Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I finished reading Roth’s The Human Stain last night. It’s really a fantastic cap to the American-life trilogy that also contains American Pastoral and I Married A Communist.

This passage from American Pastoral has always struck me hard, and I’m convinced that it’s the centerpiece of the entire trilogy:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong all over again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

This theme keeps coming up again and again: that the author is summoning ghosts out of thin air, that they probably bear no relation to the real people he’s talking about, and that people’s inner lives are completely beyond our understanding.

That’s part of what makes The Human Stain so frustrating: I keep asking whether the narrator is reliable, and it’s quite clear that he’s not — that he is, in fact, honest about his unreliability. And it strikes me that this is why Roth chose Nathan Zuckerman as his narrator: 1) he is a human being, not the omnipotent narrator who can see what his characters are thinking at any given moment; and 2) he is an author, revealing the impotence of that job. When Zuckerman tells us what Coleman Silk or Faunia Farley must have thought at a given moment, it’s quite often clear that he’s manufacturing it out of whole cloth. He has no choice. Zuckerman himself is clear enough about this throughout: Faunia dances for Coleman one night, in a scene that Zuckerman couldn’t possibly have seen; he’d been disconnected from Silk for months. As he describes the dancing, he goes into the characters’ heads and tells us what they were thinking. The point is that Coleman thinks Faunia is thinking something completely different from what Faunia is actually thinking. And so it goes: other people’s fundamental motivations are beyond even the characters’ understanding, and they’re certainly beyond the narrator’s.

This is less literary navel-gazing than it is a study of America at the end of the twentieth century. The characters constantly misunderstand one another, and lives are destroyed as a result. Professor Delphine Roux is alone in her room — lonely, desperate for a man, unsure why she’s failing in the U.S. when she was a star in France. Coleman’s sister goes only so far describing her family’s life before shutting down in a very New England sort of way. The narrator himself is a recluse in the mountains of Western Masachusetts — not hermit-like, but more dissatisfied with the world around him. This is a nation of disconnected Americans.

The crystallization of all these ideas is the final paragraph (which doesn’t really spoil anything, but skip the rest of this review anyway if you don’t like reading final paragraphs before you read a book). The context is that Nathan Zuckerman has just noticed his nemesis — whom he suspects of murder — sitting in the middle of a pond, ice-fishing, and the nemesis has spent a while explaining the role of sharp five-inch augers in ice-fishing:

I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk’s boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger — even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.

The reader — this one, anyway — has no idea whether Faunia’s ex-husband actually murdered Coleman and Faunia; Zuckerman is convinced of it, but Zuckerman has also saturated the reader with the message that he’s just as unreliable as anyone else. And here at the end of a book, the world is left thinking that Silk is authoritarian, racist, and exploitative, just like they thought when he left Athena College. Everyone is profoundly disconnected from everyone else.

So it’s an uplifting book.

Stylistically, I was less impressed with The Human Stain than with the previous two. I Married A Communist took a rather courageous leap: it’s basically one extended monologue by Murray Levin — a fantastic storyteller — with sidebars by Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral is more of a conventional novel, though again with the unreliable narrator throughout. (There’s one moment in American Pastoral where Nathan first says, “He must have thought  . . . ,” and it’s right there that I realized the rest of the book was pure invention, even within the fictional world of the book. I’ll dig around for the quote.) The Human Stain takes frequent leaps into the minds of its characters, so it ends up sounding like a long sequence of monologues — often diatribes by old people about the sad state of the world. Given the effect he’s going for, Roth may have had no other choice: how else do you explain that people are disconnected unless you can step into each of the people and show the world from his or her perspective?

More to the point, I don’t think it’s reasonable to view The Human Stain as a single book; it is the endpoint of a remarkable trilogy about the United States. The trilogy is, I think, three stories about the United States as personified through Nathan Zuckerman. I need to go back and reread the first two, now that I have a reasonably complete picture of all three. When I read American Pastoral, it seemed much more about how Zuckerman idolized Swede Levov, and the effect of the latter’s downfall on the former. Levov had an awful hidden life that tore him apart, personifying the U.S. during the Vietnam War, just as Ira — irascible, anti-intellectual, misdirected — mirrors the 1950’s U.S. in I Married A Communist. Perhaps Coleman Silk is Roth’s mirror in The Human Stain, but I think the mirror could just as well be Zuckerman himself: quiet, withdrawn, exhausted.

