¤

Given such a cast of characters, it is no wonder the Times writes such vacuous, foolish editorials; their writers haven't the skills to understand the issues they hector us about. A first-rate writer not only writes well but also understands what he is writing. [But] the Times ... doesn't hire people like that, not in economics or anything else (except for legal issues). The problem seems to go well beyond the Times, afflicting many leading newspapers and television networks. I am puzzled by all this. Markets usually work quite well at weeding out the bad products and replacing them with good products. So either there is a market failure of some sort in the entire national news business, or there are a large number of news consumers who enjoy reading or hearing ignorant assertions by untrained people.

The very strength of of the Internet that makes it proof against nuclear war and other physical attacks, its distributed nature, makes it even more vulnerable to [an] attack [on Cisco routers], because its defense depends on hundreds or thousands of organizations and individuals, while the attack can be mounted by one or just a few.

She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she make the room dark and slept. Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and made the room light.

UPDATE: Not that we don't have some serious challenges (warning: 398kB *.pdf): "Our analysis shows that this [electronic] voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts."

UPDATE: Just to rub it in, this quote from Doc Searls: "Two oddly allied mentalities provide intellectual air cover for ... threats to the marketplace. One is the extreme comfort certain industries feel inside their regulatory environments. The other is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises. Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments."

I hypothesize that repeating this process hourly, and over all the different topic subsections, will turn up an average curve that's extremely close to a perfect power law distribution.

What this means to me is that the news media is every bit the interlinked, cross-connected, and self-referential network that the blogosphere is [emphasis added -- JDM].

What makes one story bigger than another? I bet there are many in media who'd really like to know the answer to that one. I know scandal sells. Stories about kids sell. Celebrity and infamy Sell.

But I wonder why one story about an abducted kid takes off and has legs, while another pretty much identical one peters out after a day or two. Why the Niger Yellowcake story grows, while the bioweapon spewing drone aircraft story goes away.

A stony space rock must be about the size of two football fields, or 720 feet (220 meters) in diameter, to endure the thickening atmosphere and slam into the planet, according to the study, led by Philip Bland of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London.

"Stones of that size are just at the border where they're going to reach the surface -- a bit lower density and strength and it'll be a low-level air burst, a bit higher and it'll hit as a load of fragments and you'll get a crater," said Bland, who is also a Royal Society Research Fellow.

"An airburst would be a blast somewhere in the region of 500-600 megatons," Bland said in an e-mail interview. "As a comparison, the biggest-ever nuclear test was about 50 megatons."

The results suggest rocks about 720 feet across (220 meters) are likely to actually hit the surface every 170,000 years or so.

... as many as two or three dozen objects ranging from the size of a television to a studio apartment explode in the atmosphere every year, according to data from U.S. military satellites.

As far as we know, as President, his only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures.

He was a man whose mind was closed to abstractions and new ideas. But one of the truly striking things about [him] was his self-confidence.

He doesn’t seem to have had any interest in or aptitude for conceptionalizing broader policy issues. He was much more interested in policy implementation. That’s not to say that [he] was not interested in the big picture -- he just needed someone to draw it for him.

The subtleties of diplomatic negotiations between nations were completely lost on someone like [him]. He practiced a policy of brinkmanship. It didn’t really matter [what] ... country [it] was ... the negotiating posture remained the same. [He] really believed that he could pressure ... nations into surrendering to American demands.

Many historians have never forgiven [him] for that. What they see in him is a president who waged a war of conquest against a weaker neighbor. But the consequences of that war clearly benefited the United States.

So, how do you reconcile the two? On one hand, do Americans want to accept their role as a world power or do they want to adhere to those lofty principles that were responsible for the birth of this nation in the 18th century?

Texas, which he regarded as having once been a part of the country, must be restored to the United States, and the Oregon country, to which America held a clear and unquestionable title and which at that very moment was being settled by thousands of Americans, must be brought under the jurisdiction of American republicanism, in spite of the grasping hands of British imperial power. To these goals were added the reduction of the tariff to a revenue level, with the elimination of the protective principle so dear to the hearts of Whigs, and the establishment of the independent treasury system, the democratic alternative to the Whig preference for an all-powerful central bank. Finally, Polk added the acquisition of California, an aim that sprang from economic and manifest destiny considerations as well as from signs of British encroachment on the Pacific coast.

