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense ... that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." In the Oct. 31 issue of the New Yorker, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security advisor under Bush I, blasted the neocons who dreamed up the Iraq war, and uttered this amazing statement: "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Whatever Fitzgerald decides, it's high time -- past time -- for Congress to begin asking deeper questions about how this war was sold to the American people. The 2,000 Americans who have given their lives deserve nothing less.

Posted by Siva at 11:00 AM | Permalink

From American Prospect Online:

... The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt later turned out to be crude forgeries, created on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents -- and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proferred less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.) ...

Posted by Siva at 10:40 AM | Permalink

He makes a strong case:

Again, Siva's real fear appears not to be the meltdown caused by Google Print the case, but what he speculates will come after. When I look at the Google Print case, I say "game on" - I see a chance for a legitimate defendant to take a real shot at making some good law. There's broad and even unexpected support for what Google's doing. A strategy of just patiently waiting on the sidelines, to try to hold Congress off, seems potentially very damaging. I don't know how it's productive to copyfight that way - should Grokster not have been fought, because if we had clearly won, the INDUCE Act would have passed?

Yes, there are times to be bold and subjects to champion. I just don't think this is worth betting the Internet (or the copyright system) on.

My fears about Google losing (which are significant, and based on real copyright politics instead of wishful thinking) are only the premise of my criticism of Google Print/Library.

Look, when in comes to copyright, the Southern District of New York and the Second Circuit do not make good law. Learned Hand has been dead a long time. The chances of good law coming out of the home turf of Time Warner, Viacom, and the News Corporation at the behest of some punk-kid company from California are as slim as those of good wine coming from New York. I sure wish New York produced good wines. And I wish SDNY and the Second Circuit understood digital copyright better (see Universal v. Reimerdes). But we shall be waiting a long time for both these things.

And besides, my real issues are with the libraries here. Google can and should do what's best for its shareholders. The rest of us should worry about what's best for the culture, democracy, and the Internet. We can't count on any company to do that for us. We should be able to count on libraries to do it. They work for us. Google doesn't.

Basically, I think we as readers and researchers (and authors) should want such a full-text-search service. But Google is the wrong party to depend on for this in part because I think it will lose in court, undermine Kelly v. ArribaSoft, threaten future similar library projects, and crowd out other good initiatives in both the private and public sectors. The damage could be huge, both in court and Congress.

Please remember that this company is unaccountable to everyone but its shareholders. It depends on things like DRM, trade secrets, proprietary code, vague privacy pledges, and non-disclosure agreements to make this project happen. How can I cheer this on?

Look, the more fair-use friendly Google Print Library is, the more user un-friendly it is. The better the service is for Google and the publishers, the worse it is for us.

The idealization of both Google the company and the library project are really astounding to me. I just don't get it.

Posted by Siva at 05:06 PM | Permalink

Martha Nussbaum is one of my intellectual heroes:

... What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. In order to understand the situation, in turn, we need to turn to a set of events that show more clearly than any others how far the ideals of respectful pluralism and the rule of law have been undermined by religious ideology. These events are a terrible instance of genocidal violence; but they are more than that. The deeper problem they reveal is that of violence aided and abetted by the highest levels of government and law enforcement, of a virtual announcement to minority citizens that they are unequal before the law and that their lives are not worth the protection of law enforcement.

UPDATE: Here is part II.

Posted by Siva at 04:27 PM | Permalink

From Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber:

... Those were the days. Men could be men, and women could be modest -- except for the ladies of easy leisure, who were available for extramarital sex, backalley abortions, syphilis, etc. ...

Those Crooked Timber folks are smart. Don't cross them, if ya know what's good for ya.

Posted by Siva at 04:16 PM | Permalink

Boldface emphasis added by Siva:

From The (apparently clueless) Los Angeles Times:

A Love That Was Benched by Their Careers

The long-standing relationship between high court nominee Harriet Miers and Texas jurist Nathan Hecht entrances and puzzles their friends.

By Scott Gold and Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writers

October 8, 2005

HOUSTON — He was a country boy who grew up on a wheat farm, she a city girl who played on her high school tennis team.

The lives of Nathan Hecht and Harriet E. Miers began to intertwine in the early 1970s, shortly after they finished law school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Soon, they were rising stars at the same law firm, and their lives seemed to be converging in every way. They were earnest, ambitious and increasingly affectionate with one another. Friends thought they would get married.

Instead, for 30 years, Hecht and Miers — President Bush's Supreme Court nominee — have nurtured a kinship that has entranced and confounded their closest friends. They are traditional conservatives content in a modern, nontraditional relationship, one that leaves plenty of time for their true love, their work, to take center stage.

Romantic at times, the relationship has played an important role in their ascent to power — she as White House counsel, he as a justice of the Texas Supreme Court, where he has served for 15 years.

"I think they thought seriously about getting married," said Dallas commercial litigation attorney Brady Sparks, who lived across the hall from Hecht in law school and has been friends with Hecht and Miers ever since. "They both decided that it just wasn't in the cards for the agenda they both wanted, and that was to do about three lifetimes worth of work in one lifetime."

The Rev. Ron Key, their pastor, said God called him to preach, not to play matchmaker. He said that in his long career as a minister, theirs was the only relationship that had ever tempted him to intervene.

"It's been great to watch — and a little puzzling sometimes," Key said. "Their relationship has been such a special one. Sometimes I think they wanted to protect how special it was by not getting married."...

"... confounded their closest friends ..."

Ha ha he he he.

I bet it does. :)

Posted by Siva at 03:58 PM | Permalink

Remember in the VP debate last fall when Cheney claimed he had never met John Edwards, except that he had? A lot. And there were pictures. And remember how no one in the conservative media cared that the VP of the United States blatently lied to us all?

Well, Cheney has done it again.

Remember when he told Tim Russert he had didn't know who Joe Wilson was?

Hmmmmm. Think he was telling the truth?

Puleeez.

Posted by Siva at 03:33 PM | Permalink

According to a CBS News poll, a majority of Americans now reject evolution.

That's right. We are getting dumber thanks to the radical right and its anti-truth, anti-science, anti-thought agenda.

Wasn't Bush supposed to IMPROVE education?

Did you ever think an entire nation might qualify for the Darwin Awards?

Posted by Siva at 03:07 PM | Permalink

Here is Dan Solove writing about the ridiculous cost of this surveillance program.

And here is civil libertarian hero Dan Gilmore:

The NYT covered this story, on the front page, too. But somehow it was all about "Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems". It wasn't about the government automating the bugging of every student, professor, and staff person by typing a few commands from the basement of the FBI building. The nasty word "wiretap" didn't appear til the eighth paragraph, "below the fold", and when it did appear, it was buried in mid-sentence, right next to "criminals, terrorists and spies". (They never wiretap "citizens", "innocent bystanders", or "suspects", and everyone wiretapped is of course guilty-as-charged, though they haven't been charged with any crime yet.)

There's no shortage of bias in the New York Times, but this is a particularly blatant example. Now why is it in the interest of the Times to build wiretapping into the hardware of the Internet?

The story also claimed that "Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues." I think there's a civil liberties issue when the US Government wants to wire the country like the Stasi wired East Germany for indiscriminate bugging. And there's no "winning" of these court orders; they happen in secret, without the participation or knowledge of the target of the wiretap. The university cannot appear in court to argue about whether the order should be issued (and very few challenge them after issuance). In most cases the judge is *required* to issue the secret wiretap order every time the Feds merely say "we need the info". To get 99% of such
orders, they don't need a warrant, nor probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.

What used to be tough wiretap standards have been whittled away inch by inch by decades of aggressive pushing on the part of the FBI, DEA, CIA, NSA, and DoJ. In August, one judge woke up and published a decision that said, despite his previously regular issuance of secret orders to track the location of peoples' cellphones in real time, without probable cause or any suspicion of criminal activity, he was concerned about whether this routine secret practice was actually legal. (See http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_09.php#004002).

Bravo for that one judge who found his conscience. The government argues that under the same conditions (no warrant, no reason to suspect you in particular), they can monitor about 40% of the bits you send over the Internet, in real time, including where you are, who
you're talking with, what protocols you're using, and every URL, email address, IM name, or other "addressing and signaling information". (I argue that they don't have this authority, but I never get to show up in court at these discussions with the judge.)

Not only is this information supposedly legal for the government to get about every citizen, it's perfect for automated software tracking of who's-talking-to-who, all the time. The NSA term for it is "traffic analysis", and most of it works even if your communications are encrypted.

I understand why the authoritarian brass would want routine wiretapsof the innocent; as Orson Welles said, "Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy." They've lost sight of their goal (keeping people safe and free), yet redoubled their efforts. Why this would be
in the interest of the citizens (or the FCC, or the NY Times) is the puzzle.

Posted by Siva at 02:48 PM | Permalink

For how long?

Posted by Siva at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:10 PM | Permalink

His article, "Between What’s Right and What’s Easy" from Inside Higher Ed, is a wonderful exhoration to educators to boldly employ fair use, even as we split infinitives.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:01 PM | Permalink

"Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke." by KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
in the October 24, 2005 NYT:

"You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda - stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

"Despite the seriousness of the Bush White House, more than one Bush staffer reads The Onion and enjoys it thoroughly," he said. "We do have a sense of humor, believe it or not."

Via The Poor Man, and like The Poor Man, Sivacracy is proud to feature the Seal of the President of the United States, only ours is bigger, not that size matters of course.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:32 AM | Permalink

And wins!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:21 AM | Permalink

In 1999 Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson thought perjury was pure evil. In 2005, it's no big deal! Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged fills us in.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:49 AM | Permalink

Read the reviews, (e.g. "This one is up there with Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Dante's Inferno, and The Left Behind Series. Cogently argued, thoughtful, bold, outside the box thinking from America's finest living reporter. Comparable in American letters only to Paine's "Common Sense," in which this book abounds. Every single fact was checked, and re-checked against reality. And if the liberals can succeed with Christmas, wait till they get their greasy little hands on Good Friday. The mind reels."), but if you buy the book someone should pinch you hard. Via Jesus' General.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Many of these pets look embarassed, but also well fed, unlike most human models. A bunch more photos and lots of corporate sponsor propaganda here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:10 AM | Permalink

Read about the silencing of a military blogger at The Tattered Coat, via Suburban Guerrilla.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:53 AM | Permalink

If there are not enough antiviral drugs available, it will be more than a "PR disaster" but it was good to see this article draw attention to the effects patents have upon potentially life saving drugs, and also mention (though somewhat obliquely) the fact that the United States does not like to play by the IP rules it wants to set for everyone else.

Drug industry tries to avert bird flu PR disaster, by Ben Hirschler, European Pharmaceuticals Correspondent, Reuters

"Drug industry executives are working overtime to prevent what could be a positive news story on bird flu from turning into a public relations disaster.

"Normally, there must be an attempt to negotiate a voluntary licence but in a national emergency that step can be bypassed in order to save time, though the patent holder would still be entitled to a payment, according to the WTO secretariat."

FEELING THE HEAT

"This time round, the stakes could be even higher, with pressure on patents potentially coming not only from developing countries but also rich nations worried about drug supplies.

"Roche and the rest of the industry have a challenge to navigate this controversy successfully.

"Companies are very aware of the AIDS experience and the impact that had on their reputation. Have they learnt the lesson? It is difficult to speculate on that before we see what actually happens in practice," said Simon Friend, global pharmaceuticals practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:35 AM | Permalink

Bob Geiger at the Yellow Dog Blog observed:

..."Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have minimum wages higher than the national level, with Washington and Oregon topping the scale at $7.35 and $7.25 per hour, respectively. Californians earn a minimum of $6.75 per hour while San Francisco – that proud bastion of liberalism – requires that employers pay at least $8.50 per hour.

"[This] means that these are primarily liberal-leaning states and an excellent example of why we should wear that label proudly going into the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. In doing better at defining ourselves – rather than letting Republicans misrepresent who we are – drawing these kinds of distinctions is central to our definition of what being liberal and Democratic means." ...

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:24 AM | Permalink

A day after being eviscerated by Maureen Dowd (available only on TimesSelect, though Steve Gilliard provides excerpts here), Judith Miller really takes it on the chin in Public Editor Byron Calame's brutally efficient column in Sunday's Times.

Calame's biggest point comes at the end of the article, where he essentially challenges both Bill Keller's competence and Pinch Sulzberger's honesty:

Last Sunday's article raised this issue: "This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said. When I asked him this week if the integrity of The Times and the First Amendment weren't also at risk, he stressed that his assertion had to be read in the proper context. He referred me to his comments in a separate interview with The Times, which weren't published: "There were other hands on the wheel as well. And obviously if we felt that the situation didn't warrant the kind of support we gave her, we would have interceded."

Mr. Sulzberger, inclined by instinct and Times tradition to protect any reporter's confidential sources, wasn't doing anything special in backing Ms. Miller on this journalistic principle. But in an interview for the retrospective last Sunday, Ms. Miller acknowledged Mr. Sulzberger's special support in this case. "He galvanized the editors, the senior editorial staff. ... He metaphorically and literally put his arm around me," she said.

Neither Mr. Keller nor the publisher had done much digging into Ms. Miller's contacts with any of her confidential sources about Ms. Plame before the subpoena arrived on Aug. 12, 2004. Neither had reviewed her notes, for instance. Mr. Keller also didn't look into whether Ms. Miller had proposed a story about the Plame leak to an editor.

"I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own," he wrote to me, adding later, "If I had known the details of Judy's engagement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense."

What does the future hold for Ms. Miller? She told me Thursday that she hopes to return to the paper after taking some time off. Mr. Sulzberger offered this measured response: "She and I have acknowledged that there are new limits on what she can do next." It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.

It's worth reading the whole piece. Although Calame himself doesn't say anything that hadn't already been said by bloggers, his position at the Times allowed him to nail down the principals for comments. I hadn't realized that Bill Keller's email message to the staff (full text available at Crooks and Liars) had actually been a response to a query by Calame, whose position was created in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. Good to know that the reforms at that time had at least some effect. But the Miller issue is far more damaging to the Times than Blair's fabrications were. She's clearly finished, but this issue shouldn't be personalized; it's a larger problem for the news media in general, where proximity to those in power (and therefore to leaks from sources with questionable political motives) is seen as a reward unto itself, and for the Times as the former standard-bearer for American newspapers.

Posted by David at 08:43 PM | Permalink

On Thursday night, jazz singer Shirley Horn passed away after a series of increasingly grim health problems that left her unable to accompany herself on piano in her final recordings and albums. My understanding, based on conversations with people who knew her well, was that Horn was sarcastic, tough, and brutally hilarious in person, an impression that the Washington Post reaffirms in its obituary of her.

But one wouldn't know it from her music. Her quietly beautiful work in the last twenty years of her life is among the best jazz I've ever heard, largely because she had developed a singing style that stood in marked contrast to those of other stars. Where singers like Dianne Reeves and Diana Krall seem to be influenced primarily by the great vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington (and one could do far worse than to emulate any of them), Horn reminded me mostly of those instrumentalists who would hold notes at odd times, use silence as part of the music, and rely on an innate sense of phrasing rather than ostentatious power or dexterity to create something memorable. I've always thought of her as more like pianist Bill Evans, saxophonist Joe Henderson, and, of course, her friend Miles Davis than as someone whose work could be compared easily with that of other singers.

I saw her live only once -- at Bohemian Caverns in DC back in 2000 -- but it was unforgettable. Those who don't know her music should treat themselves. Any of her albums will be a wonderful introduction, but I would recommend especially her live album I Love You, Paris.

As a singer, Shirley Horn was unique, and as a musician, she was one of the best. I wish her final years had been happier ones, but I'm grateful that she continued to sing and perform. Her music will be missed.