Via Slashdot: China will soon require that a large percentage of the software which the government purchases must be produced domestically (my cache). This obviously gives a huge advantage to Linux, which can be copied freely to any country and modified for that country’s unique environment. The article gives a good capsule explanation of why countries would want to switch:

• Closed-source operating systems may contain “back doors,” allowing foreign governments to snoop. (Not hard to believe: the U.S. did something like this to Russia in the Eighties.) Microsoft released Windows source code to the Chinese government, but that seems to reinforce Linux’s position: why not just run with an OS that gives us the source code by design?
• Linux is cheap.
• “China believes that by developing its own operating system, it will have control over its destiny.” A country shouldn’t be funneling billions of dollars of its own money to a Western monopoly; better to keep that money in the country, meanwhile saving a lot in annual licensing fees (see last bullet).

Linux just makes sense for a developing economy. Sure, every now and again there are speedbumps, but it seems to me that there’s no reason for a rational cost-minimizing government not to go with Linux: there’s a marginal cost with each copy of Windows, whereas the marginal cost is nil with Linux. There may be a large fixed cost up front (the cost to train people on Linux), but even there I’m sure a big push for good UI will minimize that cost. Then that good UI reduces the fixed training cost for the next country that adopts Linux.

I’m convinced that this is the way Linux will spread: an organization here and there adopts it, then adapts it for its local needs. I’m sure there are ways to evade the GPL, but if the organization releases its adapted version of Linux under the GPL, then other organizations might find that those adaptations work for it too — e.g., maybe the government of Berlin finds that Munich’s adaptations make sense for Berlin. So Berlin adopts and adapts. And the product spreads through the incremental improvements, as more and more variants of the product become available: maybe Berlin adopts Rio Linux, or Paris adopts Nice Linux.

Again, we’ll have to wait and see. But it’s moving along quickly, and my instinct would be that the pace of movement is geometric.

I’ve had this one mathematical problem in my head for ages, and it’s killing me. I just sat down to take a stab at it afresh, and I think I hit a roadblock that makes me turn to the source of all good ideas: my adoring public.

The problem is this: you come to a bus stop and you see n people waiting there. Now, if n is small, the typical assumption is that you’ve just missed a bus and have a while to wait; if n is large, then presumably the queue’s been building for a while and the bus will arrive soon. These are approximate assumptions, but they work well enough that we use them all the time. The question is: given that we see n people waiting at the stop, how long do we estimate it will be before the bus comes?

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Normally I filter out all the Nimda and Code Red hits against my website inside of a log-processing script. But today I was curious, a long time after Code Red and Nimda were a bit deal, just how many such hits I get against my website in the course of a week. Turns out that the answer is 120 (full log output below).

I realize this isn’t technically Microsoft’s problem: if I’m not mistaken, they patched this a long time ago. But it’s worth pointing out that these problems have been around for almost two years, and a lot of people still haven’t patched their machines. Now, add up all the other Microsoft vulnerabilities since Code Red and Nimda came out, including the lovely ASN.1 vulnerability, and extrapolate from my one little machine out here in the hinterlands of the web. How much damage do you think someone could do to (or with) all these unpatched machines?

See below for the Nimda and Code Red attacks against my machine.

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I’m reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain right now, about which I’ll have a lot to say when I’m done — particularly about the connections amongst the trilogy of which The Human Stain is the third part. But I’m laughing uncontrollably at this little dialogue in the middle of the book, describing what Bill Clinton should have done to Monica Lewinsky to keep her quiet. It’s terrible, but it’s also really very funny. It’s also deeply unfit for this weblog. You should just read the book.

