William F. Buckley

The death of William F. Buckley could be considered a symbol of the death of intellectual conservatism. There was a lot he said that I disagreed with, but he said what he believed, not what would get a party or a candidate elected. His kind of conservatism, pro-liberty on economics and at least on some social issues, gave rise to the Goldwater and Reagan movements. Ultimately its dependence on religion proved its undoing, allowing the religious right to take over. But the modern libertarian movement has some of its roots in Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, which I once belonged to.

Conservatism has turned into just another big-government movement, based in fear and faith. Buckley once showed us something better, though his approach was fatally flawed.

• Commentary by Radley Balko
• Commentary by Robert Poole
• Commentary by Ilya Shapiro

Google caves in to cybervandals

Google capitulated to Pakistan's "accidental" denial-of-service attack and removed the YouTube video which regarded Islam as a fascist religion.

I should write a paragraph about how capitulating to religious fascists encourages them, but I'm feeling too generally disgusted with too many things right now.

Stephen Foster's songs

Stephen Foster's songs have a reputation for enshrining the "happy darkey" image of slavery, and several were adopted by during the Jim Crow days as the official songs of southern states. But this reputation ignores significant aspects of his work. It can take some effort to look at the lyrics with fresh eyes, avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to the use of dialect. I have a collection called A Treasury of Stephen Foster, and in looking through it, I'm struck by the number of songs which refer to the plight of slaves sold away from their homes and families. Ironically, these are often the songs that were adopted by state legislatures; after the Civil War, they were re-interpreted as nostalgia for slavery. But when he wrote these songs, slavery was still a fact; they have to be understood as the songs of relocated slaves, not disappointed free people.

Let's take some examples, like "Angelina Baker":

Early in de morning
Ob a lubly summer day
I as for Angelina,
And dey say, "She's gone away."
I don't know wha to find her,
Cayse I don't know wha she's gone.
She left me here to weep a tear
And beat on de old jawbone.

There's no suggestion that Angelina is dead. She's "gone away." Slaves don't do that of their own volition, so the meaning is clear.

"Old Folks at Home" isn't as explicit, but the most reasonable interpretation is that the singer is a slave who has been taken away from his family:

When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I.
Oh! take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me live and die.

"My Old Kentucky Home" could have come out quite differently from its published version. The book mentions a manuscript sketch:

Oh, good night, good night, good night
 Poor Uncle Tom
Grieve not for your old Kentucky home
 You're bound for a better land
  Old Uncle Tom.

The notes for the song say, "It is entirely possible that Stephen planned to write a topical song based on Uncle Tom's Cabin but thought better of it because his family were all Democrats and had no use for Abolitionists."

Foster wasn't consistent. In "Ring de banjo," Foster has a freed slave declare his love for "massa" and say, "I'll go away no more." "Massa's in de Cold Ground," a song of slaves mourning for their master, is very hard to take. He wasn't an abolitionist, even though he wrote music to the abolitionist "We Are Coming, Father Abraam" once the Civil War had started. My impression is that Foster never held an opinion that was really his own, but his human sympathies didn't stop at racial lines. Certainly there is a positive, sympathetic side to his songs that shouldn't be ignored.

Pakistan vs. YouTube

It's fascinating and worrisome how Pakistan was able to take out YouTube globally for two hours without even meaning to, and I've been tracking down some of the more intelligent analysis on what really happened. As far as the average news story goes, it was all black magic, but there are a number of technically savvy articles which show a consensus on the most likely explanation.

There's a protocol I hadn't heard of before, called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which allows networks to share routing information. It assumes that the networks trust each other, and that's what made it possible. The linked article explains, "Routes learned via BGP have associated properties that are used to determine the best route to a destination when multiple paths exist to a particular destination."

Pakistan's government wanted to prove to the world that it isn't a fascistic, freedom-hating government. Obviously the best way to do this is to censor anybody who says the contrary, and someone had put up a video on YouTube that the government didn't like, so it corrected the error by commanding its ISP's to block all access to YouTube. At least some of them did this by setting up static routing (another new term for me; I'm no TCP/IP expert) for YouTube's IP addresses redirecting them to a black hole. This rerouting found its way into the globally advertised BGP routes of these ISP's, and routers around the world accepted these routes. The details of why they were accepted in preference to YouTube's announced routes aren't clear to me, but the specificity of the IP blocks and the directness of the routes (it's a short path to /dev/null from anywhere) are apparently factors.

There's a secure version of BGP, called S-BGP, which supposedly can keep such things from happening, and is specified in an IETF working draft that expired a few years ago. This doesn't sound like an immediate solution.