Posted by David at 06:40 PM | Permalink

This article, "Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems," by Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton, in today's NYT, begins as follows:

"The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

"The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new technologies like telephone service over the Internet were endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps "in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies." ....

The focus of the article is on the cost of facilitating easy monitoring of Internet communications, and the reluctance of universities to be forced to invest millions in these technological modifications. What is left unsaid is the type of "crimes" and "criminals" that law enforcement officials will be looking for. Hmmm, let's see: "Crimes" committed by college students, over the Internet. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with peer to peer file exchanges, could it? Naaah, I'm probably just paranoid. But of course that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:45 PM | Permalink

Derek Slater explains how the RIAA keeps misrepresenting good news as bad.

Why? They need Congress and journalists to keep the panic alive.

One cautionary note about the remarkable success of online music sales (yes, we told you so):

The real cause for worry: Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" is the first song to ever reach the one million online sales mark. Very disturbing.

Posted by Siva at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Think Progress says so, and MoveOn.org denies selling them. You can buy them here, though!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:50 AM | Permalink

...because then I don't have to choose between drinking Wheat Thins, or pencil shavings:

"...have had a lot of great vintages of Dom Perignon, but I do not remember any as impressive as the 1996. Even richer than the brilliant 1990, the 1996 is still tightly wound, but reveals tremendous aromatic intensity, offering hints of bread dough, Wheat Thins, tropical fruits, and roasted hazelnuts. Medium to full-bodied, with crisp acidity buttressing the wines wealth of fruit and intensity, it comes across as extraordinarly zesty, well-delineated, and incredibly long on the palate. Moet-Chandon deserves considerable accolades for this prodigious example of Dom Perignon. Anticipated maturity: now-2020.... This features floral, candied citrus, pencil shaving and hazelnut aromas and flavors. It's fresh and focused, with a firm structure offset by a mouthfilling richness and a lacy texture. Not a blockbuster, but seamless and seductive in its approach. Drink now through 2010."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:47 PM | Permalink

Here. As reported by Dan Froomkin.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:57 PM | Permalink

Brought to you by the California Artichoke Advisory Board. A fairly difficult crossword puzzle involving artichoke trivia and pitched at children is available here, see "Kids Corner."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:37 PM | Permalink

PressThink:

1.) Did Judith Miller, as a reporter for the Times in 2003, have any special security clearances that would have allowed her to handle types of classified information off limits to other reporters and editors of the Times?

2.) If so, what did the publisher and executive editor know about such clearances and where they came from?

There is some amazing stuff in this article.

Posted by Siva at 03:07 PM | Permalink

Putting milk into cereal.

Seriously.

Posted by Siva at 02:50 PM | Permalink

A site devoted to helping Bible studiers focus on some helpfully annotated, oft neglected passages, such as:

God disapproves of adultery, lying, oppressing workers, and mistreating widows, orphans, and strangers. Malachi 3:5

After a woman gives birth, a priest must kill a lamb, pigeon, or dove as a sin offering. This is because having children is sinful and God likes it when things are killed for him. Leviticus 12:6-8

Jesus says that everyone in heaven is single. Does that mean that married people can't go there, that they must get a divorce once they arrive, or what? Luke 20:35

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:02 AM | Permalink

If you like the graphic, you'll like the political blogging at Firedoglake even better.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:55 AM | Permalink

Excerpted from this article in today's NYT:

"A well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director at WPP Group resigned his position yesterday amid an uproar over remarks he made at an industry event about female creative executives. The comments, by Neil French, 61, drew attention to the absence of women at the highest levels of the creative side of the ad industry.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:16 AM | Permalink

One person I've never wasted a single keystroke defending before is Ann Coulter, because I think she is abjectly despicable. About the only positive thing I can really say about her is that she spells her first name correctly, which is to say, without that extraneous unpronounced letter "e" at the end.

I've been a longtime reader of Pandagon, and was thrilled when Amanda Marcotte started blogging there (I profoundly miss Jesse Taylor already). However: Pam Spaulding's post at Pandagon about a conservative group that criticizes Ann Coulter in an upcoming documentary calls Ann Coulter, among other things: "The intellectually bankrupt, bed-worn b*tch of the wingnut set"; "a phony conservative media whore out for the buxxx"; "The racist man-vessel of the right wing elite"; and "the right-wing blow-up doll."

Coulter is bed-worn, a whore, a man-vessel, and a blow-up doll? Now maybe I'm missing something, but when you are explicitly calling someone else out for her "hypocrisy and bigotry," wouldn't your message be more effective if you let "her trademark meaningless, hate-filled vitriol" speak for itself, instead of hurling incredibly sexist invective of your own at her?

Cripes, I feel like taking another shower.

Update: Pam says in the comments that this was "tongue-in-cheek aping of the Coulter brand of discourse." Too subtle for me, obviously.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:36 AM | Permalink

For a number of years now, those of us from Buffalo have had to endure the worst possible mutations of our dear native diet, which largely consists of deep-fried chicken wings tossed in a tangy hot sauce. We are often offered wings in all sorts of sauces that bear no resemblance to the authentic ("sesame seeds? sesame seeds?!?!?!?"). And often wings are offered by the dozen or half-dozen, instead of the standard multiple of 10 (a single -- and thus a double is 20 and a bucket is 50). Buffalo is next to Canada, after all. So we convert to the metric system quite naturally.

Adding insult to injury, we often have to respond to the stupidest question since "is it raining out there?":

"Buffalo wings come from Buffalo?"

Yeah. Except we don't call them "Buffalo wings." We call them "wings." Like people from China call Chinese food "food."

When done properly, wings can cure the common cold, revive the hypothermic, and stop a beating heart in 30 to 40 years.

This article explains a bit of the history of wings and relies on the culinary expertise of my dear friend Leah Archibald (AKA Brooklyn's Loretta Lynn). Leah grew up in North Tonawanda, just outside of Buffalo proper. She is a true Rust Belt girl. And she knows her wings:

LEAH ARCHIBALD'S BUFFALO CHICKEN WINGS

FOR THE BLUE CHEESE DIP

1 cup mayonnaise
6 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
6 ounces plain nonfat yogurt
1/4 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons seasoned rice wine or white wine vinegar

Whisk mayonnaise, yogurt, buttermilk, vinegar, and half of the blue cheese until smooth. Stir in remaining blue cheese and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

FOR THE WINGS

5 lbs. chicken wings, separated into drumette and bow sections (save tips for soup), dried overnight on paper towels in the refrigerator
3/4 cup Frank's Original RedHot Sauce
1 stick unsalted butter
2 capfuls of white vinegar
Peanut oil for frying

1. Use aluminum foil to create a "collar" on a Dutch oven to prevent splattering. Add peanut oil to a depth of about 4 inches and place over high heat until oil registers 375 degrees on a deep-fat thermometer. Working in batches, place wings in hot oil, stirring frequently with a slotted spoon, being careful not to overcrowd the pot. Cook until wings are golden brown, anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes. Drain on paper towels.

2. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, melt butter and mix in Frank's sauce and vinegar for medium-spicy wings. Add more butter to lower spiciness, more sauce to raise spiciness.

3. Place cooked wings in a large bowl, ladle sauce over wings, and toss to coat. Serve hot with blue cheese dip, celery, and carrot sticks.

Bon Appetit!

Posted by Siva at 03:05 PM | Permalink

From the Financial Times:

‘Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy’

By Edward Alden in Washington

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.

“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”

The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."

Among his other charges:

■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.

Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.

“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”

Let the personal attacks against Wilkerson begin. As he must certainly understand, the cowards in the White House know no shame.

Posted by Siva at 02:50 PM | Permalink

I sure hope not. This is my tenure review year. If I get fired I will have to move this blog off NYU servers. And my family will be homeless.

Seriously, I'm not too worried. I think I have done all that was expected of me. But still, this process is all about quality control and it certainly should not be taken lightly by anyone.

I raise this point because mega-smart conservative blogger Dan Drezner got fired from the University of Chicago. And some suspect his prolific and articulate public work helped tip the case against him. I am not so sure. The world of political science these days is so methodologically thorny that its tenure decisions seem close to arbitrary. If you produce arcane work that matters not at all to anyone, you are certain to get tenure at an elite research university. If you write about stuff that matters to people's lives -- like politics, for instance -- you could be in trouble.

I can't say that blogging did Dan in one way or the other. I only know Dan's blog writing, which is wonderful. I have never read his scholarship but have perused his vita. It's very impressive from the point of view of someone not in political science.

I met Dan once at a great conference, where he struck me as exactly the sort of person one would want as a colleague in his business: sharp, open-minded, charming, polite, widely read and well read. Still, Chicago and similar schools routinely fire great people who end up doing amazing work at their next position. I am confident that Dan will land well.

So, back to me. Should I be fired for blogging, writing for Salon.com, or generally living a full cultural and political life? Certainly some Sivacracy readers would like me fired for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with those choices. But really, is being loud and prolific necessarily an impediment to serious scholarship?

Michael Berube (who has had tenure for some time) has some thoughts on the question.

And here is an article from Inside Higher Ed about academic bloggers and tenure.

Here is what Dan says about l'affair Drezner.

For the record, six of us in that list in the right-hand column are university professors. Two of us have tenure. Four of us do not. Two more are not academics but one of those is married to an untenured professor. So this is sort of an important question to the Sivacracy community.

Just one more thought: somehow Condoleeza Rice got tenure at Stanford. Her incompetent public work got many innocent people killed. No academic blogger has ever done that much damage.

Posted by Siva at 12:40 PM | Permalink

A Very Electronic Christmas: Teach a kid to solder for the holidays. This beginner's electronic kit assembles from (2) tree-shaped circuit boards and includes (24) LEDs-(16) red, (4) green, (4) yellow-ready to mount and solder onto it. You add the solder and soldering iron, and (1) 9V battery for power (it also functions as the stand) and you've given some lucky kid (12 or older, under adult supervision) a new skill for Christmas, plus a keepsake of the occasion. Stands 4" tall.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:04 PM | Permalink

Confused over TLDN, ICANN, WSIS, MOUSE? What exactly is being "governed" in "Internet governance?" Andy Oram can help sort it out for you.

Posted by Siva at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Author Meghann Marco wants to publicize her book, 'Field Guide to the Apocalypse,' and asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found by interested readers, but they refused. Now Simon & Shuster is one of the publishers suing Google over Google Print, claiming it constitutes copyright infringement. Marco is unhappy with this development; story at Kottke.org.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:43 AM | Permalink

Far freakin' out.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:26 AM | Permalink

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
A whole page of them here, some with visuals.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:04 PM | Permalink

Red Sweaters dot org

"Concept: Suspend 1500+ hand-knit mini red sweaters from a tree.
Participants: Anyone who can knit or crochet!
Purpose: This project is an art installation that was inspired by the war in Iraq. Its purpose is to spread public awareness, encourage thought, and inspire discussions about war and current events without promoting a specific view.
Credits: This project began Saturday, February 19, 2005 in San Francisco, California at 1:32am by Nina Rosenberg."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:53 PM | Permalink

From Tech News on ZDNet:

The Association of American Publishers has filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the Internet company's plans to scan and digitally distribute the text of major library collections would violate copyright protections.

Posted by Siva at 02:15 PM | Permalink

It turns out W chewed out Rove back when the Plame leak became public. So he knew that Rove was a traitor and a criminal. Yet he did not fire him (despite promising to fire the leaker).

Of course, when W testified before the special prosecutor, he did so without taking an oath. So we can't get W for the perjury he most certainly would have committed had he been under oath (after all, this guy is incapable of telling the truth).

But still, the President of the United States knew that one of his covert agents had been outed (and thus national security threatened) by a member of his staff and he did nothing.

Treason. Seriously. All the way to the top.

Somebody better go to jail for this.

Posted by Siva at 12:48 PM | Permalink

The third one of course is for Siva (I'm a Yankees fan too, sorry Mel). More here. Via Arse Poetica.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:09 PM | Permalink

BlogHer Conference '06
Friday July 28 and Saturday July 29, 2006
San Francisco Bay Area

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:54 AM | Permalink

Here!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:52 AM | Permalink

This essay by Michael Gaddy starts out:

"My son returned from Iraq last weekend after a year’s service. I confess to breathing much easier now that he is out of that quagmire.

"Back in 1950, you supported my father as he left my mother and me to go to war in Korea. He never returned, giving his life somewhere in that foreign land. Because of the loss of my father, my mother put a vodka bottle to her head and pulled the trigger. Your wonderful support took both my parents. Thanks again!" ....

According to the site, Gaddy is an U.S. Army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada, and Beirut.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:25 AM | Permalink

"Dead trees delivered digitally."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:21 AM | Permalink

A must-read piece from AMERICAblog

Posted by Siva at 04:07 PM | Permalink

Unhappy Birthday is a site that (wink wink) encourages you to turn in offenders who sing 'Happy Birthday' illegally. If all goes as planned. ASCAP and Time-Warner will be flooded with reports of infringement! This should keep their lawyers busy for years!

Posted by Siva at 03:57 PM | Permalink

Is this good enough?

Posted by Siva at 02:21 PM | Permalink

The White House supports cruel and brutal torture as a matter of policy.

That's why they are undermining the McCain Amendment that would require our government to obey its own laws.

Of course, obeying inconvenient laws has always been a bit of a challenge for this administration.

Posted by Siva at 02:05 PM | Permalink

Here!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Not sure what to make of this but it made me laugh so I'll assume it is intentional satire. Your mileage may vary. Not to be taken internally.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:19 AM | Permalink

I actually don't think there's a direct connection between these two (after all, I assume Cheney's baboon heart transplant probably would make him worry about taking the top spot), but I still have to love having this Boston Globe/Reuters piece:

Cheney won't run in 2008, wife says

run just a day ahead of this Washington Post article:

Cheney's Office Is A Focus in Leak Case: Sources Cite Role Of Feud With CIA

Man, I picked the wrong year to be in Tokyo.

Posted by David at 01:04 AM | Permalink

Michigan State law professor Peter Yu has posted an informative article about IP in China to SSRN entitled, "From Pirates to Partners (Episode Two): Protecting Intellectual Property in Post-WTO China" and it can be downloaded here.

The abstract states in pertinent part:

"This article begins by challenging the conventional view that the intellectual property law amendments introduced in China in the wake of WTO accession were mostly introduced to conform Chinese intellectual property laws to WTO standards. It argues that many of the amendments were created as responses to the emerging socialist market economy and the rapidly-changing local conditions in the country. In addition, the article takes on the recent proposals for the U.S. administration to file a formal complaint with the WTO Dispute Settlement Body over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights in China and explains why the United States should not do so.

"The article then explores alternative protection strategies by presenting five case studies in which intellectual property rights holders were able to protect their assets without relying on intellectual property laws. It questions the effectiveness of the litigious approach taken by foreign businesses while exploring differences between the Chinese and Western legal cultures. The article concludes by examining the progress China made in the intellectual property arena by focusing on three widely-reported incidents: the unauthorized reproduction, translation, and adaptation of Harry Potter novels, the State Intellectual Property Office's recent decision to invalidate Pfizer's patent in Viagra, and the Chinese authorities' heightened effort to protect trademarks used in relation to the 2008 Beijing Olympics."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:18 AM | Permalink

I read this column, The Woman's Seat, by Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at the George Washington School of Law, in today's NYT, and I found it very unsettling, for reasons I will articulate below. Rosen's words are in italics, my comments are interspersed.

“When President Bush nominated John Roberts to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, the retiring justice observed, "He's good in every way, except he's not a woman." Now that particular shortcoming has been corrected….”

