Happy Mother’s Day

Posted on May 14, 2006

I miss you, Mom.

What a F#@$ing Bummer

Posted on May 2, 2006

So I turn on the radio yesterday and find out that the only reason to listen to terrestrial radio these days — the brilliant Phil Hendrie Show — is having its last broadcast on June 23.

If you’re not familiar with the show, you missed out. Hendrie specialized in a kind of comic theater that was unlike anything else on the dial; he would do hour-long segments that sounded exactly like a regular talk-radio program, but with the notable difference that Hendrie was both the host and the guest. In other words, he would interview himself playing some character — and the character being interviewed was invariably advocating some position that was almost unbelievably inflammatory.

(My favorite example: the show where he played the part of a woman who had opened up a battered-womens’ shelter in partnership with a man who had previously been a coach for prizefighters. She explained very patiently to Phil that the root cause of the spousal abuse problem in America is that American women “don’t know how to take a punch.”)

The comedy of the show came from the fact that, after a few minutes of talking with his “guest”, Hendrie would open up the lines for calls — and take calls from all sorts of people who thought the “guest” was a real person. Hilarity would ensue as the callers, puffed up on righteous indignation, tried to argue with the “guest” — with Hendrie periodically chiming in as himself to stick up for the caller, only to then immediately respond as the “guest” with a blistering put-down of the caller’s arguments.

I’ve been listening to Hendrie since 2002, when I stumbled across his show while flipping the radio dial in the car one day and was immediately sucked in. Like most people, I thought it was a “straight” talk show at first; it wasn’t until I caught it a second time that I realized that I’d been had. The absurdity of Hendrie’s show was the most spot-on satirization of the talk-radio wasteland that I can imagine.

Part of what made the show so much fun was that over the years Hendrie developed a library of stock characters to play his “guests”. Each of these characters had their own unique tics designed to irritate callers into flipping their lid. Wikipedia has a very thorough list of all Hendrie’s characters, with some info as to what made each so funny. Their quote database, Wikiquote, also has “best-of” quotes for many of his characters.

Hendrie had been quite vocal for some time about the restrictions he had to work under thanks to the FCC’s post-Janet Jackson crackdown, and how much he hated them, so his decision to leave the radio biz is understandable. It’s a shame that he can’t take his act to satellite, which would be a much more natural home for his brand of humor; he hasn’t ruled out a satellite gig, but for now he says he wants to concentrate on TV — he’s currently appearing in a supporting role on the NBC sitcom Teachers.

Goodbye and good luck, Phil — your listeners will miss you.

UPDATE (May 15, 2006): I’ve posted a sample of Hendrie’s show, if you want to give it a listen to see what you’ve been missing.

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on May 2, 2006

Saw this blogad on Talking Points Memo this morning:

Fascinating. Back when John Kerry was, you know, running for President, he couldn’t run away from this image — of his younger self testifying eloquently before Congress in 1971 about the futility of the Vietnam War — fast enough. Much to the dismay of those of us who actually found his words from back then (“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”) more inspirational than anything he was saying these days.

Now that he’s trying to raise money, though (after you sign his online petition, you get sent to a fundraising pitch), suddenly War Protester Kerry is baaaaack!

Anyone want to put odds on the likelihood that War Protester Kerry will go back in the closet again if Gentleman’s Second Kerry decides to run again in 2008?

Pathetic.

In Fond Remembrance of Baaaad TV

Posted on April 28, 2006

To celebrate it being Friday, I thought I’d share something funny with you: a complete list of every episode of the long-gone TV series The A-Team.

OK, that doesn’t sound funny, but wait till you read them. I remembered that show eventually descending into camp, but I had no idea just how high over the shark it had jumped…

Some of the gems:

10/15/85 – Blood, Sweat & Cheers
(wr. Tom Blomquist; dir. Sidney Harris)
The team races to the rescue when Hannibal’s nephew’s chances of winning the regional stock-car race are threatened.
Jack Harmon: Stuart Whitman. Kid Harmon: Ken Clandt. Kyle: Wings Hauser. Dana: Toni Hudson.

