politics

Soviet-style society & the US

politics / /

From Jim Marcinkowski’s “National Security: The Attack on the Constitution“:

Over the past 30 years, I have served this country in a variety of positions from the FBI to the CIA, and as a lawyer and a prosecutor …

We fought the Soviets and I fought the Soviets because they had a fatally flawed, intolerable system of government where (and think about this):

The government was always right and never apologized;

Any dissent was suppressed, ridiculed, banned or worse;

Secret prisons were denied and never acknowledged or spoken about;

The torture of captives (in Lubyanka) was condoned;

State incarceration was not subject to the checks and balances of a legal system;

Economic plans, like for oil, were established/determined in closed sessions between politicos, commissars and production managers, far outside public view, and where government claimed privilege in so doing;

Wages were set at the lowest common denominator, no matter what Bloc country you were in;

Government agents had access to your medical records, your library records, your telephone, and your e-mail.

A place where judicial power and judicial review were proclaimed concepts, but simply ignored in application;

Where criminal records of young adults were closed to all but the military;

Where a Constitution was a mere facade and ignored by state actors.

Any dissent, debate and protest were deemed unpatriotic;

The public media was bought, paid for, and provided by the state;

The military clandestinely and shamelessly influenced the national media and public opinion;

A place where wrong was declared right;

Where tapping a phone was like tapping a pencil;

Where lying was considered a patriotic skill;

The extraction of natural resources was paramount to any concern for the environment and the impact on the health of its people;

Where the use of “state secrets,” (those things embarrassing to the government) were confused with legitimate issues of “national security”;

A place where “secrecy” and “national security” were used to control debate;

Where legitimate secrecy, was subject to political use and abuse;

Where “legislators” were mere mouthpieces for and rubberstamps of whoever was in power;

Where you lived and died with the permission of the government;

A place where foreign policy was more important than domestic concerns;

Where fear was used as a political weapon and an acceptable means of control;

Where the best medical care was reserved for the influential;

Where wealth was concentrated in the top 5%;

A place where there was no middle class – just a small economic and political elite, and the working poor.

… Since 1995 the Republican Party and its friends in the American corporate structures that so vigorously contribute to and support them have – in the space of a decade – created in this country more than the beginnings of a system that this country spent 50 years trying to dismantle.

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Why it’s hard for prisoners to sue prison systems

history, law, politics, security / /

From Daniel Brook’s “The Problem of Prison Rape” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):

When inmates seek civil damages against the prison system, as [Roderick Johnson, a 35-year-old African-American who is suing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice] has done, they must prove not merely that prison officials should have done more to prevent abuse but that they showed “deliberate indifference” – that is, that they had actual knowledge that an inmate was at risk and disregarded it. Showing that a prison guard should have known is not enough, no matter how obvious the signs of abuse.

This standard was established by the Supreme Court in the 1994 case Farmer v. Brennan, in which a transsexual inmate imprisoned for credit card fraud sued federal prison officials for ignoring his rape behind bars. While the court affirmed that prison rape is a violation of an inmate’s constitutional rights and stated plainly that sexual assault is “not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses,” it set up formidable barriers to establishing the culpability of corrections staff. At the cellblock level, the “deliberate indifference” standard discourages prison guards from shining a light into dark corners. What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

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The tyranny of HOAs

business, law, politics / /

From Ross Guberman’s “Home Is Where the Heart Is” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):

ABOUT 50 MILLION AMERICANS BELONG TO HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS, also known as HOAs or common-interest developments, which are composed of single-family homes, condominiums, or co-ops. Four out of five new homes, ranging from starter homes to high-rise apartments to gated mansions, are in one of the nation’s 250,000 HOAs. However they look or whomever they cater to, HOAs impose the same obligations: If you want to buy a property in an HOA development, you must join the HOA, allow a board you help elect to manage shared grounds and other public spaces, pay regular dues and any “special assessments” for upkeep or other costs, and obey a host of quality-of-life rules, even if they’re added after you move in.

In return, the HOA keeps the welcome sign painted, the sidewalk cracks filled, and the flower beds fresh. It may also provide streets, parks, playgrounds, security, snow removal, and utilities that were once the province of local government. But the HOA does more than beautify the neighborhood and preserve property values. It is often the sole driving force behind the Halloween parades and holiday parties that are increasingly rare in an age of bowling alone.

