history

Wikipedia defines fascism

history, politics / /

From Wikipedia’s “Fascism” (5 July 2006):

Fascism is a radical totalitarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-rationalism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism. …

A recent definition that has attracted much favorable comment is that by Robert O. Paxton:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (Anatomy of Fascism, p 218)

…

Fascism is associated by many scholars with one or more of the following characteristics: a very high degree of nationalism, economic corporatism, a powerful, dictatorial leader who portrays the nation, state or collective as superior to the individuals or groups composing it.

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Who was saved in the storming of the Bastille?

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “French Revolution” (5 July 2006):

On July 14, 1789, after hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor, Marquis Bernard de Launay, and several of his guards. Although the Parisians released only seven prisoners; four forgers, two lunatics, and a sexual offender, the Bastille served as a potent symbol of everything hated under the ancien régime.

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Napoleon’s losses in the invasion of Russia

history / /

From Wikipedia’s “Napoleon I of France” (5 July 2006):

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River (November 1812) to escape. In total French losses in the campaign were 570,000 against about 400,000 Russian casualties and several hundred thousand civilian deaths.

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Fouche’s blackmail of Napoleon

history, politics / /

From Napoleonic Literature’s “The Court and Camp of Buonaparte: The Ministers: Fouche“:

[Fouche,] who was so profoundly versed in the state of parties, — who was obeyed by one, courted by another, and feared by all; who, by means of his countless agents, could at any time congregate the scattered elements of resistance to the authority of government, was too formidable to be allowed to continue for ever in so dangerous a post. To this we may add that Buonaparte well knew the channel through which the knowledge of his amours passed to Josephine. Of the extent to which the head of the state was subjected to this galling system of espionage, Fouché furnishes us with an amusing proof:–

One day Buonaparte observed that, considering my acknowledged ability, he was astonished I did not perform my functions better, — that there were several things of which I was ignorant. ‘Yes,’ replied I, ‘there certainly are things of which I was ignorant, but which I now know well enough. For instance, a little man muffled up in a grey cloak, and accompanied by a single servant, often steals out on a dark evening from a secret door of the Tuileries, enters a closed carriage, and drives off to Signora G—-. This little man is yourself; and yet this fanciful songstress jilts you continually out of love for Rode the fiddler.’ The Consul answered not a word: he turned his back, rung, and I immediately withdrew.” — Memoires, tom. i. p. 233.

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Fouche proud of terror, expanded

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Napoleonic Literature’s “The Court and Camp of Buonaparte: The Ministers: Fouche“:

But whatever might be the merit of his services at Nantes, it was far eclipsed by those he had soon afterwards the happiness to perform at Lyons. On his arrival there with Collot d’Herbois, he announced to the terrified citizens the reward they were to expect for having dared to resist the majesty of the people, and especially for having put to death some revolutionary agents. “The representatives of the people will be impassive in the execution of their mission. They have been intrusted with the thunderbolt of public vengeance, which they will not cease to hurl until the public enemies are crushed. They will have the courage to march over countless tombs of the conspirators, to traverse boundless ruins, that they may arrive at the happiness of nations,–at the regeneration of the world!” He wrote in like terms to his employers at Paris: “Nothing can disarm our severity: indulgence, we must say, is a dangerous weakness. We never cease to strike the enemies of the people; we annihilate them in a manner at once signal, terrible, and prompt. Their bloody corses, thrown into the Rhone, must appear both on the banks and at the mouth of that river, a spectacle of fear, and of the omnipotence of the people! Terror, salutary terror, is here in truth the order of the day; it represses all the efforts of the wicked; it divests crime of all covering and tinsel!“

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Fouche’s daily list for Napoleon

history, language & literature, law, politics / /

From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:

Fouché established an organization of policing and intelligence gathering that was decades ahead of its time. Napoleon, frequently on military campaigns, depended on Fouché’s information to maintain control over France and his military effectiveness. Six days a week, every week, Fouché sent secret reports to Napoleon. The information represented an incredible array of topics:

