PopTech 2004
On a less incendiary note, if you really want to hear what smart people are thinking about the present and the future, check out these podcasts from the PopTech 2004 conference on IT Conversations. Strongly recommended:

• Adrian Woolridge on why connected politics is not necessarily left-wing politics


• Richard Florida on the rise of the creative class


• Thomas Barnett on the Pentagon's new map


• Joel Garreau on fundamental changes in human nature

Very cool stuff. They're all good, but Garreau's telling of how DARPA has created telekinetic monkeys will blow your mind.

Night of the (Shrill) Generals
I missed this last week on the Shrillblog. Read the whole thing; it's a shocking indictment of the Bush Administration's military strategy by 7 of our most eminent retired military leaders. Here's one quote, from Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy (Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000), that really jumped out at me:

Rumsfeld proudly announced that he had told General Franks to fight this war with different tactics in which they would bypass enemy strongholds and enemy resistance and keep on moving. But it was shocking to me that the secretary of defense would tell the Army how to fight. He doesn't know how to fight; he has no business telling them...As he [Rumsfeld] was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know.

Unbelievable. It's like LBJ picking bombing targets in Vietnam. It's like Churchill telling his commanders (pre-Montgomery) how to fight Rommel. It's like Hitler moving little flags around the map as the Red Army rolled from the Volga to the Vistula. In short, it's like every other damn-fool politician telling their generals how to fight throughout history; a recipe for failure, even disaster. Rumsfeld's incompetence, fortunately, had no effect on their ability to do the job they were trained and equipped for - defeating the Iraqi military. But it then doomed them to a job they're neither trained for nor equipped to do well.

Brad DeLong puts it best:

They are the finest and best-equipped battlefield soldiers in the history of the world. THEY ARE NOT ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE! THEY SHOULD NOT BE USED AS IF THEY WERE ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE!!

A Little Perspective
This thoughtful article in today's San Jose Mercury News caught my attention:

Let me say at the outset that if you're one of those people ready to scream because American sensibilities seem to be swinging hard to the religious right, your target is not evangelical Christianity, it's evangelical politics. The problem with missing the distinction: If the left keeps attacking and marginalizing the religion, it will only make things worse.

Many overlooked the political power of conservative evangelical churches largely because they could not imagine so many people could have such a different worldview. That kept them from understanding how the culture of evangelical churches -- set up, after all, to convert people -- can be an ideal political mobilizing machine. There's a regular time and place to meet, a sense of mission, small communities accustomed to teamwork, and leaders who are often strong communicators.

Karl Rove got it. He incorporated the agenda laid out by conservative evangelical leaders, and those leaders in turn encouraged their network to support Republican causes and candidates. Other political groups seem to have given up on evangelicals altogether, and some critics have resorted to ridicule, which has worsened feelings of alienation among evangelicals.

I wrote about moral fashion a few days ago, and I still think it's a relevant point. But that is clearly only one side of the story. The majority of evangelicals across this country aren't marching in lockstep behind Rove, Dobson, and Bob Jones. They're mostly ordinary, middle-class folks with the same problems and concerns as most other ordinary, middle-class folks. They also happen to believe that the tenets of their faith are necessary not only just to cope with those problems and concerns but are necessary to solve them as well. That doesn't necessarily mean that they all want to erase the separation between church and state, or overturn Roe v. Wade, or ban gay marriage. They're not stupid, they're not ignorant, they're not ill-informed, and they're not racist bigots. And they don't like being labeled as being any of those things any more than moderate democrats and progressives like being labeled as radical, unpatriotic, immoral, and elitist.

All that alienating them accomplishes is to drive them further into arms of the far right. But because they're not stupid, and they're not fanatics, and they're not ignorant or ill-informed, chances are good they'll realize that the economy is continuing to falter, that the war in Iraq is continuing to not go well, that the costs of medical care and education are continuing to rise, and that in general things aren't improving for them despite the pandering of the administration and the far right.

And when they do, will democrats and progressives treat both their values and concerns with respect, find common ground with them, and start working together on a shared agenda? Or will they continue to dismiss their values and ignore their concerns? Because, if it's the latter, the Democratic party will continue to lose elections just like they lost this last one.

Yet Another Map
This one really illustrates the urban-rural split. Of America's major cities, only Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Denver went red; 32 of the top 50 (by my unofficial count) were blue. (A Tip o'the Hat to Social Tonic).

The Lighter Side of the Insurgency
Juan Cole, after discussing incidents all over Iraq yesterday:

On a lighter note, it is hard to avoid observing that al-Baghdadi castigated Bush's administration as "fundamentalist" and "right-wing." When even the Sunni Salafis of Mosul consider you too fundamentalist and right-wing, you have probably gone too far.

Sore Winners: The Winner
This loathsome, bile-spewing rant takes first prize. Money quote, as the avatars of the hate brigade like to say:

If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.

That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women.

Memo to the rest of us: It's ok - in fact it's a sign of a thinking adult - to loathe both Ann Coulter and Barbara Streisand, to dismiss both the Swift Boat liars and Michael Moore, to reject both Fox News and IndyMedia, and, especially, to condemn bigoted cretins like this creep.

Sore Winners, A Continuing Series...
Here's a two-for-one special. Courtesy of Matt Welch, who's convinced me to wear my coastal elitistism as a badge of honor.

The State of the Onion
The Onion tells it like it is. Again.

A Contrarian Viewpoint
Paul Graham has a very different take on what decided this election.

Maps
Electoral maps are all the rage these days. But the very best one (aesthetically speaking) can be found at one of truth and beauty's favorite rest stops, the always compelling 101-365.

Moral Fashion
The right-wing meme o'the week last week, coming from everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Instapundit, was that this election was not about gay-bashing. It was about morals and values, and the American people picked the candidate who embodies those morals and values - one of which just happens to be that gay marriage is a threat to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family.

And the right's spin does indeed contain a grain of truth. A key differentiator in this election was the acceptance or rejection of a certain set of values. The exemplars of those values are right-wing Christian extremists, who've won a propaganda war that asserts that their values are morally superior and everyone else's are morally inferior. And propaganda is exactly the right word; the assertion of moral superiority has been sold, using all the techniques of large-scale public relations and advertising. And it has found a very receptive audience in a group of people looking for certitude in an era they find increasingly incomprehensible.

Paul Graham, in an essay entitled What You Can't Say, writes:

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary [as consumer fashions] and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions gets you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

Neither Graham nor I am suggesting that imprisonment or death is the consequence of the latest moral fashions. What this is really about is a struggle for power, as was the English Reformation or the Thirty Years War or our new, modern-day Islamic Reformation. Dressing it up as a struggle between God-fearing Christians and atheistic, homosexual-loving, liberal moral relativists is a more than convenient rationalization tailor-made for a segment of the elite that seeks to gain unencumbered political control.