Although structured as nonprofit corporations, HOAs operate as private governments. An HOA can impose fines on those who flout its quality-of-life policies, just as a municipality can penalize those who violate its zoning, antismoking, or noise-control laws. An HOA also levies dues and assessments that are as obligatory as taxes and sometimes less predictable. In exerting these quasi-political powers, HOAs represent one of the most significant privatizations of local government functions in history. …

About half the states allow “non-judicial foreclosures” if owners lapse on their dues. Typically, the HOA’s collection attorney places a lien on the property and announces its new legal status in a local newspaper. The home is then auctioned. Homeowners get none of the due-process protections they could use to ward off other creditors—no right to a hearing and no right to confront their HOA board.

Even in states that require court approval for an HOA foreclosure, the HOA nearly always wins. Under current law, any unpaid dues, no matter how small, can be grounds for foreclosure, particularly once the amount of the delinquency is swelled with interest and fines.

… According to a 2001 study of foreclosures in California by Sentinel Fair Housing, a homeowner advocacy group, when HOAs foreclose, the typical homeowner is $2,557 in arrears. When banks or municipal governments foreclose, by contrast, the typical homeowner owes $190,000 in delinquent payments or back taxes.

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Modern mercenaries

business, history, law, politics, security / /

From Rebecca Ulam Weiner’s “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2006):

YOU WON’T FIND THE WORD “MERCENARY” on the homepage of the International Peace Operations Association, the trade group for the private military industry. While many of the IPOA’s member companies are staffed by elite former soldiers of the United States military who now make a living hiring themselves out, the so-called “M word” isn’t in the IPOA’s corporate vocabulary. Members are known as private military companies (often called PMCs) or military service providers, who specialize in “private peace operations.” …

In recent years, private contractors have increasingly taken on important military functions, operating in some 50 countries and earning an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue. They provide security to civilian aid workers, other contractors, and even military forces. They train local armies for combat, develop future American soldiers (the firm MPRI helps run ROTC), and interrogate prisoners. At times, they’ve engaged in combat. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. has relied heavily on their support – private contractors make up a workforce of about 20,000, double the British troop presence. …

During the Iraq war, contractors have run the computers that control Predator drones, operated guided missile systems on naval ships, and maintained aerial surveillance and communications systems. In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the ratio of soldiers to contractors was 50 to 1. In the current Iraqi conflict, it is 10 to 1 and falling.

This proliferation has worried many – in the academy, Congress, the media, and, increasingly, the military – because contractors operate outside the military chain of command and most legal jurisdictions. PMCs have no clear place under the framework of the Geneva Conventions – they aren’t noncombatants, because they carry weapons, but they aren’t lawful combatants, because they don’t wear uniforms. Nor do they fit the anachronistic definitions of mercenaries found in international treaties and resolutions, because those definitions generally require engagement in direct combat.

Soldiers are subject to rules of engagement and can be court-martialed for breaking the law. Contractors are governed most directly by the terms of their contracts – their extraterritorial activities and corporate status make them virtually immune from federal law. …

Worse, critics argue, because the military has no direct control over its contractors, it won’t accept responsibility for their actions. And PMCs allow the Pentagon to evade accountability to Congress, because they circumvent caps on the number of troops approved for deployment and their casualties aren’t counted.

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James Jesse Strang, Mormon King of Michigan

history, politics, religion / /

From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):

One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church to Strang – a new friend, a Mormon of just five months, and, of all things, a lawyer. “If evil befall me,” Smith wrote to Strang in the letter, “thou shalt lead the flock to pleasant pastures.”

Strang’s rivals, among them Brigham Young, dismissed the missive as a forgery and Strang as an unworthy successor to Smith. Yet a couple of hundred church members – Joseph Smith’s widow, mother, brother, and sisters among them – believed the letter was authentic and that it granted church leadership to Strang. A disgusted Brigham Young took his followers west to Utah and built what is now the fastest growing religion in the United States. Strang took his followers to a remote island in Lake Michigan and declared the place his sovereign kingdom.