This speech by Eben Moglen is just amazing. This guy amazes me nearly as much as Yochai Benkler does. I’ve included a large excerpt from the speech below, answering an audience member’s question about what everyone asks: namely, how free software and free culture generally can bring any money to artists and software engineers.

(Note: the bracketed numbers separated by colons in the passage below are times, measured from the start of Moglen’s speech.)

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Richard Stallman makes a very simple, but very meaningful point whilst discussing the SCO debacle:

Another SCO tool of obfuscation is the term “intellectual property”. This fashionable but foolish term carries an evident bias: that the right way to treat works, ideas, and names is as a kind of property. Less evident is the harm it does by inciting simplistic thinking: it lumps together diverse laws—copyright law, patent law, trademark law and others—which really have little in common. This leads people to suppose those laws are one single issue, the “intellectual property issue”, and think about “it”—which means, to think at such a broad abstract level that the specific social issues raised by these various laws are not even visible. Any “opinion about intellectual property” is thus bound to be foolish. (See our list of words to avoid.)

It’s interesting: I had thought a lot about the issue of turning ideas into property, but hadn’t thought about the danger of lumping all those legal categories together. It’s little bits of enlightenment like this that eventually add up to something meaningful.

Via Slashdot: I’m reading a speech by attorney Eben Moglen (my cache) right now that is just wonderful and brilliant and funny. Moglen is the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation and also a law professor, and apparently a phenomenal speaker. He’s got all sorts of great insights into the broader implications of free software. Of what I’ve read so far, this is one of the best:

We are, as it happens, driving out of business a firm called the Santa Cruz Operation [sic] — or SCO Ltd. That was not our intention. That’s a result of something called the creative destruction potential of capitalism, once upon a time identified by Joseph Schumpeter. We are doing a thing better at lower cost than it is presently being done by those people using other people’s money to do it. The result — celebrated everywhere that capitalism is actually believed in — is that existing firms are going to have to change their way of operation or leave the market. This is usually regarded as a positive outcome, associated with enormous welfare increases of which capitalism celebrates at every opportunity everywhere all the time in the hope that the few defects that capitalism may possess will be less prominently visible once that enormous benefit is carefully observed.

Mr. McBride does not want to go out of business. This is understandable. Mr. Gates does not want to go out of business either. But they are both on the wrong side of a problem in the political economy of the 21st century. They see software as a product. In order to make their quote “business model” close quote work, software must be a thing which is scarce. And out of the scarcity of software there will be a price which can be extracted, which will include an economic rent, from which Mr. McBride has suggested somebody will be enabled to buy a second home.

Mr. McBride thought it was the programmers who would be able to buy a second home but people who actually understand the current state of the software industry recognize that programmers are not buying second homes these days. I think Mr McBride means the executives who employ programmers and the financiers who employ executives to employ programmers will buy a second home on the software-is-product business model for a little while longer.

We think that software is not a product, because we do not believe in excluding people from it. We think that software is a form of knowledge. The International Business Machines Corporation, the Hewlett Packard Corporation, and a number of other organizations either represented here in body or in spirit this evening have another theory, which is that software in the 21st century is a service, a form of public utility combined with knowledge about how to make best use of the utility, which enables economic growth in peoples’ enterprises generally, from which there is a surplus to be used to pay the people who help you produce the surplus, by making the best possible use of the public utility.

I think it would be appropriate to suggest, if you like, that where we now are is in a world, where, if I may employ a metaphor, Mr. McBride and his colleagues — I do mean those in Redmond, as well as those in Utah — think that roads should all be toll roads. The ability to get from here to there’s a product. Buy it, or we exclude you from it. Others believe that highways should be public utilities. Let us figure out how to use the public highways best, so that everybody can profit from them — from the reduction of the costs of transportations of goods and the provisions of services — and by the by, there will be plenty of money to pay traffic engineers and the people who fix the pot holes.

We believe, for what little our view of the economics of the software market may be worth in the 21st century — after all we are the people who transformed it — we believe that the public utility service conception of software better reflects economic actuality in the 21st century. We are not surprised that Mr. McBride is going out of business on the other business model.