I'm not trying to trivialize anyone's faith. I've a deep respect for the truly devout, who actually try to live their lives according to Christ's/Yahweh's/Mohammed's/Buddha's teachings. But, like Ken Layne, I've seen and known too many people whose trumpeting of their faith was a cover for the hypocrisy of their daily lives.

The cure for fashions that lack real aesthetic or moral values is to repudiate them. Hold them up to the light of day, examine them, criticize them, and (especially) mock them. If there is anything good and true hidden inside the ephermal mores of the moment, it will emerge all the stronger for the being challenged. And what is dishonest and false will be consigned to history's dustbin.

Sore Winners, cont.
Matt Welch, on the healing voices of the right.

Electronic Voting Glitches
A few isolated incidents? Or the beginning of a steady stream of reports? Note that in the third link, it's a county that heavily favored John Kerry. Not counting votes accurately is not counting votes accurately, regardless of who it helps.

There's no evidence of any kind of widespread fraud in the election and therefore no reason to give any credence to loony conspiracy theories. But we still have electronic voting machines that are insecure, unreliable, and wide open to fraud. And we have a number of non-technical problems that we're still failing to address - registration, polling place lines, and ballot design.

This article says it best:

What worries voting reformers more is that Congress, the White House and the states will see the lack of a 2004 election meltdown as vindication of America's voting system and neglect the tools of democracy another four years.

"There's a huge danger," said Ted Selker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

"If you're an election official, it's going to be very hard to go to Congress and say we need more money," said Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearing house for voting reform information. "What they could say is we need to finish the job we started."

Now that election-year pressure is off, will a sharply divided nation forget about shoring up voting systems poorly suited for sharp divisions?

Voting reformists are crossing their fingers and hoping not.

"Is the testing of voting machines satisfactory?" asked Selker. "No. Are the design standards appropriate? No. Are they all improving? Yes. But do we have good mechanisms for improving them? No."

Beyond those issues, the Elections Assistance Commission needs to find the best way to count provisional ballots, develop reliable registration databases and verify electronic votes.

Not Red, Not Blue. Purple

This is fantastic. Edward Tufte would be proud.

What To Expect

There will be a smokescreen of uniter-not-divider rhetoric for a short time, but I think it will quickly be replaced by a mean-spirited triumphalism. One of the first manifestations will be an all-out attack on the mainstream media. Here's a clue - keep in mind that these guys are sore winners, too.

Now, the mainstream media deserves plenty of criticism for its faux-objectivity, laziness, and status quo elitism. But that's not what will be under attack. Instead, the objective is to neutralize any journalist and any story that departs from the well-established story lines of the Republican mainstream. If they can't be coerced into being Fox-lite, then they'll be battered into submission.

Jay Rosen has a fascinating, and more optimistic, take on this. And I think he's right. There's still 49% of us who want to hear the other side of the story. That means there's a real opportunity for anyone who can speak truth to power and do it well.

This Election, a Coda

Damn. Damn. Damn.

A few observations:

• Gay-bashing and fear-mongering is a winning electoral strategy


• Placing your hopes in voters aged 18-29 is a losing electoral strategy


• This election was a referendum on the Bush administration, and they won.


• 51% is sufficient to declare a mandate, especially if you cement your control of Congress.


• Karl Rove, not GWB or Dick Cheney, is now the most powerful man in America. This is his victory.

The last point, I think, deserves a little more explanation. I think it's safe to say that a lot of Republicans were worried they would lose this election. Lots of folks on the other side, like me, believed that they would. What seems to have put the GOP over the top was the, ahem, values thing. And as far as I know, that was Rove's strategy. So I think everyone who got elected, from Bush down, is feeling both grateful and indebted to Rove.

Four more years, indeed. Welcome to the new intolerance.

The Worst Possible Outcome...

The idea that North American society can exacerbate its drive to economic bimodality without serious fissuring, up to and including a constitutional crisis in the U.S., is not likely...

W.R. Clements, Quantum Jump, 1998

The VoteMaster Revealed
It turns out the guy behind www.electoral-vote.com is Andrew Tanenbaum, who geeks like me know as the author of the Minix operating system (a precursor of Linux). He's currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (he's American, his wife is Dutch).

There seems to be a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the Netherlands these days.

Keith Olbermann
I really like that Keith Olbermann now has his own blog and I certainly hope his intuitions in this post turn out to be correct tomorrow.

But doesn't his logo image remind you a little of Thomas Dolby in the Hyperactive video?

Osama's October Surprise
The Medium Lobster says it best:

...only George W. Bush has the pure, hard determination to stand up to terror. And only George W. Bush has the unswerving, unfailing incompetence to allow terror to spread so he can continue to stand up to it.

Listen to the words of the mass murderer, and re-elect the man who let him go. It's your duty.

This Election
I'm ashamed to admit that I was one of those people who, in 2000, said "Bush, Gore - what's the difference?". If I'd lived in a swing state I might have voted for Gore, but since I don't I voted for Nader; not because I really liked him, but more as a protest/attempt to help create a viable third party.

I found the 2000 election brouhaha amusing and appalling in equal parts, right up to the point when the Supreme Court destroyed its integrity by effectively awarding the election to Bush. What I heard about the nomination of someone named John Ashcroft to be Attorney General disturbed me a little, as did what appeared to be a senseless and counterproductive tax cut. But on the whole, I didn't pay too much attention and didn't think Bush 43 would be any worse than, say, Bush 41.

People like me - or like I was, at least - are dangerous to democracy in times like these. All it takes to ensure the triumph of evil, as Edmund Burke once said, is for men of good will to do nothing. And not paying attention is the surest guarantee of inaction.

Until recently I believed that the three strikes of the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the economic malaise of the mid-to-late 70's ("stagflation", as we called it back then) would be the lowest point that I would see my country sink to in my lifetime. I no longer believe that. And I believe that the reelection of George Bush would guarantee that things will continue to go downhill.

Is this shrill? Well, you could say that I have slowly and steadily become radicalized. I still hold essentially the same beliefs I've always held; in fact, I've become a little bit more conservative. But I now also believe that the principles this country were founded on - in fact, the Constitution itself - are in grave danger of being swept aside.

My wakeup call was not 9-11. I was as shocked and stunned as anyone, but I'd read books like Alvin Toffler's Powershift and knew who Osama Bin Laden was, so I had suspected that someday terrorists would stage a successful attack somewhere on American soil. I wasn't prepared for the reality of what actually happened, but neither was anyone else.

The buildup to the invasion of Iraq woke me up. I told a co-worker on 9/11 that we'd find ourselves in a war to destroy terrorism, and that it would be comparable in duration to the Cold War. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and thought the use of the Northern Alliance as the primary fighting force supported by US airpower and Special Forces was an effective way to fight this kind of war - although I couldn't understand why the 82nd and 101st Airborne hadn't been dropped in Eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border in order to cut off the Taliban/Al Qaeda retreat.

