Published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract is a non-fiction political/philosophy tome that examines the often precarious balance between liberty and government.

Rousseau’s book has been hailed/vilified as a blueprint for totalitarianism; hailed/vilified as an examination of the need to surrender some personal liberties for the greater good of society as a whole – and, often, this greater good benefits the individual.

Often it does not, so that’s part of the debate.

Rousseau’s book opens – famously – with the following line:

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

(Ever wonder where Marx got his famous line???)

Rousseau never flinches from this statement, noting how we – individuals – matter little in the pool of individuals that comprise society.

But – as he explains – this is not necessarily a bad thing. Face it, we’re all slaves of several masters, of which government is only one: family (parents, children, relatives, spouses), work, neighbors and so on. Hell, even if living alone – by choice – on a desert island – you’d still be a slave to tides, weather, other environmental factors mostly out of your total control.

Free will – in its purest sense – is just a concept, not a reality.

Government is no different: One gives up some part of liberty to help create a stable society and help safeguard the individual.

Examples (mine, obviously, not Rousseau’s):

• Taxes: We pay taxes for many good reasons (yeah, lots bad, too..): So we have national defense, so when we call the police or fire department they don’t require a credit card before coming out, so our streets are plowed. Yes, the governments (city, state, federal) are taking our money, but there is no way any individual could provide the same amount of service alone.
• Driver’s License: Have to take tests, wait in ungodly long lines and so on, but this is a way of regulating [some of the] nuts off the roads and so on.
• Regulation: The bane of everyone regulated, yet as soon as something goes weird in this country (Enron, S&L; breakdown), all voters are for more regulations of this or that industry. Go ahead, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and tell me regulation is a bad thing…

You get the drift.

We give up some freedoms/monies and gain security, safety and so on.

There are obviously imbalances – I don’t have kids but I have a house. So my property taxes are paying for school for someone else’s kids. The hard part is balancing the usurping of freedoms and government/society power.

But overall it works out, for the most part. Otherwise the “decisions” of the Zoning Boards would be which neighbor has the most guns. That ain’t good for no one…

Nice book report Lee, WTF does this have to do with anything?

Well, this week came the revelations that the Bush Administration has been secretly spying on Americans in America.

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for “detecting, identifying and engaging” internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has erupted over the FBI’s use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency’s interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States — without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.

Defiant in the face of criticism, the Bush administration has portrayed each surveillance initiative as a defense of American freedom.

— Washington Post, Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers, Sunday, December 18, 2005

This is where Rousseau’s argument about the difficult balance is tested.

And – I think – goes beyond what is necessary. And – as Ezra Klein reminds us – it’s not the wiretapping that’s the issue, it’s the secrecy. We have procedures for dealing with just what Bush has been scolded for/Bush has defended. They could have gotten a warrant – even after the fact but elected not to.

THAT’S what got the New York Time interested, and it even waited a year and omitted some facts from its story at the administration’s urging before publishing.

One of the beauties – and frustrations – of the US Constitution is the checks and balances built in. Brilliant stuff; often impractical. This is one of the cornerstones of the democracy we’re trying to bring to other countries.

So when Bush says he approved such secret wiretaps – without getting warrants (again, even after the fact from a Justice Department committee that virtually rubberstamps all such requests), this admission leaves one with three impressions:

• The administration is trying to protect Americans. OK, that’s a good thing.
• The administration felt they needed these wiretaps, but didn’t know they could get what were essentially secret warrants for this. Doubtful, but – if so – disturbing.
• The administration didn’t really care about protocol – just do it, the President can order anything and it’s OK – so, we’ve circumvented the checks and balances. Highly disturbing.

I realize these are special times: Anyone who say 9/11 didn’t change our society forever is … not in agreement with me.

9/11 did change things, and presidential power is often discretionary in times of war, but has a war been declared – against anyone – on American soil?

Kafka is one of my favorite writers, but if he were to come back to life today, he’d recoil.

The reality of today’s news has basically put him out of a job. Non-fiction is more Kafkaesque than Kafka’s fiction.

And that’s not a good thing.

… a quarter century without John Lennon.

I was in college, getting milk from the Collegetown grocery store. That’s where I heard it about it. Wandering the aisles, I was wondering why the PA in the store (which played a local station) was playing cut after cut of Lennon.