Via BoingBoing: famed author Orson Scott Card (of Ender’s Game fame) has written a really terrible and terribly argued screed against gay marriage (my cache, just in case the website admin comes to his or her senses and removes that post in recognition of its lunacy).

Where to begin.

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Via Slashdot, I’m reading a very solid essay by Eric Raymond on the hacker-oriented UI within GNU/Linux. I’ve made the same complaint many times before, and of course so have many of the people who read this site. It’s a common lament. Raymond happens to be one of the brighter lights within the open-source community, having designed fetchmail and written “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (which gives a set of reasons why the distributed Linuxy way of producing software might give better results than the closed-source “cathedral” way). He’s a great writer with great open-source bona fides, so maybe his complaints about the UI within open-source packages will get some traction. This paragraph sums it up best:

This kind of fecklessness is endemic in open-source land. And it’s what’s keeping Microsoft in business — because by Goddess, they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we usually manage.

So now it’s time to recognize the problems that everyone acknowledges in open-source UI, and move on to actually fixing them. This might actually take some money: sitting down with actual users in front of actual computers and watching how they approach a given task takes cash. Perhaps the open-source community’s corporate sponsorship (IBM, Sun, Apple) will help with that, but if possible I’d like to see us do it on our own.

A story on BoingBoing reads, in its entirety:

Save money by tearing apart your iPod mini

Joanne sez: “The $249 iPod mini contains a $479.95 Hitachi MicroDrive. So the best deal on buying a MicroDrive is to buy a iPod mini and take it apart. You get the MicroDrive for almost 50% off and you get a free pair of headphones. You can slap an old compact flash card into the mini and keep on rocking.” Link

Sean Bonner sez: “This guy took apart the mini iPod and found that it is NOT useable outside of the iPod, so buying one for the drive will prove useless.” A firmware issue?

Putting aside the problems that Bonner mentioned, I want to make one financial point, one technical point, and one political point (like “one bourbon, one scotch, one beer,” but with a less bluesy beat and kickin’ feel):

• Financial point: If the Hitachi MicroDrive costs $480, but it goes into a $250 iPod, then the MicroDrive cost is at least 47.9% profit. And that’s just assuming that Apple only breaks even on each iPod, whereas in fact they’re making a profit; some random guy who seems to know what he’s talking about asserts that the iPod profit margin is 20%. Though I’m sure it’s more complicated than this, that would suggest that the marginal cost of an iPod is $200. And still, we have to assume that Hitachi is making at least a small profit on each MicroDrive that it sells to Apple. So the manufacturing cost of a MicroDrive can’t be any more than $200.

  If someone eventually does find a way to make iPod MicroDrives work outside of the iPod, and can add less than $230 in labor to it, then what we have on our hands is a wonderful little arbitrage opportunity.

• Technical point: I find iPods kind of silly, and the financial point above kind of explains why. The iPod has some nice design, which I appreciate, and I also appreciate Apple’s innovation. But I’m inclined to believe that most of the price on the iPod is just the cachet it carries. I’d vastly prefer a tiny, boring, beige computer with no strange proprietary audio format. I thought we moved away from this sort of locked-in hardware years ago, and I thought we realized that it worked: the computer revolution happened because the world is filled with cheap fungible computers put out by cheap fungible computer manufacturers; the revolution happened because Apple’s model of the world lost. This is right and good. Your “IBM-compatible” computer (such a wonderful anachronism) can play any type of audio format, so long as that format can be decoded to a bitstream on its way to your sound card. If you want, it’s not that hard to build your own computer from a cheap hard drive, cheap case and so forth. Yes, you’re not going to get the Apple aesthetic, but in the grand scheme of all the revolutions that computers could bring about, Apple’s aesthetic sense has to be at the bottom of the list.

  I’m rambling, but my point is simply this: the “dumb hardware” revolution is still going on, and I hope that someday soon someone will just sell us a tiny hard drive with a swappable skin (just like some cell phones) and a generic OS that we’re free to hack all we want. Opening up the technology could be just as revolutionary as opening up IBM’s hardware back in the Eighties, and just as unpredictable.

