Damn. Just Damn

Just checking in, really.

Some notes — first, thanks for good thoughts sent our way via twitter, Facebook and all the rest. My family and I are all OK.  We actually are visiting a very ill relative out of town, so nowhere near any of the mess.  All my wonderful students are OK, I believe, though I can’t imagine their state of mind.

I note that the MIT first year students who are finishing up their freshman year have now seen a terrorist attack, a murder on campus, a town in lockdown — and have as some of their formative childhood memories the fall of the towers when they were around six years old.  They’ve spent almost all of their lives watching the unfolding of wars of choice fought in the case of Iraq on false pretexts.  They seen torture routinized and the only political process they’ve witnessed is one of persistant anti-democratic manouvering pursued by one of the two major parties in our system.

They remain enormously optimistic (or at least have been in my conversations with them up till the last couple of days). They are phenomenally smart, gifted, optimistic. I damn well hope they stay so.  We need them.

Next:  I’m heartsick at the death of the MIT police officer.  I am for the marathon victims as well of course, and more abstractly for the dead on the street in Iraq, in Mogadishu, in…  But I’m like almost everyone, I think; those losses that strike closest to home color the emotions in a particular way.

Campus cops have a strange, really difficult job:  they have to both police and protect in a hothouse setting full of young (and often insufficiently wise older) folk who are not always sure that the rules and norms of the wider world are more than advisory.  Our force at MIT manages that balancing act really, really well, especially given their charge within a university whose traditions that include translocating cop cars to, shall we say, interesting coordinates.*  From the report it sounds like our man was gunned down, really just executed, and I couldn’t be more enraged nor heartsick.  I’ll save for a different post the political point I think most of you can probable guess. This isn’t the time.  But you know I’m thinking it.

More close to home stuff.  One of the graduate students in my department, a really sweet, good guy, turns out to have been long time friends with the Richard family and their eight year old son, Martin, killed  in Monday’s bombing.  The connections which bind us all run through all kinds of chance links, but through that pathway that already horrific loss comes closer.  Any murder is hateful, but the killing of kids….I’m not going to write down the words that flow through my head as I cycle back to that.  But I can tell you that, however irrational it may be, my sense of wretched, futile anger ramped up when I learned of the loss refracted through the sorrow of someone I know.

That student and other friends of the family have set up a fund to help the Richards directly — the intention is to cover medical expenses, funeral costs, and whatever else it takes to get through the various horribles coming up over the next while. I’ve thrown a bit that way, and I offer the link up here if anyone feels so moved.  The “One Fund” to offer help to those affected by the bombings (and, I’d guess though I don’t know, those affected by last night/today’s evens) is here. I’d note that folks in town and around the country have already been phenomenally generous, and I’ll add my private thanks to the much grander and more official ones I’m sure will follow.

Last utterly meaningless coincidence.  The manhunt in Watertown going on as  I write this is right smack in the middle of the neighborhood I lived in until 2009.  My wife just picked up a facebook post of a couple of hours ago from  the friends to whom we sold our apartment.  They were as of that time  hiding down in the basement with their two kids.  They’ve been there all night, since they heard the explosions, and they are trying to figure out how to get the little one to sleep, while easing the fear in their older child.  Again, close to home.

I write all this aware that around the world what is striking me as an utter derangement of the way life ought to be is simply the status quo.  I know that the US in general is a phenomenally lucky country, spared so much of the horrors visited on folks around the world — sometimes by the explicit policy and actions of the United States of America. (No need to shout DROOOOONES at me, folks).  And you know what?  I think mine is the right reaction.  This stuff is wrong, unacceptable, to be pushed back at home and everywhere.

I’m rambling. I’ll stop.

I thank everyone for their good wishes, your anger,  humor, and perhaps as much as anything else, your simple presence. It’s good to be able to shout, and not simply into the void.  Tip of the hat to y’all — and hug those you love, two footed and four, spend time talking to folks…do all that human stuff.

*Other first responders are not immune, either.

Images:  Ferdinand Waldmüller, The First Day of School, 1830

Pierre Auguste-Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1875

 

Stray Boston Marathon Bombing Notes

Hey everyone.

Anger. Grief. Frustration. Rage. Sorrow.