I’m not sure O’Connor was characterizing Roberts' gender as a “shortcoming.” Despite the fact that I disagree with her on almost everything, I have a grudging admiration for O’Connor. She worked very hard for everything she got, and she took a significant amount of abuse during her career on the Court, from just about everywhere at one time or another, with a lot of equanimity and grace. Her comment suggests to me she did not see herself as an outlier; that she knows there are plenty of women who could and should be on the Court who are Roberts' equal. And she seems to be signaling that it is important for there to be women on the Court, and she's correct about this, just as Reagan got this right when he appointed her.

“After promoting Roberts to chief justice, Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace O'Connor, emphasizing that his White House counsel had become "a pioneer in the field of law, breaking down barriers to women that...remain a generation after" O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the court.”

And those “barriers” on are full display these days as the Miers nomination plays out. The meme that women just aren’t smart enough to be judges, or partners at law firms, or law professors for that matter, is still a strong one. Miers' delicate female brain just isn't up to the rigorous intellectual demands of the Supreme Court, according to many commentators from both the left and the right, just do a quick Google or Yahoo (or whatever) search and you'll find these assertions everywhere.

“The fact that a (politically weakened) Republican president felt compelled to maintain two women's seats on the Supreme Court suggests that gender and racial diversity have now replaced geographic and religious diversity as political imperatives that no president can afford to ignore.”

This is a ridiculous overgeneralization. How does Miers’ nomination suggest anything about “compulsion” or “racial diversity”? Why is nominating a women Bush apparently believes can do a good job on the Court evidence of political weakness? Whatever else can be said about the nomination, it wasn't one of pandering to the opposition or the base.

“Republican hypocrisy on affirmative action has become painful. The familiar Republican position is that gender, like race and ethnicity, should be used at most as a tiebreaker to choose among equally qualified candidates. In that spirit, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said in September, "I don't know whether John Roberts has a twin, perhaps a sister or, uh, someone with a Hispanic last name."

So Cornyn (speaking for all Republicans?) wants a woman or “someone with a Hispanic last name” who is just like Roberts, and this is an articulation of the Republican position that gender, race or ethnicity should be a "tiebreaker to choose among equally qualified candidates"? Think back to Roberts' qualifications for a moment. Is he any less a Bush crony or party hack than Miers? Yes he was a federal judge before his appointment, but for only two years. Before that he was busy helping Bush in Florida and in DC, remember?

“In fact, a superbly qualified Republican woman - a female John Roberts - could have been appointed to the court. Like Roberts, Maureen Mahoney is a former clerk for William Rehnquist and deputy solicitor general who is widely respected as one of the top Supreme Court advocates of her generation. According to news reports, however, Mahoney was a hard sell inside the Bush administration because she successfully argued on behalf of affirmative action in a pivotal Supreme Court case two years ago. So Bush, after imposing a gender quota on himself, preferred a less qualified woman who has no published views on affirmative action to a better qualified woman who was paid to defend affirmative action. In the debate about meritocracy versus diversity, Republicans have painted themselves into a nice corner.”

If Mahoney "is widely respected as one of the top Supreme Court advocates of her generation," her qualifications were a lot better than Roberts' were as well, but Bush preferred to give a crony male the job. Did Rosen write an outraged NYT column about this? And since when are top quality credentials and cutting edge legal experience alone enough to get anyone on the bench, no less on the Supreme Court? [cf. this.]

“But the Democratic position on gender and the court is equally unsatisfying. Many Democrats embrace a version of the essentialist argument that it's important to have women on the court because they will provide a uniquely female perspective, rooted in their personal experiences as women. On a narrow range of issues related to women's rights, there may be some correlation between a justice's experiences and her judicial perspective. O'Connor, for example, voted against gender discrimination, and although she resists the suggestion, her views may have been shaped by the difficulty she had being hired by law firms after graduating near the top of her class at Stanford Law School. Liberals seem to hope that Harriet Miers, another Sun Belt Republican, may be similarly sensitive to women's issues because she, too, experienced job discrimination. But women's issues make up a tiny percentage of the court's docket, and in most cases, there is no correlation between gender and judicial philosophy. Between 1994 and 2004, it turns out, O'Connor voted less frequently with the other female justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, than she voted with any other justice except John Paul Stevens. And studies of federal district court judges have found no evidence that gender affects judicial decisions in cases involving discrimination and civil rights.”

There are so many questionable and alarming generalizations in this paragraph I hardly know where to begin. Rosen seems to suggest the Democrats want a woman on the Supreme Court because a woman will likely "vote against gender discrimination" because she has experienced it. Unlike those male Justices who vote in favor of gender discrimination because they benefit from it? Also "many" Democrats are idiots because they don't realize that all women don't vote the same way on other issues. Wish we could get some names to go with the word "many," because I'm curious about which Democrats exactly are confused on this point.

Feminists who insist that women speak in a different voice will find it hard to embrace Harriet Miers as a demigoddess of nurture. An unmarried, childless woman who spent her legal career working around the clock, she is a more plausible model for equal-treatment feminists who emphasize that professional women can be just as boldly ambitious as men. Whatever her own views about feminism, Miers may have been less influenced by her gender than by the fact that she is a religious Southerner who became a conservative after a more liberal youth, began her career representing corporations and spent formative years in government working for the executive branch. In all of these respects, she appears to have less in common with O'Connor or Ginsburg than with Clarence Thomas."

The idea that "feminists who insist that women speak in a different voice" assume that all, or even most women are "demigoddesses of nurture" is assinine and insulting. A moment ago Rosen acknowledged that O'Connor's experiences as a women probably affected her views about gender discrimination law. But "different voice" feminsts are stupid and somehow opposed to "equal-treatment" feminists, who at least understand that women can be ambitious, and can find Miers a "plausible model," (of what, exactly?), though her personal history means she is likely to turn out like Clarence Thomas, even though he has a wife and family and went to Yale and worked at the EEOC and is African American and never rose through the ranks of a highly regarded law firm.

"It appears that Bush chose Miers for reasons that had more to do with her personal loyalty - and gender - than with her merit. But it's a sign of maturity, at this particular moment in the culture wars, that liberal and conservative groups are now focusing chiefly on the nominee's credentials and substantive views. Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group, immediately opposed Miers, putting her in the same category as "other pro-abortion administration officials Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes." By the same token, some Senate Democrats, like Harry Reid, the minority leader, tentatively suggested that they were open to supporting Miers on the ground that she was more lawyerly and less radical than the high-octane female judges on Bush's short-list. That Republicans and Democrats now have the political confidence to distinguish among different types of women on the bench is a sign of progress, for women and men alike."

Well, they all wear black robes, so it's been very confusing. I can understand that some people sincerely believe they oppose Miers only because she is stupid and "unqualified." I'm not bowled over by her qualifications by any stretch, but I've spent 15 years in the legal profession, and I've seen many, many brilliant women disparaged and undervalued with some of the same criticisms directed toward Miers. Take a look at the number of women admittted to law schools when Miers attended, or the numbers of female Supreme Court Clerks about the time she graduated, or the number of female partners in large law firms then, or even today.

"If Miers is confirmed by the Senate, it remains to be seen if she will turn out to be a lawyerly pragmatist or an insecure, clerk-driven justice who has trouble seeing the forest for the trees. But regardless of whether Miers proves to be an independent-minded success or a mediocre crony, there's something perversely encouraging in the fact that women now take it for granted that they can aspire to both venerable career paths. In his day, Franklin D. Roosevelt was just as dependent on personal loyalists as George Bush, and when his adviser Harry Hopkins decided to move out of the White House after marrying, F.D.R. sulked over what he viewed as a personal betrayal. Bush, for his part, prefers to cultivate similarly intense relationships of personal fealty with women in high heels and pearls. Now little girls have a new kind of role model. Yes, Virginia: if you sacrifice your personal life and devote yourself single-mindedly to a career of whispering in the ears of the powerful, you, too, can be on the Supreme Court."

The final two sentences of this paragraph really made me want to throw up. Miers did not spend her life "single-mindedly...whispering in the ears of the powerful." She has been in positions of power herself, and she earned them. And whether she "sacrificed [her] personal life" is not Rosen's to judge.

"That this no longer seems like a trailblazing achievement may help to explain the ambivalent reaction to the Miers nomination - and this, in turn, could be a sign of hope. It suggests that both Republicans and Democrats are becoming so uncomfortable with their traditional positions on affirmative action that they may be ready to transcend crude identity politics in the judicial battles of the future."

Once again we are back to "affirmative action," and I wonder again whether Rosen is saying that Miers' nomination is an act of affirmative action, or that the nomination of any woman would be.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:24 AM | Permalink

This story from The Progressive (via Alternet) is so scary, so ridiculous, so freakin' stupid that it must be true.

. . . Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

"Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room," she says. "Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he'd never been in any trouble."

Then they got down to his poster.

"They asked me, didn't I think that it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!"

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident "would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted," she says.

The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further. . . .

Robert Greenwald's documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price premieres the week of November 13th. Click here to find a screening in your area.

Posted by Catherine at 10:10 PM | Permalink

"In late August 2005, after twenty years of service in the field of military procurement, Bunnatine ('Bunny') Greenhouse, the top official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted. For years, Greenhouse received stellar evaluations from superiors -- until she raised objections about secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) -- a subsidiary of Halliburton, the mega-corporation Vice President Dick Cheney once presided over. After telling congress that one Halliburton deal 'was the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career,' she was reassigned from 'the elite Senior Executive Service... to a lesser job in the civil works division of the corps.'

"When Greenhouse was busted down, she became just another of the casualties of the Bush administration -- not the countless (or rather uncounted) Iraqis, or the ever-growing list of American troops, killed, maimed, or mutilated in the administration's war of convenience-- but the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. Often, this has been due to revulsion at the President's policies -- from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with North Korea to the flattening of FEMA and the slashing of environmental standards -- which these women and men found to be beyond the pale. . . ."

Nick Turse has put together a list of the "Casualties of the Bush Administration," which can be seen at the Common Dreams NewsCenter. He also includes an email address where you may submit the names of additional career casualties.

Posted by Catherine at 09:22 PM | Permalink

I've been invited to meet the authors of yet another book on how to raise a child so intelligent that he/she is guaranteed to crush the spirits of all of the other babies in our playgroup. According to the authors of Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers – And How You Can Too, “This book will be the first and only book to share with everyone the coveted Asian secrets for success in the classroom!”

Why does the idea of this book so thoroughly creep me out? Is it the title, which reads like one of those booklets you might find while waiting to check out at the grocery store? Or is it the Korean American authors' apparent enthusiasm for propagating an ethnic stereotype? No, despite the odd title choice, I think what bothers me the most is that these are two authors offering advice on child-rearing even though neither of them are or ever have been child development experts, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, parents, or babysitters. I'm not even sure if they've actually met a child.

Of course, leave it to the Newspaper of Record to stay on top of this red-hot issue. My favorite quote from the Times article is “...One daughter's C-minus in biology could cast shame upon them all...” My god, what my parents must have suffered.

Posted by Catherine at 09:06 PM | Permalink

Recipe here. If "Kitty Litter" is an operative trademark, I'm guessing that sooner or later Kitty Litter Inc.'s lawyers are going to want the name of this disgusting dessert changed to "Cat Box Filler Cake."

Odd aside: Someone in South Carolina registered "Kitty Litter" as a trademark for greeting cards.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:09 PM | Permalink

It's here and it's cool!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:59 PM | Permalink

From Terry at The Nitpicker, who notes:

"Look, you can't help but question these guys. Their intelligence is too often either wrong or made up. Are those words too harsh for you? Then how about "inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading" as Colin Powell put it?

"On top of that, it just seemed too well-timed to go along with Bush's recent terror speech. There's a lot of that going around, though."

His conclusion about the letter?

"In the end, I can't say whether or not the document is real or not, but neither can any of the conservative bloggers who will trumpet this as an excuse to "stay the course." As a 13-year veteran of the armed forces, though, I find it repulsive that veterans like myself are put in the position where we're forced to decide whether our commander-in-chief is lying or al Qaeda is--and it's actually a hard decision!"

Read the whole thing here. Via Blondsense.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:12 AM | Permalink

"....Baroness Thatcher has criticised Tony Blair for taking Britain to war in Iraq on the basis of flawed evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons. The former prime minister's embarrassing criticism emerged as Mr Blair was among the 670 guests who attended a party to mark her 80th birthday.

"She added: "The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return.".... [emphasis added]

The entire article [in the U.K. Independent] is available here. Via TBogg.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:47 AM | Permalink

Here!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:29 PM | Permalink

Don't click this link if you have no sense of humor about religion, e.g. if you don't find this funny:

"As an atheist you have a number of rights and responsibilities. These include (but are not limited to):

Remember, theists will condemn you for living by this code because you are doing it of your own free will instead of because you're afraid that if you don't a supreme being will set you on fire.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:01 AM | Permalink

From today's Washington Post:

Rind compared the warming trend to what happens when a major league baseball team owner spends lavishly on players' salaries. Pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, he said, produces the same kind of predictable results as boosting a team's payroll.

"When they get into the playoffs, should we be surprised?" he asked. "We're putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we're getting a lot higher temperatures."

First of all, don't tell Steinbrenner that, and certainly not my beloved Mets (third-highest payroll in MLB). And also, er, isn't this the end of the world we're talking about? Couldn't we find a more apocalyptic analogy, perhaps comparing the production of greenhouse gases to pumping more people into suburban mega-churches? Like "When 39% of people still support the president in spite of ongoing criminal investigations, an Iraqi meltdown, his selection of his good-hearted officemate as Supreme Court Justice...should we be surprised?"

Posted by David at 04:40 AM | Permalink

"...But I was especially peeved that they can't seem to find the time or will to write about the Miller debacle when they seem to have no trouble finding the space to publish this op-ed piece by Meredith Small about the virtues of letting one's baby go diaperless, free to squirt passersby with their excrement. Just a quick stylistic note: every time I see an article that begins 'Like any American parent...,' I will open an article with, 'I hate your kids and I hate you for talking about them obsessively.'"

I couldn't agree with you more, David. Sorry I haven't posted in while, but I've been toilet training my two year old--seriously. Rather than bore you all with the details, I thought I'd just publish an op-ed piece in the NYTimes. Given the fluff that they're printing, I think I have a pretty good shot at getting it accepted. My next piece will be a 7,500 word essay on the joys of attachment parenting.

Posted by Catherine at 11:11 PM | Permalink

Steve Gilliard, Empty Wheel, and, of course, Arianna Huffington (to whom NY Times writers apparently are spilling the beans) are all over Judith Miller and the NY Times like a cheap suit.

I myself had wondered why the New York Times had been so slow to be of any use whatsoever in the discussion of the biggest political scandal in years, especially since it apparently took place partly in their own bureau. But I was especially peeved that they can't seem to find the time or will to write about the Miller debacle when they seem to have no trouble finding the space to publish this op-ed piece by Meredith Small about the virtues of letting one's baby go diaperless, free to squirt passersby with their excrement. Just a quick stylistic note: every time I see an article that begins "Like any American parent...," I will open an article with, "I hate your kids and I hate you for talking about them obsessively."

Beside that, however, I thought it nice that the Times practices what it preaches. As an American citizen and New York Times subscriber who paid both for Miller's front-page fictions about WMD and now for the war that she facilitated, and also as a reader who's been treated to Miller's martyrdom and to her silence about, oh, her role in a conspiracy to reveal the identity of a covert operative, I think they've been taking Small's advice literally. Thanks, New York Times, for the squirts.

Posted by David at 09:16 PM | Permalink

From the Free Expression Policy Project at NYU Law School:

Fair use is probably the best-known of the free expression "safety valves" in copyright law. It allows anyone to copy, publish, and distribute parts of a copyrighted work without permission, for purposes such as commentary, news reporting, education, or scholarship. Fair use not only encourages the creation of new, "transformative" works; it also allows criticism and parody of the myriad products of our past and present culture.