Then they said why.

I don’t know if love is the answer, but random acts of violence certainly isn’t.

Analogies can be powerful, offering an easier-to-understand explanation of a potentially complex issue.

Sometimes, they don’t help advance the argument.

A new bone of contention in the cable industry is the push (by the FCC) for a la carte (vs. bundled) cable.

The following analogy was used in the article:

“When you go into a grocery store to buy a quart of milk, says Cablevision Chairman Chas Dolan, “you’re not told by the grocer, ‘Well, you can’t have the milk unless you also buy a dozen eggs or a pound of cheese.’ “

True, but – if truly a la carte – should you not be able to buy 13 oz. of milk? Not a quart, not a pint? Isn’t that – those fixed sizes you may not want – bundling? A grouping where you’re paying for something you won’t use?

OK, same product (liquid milk). So, extend the food analogy to restaurants: If you don’t want the baked potato or rice pilaf, you don’t get anything off the meal. It’s bundled. Should we have to pay for each ounce of cheese, each slice of mushroom?

While the FCC argument has merit (why pay for what you don’t want?); it’s a bit flawed: One of the main reasons you get all these channels is that there is an agreement (structured how…I don’t care…) twixt the cable companies and the channels that basically help both sides, by hoping the end user will watch and the ad revenue will go up. If the channel is not there, it will not be watched; if there, maybe…

Bundling keeps costs down. (That’s my guess, and my business skills are much to sneer at.)

Working primarily on an e-commerce site these days, and the holiday rush is upon us.

So, the last few months have been, well, insane.

As in, “Sleep?! We don’t need no stinkin’ sleep!”

It’s worked out very well, overall. Sales climbing, no site crumbles and so on.

Sure, there have been hiccups and missteps, but that’s the cost of doing business. Try to identify; try to fix; try to make certain the badness does not happen (as often) in the future.

Yes, takes work and time, but remember: If I get a decent night’s sleep, the terrorists have won….

OK, I don’t know if this was bad speech-writing, bad delivery or an attempt to twist things a bit, but here is President Bush defending the war in Iraq:

“When you’re risking your life to accomplish a mission, the last thing you want to hear is that mission being questioned in our nation’s capital,” he told cadets. “I want you to know that, while there may be a lot of heated rhetoric in Washington, D.C., one thing is not in dispute: The American people stand behind you.”
— President Bush, speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy, Nov. 30, 2005

This statement is not parallel: Just because people in our nation’s capital are not behind the mission does not mean people in the nation’s capital are not supportive of the troops involved in that mission – and Bush’s remarks seem to make it seem that only in DC is war being questioned.

To me, this is one of the biggest differences twixt the Vietnam War and the current invasion, both of which became/have become unpopular at home: Whereas ‘Nam vets were often greeted with “baby killer!”, the soldiers in Iraq are viewed more as “poor bastards!”

Yes, I’m against their mission (and it’s not their mission; they’re just the pawns); and yes, I wish they could be home.

That doesn’t mean the terrorists have won or that I wish any ill-will on any troops over there.

The Chicago Tribune (dead-tree version; don’t know about Web site) had three grouped articles about Intelligent Design (ID) in its Perspective section today (Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005).

A summary of each article is the following:

• Christians can’t afford to oppose evolution – it’s too well accepted and documented. The fight should be for ID, not against evolution.
• ID makes inspiring students that much harder, especially at a time (now) when the country’s science skills/interests are going in the crapper.
• There’s room to teach both – at least mention creationism etc. as an aside, possibly.

All three articles were fairly short, well-written and without any of the hyperbole and divisive/dismissive language that has often been part of this argument.

And it has caused me to weigh in on this subject.

Before I begin, I want to explain what I believe ID is – in case I get it wrong:

ID basically says that the world is way too complex to have evolved from molecules and so on to humans and reptiles and other living organisms. And – if you look closely at evolution, there are gaps that are not yet explained. The way to explain the gaps and the complexity is to say there was some sort of Intelligent Design behind all of life. ID tries hard to not invoke the “God” word, but – tacitly – that seems to be the premise.