I soon figured it out, once the Bush administration started talking about invading Iraq. In retrospect, the passage of the Patriot Act should have been my real wakeup call. Once the drumbeats sounded about invading Iraq, though, I finally started to comprehend what Paul Krugman and others had seen as far back as the run-up to the 2000 election.

What we've witnessed in the past 4 years - if we've paid serious attention - is an attempt by a powerful and ruthless faction of the Republican party to establish what amounts to an oligarchy. The Founders crafted a system of government, with the Constitution as its main instrument, that was designed expressly to prevent this. The purpose of all of those checks and balances is to prevent any group or faction from wielding too much power.

Any group that seeks to guarantee an unencumbered ability to rule this country must, by definition, undercut the Constitution.And so it is with this administration. The Patriot Act is only the first wave of the assault on the Bill of Rights. The creation of a security state that is constantly on alert and at war is another means to upset the balance between the branches of government.So is the promotion and sanctification of an authoritarian strain of religious belief - one that is dedicated to eradicating the barrier between Church and State that the Founding Fathers erected.

We are perversely fortunate, then, that this administration's incompetence exposes its mendacity and malevolence as well as its ineptitude. From the budget deficits to pork-spewing Medicare and corporate tax bills, from failing to capture Osama Bin Laden to Abu Ghraib, from damaging our alliances and strengthening the terrorists to the failure of the occupation, from taking our eyes off Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs to the failure to secure explosives and other war material in Iraq, they have made a mess of everything they have touched.

Their one area of competence is the ability to successfully manipulate all the levers of large-scale public relations and mass media. There are still a large number of people in this country that are either unable or unwilling to recognize that they've been manipulated and deceived by this administration. There is a small group of people dedicated to ensuring that they never come to this realization. This election isn't a horse race; it's a race to see how many people have the scales fall from their eyes before November 2.

And it still appears to be a very close thing. If you give Pennsylvania to Kerry and Florida to Bush, it looks like the election comes down to Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and (maybe) Arkansas and Colorado.

All we can hope for is that enough of our fellow citizens wake up to the realization that George Bush's presidency has been an unmitigated disaster because it has both divorced itself from the principles that made this nation great as well as divorcing itself from reality.

Defending America requires defending it from the enemy within - those who would destroy our liberty under the guise of protecting us - as well as defending it from the enemy without.

Brad DeLong puts it best:
There is no excuse for anyone to support George W. Bush. None. None at all..

Let's hope at least 51% of the voters agree.

The Curse
It's over.

Now, what about the Cubs? And does this mean the the Vikings might win a Super Bowl someday?

The Curse, cont.
Three more outs. Admit it - you're still nervous. You're playing out various scenarios of disaster in your mind. Nobody's ever been up 3-0 and then lost the final four games of the World Series. Could the Red Sox be the first? (They just showed the Buckner play).

The Curse
They're up 3 games to none, they're leading 3-0 in the bottom of the 8th. But they had the bases loaded last inning and didn't score.

Admit it. You're just waiting for it go all wrong (again).

Telling It Like It Is (AKA I Wish I'd Said That)
Tony Pierce gets InstaVenom exactly right. Courtesy of Oliver Wills (an honest partisan).

Thank you, Tony, for articulating precisely what I've always thought of as Reynold's basic intellectual dishonesty. Now, I'm basically a moderate progressive (i.e., slightly left of center), but I really want to hear thoughtful, intelligent conservative voices (which is why I read Daniel Drezner and Asymmetrical Information on a regular basis). A year ago, I thought Instapundit was one of those voices. But as I read him over time, I became more and more dismayed. The two things I read that really clued me in to what he believed were ones about how the "fifth column" of liberals would lose the war in Iraq and an obtuse advocacy of genocide in the mideast.

At that point, I realized that what Instapundit was really the respectable, seemingly moderate face of what I think as the right-wing hate brigade. I used to feel the same way about Andrew Sullivan (who originated the "fifth column" meme, BTW). But in the last few months, Sullivan has started thinking hard about the gap between the right's worldview and reality, and that makes for fascinating reading - not because he's criticizing the administration, but because he's choosing his convictions over his ideological biases.

Boycott Kodak, cont.
Groklaw, of course, says it better than I ever could.

Boycott Kodak

I opened up Slashdot this morning and came across this story:

Kodak Wins $1 Billion Java Lawsuit

Kodak claims they hold patents that Java infringes on, and they want $1B in royalties. They haven''t actually won anything yet, Sun will undoubtedly appeal in Federal court, and it's very possible that the whole thing will be tossed out.

Needless to say, Kodak's claims are at best spurious. They're based on some patents they bought from Wang, and those patents are so broad-based and so dependent on prior art that they never should have been awarded in the first place.

This kind of thing is having an increasingly chilling effect on the software industry, and it's not only threatening the livelihood of software developers like me but also the future growth of America's high-tech industry. The need for increasingly sophisticated and innovative software is only going to grow. But if the potential costs of litigation make it cost-ineffective to develop it here, then it will move overseas - especially to places that don't have the incentive or need to conform to our patent laws.

I was so upset I felt compelled to write this letter to Kodak. I have no illusions that anyone there will even read this, and I'm sure that they will pay no attention to those of us who have decided to boycott their products. But I still think it's worth expressing myself.

To whom it may concern -

Several months ago, I bought a Kodak EasyShare CX7430. I was impressed by the fact it offered the same features as cameras costing $25-100 more. I was also impressed by its simplicity and ease of use. And I was glad to buy innovative, high-quality, low-cost consumer technology from an American company.

However, this is the last Kodak product that I will ever purchase.

Why? Because I read with anger and dismay this morning that you had won a lawsuit against Sun over the supposed infringement by their Java language of patents you hold. I am a professional software engineer with 15 years of experience, and currently I do most of my work using Java. Over the last few years, I've also developed an interest in software patent law and intellectual property rights primarily because of the ongoing attempt by large corporations to take advantage of the badly broken legal and patent systems in order to extort royalties from other companies or entities who they claim have infringed their patents.

In other words, I know enough to realize that the basis of your patent claim is ridiculous. The patents you hold should be invalidated because they are based on prior art that dates back to a decade or more prior to the submission of your patent (i.e., Smalltalk, which was invented circa 1976, IBM OS/360, which was created in the mid-60's, and Lisp, which was invented around 1958). Any non-trivial software product is, by its very nature, the expression of a large body of ideas developed over the last 50 years (which, in turn, are based on the ideas of mathematics and logic that date back over 2000 years). None of these ideas should be patentable; in fact, doing so goes against the original intent and spirit of American patent law.