Been cycling through those for the last hour or so, ever since my wife shouted down stairs to check Twitter.*

We’re all OK — thanks for the expressions of concern for Boston Balloon-Juicers in John’s thread.  [Anne Laurie -- check in, please.] I live close to the Marathon route and about 2-3 miles from the finish line, and you can hear the sirens going back and forth, but no one in my house is fit enough to take part in the event, and we didn’t stir ourselves to watch up in Coolidge Corner either.  (Some benefits to sloth there are, Yoda says.)

I just had a walk with my son and his friend ninja-ing behind and around me.  It was astonishing.  There were lots of people on the streets between my house and the little park and pond we often stroll around.  Everyone — and I really do mean just about everybody — was walking with their heads down, peering at a smart-phone screen.  I’ve never seen anything like it; there was a kind of hunger for news, for connection, for … perhaps a reminder that the person holding the phone was both still here and connected to others in town.  I was doing the same, reading the comments on John’s post.  When I got to the end, I hit refresh and read the next twenty, a cycle that took me through the half hour walk.

Despite the head-in-screen hunger, folks were eager to make eye-contact.  Boston isn’t quite New York in its studied avoidance of direct gaze, but we’re not by reputation exactly the most outgoing, hey-shucks-how-are-ya-stranger kind of place either.  But today, we were nodding at each other, saying a couple of words of greeting, even being welcomed, as I was at one corner, to eavesdrop openly on a phone conversation one young woman was having, describing the way the explosion looked from where she saw it — a tube of smoke straight up, then blossoming out.  Her two friends were with her, and we kind of ducked and shrugged at each other, and I just listened while someone narrated the event.

I stopped to talk briefly with two runners from the event, a couple.  They had both made it most of the way, but were stopped, of course, as soon as word of the bombs passed, and were walking to the apartment belonging to the female half of the pair.  I asked them if they were OK, and they were glad of an excuse to stop and repeat (perhaps to themselves) that they were, that they’d turned safely away from the disaster.  I asked them if they needed help.  It was kind of a stupid question on the face of it, as they were both hale and walking towards the comfort of home — but for all that I winced inside as I fumbled the question, they seemed glad of being asked, though indeed there was nothing they needed, at least not that I had to give.

The two of them were moving strongly.  The woman was wrapped in one of those metallized blankets they hand out, and she looked a little more bent over than her companion, but it was clear to me that they had pretty much run a marathon and were doing OK. But there faces  were grim, fallen — nothing like you see in my part of town every year but this one.  Usually, even the folks who really strain across the line get that “I did it!” look.  This year, not a chance.

I’m sad as hell, of course, especially as the expected-but-hoped-against reports of deaths as well as injuries are coming in.  And I’m enraged: how the fuck dare some assholes do this to these people, to my town, to all of us.

I have no idea who did this, of course, and I’m not going to begin to speculate.  I am going to note, with my usual historian’s reflex, that the disruption of civil society by thugs who crave notice and power is not a unidirectional process.  We’ve dealt with fuckers like this in the past — see the 19th century anarchist tradition, or the abortion bombers, the inept Weather folk, or McVeigh and his penumbra of deadly idiots.  The Europeans have had it worse.  Enemies internal or external may seek to derange us.  We get to decide the timing and thoroughness of their failure.

Last notes:  best news I’ve had so far, beyond that of family and nearby friends being OK is that all my current graduate students check in fine.  I hope the same is true for all those close to you (and me!).  And my deepest sympathy and regard for those caught up in the blast, their families, loved ones, and their circles of community.

*Oh brave new world and all that. It literally did not occur to either of us to check the actual TV until a friend came over to drop off her son for a play-date and wanted to check the up-to-the-second stuff.  It truly never crossed my mind.  I think back to when Challenger blew up, and the speed with which I got the ‘tube up, and its one more measure of how swiftly our lines of communication and connection have shifted.

Image:  Theodore Robinson, Beacon Street, Boston, 1884

The Land Of Broken Links

Copyright is broken. Intellectual property in general has become a troll’s playground. Jump to that link to see how easy it is for extortionists to invert every rationale for a patent/copyright regime, transforming the support of innovation into simple theft.

But we knew that.

