Today I switched fungibleconvictions.com from Go Daddy to a new registrar and host.

I was willing to give the company a chance to come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It did, slightly. But it’s much too little too late.

I’m not all that interested in patronizing a company that equivocates on such ill-conceived legislation. The option to remain anonymous to governments, the need for the internet’s structural integrity, and the non-negotiability of freedom of speech must be defended — most of all by the intermediaries between content-creators and end-users, intermediaries like Go Daddy who, as much as any government, are in the technical and moral position to protect speech and due process.

Generally, I like Boehner. But he and other conservatives—but many powerful liberals as well—apply the American Dream in a way that drives me nuts: they apply it tautologically, that is, in such a way that its logic (and the government policies intended to ensure it) can’t be disproved.

They do this by using their own success as proof that the American Dream is real.

Conservatives do tautology especially well using their own life stories. Take Boehner for example. He tells of mopping the floors of his family’s business as a teenager, of needing seven years to finish college because he had to spread out the cost, of sharing a tiny house with nearly a dozen brothers and sisters. And now he’s set to be Speaker of the House. It’s the American Dream: a sparse upbringing instilling a determined work ethic leading to financial, social, and political success.

In the context of Congress, the American Dream is a tautology. Why? Because everyone in Congress is, by definition, a success. “I’m living the American Dream,” every congressperson says. “I took over my father’s business, I rolled up my sleeves, and I made it thrive.” But when half of Congress are millionaires, how could they not say the American Dream is real? It’s all they’ve known. It’s all they see around them.

I don’t begrudge them their success. But I want to put forth the premise, and insert it into American Dream-logic, that our leaders have a sampling bias: failures don’t make it to Congress. There are thousands of Americans who worked even harder than Boehner, started off with even less, but didn’t have the breaks go their way and are now underwater on their mortgage because they bought at the peak of the market, or are out of work because their industry withered in the face of international competition. There are so many ways the world can fail people. Not achieving the American Dream is as often everyone’s fault, as a body politic, as it is any one individual’s.

There’s no way to disprove the American Dream when you ask a current congressman about it. But ask those people who are struggling with their mortgage, or who’ve been out of work for 99 weeks, or who do have jobs but work twelve hour days, seven days a week just for the sake of health insurance for their sick child—ask them if the American Dream is real, and you might get a more nuanced answer.

For all the noise about Tea Partiers, the best-intentioned of them fall squarely in the first camp, for whom the lyrics of “Proud to Be an American” make intuitive sense. They would argue—I would say illogically but sincerely—that freedom from overbearing government is paramount, even if it means dying a young, miserable, painful death from lung cancer because the free market couldn’t offer you the affordable health insurance necessary for an early, actionable diagnosis. The line “Where at least I know I’m free” frustrates that second camp (for example, the city government of Washington, D.C., ) to no end, because it’s a way of saying, “I don’t care that our bad health care and prevalence of guns means we die sooner than everyone in western Europe, because at least my life is more free from government control than theirs.” It frustrates the second camp because it’s illogical: how can you enjoy freedom if you’re dead?

But to the reason-above-patriotism camp, the line “who gave that right to me” is even more vexing. Rights can’t be given by man. Certainly not by “the men who died”. Rights are natural; you’re born with them. They come from God. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence: “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Dying on the beaches of Normandy or on Lexington Green did nothing to “give” rights. Certainly they were defended, but not given.

It’s an important distinction, because it’s what gives the patriotism-above-reason camp a peg on which to hang accusations of being unpatriotic, the classic “If you question the mission our soldiers are engaged in, you must therefore be unpatriotic.” The reason-above-patriotism camp retorts, “But what’s the point of sacrifice if what soldiers are dying for is meaningless or counterproductive?”

The irony is that both camps believe they are both fully patriotic and reasonable. Yet neither are. And sometimes it takes a thoroughly loved and hated song by Lee Greenwood to illustrate it.