The attempt by Kodak and by other large corporations to "game" the system by taking advantage of the badly broken patent system and the inability of court system to deal effectively with intellectual property rights is not merely unethical, unprincipled, and unconscionable; it is a serious threat to the American economy. If Kodak and other corporations succeed in enforcing their unwarranted claims of patent infringement, it will destroy creativity and innovation in the American software industry because only large corporations with large legal departments will be able to attempt to develop software. Unfortunately, most of the innovation and creativity in the software industry comes from the proverbial "two guys in a garage" (e.g., Google), and two guys in a garage can't afford expensive lawyers, and they can't wait for the months or even years it takes to resolve even the most groundless patent infringement claim.

I realize that nothing will prevent you from going down this path, not even the boycotting of your products by informed consumers like me. The best we can hope for is that your claim will be overturned by a higher court, and that such a decision can be used as a basis for preventing or overturning other equally spurious suits.

Here's hoping you lose. And here's hoping that someday I read in the paper that your business practices have resulted in your collapse because you have been beaten in the marketplace by companies that pursued creativity and innovation instead of stagnation and litigation.

Seen In Santa Cruz
A restored Model-T with a vanity license plate that says "Elect Al Smith" and a bumpersticker that says "Defeat Hoover". A subtle comment on this year's contest, mayhap?

Alternative History
During the convention, I read or heard someone say that Bill Clinton would have easily been elected a third time if we didn't limit presidents to 2 terms. I started thinking about that a little. If we didn't have the 22nd Amendment, and if we didn't have a broad consensus against 3 or more terms, what might have happened?

It's virtually certain Ronald Reagan would have been elected to a third term. I think that this might have changed history very little; the Berlin wall would have fallen, Iraq probably would have invaded Kuwait and we probably would have led a coalition against Iraq. And the Iran-Contra investigation would have continued until 1992. By 1992, it probably would have been difficult to disguise the effect Alzheimer's disease was starting to have on Ronald Reagan, and the country would have been ready for a change - particularly if the economy wasn't doing well.

Enter a revitalized Democratic party led by a rising young star named Bill Clinton. It's unlikely Clinton's policies would have been much different - balanced budget, failed health care plan, etc., etc. - and equally unlikely that he wouldn't have been dogged by scandal. Nevertheless, 8 years of peace and prosperity would have led to his election for a third term.

And there's little doubt that third term would have been interesting, starting with a recession followed by a wave of corporate scandals. But that would have been quickly overshadowed by other events. Richard Clarke's book indicates that the Clinton White House knew who Osama Bin Laden was and what his intentions were. Would they have been as diligent in the summer of 2001 as they were in December 1999? Would Al-Quaeda have reformulated their plans and found some other way to effectively attack the US?

I'm guessing the answer to both is yes, and that we would have found ourselves in a war on terror, and probably would joined with the Northern Alliance to throw the Taliban out of Afghanistan. Beyond that, only wild speculation is possible. But the big picture, I think, would look remarkably similar. I do think Clinton's economic policies would have served the nation better than Bush's, but we'd still be recovering from a recession.

And this election? Would Clinton run a fourth time? Or would he step aside in favor of, say, his Vice President? And after the defeat of John McCain in 2000, who would the Republicans run? Perhaps the brightest hope of the Republican Party, the three-term Governer of Texas, son of Ronald Reagan's Vice President, George W. Bush?

Would it be Bush and Gore in 2004?

Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead
Besides listening to too much Warren Zevon...
1) Check out Gentoo for OS/X
2) Check out TextPattern
3) Write about what Rhapsody and ITunes really lack (compared to Waterloo Records)

The Serendipitous Summer Visitor Departs

An unexpected visitor showed up this summer, right next to the Meyer Lemon I planted in the spring:





People walking by would compliment us on it, and we'd reply that we hadn't planted it, it had just shown up. It got to be about 5 feet tall, and the bloom was at least a foot wide.

I had to cut it down today, because the bloom had faded and the bumble bees and hummingbirds have moved on to the Oleander and other things. I took it down almost to the root, but left a bit of stem where another shoot has started. Will it grow into another huge sunflower? Will another turn up unexpectedly next year?

All your renown is like the summer flower that
blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which
brings it forth, soon slays with parching power.
-   Dante Alighieri

The only reason left to use Windows
Rhapsody. I'm hooked. Why don't they port it to the Mac?

iTunes is great for buying music, but it's terrible for checking out new stuff that you may or may not like. Rhapsody is perfect. It's also perfect for collecting all those stupid songs you like but would never purchase otherwise.

And are you noticing how the prices of CD's are starting to come down as iTunes and Rhapsody get more popular?

Learning Lisp, continued
Learning Lisp is a lot easier than it used to be, because you can get all of these things right off the web without spending a penny, and they all work on your Mac:

• GCL (Gnu Common Lisp)


• An online, downloadable copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp


• An online, downloadable copy of Guy Steele's Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition

The only quibble is that you may need to download additional GNU libraries, like gettext. I probably should be using Fink, but I haven't gotten around to it.

"What a beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free" Donald Fagan, "I.G.Y", The Nightfly (1982)

#!@&*Blogger
What happened to preview mode? I had to rewrite the previous post 10 times before I got it to look right. (And it still sucks, but that can't be blamed on the tool).

Blogging tools are the flint axes of software. I use MoveableType at work for an internal blog I set up, and it's only incrementally better. It isn't really fair to compare them to, say, my IDE, since one is a native program and the other is HTML-based. But is it that hard to do some simple WYSIWYG features? Like highlighting a piece of text you want to link and having a window pop up to enter the URL, instead of #!@&%$ A HREF=blah, blah, blah. Would it be that friggin' hard?

Joel on Software, btw, has some really good essays on the subject of improving HTML-based client apps here and here. He actually starts talking about towards the end of this article here and he's still talking about it here.

Friggin A HREF=#!@&*!^$

Learning Lisp
I've decided to learn Lisp.

Of all of the new technical kicks I could go on, this seems the least likely. I haven't even mentioned to my other hacker friends, because I'll get quizzical looks and disparging remarks. But I picked up Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters this week at the bookstore (literally - I haven't bought it yet, but fully intend to) and started reading. I've read many of his essays - and the new book mostly expands on those essays - but he convinced me about the value and relevance of Lisp in a way he hadn't before.

The three main points that convinced me were:

• All other languages are gradually evolving into Lisp.
  
• You can express things in Lisp, easily, that you can't express in other languages.
  
• The right way to write programs is bottom-up, not top-down.
  

All of these things come together in a single, compelling idea:
The programs you write in Lisp will be fundamentally different - you will get a larger language with more abstract operators and a smaller program written in it.

I've been trying to work towards something roughly similar lately by trying to build systems that consist of two kinds of components - low-level components that solve generic problems and high-level components that reflect and provide solutions in terms of the problem domain. This is hardly an original idea, but I've seen very few systems that really attempted to model their problem domains in non-naive ways. Most "systems", frankly, are collections of code that lump together the features their designers and builders thought were important at the time they were building the system. I'm in the process of trying to rework/replace one of those kinds of systems right now.

