Masculinity and Public Life

Just yesterday, I found out that certain bloggers have castigated Kim duToit for being the worst blogger in America. One of his chief crimes, it seems, is writing an essay about the disappearance of vigorous masculinity in the Western World, especially American public life.

I read Kim's essay, and essays of those bloggers castigating him for his ideas. Kim's essay makes much more sense. Among other things, he has a keen sense of the ways in which progressive-minded agitators have made masculinity unpopular.

He also makes his essay at once enlightening and disturbing. At one point, he talks about television commercials which illustrate his point. Then he adds:

Now, every time I see that TV ad, I have to be restrained from shooting the TV with a .45 Colt.

If the title didn't make me wake up and notice, that attitude would. This is a man who is angry about this subject. Not only that, but he has the self-control to channel that anger into communicating with other men, even if his momentary impulse is to shoot the TV.

Kim's essay is meant to rile up the reader; he thinks that his readers need to hear a good rant.

Another man (mixture poet, scholar, and soldier: Grim of Grim's Hall) has posted on the same subject more than once. Grim's language is much more scholarly, but boils down to the same point: the virtues that once defined men as virtuous men are no longer praised.

When an American President does something daring--like committing troops to action to destroy a foreign regime that had harbored and trained terrorists, or another foreign regime that was terrorist-friendly and very uncooperative with data about its weapons programs--then he is castigated for acting too much like a cowboy. When American and British soldiers act with incredible courage on the battlefield, the newspeople seem unable to find words to describe it. So we never hear about it.

(Well it is perfectly possible that the news reporters are biased against reporting favorably about good stories from the action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ask Arthur Chrenkoff how true that is.)

At any rate, I think it stands as a self-evident fact that the virtues of masculinity are not well-celebrated in our public life. Certainly they get good press in movies like Gladiator, or Braveheart, or Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

But a cultural hankering for a certain kind of story does not always translate into cultural acceptance in public life. On the other hand, such stories cannot remain forever in entertainment. As Grim commented at least once, virtues like strength, courage and honor may have grown unfamiliar from lack of use. But they have not disappeared entirely.

UPDATE: It appears the America's Worst Blogger can write a very well-thought-out post about the future of Iraq. Said post draws heavily on the author's experiences in South Africa during the decline and fall of apartheid.

This is the reason I keep on reading duToit. In his normal state, he is a harsh-tongued but good-thinking man who knows what he wants to say. And when he writes a good post, it is a gem of insight, logic, and hard-won wisdom about how the world works.

A Chance Meeting

(Author's note: this story is related to the previous post, and is based on this record.)

Two men walked along the road away from the city. Both were sadly discussing the news that had shaken the city last week.

They lamented to each other the death of the popular teacher. Just last week, he had seemed the most popular man in the city. But the Council at the Temple had turned against him, and charged him with leading an insurrection. The Imperial magistrate had been reluctant, but had agreed at last to a capital sentence.

And just this morning, strange news had come. Did someone steal the body?, the first man asked. The second man shook his head. Of all the things to happen, that was least probable. A squad of soldiers had been tasked to guard the grave, specifically to prevent grave-robbery. But some women had visited the grave, to finish embalming the body--and the women had told an outlandish tale.

What did happen to the guards?, the second man wondered.

They were overtaken by another man, travelling alone. After a cursory greeting, the other traveller looked strangely at them. What were they so concerned about?

The two men shared a glance, then looked at the stranger as he fell in beside them. Didn't he know what had happened?

They began sharing the tumultuous story of the past week, culminating with the death of the much-loved teacher.

But don't you know, that was the way it was supposed to happen? The stranger's voice took on a different tone. He began quoting familiar lines from the holy books, about the Anointed One so long-promised. The two men became dumbfounded as prophecy, proclamation, and promises began to pile upon each other--each one predicting that the Anointed One must suffer persecution and humiliation before the fulfillment of his anointing and mission.

The unlikely trio walked on, and the stranger expounded at length the wisdom of the ancient prophets, and the sufferings of the Anointed One.

Suddenly, the pair drew themselves up. They were just about to turn aside here, and the sun was westering. Why didn't the stranger stop to eat with them, at the inn.

He said he had further to go.

No, no, the men insisted. It's a long way to the next city, and it's late. Come on in with us.