Hold up the palm of your right hand and you’re looking at a map of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Thirty miles off the coast of your ring finger sits Beaver Island, a 55-square-mile island on the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Only one building survives from Strang’s sojourn, a museum in which Strang artifacts fill one room. …

An old metal press, long since disappeared, once filled the building’s big front room. Strang used the press to spit out the Northern Islander, the region’s first newspaper, and to print his magnum opus, The Book of the Law of the Lord. The long-winded tome of decrees includes what Strang described as the lost transcription of the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. …

He settled, for the time being, on being a lawyer. “I should rather be the best hunter in an Indian tribe than a commonplace member of the New York bar,” he wrote. But a decade of legal practice yielded little more than common accomplishments, and little more power than that which was afforded him in his capacity as the postmaster of Chautauqua County. …

Strang met the church’s leader after making the acquaintance of Smith’s brother Aaron, who lived near Strang in Wisconsin. Initially, he wasn’t impressed with Joseph Smith, describing him in his diary as a man of “meager education.” Smith, however, seems to have been smitten with Strang’s intelligence. Within weeks of meeting Strang, Smith baptized him, and just weeks after that, he named him a church elder.

Strang, who as a teen was tossed out of the local Baptist church for questioning its precepts, had called himself the “perfect atheist” before moving West, but once on the frontier he realized he might command from the pulpit the power that had eluded him. Strang didn’t bother to familiarize himself with Mormon doctrine until long after he was a church leader. …

In June of 1844, an anti-Mormon crowd killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith. At the instant Smith met his demise, Strang claimed that he received a visit from an angel who anointed his head with oil and declared him the leader of the Mormons. A few days later, a letter to the same effect, purportedly mailed by Joseph Smith before his death, arrived in Strang’s hand. His years as a postmaster, perhaps, had not been wasted. …

Strang and his followers arrived on Beaver Island in the spring of 1847 and spent three difficult summers recruiting followers before he was convinced he had enough subjects to make a respectable kingdom. In 1850, with 200 followers on hand in an unfinished log tabernacle, Strang enlisted a traveling Shakespearean actor named George Adams to muster all the pomp and circumstance he could. Strang appeared before an audience of several hundred on a moss-stuffed seat, wearing a giant red flannel robe trimmed in white. Adams came before the crowd and placed a makeshift crown on Strang’s head, anointing him King James the First. Taking hold of a two-foot wooden pole, Strang returned the favor and named Adams his prime minister.

IN THE SPRING OF 1851, NOT YET A YEAR after Strang had taken royal possession of Beaver Island, the sound of waves helped cover the midnight approach of a rowboat full of troops and U.S. Marshals. Carrying government-issue revolvers, the men slipped toward the glow of an oil lamp in a square log house. Expecting a fight, they instead found the small village of St. James asleep. Marines lay on the deck of the iron-hulled Michigan, armed and ready to charge the beach. But no shots were fired. Within an hour of coming ashore, the landing party had matter-of-factly taken the king into custody. …

President Millard Fillmore, who had entered office the day after Strang’s coronation, reportedly received news of the frontier king from his brother, Charles Fillmore, who lived in Detroit. He soon began hearing about the king from prominent members of his party as well, who pressured the president to take action. Among them was Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Senate rival, Stephan Douglas, who was wary of giving the South a secession movement to point to in the North. Fillmore instructed his attorney general and the secretary of the Navy to arrest the king. …

Judge Ross Wilkins told the prosecution that because the king and his followers hadn’t engaged in war against the United States or aided enemies of the nation in doing so, the king couldn’t be convicted of treason. That left the federal government with charges against Strang of trespassing on federal land, counterfeiting coins, and obstructing the mail. …

The next morning they delivered a verdict of not guilty. …

STRANG RETURNED FROM DETROIT AND DECLARED HIS TRIAL VICTORY a mandate for his absolute rule. He modernized the kingdom with roads (the King’s Highway, recently resurfaced, is still traveled), managed a lumber export business and a booming fishing trade, and enacted progressive conservation laws (“Ye shall preserve the trees by the wayside. And if there be none, ye shall plant them”). He even appointed garbagemen to keep the kingdom clean.

A year after his win in court, Strang won election to the Michigan Legislature, representing the island and a huge swath of the northern woods, and he commuted to the mainland to serve a pair of two-year terms. He deigned to recognize Michigan’s government, he said, because he saw that as engaging in international relations with a neighboring country. …

After his court victory, Strang’s absolute power began to corrupt him, if not quite absolutely, then bizarrely. He had a fixation with fashion that led him to decree that, for reasons of health, women should wear only loose fitting, knee-length bloomers as opposed to anything that “pinches or compresses the body or limbs.” The king’s stance, and the resulting uproar, unraveled the kingdom. When a collection of outspoken wives refused to don their new pants, Strang had their husbands flogged with a willow whip for “endeavoring to incite mischief and crime.” He reprimanded his subjects in print as well. “We laugh in bitter scorn at all these threats,” he wrote, using the royal we, in what proved to be one of the final issues of the Northern Islander.