Harry Truman, a person of no little presidential experience himself, put it best: Polk "exercised the powers of the Presidency ... as they should be exercised"; he knew "exactly what he wanted to do in a specified period of time and did it, and when he got through with it he went home."

... it can be hacked.

And it has been.

Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too. They have used our own system of electronic wiretaps to wiretap US, because you see that's the problem: CALEA works for anyone who knows how to run it. Not all smart programmers are Americans or wear white hats. We should know that by now. CALEA has probably given up as much information as it has gathered. Part of this is attributable to poor design and execution, part to pure laziness, part to the impossibility of keeping such a complex yet accessible system totally secure, and part because hey, they're cops, they're good guys. Give 'em a break. Have a donut.

This vulnerability is never discussed in public because it is an embarrassment to law enforcement and because the agencies that pay for CALEA don't want its vulnerability to be known. That might compromise national security. Alas, national security is already compromised by the system itself, and the people who might take advantage of the vulnerability have known about it for years. Only we are kept in the dark.

UPDATE: Graze on over to Transterrestrial Musings and read this. Stupidity is breaking out all over.

The judge may have been misinformed about the solutions. But no one can accuse him of being timid or indecisive. To pay for all the changes. improvements, programs and new schools, he unilaterally increased property taxes 150%, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge and, when that wasn't enough, ordered the state of Missouri to make up for the shortfall.

"Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

"The people of this nation have the courage and resolve to defeat this disease and you will have a partner in the United States of America," Bush told Botswana's President Festus Mogae in a toast kicking off a festive luncheon.

"This is the deadliest enemy Africa has ever faced, and you will not face this enemy alone."

Bush's brief remarks were greeted with chants of "Pula! Pula!," which means "all good things."

[the trottoir's inventor, Anselme] Cote says one obvious application would be to speed up transfer times between train stations - for example the Gare de Lyon and Chatelet in Paris, or Euston and King's Cross train stations in London.

Two TRRs in sequence could be used over a distance of one kilometre - on the Champs-Elysees or at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport for example, Mr Cote says.

"The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds; they can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1km)," he says.

You can travel from Le Mans to Paris in 50 mins, he points out, but crossing Montparnasse Station may take you 20 minutes.

What's more, the sensory data can be saved, allowing one sensation to be accessed indefinitely.

The technology has obvious applications in distance learning, remote diagnostics, virtual reality and entertainment.

Published on Thursday, July 3, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Dear Clarence Thomas: It Happened on July 4, 1776
by Thom Hartmann

In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote a note to James Madison about the future possibility of a president who didn't understand the principles on which America was founded. "The tyranny of the legislatures is the most formidable dread at present," he wrote, "and will be for many years. That of the executive will come in its turn, but it will be at a remote period."

The new so-called conservatives claim the power to violate citizens' private lives because, they say, there is no "right to privacy" in the United States. In that, they overlook the history of America and the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776. And they miss a basic understanding of the evolution of language in the United States.

Of course, they're not the first to have made these mistakes.

When I was a teenager, it was a felony in parts of the United States to advise a married couple about how to practice birth control. This ended in 1965, in the Griswold v. Connecticut case before the U.S. Supreme Court, when the Court reversed the criminal conviction of a Planned Parenthood program director who had discussed contraception with a married couple, and of a doctor who had prescribed a birth-control device to them.

The majority of the Court summarized their ruling by saying, "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy...."

However, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart disagreed back in 1965, saying that he could find no "right of privacy" in the Constitution of the United States. Using his logic, under the laws of the day, the couple in question could themselves have been sent to prison for using birth control in their own bedroom.

As Justice Stewart wrote in his dissent in the case, "Since 1879 Connecticut has had on its books a law which forbids the use of contraceptives by anyone.... What provision of the Constitution, then, makes this state law invalid? The Court says it is the right of privacy 'created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.' With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court."

In that view of American law, Justice Clarence Thomas - George W. Bush's "role model" for future Supreme Court nominees - agrees.

In his dissent in the Texas sodomy case, Thomas wrote, "just like Justice Stewart, I 'can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,' or as the Court terms it today, the 'liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.'"

Echoing Thomas' so-called conservative perspective, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on June 27, 2003, "There is no right to privacy specifically enumerated in the Constitution." Jerry Falwell similarly agreed on Fox News.

Limbaugh and Thomas may soon also point out to us that the Constitution doesn't specifically grant a right to marry, and thus license that function exclusively to, say, Falwell. The Constitution doesn't grant a right to eat, or to read, or to have children. Yet do we doubt these are rights we hold?