So the stranger came in to dine with the two friends.

When it came time to break bread, they let him bless the food. As he did so, and broke the bread for the meal, the two men suddenly leaned forward from their dining-couch. Why hadn't they recognized their travelling-companion before!? The realization was at once awesome and impossible. It had to be the much-loved teacher! But no, they had seen him carried off to the hill of execution, and known that he had been dead and buried.

They looked at each other. But...who...?...How...? When they turned their eyes back to the stranger, he was gone.

Didn't our hearts burn in us as he spoke? They exclaimed to each other. It can't be...It must be...

Leaving their meal uneaten, they sprang to their feet. They had to find their fellow, the other followers of the great teacher. They had to tell them the news.

History

Imagine the following: a governor's mansion, in a small territory of a large Empire. The governor lives and works here.

It is an Old World empire--there is an official religion, though the empire tolerates all sorts of alternative religions, on the requirement that they also follow some part of the official religion. Except for that one, stubborn monotheistic culture that disagrees with the Empire's urbane, polytheistic system of gods. These people have somehow managed to get a special dispensation for their beliefs.

The central place of worship for this strange religion is here, in the capital of the province. Every year, at their most significant festival, throngs of people descend onto the capital. To the governor, it seems that every year brings some new rumblings of civil unrest.

You see, these people had kicked out a previous empire at least once in the past two centuries. They were also a strongly visionary people--it seemed that every decade, some would-be prophet would claim a revelation, gather followers, and start small acts of terrorism against the ruling Empire. This governor has seen several such events turn into bloody riots, quelled by his Imperial soldiers. Usually, the death of the charismatic leader quiets things down, for a time.

This time around, another of those charismatic characters--a religious teacher--has been touring the countryside. He had spent several years building up a following. So far, there has been no indication that he's been building a private army. But he's trouble, no doubt about it. Mostly because no one can figure out his motives.

Barely a week ago, the revelers for the annual festival were parading around him, ushering him into the city wish shouts of joy. They were cutting down fronds from their national tree, waving them joyously around him. Some people have even begun paving the road for him with their clothes--a courtesy usually reserved for royalty. Those fronds, those symbols of local independence, had been all over the official money and documentation of the separatist kingdom that had kicked out the invaders before. It was still a symbol of nationalist pride.

The governor could well remember the ruckus that had ensued. The religious council--nominally powerless, but with much authority in this local culture--had been at odds with this teacher for nearly three years. They had desperately urged the man to quiet the crowds down, send them away. The council didn't like him, and didn't want him becoming more popular than he was. The man at the center of attention had jokingly laughed them off. Later, during the week, he had been heard teaching a lot in the temple. There were rumors that, in a fit of rage, this country-preacher had taken a whip and driven out unscrupulous businessmen, taking advantage of the peasants who came to offer at the temple. At any rate, the troublemaker had mostly been teaching. And his teachings had maddened the council, but delighted the crowds.

The governor hadn't done much, mainly because religious disputes of this kind were usually best lest to the disputants. Neither side was raising mobs, fomenting rebellion, or any other unpleasantness.

But now, the religious council had used their own temple guards to arrest the man, and bring him up on charges.

The governor examines the evidence that has been presented. At a trial in their own, in-house courts, they had found him guilty of capital blasphemy. Realizing that the power of life and death belonged in the hands of the local governor, they are now trying to convince the governer that the man is an insurrectionist.

The man is maddening on the stand. When the governor asked a direct question, "Are you the King of this people?", the accused replied with a bold, "If you say so."

The accusers had brought a series of charges against the man. Chief among the charges was that this man had claimed to be King. Lesser charges included advocacy against taxation, and general rabble-rousing. When pressed to defend himself on these other points, the accused stood silent.

The governor had heard that many of the acts had occurred in a neighboring province, under an Imperial vassal. He had tried to shuffle off the court case into that man's court, because he happened to be in the city at the time. The small-time king had asked many questions, had his own soldiers rough up the prisoner, but had not come to any conclusion.

Now the governor is hearing a restive mob outside his palace. He could send them off with another bloodbath, but the Emporer might not think too highly of that. Worse, the governor's best friend in the court of the Emporer died recently.

