Steve Reads

The Constitution famously says very little about the federal courts, and it took Marbury v. Madison to establish that they even had the right to carry out judicial review. So when I see that the House passed a bill today barring federal courts from deciding on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, I wonder: how far can they go with this? If both houses of the legislative branch decided that all legislative questions would now be beyond the federal court system’s reach, would that be legal? I guess this is equivalent to asking whether the legislature could ever forbid federal courts from doing what Marbury says they can do. Put another way: has the courts’ right to carry out judicial review only stood so long because the legislature hasn’t decided to void it?

I’ve had a sort of low-level displeasure with David McCullough for years. I read his John Adams and found it really fawning; ditto Truman. George Will, in a laudatory review of John Adams, wrote that McCullough

does not write “pathographies.” That neologism, coined by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, denotes a kind of biography that, of late, has been too much with us. Such biographies portray their subjects not just warts and all, but as mostly warts — the sum of their pathologies. It speaks well of McCullough that he abandoned writing a biography of Picasso because he could not stand to be so long in the company of such an unpleasant man.

as though this were a compliment. It seems to me that the proper posture for a historian is disinterest: not adoration, but not hatred either. It’s unintentional left-handed praise, it seems to me, that McCullough can only write about people he likes. Where do I go if I want to find out the bad things about Adams? He’s a human being; surely he made some mistakes.

Reading The Jefferson Image reminds me, more to the point, just how little McCullough adds to the standard Federalist/Democratic picture that U.S. society has painted for over 200 years. When Federalism (in this case Adams) is in the ascendant, Jefferson is normally portrayed as an ineffectual atheist Frenchman with a disagreeable character. And that’s exactly the portrait that McCullough gives us. He’s all about “character”: sure Adams stood behind the Alien and Sedition Acts to punish his enemies, and sure Truman dropped the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities — but at least they both have character. Neither Adams nor Truman has ever been respected as a pioneer in the great American self-government experiment; I suspect that if you asked McCullough, he’d tell you that this has more to do with the snobbishness of American elites than with the merits of either man. Which plays into the argument that Richard Hofstadter made in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life: intelligence has never won American politicians elections.

Which is to say that my recent reading has only reinforced my impression of McCullough.

P.S.: I wrote a review of John Adams on Amazon a few years ago. Scroll down on that page for my review, or just look below the fold here.

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The House of Representatives has approved $1.5 billion of funding over 10 years for the Metro, provided the Metro gets

a $1.5 billion match from the District, Maryland and Virginia. The regional jurisdictions have to create a major, dedicated source of money for Metro — such as a portion of a sales tax earmarked for transit — to cover their share of capital and operational expenses.

Says Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), “We have a lot of people who don’t like spending money on mass transit.”

I’d like to find some rigorous economic studies of the long-term cost savings in mass transit. In Northern Virginia in particular, I’m sure that the road-maintenance savings, air-quality improvements, decreased commute time, decreased car accidents, reduced acts of violent road rage and decreased gasoline consumption would pay for Metro improvements rather quickly, though I’d like to see some numbers. It might also be fun to see the Metro discontinue service into Virginia until they pay up. But that would probably backfire.

I don’t have time to write about it now, but the last thing I read before I left lunch was a discussion of Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume work Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind: 1620-1800, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860, and the posthumously published third volume, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, covering 1860 to 1920. One of the premises of the series, in short, is that the Jeffersonian tradition in American government had slowly become more and more obsolete, and that the Hamiltonians had always had a much better grasp on the actual levers of governance. Liberals — represented by Jefferson — had always been much more devoted to principle. They were beautiful principles (equality of man and all that), but they were always going to lose to Federalists who understood economic reality. As time went on, and the agrarian society that Jefferson exalted became less and less prominent, liberals were going to lose even more.

Looks like that may be next in the Why Liberals Keep Losing series.

A propos of a TikiWiki SQL-injection vulnerability, I wonder: why isn’t there a single library for sanitizing and inserting things via SQL queries? Why does this need to be done anew by every open-source package that uses SQL?

A while ago I wondered what the appropriate return value should be from a function that reads a file which may be empty. If the file is empty, the function legitimately wants to return the empty list () or the empty string ". I wanted the function to signal an error in some way — say, when the file doesn’t exist — and I wasn’t sure how to do that.