1. Palace gossip.

2. Audience reaction to a new play.

3. Stock market prices.

4. Desertions from the army.

5. Arrests of foreign agents.

6. Results of interrogations.

7. News of crime.

8. Offenses by soldiers.

9. Fires.

10. Rebellion against the Gendarmarie.

11. Intercepted correspondence.

12. Visiting personages.

13. Public reception of news of victories.

14. Shipping news.

15. Indiscretions of Fouché’s enemies.

16. Contractor’s tenders.

17. Agitation against the draft.

18. Suicides.

19. Prison epidemics.

20. Progress of construction.

21. Unemployment figures.

22. Extracts from inter-ministerial correspondence.

23. Persons detained or under special surveillance (Stead, 1983, pp. 41-48).

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Fouche proud of terror

history, language & literature / /

From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:

As chief police officer of the revolutionary government, Fouché was given the power to impose the government’s policies quickly and mercilessly. He demonstrated his willingness to accomplish this feat when, after the population of Lyons revolted against the government, he personally presided over the mass executions in that unhappy city (Forssell, 1970, pp. 71-78).

As the guillotine blade dropped and the massed canon fire dispatched the condemned by the hundreds, Fouché proudly wrote to Paris of his accomplishments, “Terror, salutary terror is now the order of the day (Schom, 1992, p. 112).”

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Fouche praised with parallelism

history, language & literature / /

From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:

Such was Fouché’s accomplishment that Chaumette, a Jacobin extremist in the Assembly, publicly praised his efforts:

Citizen Fouché has worked the miracles of which I have been speaking. Old age has been honored; infirmity has been succored; misfortune has been respected; fanaticism has been destroyed; federalism has been annihilated; the production of iron has been activated; suspects have been arrested; exemplary crimes have been punished; grafters have been prosecuted and imprisoned – there you have a summary of the labors of Fouché as representative of the people (Zweig, p. 41).

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Joseph Fouche the atheist

history / /

From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:

Moreover, Fouché was not content with merely attacking the aristocracy. He orchestrated a campaign of atheistic fervor never before seen in Europe. He abolished clerical celibacy and ordered priests to marry or adopt a child within a month. Churches were pillaged, and priests were forbidden from wearing their robes in public. By his command Christian funeral services were banned and the inscription, “Death is an eternal sleep,” placed over the gates of the cemeteries (Zweig, p. 39).

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India’s transgendered folks

commonplace book, history / /

From Henry Chu’s “Bullied by the Eunuchs” (Los Angeles Times: 7 June 2006):

I was being hit up for a handout by one of this country’s many hijras.

They are eunuchs or otherwise transgendered people by birth, accident or choice. Something between male and female, they are shunned by Indian society as unclean. Many make a rough living through prostitution or by crashing weddings, birthday parties and other festive occasions, threatening to disrupt the celebrations with vulgar behavior and to bring bad luck unless they are paid off. …

India has somewhere between half a million and a million eunuchs. The estimates are very approximate, because the hijras live in a secretive, shadowy world they’ve created for themselves away from the abuse and persecution of general society.

They gather in public in large numbers only at their annual conventions, which always attract media attention for the skillful dancing, the raucous atmosphere and the sight of gaudy clothing draped around burly shoulders and dainty jewels hanging off overly thick wrists.

In antiquity, India’s eunuchs dressed as men, and a few were granted royal jobs — for example, as guardians of harems. But today’s hijras make themselves up as women. In the West, they would probably be identified as something between a cross-dresser and a transsexual; in India, they often describe themselves as a third sex, and refer to themselves as “she.” …

Only a handful of outsiders have managed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the hijra community. The writer William Dalrymple, in his book “City of Djinns,” describes an often well-ordered sisterhood divided geographically into local “parishes” whose members, overseen by den mothers, diligently work their beat. …

The short one continued to appeal to me directly, gazing at me meaningfully and sprinkling her Hindi with unmistakable English phrases like “a thousand rupees” (about $22). At one point she knelt down and touched my feet in a sign of obeisance or importunity. Then, growing frustrated by my stinginess, she drew up the hem of her sari, perhaps to warn me that she was ready to flash her mutilated parts, a common tactic among eunuchs to hurry horrified partygoers into forking over cash to get their uninvited guests to leave.