  All that said, I of course realize that there are iPod competitors out there, and that many of them probably feature just what I’m asking for. So maybe I’m picking on Apple unnecessarily.

• Political point: As Adam’s been arguing for a while, people fetishize Apple way too much. Larry Lessig — canonical “lawyer who gets it” — nonetheless manages to describe the Bush In 30 Seconds campaign as iPolitics. Apple’s great, and I’m glad they’re designing cool tools like GarageBand for small artists. They’re probably doing a lot to advance the cause. But they’re also just a corporation, and I fundamentally don’t believe that economic and artistic revolution will come at the behest of any corporation. If bottom-up politics happens, it will be because the people make it happen, not because Apple put out a new cool toy for a few hundred dollars. I don’t doubt that they can help speed up the process of, say, dismantling the record companies, but that’s about it; they’re a catalyst, not a cause.

  Perhaps this is overthinking a toss-off “iDemocracy” line. But I don’t think so: Apple has done such a successful job marketing itself as the technology for iconoclasts that we’ve come to think iconoclasts need to buy the right toys. Ever since the “1984” ad (warning: features large embedded QuickTime movie), Apple’s been the revolutionary little guy against the faceless multinational. It’s odd to see a fundamentally self-interested corporation define itself as the voice of the oppressed, but I think that’s the implicit message in a lot of Apple’s branding. And it works fabulously.

  I suspect that revolutionaries in the jungles of Burma are using Linux on cheap, 5-year-old hardware, sending one another messages using the open-source GNU Privacy Guard package to keep everything encrypted. I doubt real revolutionaries can afford corporate sponsorship.

Speaking of Elvis Costello, you really should check out The Juliet Letters by Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. It took me a long while to get into it — it went into that pile of Albums That I Ignored For A Few Months, And Then Somehow Rediscovered And Listened To Obsessively. (“Water” by The Roots, off Phrenology, goes in the same pile). It’s just a beautiful concept album. Here’s how Costello describes the concept:

My wife, Cait, pointed out the tiny newspaper item about a Veronese academic who had taken on the task of replying to letters addressed to ‘Juliet Capulet.’ This apparently continued for a number of years, until some gentlemen of the press exposed this secret correspondence. Quite how he came by these letters in the first place remains unclear. We can only make a guess as to their content. After all, these people were writing to an imaginary woman, and a dead imaginary woman at that. Perhaps they were simply scholarly enquiries, or letters of sympathy from others disappointed in love, or even a plea from someone forced into an unhappy arranged marriage. Whatever was contained in these letters and their replies, the idea of this correspondence provided our initial inspiration.

[ . . . ]

With The Juliet Letters as our title, we thought of the many types of character that the letter form would allow us. Somewhere there is a list of letters which we considered. Love letter, begging letter, chain letter, suicide note, etc. In order to make the work more personal we decided that each of us would contribute to the text, not forgetting the words written by Michael Thomas’s wife, Marina. [ . . . ] It seems that only poets and politicians write letters with a view to them being printed in collected form. In my experience the language of most letters swings wildly from the lyrical to the banal and from the courteous to the confessional, sometimes inside the same paragraph. I hope we’ve caught something of this in the words of The Juliet Letters.

Isn’t that just a phenomenal premise for an album? And they execute it almost perfectly, though there’s a small zone in the middle where I unfailingly space out. With tracks like “This Sad Burlesque,” “For Other Eyes,” “Who Do You Think You Are?,” “Taking My Life In Your Hands,” and especially “This Offer Is Unrepeatable,” though, they can afford a little dead air. Highly recommended.

I wonder how often the Socrates/Christ character appears in world literature: a man many years ahead of his time, who’s disconnected from the material world and exists to educate those around him, but who eventually angers enough people that the power structure decides he must die. The martyr, in other words. I wonder if every culture has a martyr.

(This review contains spoilers, if such a thing is possible in a story that everyone has known for 2,000 years.)