Fair use is thus critical for free expression and cultural life. If permission were required for every quote or new creation that borrows from works of the past, the costs and logistical difficulties of finding owners, seeking licenses, and paying their sometimes exorbitant costs would dramatically dampen political and artistic discourse. And equally important, copyright owners would be able to enforce orthodoxy simply by denying permission to quote a text or image to any author whose views they disapproved.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, every work of "'literature, science and art borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before.'"1 The fair use doctrine guarantees "breathing space within the confines of copyright," and affords necessary "'latitude for scholarship and comment.'"2

But the digital age, bringing with it a tilt toward increased control by owners of "intellectual property" (or "IP"), now poses a major challenge to fair use, and to related doctrines that protect free expression under trademark law.3 The employment of "digital rights management" to restrict access to and copying of cultural products; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "take-down" procedure for alleged violations of copyright; and initiatives such as the "broadcast flag" all threaten the public's ability to exercise fair use for material in digital form. Added to these hurdles are the inherent unpredictability of fair use, the high cost of defending it in court, and the crushing liability that may result if one guesses wrong. Industry practices also contribute to the problem - a "clearance culture" that assumes the necessity of licensing everything, and the common use of cease and desist letters to threaten artists, parodists and others who rely on fair use with dire punishments for copyright infringement. ...

Posted by Siva at 05:20 PM | Permalink

Capcom has released a video game about lawyers:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - October 11, 2005 - "All rise! Capcom® today announced the release of Phoenix Wright™: Ace Attorney for Nintendo DS™, the first in the popular court room battle series from Japan to be released in the US. While the series’ previous three entries appeared on the Game Boy® Advance system in Japan, this marks its debut on the Nintendo DS. Not everyone is innocent until proven guilty! Players star as a defense attorney, who must prove his seemingly guilty client’s innocence no matter how dire the circumstances may seem. The game presents twisting storylines and intriguing gameplay in a comical anime style. Players must collect evidence, weed through inconsistent testimonies, and overcome corrupt agendas to ensure that justice prevails. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is now available at retailers across North America and carries a “T” rating for teen audiences by the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board)."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:51 PM | Permalink

You can read it here or below.

BOB GARFIELD: Late last year, Google announced its intention to digitize millions of books from the collections of five major libraries in the U.S. and Britain. Last week, the Authors Guild announced its intention to sue the Internet juggernaut for copyright infringement on a grand scale. The plaintiffs say Google must get permission of each and every copyright holder before scanning his or her books. Google maintains that because only small sections of the books will be put online, the so-called Google Print Library Project is actually good for authors in that it will massively increase the visibility of their books. Joining me now to parse the controversy is Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches in the Culture and Communications Department at New York University. Siva, welcome to the show.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Thanks, Bob. It's good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Begin, please, by describing how the Google Print program would work as it's currently envisioned.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: As you describe, the Library Project is a massive endeavor done without the express permission of publishers or copyright holders. For public domain books, books published before 1923, books that are definitely beyond copyright, we are going to get full text capability. However, for most of the books published in the 20th century, we are only going to get snippets. We're only going to get a series of pages. You would not be able to read more than three or four at a time. You would not be able to print them out. It would give you a taste of the book. And on the left-hand side of the column you would be given links for places you could buy the book, either online or in real life, and libraries in your area where the book would be available.

BOB GARFIELD: So it would seem to me like this would be a great deal for any author, certainly a way for lesser-known authors to have their books made more visible to the public, which might, you know, buy them with, you know, a mouse click or two.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think it's impossible to predict any market effect one way or the other at this point. So I totally understand their anxiety and their motivation. What's interesting about their claim is they think that Google should go back and find the copyright holder in every case of this project and clear the rights. Well, that's frankly impossible. Our copyright system is so poorly laid out that you can't find who owns most books. There's no database. So most of the time, whether you're a historian trying to use photographs in a book or - or you're a publisher trying to republish a long-lost work, there's no way to clear the rights and things don't get done.

BOB GARFIELD: But in the absence of certainty about what kind of market effect it will have, the authors are saying, "The market is irrelevant. We own this work and we have the right to say how it's duplicated, period."

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That's right. And that is the traditional understanding of how copyright works in the real world, in the book world. Now, you know, traditionally in copyright there are limits to the power that a copyright holder has, and among those limits is fair use. Fair use is what secondary users can claim to be able to use elements of copyrighted works or sometimes the entire copyrighted work under certain conditions. And fair use is there to encourage criticism, journalism, parody, scholarship and teaching and other public goods. So fair use works in a certain way in the real world, in the analog world. It works sort of under different principles in the Web world.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I want to ask you about that, because obviously in this digital age we can hyperlink entire pages of content without any kind of permission. Do the old notions of what constitutes fair use have to change in the digital world?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well, they already have, for the basic reason that Google has based its entire business on the fact that it can copy almost the entire Web without any serious copyright implications, because to create an index, it has to make copies. If you don't want someone copying your work online, it's your duty to opt out of the system. There are ways that the New York Times makes sure that its news stories, for instance, don't get copied by Google and then placed in the index. Now, most people producing most webpages opt in or don't opt out, and Google has been free-riding on all of this content around the Web that people have been creating for more than a decade. What Google is now doing is reaching into the real world, into the analog world, into the book world and saying, "All right, now you're going to play by our rules." What you're seeing here is the norms of the real world are clashing with the norms of the Web world.

BOB GARFIELD: As you look at how courts have behaved on questions of fair use, now, what would be your bet as to how this litigation may turn out?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well, I'm not confident that Google's rather bold goals are going to satisfy the courts in this country. And if a court comes along and rules against Google in an indelicate way that goes beyond the particular contours of this case, it could rein in a lot of what Google wants to do in the future and maybe even what Google has done so far.

BOB GARFIELD: So if I understand this right, you're actually sympathetic with Google's view of how fair use and copyright law should be understood but you just think that they're rolling the dice and too likely to hit snake-eyes on this one.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Exactly. I see our copyright system right now as rather absurd and unworkable. And what does work is delicate. It's a delicate ecosystem, and I'm very worried about something so disruptive and so revolutionary really flattening out a lot of the nuances of copyright that have allowed for such amazing creativity in the Web world.

BOB GARFIELD: If not Google now, then who? And when? Who should be in charge of deciding which books get scanned?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well, I actually think that this is the job of libraries. I think libraries should be doing this first and foremost. The Library of Congress should have identified this as a major public need and goal and pursued this sort of project years ago. Instead, they've outsourced it to a private corporation, and this corporation, as good as they like to make us think they are, is still operating by keeping us blind. Their technology is proprietary. Their algorithms for search are completely secret. We don't actually know what's going to generate a certain list of search results. They don't work for us.

BOB GARFIELD: You're suggesting this is a war that has to be fought. You just don't want Google to be the one doing the fighting.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah. It's a sad commentary on our sort of state of information these days that it takes a daring and - for now, anyway - rich company to make these sort of inroads and stand up for a more flexible copyright system when in fact our public institutions should be doing this. But in this day and age, it's not very fashionable to believe that public institutions can actually do anything for us.

BOB GARFIELD: Siva, thanks very much.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Siva Vaidhynathan is author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio.

Posted by Siva at 02:50 PM | Permalink

These are law-specific. But the point holds generally.

From PrawfsBlawg:

10. Time Travel and Originalism: Using Technology to Learn What the Founders Really Meant

9. The Right to Bear Arms Should Include Surface-to-Air Missiles

8. The Law and Economics of Negligence: What I Learned in 1L Torts

7. The Sex Life of Law Students: My Three-Year Empirical Study

6. Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? A Deontological Approach to Epistemological Failure

5. The Law & Economics of Law & Order

4. La Cosa Blogstra: Why volokh.com is a Criminal Conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 371

3. Barking Up the (Wrong) Poisonous Tree: Is Tainted Evidence Admissible If It Would Have Been Found By Dogs?

2. Parsing Rule 10b-5: Thoughts from Das Kapital

1. In re Random Corp. Class Action Litigation: Illuminating Points I Made in My Brief

Posted by Siva at 02:39 PM | Permalink

From The Jakarta Post:

"One important matter contained within fatwas (edicts) recently issued Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI) is the judgment that Intellectual Property (IP) violations are haram. This conclusion means that utilizing IP without a right is a violation of God's prescribed law and thus a sinful thing to do for a Muslim. MUI's argument is that Islamic law protects the rights and property of individuals and that Intellectual Property is also a form of property that is protected under Islamic law." ....

"The MUI's fatwas are not binding, both in terms of religious or positive law. However, they have great psychological influence as the majority of Indonesian Sunni Muslims will tend to adhere to it."

Note that this is in the "opinion and editorial" section of the paper.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:07 AM | Permalink

It looks better than I expected -- especially in my neighborhood of Uptown, but even in areas I thought got leveled, like Mid-City (where JazzFest takes place). My house was unscathed -- completely unscathed. Pretty amazing. Someone did break into my shed to try and get water from the hot-water heater (fairly common after the first few days) so there's a minor gas leak.

The marker of home ownership right now is a fridge duct-taped shut outside the house in a pile of garbage. Most folks are electing to get new fridges rather than clean 'em out -- between the unbelievable fridge stink and the fact that there has been no garbage pick-up since the hurricane, you get hit a wave of stench every ten steps or so. But we didn't lose nearly the number of trees mentioned (more like 8% than 25%), the leaves were still on the trees, there were a few birds, Audubon Park still looked OK. The military cordoned off the Ninth Ward so we only had a chance to drive through the devastated communities in the city and not out in East New Orleans (the communities that got wiped out and might have to be bulldozed). There it was way worse: you could see the water line about 7-8 feet high on buildings and cars, lots of looted small businesses, much more serious wind damage.

At night on the chillingly quiet residential streets, New Orleans felt like a stage-set, and the rest of the time -- especially at the few open bars and restaurants -- it felt like an expatriate community at a frontier (or even colonial) outpost. I was told by a friend with the CDC that until last week the city was dark and under heavy military rule. Each major intersection had a checkpoint and there was a serious 6 pm curfew. But as of last Wednesday, they began letting folks in. Curfew was midnight for the weekend and the military presence was reduced to the occasional Hummer. I drove in with my friend Audrey and we cleaned fridges and our front yards, then drank at night. Saturday night the Hot 8 brass band played at my favorite local dive, Le Bon Temps Roulet -- even if they were down to a Hot 4, it was a nice act of affirmation. Sunday night we went to a restaurant in the Marigny (the true boho quarter of NOLA) where the bartender/cook was a local neighbor who had never done either professionally and the waitress just got to town that morning and worked 12 hours straight -- she, too, had never waited tables. We had a great hang with them, slugged some booze, and then caught 4 hours sleep before waking up for the 5 AM trip back to Austin.

Posted by Joel at 12:05 AM | Permalink

From the Nelson Rocks Preserve site:

WARNING
"Nature is unpredictable and unsafe. Mountains are dangerous. Many books have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the books.

"Stay on the trails whenever possible. The terrain, in addition to being dangerous, is surprisingly complex. You may get lost. Carry food, water and first aid supplies at all times.

"Rocks and other objects can fall from the cliffs. They can tumble down slopes. This can happen naturally, or be caused by people above you, such as climbers. Rocks of all sizes, including huge boulders, can shift, move or fall with no warning. Use of helmets is advised for anyone approaching the rock formations. They can be purchased or rented at Seneca Rocks. They won't save you if you get hit by something big or on another part of your body. A whole rock formation might collapse on you and squash you like a bug. Don't think it can't happen.

NRP Management

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:09 PM | Permalink

Story here. The Newsmax.com article has been edited, I supercopied the text of the original when I posted it below, the "corrected" version is here. Pretty sleazy still, I'd say.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:19 PM | Permalink

Yep, it's the work of The Onion.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:30 PM | Permalink

The Top 14 Stories in the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bible

14> David takes out the giant with a week-old, hard-as-a-rock
meatball.

13> The third seal is broken and the Antipasta lets loose the
Four Hors D'oeuvres of the Apocalypse.

12> As the Flying Spaghetti Monster lies dead in the refrigerated
tomb, the giant cheese wheel is mysteriously rolled away from
the opening. Three days later, his leftovers are reheated
again, and behold! He is delicious!

11> At the first Nativity, the Three Wise Guys bring gifts of
tomato, garlic and onion.

10> The Flying Spaghetti Monster causes the Israelites to wander
for 40 years through the dessert.

9> From the mountain, Moses brings down the Ten Condiments.

8> Lot's wife turns back, and is transformed into a pillar of
parmesan.

7> Noah builds a zucchini ark, then sets out to find two of
every type of pasta.

6> The parting of the Red Sauce.

5> Moses wanders in the desert for 40 years, earning the
reputation of worst pizza-delivery guy EVER.

4> The angel Gabriel announces the coming birth of the savior
to a bottle of extra virgin olive oil.

3> Pontius Pilate orders the Flying Spaghetti Monster thrown
against a wall to see if he sticks.

2> Adam and Eve order the apple pie and are kicked out of the
Olive Garden.

and Topfive.com's Number 1 Story in
the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bible...

1> At the last spaghetti supper, His Holy Noodleness is
betrayed by disciple Atkins Lowcarbiot.

[ The Top 5 List www.topfive.com ]
[ Copyright 2005 by Chris White ]

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:38 PM | Permalink

From CNN 'Reliable Sources':

... I think "The New York Times" has lost the capacity to tell the truth about itself in this story. It's completely overidentified itself and the majesty of the institution with Judy Miller and what its own people describe as her personal decision making. We know that other reporters in similar circumstances were able and thought it wise to work out deals with the prosecutor. And here we have this great institution allowing itself to be, in effect, muzzled by Miller, her decision that her waivers weren't good enough, her decision to change her mind after the waivers were now good enough, and it's just inexplicable, as Michael said, that beyond reporting about the Miller case itself, "The New York Times" has apparently shut down, either implicitly or explicitly, all its columnists. It hasn't done pieces looking at the state of the law and what the Miller case has done to press law. Nobody has been able to say a word about it. And I think that a big mistake in judgment was made when "The Times" threw its weight behind the decision making of an individual.

... And I think that they began to assimilate this case to the great history of "The New York Times" resisting government encroachment -- in the Pentagon Papers, in many other cases -- and they saw this as another chapter in the glorious fight of "The New York Times" against government power. But the facts of the case are so ambiguous, and it kind of doesn't pass the smell test in a lot of ways. And that's why it was unwise to suspend reporting while Judy Miller's case played out. It isn't the First Amendment drama that they think it is. It's a much more complicated, darker and ultimately dubious tale, and that has suspended journalism at "The New York Times."

Posted by Siva at 11:03 AM | Permalink

From Newsmax.com, so quite possibly wrong, but certainly ultimately verifiable one way or the other...

Bono, U2 in Fund-Raiser for Senator Rick Santorum

"On Sunday, October 16, a truly unique political event will take place.

"Wolfington puts it this way: "It's truly appropriate for U2, a band with a purpose, to be involved in a fund-raiser with Senator Rick Santorum, a politician with a purpose. Both men are passionate about what they believe and their faith is very important to them.”

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:43 AM | Permalink

Excerpted from her blog:

"This weekend is my sister's wedding---I don't have to do much except shepherd Nora through her flower-girl performance, be in some pictures, and read a poem solely in order to drag out the non-religious ceremony. I printed out the poem to get a feel for how it would read out loud, and I noticed some awkward parts that just did not scan, and some adverbs (ugh: adverbs should be a last resort in poetry), and some places where I really felt there should be punctuation. So guess what! I edited it! I know, it's wrong on a whole bunch of copyright and other levels, but the poem is by no means well known and if I can produce a smoother read and a smoother ceremony by changing a few words, so be it. My only concern is that the poet will somehow hear of this and I will be sued or beaten up. WELL, BRING IT ON, YOU ADVERB-LOVING BASTARD!"