How the hijras come by their condition varies. Some are born hermaphrodites, considered by many Indians to be a terrible curse. Others feel as though they are feminine souls trapped in masculine bodies and undergo voluntary castration — the luckier, better-off ones through chemicals or by trained surgeons, the poorer ones in dangerous back-alley operations involving little more than booze and a dirty knife. There are also hushed stories of boys being kidnapped and mutilated against their will.

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Why no terrorist attacks since 9/11?

history, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):

… you have to wonder why there have been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. I don’t believe the “flypaper theory” that the terrorists are all in Iraq instead of in the U.S. And despite all the ineffectual security we’ve put in place since 9/11, I’m sure we have had some successes in intelligence and investigation — and have made it harder for terrorists to operate both in the U.S. and abroad.

But mostly, I think terrorist attacks are much harder than most of us think. It’s harder to find willing recruits than we think. It’s harder to coordinate plans. It’s harder to execute those plans. Terrorism is rare, and for all we’ve heard about 9/11 changing the world, it’s still rare.

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Unix specs vs. Windows specs

business, history, tech help, technology / /

From Peter Seebach’s Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone (IBM developerWorks: 8 March 2006):

In the past 20 years, developers for “the same” desktop platform (“whatever Microsoft ships”) have been told that the API to target is (in this order):

* DOS
* Win16
* OS/2
* Win32
* WinNT
* WinXP
* and most recently .NET.

Of course, that list is from last year, and now the “stable” target that you should be developing for, if you have an eye for the future, is Vista.

It hasn’t been quite as bad in the Macintosh world, where the number of major API changes has been limited: classic single-tasking Mac OS, classic multitasking Mac OS (System 7), Carbon (System 8/9 and preview of OS X), and Cocoa (OS X), but even there, the cost of migration has been significant. At least OS X finally offers a stable UNIX API for the back-end part of programs, allowing developers to ignore the API creep except in GUI code.

By contrast, twenty-year-old UNIX utilities still compile and run. A new desktop computing API will come and everyone will have to rewrite for it, but mountains will erode away before read() and write() stop working. This is the reason that all the hassle of formal UNIX standards has had so little effect on practical UNIX software development; the core API is simple, clean, and well-designed, and there is no need to change it significantly.

… UNIX users have been switching hardware platforms since the 1970s; it’s no big deal. …

Just as there are many varieties of UNIX, there are many UNIX standards:

* Probably the oldest standard that people still refer to is AT&T’s 1985 System V Interface Definition (SVID). This standard shows up, for instance, in man pages describing the standards compliance of functions that have been in the C library “forever.”
* Meanwhile, X/Open (now the Open Group) was developing “portability guides” with names like XPG2, XPG3, and so on. XPG1 was actually released in 1995. The XPG guides are largely subsumed into newer specs, but once again, are still referred to sometimes in documentation.
* The IEEE’s POSIX standard showed up in 1990 with updates in 1992 and 1993 and a second edition in 1996. It’s still a viable standard, although it has suffered from poor accessibility. POSIX specs have names like 1003.x; for instance, 1003.1 and 1003.2, which refer to different parts of the standard, or 1003.1-1988 and 1003.1-1990, which refer to two versions of the standard.
* The fairly ominous sounding “Spec 1170” (also known as “UNIX 98” or “Single Unix Specification”) is probably the most complete specification; it is produced by the Open Group, and is effectively a descendant of the XPG series. In practice, this is “the” UNIX standard these days, although it’s a little large; this has had an impact on conformance testing.
* The Linux Standards Base is not strictly a UNIX standard, but it’s a standardization effort relevant to a very large number of developers working with code designed to run “on UNIX.” …

You can look at OS specifications in two very different ways: one is from the point of view of a developer trying to port an application, and the other is from the point of view of the user trying to interact with the system.