• My Center’s response to the Haiti earthquake, which has resulted, mainly through Chris’s work, in coverage from BoingBoing, the New York Times, and lots of other outlets.
• A Project Management course at Harvard University’s Extension School, a class that ate up 2pm-5pm most days the last three weeks, plus hours of group work each night.
• The demoralizing loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, seriously curtailing what’s possible in health care reform
• Unexpected interest from my neurologist in the lightheadedness I sometimes have, requiring me to do a four-day EEG next weekend, which means I’ll be stuck at home looking like this:



• Needing to throw together some presentations—with great help from MIT colleagues—for a group of high school honors students on a tour through Boston
• Packing my office for our move from 14N to the old Media Lab building
• And planning my IAP course, materials for which are now posted at http://fungibleconvictions.com/web-typography.

But I have to say, this crazy month has been pretty fun. It’s the first time I’ve been reminded of my favorite, exhausted days from high school, when having little spare time meant I stayed mentally engaged, and being among colleagues who also had little spare time meant we stayed engaged with each other. We all end up doing things we’re not exactly prepared or qualified to do but find fun in it and end up doing it well. (One more dorky highlight: I got in touch with Robin Kelley, author of the Thelonious Monk book I’ve been praising, and one of the profs in my department was a researcher with him and wants to get him to MIT for a talk.)

All the same, it’s a quiet afternoon, watching basketball, half-reclined as I count down the next hour before leaving for the North End for good food with my wife, dad, and step-mom. Things are good.

Tuesday is the special election for Ted Kennedy’s open U.S. Senate seat, and with it rides the fate of health care reform: the 60th vote.

I urge you to book an extra 30 minutes Tuesday morning to go to your polling place and vote for Democrat Martha Coakley:

Your voting location:

http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/myelectioninfo.php

Tons of my friends have the dreaded “pre-existing condition”. I have one. Someone in your family has one. If Coakley loses and health reform fails, it may be decades before discrimination based on pre-existing conditions can be fixed.

The bill isn’t perfect. But it lowers costs in the long-run, cares for the most vulnerable, and ensures coverage for millions of Americans.

Vote Coakley on Tuesday to pass these needed reforms.

Andrew

PS Forward this note to your friends throughout Massachusetts.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Really remarkable interview between Chris Matthews and Bishop Thomas Tobin, who banned R.I. Congressman Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because of Kennedy’s support of abortion rights.

Matthews, who is Catholic and indicates in the interview that he is pro-life, hammers the bishop on a single point: if you’re going to withhold communion from a legislator because of his undertanding of the law, what specific law would you have him make instead?

And even more to the point, Matthews asks, if abortion is to be illegal, what would the punishment be for performing one? Prison? For how long? Who would be punished? The woman? The doctor? Medical staff?

The Catholic church, as other ecclesiastical bodies do, has a persuasive moral argument against abortion. But as Chris Matthews says, once a church heaves legal arguments atop its moral ones—as the Catholic church has done in denying Kennedy communion for supporting something that is legal—it must start advocating for the specific punishment of criminal acts. In other words, to paraphrase Matthews, if you think abortion should be illegal, you need to start arguing that women and their doctors should be going to prison. Not many people go that far.

I want to be clear. I’m not making my own opinions known here, except to the extent that I think Matthews is right: if you think something should be illegal, you should plan for the consequences of its enforcement. And I don’t see the Catholic church, at least in the person of Bishop Tobin, doing that.

“…and that is that health care is a moral issue.”

I spent a good deal of this weekend suddenly sad, and in trying to explain it to my wife, one of the things I lingered on was a dissatisfaction with how well I do things I know I should do.

The quote above is from Ted Kennedy’s memoir, written as he thinks back on his time spent in a Boston hospital convalescing from a broken back, when he realizes that the average person is an illness or accident away from utter ruin. I cite the quote because it exemplifies Kennedy’s ability to do what he should do. He sees a moral issue to address, and he therefore spends the next forty years addressing it.

Most of us though are like me. If we’re not lazy, then we’re at least in search of comfort to displace discomfort, driven not by a roaring fire but by warm gray coals, ones we stoke every so often, the kind of fuel that gets us through the day and the years but can’t power our souls to do all the things we should do.

