This is how it happens. Pettiness is the most subversive enemy of freedom.

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I’m participating in a group blog about what the government of a connected people might look like. It’s at GreaterDemocracy.org.

For example, the latest entry is from Jon Lebkowsky:

Langdon Winner explores how the technological complexity of our infrastructures has made the U.S. (et al.) vulnerable to attack, and how, having seen a demonstration of that vulnerability in 9/11, we have hardened social and political systems and accepted a sacrifice of fundamental rights and freedoms that would have been unthinkable before the terrorist attack. Winner suggests better ways to deal with the perceived vulnerability. [Link]

Other members of the blog team include Jock Gill, Peter Kaminski and David Reed.

Adina blogs about why she’s been blogging about politics more than she expected to:

My personal feelings about these issues come from the fact that my dad is a holocaust refugee…[O]ne of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was — if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up, or would I be one of the people who kept silent until life became unbearable.

When the government rounds up immigrants on excuses of incorrect paperwork, and is able to detain them indefinitely without evidence or trial…

Every political decision says something about who we are but also about who we are becoming. And that’s what’s truly scary.

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I have come upon certain information about a hidden weakness of the 10-missile defense shield President Bush has decided to erect to protect our country. Although some may call me unpatriotic or even a traitor for telling our potential enemies how to defeat the shield, I prefer to think of myself as a whistle-blower.

So, here is the one can’t-fail way to exploit the hidden weakness of our missle shield: Fire 11 missiles.

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Kevin Marks writes “Bruce Schneier gets it” and appends this quotation to prove it:

This is law, not technology, so there are all sorts of shades of gray to this issue. The interests at stake in the original attack, the nature of the property, liberty or personal safety taken away by the counterattack, the risk of being wrong, and the availability and effectiveness of other measures are all factors that go into the assessment of whether something is morally or legally right. The RIAA bill is at one extreme because copyright is a limited property interest, and there is a great risk of wrongful deprivation of use of the computer, and of the user’s privacy and security. A strikeback that disables a dangerous Internet worm is less extreme. Clearly this is something that the courts will have to sort out.

It’s important that we brand the RIAA position as extremist. It’s also important that we recognize that software will never be able to make the Fair Use judgments that humans do. Leeway is crucial.

Kevin writes: “His ‘Secrets and Lies’ book is good on this too.” I haven’t read it, but in my experience Kevin has yet to be wrong in a recommendation.

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From Slate’s daily roundup of the news, by Eric Umansky:

The LAT’s [Los Angeles Times] Lott coverage had a nice bit of newspaper-speak. It mentions that he promised to reconsider his ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, “a group attacked as segregationist.” A group attacked as segregationist? Any semi-conscious person would conclude so. (See for yourself: http://www.cofcc.org/page12.htm )

Lott has given speeches to the group over the years and has met with their leaders. According to the Washington Post:

In his speech [to the group], Lott, according to the newsletter, called the Citizen Informer, warns against the forces supporting government spending: ‘We need more meetings like this across the nation’ to offset these liberal pressures. ‘The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries'” (Thomas B. Edsall, The Washington Post, December 16, 1998).

Here are some excerpts from the page Umansky points to :

To a large extent, soft conservatives and so-called “neo-conservatives” have embraced the legacy of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Nowadays, the average “conservative” policy maker thinks and acts like a bleeding heart liberal from 1963. …

The C of CC recognizes that European Christian heritage is essential for the survival of our standard of living and way of life. There is no acceptable substitute for the civilization that has evolved through the Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons.

Some “gems” from elsewhere on their site:

The burden of slavery will probably never be lifted from the white man. And yet, the real shame of slavery is that Africans were ever brought to America in the first place. No system of labor was ever more costly or cumbersome…

Rather than doling out government checks from welfare offices, an African Slave Reparation and Repatriation Fund should be created to undo the wrong that was done 400 years ago. Countries like Gambia, Senegal, and Liberia would receive a fixed bounty for every slave descendant who migrates to Africa …

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Lott may never have meant, as happily charged in the press, that we would have been better off with a segregationist President, but I wish he had. It is true, and it is time someone says so.

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The Sixth Law of God is a book that will stun even fundamentalist Christians! Pastor V. S. Harrell has researched the oldest available Greek Septuagint texts to prove that the Commandment against adultery is a law against race mixing!

Lott will be gone within a week. Having rejected segregation, the Republicans will turn with minty-fresh breath to the task of preserving the nation’s concentration of wealth.