UNIX conveniently blurs this distinction. The primary user interface is also one of the primary development environments; therefore, UNIX specifications often cover not only the C language API, but also the shell environment and many of the core utilities shell programmers rely on. …

From the perspective of a developer who’s seen many Unix-like systems, Linux is probably mostly sort of similar to System V. The heavy focus on GNU utilities gives a sort of surreal combination of Berkeley and System V features, but if you have to guess whether Linux does something the Berkeley way or the System V way, go with System V. This is especially true of system startup; nearly all Linux systems use the System V /etc/inittab and /etc/rc.d structure, or something very close to it. …

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The inventor of UNIX on its security … or lack thereof

history, security, technology / /

From Dennis M. Ritchie’s “On the Security of UNIX” (: ):

The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any realistic sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes. (Actually the same statement can be made with respect to most systems.) The area of security in which UNIX is theoretically weakest is in protecting against crashing or at least crippling the operation of the system. The problem here is not mainly in uncritical acceptance of bad parameters to system calls – there may be bugs in this area, but none are known – but rather in lack of checks for excessive consumption of resources. Most notably, there is no limit on the amount of disk storage used, either in total space allocated or in the number of files or directories. Here is a particularly ghastly shell sequence guaranteed to stop the system:

while : ; do
mkdir x
cd x
done

Either a panic will occur because all the i-nodes on the device are used up, or all the disk blocks will be consumed, thus preventing anyone from writing files on the device. …

The picture is considerably brighter in the area of protection of information from unauthorized perusal and destruction. Here the degree of security seems (almost) adequate theoretically, and the problems lie more in the necessity for care in the actual use of the system. …

It must be recognized that the mere notion of a super-user is a theoretical, and usually practical, blemish on any protection scheme. …

On the issue of password security, UNIX is probably better than most systems. Passwords are stored in an encrypted form which, in the absence of serious attention from specialists in the field, appears reasonably secure, provided its limitations are understood. … We have observed that users choose passwords that are easy to guess: they are short, or from a limited alphabet, or in a dictionary. Passwords should be at least six characters long and randomly chosen from an alphabet which includes digits and special characters.

Of course there also exist feasible non-cryptanalytic ways of finding out passwords. For example: write a program which types out login: on the typewriter and copies whatever is typed to a file of your own. Then invoke the command and go away until the victim arrives. …

The fact that users can mount their own disks and tapes as file systems can be another way of gaining super-user status. Once a disk pack is mounted, the system believes what is on it. Thus one can take a blank disk pack, put on it anything desired, and mount it. There are obvious and unfortunate consequences. For example: a mounted disk with garbage on it will crash the system; one of the files on the mounted disk can easily be a password-free version of su; other files can be unprotected entries for special files. The only easy fix for this problem is to forbid the use of mount to unprivileged users. A partial solution, not so restrictive, would be to have the mount command examine the special file for bad data, set-UID programs owned by others, and accessible special files, and balk at unprivileged invokers.

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Weegee at work

history / /

From Holland Cotter’s “‘Unknown Weegee,’ on Photographer Who Made the Night Noir” (The New York Times: 9 June 2006):

A freelancer by temperament, he had long-term gigs with The Daily News, The Daily Mirror and the left-leaning daily PM. His beat was the inner city, and everything was raw material: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. He liked nights because he had the photographic turf to himself but also because the best bad things happen at night, under the cover of darkness. Vandals make their mark; hit men practice their trade; people get crazy.

Like a boy scout, he was always prepared. He prowled the streets in a car equipped with a police radio, a typewriter, developing equipment, a supply of cigars and a change of underwear. He was a one-man photo factory: he drove to a crime site; took pictures; developed the film, using the trunk as a darkroom; and delivered the prints.

He often finished a job before the cops had cleared the scene, in some cases before they even arrived. About certain things he was clairvoyant. (Weegee = Ouija, as in board. Get it?) He caught catastrophes in the making and filmed them unfolding. An opportunist? A sensationalist? A voyeur? You could call him all that. He wouldn’t mind. “Just get the name right. Weegee the Famous.”