Oh noes! Certainly the only way to meet the threat of losing a regional stock-car race is with heavy firepower.

10/22/85 – Lease With An Option To Die
(wr. Bill Nuss; dir. David Hemmings)
Some goons are trying to force BA’s mother out of her Chicago apartment.
Mrs BA: Della Reese. Karen: Wendy Schaal. Phillip Carter: Ray Wise. Plout: Brian James.

I pity the fool who screws with Mr. T’s mother.

11/05/85 – The Heart Of Rock ‘N’ Roll
(wr. Frank Lupo; dir. Tony Mordente)
Singer Rick James asks the team to help an old rock-and-roll legend whose time in prison has made life very dangerous for him.
CJ Mack: Isaac Hayes. Devon: Eileen Barnett. Warden: Peter Haskell. Starger: Beau Starr.

If you are super freaky… and no one else can help… and if you can find them… maybe you can hire… THE A-TEAM.

11/12/85 – Body Slam
(wr. Bill Nuss; dir. Craig R. Baxley)
Hulk Hogan asks his old friend BA for the team’s help against a mobster who’s out to close down a youth club — for no apparent reason.
Dicki: Deborah Wakeham. Sonny: Michael Gregory. Papa Kotero: Titos Vandis.

Starring Hulk Hogan! How 80’s is that?

12/17/85 – Uncle Buckle-Up
(wr. Danny Lee Cole; dir. Michael O’Herily)
Hannibal auditions for a kid’s show and gets a bigger role than he expected when the team discovers the show’s fronting a heroin ring.
Sydney: Arte Johnson. Kelly: Susan Scannell. Gretsch: Art Metrano.

I know what you’re thinking: “a children’s show as a front for a heroin ring?” But the real question is this: how many children’s shows don’t front for a heroin ring? (sigh)

01/14/86 – Wheel of Fortune
(wr. Bill Nuss; dir. David Hemmings)
Murdock wins big on "Wheel Of Fortune", and may lose big when he’s kidnapped in a plot to steal a Soviet gunship.
Pat Sajak: Pat Sajak. Vanna White: Vanna White. Joshua: George McDaniel. Jody: Lydia Cornell. Woods: Bernie Bock. Stein: Richard Evens.

It’s a good thing he wasn’t on “Family Feud” or he’d have ended up in a prison in Kazakhstan…

And my personal favorite:

10/29/85 – The Road To Hope
(wr. Stephen J. Cannell; dir. David Hemmings)
Hannibal poses as a wino to avoid an Army trap, and stumbles onto a racket that involves knocking off winos.
Jim Beam: Elisha Cook. Scarett: Christopher Neame. Colton: Warren Berlinger. William: Bill Marcus.

“A racket that involves knocking off winos.” That sounds like one well-thought-out criminal conspiracy!

Step 1: Knock off winos
Step 2: ….. ?
Step 3: Profit!

Passages: A. Scott Crossfield

Posted on April 21, 2006

One of the great pioneers in aviation history died yesterday.

A. Scott Crossfield

Albert Scott Crossfield held the title of “fastest man alive” in an age when such feats could still capture the attention of the world. In 1953, he became the first human to travel faster than Mach 2 — 1,320 miles per hour — flying a Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket rocket-powered experimental aircraft. The D-558-II had not been designed to travel at such high speeds; Douglas put its top speed around Mach 1.6. Crossfield convinced the Powers That Be to let him push the envelope with it, though, and his skillful flying, combined with some extraordinary effort by his ground crew to prepare the aircraft, put him into the history books. Crossfield’s November 20, 1953 flight was the first an only time a D-558-II ever broke Mach 2. Today Crossfield’s D-558-II hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

After this achievement, he went on to become one of the lead test pilots on the record-breaking X-15 project, which brought pilots for the first time to the edge of space. An accomplished aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, Crossfield was responsible for many of the design features incorporated into the X-15. Crossfield was the pilot for the X-15’s first flight in 1959, and in 1960 he narrowly escaped death when the huge rocket engine of an X-15 he was testing catastrophically exploded. The aircraft was completely destroyed, but Crossfield, by some quirk of fate, walked away unhurt. Scott Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983.