I'm thinking in terms of building blocks - constructing something, lego-like, out of pre-fab materials, with the language as the mortar. The blocks and language are made out of the same material - the language - but they're conceptually and cognitively different.

Graham is suggesting something much more elegant. He's talking about expressing the solution directly, in the language itself. The difference is subtle - especially since I'm not expressing it very well - but huge. And it resonates with me to the point where I feel compelled to try to become proficient in the language. Even, possibly, to write real systems in it.

I still firmly believe Dennis Ritchie's dictum that the way to learn a language is to write programs in the language. I've gotten myself back up to speed in the basics (I noodled around in Interleaf Lisp about 10 years ago, but never really learned to use the idioms of the language properly). So now I need to pick some programs to write.

Kenny Boy
I just finished reading Robert Bryce's Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron last week, which was by coincidence the same week Ken Lay finally got indicted.

Bryce's book is lucidly written, funny as hell, sharp, and incisive. It's in the same league as James Stewart's Den of Thieves. He gives a surprisingly comprehensive look at the entire energy industry as well as a lot of insight into the people who drove Enron into the ground.

Kenny Boy, meanwhile, is making a very public defense that he didn't know what was going on and that Andrew Fastow was the evil genius behind it all. After reading Bryce's book, you can almost believe the "I was clueless defense" - Lay frequently comes across as downright stupid - except for his actions on October 23, 2001.

Bryce's core thesis is an old Texas saying: "Fish rot at the head". Lay proves it. He's either a liar or an irresponsible, incompetent fool. What kind of leader defends himself by saying "I didn't know what was going on" when the company he's Chairman and CEO of collapses in the biggest financial scandal ever?

But even if he's indicted, the SOB will probably get to keep most of his ill-gotten gains. Just like Michael Milliken. Crime does pay, if you practice it at a high enough level.

War and Peace
I felt compelled to write this comment to this post by Brad DeLong about Sy Hersh's assertions that the White House is covering up a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing w/r/t Abu Ghraib:

If it's true, why isn't this a front-page article on the NYT, and why isn't it the lead story on the nightly news? If it's true, why hasn't anyone else stepped forward?

If it's not true, then why is Sy Hersh telling these stories?

I hope what he's saying isn't true, because it's horrible beyond belief. I fear that it's true, because I have no faith in the decency, honesty, or competence of the Bush administration. But assertions of this kind demand incontrovertible facts. Where are they?

As usual, I found it difficult to convey exactly what I'm thinking in a few short words. So here are some more:

The last thing I want to see is more pictures/videos of American soldiers and/or civilians degrading Iraqi prisoners. But if they exist, and are significantly worse than what we've already seen, then someone in a position to know and with sufficient credibility needs to come forward and admit the truth - with sufficient and undeniable evidence to back them up. If they don't, then someone equally informed and credible (the latter of which means not someone from the administration) needs to squelch the rumours.

I find it difficult to believe that what we already know as established fact was the work of a few low-ranking enlisted soldiers. It's impossible for me to believe that the unit's NCO's and officers weren't aware of what was going on. It's equally impossible to believe that they were aware but weren't responsible - that is, that they hadn't given the orders allowing torture and humiliation. It's difficult for me to believe that there's no connection between what happened at Abu Ghraib and what happened at other places in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's equally difficult to believe there's no connection between the administration's discussions on the use of torture, the denial of Geneva Convention rights, and what happened at Abu Ghraib and other places.

But there's a big gulf between belief and proof. The best possible thing that can happen now is for the truth - all of it, without exception - to come out. If, in fact, it was just a few out-of-control enlisted troops this needs to be something the evidence supports and can be believed by any reasonable person. If, in fact, this was encouraged and directed at the highest levels of government this too needs to be established beyond reasonable doubt and appropriate actions taken. Because that gives us a chance to act on the truth and do the right things. In fact, it is the only thing that can help us in the eyes of the rest of the world, because it would show that at least we are willing and able to punish those who exceed the limits of the law and of human decency.

War And Peace
The Onion gives us the good news in Iraq.

"... the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead. According to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, of the approximately 24 million Iraqis who were not killed, nearly all are not in a military prison. Bremer said "a good number" of those Iraqis who are in jail have been charged with a crime, and most of them have enjoyed a prison stay free of guard-dog attacks, low-watt electrocutions, and sexual humiliation."

Way to go, Operation Freedom!

Come November...
A passing comment by Brad Delong caught my eye:

But there is an election coming up. If George W. Bush loses it, things may still be OK.

Yes, I thought, but what happens if he wins?

Let's rewind to 2001. After the election debacle fades, the Bush administration (with the help of a compliant Congress) proceeds to act as if they've been granted a mandate. This behavior is reinforced by 9/11 - if you're not with them, you're against them. Whatever else you can say about this administration, you have to admit they've been extremely successful at carrying out their policies.

Of course, unless you're a rabid partisan ideologue, you'd also have to admit that their record of accomplishment has been dismal at best and an utter failure at worst. As bad as the situation in Iraq looks now, the present state of affairs pales next to the long-term consequences of this misadventure. But that's only one of potential disasters confronting this administration. The torture scandal that began with Abu Ghraib is still breaking. That $8B no-bid Halliburton contract is receiving an increasing amount of scrutiny. The economy is still short about 1.3 million jobs since January 2001, and while corporate profits are rising, wages are not. The Valerie Plame affair is before a grand jury and the President has engaged personal counsel. We're still waiting to find out if Ahmad Chalabi is an Iranian spy.

You'd think that all that, on top of an increasingly unpopular war, would be enough to send GWB home. It's hard to believe that none of the potential crises facing his administration won't boil over.

But what if none of them do? What if Bush survives, and gets enough votes to win the election?

I'm afraid it will be taken as a complete vindication of the administration's policies. Any margin of victory, no matter how slim, will be treated as if it were a mandate, a la Reagan in `84 (or Nixon in `72). And that will be used to justify any or all of the following:

• More tax cuts for the rich


• More cuts in benefits for the poor


• Further curtailing of civil liberties (Patriot II, anyone?)


• Privatization of Social Security

It's hard to believe that they'll be able to indulge in any significant military adventurism post-Iraq, but you never know. The Neo-cons may find also redemption in a Bush victory, and if they do, they'll resume the drumbeat for regime change.

I'm back
Over three months have passed since my last post, mainly due to the 60-hour weeks I've been working since mid-February. We're all exhibiting the signs of burnout, the most classic of which is exhibiting no more than a dull sense of relief (as opposed to exhilaration (or even moderate satisfaction)) when the last few things come together.

The other reason for not writing is that I've discovered a new passion. When we bought a house last December, we inherited an overgrown mess. Worse, we had to tent the house to kill all the termites and beetles in and under it, which also appeared to have killed off a gorgeously rampant Bouganvillea and a lovely Mexican Sage on the side of the house. So we started to clean things up as best we could and hoped the neighbors wouldn't think too badly of us.

