I flew into New Orleans two weekends ago, and drove up to Baton Rouge. The causeway bridge across Lake Ponchatrain is still standing, but on I-10 east of the city, entire concrete chunks are missing, rendering what once was an interstate an uncrossable mess of stepping stones. And while in Baton Rouge, I went to the very new 3-D computing lab at LSU, where among the things I saw were satellite images of Sri Lanka, before and after the tsunami's wrath, and also similar shots of New Orleans, which were intended to help hurricane forecasters predict the impact of water upon the city and respond accordingly. It seemed so academic.

My favorite night in New Orleans was not during Mardi Gras, or spent at one of the famous clubs, but walking around the beautifully scented Garden District until 4am, just talking with two dear friends. New Orleans was for me a place in America that was always full of living color even when Chicago was iced over, refuge from the elements.

from Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems

LOST

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.

On Point had a piece on Google last night. Apparently, the mega-internet-informatory is extending its wiry fingers into other vistas, among things they mentioned: Google cell phones, Internet chatting, and 3-D mapping of the entire planet.

Although I often find myself a sucker for these little types of gadgets--AIM instant messenger, Map Questing every address I'm supposed to mail something to, Googling many to most professors and TA's I have--I too found myself furrowing my brow, listening to the many innovations that Google's planning on instituting on the internet.

It's not that I fear losing my sense of privacy. Indeed, if I did, this entire blogging thing would be pretty ridiculous. And indeed, it's not at all that I'm concerned with people losing sight of person-to-person contact: as many of my friends can testify, it's hard enough to keep in contact with me by e-mail, let alone in person.

What worries me is the amount of eggs that seem to be going into one basket, and then what's going to happen to that basket. It's not unrelated to the "one ring to rule them all" in Tolkien's famous trilogy. Clearly, that's an exaggeration--that the happy rainbow colored letters of the seriffed Google logo can transform themselves into a disembodied eye staring disapprovingly over my shoulder while I discover again that I've locked myself out of my apartment yet again.

But it's still somewhat alarming that so much information is instituted in some private company. And, knowing full well the caveats of asking these questions on a decidedly Libertarian blog, I continue: shouldn't there be some governmental regulation on the type of information permissible through these sites? At the very least, governmental standards for security, much like there are for research laboratories and facilities? And, perhaps most importantly, what type of regulations are there?

Comments are open.

"Suspicious Minds"
We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much baby

Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I say?

Othello provides a famous solution,[2] albeit a very problematic one, that allows my favorite Shakespearean woman to shine. She is a woman whose ability to rise to the situation is believable because she herself seems real. I've complained before about the convention of love at first sight (I still don't believe it exists); I likewise find it difficult to take seriously the stage's utterly perfect women. Once Desdemona has been much talked about, defended well to her father her loyalty to her husband, and been praised again, she'll die without fisticuffs[3] and having survived just long enough to breathe her only known lie.[4] She's a lovely example of what unreal people do in very real circumstances.

Emilia, on the other hand, is a real woman who does provide an example of what living heroes should and can do. Her greatest mistake in the play, so far as I can tell, is not to ask why her husband wants the handkerchief which he has a hundred times requested. She's not in general a clueless woman--far from it, she has a practical and worldly nature beyond Desdemona's[5]--but she simply does not capitalize on the one slim clue the play gives her. Second to that, she obeys a brutish husband who, when he first introduces her in Cyprus, cruelly mocks her beyond acceptable teasing; she does not confess this manipulative man's theft to her kind mistress.

But when she finds Desdemona dying, killed by Othello, Emilia begins to speak out, believing the truth known freely to outweigh any consequences, even death, her act will have upon her. Let her die twenty times, she cares not for Othello's sword, she will speak up to say her master killed her blameless friend though she has no proof but her own words and knowledge of Desdemona's character. Othello, though crazy enough to kill his wife in rage, might not be mad enough to slay her for speaking what he feels, at that point, to be tired lies and misconceptions.