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From Cryptome comes a write-up of an article in the SF Weekly that’s successfully scary about what it means to have your personal info aggregated:

The SF Weekly’s column by Matt Smith in the Dec 3 issue points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone +1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare (+1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 (+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions — decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American.

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Regina Campbell, the teacher who initially reviewed the MCAS test with Jennifer Mueller, has chimed in on the discussion page of my blog about it. Regina says that Jennifer solved it purely by looking at patterns, not with a “dinner party” story, despite the Boston Globe’s explanation. Regina’s first-hand account is worth reading.

On the other hand, Jonathan Peterson points out that I ought to have points deducted from my reading comprehension score: even with the acceptance of her answer on that question, Jennifer was still two points shy of passing the test. Well, they ought to make an exception. Oh, that’s right, standardized, quantified tests don’t allow exceptions. (Yeah, yeah, there’s talk of granting some type of near-miss diplomas…)

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we now have the greatest example ever of why quantified, standardized tests should not be used as the way of certifying students’ achievements. A novelist couldn’t have come up with a better one.

In Massachusetts, we’ve introduced the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) that all students must pass in order to get a high school diploma. Fail the MCAS, no diploma.

So, along comes Jennifer Mueller, a senior at the Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in (Go Panthers!) who took the MCAS last spring and got a score of 218, two points short of passing. So, she looked over the results and thought there was one particular answer marked wrong that she was convinced she’d gotten right. So, she took it up with the State Department of Education and convinced them that her answer was acceptable. So, the Department upgraded her and everyone with the same answer. As a result, 557 students who had failed, now passed.

You can read the question in question at the Boston Globe site for the next couple of days before the article gets moved to the Ash Heap of Broken Links. It represents the numbers from 0-10 in binary by showing each as a set of 4 circles, either white or black. Then it gives a multiple choice answer asking you to find the set of 4 circles that express 11.

Jennifer Mueller looked at the sets of white and black circles in row after row and observed a social pattern: The first white circle has dinner alone. Then the second white circle has dinner alone. Then they have dinner together. Then a third white circle has dinner alone. Then the three of them have dinner together. That pattern holds: a white circle has to have dinner alone before it can have dinner with the rest. Jennifer used this to correctly predict the next in the sequence. Unfortunately, the next line in her pattern expresses the number 12 in computer language, not the number 11. The pattern she found is indeed there. Her answer is right. And she deserves credit for it.

Jennifer’s discovery hits all the bases. She came up with a pattern that took a particular type of brilliance to see. Furthermore, to make this a textbook example, the pattern she came up with depended on her thinking about things in terms of pictures, not numbers. And she thought this through in terms of sociality — those dots were having dinner together. Where’s that type of intelligence being measured and valued?

The biggest point is that 500 students who yesterday were not worthy of a high school diploma today are worthy, without anything about them changing. I understand that these tests are standardized and quantified in order to make them fair, but here’s a case where accuracy actually works against fairness. A score of 220 passes, 218 fails: because it’s so precise, who passes and fails is arbitrary. It has to be, because being educated doesn’t have a sharp edge: “Yes you are, no you’re not, and here’s the dividing line.” It doesn’t work that way, no matter how much comfort we get from thinking that tests can sort us into two piles. “Accurate and unfair.” It’s not a junction we’re comfortable with, but it’s there. Fairness is all about our ability to make exceptions, to look at context, to dwell on what the numbers don’t say…Just like Jennifer Mueller, who almost failed because she is so much smarter than the test she took.

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The Most Clueless comments of the young millennium come from Rev. Robert V. Meffan as reported in today’s Boston Globe. (You can read them today here and here. The Globe will soon lock them in its Vault of Public Ignorance.)

Rev. Meffan had sex with teen-age girls entering a nunnery because “I felt that by having this little bit of intimacy with them that this is what it would be like with Christ.”

This wonderful man doesn’t even bear any grudges against the young women whose trust he violated: “They were wonderful girls. I have no hatred toward them, no animosity toward them or anything like that. To me they were just wonderful, wonderful young people.”

And I thought that I was at the point in this outrage where no further revelation could get me to yell “Holy shit!” while reading the morning paper. I should have known better.

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The new Get Your War On is out and climbing the DayPop Top 40, as it should. After all, how can you not love a strip that begins:

“Well, at least Timmy had a good ten years without having to know who Henry Kissinger was. There’s something so precious about a young child’s first encounter with Henry Kissinger…”

Will someone please give David Rees a Pulitzer? Or better: contribute to Landmine.org to which he donates his royalties.

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