Still:  the latest outrage to hit my twitter feed gave me real pause.  It’s an example of the ease with which private censorship can manipulate the IP legal regime to disappear uncomfortable speech.  I don’t know how many of you know of the excellent site Retraction Watch, founded and run by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky (full disclosure — Ivan’s a friend of mine).

The site monitors the scientific and medical press to identify and discuss withdrawn research papers — its motto is “Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.”  The fact of retraction is occasionally a sign of genuine error, but as Ivan and Adam have documented, betting on misconduct is never a foolish option.

Yesterday Ivan put up a post that differed from the usual fare of discredited research and queries about peer review or the editorial processes involved. Titled “WordPress removes Anil Potti posts from Retraction Watch in error after false DMCA copyright claim”*, the piece documents how an obscure Indian website managed to persuade Word Press to remove ten posts about former Duke University researcher Anil Potti.  As described in an Ars Technica article,

Potti first fell under scrutiny for embellishing his resume, but the investigation quickly expanded as broader questions were raised about his research. As the investigation continued, a number of Potti’s papers ended up being retracted as accusations of falsified data were raised. Eventually, three clinical trials that were started based on Potti’s data were stopped entirely. Although federal investigations of Potti’s conduct are still in progress, he eventually resigned from Duke.

By Ars Technica’s count, Retraction Watch has so far published 22 posts on the Potti case.  Ten of those have now gone missing.  Here’s Ivan:

If you went looking for ten of our posts about Anil Potti today, you would have seen error messages instead. That’s because someone claiming to be from a news site in India alleged we violated their copyright with those ten posts about the former Duke University cancer researcher who has had 19 papers retracted, corrected, or partially retracted.

The claim, as Ivan documents, is bullshit (a term of art, of course, but mine, not deployed by Retraction Watch):

If you click on any of the NewsBulet.In URLs provided in the takedown notice, you will indeed find the text — and images — from ten of our posts about Anil Potti. But as will be abundantly clear to anyone who does so that our text was placed on NewsBulet.In, not the other way around.

In other words, NewsBulet.In is violating our copyright; we are not violating theirs. That’s driven home by the fact that the site did not exist until October 2012, according to a WhoIs search. All but one of the Retraction Watch posts they cite appeared before they even existed.

Retraction Watch is on the case — neither of its two authors fell off a turnip truck recently.  But even if — when — the material gets restored to the site, the chilling power available to those who would use copyright for evil is obvious.  The assertion of bluntly false claims is hassle enough — and if it distorts or simply constrains folks’ ability to cover controversy, then the damage is obvious.

Of course, the problems with copyright (and the patent system) extend far beyond overt nonsense like that which Retraction Watch confronts today.  For a historically grounded insight into our troubles, I highly recommend Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air, in which Hyde examins what our founding fathers actually meant by the intellectual property system they advanced at the birth of the American republic. In the here and now, the problem — or at least one big one — is that it is just too damn easy to disrupt the free exchange of ideas with spurious claims, acts for which there are no consequences sufficient to offer an incentive to play nice.

I have no good idea how to dig out from this mess (though any solution that makes Mickey Mouse cry would be a move in the right direction, I think).  You?

*OK.  I’ll admit that the headline isn’t quite in the “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar” league

Image:  Georges de la Tour, Cheater with the Ace of Diamonds, 1635.

Sermons in Stones

Plenty of folks have responded to what seems to me to have been an extraordinary Second Inaugural address by President Obama.  See two Jim Fallows posts for starters.  It was, as Fallows says, a striking speech on at least two levels:  that of content, with the president’s clear and unequivocal declaration of liberal intent; and that of rhetoric with its phrases infused with historical intent, American civic scripture, and compact, elegant, present-day exegesis.

But the symbolism within the speech did one aspect of the speech that hasn’t got much (any?) notice — perhaps because Chuck Schumer told the story, not Obama.

That is:  the setting of the president’s speech, the porch of the US Capitol, provided a visual and material rhetorical grace note to the claims on history and present urgency that President Obama expressed in words.