The governor steps out of his palace, and faces the crowd. He beckons out the accused man, and his guards. The accused has gotten a taste of classic Imperial justice--a whipping had left bloody stripes on his back.

The governor addresses the crowds, telling them he cannot substantiate the charges against the accused. Also, he's been in the habit of releasing a political prisoner as part of honoring their yearly celebration, culminating at the end of the week. So, he'll release the prisoner.

They yell back, Kill him! Kill him!

The people didn't want their usual release of a prisoner during the festival?

Kill him! The shout continues. They name another man--a seditious, murderous felon. They demand his release, but the death of the maddening countryside preacher.

The governor gestures to one of his servants, whispers something in his ear. Then he addresses the mob again. If they want things that way....

The servant brings out a bowl of water. The governor dips his hands in the bowl of water; his final words to the people: they can execute the accused. With the most brutal execution that the Empire has among its tools of punishment.

Now, the governor muses about this case. One more rabble-rouser, this time a religious teacher, sent to his death. This one would be executed with a pair of theives. All three would suffer a long and painful death, in public, just at the edge of the city. A public notice would be hung above the condemned man's head, reminding everyone else how to avoid a similar fate.

Would he be remembered next year? Maybe, but only by people warning young hot-heads about the dangers of being too conspicuous. The year after? Maybe, maybe not.

Another charismatic leader thrown on the ash-heap of history, the governor muses. He might, if lucky, get a footnote in the annals of the Empire. And history would march on.

At least the governor could have another meeting the ruler of the neighboring province--that Imperial vassal. At least he'd been friendly, during this strange day of trials, hearings, mobs, and appeals. In the past, the governor had never been king to the little king, who seemed very prone to big architectural projects. But now they had some common cause. Both of their provinces were full of this minority religion that had caused so much trouble. Maybe they could collaberate on reining in the local troublemakers.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Author's note: these events has been mentioned by at least one secular historian. The sequence of events described above was re-told at length by four different religious authors. In a later text, one of those authors records a speech before the religious council, mentioning several insurrections that had been put down previously in that part of the Empire.

As a curious detail, the seculur history linked above described the trial, execution, and following events in the 3rd paragraph of the 3rd chapter of the book linked. However, there is one phrase in the first sentence, and a sentence in the middle of the paragraph, which appear to repeat the teachings of the religious authors linked above. But there is little in the rest of that work to justify believing that these were the sentiments of the author himself.

By The Numbers: judges

Something I've been trying to keep an eye on (int politics) is the rate of confirmations of Federal judges by the Senate.

One thing that's been hard to quantify is if the current rate of judicial confirmations lags the historical rates for previous Presidents, with friendly (or unfriendly) partisan distribution in the Senate.

Just now spotted at Daly Thoughts (via Fishkite): a historical comparison of judicial nominations and confirmations from the Truman administration to the present. Daly claims to have culled the data from official Senate publications, and it shows some interesting trends.

For starters, he shows stuff like this:

President	Confirmation Percentage
Truman	81.8%
Eisenhower	90.2%
Kennedy/Johnson	89.7%
Nixon/Ford	89.1%
Carter	91.8%
Reagan	81.3%
G.H.W. Bush	77.8%
Clinton	61.3%
G.W. Bush	51.5%

Looks like a general decline since President Carter. However, if I truncated at Reagan's numbers, that part of the trend would be barely below the other low point on the graph, at Truman.

But Bush (the elder) sees the first numbers low enough to significantly affect the overall average. Clinton is lower yet. And Bush (the younger) barely gets half of his nominees accepted.

At the linked article, there is some commentary on this. A large number of Bush (the younger)'s appointees never got heard. For some reason, the Senate remained out of session for longer than usual, and these judicial nominees languished for a period of time, and any judicial nominee that hangs in limbo for 30 days needs to be officially re-submitted.

Take a look at another table, this time for a President's first Congressional session.

President	Confirmation Percentage, 1st Congress
Truman	87.5%
Eisenhower	92.3%
Kennedy	77.2%
Johnson	100.0%
Nixon	87.0%
Ford	76.9%
Carter	100.0%
Reagan	95.0%
G.H.W. Bush	95.6%
Clinton	86.3%
G.W. Bush	53.1%

Presidents Reagan, Bush (the elder), and Clinton all had good first sessions of Congress. They managed to get at least 15% better from that session than they did during their entire term. However, Bush (the younger) had a terrible first session. Presidents Ford and Kennedy are the next closest for their first session of Congress, and each is 20 points above Bush (the younger).