The simple reality is that there are many "rights" that are not specified in the Constitution, but which we daily enjoy and cannot be taken away from us by the government. But if that's the case, Bush and Thomas would say, why doesn't the Constitution list those rights in the Bill of Rights?

The reason is simple: the Constitution wasn't written as a vehicle to grant us rights. We don't derive our rights from the constitution.

Rather, in the minds of the Founders, human rights are inalienable - inseparable - from humans themselves. We are born with rights by simple fact of existence, as defined by John Locke and written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," the Founders wrote. Humans are "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...." These rights are clear and obvious, the Founders repeatedly said. They belong to us from birth, as opposed to something the Constitution must hand to us, and are more ancient than any government.

The job of the Constitution was to define a legal framework within which government and business could operate in a manner least intrusive to "We, The People," who are the holders of the rights. In its first draft it didn't even have a Bill of Rights, because the Framers felt it wasn't necessary to state out loud that human rights came from something greater, larger, and older than government. They all knew this; it was simply obvious.

Thomas Jefferson, however, foreseeing a time when the concepts fundamental to the founding of America were forgotten, strongly argued that the Constitution must contain at least a rudimentary statement of rights, laying out those main areas where government could, at the minimum, never intrude into our lives.

Jefferson was in France when Madison sent him the first draft of the new Constitution, and he wrote back on December 20, 1787, that, "I will now tell you what I do not like [about the new constitution]. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land..."

There had already been discussion among the delegates to the constitutional convention about whether they should go to the trouble of enumerating the human rights they had held up to the world with the Declaration of Independence, but the consensus had been that it was unnecessary.

The Declaration, the writings of many of the Founders and Framers, and no shortage of other documents made amply clear the Founders' and the Framers' sentiments that human rights were solely the province of humans, and that governments don't grant rights but, rather, that in a constitutionally limited democratic republic We, The People - the holders of the rights - grant to our governments whatever privileges our government may need to function (while keeping the rights for ourselves).

This is the fundamental difference between kingdoms, theocracies, feudal states, and a democratic republic. In the former three, people must beg for their rights at the pleasure of the rulers. In the latter, the republic derives its legitimacy from the people, the sole holders of rights.

Although the purpose of the Constitution wasn't to grant rights to people, as kings and popes and feudal lords had done in the past, Jefferson felt it was necessary to be absolutely unambiguous about the solid reality that humans are holders of rights, and that in no way was the Constitution or the new government of the United States to ever be allowed to infringe on those rights. The Constitution's authors well understood this, Jefferson noted, having just fought a revolutionary war to gain their "self-evident" and "inalienable" rights from King George, but he also felt strongly that both the common person of the day and future generations must be reminded of this reality.

"To say, as Mr. Wilson does, that a bill of rights was not necessary," Jefferson wrote in his December 1787 letter to Madison, "...might do for the audience to which it was addressed..." But it wasn't enough. Human rights may be well known to those writing the constitution, they may all agree that governments may not infringe on human rights, but, nonetheless, we must not trust that simply inferring this truth is enough for future generations who have not so carefully read history or who may foolishly elect leaders inclined toward tyranny. "Let me add," Jefferson wrote, "that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."

Madison took Jefferson's notes and shared them with Hamilton, Adams, Mason, and others, and then sent a letter to Jefferson outlining the objections to a Bill of Rights that had been raised by the members of the constitutional convention.

On March 15, 1789, Jefferson replied to Madison: "I am happy to find that, on the whole, you are a friend to this amendment. The declaration of rights is, like all other human blessings, alloyed with some inconveniences, and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly overweighs the evil.

"I cannot refrain from making short answers to the objections which your letter states to have been raised [by others]:

"1. 'That the rights in question are reserved, by the manner in which the federal powers are granted.' Answer. A constitutive act [the Constitution] may, certainly, be so formed, as to need no declaration of rights. ... In the draught of a constitution which I had once a thought of proposing in Virginia, and I printed afterwards, I endeavored to reach all the great objects of public liberty, and did not mean to add a declaration of rights. ... But...this instrument [the U.S. Constitution] forms us into one State, as to certain objects, and gives us a legislative and executive body for these objects. It should, therefore, guard us against their abuses of power, within the field submitted to them."

In this, Jefferson is stating openly that the purpose of the Constitution - and even the Bill of Rights - is not to grant rights to the people, but to restrain government. It doesn't grant, it limits.