Yesterday, Crossfield was flying a small plane from Prattville, Alabama to Herndon, Virginia, returning home from a talk he had given at Maxwell Air Force Base. Over Georgia, his plane disappeared from radar and a search began. Crossfield’s body was discovered amid the wreckage of his plane. He was 84.

Dorkus Profundus

Posted on April 19, 2006

I can’t be the only one who thinks the poster art for the upcoming “Da Vinci Code” movie makes Tom Hanks look like a complete dork.

Judge for yourself:

Click image for larger version

I love his expression — it’s like a caricature titled “Man Thinking”. And is that a mullet he’s wearing? Dear God.

Taxes

Posted on April 17, 2006

Since tonight is the deadline for filing Federal income taxes in most of the country, I thought now would be as good a time as any to beat one of my favorite dead horses:

Progressives should embrace tax simplification.

Why? Think about the system we have today. It’s so Byzantine, so complicated, that the average person can’t file their taxes without the help of a tax advisor and/or tax-prep software. And that’s even if you have a simple return — God help you if you do anything out of the ordinary, you’ll be plunged into a thicket of regulations so impenetrable that you might as well just throw a dart to see how much you owe.

You know all that already. But why should it be a progressive cause to simplify the tax code? Because every dollar that is spent on help deciphering the tax code is, in effect, payment of a hidden tax. Call it the Complexity Tax — and it falls heaviest on those at the bottom of the income scale, since they can least afford to shell out $50 on a copy of TurboTax.

(In recent years, the IRS has helped mitigate some of that impact with its FreeFile program, which allows taxpayers with income under $50,000/year to use online tax-prep software from participating vendors for free; but you can’t use FreeFile unless you click through to the vendor’s site from irs.gov’s FreeFile page, and how many low-income taxpayers know to do that? And what about the ones without Web access who’d be better served by installable software?)

Every year the system gets more complex, and people have to pay more just to keep up — money that they could better use to pay for food, shelter, and education. And as the complexity goes up, the frustration goes up with it.

Conservatives have already sussed this out, and are pushing alternatives like the “flat tax” and the so-called “FairTax” — both of which lighten the burden on the rich and increase the burden on the poor. In doing so, they’re following the time-honored GOP tradition of bait and switch, using people’s frustration with the complex tax code to try and convince them to accept a regressive system that would fall hardest on those who can least afford it

Progressives have an interest in seeing that not happen. One of our core values is that taxation should be, well, progressive — that those who benefit most from the services and protection of society should give the most back. But by being satisfied with the status quo, we put that at risk.

It’s possible to envision a tax system that is both simple and progressive, with taxpayers falling into a few broad tax brackets based on their gross income, and with many, many fewer deductions. It can be done. But will we do it? Do progressives have it in them to stand up for the little guy?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind paying my taxes every year. I see quite clearly what I’m getting for that money — a life in a stable, free society, protected from those who would do me harm, with a range of opportunities to better myself. I’m not one of these “taxes are robbery” types. But if we want to maintain that society, we have to ensure that the tax system works for the average person, not just the accountants and the tax attorneys. Right now, it doesn’t; and if we care about ensuring a future where everyone pulls their own weight, we should fix it before some soak-the-poor bozo “fixes” it for us.

End of rant. Now get your 1040 filed 🙂

The Nuclear Option

Posted on April 8, 2006

If you thought the Administration had completely exhausted their supply of monumentally bad ideas, Seymour Hersh’s latest report in the New Yorker will set you straight.

The first few paragraphs don’t say anything you probably don’t already know. But then, about a third of the way in, it starts getting shocking.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program…
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran… The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete…
The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan…”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue.

