Month: November 2001

“Mixing/Memory and desire”

The New York Times finally ran the profile on Doug Ketcham, my friend from Monroe Hill at Virginia who was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. As should surprise no one, Tin Man wrote a much more evocative eulogy for him two months ago…. It still doesn’t seem real. I had lost touch with him after graduating and didn’t even know he was working in New York. Seeing it in the Times just adds to the unreality.

A more appropriate time to be re-reading The Waste Land than I had realized. From “The Burial of the Dead” (which is ironic since Doug is still officially “missing”):

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

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Oops

Interesting issue. When I paste text from an email, it comes in with line breaks — which are ignored in the HTML and end up running words together. Got to do something about that–maybe a new scripting challenge. After I finish my exam today, of course.

The morning civil liberties roundup

Good morning! I have to get some work done this week, so I’m making a pact with you, my reader. I will only write about hideous abuses of power and civil liberties once a day, so I can do it once and then ignore it, and I’ll start tagging those hideous abuses with a special icon, so you can ignore them if you want to. How’s that?

Speaking of civil liberties, my lawyer friend Greg is somewhat fixated on that side of the problem right now. He’s a born blogger, but has never set up one of these sites for himself–that could have something to do with the fact that he’s actually employed ;). He writes,

At The Nation , you can read about a detainee — since that’s what we’re calling them — who died while being held. Well, so much for our first plaintiff …

There’s a great description of the synergies between the new detention, eavesdropping and tribunal rules at Slate, courtesy of Slate magazine’s very own lawyer babe [and wickedly funny writer] Dahlia Lithwick.

Finally, at Findlaw, a link to the most inspiring legal opinion I read during law school — and it just happens to be about a man detained on Ellis Island until he could return home, oh, and don’t mind that he had no country to return to. Read the dissent by Justices Jackson and Frankfurter; search for the clause “Frankfurter joins, dissenting” to find the starting point. The parallels with current times should roll out with the very first sentence.

Even though the detainee lost, it’s cases like that one that remind me of the worth of studying law.

The new culture

I’ve mentioned before that my writing style has changed since switching over to News Items. Part of that, I think, is due to the fact that I was usually creating news items in the browser, which makes me want to write less. Part is that my reading style has changed too.

I used to read TidBITS pretty frequently. After all, I got it via email. A few email addresses ago I stopped receiving it, and I forgot about it. But then I found this article about the recent unpleasantness with the iTunes installer. It’s well written, insightful, and strikes to the heart about what’s interesting and new about Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a tremendous hybrid, with all the vigor and personality quirks that that implies. It has traditional Mac applications and all the power of Unix. And it has people from both operating systems coming to the platform. Now there’s lots of opportunities for conflict (Unix guy: “What kind of idiot names their directories with leading spaces and funny characters?” Mac guy: “What kind of moron digs an appplication that you have to type at the command line to use?”), but also opportunities for tremendous benefits when you combine both approaches to computing. Programming and using Mac OS X is like taking part in the creation of a new culture. Pretty darn cool, actually.

Spending => more spending

Home electronics upgrade month continues. We replaced our TV a few weeks back with a new model from Costco, and today we splashed for an Onkyo surround receiver. The audio sources are hooked up, and hooking up the video will wait for another day. However, there was a bit of disappointment about the remote control. It controls a wide variety of video devices, but not the CD player we have. And both the CD and the receiver have remote connectors on the back panels so that you can control one device with another–but the CD player is Sony and the two remote interconnectors are not compatible.

So I’m in the market for a universal remote control…

Answering questions about unanswered questions

Good Morning! After yesterday’s chilly 39° to 45° (F) weather, today is a relatively balmy 54° in Boston. A good blogging day; unfortunately I need to study.

I got a couple of good questions about some of the things I’ve written that I wanted to respond to. Michael Terry asks, “What new categories of information or action is the administration keeping secret?” I should have done a bit more link research before posting the pointer in question, covering John Dean’s editorial. Dean was concerned in general about Bush’s “mania for secrecy,” including building an Office of Homeland Security with the authority to classify anything it deems appropriate as top secret.

But in particular he was concerned about Executive Order 13233, Bush’s gutting of the 1978 Presidential Records act (44 U.S.C. 2201-2207) and of Reagan’s 1989 Executive Order 12669 that implemented it. The original act was intended to ensure that presidential records were made public. The new act ostensibly defines a procedure to make the records public. But the devil is in the details. The President or former President may indefinitely review the documents to be made public; during this period the public has no access to the documents. It explicitly gives a sitting President the right to block release of the records of a former President. It extends the protection to the records of the Vice President. It’s interesting that this order was issued now, when there are a lot of people in power who were in office during the Reagan administration.

There was a second question that I will address later. Got to run now.

More voices of dissent

Another commentary on the current administration’s mania for keeping things hidden, this one, ironically, by John Dean III of Watergate fame:

While some secrecy is necessary to fight a war, it is not necessary to run the country. The terrorists will win if they force us to trample our own Constitution.

The Bush administration would do well to remember the admonition of former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report on government secrecy: ìBehind closed doors, there is no guarantee that the most basic of individual freedoms will be preserved. And as we enter the 21st century, the great fear we have for our democracy is the enveloping culture of government secrecy and the corresponding distrust of government that follows.î

Throwing out the rulebook

Another New York Times editorial, this one from the paper itself, about the erosion of civil liberties and due process being perpetrated in the name of security:

“With the flick of a pen, in this case, Mr. Bush has essentially discarded the rulebook of American justice painstakingly assembled over the course of more than two centuries. In the place of fair trials and due process he has substituted a crude and unaccountable system that any dictator would admire…[At Nuremburg] Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, warned of the danger of tainted justice. ‘To pass those defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well,’ he said.”

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