Turns out I was being silly. Perl has a value called undef, such that you can do things like so:

unless( defined( func() ) ) { doSomething(); } 

Problem solved: if the function wants to signal an error condition, it should just return undef.

My friend Sharon’s friend lives in Lebanon, and gave Sharon her perspective on it in an email, which I include below. It is heartbreaking. I don’t know what to do.

My friend Chris sent me an Israeli perspective on the bombardment the other day. I’ve not read it yet; I’ll do that soon and probably post it here too.

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I probably need to read Leo Strauss. He seems to be the philosophical godfather of the neoconservatives, and as such he’s been coming up a lot recently (e.g., today, in the longest blog post I’ve possibly ever read).

For that matter Machiavelli — specifically The Prince and Discourses on Livy — should be rather high on my list.

P.S.: See Cosma Shalizi on some neocons as filtered (kinda) through Strauss, whence Brad DeLong devoting far more powers of satire than I have to the task.

P.P.S.: Below the fold, an article from the New York Review of Books that’s behind a paywall.

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Somehow I just learned — via Ze Frank’s show — about a successful use of the state-secrets privilege to quash a man’s lawsuit against the government. The man had claimed that “he was beaten, sodomized and repeatedly questioned [by the CIA] about alleged terrorist ties.” Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed the claim because “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets.”

Um. Hm. I wonder if they’ll appeal. Because that’s insane.

P.S.: I include El-Masri’s statement below the fold.

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My friend Charlie — sometimes-commenter to this blog, when I write about programming and don’t make too much of an ass of myself, or write about math and invariably make an ass of myself — had a funny story when I was in Berkeley. A professor at Berkeley — some googling tells me it was Leo Harrington — had recently delivered a talk in which he translated Hegel into the language of group actions. (E.g., “We are spirited away towards encountering certain beings; we end up potentially constituted as a set U acted on transitively and faithfully by a group G (although G and U are never actually achieved and are to be viewed as under construction) . . . ”) To one unfamiliar with the jargon, this might seem earnest, but I have some severe doubts that it was delivered that way. I hope that it was delivered totally deadpan, whether or not it was serious; that just makes the joke better. If you grasp the absurdity of this translation — like translating the works of William Shakespeare into recipes for flan — you will find the whole project witty in an extraordinarily subtle way. Merely getting the joke is half the fun.

That’s a long way of getting around to the book I’m reading now, by way of a story featuring two of my favorite things, namely math dilettantism and snarkiness.

The book is The Jefferson Image In The American Mind, which I only discovered a week ago. It’s funny in the same way as that joke, though the joke in the Jefferson book may be all in my mind. [*] It’s 460 pages of Jefferson’s travails after his death, wherein he’s alternately viewed as the savior of the nation; its destroyer through weak government; a powerful man of action; an effeminate, pusillanimous coward; the apostle of individual liberties; the creator of states’ rights; the father of sanctified, timeless liberal democracy; and the inventor of a governmental technology made obsolete by the new industrial world.

This is just very funny. After a couple hundred pages of it, I find myself giggling. I don’t quite know if this was the intent, but it’s almost unavoidable. By the middle of the book, you feel bad for Jefferson’s corpse and somewhat mystified at what the man actually believed.

It’s not that he’s an especially inconsistent or shape-shifty man; indeed, I think part of the point is that his views changed just as much as any responsible human’s would in the face of changing circumstances. But he’s the cofounder of a nation, so his words and deeds take on far greater importance than yours or mine. He also developed and applied a body of philosophy to the new American government, which few others among the Framers (Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Marshall  . . .  anyone else?) can say. When you put your views on the line, you have to expect that you’ll get fired upon.

It’s an exquisite book, meticulously researched and sturdily delivered; Peterson’s sentences are workaday and occasionally funny, but the essence of his humor (if I’m not imagining it) comes over time, not in yuks. It’s enormously thought-provoking, which may be inevitable if you’re an American (and hence may have less to do with Peterson); I filled up three pages of notes during my time at Murky and at the Library of Congress (namely the Jefferson Building — DUH DUH DUH) today. I’ll have more to write on the subject presently.

In the meantime, I highly recommend it if you’re interested in the rather malleable American definition of freedom.