I just got back from Mel Gibson’s The Passion. Not knowing much about the actual history surrounding Christ’s death, I’m not especially qualified to talk about the movie’s verisimilitude (forgive me for using that word; I tried everything else, including “true-to-lifeness,” before realizing that “verisimilitude” is probably the shortest word expressing what I want). I’ll just give some general impressions:

1. It’s beautiful. Given what it was trying to accomplish, it succeeded without question. The essence of Christ, as far as I’ve been able to tell hearing about the man throughout my life, is that he suffers. In the Christian teachings that I know, he forgives his enemies right up to the very end, while still suffering. This seems as though it would be really hard for an actor to convey: how do we convince people that this man has suffered, yet maintains this deep well of empathy throughout? How do you convey a virtually godlike man who’s still all too human? From my outsider’s perspective (both as a non-Christian and non-actor) that seems incredibly hard. I salute James Caviezel for pulling it off. I also salute Caleb Deschanel for his cinematography and John Debney for the score; both work perfectly toward what they were trying to accomplish. Indeed, if we judge perfection in film by how closely the artist met a goal, then I’d have to say that the cinematography and scoring here were nearly perfect.
2. Jews come off looking bad here, and Romans get the soft touch. Pontius Pilate is between a rock and a hard place — fighting off rebellion on the one hand, or execution by one of the Caesars on the other. He looks pretty helpless throughout. Jews, by contrast, share guilt for Jesus’s death about equally with Roman soldiers. The latter are sadistic, mindless, and bestial. Gibson spends very little time explaining Jewish bloodthirst in this film, except in probably three total minutes of dialogue in which Christ is labeled a blasphemer. As characters, Gibson doesn’t do a very good job with Jews; his portrayal of them is just about as complicated as Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock. I think it’s safe to say that Gibson doesn’t care much about any of the characters in this movie other than Jesus — which is, perhaps, to be expected. Christ suffers, his mother suffers, Pilate frets, Pilate’s wife feels pity for the Virgin Mary, Roman soldiers mercilessly beat Christ all the way to his death, and that’s about it.

   We never learn what made Judas tick, or why he betrayed Christ; we only see that he haggles over the price with Jewish high priests (a historical inaccuracy, I understand), then gets chased to the top of a hill by demonic (Jewish?) children who may or may not live inside his mind. He hangs himself to escape the agony of his own head. Gibson is too focused on getting a story out and revealing Christ’s essential goodness to really take any time on these characters. Maybe he thinks that they’ve already been so fleshed out in Western culture that he needn’t dive too far into them.

3. Normally I agree with Ebert that the point isn’t what the movie is about, but how the movie says what it’s about. Lots of different media could tell us about Christ; we could read him in a book or hear a speech about him or listen to a radio show about him. The point when talking about most films is: what did this filmmaker do here that he couldn’t have done just as easily in a book or a radio show?

   Having not read Ebert’s review of this movie yet (I will once I’ve finished jotting down these initial thoughts), I’m not sure whether he adopts the same standard for Gibson’s film. Here it doesn’t seem appropriate: The Passion is fundamentally a non-fiction film with some film style thrown in. The what of the story is just as important as the how. If Gibson tells us that Christ was a carnival barker in 1920’s America, we should have some problems with that. Similarly, if any documentary filmmaker avoids asking basic questions of his interview subject, we have a right to be concerned. Maybe Ebert is mostly right, but a film like The Passion isn’t the best example of his principle.

All in all, I’m quite glad I saw it — probably more for the style than anything else. I’m not really qualified to judge it on its anti-semitism, though it definitely paints Jews in a less-than-positive light. If these are false depictions of the truth about Judaism, then I find it regrettable but from my personal perspective not that awful: some questionable assertions about how Jews behaved 2,000 years ago wouldn’t have any effect on how I treat my Jewish friends now.

I was about to comment on something that Adam pointed out to me: my machine’s been up for — i.e., I’ve not rebooted it in — 42 days. His machine’s been up for 48 days. A machine that our friends run has been up for 177 days.