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:16 PM | Permalink

Here!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:06 PM | Permalink

Those are Gen. MacArthur's words. The entire U.S. military tries to take them very seriously. Alas, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush do not (perhaps because they were too scared, lazy, and/or drunk to serve when it was their time).

The extent to which these cowards have mistreated good, brave, American officers and soldiers is the great untold scandal of the past six years.

Here is one example:

“It was my turn to be humiliated every time I was taken to have a shower. Naked, I had to run my hands through my hair to show that I was not concealing a weapon in it. Then mouth open, tongue up, down, nothing inside. Right arm up, nothing in my armpit. Left arm up. Lift the right testicle, nothing hidden. Lift the left. Turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks, knowing a camera was displaying my naked image as male and female guards watched.

“It didn’t matter that I was an army captain, a graduate of West Point, the elite US military academy. It didn’t matter that my religious beliefs prohibited me from being fully naked in front of strangers. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been charged with a crime. It didn’t matter that my wife and daughter had no idea where I was. And it certainly didn’t matter that I was a loyal American citizen and, above all, innocent.”

Click on the link or read below to see a fuller account of how W's administration purges the ranks by accusing soldiers brave enough to tell the truth of sexual misconduct. Warning: it's disgusting.

By Scott Horton

This week Capt. James Yee’s book concerning his experiences in Guantánamo will hit America’s bookstores. This morning’s Sunday Times (London) offers a fascinating set of excerpts from Yee’s work. Money quote:
“It was my turn to be humiliated every time I was taken to have a shower. Naked, I had to run my hands through my hair to show that I was not concealing a weapon in it. Then mouth open, tongue up, down, nothing inside. Right arm up, nothing in my armpit. Left arm up. Lift the right testicle, nothing hidden. Lift the left. Turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks, knowing a camera was displaying my naked image as male and female guards watched.

“It didn’t matter that I was an army captain, a graduate of West Point, the elite US military academy. It didn’t matter that my religious beliefs prohibited me from being fully naked in front of strangers. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been charged with a crime. It didn’t matter that my wife and daughter had no idea where I was. And it certainly didn’t matter that I was a loyal American citizen and, above all, innocent.”

When all the baseless suspicions against Yee were disproved, the Pentagon turned to its favored technique to punish him. He was accused of improper sexual conduct. In American society today, these words generally relate to conduct that is abusive – unauthorized sexual contact. Not in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon: there they relate to consensual sexual relations between a man and a woman. The consistent factor is that one of the sexual partners has made it on to the Pentagon’s black list for one reason or another.

The Rumsfeld Pentagon has developed destruction of the character of those who get in its way to an art form. Those viewed as troublesome become the target of a special investigation. Wiretaps are applied to their telephones and their emails are read. An evidentiary case is built and humiliating leaks to the press occur.

Let’s stop for a moment and ask: when the persons in question are two-, three- and four-star generals, at what level must this be authorized? In fact, the targets have included two-, three- and four-star generals, and the authority or impetus for such action has almost certainly come from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The charges brought have tended to fall into two baskets: charges of petty dereliction and sexual misconduct. In the former case, we have seen charges that officers kept classified documents on their laptop computers – when the documents turned out not to be classified; and we have seen charges of petty errors and oversights in contract administration. (Conversely, serious cases of contract misadministration involving billions of dollars and Halliburton are resolved by persecuting the whistleblower .) But the favored technique clearly lies in bringing charges of improper sexual conduct, invariably involving consensual sexual relations.

These charges are easily brought. The number of eunuchs and sexual abstainers among the uniformed military is low and sociological research has long shown that the vast majority of the population has sexual relations outside of wedlock at some point. That means that these charges can be brought against virtually anyone. If the rules were enforced uniformly and aggressively, we would not be able to maintain a volunteer army. But the current highly selective application may achieve the same result. Two important bar organizations have already looked at the situation and concluded that the application of sexual misconduct rules by the uniformed services suggests highly uneven application. Both urged reforms. The Pentagon refuses to budge. The tool is too powerful, and too readily abused. Therein lies its attraction.

In addition to the case of Capt Yee, developed in his current book, consider these:

- Maj Gen Thomas J Fiscus, Judge Advocate General of the Air Force – known to have criticized rules on treatment of detainees – accused of sexual misconduct

- Lt Gen John Riggs – questioned the level of troop commitments to the Iraq campaign – accused of sexual misconduct and technical contract infractions

- Gen Kevin Byrnes – responsible for incorporating changes in doctrine on interrogation and treatment of detainees, rumored to have had reservations about changes hammered through by Rumsfeld – accused of sexual misconduct

Each of these cases suggests highly irregular investigative and disciplinary process which sharply discredits the Pentagon and the military justice system. Press reports also demonstrate a remarkably incurious media that frequently plays into the Pentagon's smear tactics by failing to fathom the currents under the press releases. The Pentagon is aided in this process by the coerced silence of the accused, usually eager to salvage something of his pension and benefits. A good example is the Washington Post article reporting on the punishment of General Fiscus. An unnamed Pentagon source is quoted as saying, with obvious malice, that Fiscus can expect to be disbarred as a consequence of their action. When I raised the matter with a bar ethics committee chair, I was told this: "If we began disbarring lawyers because of consensual sexual relations, we would rapidly run out of members."

To really understand what’s going on, these cases and the extreme sexual priggishness they reflect must be juxtaposed against a decision – taken at or near the top of the chain of command and crammed down on investigators – to jettison prior military doctrine requiring humane treatment of detainees. In introducing new, inhumane practices, the Pentagon leadership embraced sexual humiliation tactics with particular relish. An examination of published accounts of the twelve internal Army investigations discloses the following admittedly inhumane practices:

- enforced nudity, including suggestive poses and stacking of bodies;

- allusions to and threats of improper sexual conduct;

- improper and unauthorized touching, including touching of genitalia;

- probes involving light sticks and other tools (which may come close to constituting rape by instrumentality under state statutes);

- use of (fake) menstrual blood;

- sexual blackmail;

- distribution and use of sexually explicit materials;

- suggestions that detainees are homosexual or have otherwise engaged in sexual conduct inconsistent with Muslim religious values; and

- having an interrogator deliver “lap dances” to detainees.

These practices clearly violate legal rules and traditional US military doctrine on the treatment of detainees. They also degrade the US service personnel who are required to apply them. But consider the swing between the disgrace and ruin of highly valued career officers for consensual sexual relations and the officially sanctioned, grossly abusive sexual misconduct described above. It demonstrates a plasticity in moral values, that can only be called breathtaking. How are we to bridge this chasm? The most appealing explanation lies in the motives of those driving this ostensibly schizophrenic conduct. Plainly, they view sexual morals as something to be manipulated for the accomplishment of political objectives. Hence, lewd and offensive sexual conduct can be deliberately used as a tactic against detainees. On the other hand, officers who earn the leadership’s ire will be humiliated and disgraced using innuendo of sexual misconduct as a tactic.

The cynicism and immorality of this mindset is staggering. It reflects a wholesale repudiation of traditional military values.

One can well question the efficacy of sexual humiliation practices as tools for interrogation and intelligence gathering. However, no one can question their highly inflammatory effect in the War on Terror: they tarnish America's reputation and put our soldiers at risk. And they may well claim another victim. Experts are already noting that at Rumsfeld's current burn rate, the volunteer army cannot be sustained much longer. Rumsfeld's cynical sexual policies are destroying military morale and discipline and hastening the volunteer army's demise.

Posted by Siva at 02:29 PM | Permalink

Woman Booted Off Flight For Anti-Bush Shirt
"A Washington state woman was bounced from a Southwest Airlines flight in Reno for wearing a T-shirt with the pictures of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and the F-word.

"But the American Civil Liberties Union said Heasley's T-shirt is "protected" free speech under the Constitution."

Via the Leiter Reports. The shirts can be purchased here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:57 AM | Permalink

As I was rushing around getting for work this morning, I heard this story on NPR:

Plastic Surgery Popular in Iraq
"Morning Edition, October 10, 2005 · Deborah Amos reports on the new craze in Iraq: plastic surgery. Well-off Iraqis are seeing Western-style pop music videos featuring thin women with small noses and deciding to go under the knife."

Among other astounding assertions the story seemed to suggest that lots of Iraqis are much wealthier than they were "under Saddam," so now they have disposable income to spend on luxury purchases like plastic surgery, and access to western television makes Iraqi women want to look more like western women. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor before I could brush my teeth.

I have friends who have recently served in Iraq, and a few who are there right now. Even the ones who fervently believe the situation there can be improved do not give the impression that things are very good there at the moment. The delivery of water, electricity and other municipal services is still lagging behind what it was "under Saddam." Violence, and attempts to control the violence, are huge impediments to industry and commerce. Oil production still has many challenges. So how is it that Iraqis are, as the story said, wealthier now than they were "under Saddam"? Where is all this money coming from?

Ultimately I guess we are supposed to be reassured that Iraqi women can be brainwashed into self-hatred of their bodies, and deep down they want to be just like us, and surely will begin conforming to US mores, and doing what we tell them, soon. Later this morning the "audio" will be available at the NPR website, and I need to listen to it again to see if it was as stupifying as I am remembering it. I'll update this when I can listen to the story again and confirm my memories of what it contained.

UPDATE: Ugh! The story is introduced as something that can be explained by Iraqis' powerful "hope for the future," and as a "small sign of a larger trend." A "steady diet of pop culture" has made Iraqi men dissatisfied with the bodies and faces of their wives, and rendered women unhappy with their own appearances, and somehow this is "a sign of progress" for Iraqis who "don't know what the future will hold, but can at least control what they will look like."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:31 AM | Permalink

Longhorns beat Sooners 45-12

Nothing can stop these Horns!

Posted by Siva at 06:09 PM | Permalink

Click here to watch the Quicktime clip.

Posted by Siva at 05:57 PM | Permalink

The History of Sampling Java page pulls data from the-breaks.com and presents a fascinating chart.

Posted by Siva at 04:05 PM | Permalink

From here:

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY: James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers."
REFERENCE: "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming between the World Wars," James Watson, Agricultural History, vol. 78, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 346-60.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Watson

FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."
PUBLISHED IN: Polar Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.
ACCEPTING: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony because they could not obtain United States visas to visit the United States. Dr. Meyer-Rochow sent an acceptance speech via videotape.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:38 AM | Permalink

..but the timing of the new "credible threat" to NYC subways is awfully convenient, coming as it does on the very same day as Bush's only-I-can-keep-you-safe speech about terrorism...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:14 PM | Permalink

An annotated list.

Here is a small sample:

Ice Ages

"To which Keith Harwood adds: The prehistory of Egypt stretches from about 8000 BCE. The history, that is, what was written down at the time, stretches from ~3500 BCE through invasions by Hyksos, Hittites, Romans, through floods, famines, insurrections, twenty-odd ruling dynasties, massive building projects, and the mind-boggling minutiae of royal bureaucracy. During this period the whole world was engulfed in a flood which scoured the land clean. And in Egypt, nobody noticed. (They didn't notice when they lost a Pharaoh under the Red Sea, either, but that was later.)"

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:18 PM | Permalink

Today's New York Times has yet another hilarious article drawing parallels, ones that only the "journalists" at the NY Times see, between creationists and scientists. I use quotes there because, really, can Jodi Wilgoren be considered a journalist? Read the article, listen to the audio slide show. This is FRONT PAGE stuff folks.

On the upside, the Complete Coverage page has a link to an OP-ED that I missed while on vacation this summer. By Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Tufts, it is fantastic.

Meanwhile, the smart and serious, Chris Mooney is keeping track of the goings at the SCOPES II trial in Dover, PA. Apparently, the text book, Of Pandas and People that the school board chose to replace Biology
was edited using a technique akin to the 'Replace' feature of MS Word. The word creation was simply replaced with intelligent design after the Supreme Court ruled in 1987. Geez, just how lazy are these people?

Posted by Melissa at 12:39 PM | Permalink

This is a very bad essay. Rothstein completely misreads and misrepresents both Lessig and me. He conflates analysis with advocacy. He is hardly the only one to do this -- to place me among the radicals when all I have done is explain their motivations and effects and proclaim their relevance and value. He flattens out all the complexity and nuance in my work. I wish Rothstein had read my work more carefully. He is usually better than this.

From the International Herald Tribune:

Contemporary issues might seem to be limited to whether Amazon.com should be able to patent its one-click purchasing system, or whether file-sharing of films and music should take place freely on the Internet.

But take a few steps back, and you can hear the firings of ideological muskets. Traditional arguments over public good and private rights have taken a turn; this time, idealism confronts materialism, socialism confronts capitalism, beliefs about communal virtue confront conceptions of individualism.

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and one of the major polemicists opposing what he calls "the copyright warriors," has argued that the preponderance of moral and social virtue lies not with the protectors of copyright but with its "pirates" who open the way to cultural evolution and innovation.

"We are less and less a free culture," he has said about copyright enforcement, arguing that the crackdown on piracy is "something more extreme than anything we've seen before."

Another challenger of copyright warriors, the New York University professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, explicitly champions "information anarchy" in response to copyright control, using rhetoric that echoes the anti-globalization movement. He has argued that a worldwide confrontation is taking place between oligarchs who seek to control information (ranging, he says, from university presidents to corporate executives) and those who seek to free information (ranging from computer programmers to political dissidents).

Read the whole thing below.

Essay: A fast-forward debate

By Edward Rothstein The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2005

NEW YORK In 1709, Daniel Defoe compared them to "House-breakers," "High-Way Robbers" and "Pick-Pockets," not sounding that different, perhaps, from the way software manufacturers, movie studios, television producers, and some performers and writers sound today when they speak about copyright pirates.

Why, Defoe asked - at a time when authors had no rights in their own work - should there be laws against one kind of villain, and not against those who steal another kind of property created "after infinite Labour, Study, and Expence"?

Why, his colleague at arms, Joseph Addison, asked, should "Mechanick Artizans" be able to reap the "Fruit of their Invention and Ingenuity without Invasion" while a writer who has "studied the Wonders of the Creation" has "no Property in what he is willing to produce?"

Defoe and Addison were demanding such consideration at a time, like ours, of great technological and cultural change. In their London, the right to "copy" or publish any book was held not by the author, but by members of the Stationers' Company - booksellers and printers who held a monopoly on that right in perpetuity - something that must have seemed reasonable just after the introduction of the printing press and the considerable expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book to the small percentage of literate citizens.

But that guild's monopoly inspired dissent, and here, too, the objections sound familiar. The poet John Milton called the Stationers "monopolizers in the trade of book-selling" who do not "labour in an honest profession."

By the beginning of the 18th century, in fact, that old order could no longer be sustained: Printing was becoming less expensive; international and provincial publishers were creating competition; literacy was increasing; and authors were growing in public stature. So over the next half century, British laws limited the control of the Stationers and expanded the rights of authors, while putting time limits on all forms of control, creating an eventual beneficiary in what became known as the public domain.
Then came another wave of technological change: the industrial revolution. And similar controversies erupted over intellectual property.

Inventions were once relatively immune from competitive copying because of the immense amount of craft they required; the execution could seem more difficult than the idea. Once manufacturing was mechanized, though, the idea could become vulnerable on its own, leading to both increased governmental control and increased industrial espionage. Both those who copied and those who protected became ever more vigilant.

In the 18th century, for example, England passed protective laws prohibiting the export of machinery. But the fledgling United States welcomed insiders with manufacturing information from England, Russia gave incentives to hire specialist foreign workers, and Sweden spied on England's iron and copper industries. Eventually, some governmental controls loosened while patent protection grew.