Now, I disagree with ID, for reasons outlined below, but I will say that the ID thinking has merit. Life is incredibly complex, and to say that my cat and me both – at the end of the day – evolved out of the same pool of organic molecules is pretty stunning. Ditto for trees and those scary-looking carpet bugs that look like elephants. We’re distant cousins? No way, Jose…

But most of the arguments ID offers are ineffectual, and – to a certain degree – can be explained away by invoking the God word:

• Life is too complex to be the result of evolution: If there is an omnipotent God that created the universe, all we know and see, why could this God not design a complex system that is the result of a god-driven evolution (as God’s choice)? Why not? I think such a God could knock this out faster than I could whip up a Perl script for a log file.
• There are gaps in evolution: Agreed, yet the gaps keep getting filled in. Only a couple of thousand years ago – a mere blink in the history of the earth – the world was make of hard, indivisible atoms. Then atoms were made of particles (proton, neutron, electron). Then these particles were made of other particles (quarks, leptons, mesons) and so on. Let’s say this ID theory was around a century or so ago, when anti-particles(!) were postulated and detected (positron, for example). This was way too complex for the time, so it must be ID! Right?
• What happens when the gaps are closed? When gaps – which were explained away as ID – are pretty conclusively proved, what happens then? Uh, well, ID still explains this other gap, that hasn’t been proved….
• There are gaps in our knowledge overall: Maybe we didn’t all come from one pool of organic molecules, maybe there were hundreds. Or a meteorite with molecules hit us and gave us another batch? Who knows? We’ve gone for Helios riding across the sky pulling the sun through a heliocentric system (Galileo) to our current, more Einstein view of circling the sun (depends on where you’re standing). Simply because we don’t understand everything – or anything – about an area of science today doesn’t mean it’ll never be understood.
• Room to Teach Both: The author mentioned that he had a Mennonite biology teacher who would mention creationism – as an aside – rolling his eyes a bit – but mentioning it. OK. I don’t have a problem with that. That’s the teacher’s – and, to a degree, the community’s – choice. The issues in Kansas and the Keystone State [where the issues split] called for teachers to be required to teach ID. That’s way different from being allowed to mention it. Vastly different. And if you don’t get the difference, read the Constitution of the US, Amendment 1.
• Francis Bacon: You know, the whole scientific method. Controls, cause vs. effect and so on. Empirical evidence. ID is the explanation for LACK of empirical evidence. That’s not science – it’s religion or philosophy (which is fine, but don’t require it in science classes). Lack of expected empirical evidence can be a good thing – see the Michelson and Morley Experiment, that failed…brilliantly! It did not give the empirical evidence expected, but the data – empirical evidence – led to acceptance of Einstein’s convention of a universal speed of light.
• Why Limit ID to Evolution Knocking? Genesis says the earth and all its stuff were made in six days (on the seventh, God kicked back – whew!). Evolution says it’s a long, slow process (though punctuated equilibrium/evolution has gained ground lately; I personally feel it’s valid). So they’re at odds. But – unless it truly is a Biblical vs. Empirical issue (which ID keeps saying it isn’t), aren’t there better/additional areas to apply ID? Big Bang vs. Steady State? If the former, what “there” was there before the bang? The Big Bang – overall – goes against Genesis; why no ID outcry here?. Quantum physics – hell, quantum mechanics gave rise to Einstein’s famous “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world” utterance. The more one looks as quantum mechanics, the more obtuse it seems. A century after Heisenberg, we still don’t fully get it. Must be the hand of God Intelligent Design…
• Science/scientists != atheism/atheists: Einstein believed in god; it’s almost hard to really delve into astrophysics – with wormholes, curved space, edge of the universe (what’s on the other side?) and so on without thinking about some larger power. No, we can’t prove it – does that mean we’ll stop trying to get empirical evidence?
• We ARE a Lazy Science Nation: Ever see the Jaywalking episodes on the Tonight Show? Where Jay Leno just cruises the streets and asks ordinary folks basic questions? Be very afraid; we don’t look so good. And science is a discipline where not knowing the answer is OK; where our understanding of issues changes over time (see the atoms issue, above); where we’re often wrong (see the Michelson and Morley Experiment), but pursuit of truth continues. Can you prove that this or that is ID? Yes? Then let’s stick it in the canon of science and then – as always – try to repeat the proof, debunk the proof, offer alternatives and so on. Let’s not just say the hard stuff is ID. Even if true (if so, prove such), this isn’t the scientific method (see Bacon, above). This is like a parent explaining to a child why the kid has to go to bed: “Because I said so.” Fine in this context; but it’s not science.