The short and sweet version is, something has changed drastically in the way judicial nominations are handled and passed.

The long and detailed version is...well, it's over at Daly Thoughts.

(Wish I had to to hunt down facts like this...)

Sunset

Walking across town today, I saw the most interesting sunset.

It is a rare kind of sunset--a bank of clouds covering the horizon enough to block the usual reds and oranges of sunset. But large swaths of clear sky above the clouds. That part of the sky had a bright, but deepening, blue. The lighter blue-gray of the clouds along the horizon against that deep blue sky has a unique beauty in it.

After about 10 minutes, the sky was too dark to distinguish from the clouds, signifying the end of this sunset. Is it not sad, that any beautiful sunset is so short?

News from the Outside World

While studying at a graduate school ( in a small town, 100 miles from anything resembling a significant city ) it is somewhat easy to lose track of the rest of the world.

To combat this, I read blogs of people who pay attention to such stuff.

One such blog is The Belmont Club, run by Jim Wretchard. Today, Wretchard has posted an interesting article on a new idea by Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the U.N. It seems that Kofi has some big ideas about how to combat terrorism internationally. Those ideas include:

• a bigger Security Council, with more diverse membership
• "developed nations" giving economic assistance to "undeveloped nation"
• "undeveloped nations" behave in such a way as to alleviate security concerns of "developed nations"

Wretchard's analysis is insightful. Among other things, he questions how a bigger security council will be any better at making decisions quickly. He also wonders how the Security Council will be able to enforce its decisions without strong military force by UN members.

But the best description of this new idea was by one of the commenters at the blog:

Tribute by another name .....

This resembles nothing so much as the old order of things - whereby the nomadic tribes would extract tribute from city states in exchange for not ravaging them. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Stories of this type aren't limited to nomadic tribes and developing city-states of the Old World. It's happened over and over again in world history. Remember the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean (early 1800's) ? What about the Danes invading Medieval England? In both cases, enemies of a civilized order asked for money--and threatened death, destruction, and plunder if they didn't receive what they asked for.

At any rate, it seems that the office of Kofi Annan is bent on continuing this ancient human tradition. I'm pretty happy that our President sees another way to deal with terrorism.

Books, computers...

I've been thinking about books I've read the last year, and noticed somethng. A couple of them really stuck in my mind because of the way in which the author involved computers in the plotline.

One such book was Cryptonomicon, equal parts war story, spy story, computer-geek story, and treasure-hunting story.

Another one was Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Heinlein didn't have Neal Stephenson's advantage--he'd never seen the wonders and terrors of the World Wide Web, for example--but he appeared to know a few important general principles about computers.

Of course, another part of his expertise was his ability to think up an interesting technological situation, give a few hints as to why the technology is behaving the way it is, and give his knowledgeable readers plenty of room to fill in the blanks from their own imaginations.

That method appeared to work very well with the creation of one of the two main characters in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. This character is an apparently self-aware computer named Mike.

We are introduced to Mike by Manuel O'Kelly, the narrator in the story. Mike is apparently an accident--a high-powered computer that has been added to, augmented, and tweaked endlessly by his owners. Manuel gives a few details about the computer's central core, enough to let us know that Mike is at least a distinct possibility (in the world Heinlein has created, that is).

The revolution that the book tells about is an amazing story. All the leaders of the Revolution have some knowledge of failures and successes of previous revolutions, and work hard to make the current revolution produce the best possible results.

However, as the Revolution plays out, the character of Mike takes on many surprising changes. He begins with a child-like sense of humor, playing occasional pranks from his position of control over Luna's communications, environmental systems, power grid, and banking system. As he is introduced to other revolutionaries, Mike takes on some responsibilities, and appears to grow a little bit. Somewhere along the way, he creates an alter ego to help the revolution along. He studies every piece of history, economics, sociology, and politicial science that has ever been written, and stored electronically. He helps the revolution network, plot, and fund their schemes.

And shortly after the climax of the story, Mike disappears entirely.