It’s always troubled me. Most of us do just enough to get by, but why don’t I do more? Why is my capacity for personal comfort larger than my capacity for moral action? I have little to lose by working a bit harder, reading more books again, getting up early on a Saturday to volunteer, calling old friends more often. Why does that simple motivation fail me and most of us?

It’s a related issue that permeates Kennedy’s memoir, in the words of his father Joseph: you’re either going to live a serious and productive life, or you’re not, and if it’s the latter, know that I’ll love you all the same but I won’t have much time for you. Ted Kennedy had many opportunities to live a comfortable life but always ran up against his father’s—let’s face it—threat that if he’s not going to choose to face the harder things life has to offer, then he’s out of his father’s life.

Is that what it takes before people always do what they should do?

ACLU lawyers—and libertarian lawyers along with them—have a particular panache I love, though, and I’ll support them so long as they use it. Namely, they’re able to identify and eviscerate legal absurdities. One that they laid low today was the U.S. government’s argument that it should be allowed to withhold evidence of prisoner abuse on the grounds, in part, that that evidence’s release would embolden America’s enemies. From the Washington Independent’s story on the ACLU’s argument:

“No court has ever upheld the suppression of descriptions of government misconduct on the ground that those descriptions would inflame the nation’s enemies,” writes the ACLU lawyers in their brief filed today. “To do so would enshrine into the [Freedom of Information Act] the fundamentally antidemocratic principle that the more egregious the government misconduct at issue, the more protected it would be from public disclosure.” A law enacted “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed,” writes the ACLU, citing the Supreme Court, would thus be “transformed into an instrument of cover-up.”

And with that, any federal judge hearing this and similar future cases should have no doubt that the law’s letter and spirit demands releasing evidence of abuse, no matter how damaging to the government. For if we’re not a nation of laws, what are we even protecting through torture? Life, you might respond. We torture to protect lives. Our government-sanctioned torturers were thinking of protecting their fellow citizens and their families when they did what they certainly didn’t want to do, you might say. Be that as it may, the law tops it all. Why, after all, did we fight the Revolution or the Civil War or the two World Wars—to demand and defend laws. Our countrymen laid down lives because we believed in laws and their equal, just application. Closet totalitarians in this country like to point out that “life” comes before “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence. But the thriving of both presupposes law.

So, really, it’s time to release those transcripts.

.)

So perhaps I’m biased when I don’t see a problem with Google archiving so-called orphan works, publications that have been abandoned by both author and publisher, are out of print, and are effectively if not technically out of copyright. I don’t see a problem with making available works that no one can easily see/acquire, that no one is promoting, and that no one is making money from—but that may, and often do, still have great value.

I’m also biased, however, in favor of one of the great archival minds of our age, Robert Darnton:

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

The question for Darnton and others, though, is: is this a bad thing? Google does not somehow become the exclusive copyright holder to orphan works. Other groups and companies are welcome to do the same thing and to also make money from it. And this particular monopoly is, contradictorily, limited and temporary. There will be well-funded competitors. There’s no indication that Google wishes to charge for access—it’s fair to assume Google will monetize the collection through targeted advertising as it does with search results and within Gmail. The original orphan works don’t disappear.

So I don’t begrudge Google its ambition. While experience shows that powerful groups try to control archives as a way of shaping history, experience also shows that seemingly dominant businesses, such as General Motors and Microsoft, are inevitably outflanked. And most important, as Schmidt explains in the Auletta interview, Google thrives only in so far as it is trusted. It’s a business that deals in user data, and that demands trust. Trust broken once is trust lost, so it’s in Google interest to welcome competing ideas, to accept criticism, and to be, above all, open.

No one can get in the head of New Yorker writer David Denby, but to read this piece on Wonkette—one that eviscerates Denby’s criticism of blogs and exposes serious flaws in his own writing/research ability—is to understand perfectly the relationship between old-school and new-school writers.