[*] — The Harrington joke can’t all be in my head; I don’t believe that someone could write that “The Doctrine of Essence is about how G acting on U reflects the doctrine of being, where again our access is limited” and be serious about it.

It’s a trifling point, as these things go, but: I’m surprised the media routinely transliterate a particular group from the Arabic as “Hezbollah.” The name means “Party of God,” and if I’m not mistaken it has “Allah” in the name. The more sensible transliteration, it seems to me, is “Hezb’Allah,” which I’ve only seen occasionally. You’d think that a media intent on scaring people about Arabs would jump on the chance to remind us that they worship Allah.

Of course I’m no linguist. If anyone has more authoritative information on why the group is more commonly rendered “Hezbollah,” feel free to chime in.

The Mark Pike, as mentioned previously, is way cool. He has now left my employer, but before he heads off to law school, he’s going on a last hurrah: a roadtrip across the country to push E85. It’s part of my employer’s campaign for American fuels to help “kick the oil habit.” To the extent that E85 helps with reducing foreign oil dependence, I applaud it. To the extent that corn- and alcohol-based fuels are better for the environment than oil, as measured (for instance) by the ratio of input energy to output energy, I also applaud it. To the extent that it’s just a political play to get the “heartland” on our side, I have some reservations. People at work have heard my reservations in recent days.

However, all that said, I’m very happy for Mark. It sounds like he’s having a great time. I wish him the best, both on this trip and in law school.

I had a really unbelievably spectacular day. I started, as usual for a Saturday, at Murky Coffee on Capitol Hill and had the best coffee — by general acclamation, as far as I can tell — in the D.C. area. It’s certainly the best coffee I’ve ever had anywhere. I’ve had a metric buttload of coffee, so I think that’s non-vacuous praise.

Incidentally, the Washington Post is soliciting nominations for various Best Places in D.C. — bakeries, bookstores, restaurants, coffeeshops, etc. If you live around here, you should go vote. Since I’m such a Murky Coffee partisan, I would particularly invite everyone who likes coffee to sample all the nominees and then vote for their favorite; in my mind, there isn’t the slightest bit of competition for the best-coffee title, though I suppose there may be some argument over which is the best coffeeshop. Even in that arena, though, I think Murky wins hands down: it’s in a beautiful part of Eastern Market where, on the right day, you can sit outside and smell the flowers as you sip the best coffee in the city.

From Murky, I took a stroll down to the Library of Congress and spent probably an hour reading in the main reading room (seen at right, actual size). It’s grand and glorious, but like a lot in D.C. — in fact, like 90% of the government buildings — it sacrifices humanity on the altar of grandiosity.

I’ve been meaning to write for a while, actually, about what makes this place so odd. It’s not a center of education, of culture, of commerce or of industry, except for the defense contractors that fill Northern Virginia. It never has been. It has only been a center of government. Places like Philadelphia or Boston or New York or Paris all exist and thrive because people want to be there; D.C. is here by fiat. As The Age of Federalism makes clear, this particular trick almost never happens; the only other time it has happened is Saint Petersburg, and there it happened because Russia was under the control of a ferocious dictator of near-superhuman talent and energy. Until the Civil War, no one wanted to live here. Today, it has something like cargo-cult culture: someone clearly read about what makes a city great, and lined up all the toy soldiers to make it look like one of the world’s great cities, then waited. But it doesn’t really work. It’s all very clear and cold and pure and very dead.

But that’s just my standard rant, and it interrupts in no way the flow of a very wonderful day. My amazing friend Aristotle Benjamin Winger — whom you must meet to truly appreciate, because words do not do Aris justice — is in town for the weekend to spend time with the love of his life, and before her flight arrived he decided to see me; I was, of course, honored to see such a spectacular person. We spent some time chatting in Tryst, spent some more time chatting over falafel (a nominee, incidentally, in the Cheap Eats category in the WaPo survey), then headed up to Meridian Hill to play some frisbee. We threw uphill for a time before venturing to the top of the hill and noticing that there is, in fact, an enormous — football-field-sized — flat park up there. We played for probably another hour. I threw some damned good frisbee, as did Winger. I’m inclined to find some ultimate-frisbee pickup games on the basis of my playing today; my forehand is awfully good when I practice a little.