Less than two weeks later, a mob of angered husbands, still smarting from their willow lashings, ambushed the king. Strang was pistol-whipped and then felled by an assassin’s bullet. … When Strang fell, pillaging mainlanders flooded the island to drive the Mormons away. The kingdom was scattered and soon forgotten to all but a handful of us Michiganders.

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Posse Comitatus Act

history, law / /

From Geoffrey Klingsporn’s “The Secret Posse” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2005):

What do these scenarios have in common? Under current military policy, both fall under the heading of “Information Operations,” officially defined as “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.” …

The law that, in effect, prevents the Army from acting as a national police force is the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 statute that prohibits law enforcement officers from using military personnel as a posse comitatus—Latin for “power of the county” or, in the vernacular of the Old West, a “posse”—to enforce domestic law, except with the express authorization of the president or Congress. …

“The use of military forces to seize civilians,” wrote the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, “can expose civilian government to the threat of military rule and the suspension of constitutional liberties,” and can chill free speech and other fundamental rights, creating the atmosphere of an enemy occupation. …

Since the 1980s, though, the statute has been weakened by laws that allow the military to help address the problems of drug trafficking, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks. It is now routine for soldiers and sailors to help state and local police with training, equipment, and logistics; to detect and monitor suspected smugglers; and to keep order in disaster areas. … But the courts generally have ruled that it is well within the discretion of the president and Congress to allow the military to help in nonmilitary situations, including cases of terrorism. In 1988, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Posse Comitatus Act was not violated when the FBI used the Navy to help capture a suspected terrorist in international waters and transport him to the United States.

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The TSA acts outside the Constitution

law, politics / /

From Ars Technica’s “Terrorist watch list follies, and my time in the TSA’s Constitution-free zone“:

So what are your rights if your name is unjustly on the watch-list, and you’d like to be able to move about the country without being singled out by airport screeners and possibly even traffic cops for extra attention? The answer is, unfortunately, that some of your basic Constitutional rights are effectively non-existent if you happen to get caught somewhere in America’s growing terrorist dragnet.

As of right now, there aren’t many rules to which you can appeal for redress—no laws aimed at protecting the accused, no binding judicial decisions, and few formal departmental protocols for addressing grievances. The kinds of rules and precedents that govern most of the other citizen-facing aspects of the federal bureaucracy just aren’t there when it comes to anything terrorism and/or TSA-related. …

To sum up, if you run afoul of the nation’s “national security” apparatus, you’re completely on your own. There are no firm rules, no case law, no real appeals processes, no normal array of Constitutional rights, no lawyers to help, and generally none of the other things that we as American citizens expect to be able to fall back on when we’ve been (justly or unjustly) identified by the government as wrong-doers.

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Open source breathalyzers

history, politics, security / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “DUI Cases Thrown Out Due to Closed-Source Breathalyzer“:

According to the article: “Hundreds of cases involving breath-alcohol tests have been thrown out by Seminole County judges in the past five months because the test’s manufacturer will not disclose how the machines work.”

This is the right decision. Throughout history, the government has had to make the choice: prosecute, or keep your investigative methods secret. They couldn’t have both. If they wanted to keep their methods secret, they had to give up on prosecution.

People have the right to confront their accuser. People have a right to examine the evidence against them, and to contest the validity of that evidence.

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Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds

commonplace book, politics, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:

… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …

Banishment is the absolute worst punishment any multi-player online role-playing game can impose on a player. Which is to say that a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account and stop logging in; the rest of the deterrent value of the punishment evaporates. It’s hard to hold characters accountable.

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The American Revolution: led by elites, sold to the masses

history, politics / /

From James Grimmelmann’s “On the Second Life Tax Revolt“:

The Boston Tea Party was the expression of mercantile anger at taxes: the protesters wanted was a revision of British tax policies to favor colonial merchants at the expense of merchants in England. Economically speaking, the entire American Revolution was a scheme to improve the fortunes of colonial elites. But to convince their future countrymen to go along with their tax revolt, they developed one of the most inspiring ideologies of liberty and justice the world has ever seen. ‘No taxation without representation’ is a slogan that transforms ‘mere’ economics into egalitarianism. There are plenty of thinkers who will tell you societies as a whole can often reap enormous benefits by letting one particular group get rich; these benefits are hardly confined to material wealth.