Here’s the background: design work had begun on a new dome  for the building in 1854, following an expansion of its two wings of the Capitol, completed in 1855.  That work was nowhere near complete on 4 March, 1861, the day of Lincoln’s first inauguration:

Work on the dome — or rather payment for the work — ceased for most of 1861.  The lead contractor on the project had $1.3 million worth of building materials on site — I’m not 100% sure, but I believe that you can see some  of the construction materials for the dome in the foreground of the image above — and decided it was better to keep going and hope that the federal government would pay up in time, which they did.  As the Historian of the Capitol, William Allen, notes the story that the new president himself  [PDF] ordered the continuation of the work is a myth — but the symbolic significance of the project didn’t escape Lincoln either.

The exact form of the Lincoln quote in reply to a question as to why spend money on architecture in the midst of war seems a bit apocryphal to me, but there seems to be a pretty broad recollection that he said something like  “if people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.”  Certainly, when I interviewed him for this film, Allen emphasized how potent the ongoing construction was for the troops from all over the Union who mustered on the Mall before marching off to the forward positions of the Army of the Potomac.

The dome wasn’t quite complete in March, 1864, but it looked mostly as it does now — that towering white, grandly neo-classical confection, its domed shape a recognized symbol of the cosmos as a whole — of the order of heaven — in a bit of architectural iconography established at least as far back as the Emperor Hadrian, who so pointedly staked his claim of divine sanction in one of the foundational statements of western architecture.

And of course, to play a little of the political numerology so beloved of pundits, that means that the first Second Inaugural to play out against the backdrop of the dome was Abraham Lincoln’s.  The most recent, complete with language deliberately echoing Lincoln’s, came yesterday.

Schumer’s anecdote played on that connection — that Lincoln asserted the claims of union against the forces of disunion and authoritarian oppression, while Obama yesterday advanced the notion that we are a society, not an atomized cloud of individual secessionists.

We’ve lived a to-me unprecedented four years in which the opposing party has challenged not just the policies or politics of the administration, but its legitimacy, the right to exercise power conferred by democratic choice.  The echoes of race, of secessionism, of the authoritarian claim that the consent of the governed is tolerated only so long as hoi polloi make the right choices are all distant (and not always so muted) echoes of 1860 and 1861.  And yet the black man with the funny name just took the president’s oath for a second time, directly beneath what we might, not quite accurately, nonetheless call Mr. Lincoln’s dome.

This is how rhetoric engages historical change. The meaning of the dome is not the same as it was in March, 1865.  Still, it connects.  And even if President Obama’s opponents cannot bring themselves to accept the blunt reality of a Democrat, an African American, and  a mainstream-progressive (if that characterization makes sense, and I think it does) not just winning, but holding power, the dome is there to remind them of a lesson very similar to what the traitors of 1865 learned to such cost: that the union is not merely the property of entrenched power.

That’s the chief significance of the visual language of Obama’s greying head beneath that wedding cake of dome.  It’s sufficient.

But there is actually one more thing.  Somewhere — it may have been a Balloon Juice comment thread, actually — I read someone quip that with all of Obama’s talk of internal improvements, infrastructure and investments in the future, the man sounded like a Whig…just like that railroad lawyer, the young Abe Lincoln.  In that context, the Capitol dome is a perfect symbol of the innovation and swelling ambition of the nation, then and now.

For the dome is a glorious lie.  It may look like shining marble, a masonry structure just like the grand baroque domes of Europe, St. Peter’s and the like.  It’s not.  The entire thing, inside and out is a jigsaw puzzle of cast iron, painted to fool the eye.  I’ve had the exceptional good fortune to climb inside the dome, between the inner shape you see from the rotunda and the familiar gleaming confection that stands over the mall.  When you do you climb up the stairs there you duck through the ribs that hold up the outer skin and from which rods connect to the (self-supporting) inner one, each made of plates bolted together.

(Don’t be fooled — all those coffers on the inner dome that appear to be pale carved stone in the drawing above are cast iron too, painted a dull grey on the side the punters don’t see.)

The iron segments that accrete into the dome were cast — in NY, I believe, though I’m on the road, away from my notes, and my memory may be playing tricks.  The material was shipped to Capitol Hill and assembled there, like a giant erector set.

The meaning — or at least a meaning?

You see in the fabric of the building at least two connected thoughts:  an object lesson in the sources of the defeat of the Confederacy:  already, by the 1860s, the American metal working industries — largely concentrated in the loyal North –  were advancing to and past the capabilities of the world leader, Britain.  And in our Civil War, Yankee industrial power and skill beat an economy based on the theft of human labor.  Paying attention to science, to technology, to the skills needed to play in the big leagues actually made a difference in that war, logistically, the difference.