In terms of storytelling, I have not met another author who could make an Artificial-Intelligence character so vivid, and make his death so compelling. Mike's "body"--the complex computer system that ran Lunar communications, environmental controls, banking, etc., is still there. It is still doing what it is supposed to be doing.

But Manuel never gets any response out of Mike. He also never sees any sign of Mike's individuality again. No accounting mistakes that give some unknown miner 10,000,000 Lunar Dollars extra in his paycheck. No unexplainable misroutings of private telephone calls.

Another contribution to the good storytelling is the way in which Manuel tries to explain Mike's existence. Manuel can't pinpoint a time when he knew that the computer changed from a pure analytical machine into a person with a personality. This leaves the reader with the impression (I suspect a perfectly accurate one) that self-consciousness is hard to define, let alone measure or create. When Mike disappears, Manuel guesses at what might have caused his death. But he doesn't know, any more than he knew why Mike had first come into existence. All that he knows is that his old friend is gone.

A good explanation is attempted--there must be a basic level of neural ability, or some critical combination of components, which are required to support self-consciousness. But Manuel can't tell which components and/or system processes are essential, and in what ways they are essential. More bluntly, Manuel doesn't know how to plug Mike back together and re-create him.

Admitedly, this is a novel that was targeted towards a teenage/young adult audience. Like several other Heinlein stories, it makes use of themes that concern a wider group of people. Like almost all Heinlein stories, it contains several colorful characters. Even better, the colorful characters are more than decoration. They are people, and people who are important to the story.

Dreamer

Imagine a young man, living on the British Isle during the fading days of the Roman Empire. The last Imperial Legions left the island some time ago, and the Roman-based culture is dwindling.

Among other issues that the Brits deal with is the raiding parties of the warlike barbarians--most notably, raiding parties from Ireland.

This young man has recently escaped from Ireland, after years spent as a slave/shepherd for a rich Irish chieftain. He doesn't quite fit into his home culture anymore, though. He had never properly finished his education, mostly because of the captivity. He had become so accustomed to the wild, open hillsides of Ireland that the more orderly towns of the British Isle seemed constricting.

And during the time of his captivity, he had remembered the religion of his youth, a religion that he had not taken seriously when he had lived in Britain. The long hours tending his master's flocks had given him much time to meditate and pray.

Now, this young man has a strange dream. Someone has come to him from Ireland, bearing letters written to him there. As he opens the letters to read them, he hears voices coming from Ireland, asking him to come back.

The young man does not go directly back to Ireland, because he feels a need to finish his education, especially his teaching in the schools of his childhood faith.

However, after that is done, he heads back to Ireland, setting a goal of telling everyone who will listen about his religion. Incidentally, this young man was not the first to attempt this in Ireland. At least one other person had attempted, and then returned in defeat.

The way was not easy. Although the young man and his converts were never hunted outright, they faced opposition at every turn from the priests of the native religion. This young man spent a lifetime trying to convert people to the new faith by persuasion. Perhaps his biggest asset in this department was his understanding of the native tongue, and his ability to live among them as a member of the culture. He was an outsider, but he was an outsider who had learned how they lived, and what they thought was important in life.

Within a century, this new faith--Christianity--became a major religion in Ireland. A significant, unexpected side effect of this: within two centuries, Irishmen were setting out to begin monasteries, wherever they could. When Ireland ran out of room, they moved to other places, in Britain and on the Continent. These monasteries were the beginnings of many of the major cities of Europe, and were storehouses where some books, and the tools of literacy, survived.

Many of the major social structures and cities of modern Europe owe a lot to those monasteries, and those intrepid Irishmen.

The precipitating event in this story was the evangelization of Ireland. The man who took up that project was a dreamer named Patrick.

(Writings by St. Patrick and encyclopedia entries about him can be found at CCEL.)

Break....and crash

Spring Break brings about a wonderful feeling--a feeling of rest, relaxation, and readiness for a few more weeks of school. There may be a haunting feeling that some of the stuff you learned in class has slipped out of the back of your mind, because you weren't reminded of it everyday--but there's a happy-go-lucky, ready-to-tackle-hard-stuff feeling that drowns out the worries.

This feeling is also one of those that is a little hard to recognize until it is gone.