Now comes another wave of change. The cost of copying - once a major obstacle - has become nearly nonexistent for digital media and software. And just as increasing trade and decreasing costs helped lead to the breakdown of the Stationers' monopoly in the 18th century and an increase in industrial espionage in the 19th, the elimination of costs for the transmission of digital media has led to another wave of copiers and protectors, along with accusations of theft and heated debates.

But this time, there is an important difference. When a breakdown of control over patents and copyrights is championed today, it is imagined not as a triumph for authors (as was initially the case in the 18th century) or as a triumph for profiteers or national ambitions (as in the industrial espionage of the 19th) but as a form of liberation: The ideology has changed.

Contemporary issues might seem to be limited to whether Amazon.com should be able to patent its one-click purchasing system, or whether file-sharing of films and music should take place freely on the Internet.

But take a few steps back, and you can hear the firings of ideological muskets. Traditional arguments over public good and private rights have taken a turn; this time, idealism confronts materialism, socialism confronts capitalism, beliefs about communal virtue confront conceptions of individualism.

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and one of the major polemicists opposing what he calls "the copyright warriors," has argued that the preponderance of moral and social virtue lies not with the protectors of copyright but with its "pirates" who open the way to cultural evolution and innovation.

"We are less and less a free culture," he has said about copyright enforcement, arguing that the crackdown on piracy is "something more extreme than anything we've seen before."

Another challenger of copyright warriors, the New York University professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, explicitly champions "information anarchy" in response to copyright control, using rhetoric that echoes the anti-globalization movement. He has argued that a worldwide confrontation is taking place between oligarchs who seek to control information (ranging, he says, from university presidents to corporate executives) and those who seek to free information (ranging from computer programmers to political dissidents).

This is not just the perspective of members of the professoriate. In June, Jesus Villasante, the head of the software technologies unit at the European Commission's Information Society and Media directorate general, warned that major corporations like IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard had become so dominant in the open source marketplace - a realm originally meant to be a refuge from commercial interests - that the "open source community" effectively had become a "subcontractor of American multinationals."

In forum after forum, challengers of copyright and patent legislation portray themselves as liberators, bravely opposing an avaricious global corporate culture that attempts to claim each bit of intellectual property for itself the way an imperialist explorer would try to plant the motherland's flag on every unclaimed piece of land.

The advocates of tighter control over copyright, of course, see things very differently, viewing this attack as harmful - an assault on their liberties, creating obstacles for those prepared to invest their time and labor to answer human needs.

For a while, books and articles predicted that technological change would bring about profound social change; an international counterculture developed around the new technologies, sometimes spurred by the same figures who had been active in the political counterculture of the 1960s and '70s.
Steward Brand, for example, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and a pioneer in online communities, coined the now familiar mantra, "Information wants to be free." Lessig, in his books, writes about the Internet as if it were once on its way to being a world of liberatory interchange, free of concerns about property and payment. The open source movement grew out of a similar intellectual atmosphere.

But of course, information doesn't want to be free; people want it to be free. And organized information - information given shape and meaning - almost never is free. Of course, neither is the Internet really a different realm, but an extension of the real world in which human concerns and commerce replicate themselves. Expectations of social and human transformation by the Internet have been greatly exaggerated.

So has the way open source software is supposed to spur the "evolution of society." The continued success of the operating system Linux, for example, is partly due not only to the ways in which varied individuals are freely contributing to its evolution, but to the ways in which companies are supporting it, and panels of overseers and a strict organizational procedure govern its specialized licenses; those procedures lead to reliability and uniformity.

Technological change always leads to anxiety among both parties of this long debate. It also pulls the rug out from under their expectations.

The same should be true now: Some new forms of control will be needed to prevent unrestricted copying and plunder; but technological innovation will undermine attempts to apply too much control. Some flexibility in control is needed to prevent the stifling of communication and commerce, but technological innovation will foil those who believe it should not exist at all.
This doesn't make things easy: It makes them unpredictable.

This is even true in our era's most notorious legal cases in which control over intellectual property has been considered too extreme: the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft. These cases essentially assert that Microsoft's control over its intellectual property is stifling innovation and that, because the company wields monopolistic power, it must sacrifice control. Many counter-copyright figures are also vigorously counter-Microsoft.

But the cases are based on already archaic concepts of the personal computer and its operating system.

The U.S. District Court's 1999 Findings of Fact that became the foundation for all later American antitrust court decisions regarding the company, for example, suggested that not every user of a personal computer would want Internet access; now Internet access is a presumed feature of a PC.
And the court's other idea, that there should be strict boundaries between how a user interacts with a PC and interacts with the Internet - an idea that Microsoft was challenging by integrating the browser and operating system - now seems well worth discarding.

It is being undermined not just by Microsoft but by Google, which, for starters, is demonstrating how closely knit the Internet and desktop will become for doing searches and exchanging information.
Not many people imagined just three years ago that Google could become Microsoft's greatest challenger. Microsoft couldn't control this evolution; why do courts believe they can?
Notions of intellectual property will also mutate under pressure, leading to unexpected forms of control and freedom. But for now, there is bound to be a continuing wrestling match over continuously transforming terrain.

There will be echoes of earlier battles, of course, but the hope is they will resemble the ones always fought, and not the ones that dream for more than can be won.

Posted by Siva at 06:49 AM | Permalink

Try it yourself here! Via Pen-Elayne.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:48 AM | Permalink

village voice > news >Brian Z. Tamanaha explains:

The potential conflict between these conservative positions is easy to observe. One cannot urge judges to abstain from government by judiciary while simultaneously asserting that the judges must advance a particular set of substantive positions, because vindicating the latter may require quashing contrary legislation. The protection of states rights, for example, comes by invalidating federal legislation.

A recent poll of the public by the American Bar Association found that 56 percent of respondents believe that there is a judicial activism “crisis,” in which judges “routinely overrule the will of the people.” Conservatives claim this as their position. According to a recent study, however, conservative darlings Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have voted to strike congressional laws 65 percent and 56 percent of the time, respectively, more than double the rate of Justice Stephen Breyer (26 percent), and well above liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (39 percent) and John Paul Stevens (39 percent).

There is another kind of conservatism, which might be called legal conservatism. This counsels adherence to precedent, self-restraint, judicial modesty, with an emphasis on preserving the autonomy and integrity of the court from the taint of politics. Chief Justice Roberts espoused this kind of conservatism. From the conservative point of view, the problem with this kind of conservatism is that it promises to lock into place longstanding decisions like Roe and the Warren Court’s liberal constitutional reforms. This is why the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was unhappy with Roberts, and has already come out against Miers.

Given this constellation of conflicting conservative positions, any nominee would have raised ire from one conservative wing or another. The misfortune of Miers is that her views are so unknown that every conservative group feared the worst, and let loose their barrage of angst and frustration. After repeated failures, this was their best chance in decades to turn the orientation of the Court toward the right, and now it may be lost.

Posted by Siva at 01:11 PM | Permalink

The annual Open Source Jahrbuch for 2005 is out and up on the Web. You can download a PDF of my contribution, which is one of the few in English.

This is an amazing volume. I recommend it highly, especially if you read German.

Posted by Siva at 12:33 PM | Permalink

Here is the EBay page for "items with a Siva theme."

UPDATE:

A Sivacracy reader writes:

I am currently on back order for a copy of Swami Muktanada’s double-negative classic “Nothing Exists That is Not Siva”. I am unclear about the concept of Sivaness. I think it might have something to do with the Buffalo Bills, Mickey’s Malt Liquor and progressive politics. Hopefully, the Swami can enlighten me. I anticipate that the Swami’s take on Siva is similar to Mojo Nixon’s take on one Elvis Aaron Presley. Mr. Nixon firmly believes that “Elvis is Everywhere.” “He’s in Nutty Buddies. He’s in Joan Rivers, but he’s trying to get out,” Mr. Nixon once sang. I think Siva may also be in Nutty Buddies.

To which I reply:

True Bliss can only be realized when Nutty Buddies are in Siva.

Mmmmmmmm. Nutty Buddies.

Posted by Siva at 12:28 PM | Permalink

Ok. We know that the National Weather Service saved untold thousands of lives by getting the information out on Katrina's dangers. And we know that the Bush administration hates inconveniences like facts and truth. And we know that Sen. Rick Santorum has been trying to pass laws that would create a monopoly for his contributor Accuweather by undermining public access to the National Weather Service.

Today we discover that the Bush administration has issued gag orders National Weather Service staff.

Seriously. Can anyone justify this policy with anything beyond CYA logic?

Thanks, Bev!

Posted by Siva at 12:26 PM | Permalink

Hockey is back!

Posted by Siva at 11:05 AM | Permalink

Ok. So it seems that the new comments configuration I installed does not work. I set it up so that commenters had to register and I could screen the comments before they went up. As you know, I turned off the comments over the summer when things were getting out of hand -- too hateful, bitter, personal, and almost dangerous. I miss the comments. But I could not host hate.

Turns out there is no way for commenters to register as I have set it up. I will work on fixing that. When and if I do I will consider reinstating comments by the end of the year. Until then, please continue to send me e-mails with questions, complaints, and advice.

Thanks to everyone for patience and understanding with this matter.

In response to the issue I asked about yesterday, several people offered helpful advice.

Here is one from a librarian in San Diego:

I tried responding to your post "Little Help" but the blog software refused to accept, saying I had to register first. However, I see no way to register on your site; thus the e-mail.

Regarding the gentleman with the problem, I strongly suspect it is an Internet Explorer issue--there's no clue which version he's using, or how well he has patched it with updates, but even fully patched, I have found IE to be troublesome both in viewing experience and with security. I use Firefox and sometimes Netscape 7, and have never had a problem with your site. For what it's worth.

Regarding your call for comments about site design, I think you have done a very good job with the layout, and even more so with the content. My only suggestion would be to ask you to consider making the text a little darker. I think the increased contrast would make it more easily read.

Thanks for what you're doing. I'm a daily visitor and have recommended your site to my friends and colleagues.

Another from a loyal reader:

Hey Siva, Thanks for your site. It is wonderful. So good that I put up with rescrolling up and down until the lines I am trying to read resolve fully. Then I do it some more. If you do find a fix, I could use it too.

I tried to comment, but the message said I needed to register. I may be overlooking something, but I could not find a way to register.

And a gentleman from Purdue University wrote:

Prof. Vaidhyanathan,

She seems to be using an old version of Internet Explorer. IE's support of CSS has always been patchy.

Maybe upgrading to IE6, or better yet Firefox, will solve the problem. Firefox can be downloaded from here.

(I tried posting a comment but it said something about me having to register. Hence the e-mail.)

The gentleman who first said he had problems with the text wrote back to say that he is able to fix the problem by adjusting the font size. I am glad that works.

I would suggest to everyone that they ditch Internet Explorer and use FireFox or Safari instead. They are both much better. Of the two, FireFox is more stable, consistent, and adaptable. It also mimics Internet Explorer, so that sites specifically designed for IE have a better chance of working.

I use Safari because I like syncing all my bookmarks among three Macs. That's probably not a good enough reason. But Safari works fine for me under most circumstances.

All that said, I am happy to report that in the month of September we set a record. We had more than 12,500 unique visitors to the site. We had been getting about 10,000 per month. We are now getting about 560 unique visitors per day, 3000 per week. Our global readership continues to grow, despite our US-centric voice on most issues.

We are nowhere near the major blogs in readership. But I think we have a sizable following among important groups, chiefly libarians. When you have librarians reading your stuff, you must be doing something right.

Our newest contributors, Catherine and David, have been wonderful and witty. It seems Sivacracy readers agree.

As they used to say about Elvis, 12,500 fans can't be wrong.

Posted by Siva at 10:39 AM | Permalink

Happy Rosh Hashana, to those who celebrate it. Site via Pen-Elayne.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:42 AM | Permalink

"Major labels Sony BMG and EMI are releasing more and more new CDs that block fans from dragging their tunes to iPods.

"Now, in the most bizarre turn yet in the record industry's piracy struggles, stars Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters and Switchfoot -- and even Sony BMG, when the label gets complaints -- are telling fans how they can beat the system."

Read the entire article at CNN: Musicians tell how to beat system: Web sites instruct fans on how to beat copy-protected CDs

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:51 AM | Permalink

Here. It will not burn your monitor or turn your keyboard pink!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:27 PM | Permalink

A Sivacracy reader sent me this screen shot. It seems he can't see more than half of every character on IE Explorer.

Anyone have any tips for him or for me? Anyone else have design issues?

Comments are on for this one.

Posted by Siva at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thought I'd share the following announcement, which was forwarded to me this morning. It seems appropriate for the smarty-pants readers of Sivacracy. Note: I do not work for the Information Society Project, Yale Law, or even Yale.

Information Society Project
Yale Law School
ISP Fellowship Announcement

Information Society Project Fellowship Program
c/o Deborah Sestito, Room 333
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven CT 06520-8215

Posted by Catherine at 03:55 PM | Permalink

From Editor and Publisher:

Miers Briefed Bush on Famous Bin Laden Memo, But Newspapers Handle the AP Photo Quite Differently:

NEW YORK -- On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch “in August 2001,” the caption reads.

USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply “2001,” but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001.

Does that date sound familiar? Indeed, that was the date, a little over a month before 9/11, that President Bush was briefed on the now-famous “PDB” that declared that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to attack the U.S. homeland, perhaps with hijacked planes. But does that mean that Miers had anything to do with that briefing?

As it turns out, yes, according to Tuesday's Los Angeles Times. An article by Richard A. Serrano and Scott Gold observes that early in the Bush presidency “Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial 'presidential daily briefing' hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.”

So the Aug. 6 photo may show this historic moment, though quite possibly not. In any case, some newspapers failed to include the exact date with the widely used Miers photo today. A New York Times spokesman told E&P: "The wording of the caption occurred in the course of routine editing and has no broader significance."

The photo that ran in so many papers and on their Web sites originally came from the White House but was moved by the Associated Press, clearly marked as an “Aug. 6, 2001” file photo. It shows Miers with a document or documents in her right hand, as her left hand points to something in another paper balanced on the president's right leg. Two others in the background are Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and Steve Biegun of the national security staff.

The PDB was headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” and notes, among other things, FBI information indicating “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”

Posted by Siva at 03:13 PM | Permalink

Jack Balkin explains:

And what, exactly, does business want? Overturning the New Deal? The Constitution in Exile? The return of God to the public schools? The end of affirmative action? Outlawing abortion once and for all? Squashing gays and lesbians underfoot? None of these things. What business wants is stability, comfort, predictability, and an agile, productive, submissive and demobilized population. It wants a powerful executive that can protect America's interests abroad. It wants a Congress freed from federal judicial oversight that is able to dish out the pork, jiggle the tax code and deregulate the economy according to its ever shifting concerns and interests. And it wants a Supreme Court that will give a pro-business President and a pro-business Congress a free hand, a Court that will protect the rights of employers over employees, advertisers over consumer groups, and corporations over environmentalists.It wants, in short, someone very much like Harriet Miers.

Posted by Siva at 03:01 PM | Permalink

Billmon points us to some more Wingnut tirades against the Meirs appointment.

I can't believe how easy this is now. I don't really have to blog indignantly. I can just let the right erode itself from its corrupt innards. These guys are almost as sick of W as I am. They are certainly as angry.

Of course, there is a difference. I am angry because W stole an election and violated every principle of representative democracy, betrayed every promise he made about "modesty" in foreign affairs and "compassion" in domestic. I am mad because innocent Americans have had to die for his lies and incompetence. I resent that he and the rest of his draft-dodging buddies live high off the sacrifices of people who actually work for a living and are willing to put their lives on the line for this country. I resent the fact that he has spent my children's money to make his rich friends richer.

They are mad because he is being too profilgate and conciliatory, because he recognized his political impotence and hedged his bets.

