Glenn Hauman: View From Above

John Perry Barlow is writing again.
Every so often, he goes off and writes an essay that seriously changes
the POV of the world as we know it. This is going to be one of those.
I just wish that this didn’t have to be the subject– but it’s the times we live in.

John Ellis reports
on a New York Times article about 15% of the votes cast in this year’s
mid-term elections will be cast before Election Day, and therefore

…this will make it much more difficult for the Decision
Desks of the various networks to accurately project winners quickly on
Election Night. Because of the size of the absentee vote in states
across the country, there’s an outside chance that we won’t know on
Election Night who will control the US Senate, the US House and/or key
gubernatorial seats. We may just have to wait until all the “absentee”
votes are counted.

Damn. If only he could have shown such restraint when he worked at the Fox News Desk for Election 2000, when he called the Florida election for his cousin George W.

He also says in the same post, “governors can actually help a presidential candidate win an election.” Gee, you think?

The New York Times has an editorial today saying that the copyright term is too long, in a nod to Eldred v. Ashcroft:

The purpose of the 1998 Congressional extension was not protecting
artists, but enriching media companies that hold property rights in
their creations, virtually in perpetuity. The founders did not envision
copyright being put to this use, and the Supreme Court should not allow
it.
Bully for them. But they can do a lot to promote the issue right now.
The Times could do their own shortening of the copyright extension,
just by declaring that everything they’ve published prior to 1927 is
now in the public domain, to go back in line to that 75 year term.
Simple, no muss, no fuss, and it would show great benevolence on their
part. Think of it as form of “exceeding federal guidelines”.
My suspicion on Eldred v. Ashcroft, btw, is that the courts will not
only rule the current retroactive extension illegal, but all previously
enacted retroactive extensions– in other words, the term of copyright
will become what the term was at the time of the creation of the work.
And boy, won’t that be fun to watch.

Both the WSJ and the Boston Globe are running stories about more nasty Bush dealings with Harken, including what looks suspiciously like a payoff. Media Whores Online
summarizes:
\\ These reports document how a long-time Bush family political
supporter, Robert J. Stone, Jr., in league with the Cabot family oil
interests, manipulated the Harvard Management Company to invest
millions in Harken in an off-the books arrangement that bailed the
failing company out of a liquidity crisis, kept hidden from Harken
investors and the S.E.C., in 1990.
The reports further show that the financial guarantor of the deal was
none other than Robert Abboud of First City Boston — the one-time head
of the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, a close political supporter of Bush?s
father, a personal friend of Saddam Hussein, and a figure with a
longtime history of dubious financial and political dealings.
Finally, the reports show that George W. Bush, as a member of Harken?s
audit committee, personally signed off on the secret deals, the
deception of investors, and the manipulation of Harken?s stock price.
As a result of that manipulation, the S.E.C. then justified its
suspension of its investigation into possible fraud in the younger
Bush?s earlier Harken dealings ? an investigation whose files still
remain under lock and key thanks to Harvey Pitt.
?It seems to be a simple case of Aeneas [Harvard Management Company?s
venture capital arm] bailing out Harken,? Dala Bharan, the accounting
expert consulted by the Wall Street Journal, said.
The timing of that bail-out is all-important ? coming at a time that
salvaged George W. Bush?s sinking reputation as a businessman and
fended off official federal investigations.
So are the off-the-books methods, which are almost identical to the
kinds of arrangements that the thieves at Enron indulged in.\\

US Politics
on About.com has a disturbing piece on Health and Human Services
investigating organizations that criticize Bush’s AIDS policies.
Worried yet?

Cogent Provocateur provides us with an excellent Field Guide to Bellicose Casuistry,
giving a good rundown on reasons to go to war with Iraq. Only things
missing: the idea that Bush is trying to distract America from his own
failings, hoping people focus so much on something else to hate that
they’ll forget about his screwups. (See dog, wag the.)

Ted Barlow nails it:

Well, it’s the issue that everyone is talking about. To
me, it seems pretty clear. Deadlines are deadlines, and rules are
rules. When candidates miss them, especially after disgracing
themselves by violating the laws they’re sworn to uphold, they
shouldn’t be on the ballot. There is no legal argument to support these
candidates, just vague appeals to “the will of the people.” That’s why
I join with principled, consistent conservative commentators to insist
that Katherine Harris be removed from the ballot in Florida.

A friend asked me after reading this if I’d flip-flopped from
conservative to liberal on him. I replied that my consistent thread has
been a stand against hypocrisy, and boy howdy, there do seem to be a
lot of it going around today, don’t it? I mean, Hillary might not have
been around New York long, but at least she followed the law. Unlike,
say, Milt Romney.

Ted Chiang.
Ted F. Chiang.
Damn, he can drive me nuts.