(Emphasis mine.)

You read that right — there are actually people arguing for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

For reference, here’s some information on the B61-11 air-delivered tactical thermonuclear weapon, also known as the “bunker buster”.

The argument being proffered is that Natanz and other Iranian nuclear production facilities are buried so far underground that only a nuclear weapon can guarantee taking them out. The problem is, it’s not clear that even a tactical nuke can do that. The centrifuge facility at Natanz, for example, is described by GlobalSecurity.org as “hardened with a roof of several meters of reinforced concrete and buried under a layer of earth some 75 feet deep.” Can a B61-11 reach down that far underground? Tests in Alaska’s frozen tundra have not been encouraging:

The frozen soil proof drop tests conducted in Alaska in March 1998 suggests that the earth-penetration capability of the B61-11 is limited. During the test, two B61-11 shapes were dropped from a B-2 bomber at 8,000 feet. The two shapes hit the ground some 45 feet (15 meters) from each other. The Air Force said the B61-11 only proved capable of penetrating some 6-10 feet (2-3 meters) into the frozen soil. At best the weapon would penetrate 15-25 feet (5-8 meters). A photo taken of the retrieval of one of the bombs in Alaska suggests the penetration depth was around 18 feet (6 meters).

Those tests were just of the bomb’s earth-penetration capability, of course; they didn’t include the actual detonation of the nuclear warhead, which presumably would dig up some more of that dirt. But could it reach down the extra fifty or sixty feet it would need to in order to shut down the centrifuge for good?

I don’t know, and I hope to God that we’re not about to find out.

(Much thanks to John Robb for the pointer.)

UPDATE (Apr. 10 2006): ArmsControlWonk.com says that conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) penetration munitions would be more than adequate for taking out a facility like Natanz.

Welcome to Boot Camp

Posted on April 5, 2006

Damn. My reasons for not buying a Mac are getting fewer by the day…

Reconsidering Python

Posted on April 3, 2006

Well, I suppose it’s time for me to confess one of my least accurate technology assessments of the last 5 years or so.

Back in 2002, I was a consultant evaluating different open-source content management systems for my company, with an eye towards potentially adopting one as our in-house development platform. After looking over what seemed like dozens of them, I came away dissatisfied with the lot.

That’s neither here nor there (they ended up writing their own CMS in the end), except for one thing I said in evaluating the Zope CMS:

… cool architecture, but only lets you code in Python, a dead-end language.

Yep, I called Python, which has blossomed in the last few years into such popularity that people speak seriously about it replacing Java, a “dead-end language.” Doh!

What I was getting at with that remark was my sense at the time that Python was interesting in an academic sense, but not a business sense; it might be really cool, but there weren’t many people using it, the tools were thin on the ground, and you were generally locking yourself into a limited space if you went with it. Compared to the thriving ecosystem around PHP, for example, it didn’t seem that compelling.

I was clearly wrong on that score. Python eventually gained critical mass, there’s now a raft of good tools that work with it, and it’s finding its way into more and more niches every day. (Some of its buzz has been stolen in the last few months by Ruby, but Ruby in 2006 has a lot of the same problems I saw Python having in 2002.)

All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that I decided recently that, as penance for being so dumb four years ago, I should sit down and try to learn how to program in Python.

I won’t bore you with a lot of details about what makes Python different from other languages. The short version is that Python is a joy. I was really, honestly surprised by both how quickly I was able to be productive with it, and how much I could get it to do with just a few lines of code. For someone whose “real programming” experience started with the verbosity of Perl, Python is an eye-opener.

Now I find myself tempted to dive into the deep end and start playing with Python-based frameworks like Django and TurboGears for my Web development work. And then there’s Jython, which brings the Java class libraries into Python, to explore, as well as wxPython for GUI apps…

Anyway, if you’ve been like me and had your eyes closed to Python for the last few years, take this as my recommendation that you drop your preconceptions and check it out. I think you’ll like what you find.