And, Jefferson said, his proposed Bill of Rights was only a beginning and imperfect; it would be nearly impossible to list in detail all the rights humans have. But a start, a try, is better than nothing - at least it will make clear that the purpose of the constitution is to limit government:

"2. 'A positive declaration of some essential rights could not be obtained in the requisite latitude.' Answer. Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can."

His third point was that the states may try to limit peoples rights if the explicit nature of government and rights wasn't spelled out in the Constitution through a Bill of Rights, so the constitution protected citizens from tyrannical state governments who may overreach (as the Supreme Court ultimately ruled Connecticut had done in banning birth control).

And, finally, Jefferson noted that if they were to err, it would be better to err on the side of over-defining rights - even if past efforts had proven unnecessary or nonviable - than under-defining them.

"4. 'Experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights.' True. But though it is not absolutely efficacious under all circumstances, it is of great potency always, and rarely inefficacious. A brace the more will often keep up the building which would have fallen, with that brace the less. There is a remarkable difference between the characters of the inconveniences which attend a declaration of rights, and those which attend the want of it. The inconveniences of the declaration are, that it may cramp government in its useful exertions. But the evil of this is short-lived, moderate and reparable. The inconveniences of the want of a declaration are permanent, afflicting and irreparable."

A Bill of Rights wasn't necessary, but it was important. We all knew the constitution was designed to define and constrain government, but it's still better to say too much about liberty than too little. Even though this thrown-together-at-the-last-minute Bill of Rights doesn't cover all the rights we consider self-evident, and may inconvenience government, it's better to include it than overlook it and risk future generations forgetting our words and deeds.

Beyond that, there's good reason to believe - as the majority of the Supreme Court did in the Griswold case, the Texas sodomy case, and at least a dozen others - that the Founders and Framers did write a right to privacy into the Constitution. However, living in the 18th Century, they never would have actually used the word "privacy" out loud or in writing. A search, for example, of all 16,000 of Thomas Jefferson's letters and writings produces not a single use of the word "privacy." Nor does Adams use the word in his writings, so far as I can find.

The reason is simple: "privacy" in 1776 was a code word for toilet functions. A person would say, "I need a moment of privacy" as a way of excusing themselves to go use the "privy" or outhouse. The chamberpots around the house, into which people relieved themselves during the evening and which were emptied in the morning, were referred to as "the privates," a phrase also used to describe genitals. Privacy, in short, was a word that wasn't generally used in political discourse or polite company during an era when women were expected to cover their arms and legs and discussion of bedroom behavior was unthinkable.

It wasn't until 1898 that Thomas Crapper began marketing the flush toilet and discussion of toilet functions became relatively acceptable. Prior to then, saying somebody had a "right to privacy" would have meant "a right to excrete." This was, of course, a right that was taken for granted and thus the Framers felt no need to specify it in the Constitution.

Instead, the word of the day was "security," and in many ways it meant what we today mean when we say "privacy." Consider, for example, the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...."

Similarly, "liberty" was also understood, in one of its dimensions, to mean something close to what today we'd call "privacy." The Fifth Amendment talks about how "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property..." and the Fourteenth Amendment adds that "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property...." And, of course, the Declaration of Independence itself proclaims that all "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So now, on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we have come to that remote period in time Jefferson was concerned about. Our leaders, ignorant of or ignoring the history of this nation's founding, make a parody of liberty and, with their so-called "Patriot Act," flaunt their challenges even to those rights explicitly defined in the Constitution.

Our best defense against today's pervasive ignorance about American history and human rights is education, a task that Jefferson undertook in starting the University of Virginia to provide a comprehensive and free public education to all capable students. A well-informed populace will always preserve liberty better than a powerful government, a philosophy which led the University of California and others to once offer free education to their states' citizens.

As Jefferson noted in that first letter to Madison: "And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

The majority of the Supreme Court wrote in their opinion in the 1965 Griswold case legalizing contraception that, "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights [and] older than our political parties..." saying explicitly that the right of privacy is a fundamental personal right, emanating "from the totality of the constitutional scheme under which we live."

Hopefully Americans - including Clarence Thomas - will realize that the Constitution doesn't grant rights but instead constrains government. Our rights predate any government, a fact recognized when the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. We must teach our children and inform the world about the essentials of human rights and how our constitutional republic works - deriving its sole powers from the consent of We, The People who hold the rights - if democracy is to survive.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is the author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," and a nationally syndicated daily talk show host. www.thomhartmann.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.