So I got lots of physical exercise, lots of time outside, lots of reading, great coffee, and time with one of the greatest people I know. That counts as a complete day in my book.

TPM Muckraker reader “DK” — anonymous until now, I’d imagine — has written a very simple yet eloquent explanation of what’s going on with Specter’s FISA “compromise” and Democrats’ response to it. I quote it in full below the fold.

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Properly understood, conservatism is very much a virtue. Conservatism is at the heart of the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Conservatism is the desire to move slowly, adhere to tradition when tradition has proven its value, and yet realize when things do need to change. Obviously the world does change, so doctrinaire conservatism goes overboard. Judicious conservatism should be our mantra. Change for change’s sake is dangerous, but then so is inertia for inertia’s sake.

Understood in that way, the problem is not that the Bush administration is conservative; it is that it is extremely radical, overturning generations — centuries? — of precedent in the conduct of war, the treatment of our citizens, the government of our finances, and our respect for humankind. Bush has been labeled conservative because in our society, one of the strongest meanings of ‘conservative’ is ‘cultural conservative’. (Cultural conservatives are those who are committed to a rollback of political and social freedoms won at great cost in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are a pathetic counterrevolution to the excesses of the real revolution that took place from World War 2 through the middle of the 1960’s. They are fighting a long-term losing battle to dislodge habits of life that are now deep within the American marrow, and they are destined to lose painfully.) Yet what we need right now is true conservatism — true devotion to the principles that have made this country great for 230 years. What we need is a Democratic party that will proudly label itself ‘The True Conservatives’ and make clear what that means. It seems to me that branding ourselves in this way could send exactly the right message to both sides of the political divide.

Sadly, if I wanted to make an Earth sandwich and hold one piece of bread, the other person would have to be holding his or her bread somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The same appears to be true of anyone else living in the continental U.S. or Mexico. If you live on the border between Canada and the U.S., your sandwich buddy could be standing in “French Southern and Antarctic Lands” (which look pretty awesome), but otherwise I think North Americans are going to lose this contest. (However, northern Alaska and northern Antarctica are on opposite sides of the world, which if you think about it makes sense.)

Actually Europeans look pretty screwed too. And Africans. Pretty much anywhere you look, the other side of the world is water. China’s set, though: stand in China, the other guy stands in Argentina, and you’re set.

Forgive me for this post, but the opposite-side-of-the-world tool is weirdly addictive.

For my little Ze Frank downloading script, I’d like the videos to either be written or not be written; if the power goes out mid-download, I don’t want half a video to be written to disk. (Half a video may in fact be more useful than no video at all, but this is more about learning something than about the specific application.) The software engineers in the room will note that what I want is an atomic write.

Is there some quick way to get an atomic write in Perl, or do I have to write my own journaled writer that can roll back if a write is incomplete?

(Click the photo for others in the series)

This whole article hurts me more than I can say.

P.S. (14 July 2006): Jack Balkin and Marty Lederman provide summaries of the Specter “compromise.” In no way is it a compromise; it gives the president absolutely everything he could want, and much more. It is a dream for the president. It affirms lawlessness of a high order. Specter should be ashamed.

And to cap it off, Balkin notes that the bill authorizes warrantless breaking and entering:

the Specter bill also gives the President a blank check to engage in warrantless physical searches — i.e. breaking and entering — as long as he claims that he is engaged in foreign intelligence surveillance. 18 U.S.C. 1827 currently makes it a crime to “execute a physical search within the United States [for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information] except as authorized by statute.” That is, under the current rules, if the President wants to break into someone’s house to look for evidence of spying, he has to comply with FISA first. Specter’s bill amends this provision to read “except as authorized by statute or the Constitution.” In other words, physical searches are not illegal if the President breaks into your house asserting his Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief. None of FISA’s oversight procedures apply.

So when you hear that sound of broken glass in the night, don’t be alarmed. It’s not a burglar. It’s not a thief. It’s just some agents from the government, and they’re here to help.

A five-minute presentation on why Gamma et al.’s book is actually not an especially interesting thing, and how actual pattern languages are much more interesting.

Takeaway sentence:

I felt I would deserve anything I got for having associated [the design-patterns] movement, however peripherally, with goat dick.

Actual software engineers: care to comment?