After a day of hard work getting one of my projects back off the ground, and the realization that I needed to finish one piece of homework today, and that I should have started next week's homework already...things felt terrible. (Blast the professor who keeps on assigning 20 problems at a time, due in two weeks. It's so easy to procrastinate, but each problem is a couple of hours work.)

It was probably not helped by me feeling tired half the day.

What would I do to be able to go back on break, even for a day?

But I have no choice, so I slave on. And take small breaks when I can.

[Mutters to self:'To code, or not to code, that is the question/Whether 'tis nobler in my studies to suffer/Segmentation faults and debugging woes/Or to carry out proofs, with not/ One detail neglected...]

I think I need a good book to read during those small breaks.

Funny Pictures?

Over at Little Green Footballs, pictures of policewomen graduating from the Palestine Police Academy.

At least a couple of people have called these pictures funny--policewomen wearing burkhas. A couple of references were to "nuns with guns" jokes, or "Char-Ali's Angels".

I think it's a little odd, but I don't know how funny it is.

Teddy Roosevelt and Maximus

One of the enjoyable events from Spring Break was me catching the movie Gladiator on cable television.

The story of Maximus, former Roman General and gladiator, is awe-inspiring. His pursuit of excellence in gladiatorial combat, and virtue in his dealings with members of Caeser's family make an excellent story. The virtues of strength, honor, and courage are central to the story.

Perhaps most amazing, Maximus doesn't try to usurp Caeser's throne. Instead, he tries to restore the society of strength and honor that was central to Rome, and restore the ideal vision of Rome that he'd seen under Marcus Aurelius. I couldn't help but notice that Maximus really wanted an older ideal state. He wanted the glory of the original Roman Republic, a society of virtuous men.

Just now, after arriving home from break, I entered Grim's Hall.
Grim has posted several things since he returned from his trip, and one of them was about Theodore Roosevelt (prompted by an article at New Criterion). Grim's thesis is that TR represented a courageous, manly virtue that is sorely missing from most of modern politics.

The most prominent way in which this viewpoint would affect the modern political scene (aside from the foreign-policy issues which immediately spring to mind) is in the concept of rights and duties.

For example, there are several ways to speak of the "debt owed to society" by those who have committed felonies. One way is to speak of the debt of punishment earned--whether stripes at the whipping post, hours spent in the stocks, months spent on a chain-gang, or years spent in a penitentiary. Another way to speak of this is given by Grim:

The debt is owed by all citizens. The true debt owed is this: to love and to improve the civilization into which you are born; to defend and sustain the common peace; to preserve the Republic and its freedoms; to suppress rather than to become the unjust; and to uphold the weak.

What debt does each of us owe to our parents for selflessly working to usher each one of us from fetus-hood to infancy, from infancy to childhood, and from childhood to manhood? It is a long a arduous task to so train a child, and each of us has benefited in some way from that work.

In a larger way, we owe a similar debt to the society that gave our parents a free and safe place in which to raise their children. This society that has caused labor to be rewarded with wages, property ownership to be secure, and (ideally) life and limb to be protected from unruly neighbors.

Actually, the modifier "ideally" can be rightly used to describe all the good things that parents and society give to each of us.

However, to return to my point--felons who have shown that they cannot apprecate the size of the debt owed to society before they began commiting crime should not be allowed to vote. They have trumpeted their misunderstanding of that debt by their criminal deeds.

I will add a caveat--some felons do come to a proper understanding of their debt to society. It is not impossible for any felon to mend his ways. However, that should be judged on a case-by-case basis. For example, there was a man who commited several felonious deeds while working at the White House under President Richard Nixon. In the fallout of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, Charles W. Colson was charged with several illegal deeds, and convicted of at least one.

(Colson also converted to Christianity sometime during the investigation. The full story is detailed in his autobiography Born Again. A later book, titled Life Sentence, sets the stage for what I am about to relate. )

As a result of this, Colson lost his license to practice law, and his right to vote. However, after his stay in prison, Colson created an organization to minister to people who were in prison. From that time until today, Prison Fellowship Ministries has done many good things for prisoners all over the world. The ministry teams of Prison Fellowship usually begin by visiting prisons and setting up Bible studies. They often expand to collecting lists of children of inmates to give Christmas presents to, and help in re-integrating inmates into lawful society after their release, among other things.