I am bitter that W shamed and betrayed the core principles of the country I love. They feel cheated because he betrayed a political movement and party.

See the difference?

Now, let's sit back and watch the right try to fillibuster Miers. Heh heh.

Posted by Siva at 02:53 PM | Permalink

Michael Berube Online

... But all you people are wrong. You are trying to assess the candidacy of Harriet Miers by looking at her past (not much to go on there!), or by estimating George Bush's present political capital (disappearing faster than the polar ice caps!). These are inevitably flawed methods to bring to bear on such an important subject. Instead, we should focus on analyzing the future. And thanks to Google's brand-new feature, "Future Search," you can check out the full record of Justice Miers's service on the Supreme Court.

It's all right there on the Future Internets: her famous declaration in early 2006 that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided . . . and that a woman's reproductive rights should be predicated on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead! Pro-life groups were especially outraged when Justice Miers closed her opinion with a sentence that many legal analysts interpreted as a repudiation of the American religious right: "Psyched you all out, didn't I" Justice Miers then followed this decision with a stunning series of rereadings of Fourteenth Amendment case law, reaching all the way back to the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which first established the principle that corporations are "persons" under the Constitution. "No way are corporations persons," wrote Miers in June 2006, deftly undoing 120 years of precedent and restoring to the Fourteenth Amendment its original function of extending the scope of U.S. law to actual living people (particularly freed slaves). "Check out Section Three of the Amendment if you don't believe me," Miers wrote, in the famously colloquial style that won her legions of admirers and epigones throughout the legal profession. "There's no question that 'person' means 'a guy' or 'a woman,' not 'a commercial entity.' How could Acme Corp. or Amalgamated Products Inc. serve in Congress or as an elector, or be a state legislator, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, et cetera et cetera et cetera? It doesn't make any damn sense."

Posted by Siva at 02:35 PM | Permalink

Notes on the Capital of the 21st Century:

By Todd Gitlin

I’m just back from two weeks in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou, mainly Shanghai, where I lectured on American history, journalism, politics and intellectual life to students and faculty at East China Normal University, Fudan University, Shanghai International Studies University, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Overwhelmed is one word for what I’m feeling, and I don’t mean jetlag. But I offer a few notes for now on the state of thought, spirit, and debate in the Communist capital of Asian capitalism-in-the-making.

The only website I was unable to access from hotel rooms in China was blogspot.com. New York Times, fine. Washington Post, fine. TPMcafe.com, fine. The Chinese government doesn’t want its citizens to start or read their own individual expressions. While I was there, in fact, the government promulgated new rules restricting not only sites but e-mail lists.

Shanghai: Spectacularly boisterous city of 16-20 million—and who’s counting?—where outside the five-star hotels the kiosks feature not a single Western magazine or newspaper. Yet all are available on-line. Contradictions, comrade.

A few glimpses of states of mind. My first lecture to the American Studies program of ECNU, on the Enlightenment and the decline of Marxism, was interrupted by an earnest student, austerely dressed, who asked me whether I could speak of Marxism as a theology. I replied that that was the right way to put it, all right, and proceeded to answer about Marx’s debt to Hegel, the abstract idea of the proletariat as universal class, and so on. A few minutes later her hand shot up again and she apologized saying that she hadn’t meant “theology,” she’d meant “ideology.” I said that she shouldn’t apologize because “theology” was really the apt word. Afterward she came up to me and said perhaps she really had meant “theology” after all.

The first question after my lecture came from another young woman, wearing a single long braid, to wit: “I read something in openDemocracy that really shocked me. Some people say that Stalin killed more people than the Nazis. I think of Stalin as a great revolutionary leader. But he made some mistakes, and maybe later he was crazy. Do Americans believe this about Stalin?” I assured her that every serious historian believes that Stalin was a mass murderer who was indeed responsible for more deaths than Hitler.

Some teachers defend “Marxism” but hardly any of them have ever read Marx or even heard of his relation to Hegel. In school the students must study something called “Marxism” but it does not include the reading of Marx. This “Marxism” is the same sort of dead catechism they used to teach in the USSR, a “short course in Marxism-Leninism.” Meanwhile, the Party is huge, growing, and calcified—mainly a route to advancement. My talk to journalists had to be canceled because a Party indoctrination session intervened—part of a new campaign to straighten up and fly right.

And so they live at a frantic pace, amid choking traffic, among supermalls and neon, flat-screen TVs and knockoff DVDs, contemplating high-rise apartments selling for $100,000 (that’s US dollars) in a city where average income is of the order $5000. And superficially, at least, my impression is that students are full of hope.

Posted by Siva at 12:24 PM | Permalink

The woman who helped her run for Dallas City Council knows her politics pretty well:

"She is on the extreme end of the anti-choice movement," Bartos says of her former client. "I think Harriet's belief was pretty strongly felt. I suspect she is of the same cloth as the president."

... Bartos tells the Morning News that Miers supported abortion rights as a young woman but then had a "a born-again, profound experience" that caused her to change her mind. Perhaps that's what the president had in mind yesterday when he said that he knows Miers and knows her "heart."

Posted by Siva at 12:21 PM | Permalink

From an Altercation/Sivacracy reader:

Let me first say that I'm generally a fan of your work, as it appears on Altercation.

But I must side with your wife on certain
baseball-related program activities. I tried to send
my response to Altercation, but the form on that site
was giving me an error. So I thought, hey, I can just
send it straight to the horses mouth, so to speak. So
below is my letter. But I haven't gone through it to
change how I wrote it, so it is still in the form of a
letter to Altercation, please enjoy it in good health:

Since when does Siva start writing such schlock?
Perhaps since he started writing about the Yankees.

First of all, Siva moved to NYC during the Yankees big
World Series run -- he just a bandwagon jumper.
Second, only a few sickos among Red Sox fans wanted to
stay martyrs -- most just wanted their team to finally
win the World Series for the joy of it and so they
could be normal fans again, if rabid, rather than
"cursed." Fortunately, the Sports Guy from ESPN has a
new book out all about this -- Siva should read it, if only to help his marriage. Actually,
Simmons does a great job writing about the Red Sox, so
he should read it just for the pleasure.

His wife claims Yankees fans are arrogant, and Siva
proves it with several quotes, "the Yankees naturally
won," "I would miss the fourth and final game and yet
another moment of humiliation for the Red Sox," "I am
certain that the Red Sox will have to endure another
86-year exile from the Promised Land," and "Of course,
the Yankees won that game." Even though I think he
was doing this on purpose, it still fits the
eye-rolling Yankee fan behavior to a T.

But Siva should know better. And he claims that
Buffalo fans have it worst. Hmm, how many people would
visit the graves of loved ones to deposit Bills
memorabilia if they finally won the Super Bowl? Maybe
a few. Maybe a few more if the Sabres were to bring
the Stanley Cup around for a tour. But all the folks
visiting the graves of lost loved ones around here
were all over the headlines here for a week after the
World Series, and made it into a moving article in
Sports Illustrated.

Part of what has built up so much angst for Red Sox
fans is that they have (pretty) consistently fielded
competitive teams, but every 10 years or so get to the
World Series only to lose in seven games. In '86 it
just started to become bizarre. So this (not the
rally) monkey really need to be shed off their backs.
Boston fans have been devoted to the Red Sox for
generations, which leads me to my next point. He
tries to point to the successes of Boston's other
sports teams, but what he doesn't admit/realize is
that Boston's sports lives and dies by the Red Sox.

Would he abandon the Sabres for the Canadiens (I mean,
if hockey existed)? And, yes, the Celtics have had
great basketball success, but more recently they have
had 2 number one picks, um, die. One before he could
even show up for a practice, and the other after
several strong seasons becoming the team leader.
Kinda takes the wind out of a franchise's sails. The
fans' too.

Side note: I can't stand it when people say that the
Patriots now are just like the Yankees. Not even
close. Winning is not the only defining
characteristic of the Yankees. You must also act like
you own the league and treat other teams like your own
personal farm club. The Patriots have won while on a
level playing field and without any arrogance - they
specialize in teamwork and execution from the players
and great coaching and team building from the coaches
and owners.

Yeah, Pedro is an "aggressive" pitcher. So is
Clemens. Hardly anything new for dominant pitchers.
And yeah, the Yankees had to respond - I have no
problem with that, but what is a 72 year old guy doing
in the melee acting like dumb ox? It was unfortunate,
but I'm just glad he got put on the ground rather than
actually taking any blows. It wasn't pretty, but it
could've been worse.

For the record, I'm originally from Los Angeles,
where all the families and sports teams are originally
from someplace else. But I have lived in Boston for
the last 13 years and I'm endlessly fascinated by the
local bible belt style fundamentalism over sports.
NYC appears to share this trait.

Thanks,
Michael Roberts

Posted by Siva at 12:08 PM | Permalink

From Gawker:

How to score a book deal in 10 easy steps:

1. Work at New York Times
2. Unquestioningly run spoonfed information regarding WMDs
3. Look like an asshole, embarrass your publication
3. Write MASH notes to cabinet members
4. Declare yourself Queen of Iraq
5. Muddle up some espionage leaks
6. Look like an asshole, embarrass your publication
7. Refuse to talk about anything, despite having full permission to do so
8. Reinvent self as First Amendment freedom fighter
9. Go to jail for 12 weeks, listen to hip-hop
10. Sign $1.2 million book deal

Posted by Siva at 11:37 AM | Permalink

It isn't all that brief, actually, but it's good! From Hubris.

"1. “Feminist” can simply mean that you are an advocate for equal rights for women. Someone saying “I advocate equal rights for women” or the related thought that “I would like to be judged based on my merit, not my gender” does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that they will make you spell “women” funny, are working toward the destruction of the nuclear family, or feel that women are better than men. Despite the unfortunate encounter you may have had during a college Psych class with a self-identified feminist, or the wacky story of feminist excess in Seattle that was posted in the latest “Tales of Outrage” column in the local paper, I swear that this is true.
2. In connection with (1): If your politics are right of center, and that has led people to automatically assume that you are a right-wing extremist nut who loves fascism, remember how stupid you thought that was. Then read (1) again.
3. The next time you accuse someone of resorting to “victimhood” because they object to something that they argue is sexist, think about how whiny you might sound as you say how unfair it is to be accused of sexism, and realize that the victimhood allegation is fairly cheap, as it essentially can be applied to whomever was the last person who felt aggrieved in the argument. Like, for instance, you.
4. Someone who argues that each individual should be judged on their own merits is not necessarily arguing that there are no differences between sexes in distribution patterns with respect to some characteristics. For example, most people would acknowledge that vagina possession is much more common among women. Maybe save the evolutionary/hunter-gatherer/muscle-distribution story until you verify that it’s actually needed in the particular discussion.
5. You know what, responding to a woman’s objection to alleged sexism with “there’s no need to be so sensitive and emotional about the whole thing” is probably not helping your case that they are paranoid with respect to perceptions of sexism. Especially if you recall how you acted the last time you were pissed off about something. I’ll leave it to you to figure this one out.
6. Another one for my friends on the Right: The next time somebody gets upset because you refer to their gender in your criticism of what they said, and you think they’re being ridiculous and touchy, recall the last time someone attacked one of your arguments only by saying “of course he thinks that, he’s just some fucking white guy.” Did you think that was pretty idiotic? If you answered “yes,” go back and read this one (6) again, and think about it for a minute.

"Don't bring down the fucking curve."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:30 AM | Permalink

List of nicknames coined and employed by George W. Bush.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:26 AM | Permalink

For any of our readers who knows Russian: back in the USSR days, did Pravda ever run something as shameless as this?

My favorite part is that I'm supposed to cheer that Judith Miller got privileges that no other journalist has ever had, and that she was able to redact her own notes. Which means, I guess, she probably blacked out phrases like "Fuck you, Joseph Wilson" or "Fuck you, American People, they've got WMDs if I say they do."

Because of my long-term reliance on the paper, I've often been willing to give the Times a pass. But running this article, this open-handed slap at its readers and the American public, this is stunning. I guess the only good thing about the article is that it's conspicuously silent about the reaction that her reporter (not editor/publisher) colleagues had about her return to the newsroom. And given the gushing over the emails and the flowers, don't you think Seelye would have mentioned it if it had been a warm reception?

Posted by David at 09:54 AM | Permalink

Over a third of folks teaching Intellectual Property at law schools in the United States are female, but you'd never know it from the line up of speakers here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:29 AM | Permalink

Yes, really. Here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:25 AM | Permalink

The Wall Street Journal get it right on:

Posted by Siva at 04:26 PM | Permalink

Jay Rosen explains via The Huffington Post:

By choosing confrontation when she didn't have to, and by going to jail in circumstances that allowed for other, subtler options (good enough for her peers but not for her) Judy Miller has made a great newspaper's history for it. The case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, after all. Her confinement ended because she suddenly made a practical decision to quit standing on principle. And that too--confusion between the epic and the expedient--now attaches itself to the reputation of the Times.

The NY Times is all about reputation. The Times already sacrificed its reputation for fairness, honesty, integrity, and balance by allowing Miller to serve as an organ to push neocon fantasies on the rest of us. This all came after years of seeing the Times used by right-wing activists who pushed myths like Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee's alleged treason, and most recently "intelligent design." Even so, it was painful to read the Times leaders defend Miller's craven actions as matters of principle.

Now they have nothing to say on principle. They are stuck defending a hack reporter who has axes to grind and who really really hates all of those who revealed the truth about Iraq's lack of weapons.

It's sad that Miller is playing a part in taking down what was once a great paper.

Posted by Siva at 04:18 PM | Permalink

Instapundit links to all those who are outraged by this appointment.

One can safely assume that this is not exactly what Pat Robertson was praying for.

Perhaps the best strategy the left could offer is to sit back and watch the right devour itself over this one.

He he.

Posted by Siva at 04:08 PM | Permalink

Via Daily Kos:

The infamous right-wing hack David Frum wrote:

She rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush. I mentioned last week that she told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. To flatter on such a scale a person must either be an unscrupulous dissembler, which Miers most certainly is not, or a natural follower. And natural followers do not belong on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Basically, Miers represents the best Bush can hope to do now that almost no one supports his policies or his presidency. He lives in a bubble. He only talks to people in that bubble. He lacks the imagination to consider people outside the bubble.

She is the perfect symbol of a failed presidency. It's not her resume that is the problem. It's her company.

Posted by Siva at 04:05 PM | Permalink

From LawPundit:

But is the library entitled to make these copies (or have these copies made for hire?)

Under §108 of the U.S. Copyright Act the library is entitled to make ONE copy of copyrighted works, provided that "the reproduction or distribution" must be made "without ANY purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage".

Kenneth D. Crews in Copyright Law, Libraries, and Universities comments Section 108 as follows:

"Section 108 is generally not regarded as the source of rights for reserve operations. Reserve room copies are made pursuant to fair use law; reserve rooms may be located in libraries, but they function as an extension of classroom teaching. The distinction between Section 108 and 107 for reserve rooms is important. Section 108 provides only for single copies of items, while the fair use statute specifically permits some multiple copies for classroom use, although subject to the four factors of fair use. Multiple copies are often essential for effective reserves."

It would seem then that the library (libraries) can not rely on §108 to make more than ONE copy of a copyrighted work (they are making two in this case - one for the library and one for Google) and that copying can have not even an "indirect" commercial advantage, which it might have for Google (though it is not clear whether or not the decade-long venture may cost Google much more than it will earn - presuming that Google even exists in 10 years).

But if libraries are relying on § 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act to make multiple copies of copyrighted works for "archival" purposes, are they not running foul of the precedent in the Texaco case:

American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc. 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1995), cert. dismissed , 116 S.Ct. 592 (1995), which Crews comments as follows:

"The Texaco decision is a significant endorsement of the Copyright Clearance Center. If permissions are easily forthcoming through the CCC, then fair use is of lessened importance for fulfilling research objectives--according to this case. That decision from the court is both stunning and foreboding, although it is still limited to fair use in the profit sector."