The quintessential Santa Cruz garden is an abundant mixture of plantings in a informal arrangement that are more often the result of the whims and passions of their owners than they are of a carefully arranged design by a landscaper or architect. I've admired many of these gardens - you see them all over the city, and I can honestly say that almost every house on my block has one. Slowly and tentatively, I caught the bug too, starting with a Star Jasmine that I planted along the back fence and escalating into weekly purchases at one or more of the garden shops around town. By March, I'd dug out the two raised beds at the front of the house, replanted everything, and found myself with this.

And a few other things, like this Blue Hibiscus:




More later...

War and Peace
This, my friends, is how the peace will really be lost. Whether or not Chalabi is the titular head of the government or the power behind the throne is probably of small consequence; either way, it's the direct equivalent of, say, installing the Shah on the throne of Iran or helping Pinochet overthrow Allende in Chile. Or supporting Somoza, Marcos, Suharto, the Saud family, etc., etc. You can even make an analogy to supporting a previous ruler of Iraq in his war against the Mullahs who overthrew the Shah.

Here's a prediction: If Chalabi and his cronies gain power, they will be overthrown, perhaps peaceably, more likely violently, within a decade. Their overthrow will be accomplished by rebels who will be, among other things, violently anti-American. The resulting chaos will, once again, undermine any efforts to stabilize the Middle East and bring Islam into the 21st Century.

We haven't learned a damn thing in the last 50 years.

Cynicism and Misdirection
There's been a great to-do about last week's proposal by GWB to amend the constitution to defend the sacred institution of marriage by limiting it to heterosexual couples.

Over the years, I've increasingly become something of a strict Constitutionalist, as well as believing in balanced budgets and State's rights. In fact, I've become a Republican. A Jefferson/Madison Republican, that is. So repeated soundings about amending the Constitution for the (non J/M)-Republican issue du jour (before it was balanced budgets, today it's gay marriages) strike me as a dangerous disrespect for one of the foundations of this nation.

But that reaction entirely misses the point. If you think about it, you realize that the administration has to know that there are at least 35-40 Democratic Senators who are likely to oppose the Amendment, and maybe as many as 5-10 Republicans. So they must realize there's virtually no chance it would pass.

Here's my take: the administration wouldn't want it to pass. They probably don't even want it to come up for a vote. They just want to float it out there and engineer/manipulate the resultant controversy. One big reason for floating it is to pander to the right-wing fundamentalists. Why? To tighten up support from that important constituency prior to the Convention and the election. But that's not who they're really aiming at. They're really aiming at the swing voters - the ones that elected Clinton in `92 and `96 and the ones they got just enough of in 2000. Most of those voters are reasonably tolerant folks who nonetheless are a little uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex marriages. If you're looking for a wedge to tip some more of those voters to your side then whipping up a controversy, standing foursquare for some sacred institution supposedly under threat, and subtly manipulating the other side into positions that you can cast as extreme is a proven winner.

It's a bit of risk - it could backfire - but it's a hell of a good strategy. Especially if you don't give a damn about any of these constituencies beyond capturing their votes.

Calling this cynical is like calling the sky blue. Almost all politicians will do whatever it takes to get elected. I've repeatedly said that you can't understand large-scale politics without understanding large-scale public relations. But no presidential administration has so completely sacrificed conviction and policy in favor of electioneering like this one since the Nixon White House.

More From Yesterday's Paper

Buried on Page 18A:

“County officials challenge state over voting machines”
Santa Clara county officials are pushing back against California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's directive to require security measures to safeguard the integrity of electronic voting systems. Officials in 9 other counties are supporting Santa Clara. All of these counties recently bought new touch-screen voting machines.

Why the pushback? Simple bureaucratic politics is my guess. Someone or some group in each county authorized the purchase of these machines and stands to get blamed if the machines are found to be flawed or unusable.

Now, I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories about the Diebold voting machines. Various companies, including Diebold, rushed these machines into production after the 2000 election debacle because they saw a chance to make a quick buck. The investors out for a quick buck couldn't care less about security issues or quality software development processes; those things just cost more money and delay the release of the product. So the engineers - who probably don't have much experience in or knowledge about building secure systems - realized that the thing is badly flawed and will constantly need to be fixed using field-expedient methods. So they put in things like wireless network cards and simple locks that make it easy to replace memory cards and firmware.

When the CEO of Diebold promises to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party in the next election, he's acting as conventional party power broker, not as some sort of evil conspirator who's deliberately created a system he knows his co-conspirators can hack.

When the Diebold folks deny that there are any problems with their systems, they're not engaged in some systematic and well-organized coverup. They're clueless. Dismissing all the evidence of any problems is nothing more than the simple human act of denial.

When California county officials complain about the Secretary of State's directives about security, they're engaged in a bureaucratic turf war. They're not participants in a massive conspiracy to alter the results of elections.

Never ascribe to malice that which can explained by simple incompetence.

It's apparent that no matter how many times independent security experts point out how badly these machines are flawed, there will be no stopping their adoption and use. I'm beginning to think that the best thing that could happen is for a group of white-hat hackers to alter the results of an election in some ridiculous and undeniably obvious way (like having Mickey Mouse be the winner of some race in a Los Angeles county election) and then announce exactly how they did it.

Of course, that would be wrong. And the government and media would probably focus on what a horrible crime had been committed and prosecute the hackers to the full extent of the law (perhaps adding some new provisions to the Patriot Act to allow even greater punishment of the offenders), thus drowning out the issue of how insecure and untrustworthy these machines are.

Instead, it'll be the black-hat hackers who compromise these systems. They'll do their best to cover their tracks. And they'll probably get away with it. All we can hope for is that they're incompetent, too, and that they'll mess up and get caught.

I just found out that the Diebold machines use Microsoft Windows as their OS. So even if you remove the wireless card and the ability to remove and change memory cards and firmware, you still have all the vulnerabilities of the world's most popular and insecure operating system. Unbelievable. What was behind the choice of Windows? Surely, more incompetence. No reasonably knowledgeable software system architect would ever make such a choice.

Yesterday's Paper
Yesterday, I sat down with an actual newspaper (the San Jose Mercury News) while I had a late lunch at my favorite Greek restaurant, and read these tasty tidbits.

“Former CEO of Enron may face criminal indictment”
Yup, they're finally going to go after after Skilling. Looks like the official announcement will be later this week.

“Clinton pushes philanthropy at a personal level”
I've always been ambivalent about Bill Clinton, who I find fascinating but deeply flawed. But I find it ironic, and not a little bit amusing, that the policies and actions of the current administration are probably doing more to rehabilitate his reputation than any words or actions of his supporters.

“Almost all Iraqui exiles misled U.S., officials say”
What? Next you'll tell me that there's no WMD, either! And that it's all the intelligence community's fault!