Recently, the governor of the state in which Colson resides signed an executive order, granting Colson the right to vote legally in that state. (I believe the state was Florida, the governor was Jeb Bush, and the election was the 2000 general election.)

This is one example of a felon who was deemed to have come to an understanding of his debt to society. It should also be an example of the reason why we shouldn't grant such rights to felons wholesale. The change from a felonious person to a society-strengthening person is not easy, and shouldn't be assumed in the face of lack of evidence.

In his essay, Grim goes on to bigger and better things--I encourage you to read it all. I was amazed at the virtues that Grim praises. Those virtues are central to the American Republic.

On the Lighter Side...

So I'm wandering around the streets of my hometown this week. (It's far, far away from the frozen shores of Lake Superior, but still has a small accumulation of snow.)

I happen to be shopping for a birthday present for my cute little sister, and run into an old acquaintance at Hammel Music.

Had a fun minute of conversation, catching up on the details of life.

I miss the good old days. I miss them terribly.

However, that's not the end of the fun stuff.
[EDIT...continued in the next post]

On the lighter side...

[EDIT...broken up, originally part of "above" post]
Did I mention that I'm spending a week away from school because of Spring Break? I decided to come down here without any computers of my own. After about half a day, I dug out my Gentoo Linux Install discs and starting hacking away on one of the old dinosaurs cluttering up the basement.

It was quite a trip, because this is an old box with a pretty smart BIOS on it. The BIOS isn't one of those ASCII-based menus. No, it's a graphics-based thing, with no "shortcut keys"--like the classic "F10 to quit anc save, F11 to quit without saving, F1 for totally useless description of an arcane option" stuff. No, I had to use arrow keys, the Enter button, and the Esc button to do everything.

Anyway, this finicky old BIOS doesn't behave itself around a bootable Linux CD. Every time it tried to access the CD and boot, the screen went blank. Fifteen seconds later, I would see the Power-on-Self-Test screen, when the computer started counting available RAM.

So I had to find a floppy-diskette boot option.

But Gentoo isn't one of those Linux distributions that comes with a handy make-a-boot-diskette-image somewhere on the main CD-ROM. Gentoo is different, and this is one of the important differences. You see, the guys who created Gentoo wanted to give you as many options as possible when you're deciding how to go about your installation. You want to work from inside an already-installed Red Hat Linux? No problem, there's a short description of a good way to do it. Want to use the enourmously-powerful Knoppix live-CD? Or do you want to use a Gentoo-minimal install? Want to install using packages imported from the Internet? Or using packages on the provided install-CD? Or a mixture of the two?

At any rate, if you have a running Linux kernel, a shell, the ability to get files over the Internet, and the ability to unzip them (using bzip2 and tar), then you have all the tools you need to begin a Gentoo installation.

I tried several different ways to get the above situation working with Gentoo. Somehow, there was always one tool missing from my downloaded stand-alone floppy. Finally, I remembered that the Alternative Installation Methods mentioned a cool idea: a boot-loader floppy. Using that, I was able to complete the installation, since the boot-loading floppy got the Gentoo-install CD to boot. The install proceeded swimmingly from there.

Later, I realized that I'd skipped a much easier method.

You see, I had several computers handy which would boot fine under Knoppix, though I had to let my family use Windows on them most of the time. But once I booted Knoppix, I could create a custom-boot-loader disk using a tool that I was already familiar with: Gnu's Grub bootloader.

See, there's a simple set of instructions to use an installed version of Grub to create a Grub floppy-disk. Once I've created a Grub floppy, I can use Grub to boot the system. Then I input a set of commands to boot any available operating system that's handy.

Again, this was something I learned how to do back when I first installed Gentoo, and used Grub as a bootloader.

But it's one of those things that I just don't do too often, so I'd forgotten the usefulness of Grub.

Now that it's installed, I can use it to compile and test code. (Woot!)

Free Speech ain't Free

Alright, my first big political post.

It seems that certain members of the Federal Election Commission have noticed that several big-name bloggers had a large effect on the last election.

So, they want to classify Internet-publishing as "indirect campaign contributions", and limit such publishing under the McCain-Feingold election funding law. Said law supposedly limits personal campaign contributions.

Hence, the FEC might start telling bloggers when they can stop posting about politics.