And that’s all I have to say about this at this time…

Tim Bray points to what it a very odd ZDNet blogger entry by Dana Blankenhorn suggesting – well, saying – that open-source applications are overwhelmingly just followers, not innovators. (And so what’s the use of it?)

While there is a certain degree of truth to this – Open Office is replicating MS Office, the GIMP trying to give the world a free Photoshop and so on, this isn’t the whole story. Because you could say the same thing for closed source software.

• MS Office was just a WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 clone with some other tools.
• Aldus Freehand tried (tried…) to duplicate Adobe Illustrator.
• Aldus PageMaker was a QuarkXpress copy, and now Adobe has their InDesign (I think that’s what it’s called).
• On the Web scripting language side, I don’t know who came first, but I guess the first one – to Blankenhorn – is the only innovator, the rest mere clones, be they OSS or CSS. So only one the following (abbreviated list) is an innovator, the rest imitators: PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, JSP, Lasso.

I really don’t see a lot of breakthrough apps on either side; sometimes the first innovator remains the best (Apache) in many respects; in some cases, the innovator falls by the wayside as others jump on this band wagon (Netscape eclipsed by IE, later by Firefox and Safari; Radio blogs bested by SixApart and Blogger). There are different types of innovation: breakthrough and incremental, for example.

And let’s take a look at a handful of OSS projects that were truly innovative and still remain the leaders:

• Apache – OK, I think this began as NCSA Server, but this was before the Web itself existed. Apache currently has approximately a 70% share of the server market, a figure that has remained pretty consistent (with an overall uptick trend) for the past five years. Apache runs the Web. Even Microsoft, with its large installed base and millions in advertising yearly, is second with roughly 20%.
• Perl – Before Perl, there were handfuls of shell and C scripts. Perl still massages the data that is presented on the Web. Python – and now Ruby – have made some inroads, but Perl is still out there and running strongest. Virtually every Unix server – and many MS servers – have Perl on them; few have Python or Ruby. First of its kind; still the most popular.
• Javascript– Developed by Netscape, this language (whose name was changed from LiveScript to cash in on the growing popularity of the then-new compiled language, Java [NOTE: JavaScript != Java except for some similarities of syntax]) is now the engine (along with CSS) that is AJAX: Part of what some call Web 2.0. VBScript is the only competitor, and only really used with ASP.
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – Interestingly, I have no idea where this came from; I think it might be a W3C implementation. I just don’t know. All I do know is that it’s not a shrinkwrapped product. It’s a spec, more than an app.

Also, Blankenhorn missed the mark – to me – by suggesting that apps are only innovative if they are totally new (for example, he points to TiVo, which is a good example of such; another [more retail] would be Netflix).

But sometimes the way an app/software is innovative is in the way you can use it, or how you can build it. JavaScript, for example, is a weak language. But you put it in a browser and can do things client-side: No server hit. Whoo-hoo! This made it powerful if it were the first or 1,000th incarnation of this type of language.

And do you every wonder why there are so many (according to surveys) VB coders vs, for example, C++ coders? Two reasons: 1) VB is built to be easy to use; 2) MS’s Visual Studio is an amazing work environment. Easy – but powerful – language with a great IDE. Duh. So we gots lots of VB apps.

If you applied Blankenhorn’s statements to cars instead of software, well, hell, the Toyota Prius, Audi Quattro and Hummer H2 are all just efforts to replicate the Model T (or perhaps Daimler’s and Benz’s first horseless carriage…).

Blankenhorn also misses one very important point, one he almost captured…but missed.

Projects like Mozilla and Openoffice are all about offering free replacements to proprietary monopolies. Databases like mySQL are still working on “innovations” proprietary products had years ago.

This is true in Linux as well and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

See – he almost had it: One of the truly innovative aspects of open-source software is that it is about offering free replacements to proprietary products.

View this as a good thing or bad (Blankenhorn agrees, at least for Linux, this is a good thing), it’s definitely new.