Two things that distinguish this administration is its near-absolute refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of its policies and its ability to manipulate the tools of large-scale public relations. This is yet another example.

What distinguishes our mass media is the inability to offer any kind of intelligent analysis of how this administration (or the previous one, and any future one) operates.

Robert Glass Doesn't Get Open Source
Robert Glass is one of my favorite writers on the subject of software development, and 10 years from now his book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering will still have an honored place in the "always relevant" section of my technical library. But, alas, he doesn't understand the relevance or importance of Open Source in any way, shape, or form:

“...open source is most prominently about building software products for no financial compensation...There is a faint whiff of Communism about the concept of working for no financial gain”

Wrong. Open source is primarily about programmers building products for themselves and for other programmers. If you don't get that, you don't get Open Source. There's nothing particularly altruistic about this, and it's worth noting that all of the successful OS projects are meritocracies. It's also worth noting that the best known advocates of Open Source and free software - Eric Raymond and Richard M. Stallman - are libertarians, not communists. The comparison to Communism is a cheap shot - the kind Darl McBride would make - not a serious comparison or analogy.

A much better analogy would be to the writers and scholars of the early Renaissance. They didn't support themselves by publishing their writings and they didn't expect to. The wrote and studied because it was what they did. They supported themselves by seeking the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. This isn't too different from what Linus Torvalds does, and there's no better example of a wealthy and powerful patron than IBM, which supports a wide variety of OS projects and programmers.

And what kind of things are these programmers building for themselves and others? Tools. Not applications. Tools. Tools made by craftsman, for other craftsman, so that all of these craftsman can get down to the serious work of creating applications for paying customers. In a few short hours, I or any other aspiring programmer can download and install all of the tools they need to create any kind of application for free. I don't need to fork over several thousand of my own dollars for someone else's ideas about what kind of tools I need. I can get the ones I want - for free - from my peers, who have a far better understanding of what I need than the program managers and marketeers in Microsoft Developer Relations. This, surely, is a motivation that anyone can understand.

Glass then goes on to natter about the “...critical importance of the economic model to the open source movement”. Critical to who? Not to the Open Source developers themselves. The “economic model” was invented by the VCs and execs who wanted to exploit the Open Source phenomenon, not by OS developers and users. Linus Torvalds isn't going to stop working on Linux 2.6 if all the companies selling Linux go under.

Glass makes a more interesting point when he compares OS to SHARE, one of the user organizations that thrived in the late `50's and early `60's before the Justice Department ordered IBM to unbundle software from hardware sales. He states that “for those of us who lived through the era of software that was free and open because there were no alternatives, a return to the notion of free and open software feels like a huge regressive step”. Perhaps it does. But having begun my career in a proprietary marketplace in which the most basic tools - like a C compiler - cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, the availability of thousands of tools, libraries, components, and code snippets is a kind of Utopia. And having to go back to proprietary toolkits is unthinkable.

Weekly News Roundup, with your anchor George Orwell

<G.O., speaking directly to camera #1:>
President Bush, appearing on Meet The Press with host Tim Russert:

<roll tape>
Russert: How? why, as a fiscal conservative as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?

President Bush: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in half in five years.

Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do know that if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the deficit in half. And at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will be relatively low.

<jump cut>
Russert: But your base conservatives and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they're all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.

President Bush: Well, they're wrong.*

<G.O. does quarter turn in his anchor chair to face camera #2 and intones:>
In other news, the American Bar Association announced that a top lawyer at Microsoft has been named to chair the Antitrust Committee for the ABA.**

<Cut to commercials -

#1 How Walmart helps communities,
#2 shows an oil company helping to preserve the environment,
#3 is a lite beer commercial with a flatulent horse.

Return to G.O. facing directly to camera #1>
In tonight's final story, Diebold, makers of new high-tech touch screen voting systems announced last week that “Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary”.***

<Cue music, cut audio, pull back to wide shot and then go to commercial>


*“There's the overstatement of the current deficit in order to make plausible the claim that they will cut it in half in three years.”

** No links needed. Welcome to the post-ironic age.

***"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits that allowed tampering". Just for fun, search Google for "Diebold, Maryland, Raba" and look at how the mainstream media outlets reported this story.

SCO Follies continue
I never liked Ayn Rand's writing and I was never able to finish Atlas Shrugged. But it occurs to me that Darl McBride is exactly the kind of pseudo-capitalist that Rand railed against. She had a word that she lumped people like Darl under:

Looter

It's hard to say what Rand would have made of Open Source software. But if you think carefully about it, you'll come to the conclusion that Open Source is an engine of creativity and innovation that adds considerable value to many - and perhaps eventually most or all - of our industries and enterprises. Just ask IBM. They're even willing to pay for Super Bowl ads to promote it.

You might even draw the conclusion that Linus Torvalds has a little in common with John Galt.

The other conclusion you might draw is that IBM doesn't seem very worried about being sued by SCO.

Update: I originally wrote this on 1/26, but hadn't gotten around to publishing it. But SCO's latest bit of nonsense led me to finish it. The best source of what's going on with the SCO-IBM case is, as always, Groklaw.

Finally
Brad DeLong points to this Washington Post article that reports we're one step closer to bringing Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to justice. Andrew Fastow is going to jail and is reportedly cooperating with investigators seeking evidence against former Enron Chief Accounting Officer Richard A. Causey. The next link in the chain after Causey? His boss, Jeffrey Skilling.

It's about time.

A Comment on Era Transitions vs. Transformations

My friend T lends us his thoughts about the state of the era we're in. He also has some thoughts on hosting a good story.

“Writing about the rapid change of the era in which we are now has become almost trite these days. It was 1970 (the year of this author's birth) when Alvin Toffler put his finger on the idea that people are more behind the times than ahead of them in his book Future Shock. That was 34 years ago, and the pace of change that he was writing about is nothing compared to what has been happening since then. We all know the times are in rapid change. Fine.

A more interesting thought, is that not are we merely in the throes of all this change, but the true era change many talk about is only just approaching mankind. I would contend that what we are going through right now is merely the staging time for the era change that is about to rock the world in the next 15 to 25 years.

The reason that I write this is that we are in a time when we are starting to complete the technologies (or at least evolve them to such a level as necessary for the revolution) that enable the era change that is to come. With the abilities that we have been developing over the last 150 years, with the revolutions in metallurgy, biomedicine, communications and computational power, we are setting the stage for such things as the bio-technical and nanotech revolutions. Not only have we evolved the technology to support the coming massive leap, we are developing the mental/psychological necessities to do so.

It's been a long road. From developing a system of government, economics, security, mass production, distribution, transportation, communications, information management we can support the kinds of research that will bring sweeping revolution. We have moved beyond a time where we can only know what our god given senses limit us to. Now that we can measure the unseen, we are able to think far beyond our human condition.