(Bad) Ideas in Motion

Posted on March 29, 2006

Marty is right, Chevy’s new “make your own commercial” online ad campaign for the new Tahoe SUV is both (a) very cool from an implementation standpoint and (b) completely culture-jammable.

Don’t believe me? Watch my Tahoe commercial and see if you want to run out and buy one. (Be sure to turn your speakers on, it’s worth it.)

Then, make your own. Post the links to your commercials in the comments — I have a feeling that we’re going to be seeing some (ahem) creative entries…

Pick a Chair, Any Chair

Posted on March 22, 2006

So yesterday my trusty computer chair at home finally gave up the ghost. My primary clue was when I sat in it and noticed that I was tilted at a jaunty 30 degree angle to the left, much like the Titanic shortly after hitting the iceberg. Since one of the selling points of a chair is that it keeps you reasonably level, I quickly deduced something was wrong.

My deduction was correct — a weld joining two pieces of metal had split. So now I’m typing this while sitting perched on an old stereo box (a style of decor best described as Bachelor-Pad Contemporary) and trying to figure out what to get for a replacement.

I’m torn between two chairs. One is the Ikea Joakim ($150).

This is supposedly the nicest office chair you can buy that isn’t some $800 Herman Miller abomination. However, I’m torn because I have a completely irrational fondness for kneeling chairs; they encourage good posture and stow nicely underneath a desk, which is important since I have a small apartment. The chair that just died on me was a kneeling chair that had served me well for years.

For $180, you can get a kneeling chair that’s stuffed with memory foam, which sure sounds nice:

But that’s $30 more, which is a non-trivial amount. And apparently the health benefits of kneeling chairs have been somewhat overstated to begin with, which makes me less inclined (ha ha!) to seek one out.

But then I think about my small apartment, and how nice it is to just roll the chair under the desk when I’m done with the computer…

Maybe I should just ditch them both and spend $50 on a PostureBall:

(Yes, there are actually office workers out in America today sitting perched on top of medicine balls. I shit you not.)

So, I figured, why not ask my Teeming Millions of blog admirers for guidance? Pick a chair, any chair; leave a comment and help me cut through my indecision. Don’t wait too long, though; I’m not sure this stereo box is gonna hold up forever.

UPDATE (Mar. 25, 2006): I bought the Joakim today. So far so good — it’s quite comfortable. Now the stereo box can go back into storage 🙂

UPDATE (Sep. 10, 2010): In which the Joakim turns on me like a wild jackal when I try to sit in it full-time, forcing me to explore alternatives.

Tango Project

Posted on March 12, 2006

Boy, does the Ubuntu desktop look a whole lot sharper once you replace the standard icons with the ones created by the Tango Project!

Thumbs up.

Jack Bauer Theatre

Posted on March 7, 2006

In which we bring you scenes from the finest works ever to grace the stage, all featuring performances by the incomparable dramatic actor Jack Bauer.

Guy Blogs, For Guys

Posted on February 28, 2006

Can there be anything more designed to appeal to the hearts of guys than Shaveblog — which, in its own words, is

about the lost art of wetshaving, and how old-school razors, badger hair shaving brushes, and high-end English shaving creams not only deliver the greatest shave you can possibly imagine, but bring back the pleasant, gentlemanly ritual that’s been missing since the bloodbath of 1971 when Idi Amin led a coup to become ruler of Uganda and Gillette introduced the first twin-blade razor

?

Combine this with English Cut and Manolo for the Men and you can now satisfy all your most twisted metrosexual fantasies via the blogosphere…

XULRunner 1.8.0.1 Developer Preview

Posted on February 20, 2006

If you’ve ever thought about developing an application using Mozilla’s XUL toolkit, you’ll want to check this out: a developer preview of XULRunner 1.8.0.1 is now available.