He was in the right place at the right time. New York from the Depression through World War II was a rude, crude town. No heat in winter, way too much in the summer. Immigrants poured in; there was barely enough room to hold them. Native-born workers felt the competition for jobs and space, resented it. The melting pot was on a constant boil.

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The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad

business, commonplace book, history, science / /

From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:

From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, even if not always applied in practice; Commodity: That a building must accommodate its program; Firmness: That it must stand up to the natural elements, among them gravity; Delight: that it must be satisfying to the eye, is with the aberrant exception of the tiny, current avant garde, the ideal of architecture. …

Let me propose the urban triad of Function, Disposition and Configuration as categories that would both describe and “test” the urban performance of a building.

Function describes the use to which the building lends itself, towards the ideal of mixed-use. In urbanism the range of function a first cut may include: exclusively residential, primarily residential, primarily commercial or exclusively commercial. The middle two being the best in urban performance although the extremes have justification in the urban to rural transect. An elaboration should probably differentiate the function at the all-important sidewalk level from the function above.

Disposition describes the location of the building on its lot or site. This may range from a building placed across the frontage of its lot, creating a most urban condition to the rural condition of the building freestanding in the center of its site. Perhaps the easiest way to categorize the disposition of the building is by describing it by its yards: The rearyard building has the building along the frontage, the courtyard building internalizes the space and is just as urban, the sideyard building is the zero-lot line or “Charleston single house” and the edgeyard building is a freestanding object closest to the rural edge of the transect.

The third component of the urban triad is Configuration. This describes the massing, height of a building and, for those who believe that harmony is a tool of urbanism, the architectural syntax and constructional tectonic. It can be argued that the surface of a building is a tool of urbanism no less than its form. Silence of expression is required to achieve the “wall” that defines public space, and that reserves the exalted configuration to differentiate the public building. Harmony in the architectural language is the secret of mixed-use. People seem not to mind variation of function as long as the container looks similar. It is certainly a concern of urbanism.

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Library book returned 92 years late

commonplace book, history / /

From AP’s “Borrowed books returned to museum — 92 years later” (CNN: 6 November 2000):

The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — 92 years late.

It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he accepted a job at the Field Museum in 1908. American Museum officials suspect anthropologist Bertholt Laufer was using the books for research when he was hired away. …

Laufer had purchased 500 volumes — including texts on medicine and natural history — for the American Museum during an archaeological expedition to China from 1901 to 1904.

The American Museum didn’t even know 10 of the books — each belonging to a larger set — were missing until it decided in 1990 to computerize its collection.

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Joan Didion on life in Los Angeles

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:

Among the many piercing flashes of insight to be found in [Joan Didion’s] The White Album’s essays, many of which were written between 1968 and 1979 for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, is one overarching fact of L.A. life – that it exists on a very slippery foundation. Here was an arid desert landscape adjacent to the Pacific that received its water over 200 miles away from the Central Valley, that built its houses on an active seismic fault, that was prone to brush fires, flooding and earthquakes. It was a city in denial of its own instability. …

But it was more than just the events of that darkest year of the sixties that gave Didion intimations of impending doom. She understood what so many failed to grasp about Los Angeles, especially all of those outsiders who migrate here seeking eternal good health, good weather and untold riches: That life here tends to be about as stable as mercury on glass, and therefore not prone to snug feelings of security and safety. …

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Vitruvian Triad terminology

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “Good Architecture“:

In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:

‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).

These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 ISBN 0-7506-1283-5

or, in the slightly more familiar but antique: ‘Firmness, Commodity & Delight’

— MartinNoutch

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The origins of 2600

history, law, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):

The event was organized by 2600, a quarterly magazine whose name refers to one of the great discoveries in hacker history: that the plastic whistles given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the early 1970s could be slightly modified to create sound waves of 2600 MHz, a frequency that allowed you to make free calls on the old AT&T phone system.

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