Given that Pakistan could do this accidentally, it seems that if a country with lots of Internet connectivity -- say, China -- wanted to launch a denial-of-service attack or even created forged hosts for IP addresses, it wouldn't have too much trouble bending BGP to its will for a few hours, perhaps longer if it was sneaky. Don't count me as an expert on this; I'm just slogging through the technical details and saying what I found.

Comcast vs. the FCC

The public hearing which the FCC has convened on Comcast's practices is a classic battle of false alternatives.

On the one hand, Comcast is offering platitudes such as "There's nothing wrong with network management," ignoring the fact that Comcast violated broadly accepted protocols by using forged packets for what it calls "network management." Meanwhile, the FCC's Michael Copps is using the occasion to call for "a specific enforceable principle of nondiscrimination."

What we have is a breach-of-contract issue; Comcast limited certain types of traffic by deceptive means and without notice. But neither side wants to admit that. Comcast, rather than coming clean on the matter, is trying to obfuscate the matter and effectively inviting regulation. Earlier it had lied outright. The regulation advocates, blinded by their desire for government-mandated "net neutrality," are using the hearing as a springboard for their agenda rather than focusing on the deceptive practices.

It may be reasonable to give lower priority to streaming protocols, which are bandwidth hogs, in order to let other traffic flow more quickly. There are ways to do this, and it was probably technical blundering rather than intentional deception which led to the forged-packet approach. But by justifying its approach as legitimate "network management," Comcast is digging a pit for itself.

There have been too many cases -- the names Diebold and Belkin come to mind immediately -- where high management at technology companies has decided that when something goes wrong, deceiving a technically illiterate public is the golden road to success. It doesn't work, and it leads to more government control.

Not making the trains run on time

While most means of transportation have greatly improved in speed, train trips between Boston and outlying locations actually take longer today in some cases than they did in the early 20th century, according to an article on Boston.com. Recently the Worcester line lengthened the times on its schedules to match reality.

The article cites a number of reasons for the decline, including heavier traffic and more local stops. But one factor which isn't mentioned is that buses, airlines, and cars are provided by competing private companies, while Boston's commuter rail is a government-chartered monopoly.

The MBTA claims that in those days, "the railroads operated just as they wanted to without any regulation. They could be in an accident a day and continue to run." The reality is that the railroads were very concerned with safety; an accident a day on any rail line would quickly result in no passengers. For example, take a look at these rather morbid railroad safety posters from the 1920's. Advances in technology made trains safer over the course of the century, but the idea that private companies lack the incentives for safety that government-granted monopolies have is absurd.

Bush threatens America to save his skin

Bush has openly threatened to compromise national security to save his own skin, yet he isn't being called on it very widely. In an interview transcript, he said:

How do you compromise on something like granting liability for a telecommunications company? You can't. If we do not give liability protection to those who are helping us, they won't help us. And if they don't help us, there will be no program. And if there's no program, America is more vulnerable.
 
What I'm going to do is continue to remind people that unless they get this program done, we're going to be vulnerable to attack.

This wasn't an isolated slip of the tongue. Earlier , Kurt Opsahl reports, Bush had threatened:

If these companies are subjected to lawsuits that could cost them billions of dollars, they won't participate. They won't help us. They won't help protect America.

(Opsahl calls it a threat by the telecom companies, but as far as I know only Bush has publicly made the threat. I wrote to Opsahl pointing this out, but haven't received any response.)

Bush threatens that if he doesn't get immunity for the telecommunication companies for past violations of the law, they will stop cooperating with American intelligence, with his implied blessing. He didn't say that the telecom companies will become overcautious; he said flatly, "there will be no program." Bush intends, by his own words, to shut down terrorism-related electronic surveillance until he's safe from whatever those lawsuits would disclose. This is extortion.

In this morning's news we find that Bush is pushing the threat forward. Homeland Security and National Intelligence asserted:

We learned last night after sending [the original] letter that . . . new surveillances under existing directives issued pursuant to the Protect America Act will resume, at least for now.
 
We appreciate the willingness of our private partners to cooperate despite the uncertainty.
 
Unfortunately, the delay resulting from this discussion impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information.

If the telecom companies have been dragging their heels in legal surveillance in an attempt to extort immunity for their illegal actions, then Bush should have denounced them, not helping to hide them from the law. Have they? I don't know. It's all hidden behind state secrecy.

Calling Bush a crooked politician is an insult to crooked politicians. Willfully endangering legal intelligence-gathering goes far beyond the usual looting and corruption.