What is XULRunner, you ask? There’s a long list of features, but basically it’s a runtime environment for Mozilla’s user interface toolkit, XUL. Previously, if you wanted to use XUL to build an app, you could only deploy it on a machine with Firefox or another Mozilla app already installed — which limited you to building stuff that made sense inside a browser or mail client. With XULRunner, you can bundle everything you need right into your app, so you can distribute it as a full-blown standalone application rather than a simple extension.

An example of what’s possible with XULRunner is Songbird, the new music player; it’s the first serious application to ship that uses XULRunner at its core.

Finally, EU3

Posted on February 17, 2006

Great news from Paradox. I can’t wait.

Brace Yourself

Posted on February 16, 2006

John Robb says we should be expecting another al Qaeda attack on the US in the near future.

Awwww

Posted on February 14, 2006

Here’s a special Valentine’s Day placemark from Google Earth for you. Enjoy.

(Props to Phil Verney in the GE BBS for finding this.)

Heaven

Posted on February 12, 2006

Everyone is trying
to get to the bar.
The name of the bar,
the bar is called Heaven.
The band in Heaven
plays my favorite song.
Play it once again,
play it all night long.
Oh, Heaven
Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
nothing ever happens.
Heaven
Heaven is a place
a place where nothing
nothing ever happens.

— “Heaven” by David Byrne and Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, from the album “Fear of Music” (1979)

Photo ©: Stephen Coburn | Agency: Dreamstime.com

End of an Era

Posted on February 7, 2006

Did you know that, as of January 27, you can no longer send a telegram via Western Union?

If I had known they were shutting that business down, I woulda sent one for posterity…

If you want to wallow in nostalgia for the wonders of 19th-century telecommunications, James Lileks has posted some examples of telegram art.

Free Speech, and Its Discontents

Posted on February 6, 2006

I’ve been holding back on saying anything about the ongoing controversy around the cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed recently run in the Dutch Danish (thanks to Sandy for correcting this in the comments) newspaper Jyllands-Posten because I didn’t want to read too much into what initially struck me as a tempest in a teapot. But now that the protests have reached such a high pitch that two protesters have been killed marching on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — and they’re still going on, so the potential exists for more casualties — I can’t imagine how anyone could say it’s not significant.

(The significance is underlined by the fact that Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, was gunned down on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004 for having the unacceptable audacity to offend Muslims.)

There’s already been plenty of outrage voiced on both sides, so I’m not going to waste time venting my spleen. I’d rather chew on a question that I haven’t heard many people tackle directly — how a free press can co-exist with Islam, or indeed with any other culturally-sensitive minority group.

It seems to me that the basic problem that has spawned this situation is a fundamental mismatch in the two sides’ understandings of the social contract. To the paper and its defenders, “freedom” means freedom to: freedom to act as one wishes. To the outraged Muslims, “freedom” means freedom from: freedom from a culture that they see (with some justification) as perversely opposed to the values of their faith.

The only way to resolve the mismatch is to come up with a common understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a free society. I’m not going to pretend that I can bridge this gap with one blog post. But I would like to submit some ideas to move the discussion in that direction.

Let us, then, wrestle with the central question: what are the boundaries of free speech?

There are ideologues on both sides of this issue, and they are equally wrong. Fundamentalist Muslims who demand censorship of any publication that does not hew to their worldview in every detail — remember the Taliban? — clearly aren’t being realistic. But then, anyone who says that free speech has no boundaries isn’t being realistic either. The classic reproof of this position was summarized neatly by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.

In other words, if a reasonable observer could conclude that your speech has a high probability of provoking actions that lead to harm to others, the government has the right to step in and stop your speech before you make it. It doesn’t have to wait until you cause a panic to act.

(One thing to be clear about — this is not the standard that we in the United States live under today. Holmes’ Schenck test was overturned fifty years later in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which ruled that the state could not act to stifle speech “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”. Either way, however, it’s clear that the limits of “free” speech fall somewhere short of absolutes.)

So if speech is neither completely subject to minority whim or completely free, what is it?