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A game completely controlled by the players

commonplace book, education, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Ron Dulin’s “A Tale in the Desert“:

A Tale in the Desert is set in ancient Egypt. Very ancient Egypt: The only society to be found is that which has been created by the existing players. Your mentor will show you how to gather materials and show you the basics of learning and construction. These are the primary goals in the game–you learn from academies and universities, and then you use what you’ve learned to build things, such as structures and tools. As your character learns new skills, you can advance. …

Higher-level tests are much more complex and require you to enlist lower-level characters to help you complete them. Players are directly involved in almost all aspects of the game, from the introduction of new technologies to the game’s rules to the landscape itself. With a few exceptions, almost every structure you see in the game was built by a player or group of players. New technologies are introduced through research at universities, which is aided by players’ donations to these institutions. Most interestingly, though, the game rules themselves can be changed through the legal system. If you don’t like a certain aspect of the game, within reason, you can introduce a petition to have it changed. If you get enough signatures on your petition, it will be subject to a general vote. If it passes, it becomes a new law. This system is also used for permanently banning players who have, for some reason or another, made other players’ in-game lives difficult. …

The designers themselves have stated that A Tale in the Desert is about creating a society, and watching the experiment in action is almost as enjoyable as taking part.

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10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful

business, history, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Dan Gillmor’s “10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success“:

1) Make it all work on top of existing networks.

2) Use packets, not circuits.

3) Create a ‘routing’ function.

4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) …

5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T.

6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET … The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking.

7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols.

8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI.

9) The NSF creates an “Acceptable Use Policy” restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities.

10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way.

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Railroads & tolls

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

Railroads were the dominant industry of the 19th century. … Early railroad charters, in both England and the U.S., were modeled after canal and turnpike charters, and almost uniformly envisaged that railroad companies would not be carriers themselves. Instead, they were expected to offer their facilities for use by carriers that would carry goods and passengers in their own wagons over the rails. Still, these charters specified tolls that varied greatly depending on the nature of the cargo. … For example, the very first parliamentary act for a railway was enacted in 1801. (Previous railways had been on private property, but in this case, as in subsequent ones, promoters were asking for the right of eminent domain to acquire the necessary land.) Between the endpoints of the railway, “chalk, lime and other manures were charged at the rate of three-pence per ton per mile; coals, corn, potatoes, iron and other metals, fourpence; and all goods not specified, sixpence” (p. 45 of [13]). …

Although some railroads did operate with other companies’ equipment on their rails for decades (and modern ones do so extensively), there was a relatively quick shift in the 1830s and 1840s towards railroads being exclusive carriers. There were technical reasons promot- ing such a shift (safety was jeopardized with multiple operators and primitive technology), but there is evidence that desire for greater control over pricing by railroads was also a major consideration [64]. Once railroads became carriers, they could engage in much more extensive price discrimination than allowed by the toll structure in their charters. And, propelled by the economics of their industry, with high fixed costs, railroads did engage in massive price discrimination, including personal discrimination. The result was massive political movements leading to government regulation [62,65].

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Arguments against the Web’s ungovernability

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Taming the Web“:

Nonetheless, the claim that the Internet is ungovernable by its nature is more of a hope than a fact. It rests on three widely accepted beliefs, each of which has become dogma to webheads. First, the Net is said to be too international to oversee: there will always be some place where people can set up a server and distribute whatever they want. Second, the Net is too interconnected to fence in: if a single person has something, he or she can instantly make it available to millions of others. Third, the Net is too full of hackers: any effort at control will invariably be circumvented by the world’s army of amateur tinkerers, who will then spread the workaround everywhere.

Unfortunately, current evidence suggests that two of the three arguments for the Net’s uncontrollability are simply wrong; the third, though likely to be correct, is likely to be irrelevant. In consequence, the world may well be on the path to a more orderly electronic future-one in which the Internet can and will be controlled. If so, the important question is not whether the Net can be regulated and monitored, but how and by whom. …

As Swaptor shows, the Net can be accessed from anywhere in theory, but as a practical matter, most out-of-the-way places don’t have the requisite equipment. And even if people do actually locate their services in a remote land, they can be easily discovered. …

Rather than being composed of an uncontrollable, shapeless mass of individual rebels, Gnutella-type networks have identifiable, centralized targets that can easily be challenged, shut down or sued. Obvious targets are the large backbone machines, which, according to peer-to-peer developers, can be identified by sending out multiple searches and requests. By tracking the answers and the number of hops they take between computers, it is possible not only to identify the Internet addresses of important sites but also to pinpoint their locations within the network.