Free Speech is not a Free thing.

We have to defend it. I'll begin by saying this: I will in the future post material about politicians and political causes. No ruling, legal action, or FEC committee will be able to stop me from exercising my right to free speech.

I'll also call my Senator and Congressman later this week to tell them that any law which limits what I can say during an election cycle is a law that limits free speech.

And I'll try and join the McCain-Feingold Insurrection.

UPDATE: several cool banners have been thought up. Here's my favorite:

Good Books: Cryptonomicon

About two months ago, I read the first few chapters of Cryptonomicon. It took me about that long to figure out that it was really two stories being told separately.

Three weeks ago, I finished the book. It took me that long to figure out that it was one story all along.

I first ran into Neal Stephenson when I was reading articles about Linux, and the Gnu/Linux environment. His article "In the Beginning was the Command Line" was an interesting introduction to the culture and technology. I didn't learn as much about the Linux kernel as I expected, but I learned a great deal about people and technology.

This novel Cryptonomicon is about similar stuff, although it's more gripping read. Stephenson usually writes science-fiction, although this book is more properly called "techno-fiction". It deals with emerging high-tech ideas and tools, and historical events that surround them.

One half of the story belongs in World War II. Stephenson manages to make this part a real hair-raiser of a story, while describing many events that are remembered as common knowledge about the war--Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, and MacArthur's return to the Phillippines, for example.

He also mentions some of the lesser-known stuff, wrapped up in the technology of codes and code-breaking. For example, the British had broken some German codes, and managed to sink many German supply ships. To hide the fact that they were reading the German messages, the British Navy sent spotter planes out, so that the convoys were "spotted" by British airplanes before they were sunk. But once, the German convoy was sunk in dense fog. The military had to do something to cover this mistake, before the Germans figured out what was going on and changed their code-system.

The other half of the story is set roughly in the modern day. It includes an interesting caste of fomer soldiers, computer hackers, University intellectuals, and high-tech businessmen. (The first clue that the two stories are related comes from the fact that one of the central characters, a computer geek, is a grandson of one of the characters in the earlier part of the story.)

The storytelling style feels a bit ragged at first. The chapters switch between modern-day and 1939 with little warning. Important characters are introduced in strange ways. We meet one of them as he is composing haiku, while standing on the running board of a careening jalopy heading towards Hong Kong. Another is introduced through a quick summary of his family background--after several paragraphs summarizing the general history of the ecosphere on Earth, and the human race in that ecosphere. As I read it, I became accustomed to this ragged feeling, and began to see the larger story taking shape around this effect. It is also true that once the characters are introduced, it is easier to follow the story.

Even more intriguing (to me), the story sometimes takes a short digression into mathematics and encoding of information. Sometimes, this is done through two characters talking about a related subject. Sometimes, the narrator picks a strange detail (like a loose link in a bicycle chain) and expounds on the mathematics properties of the event, or process, for several pages. Better, the narration of such scenes is done in a way that connects the mathematical abstractions to the events in the story--taking the strange symbols, numbers, and ideas and giving them a connection to the story at hand.

There was one point where I wondered what was going on--a character who appeared to have died in late 1943 had been showing up (via email) in the present era. I hunted backwards and forewards through the book, and found out the death-scene is ambiguous. However, the story doesn't take time to flesh out those details, though it does show that he didn't actually die at that point, by having him show up in an unexpected place in 1945.

At any rate, this is a book which is not a war-story--though it has most of the action of a good war-story. Neither is it a crime-story--though some serious detective work has to be done by one character to figure out what is going on. Nor is it a Grisham-style legal thriller--though several turns of the story depend on the niceties of business law, and the threat of bankrupting lawsuits. It is a story about codes, code-breaking, commerce, and people who are involved in them.

Small Details

Alright, I just saw myself linked somewhere else. Thanks, Fishkite. (Reciprocating link is in place.)

I don't know if Fishkite is still updating his database on Saddam's WMD program. It contains some pretty interesting research, if not any smoking gun (or ticking bomb). His litany of items unnoticed, details unmentioned, and facts that bely assumptions was very useful, during the last election season. Even better, he culled all his data from public news-sources.

It's amazing what you can find out these days, even if you don't have several hundred underlings tooling around a desolate, California-sized desert in the Middle East.