SOME PRINCIPLES

To figure that out, we will have to attempt to derive some principles by which we can judge how close we are treading to the limits. These principles are not based on the laws of any particular society; instead, they are an attempt to describe how an ideal Platonic regime of “free speech” might work. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I did, however, crush the LSAT 🙂

First, it seems clear that you cannot claim to have a free press unless citizens can publish without prior approval. This may seem obvious, but ask someone who grew up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union if they were free to publish whatever they wanted.

While a free society allows anyone to publish, however, it does insist that publication is an act that can carry legal and/or financial consequences. If you publish a seditious document, you are committing sedition; if you release a trade secret, you can be held liable. Because a free society devolves the power to publish to the individual, it attaches the responsibilities that come with publication to the individual as well.

It is a necessary corollary, then, that by publishing, the citizen accepts the consequences that might derive from the act of publication. You cannot disclaim your ownership of an idea once you have published it.

Speaking broadly, there are two types of consequences you can incur by publishing. These are:

• Public sanction: These are the consequences you can incur by breaking the law, divulging national security secrets, or otherwise crossing the government.
• Private sanction: These are the consequences you can incur by crossing private parties: individual citizens, groups/associations, corporations, and any other parties who do not directly wield the force of law and the power of the state.

Since it was the reaction of religiously-minded citizens that prompted this line of inquiry in the first place, we shall focus on private sanction.

So far, we have focused on the rights of the publisher. Let’s turn around for a moment and take a look at the rights of the audience. Do you have any? Can you legitimately push back on speech that offends or angers you?

I would argue that you do, and that you actually have a significant scope in which you are free to do so.

First, you as a consumer of information have the right to apply a limited market remedy by ceasing to purchase the publication in question. This will deprive them of revenue from your purchases, and stop the offending material from crossing your desk.

(This is another point that may seem obvious, but it has an important corollary that points up its importance: nobody can force you to read anything. There is no national newspaper, or any other publication, that you are required by law to subscribe to; the law reserves the right of choice in your hands.)

While it might be emotionally satisfying, this limited market remedy is unlikely to directly affect the publication’s bottom line. So can you take it further? Yes. At the next level, you have the right to counter speech with speech — you can directly address the offensive material with material of your own. You will not be prevented by government from doing so.

Should you wish to escalate further, you have the right to join in league with other like-minded citizens to express your disapproval together. Such organizations can multiply the impact both of market remedies (by organizing coordinated boycotts instead of scattered cancellations) and speech remedies (by providing a platform from which you can get your message out).

Some would argue that this last right unacceptably limits free speech, because it could potentially lead to censorship by market pressure; publications that see large chunks of their readership drop away due to an offense to a community might self-censor to avoid further damage to their balance sheet. I don’t think this threat outweighs the need of citizens to have a way to express their own viewpoints in opposition. Pulling your business from a publication is a legitimate response if you feel wronged by the publication; if so many people feel wronged that the publication can’t stay afloat, perhaps it should re-evaluate its position in its community.

WHAT YOU CAN’T DO

So we’ve covered the rights of publishers and readers. There’s one place we have yet to go: the areas for each that are beyond the boundaries. What behavior isn’t acceptable in our ideal regime?

Let’s start with publishers. The big one is pretty clear from the arguments in the cases I cited above: it is not acceptable to publish material that you know will directly result in or provoke violent harm to another. Despite the schoolyard rhyme, sometimes words can cause physical harm just as much as sticks and stones do.

(This is a fine line to walk. An example: a white-supremacist group of long standing called the White Aryan Resistance publishes a magazine, “Insurgent”, which they advertise as “the most racist newspaper in the world”. Their positions as expressed in the magazine and their Web site are utterly toxic, full of the crudest race-hate. However, as distasteful as their rhetoric is, the question we must ask is: is it likely to provoke real, tangible harm against the people the group rails against? Or is this just a case of maladjusted nuts blowing off steam in print?)