Once central machines have been identified, companies and governments have a potent legal weapon against them: their Internet service providers. …

In other words, those who claim that the Net cannot be controlled because the world’s hackers will inevitably break any protection scheme are not taking into account that the Internet runs on hardware – and that this hardware is, in large part, the product of marketing decisions, not technological givens.

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The growth in data & the problem of storage

politics, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “The Fading Memory of the State“:

Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, but that figure will likely double to 22 percent in 2007, according to International Technology Group of Los Altos, CA.

… the Pentagon generates tens of millions of images from personnel files each year; the Clinton White House generated 38 million e-mail messages (and the current Bush White House is expected to generate triple that number); and the 2000 census returns were converted into more than 600 million TIFF-format image files, some 40 terabytes of data. A single patent application can contain a million pages, plus complex files like 3-D models of proteins or CAD drawings of aircraft parts. All told, NARA expects to receive 347 petabytes … of electronic records by 2022.

Currently, the Archives holds only a trivial number of electronic records. Stored on steel racks in NARA’s [National Archives and Records Administration] 11-year-old facility in College Park, the digital collection adds up to just five terabytes. Most of it consists of magnetic tapes of varying ages, many of them holding a mere 200 megabytes apiece–about the size of 10 high-resolution digital photographs.

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How he liked being tarred & feathered

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (166):

Asked how he enjoyed his office [of President], [Lincoln] told of a tarred and feathered man out West, who, as he was being ridden out of town on a rail, heard one among the crowd call to him, asking how he liked it, high up there on his uncomfortable perch. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” the man replied, “I’d sooner walk.”

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Too much tail to that kite

history, politics / /

From Addison Hart’s “General Fremont Has Chicken Guts!: Why John Charles Fremont Got Kicked Out Of Missouri“:

… [John Charles] Fremont did little else in his first few months in command in Missouri … He did, however, manage to get some criticisms over his choices for staff positions. Unlike many generals, Fremont wanted to be allowed to pick and choose each member of his staff and his bodyguard, and he did in fact do so. One priority, it seems, was that a candidate had to have a funny name, or at least a European one. In fact, the majority of Fremont’s staff members seem to have been Europeans, primarily Germans and Hungarians. A large amount of them seem to have been extra-legally commissioned and most had no idea of how the war in the West was to be fought. Those who knew military tactics advocated using the outdated tactics of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, as well as the Baron Jomini and that lot. A lot of them were as inefficient as possible, some were even minor nobility, and many were corrupt, mixed in with anti-Lincoln groups, Know-Nothings, and the like. …

The fact that the list of the staff members (about three hundred men in his personal bodyguard alone and a good thirty members, all over five foot eleven inches in height, made up his staff) is practically endless also bothered some individuals, especially when scrolling down the list one reads many times over French or Italian names, or running over several individuals with the surnames of ‘Kalmanuezze’ or ‘Zagonyi’. A lot of these fellows spoke English very badly at best, which only deepened the stupidity of the situation. When Fremont’s opponent in the field (not that Fremont ever bothered to fight him), General Albert Sidney Johnston, [Confederate States of America], was shown a copy of the staff list at his headquarters in Nashville, he simply commented with one of his deep chuckles “There’s too much tail to that kite!” Even the locals could feel their stomachs turn when they saw Fremont’s bodyguards and staff officers walking the streets, many wreaking of perfume, and wearing ridiculous (overly grandiose) uniforms with plumes and braids. Such men were the reason that the locals gave the men of Fremont’s staff (and the General himself) the somewhat embarrassing title ‘Chicken Guts’.

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Lincoln’s 1st political speech

history, politics / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (23):

[Lincoln’s] first speech was made at a country auction. Twenty-three years old, he stood on a box, wearing a frayed straw hat, a calico shirt, and pantaloons held up by a single-strap suspender. As he was about to speak, a fight broke out in the crowd. Lincoln stepped down, broke up the fight, then stepped back onto the box.

“Gentlemen and fellow citizens,” he said, “I presume you all know who I am: I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal-improvements system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.”

Election day he ran eighth in a field of thirteen …

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The great divider

commonplace book, religion / /

From Richard Dawkins’ “Time to Stand Up“:

It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say “Enough!” Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. …

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all. …

Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

… Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God’s goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?

The great divider Read More »