I just picked up the collection Stories Of Your Life (and others)
and damn, he’s good. This may be the only book I’ve ever seen on Amazon
with a five star average rating, across the board. Yes, he’s that
good.
Ted has the single best batting average in science fiction. He’s had
eight stories published in the last twelve years– this collection
reprints his complete professional fiction output. In that time, he won
the Campbell New Writer Award in 1992, a Nebula Award and a Hugo
nomination for his first published short “Tower of Babylon”, another
Nebula and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and a Hugo nomination
for “Story of Your Life”, a Sidewise Award and another Hugo nomination
for “Seventy-Two Letters”, and this year’s Locus and Hugo Award for
“Hell Is the Absence of God”. Everything the man’s published has gotten
nominated for something.
His first six stories picked up over twenty award nominations and six
wins.
You might think I’d want to pay him the ultimate writer’s compliment:
“I hate him and I want him dead.” Except that isn’t true. I’d say I
wish there was a way to get him to write slower so the rest of us would
have a chance except A: I don’t want to deprive myself of any of his
stories, and B: I don’t think it’s possible for his output to be any
slower than it is.
Why is this bugging me? Because I know the guy, have for years. I went
to Earl L. Vandermuelen High School in beautiful Port Jefferson, New
York with him. We worked together on the school paper, the Purple Parrot,
where we were part of a glorious revolution. The paper had run out of
its budgeted money by December of that year, and had become a paper of
pure apathy– the last issue was two pages on a monthly schedule. Ted
and I worked under the bundle of energy known as Eddie Chang (no
relation) and by the end of the year we had raised money, resurrected
the paper, gotten it on a bi-weekly schedule (the last issue was 14
pages, and if that sound puny, please remember that this was a year
before Pagemaker) and the former newspaper advisor stepped down from
his post amid allegations of kickbacks from the printer.
Ted wrote at the time, “Things always work out oddly… how does the
Parrot work? I really don’t know; it always looks on the brink of
death, and it always survives anyway. The Parrot’s a very strange
bird.” But it was fun stuff.
The next year, he was layout editor of the paper and I was assistant
layout and graphics editor. We spent a certain amount of time at
loggerheads– no specific death threats– but we still managed to put
out some damn fine work. And at the end of the year, we still liked
each other. He’s the last signer in my yearbook for the year that he
graduated.
He wrote a regular science fiction review column for the paper the
first year. The column was met with a certain amount of incredulity– a
review column of science fiction books? In a high school newspaper? Who
reads this thing, and why is it taking up valuable space which could be
used to run pictures of cheerleaders? Ted knew it was unexpected and
made self-depreciating comments about the column in it all the time.
Still, Ted persevered, with reviews of Spider Robinson’s Stardance, the Niven/Pournelle Inferno, Asimov’s Winds of Change, and even a review of I-Con III,
where he proceeded to state that Harlan Ellison was only 5’2, thereby
proving that Harlan does not in fact read everything ever published
about him. And since this is appearing on the Internet, it’s unlikely
he’ll read this either.
Ted has a sense of humor so black it could have been used for set
changes. I was reasonably sure that his Indian spirit animal was
Eeyore. The next year, the sf review column was replaced by a more
general criticism column, which read like H.L. Mencken’s secret diary.
Echoes of a lot of Ted’s stories can be found in his high school years.
“Tower of Babylon” maps very closely to a story he wrote for the high
school literary magazine. “The Story of Your Life” discusses light
refraction through glass, and the name of that column he wrote in high
school was “The Critical Angle”.
I have probably had more face time with him than any of his editors. I
also haven’t seen him in fifteen years– had I known he was going to be
at Worldcon this year, I would have gone to San Jose to say hi.
But I figured he’d wouldn’t show up. Why? Because he’s been incredibly
quiet and isolated. He’s almost become the science fiction equivalent
of J.D. Salinger. Even though he attended the Hugo Awards ceremony this
year, he didn’t pick up his own award. This article may be the most
biographical information anybody has ever written about him, and that’s
info that a decade and a half old. The phrase I heard used to describe
him today was “shockingly humble”. But I don’t think it’s just that.
I think that Ted is still not ready to believe that he’s standing in
the ranks of people like Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein and Spider, Niven
and Pournelle. And he lives in Washington, away from most SF pro
enclaves, so he doesn’t get as much support from other pros as he
should.
That’s what’s bugging me. After 18 years, this humility routine and
belief that “nobody reads my stuff” is getting really tiresome.
Take a bow, fella. You deserve it. And to steal your stealing of
Shakespeare, “If we should meet again, why, we shall smile.”
By the way, Paul and Ed say hi, and please say hello to Michelle from
me when you get a chance. And hey– wanna write some media tie-in
stuff? It’s not so bad once you get used to it.

Yes, it’s true. Everybody on the planet is a telepath but you, and we’re all thinking about you behind your back.

…and just now came across James Kosub’s comments and post about Oaths,
where he states that it’s unreasonable that the memory of September 11
lasted for 400 years into the future.
To this I say, nonsense.
People remember a wide variety of things from that long ago, although
the fragments can be somewhat jumbled. But saying that we don’t
remember it because certain other events had a higher body count is
just silly. People remember the Great Chicago Fire, but it wasn’t even
the biggest death toll of the day. 300 people died in the Chicago fire.
But on October 8, 1871 the logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin
also caught fire, as well as the surrounding forest. 1,150 people died
there. But the town’s telegraph lines burned down along with everything
else, so the news was late getting out, and got dwarfed by the news of
Chicago, as well as the colorful story about the lantern.
In the case of Corsi, what got passed down was not the death of the
2500 civilians, but the idea of sacrifice and duty that came from the
firefighters. The men who ran into certain death, and the ones who knew
it and went anyway. Particularly if it was a family heirloom, probably
from someone who died that day doing what Corsi was doing, putting
herself in harm’s way. Lense didn’t even need to know what 9/11 was to
know what a firefighter is, and to know that this was the tool of
someone who died, not in battle, but in service– and that it probably
inspired Corsi to put her life on the line doing the same thing.
Regardless, James has no idea how the future will play out. For all he
knows, 9/11 could very well bring out that future of death and
destruction he speaks of. Ever seen a Muslim in the Star Trek universe? 9/11 might be the beginning of why.

Is it possible it will be forgotten by many? Yes, as so many other things are.
But to proclaim knowledge of what will be remembered in the future (and
who will remember what, and for what reasons) is just, well,
presumptive.