Here, the libraries are in the non-profit sector.

Moreover, as Crews observes:

[in the Texaco case] "[T]he copies had a harmful effect on the potential market value of the copyrighted work."

Since the library (libraries) are non-profit institutions, this is not an issue for their making copies of their collections, and the case is thus not directly applicable.

Another interesting twist is that the library position is the exact reverse of the situation in Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Serv., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996), cert. den., 137 L. Ed. 2d 495 (1997), where it was opined:

"It is true that the use to which the materials are put by the students who purchase the coursepacks is noncommercial in nature. But the use of the materials by the students is not the use that the publishers are challenging. What the publishers are challenging is the duplication of copyrighted materials for sale by a for-profit corporation that has decided to maximize its profits -- and give itself a competitive edge over other copyshops -- "

In the Michigan Document case the court did not concentrate on the non-profit USE to which the students were putting the coursepacks (this would correspond to the for-profit subsequent USE by Google in the instant case) but stated rather that the issue of duplication for profit by the document company was determinative (so that this would correspond to the non-profit duplication by the library (libraries) and not to any use by Google).

Using the logic of the Michigan Document case, the court must FIRST assess whether the copying of books in the instant case by the library (libraries) is permissible fair use or not, and only then could the court go to the question of whether the use to which Google has or intends to put the resulting database is transformative use or not.

The suit by the Author's Guild thus puts the cart before the horse.

Posted by Siva at 03:45 PM | Permalink

Sorry, Siva, but I like my justices to have had a little more judgin' under their belts before they arrive at the highest court in the country. It ain't an internship, and her lack of judicial qualifications screams token female appointment or cronyism or both. Her background is impressive, indeed, for a woman of a certain age from Texas, but, damn, is this the best that they can offer? I'll admit that I'm not an attorney and I could find very little on Miers other than the mainstream media mantra (official bio, ATRA, TBA, Dallas City Council, blah, blah, blah). But, of course, wasn't that the Evil Puppetmaster's plan along? There's no need to cover the trail if there's no trail.

By the way, have you seen Althouse today? Funny stuff (of the funny-interesting, not funny-ha-ha, variety), particularly the bit about Chuck Shumer appearing "pleased" with the Miers nom and lots of speculation that she's a compromise. The supposed proof is a donation to Al Gore's campaign in 1988. You and I know all too well that 1988 was just five years away from Phil Gramm's conversion and there were still many Republicans in Texas Democrat clothing back then.

For fun (funny-ha-ha this time), check out Harriet Miers's blog.

Posted by Catherine at 03:20 PM | Permalink

A response comes via Altercation:

Name: Kevin Matthews

Hometown: Somerville, MA

For Siva, My girlfriend likes the Yankees, so sort of identify with your position. But rooting for the Yankees (especially for someone born outside of New York) is like rooting for the dealer in Black Jack.

The Yankees only win the World Series about a quarter of the time.

Posted by Siva at 12:41 PM | Permalink

No. I don't mean that.

We might discover many wonderful things about Miers over the next few weeks. But in the mean time, understand that like John Roberts she worked on Bush v. Gore, which pretty much sullies her as far as supporting basic ideas like Constitutional democracy.

I wish someone in the Senate would ask her about that. I can't think of a more important or unjust ruling since Plessy v. Ferguson.

Oh yeah. The nice thing.

She is no Michael Brown.

There have been hints that the Dem strategy to shake her up will consist of calling her appointment another example of "cronyism and incompetence." Some will accuse her of lacking the resume for the job.

I say that's crap for a couple of reasons:

1) For a woman of her generation to achieve all she has is remarkable. She had to work in firms full of the goodest and oldest of the good old boys. Think about all the snide remarks she must have had to put up with over the years. Think of all the men she has had to school. So few women have been appointed to the federal bench that we can't expect any president to limit himself to judges when considering such an appointment. It's good to see a president look beyond the usual suspects.

2) White House Counsel is a hell of a difficult job, full of consitutional judgements complicated by political contingencies. The very fact that she has served in that job without making headlines is to her credit. Alberto Gonzales was not that deft. Neither was John Dean. So kudos to Miers for serving her client well.

That said, I shall now proceed to gather more reasons why she should not serve on the High Court.

Posted by Siva at 12:15 PM | Permalink

David Ignatius in The Washington Post:

So what is the way forward in Iraq? I come to the question with a good deal of baggage. I thought the war made sense three years ago, not because of the putative weapons of mass destruction or the al Qaeda threat but because I hoped that toppling the Arab world's most repressive regime could open the door to positive change in the region. I still believe that, but I shudder at the administration's postwar mistakes and at the human cost of the war. And I sense that both Americans and Iraqis are running out of patience. We are at a crucial decision point, so here is what I think:

The right way forward now is exactly what it was in April 2003. The United States must foster a modern, secular Iraqi government that can bring together Sunnis and Shiites and, under that umbrella of national reconciliation, stabilize the country. Above all, that means finding a way to engage the people who feel most left out of the new Iraq -- the Sunni minority that held power under Saddam Hussein and now feels disenfranchised.

Say, that is a good idea. And David Ignatius has never steered me wrong before. Oh, right, except for that Iraq War thingy.

Posted by David at 10:32 PM | Permalink

"The results of WSIS Prepcom 3 demonstrate the failure of US unilateralism. The US is well on its way toward being isolated, having lost the support of the European Union in its attempt to keep ICANN and Internet governance under its own control. Now its rigid, defensive policy has put the Internet itself at risk.

"As the WSIS debate spills into the US media, do not permit the US government to wrap itself up in the flag of Internet freedom. It is reaping what it sowed. Its own special, extra-legal authority over ICANN and the Internet has been the lightning rod for politicization. Its insistence on retaining control, and the spillover from its unilateralism in other areas such as the war in Iraq, has done tremendous damage to its credibility. Now the Internet is paying the price."

Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:19 AM | Permalink

During the roughly four hours I spend reading about Iraq every day, I've been a little preoccupied with such issues as:

- the market bombing in Hillah that killed 10 and brought the week's known toll to over 200 people killed in various attacks;

- the military's report that out of 107 Iraq battalions, the number that can fight without US support has dropped from 3 to 1;

- Moqtada al-Sadr's reported order to his militia to kidnap two Britons to exchange for two militia members being held by the Brits in Basra, just a few days after the weird shootout and prison break effected by the British army;

- West Point alum and Army Captain Ian Fishback is being "sequestered" at Fort Bragg after trying to investigate standards for humane treatment of Iraqi prisoners and writing to torture victim John McCain about efforts to halt his inquiries;

- Judith Miller is freed from prison after giving a totally mind-blowing explanation for her principled decision to testify about Scooter Libby, who had, I guess, been coerced into his earlier waiver authorizing her to come forward;

- A federal judge orders the release of the remaining Abu Ghraib photos, which I expect to see around the same time that the government also introduces me personally to the aliens captured in Roswell, New Mexico;

- Baghdad is being divided up between Sunni neighborhoods and militia-infiltrated security forces on search-and-destroy-(and-kill) missions, which might discourage some from being excited about the upcoming constitution;

- and President Bush lending some credence to the National Enquirer story that he's drinking again by saying in his radio address that the US commanders in Iraq "have made important gains in recent weeks and months; they are adapting our strategy to meet the needs on the ground; and they're helping us to bring victory in the war on terror."

Anyway, because my attention was focused on these other looming disasters and nightmares, I had completely forgotten to consider how fragile the agreements between the Shiites and Kurds (generally viewed as a politically unified, pro-constitution bloc in a lot of the media) are. But the new burst of anger by Presidient Talabani, who accuses Shiite leaders on reneging on pledges about a Kurdish return to Kirkuk, made me remember that as bad as things look, there are extraordinary reasons for despair that are simply flying under the radar.

It's a completely moot point, of course, but I'm wondering whether conservatives who support the war and the Bush commitment to keep troops in Iraq have actually come up with an independent standard for evaluating when we can withdraw them. My understanding is that the logic is that we need to keep troops in Iraq until the Iraqi security forces can fight without them. Fair enough. I guess we'll know that, er, when? When President Bush announces that that's the case?

And if he does so, and we withdraw troops at that time, and then Iraq falls into civil war, under what conditions would they argue that Bush made a bad decision at some stage in all of this: the decision to go to war, to withdraw troops, etc. It's a moot point because President Bush's word will be taken, as it always is, as infallible in a way that Pope Benedict only dreams of having. It'll be the Iraqis' fault. President Bush liberated them and gave them a chance; they simply couldn't get their act together.

Posted by David at 11:21 PM | Permalink

I'm a little dismayed at how quickly The Scotsman identified the newest Bali bombing as the work of Al Qaeda. The extent of Al Qaeda's reach, as well as the proper ways of identifying it, have been research interests of mine for a while, and I've written articles specifically on Southeast Asia in this journal issue and this edited volume.

It's not that Jemaah Islamiah, which has quickly and (from what I can surmise) appropriately been labeled the likeliest culprit, is unconnected to Al Qaeda. In a superb 2003 report (note: you must register at www.crisisgroup.org to get access, but registration is free and, in my judgment, this is an indispensable website) that details the history and structure of Jemaah Islamiah, the International Crisis Group argues:

Despite these clear ties, JI’s relationship with bin Laden’s organisation may be less one of subservience, as is sometimes portrayed, than of mutual advantage and reciprocal assistance, combined with the respect successful students have for their former teachers.

I've argued that it's better to think of Al Qaeda as a social movement organization, or rather the ideological and, in some ways, financial core of a much larger movement of Islamist groups whose most important goals are highly local and provincial. I don't mean that they have no global aspirations; indeed, Al Qaeda's language is usually effective because it links local disputes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere to a global struggle. Even so, at a certain level, I think all politics is local, and we can't understand a given terrorist act (whether the 2003 Bali bombing or the terrible one last night) without taking into consideration who the local actors are and how they're choosing their targets. I suspect that it's significant that Indonesia has a history of relatively low-level violence directed by Islamic movements (sometimes operating as enforcers for extortion rings) at "impious" institutions such as bars, nightclubs, etc. These attacks were notably carried out by the Islamic Defenders' Front in Jakarta, a group that has reportedly disbanded, but left in its wake a repertoire of violence focusing especially on the kinds of institutions that have now twice been targeted in Bali.

My point is not that these groups aren't dangerous, and it's not that Al Qaeda is somehow irrelevant. But in describing the attack as an Al Qaeda attack, we once again return to the claim that there's somehow a great brain operating in the mountains of Afghanistan/Pakistan, which is strictly directing the minutiae of a global jihad. Remember after the first Bali bombing, when we heard that Al Qaeda was now focusing on "soft targets" like the discos? One could easily describe the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an attack on a "soft target," since there wasn't very tight security and it wasn't a government or military installation. The idea that the central organization "decided" to change tactics and now was somehow directing global efforts in a clear and identifiable manner is a difficult one to defend. I mean, I'm not inside Bin Laden's head (thankfully; I've got enough problems dealing with my own shit), but does anyone really believe that he has a cache of explosives and he and his colleagues determined the best place to use them was in a restaurant in Bali?

When journalists and pundits speak (idiotically, in my view) of a transition to "Baby Al Qaedas," indicating that the problem as now spread like a family of snakes, they incorrectly imply that there was a dominating, operational core to begin with. Most likely, there wasn't, at least not in the way that many would believe. The most reputable research on the organization (for example, Gilles Kepel's Jihad) suggests a fractious network of mujahedeen operating out of Afghanistan, with different leaders trying desperately to turn the larger movement toward their own interests (whether in obliterating Israel, toppling the Saudi royal family, attacking DC and NYC, or assassinating Mubarak, inventing less decadent Ben & Jerry's, whatever).

Two more comments from ICG reports.

Within Jemaah Islamiah itself, there are deep doctrinal divisions that seem to affect leaders more than followers, who seem able to cooperate on attacks even when those at the top disagree over tactics:

While it is a mistake to see JI views as monolithic, it is also a mistake to see the divisions as immutable, and cross-cutting fault-lines in the organisation can sometimes bring two people on different sides of one debate into the same camp on another.

and

...training programs, whether Afghanistan, Mindanao or local ones like Cijeruk, are always places where new bonds are forged and lasting friendships made. Alumni of a program are likely to be able to call on fellow alumni for help in times of need, in a way that may strengthen a logistical support network.

Local communal conflicts such as Ambon and Poso serve as important incentives for reactivating old networks and reinvigorating jihadist groups. It is one more reason for trying to prevent simmering tensions from erupting into violence.

In other words, local politics matters a lot. Al Qaeda, particularly because of the size and international reach of its training camps in Afghanistan, has been particularly important in establishing networks between militants, but it almost certainly doesn't "call the shots" in any meaningful operational way in many of the attacks that foreign journalists and pundits ascribe to it.

From a poltical science perspective, I'm not completely satisfied with using "social movement theory" to explain Al Qaeda, because the literature on social movements itself is beset with tensions over the specification of key variables, definitional problems, and occasionally murky causal pathways. But social movement theory, whatever its problems, has yielded a lot of top-notch research over the years, particularly as a heuristic device for grasping the strategies that movement organizations use as well their susceptibility to larger discursive and symbolic environments. And I like social movement theory better than any of the available options from security studies or other frameworks that tend to want to establish Al Qaeda as a threat that can be compared, in some meaningful way, with that posed by an enemy state.

It's possible that members of Al Qaeda's inner circle were involved in this latest atrocity, but I would be very surprised to hear it. And while most of us probably would also assume that local militants were behind the attack, perhaps it's time to start being more careful with how we label Al Qaeda's proper role. I'm hardly trying to get Bin Laden's crew off the hook. But in misspecifying the nature of the threat, we also turn the public's eyes away from potentially effective remedies.

Posted by David at 09:58 PM | Permalink

The Highlander in 30 seconds, re-enacted by squeaky cartoon bunnies.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:37 PM | Permalink

The future of the Supreme Court may be one with only one woman on the bench, depending on who Bush nominates to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. So it's sort of nonhumorously ironic that an upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota Law School entited: "The Future of the Supreme Court: Institutional Reform and Beyond" has only one woman speaker (out of 14).

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:48 PM | Permalink

From the blog, Enjoy and Exciting!:

Siva Vaidhyanathan is my new boyfriend...� So the writing conference is great so far, there's a large number people who want to yap about arcane critical theory all day long and god bless 'em, but there's also a fair number of those who want to talk about issues of intellectual property, ownership and free culture in age of the Internet, the real meaty stuff that concerns me as a writer. Siva Vaidhyanathan (he's an NYU professor who focuses on copyright, ownership and technology) is awesome -- anyone who drops Biz Markie in the first few minutes of his very academic presentation wins my affection. This one guy decided to blah blah about Foucault and the radical theory of the author, and how very special it is and Siva Vaidhyanathan is all "well we can talk about that, but no one outside of this room is gonna care, so that's not going to be much help in changing copyright law." It was so awesome, I wanted to stand up and yell "and that's how it's done, motherfucka!" No offense to the guy, he was actually very well informed and smart, I'm just a fan of public scholarship, the idea that the kind of talk that goes on in university conference like this can be made accessable to normal, everyday people, and considering how many of us are out there keeping blogs and posting our writing, music and art on the Internet, it's more than just academics who need to participate in this dialogue.*sigh* It almost makes me want to go back to grad school. *looks at student loan bill* Almost.So anyway, I'm having a good time. One more day to go!

Posted by Siva at 10:28 AM | Permalink

This week on NPR's show, "On the Media" you can here me explain at length about Google Print Library.

Posted by Siva at 08:48 AM | Permalink