The changes that we have seen to get us to this point will be, upon future reflection, small compared to how the human condition will change after the nanorevolution. The radical changes to human life will go far, far beyond the changes that we have recently seen. When achievements start rolling in from such fringe fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology, life will be almost so different as to be unrecongnizable from today. Hold on! We're just getting started!”

Now, we both think we're in an era transition. But we have a subtle disagreement on what really constitutes the era transition. T thinks it happens when a host of revolutionary technologies come on-line. I think it really happens before then, and the revolutionary technologies are the effect, not the cause, of the era transition.

Now, if I'm right, the era transition may have already happened and this is a moment of stasis before an explosive (and probably very difficult) period of near-chaotic change - as surely as Reformation followed Renaissance. Note that this period of stasis may be measured in decades (or may not, if we're especially unlucky), and the changes to follow will be spread out over many more decades. This, admittedly, is a pessimist's viewpoint.

T, on the other hand, is more of an optimist. He's talking about the cool stuff - the stuff that lets us be something more than we our today. And he believes that we're developing the mental and psychological facilities that will allow us to move beyond the flesh-and-blood limits of our current condition. And, in his view, that's the real transition - to what amounts to a posthuman age.

Some other very smart folks - like Vernor Vinge and Bill Joy - believe the same thing but interpret it in a way that makes me sound like a pollyanna. Vinge pulls no punches:

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

The implication is that we ordinary humans get replaced - very swiftly - with some super-intelligent post-human. I can't buy that. I think an era transition will be messy, dangerous, and difficult. But no more so than the original Reformation. And it'll probably be even be less hazardous than, say, the Black Plague of the mid-14th century (which harmed China and Islam even more than Europe). I think we'll transition into post-humanism in stages, and we'll bring most everyone who survives the wars/plagues/pogroms/riots (which will be a large majority) along.

I like what Bruce Sterling writes about a post-human future:

Posthumans aren't content with human achievements. They're better at posthumanity than we are...[But] The posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards. Oh, sure, we may become as gods, but the thrill fades fast...By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They are not magic, they are still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules-based physical universe. They will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own conditions, whatever those limits and conditions may be.

A condition that sounds so...human.

The Fiscal State and Our State
Peter Drucker:

“The two world wars of this (previous) century transformed the nation-state into a 'fiscal state'...They (nation-states) have all come to believe that there are no economic limits to what government can tax and borrow, and, therefore, no economic limits to what government can spend. Under the new dispensation, which assumes that there are no economic limits to the revenues it can obtain, government becomes the master of civil society. The sole result of the fiscal state has been the opposite of what it aims at...In every single developed country, governments have reached the limits of their ability to tax and their ability to borrow. The fiscal state has spent itself into impotence.

Worst of all, the fiscal state has become a 'pork-barrel' state...government spending becomes the means for politicians to buy votes...In the fiscal state, the looting [of the public treasury] is done by politicians to ensure their own election...Democratic government rests on the belief that the first job of elected representatives is to defend their constituents against rapacious government. The pork-barrel state thus increasingly undermines the foundations of a free society.

Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1918 that the fiscal state would in the end undermine government's ability to govern. Fifteen years later, Keynes hailed the fiscal state as the great liberator; no longer limited by restraints on spending, government in the fiscal state could govern effectively, Keynes maintained. We now know that Schumpeter was right.”

Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, quotes from pages 125-135

You can see this in the small - if the phrase "the fiscal state has spent itself into impotence" doesn't apply to California, I don't know what does - and in the large, as the federal deficit zooms out of control. Just look at the new Medicaid bill, which manages to spew pork in all directions while providing little to no actual benefits to ordinary citizens.

What got me on this track was reading about our Governor's new budget. As some wag pointed out, it's probably almost identical to the budget Gray Davis would have produced. The most salient points to me were the reliance on a $14 billion bond issue and the transfer of an extra $1.3 billion in property tax revenues from cities and counties to the state. There's very little that sounds like trimming the fat off the pork, unless you consider education and health services wasteful and unnecessary. I find it impossible to believe that there aren't billions of dollars in truly wasteful corporate and special interest welfare that can't be cut.

What would real reform look like? Well, it might start by dealing effectively with the problems described here. And it might end with a significant transfer of both funds and responsibilities out of Sacramento and back into local governments. It would be the end of the fiscal state.

And that end will come. It's just a question of whether it will be a difficult transition (the best case) or a painful, revolutionary upheaval.

I don't believe that our new Governor will lead us into that transition. For all the talk of a revolution in California politics, I think that Arnold's election is an end, not a beginning. It's an end because the only way one group of entrenched power interests in this state (the Pete Wilson Republicans) could get elected was to use a popular cultural icon as their frontman. But what happens if the frontman's administration is as ineffective and unpopular as the previous administrations?

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again

Is it just me, or does Instapundit seem to be getting a little meaner, a little more ideological, a little more self-righteous, and a little more poorly written as the months go by? It's all very predictable and tiresome. I read blogs to learn something new and/or to get exposed to different points of view, not to be beat over the head with someone else's ideology and agenda.

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to observe what Oliver Willis calls the "Instapundit crowd". To their opposites on the ideological divide, they're yet another right-wing conspiracy. But they're not. They're a damn good example of how a social network works. And their mass and influence should tell us all something.

Today, they're jumping all over Paul O'Neill (with a few swipes at liberal scum Molly Ivins and Wallace Shawn*). Meme Of The Day: He (O'Neill) gave out transcripts of a secret NSA meeting! That's as bad as outing an undercover CIA agent! No, it's worse!

Never mind that the document in question was released to the public 6 months ago. It's all about spreading the meme. And unlike Ivins, they never apologize for their gaffes or bad jokes.

Now compare that to what Josh Marshall writes:

“So now the White House has pilloried Paul O’Neill as a sorry doofus and, by all appearances, launched a punitive investigation against him.

How about denying any of his claims or those in Suskind’s book?

Just a thought ...”

An appeal to objectivity and facts? What, no slams of straw men or idiots? No simple-minded sound bites to stick in peoples' heads? This is why the left is losing.

*(And, yes, I think Shawn is an idiot. Ivins, on the other hand, is a terrific writer and journalist who occasionally sticks her foot in her mouth, an old and honorable Texas tradition. Her gaffes shouldn't obscure that fact that 95% of the time she's funny as hell.)

LOTR, Pt. III
I finally saw the Return of the King. I didn't like it quite as much as the first two - it departs from the book more than I liked - but it's still marvelous entertainment. Some people have complained about the multiple endings, but I liked them (except for the absence of Saruman's scouring of the Shire and its rebirth).

It's been raining a lot and when I left the theater I expected to walk out into a downpour. Instead, the sky was clearing after a fresh rain. I walked through Bookshop Santa Cruz and saw a rainbow to the south as I came out the back, the clouds low and gold in the west in the setting sun.