Turning to readers, the big line is pretty clear: you cannot take force into your own hands to stop the distribution of material that offends you. You can gather together with others who agree, and if you wish you can even march on the publisher’s building in peaceful protest. But if your protest threatens mob violence — if it steps beyond the market and speech remedies outlined above and advocates instead for violent action against specific named parties — you have crossed the line.

Which leads to my final principle, and the one that the most people will have trouble swallowing: you have no right to be protected from offense. If you are offended by a publication, there are a range of things you can do to try and counter its message, or pressure the publisher so that they don’t offend you in the future. But you cannot demand that you be pre-emptively shielded from any materials that might offend you; it’s simply incompatible with the principle that citizens can publish without seeking prior approval.

Will these principles defuse the situation that the Mohammed cartoons have created? Probably not. But today’s crisis is only a symptom of a broader problem — those conflicting notions of freedom — that we’re going to be finding ourselves grappling with more and more in the years to come. Discussions like this can, I hope, help start us down a path that will eventually lead to the solution of the underlying issue.

Those are my ideas, anyway. What do you think?

UPDATE (Feb 7 2006): Post edited to correct my confusion — for some reason I thought Jyllands-Posten was a Dutch newspaper, when in fact it is Danish. My apologies for the mix-up.

Some other opinions on this from around the Web:

A diarist on Daily Kos thinks the whole controversy has been artificially inflated by the Saudi government to distract attention from yet another stampede at the Hajj, the annual pilgramage to Mecca that is one of the central pillars of Islamic faith. This year’s stampede killed 345 people; deadly stampedes have occurred every couple of years for a decade at least. The Saudis are responsible for ensuring the safety of pilgrims and managing foot traffic, so it would make sense that they would have an interest in diverting people’s attention.

Slate has a roundup of reactions from Arab journalists to the controversy. They seem to be under the impression that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial does not find its way into print in Europe and the U.S. Um, no.

Reason has a good collection of links to other stories about the protests/riots, including this priceless cartoon.

Juan Cole reminds the rest of us not to feel too superior to Muslims on this issue:

I’ve gotten a lot of comments by email which have the structure, “Yes Europeans would be offended by X, but would it cause violence?” I presume these readers somehow consider the Irish not really Europeans.

Prominent al Qaeda Terrorist Escapes Yemeni Prison

Posted on February 6, 2006

Good work, Yemen:

Interpol has issued “an urgent global security alert” after 23 “dangerous individuals” — including a man identified as the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 — escaped from a Yemeni prison.
The international crime-fighting organization said Sunday at least 13 of the 23 who escaped Friday were “convicted al Qaeda terrorists, some of whom were involved in attacks on U.S. and French ships in 2000 and 2002.” …
They escaped via a 140-meter (150-yard) -long tunnel “dug by the prisoners and co-conspirators outside,” Interpol said…
Among the escapees was Jamal Ahmed Badawi, considered the mastermind behind the attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000.

Sounds like the authorities in Yemen have never seen The Great Escape…

Here’s more information on Jamal al Badawi, if you’re interested.

Google Talk Opens Up

Posted on February 2, 2006

Looks like Google has finally turned on “federation” for their new-ish instant messaging client, Google Talk.

What that means is that now GTalk users can IM not just with other GTalk users, but also with anyone using the Jabber IM system.

If you’re on GTalk, let’s test this sucker out — my Jabber IM address is the same as my e-mail address: jason@jasonlefkowitz.net.

IE7 Beta Available

Posted on January 31, 2006

It’s been in a restricted-access beta for a couple of months now, but today Microsoft opened the gates (sorry) and announced that Internet Explorer 7 is now available as a public beta for any interested parties to download.

Begun, this browser war has…

UPDATE (Feb. 1, 2006): Wow. Um, OK. So it turns out they have completely ditched the standard Windows human interface rules:

Click image for full-size version

Note the complete absence of a menu bar, and the migration of the taskbar icons to the right of the (new) tab strip.

I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, given how MS has already thrown out the Windows UI in Office, but it’s still a little disorienting to see a Microsoft application with an out-of-left-field UI.