And innovative, Ja?

I’ve installed Google’s Web Analytics, so I just wanted to let readers – yes, BOTH of you – know that they are being tracked. I’ve plugged it into most of the areas of littleghost.com.

Ironically, this Google tool – which should certainly raise privacy concerns by those so disposed – isn’t ruffling feathers the way GMail did (“They’re reading my e-mail!!”) .

Yes, there are questions, but Google seems to have avoided the wrath of the Net in this case. Interesting.

Right now, the performance of this tool is really uneven and sluggish.

11/20/2005 Update – Google’s posted this on the analytics page:

Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. The demand for Google Analytics surpassed even our highest expectations and as a result some customers may temporarily experience report-update delays. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost. We are currently adding resources to ensure high-quality service. We apologize for any inconvenience.

However, the data it presents – and how it presents it/options to export same – is remarkable. I mean, holy crap. WebTrends must be curled up in a ball in the corner sobbing. They – and others – have per hit, per processor, per bandwidth yada yada costs; Google’s offering currently has the following pricing structure: FREE. FOR ANYONE/ANYTHING.

Youch.

There have been many articles – some by me, if I recall – saying Google is (or isn’t) the new/another Microsoft, and – to a degree – there’s an argument to be made either way. Since this issue even comes up makes it an approachable issue, to a degree – hell, if I keep being compared to Donald Trump or Doctor Ruth, for example, well, probably not true but worth investigating….

However, there are two important differences twixt MS and Google, as this analytics tool clearly delineates:

• No Lock In – Installed base is huge, especially when docs have to be shared. That’s why it’s important to have MS Office and so on. An Excel doc is an Excel doc. Standardization is key. But – with tools like Google Analytics – there isn’t such a issue. The reports are for you/your company – and Google offers export options (including Excel!). So a company can ditch this tool and go to AwStats, WebTrends and so on and there is little impact.
• Price Structure – I understand that MS has to make money – it’s a business, dammit! So does Google. Each company is approaching the issue from a different direction. MS is tapping the end user; Google is using the end user’s activity to fund its apps at no (up-front) cost to the end user. Merits to both views and I’m not going there tonight; I’m just saying these are fundamentally different approaches.

Damn. Where did this week go?

With the rising profile of blogs, even the mainstream media is covering a phenomena well-known in the blogosphere: Hey, blog about your job and you might get fired for same.

Duh.

Sacked by Google, an airline and Microsoft. There are about a bazillion other examples, but this handful of links show concrete examples of what I wrote above: Hey, blog about your job and you might get fired for same.

Perhaps the best example – in the blogosphere – is Heather Armstrong, webmistress of dooce.com. Yeah, she got fired for her blog postings (and she was stoooopid, as she admits). Read her; she’s smart and sassy.

This whole leadup is to something wedged into something Jakob Nielsen recently wrote about – about usability and so on for blogs.

I have my differences with Nielsen, but he’s generally 90% on the mark for me.

One item – a lower priority item – on his list for blog usability etc was something I hadn’t really thought about. His issue was the following:

Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Whenever you post anything to the Internet — whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email — think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years. Once stuff’s out, it’s archived, cached, and indexed in many services that you might never be aware of.

I’ve thought about the whole Internet archive thing before, but never in terms of a blog and a future boss/employer: This gives one pause.

That post about Sun Niagra servers hurting/helping a job X years from now?

That post showing an obvious tilt toward/against OSS/MS, Blue States/Red State, Pro-Choice/Pro-Life or whatever.

Yep, it’s out there. And it can help/hurt you in the future [which is Nielsen’s postulate]; not just today – which are all the stories you read.

I’ve never read about someone fired/not hired because of some old blog post; but why would that never happen?

It will.

I just never thought about it.

Will I stop blogging/change my voice?

No.

Still – interesting.

This weekend is either peak or just past peak of Autumn here in Chicago. Tomorrow I’ll be a raking fool…

Accordingly, I’ve switched the default stylesheet over to the Autumn one.

One thing I never did this year was build a summer stylesheet (I just copied the spring one to summer). I have the pics; just not the time to do such. Maybe sometime in the bowels of winter clicking on the Summer stylesheet will appear…or not.