Such attention is still all-in-all. . Hence the significance of that portion of President Obama’s campaign and inaugural address that spoke and speak to the need to invest in the brains and the technologies that matter right now.  And all the while he spoke, the dome stood behind him, granting historical assent.

Material objects have always been able to serve as both things and symbols. That China has just opened the longest high-speed rail line in the world is of obvious practical consequence for that nation.  No one doubts it has rhetorical significance as well.  The Mars rover Curiousity is so much more than a go-cart.  And so on.

Symbols as they age change:  they gain resonance; that accumulate layers of meaning, perhaps even some that complicate each other.  The Capitol Dome was completed as an element in the argument over what kind of country the United States could hope to be.

The second inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama, performed under that great structure, advances the cause of union and of this Union at this precise moment in time.  It is altogether fitting and proper that it should do this.

*Actually, the first dome was a visual disaster all on its own, one of Charles Bulfinch’s least impressive efforts — though it must be admitted that he didn’t have an entirely free hand in his design.

Grief is Another Country

I have nothing to coherently substantive to say about the Newtown tragedy, at least not yet.

I’ve lost much of today thinking about the parents, which has pretty much frozen my brain in place.

It’s a cliché, but still, absolutely true:  there is no loss like that of a child.  To my great good fortune and deepest fear, that’s a catastrophe I do not know.

But I did see it up close.  Without belaboring personal details (and a story that is not mine alone), my father predeceased my grandmother.  She lasted months only after that calamity, and that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.

But it’s the utter wreck that such a loss wreaks on those it touches that I’ve been turning over in my head all day.  John caught a lot of that with this post, which I read this morning, but that just made me think on it the more.  At some point during the day, it came to me, a stray wisp of memory — some words that I had once encountered that I half recalled to be as close as anything to give voice to something of what parents feel in these circumstances.

Decades ago, some years after we lost my dad, I capped a wholly undistinguished college acting career with a bit part in one of the lesser Shakespeares, King John.  Even Bill’s second tier work has flashes of seemingly impossible insight delivered in otherworldly language.  Act III of King John erupts in such a moment, at the point when Constance, believes her son, Arthur, has been doomed to murder at the order of King John.  I looked it up and here’s what I found:

CARDINAL PANDULPH
Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.

CONSTANCE
Thou art not holy to belie me so;
I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, ’tis like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal;
For being not mad but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver’d of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he:
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.

KING PHILIP
Bind up those tresses. O, what love I note
In the fair multitude of those her hairs!
Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen,
Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends
Do glue themselves in sociable grief,
Like true, inseparable, faithful loves,
Sticking together in calamity.

CONSTANCE
To England, if you will.

KING PHILIP
Bind up your hairs.

CONSTANCE
Yes, that I will; and wherefore will I do it?
I tore them from their bonds and cried aloud
‘O that these hands could so redeem my son,
As they have given these hairs their liberty!’
But now I envy at their liberty,
And will again commit them to their bonds,
Because my poor child is a prisoner.
And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again;
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud
And chase the native beauty from his cheek
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit,
And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

CARDINAL PANDULPH
You hold too heinous a respect of grief.

CONSTANCE
He talks to me that never had a son.

KING PHILIP
You are as fond of grief as of your child.

CONSTANCE
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!
–William Shakespeare, King John, Act III, Scene 4

My thoughts and all sympathy to the families of those now burdened with grief, or, as it is customarily said at such times in my Jewish tradition, “may they be comforted wtih the other mourners of Jerusalem and Zion.”

Image:  Anthony van Dyck, Family Portrait, 1621.

Tyranny of the Gun/Night Thoughts Of A Parent On Tucking In His Child

What can I say?

How to express the sorrow I feel for the families and friends in mourning after the Newtown school murders?

As many of you know, I have a young son, twelve now.  Every day I walk him to his public school in a suburb of Boston.  As I write this paragraph, I’m just about to head home to take him to his martial arts club — the kind of ordinary thing parents do.  The notion that I could have hugged him at the school door at 8 a.m. and then at lunch received that unspeakable phone call?