But what luck: I see via Slashdot that CRN has an interview with Microsoft’s general manager for platform strategies (my cache) — the guy who is charged with “eliminat[ing] open-source technology.” Reasonable people can disagree, but I think it’s almost as unreasonable to talk about eliminating open-source as it is to talk about banning discussions of sex. Good luck, but there’s no head you can cut off. Again, I’ll have to let the proof meld with the pudding: just wait and see.

But the uptime statistics on my crappy little 400 MHz Pentium II are indicative of something: it wasn’t hard to get a highly reliable server running atop cheap hardware, and it certainly wouldn’t be hard for a server admin. I’m running a web server, an email server, and a standard desktop productivity machine all on essentially free hardware. How many people are using similar Windows machines for the same purpose?

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Intel continue to suggest that there’s any reason for most people to upgrade their machines and their OSes to the latest and greatest. This is because obsolescence is their bread and butter. Without continual upgrades, Microsoft would be in the poor-house (or would effectively be collecting interest). Without new machines or expanding markets, Intel is in the same boat. Open-source developers aren’t. Again, I guess I’ve grown tired of trying to convince people that the open-source alternative works, and works well: by now, if you’ve not seen it for yourself, there’s nothing I can do to convince you. We’ll just have to wait. I doubt we’ll have to be all that patient.

Whenever you’re unemployed, your friends typically find it salutary to buy you large quantities of alcohol. Godblessem. Or ‘damnem, depending.

If it’s taking forever to load this blog, it’s because many people are downloading the Grey Album MP3s. I’m sitting behind a cable modem, though, so there’s not much bandwidth to go around. My apologies for any inconvenience. Bandwidth will go back to glacial-but-somehow-still-passable at midnight.

Via BoingBoing: Pentagon suppresses report predicting environmental doom; lefty British newspaper somehow gets its hands on it. I am highly skeptical. Can I get some confirmation on this?

Update: BoingBoing updated their post and linked to the full text of the “suppressed” report (my cache). I’ve not read it yet.

Yale Law professor Jack Balkin discusses an amazing and alarming new bill called the “Constitution Restoration Act.” I decided to gather my own impressions of the bill before reading Balkin’s, so turn to him first if you’re looking for an actual legal scholar’s knowledgeable take on the bill.

The Act’s goal seems to be the enforcement of Scalia-brand “originalism”: it orders the courts as follows:

In interpreting and applying the Constitution of the United States, a court of the United States may not rely upon any constitution, law, administrative rule, Executive order, directive, policy, judicial decision, or any other action of any foreign state or international organization or agency, other than the constitutional law and English common law.

My non-lawyerly mind gets the impression that the Court has always defined its own rules of intepretation. Granted, it has to work under the constraints Congress imposes, such as mandatory minimum sentences, but it seems unprecedented to mandate a particular mode of intepretation.

Then there’s the part of the bill that wants to reinject religion into our law enforcement:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element’s or officer’s acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

I wonder whether the bill will need to be amended when an evangelical Hindu or Muslim takes the bench.

Or how about the part of the bill that — as far as I can tell — puts in place an ex post facto order?

Any decision of a Federal court which has been made prior to or after the effective date of this Act, to the extent that the decision relates to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction under section 1260 or 1370 of title 28, United States Code, as added by this Act, is not binding precedent on any State court.

If I’m reading this correctly, it says that any Court decision “against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element’s or officer’s acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government,” is now null and void.

I grant you that the precise meaning of “ex post facto” is up to the case law. However, if this bill is as ex post factoy as it seems to be, then Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 3 in the Constitution is quite clear: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” Then again, Larry Lessig demonstrated pretty clearly that the ex post facto parts of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act were inseparable from the rest of the bill, yet he still lost his appeal of the Eldred case before the Supreme Court. So there must be some wiggle room. In this new bill, the ex post factoness just seems ludicrous.

The bill is available on THOMAS (search for “constitution restoration act”; keep the quotes), but their search facility is rather dysfunctional: it gives you a URL that disappears quickly; hence the copy that Professor Balkin linked to is gone. I’ve cached it, as a result.

Larry Lessig has a great description of the legal issues surrounding Grey Tuesday. Highly recommended.