The New Despotism. Read this interview with author Gore Vidal on Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, and do I dare use his name in the same company as these giants of U.S. history, George Bush.
In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?
Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don’t think he could endure the current dishonestly. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.
But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?
No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.
Seti call home. Those of you using seti@home may want to update your software to version 3.08. It seems there is a buffer overflow condition that could be exploited by an attacker. Said attacker would then be able to execute arbitrary code on your PC. In other words, the l33t hax0rs would ownz U.
ZDNet has a story on subpoenas filed in U.S. District Court in Utah against Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, The Open Source Development Labs, and others. The subpoenas are part of SCO's suit filed in March alleging that IBM illegally incorporated trade secrets from UNIX into Linux. IBM responded with its own set of subpoenas in October and now SCO is responding with more legal filings.
In my opinion, it is difficult to see the good that will come of this. SCO insists they are merely protecting their intellectual property rights, as well they should. However, there appears room for interpretation as to what rights SCO may have as it pertains to UnixWare and Linux. One must also remember that SCO views Linux as a competitor to UnixWare, and as such, these legal moves appear more as a business strategy to remove such competition than protecting their rights. YMMV.
Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!