I have no words.

I’ve spent the afternoon trying to think of something other than the raw misery of the day.  The way my mind works, though, I couldn’t stop coming back to the same old question:  what to do about the damn guns.  I started by reading Fallows on this near-weekly exercise in American exceptionalism, and then I came across this essential Ezra Klein  piece, “Nine facts about guns and mass shootings.” 

The whole post is worth your attention, but here’s what is to my mind the money quote:

7. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.

Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:

“The map overlays the map of firearm deaths above with gun control restrictions by state,” explains Florida. “It highlights states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place – assault weapons’ bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements. Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48).”

And yes, just in case there are any gotcha gun nuts reading this:  I’m aware that Connecticut with its relatively strong gun laws was the site of today’s tragedy.  That’s (part of) the problem — the most rigorous gun laws in this country are a shadow of what they are in other, less murder-stricken lands, and the state-by-state patchwork of laws combined with the interstate highway system means that even the strongest local protections are leaky as hell.

So, as I say, check out all that Ezra has to offer on all this; this is one of his good ones.

The only other thing I want to say right now is that I think it’s important to politicize the hell out of this event…but towards particular policy goals.
I’m not really ready to write coherently anything more than to note that it is intolerable — immoral, in my view — to simply accept as the cost of being American a gun culture that results in both the murder of children and a rate of death by gun that took about 30,000 lives in 2011, roughly two-thirds of them suicides. (PDF).  We’ve got to get to a better circumstance — and if that means taking out NRA candidates state assembly rep by rep — that’s a challenge we can talk through over the next little while

But for now…well I’ve been pecking at this between kinder-transport duty and dinner and dishes, and I’ve just come downstairs again from a longer-than-usual bedtime cuddle.

My son and I talked a bit about the shootings, and he took the news on board without really letting me know what he thinks about it.   He does that — he guards his counsel until he’s decided what his parents need to know.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew why I squeezed him tonight harder than usual.

It sounds hollow as hell to say it, but fuck it — here goes:

Stay safe, everyone, and hold close those you love.

Image:  Fra Angelico, The Massacre of the  Innocents, between 1451 and 1452.

Prescience, or Claude Shannon Anticipates Sen. McConnell’s Procedural Maneuver Today

Claude Shannon is best known as the founding titan of information theory — which was an idea of such pervasive impact, some have ranked it along side relativity theory as the most significant intellectual creation of the 20th century.

He wasn’t simply a brilliant mathematician and logical thinker, though.  He was as well a lifelong tinkerer, builder, and whimsy merchant. You can get a sense of that side of his life from this catalogue of MIT’s collection of Shannonania.

Among those creations you can find a simple device, apparently inspired by Marvin Minsky (himself no stranger to orthogonal humor), one that Shannon dubbed the Ultimate Machine.

I happened across mention of it today while reading Jon  Gertner’s excellent new book about Bell Labs, The Idea Factory, looked it up, and on seeing it, realized it was a perfect model for both Minority Leader McConnell’s decision today to filibuster his own bill — and for the Republican approach to the whole concept of governance.

Check it out:

As a lagniappe, enjoy this demonstration of the boss donkey’s approach to tech:

You’re welcome.

Chris Hayes And Ta-Nehisi Coates In Conversation

Just to deliver on a promise made in a thread last week, here’s the video of Hayes and Coates talking about Twilight of the Elites at MIT last week.

The whole evening was great, but I have to confess that while I have very little of the fan left in me at my doddering age, it was a true thrill to meet none other than Charles Pierce after the show. This just about captures my reaction.

We only had a few minutes to chat, but I can tell you that his gift for ornate invective is as present in conversation as its is on the page; I wish I could recall his crack about Eric Fehrnstrom (whom he knew when they were both reporters at the Boston Herald) well enough to transcribe it for you.

You shoulda been there.

For a Good Time in Cambridge: Ta-Nehisi Coates/Chris Hayes/MIT Edition

Hey Boston-area Balloon Juice folk.  Tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m., Ta-Nehisi Coates will be talking with MSNBC host Chris Hayes, author of the highly recommended (by me!) Twilight of the Elites.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the event is titled “The 2012 Election and the Twilight of the Elites.”