Of all the characters gathered together, Emilia's the one to realize Iago is a murderer. Perhaps fearing her husband, perhaps not with all these guards around her, but surely knowing her place and the rules she breaks, she cries out to the men around her:

Good gentlemen, let me have leave to speak:

’Tis proper I obey him, but not now.

Perchance, Iago, I will ne’er go home.

’Twill out, ’twill out; I hold my peace, sir? no;

No, I will speak as liberal as the north;

Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,

All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.

So come my soul to bliss,as I speak true

So speaking as I think, alas, I die.

Notes:

[1] Oxford American opened my ears to this recording.

[2] This production features an excellent Iago & a somewhat too epileptic Othello.

[3] Yes, I realize the impracticalities of putting up a defense against such a warrior.
3:4 - Othello - "Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady."
Desdemona - "It yet hath felt no age, nor known no sorrow."

[4] 5:2 - Emilia - "O who hath done this deed?"
Desdemona - "Nobody. I myself."

[4] 4:3 - Emilia, on whether she would cuckold her husband for all the world, replies practically: "In troth, I think I should, and undo ’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition; but for the whole world, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? I should venture purgatory for ’t."

It seems inappropriate not to make at least passing mention of the wreckage of Katrina. On Monday I casually predicted that New Orleans had luckily dodge the worst; apparently that was grave error. Orin Kerr is now drumming up disaster relief donations while Professor Bainbridge and others discuss donation tactics and Professor Balkin briefly discusses the early constitutional debates over disaster relief and internal improvements, although with a slightly less sympathetic cast to the losers than I think they deserve.

At any rate, it is unfair for those with my theistic caste to blame nature for disaster, but that does not mean we must not fight it off.

Jeremy Blachman has an op-ed in today's New York Times half-heartedly suggesting some measure of employment law protecting those who blog from being fired. Which is to say, he proposes forbidding all bloggers from accepting employment-at-will contracts.

He suggests that this restriction on employment contracts for bloggers would be justified by the social benefits that blogs provide, although I confess that I fail to see the link. Lots of things, from sexual intercourse to parties to gossip provide social benefits to lots of people, but it would be rather odd to create employment-law categories for all of them. Indeed, halfway through I thought Blachman was going to make exactly this point when he wrote:

You can be fired for being ugly, you can be fired for being left-handed, you can be fired for something you say to your secretary. And if you can be fired for something you say to your own secretary, it seems silly to say you shouldn't be able to be fired for something you post on the Internet for everyone else's secretary to read.

In a recent post, Chicago's Rita K complained that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is insufficiently proactive in her attempt to ferret out non-vampire evil going on in and around Sunnydale. I responded with a simple-minded textualist argument (vampires are her job, the rest is just ancillary). Rita then pointed out that since the market is pretty thin in non-vampire slayers, Buffy must do her duty in those quarters too. Since there is no mantis-slayer, hyena-slayer, etc. (or at least none that we have seen in the first 1.3 seasons) those fall under Buffy's purview too.

Fair enough. Though the purpose of the office of the Slayer does seem to be to slay vampires, the purpose of an institution is frequently outrun by the needs of the here and now. It is unfortunate that the non-vampire bad guys frequently claim victims before Buffy even figures out to stop them. But Rita is still wrong to blame Buffy for this lack of pro-activeness.

She should be blaming Giles. At the risk of making the narrow textualist argument again, she is the slayer. Her job is to kill things. Sure, a decent amout of seeking, watching, patrolling, and so on are a part of her job as a necessary sideline to the actual job of slaying (just as a decent amount of interpretation and policy-making are a necessary side effect of the president's duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed). But it is still Giles's fundamental duty, so far as I can tell, to do the watching. Not Buffy's.

So if somebody is falling down on the job in Sunnydale, and I am inclined to agree with Rita that somebody is, that somebody is Giles the watcher, not Buffy the slayer. Sure, Buffy should be picking up the slack when Giles lets down his end (and when she can, she sure does) but it is unrealistic and uneconomic to expect Buffy to hold both slaying and watching positions full-time. Something must be her first priority, and given her comparative expertise in beating the tar out of people, I think she has made a fair balance of things.