 

 

It’ll all be happening at MIT’s Simmons Hall, W79 in TechSpeak, 7-8:30, free and open to the public. Simmons Hall is on Vassar Street in Cambridge, opposite the MIT playing fields.  Interactive map here.

Event description:

In his new book, Twilight Of The Elites, journalist and MSNBC host Chris Hayes poses a challenge with special resonance for the MIT community — Are the institutions which foster America’s leadership class working as intended? Hayes’ book covers ground as diverse as education, the financial sector, our political system and the Catholic church in an attempt to understand whether the American elite truly upholds the values of competition and meritocracy which it claims to espouse. His conclusions are troubling.

Join Chris Hayes in conversation with Atlantic Senior Editor and Dr. Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates on Tuesday November 13 at Simmons Hall for an election year discussion on the future of our country and an assessment of its institutions.

Should be fun.

Image: Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Fall of the Titans(alt: Fall of Satan), c. 1588

 

Get Me To The Church On Time

Good news out of the 2nd circuit. A second appeals court rules on DOMA:

We conclude that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act violates equal protection and is therefore unconstitutional. Judge STRAUB dissents in part and concurs in part in a separate opinion.

I know that Dinesh D’Souza is a boil on the ass end of a louse infesting Eric Cantor’s sheets, but still, the juxtaposition of his story with this gives me a chuckle.  And when you read the opinion, It Gets Better:  Dennis Jacobs, Chief Judge for the circuit and a George H. W. Bush appointee, writing for the majority, handed the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (aka BLAG)* its collective head:

BLAG argues that, unlike protected classes, homosexuals have not “suffered discrimination for longer than history has been recorded.” But whether such discrimination existed in Babylon is neither here nor there. BLAG concedes that homosexuals have endured discrimination in this country since at least the 1920s. Ninety years of discrimination is entirely sufficient to document a “history of discrimination.”

More:

The question is not whether homosexuals have achieved political successes over the years; they clearly have. The question is whether they have the strength to politically protect themselves from wrongful discrimination…

David Lat, writing at Above the Law, pours an extra pinch of salt in BLAG’s wounds:

It would appear that the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), which is defending DOMA, has now lost at least six cases in a row — and spent about $1.5 million doing so.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

One last thought:  Lat points to commentary by Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed (where you can find the full text of the opinion) who notes what seem to me to be a couple of very important elements to the court’s ruling. For one, as Jacobs wrote:

Because DOMA is an unprecedented breach of longstanding deference to federalism that singles out same-sex marriage as the only inconsistency (among many) in state law that requires a federal rule to achieve uniformity, the rationale premised on uniformity is not an exceedingly persuasive justification for DOMA.

And for another, perhaps yet more significant determination, Geidner writes:

Beyond striking down the law itself, the most significant development in today’s ruling is that the Second Circuit held that laws that classify people based on sexual orientation, like DOMA, should be subjected to a heightened form of scrutiny when courts examine the government’s claimed reasons for such laws. The holding that “intermediate scrutiny” applies makes the Second Circuit the first federal appeals court to do so. The First Circuit did not apply heightened scrutiny in its earlier decision striking down DOMA.

The Second Circuit, however, held:

“In this case, all four factors justify heightened scrutiny: A) homosexuals as a group have historically endured persecution and discrimination; B) homosexuality has no relation to aptitude or ability to contribute to society; C) homosexuals are a discernible group with non-obvious distinguishing characteristics, especially in the subset of those who enter same-sex marriages; and D) the class remains a politically weakened minority.”

I Am Not A Lawyer, so I’ll leave it to those members of the commentariat that are to weigh in on the significance of those aspects of the ruling.  But naively, it seems like a big deal to me.

All of which to say:  good times.

And to celebrate such, how about a couple of tunes?  The first, sent to me by a member of the BJ community, is a  sweet (perhaps too much so for some of you jackals) love song, purposed now to support same-sex marriage rights in the various referenda up for grabs around the country:

And the second? Well, consider it an antidote to any excess of sentiment above:

*BLAG is, of course, hardly bipartisan.  With three GOP members to two Dems, it is the vehicle for the House leadership to bother themselves with what American citizens do in their private lives.  It took up this case after the Obama administration decided it could not defend DOMA’s constitutionality.

Image:  Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions, 1862.