The Windkey and the Lamplighter

(This is a letter I sent to Senator Kerry earlier today, with a
variant to Senator Kennedy and one criticizing my representative for
voting yes.)

Dear Senator Kerry,

I am writing to encourage you to vote "No" on the Deleting Online
Predators Act.

This act endangers access to a number of internet technologies which
are growing in popularity and utility. Although the act is targeted
at sites like "MySpace", due to fears that online predators could
endanger children, it is harmful to those children’s education and
does little to protect them.

Weblogs, wikis, social networking sites, and other
participatory fora are the town square of the Internet Generation.
Instant message clients are our telephones—children who in the 1980s
or 1990s might have called a friend to chat or ask a homework question
might now call up AIM or Yahoo Messenger. And, because of the global
nature of the Internet, distance no longer matters. We can as easily
chat with friends across the room or across the globe.

On the children section of your Online Office, you say "Education
is the cornerstone of the American Dream. Yet today, too many schools
don’t give our children the high-quality education they deserve." But
schools have always been the place where we prepare our children for
membership in society, not just with "reading, ‘riting, and
‘rithmatic", but with experience interacting with that society.
Furthermore, many teachers are using the same internet technologies to
which this act prevents access to teach students who are increasingly
distant from the lecture and textbook techniques of the previous
era. The young have always been first to wholeheartedly embrace new
technologies. Prohibiting (or even restricting) them from being
taught to safely use those technologies is contrary to your stated goal
of high-quality education.

Further, on the technology section of your Online Office, you state
that "Washington must again make science and technology a priority."
So why are you making it difficult for low-income Americans, whose
access to the Internet is primarily through public facilities like
schools and libraries, to participate in the technologies that are
reshaping our culture? Should those who can not afford internet
access at home, or a computer, be denied entry into our "digital town
square"?

I am disappointed at the lack of understanding of this issue shown by
the House. As a citizen of Massachusetts and
the Internet, I expect my representatives to understand the needs of
both. Please show me that the Senate can do better.

Sincerely,
Me

*Thanks to Henry Jenkins who pointed out this stupidity*

Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the
skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except what they
see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by
their little minds. All minds, whether they be men’s or
children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere
insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world
about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the
whole of truth and knowledge.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its
own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the
piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying
vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we
shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside,
but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest
man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever
lived could tear apart. Is it all real? Ah, in all this world there
is nothing else real and abiding.

It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in
its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those
isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive
few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect
know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the
unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the
delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are
made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority
condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the
common veil of obvious empiricism.

It’s amazing how well it all fits together. I do recommend Baum’s
entry into the Mythos for all those seeking deeper
explanations.

In honor of Mozart’s 250th birthday, the
Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg and The Packard Humanities Institute
have created the a library of all his music, available online for
personal use. You can search it in German or English, but of
course the music is in Latin, German, whatever, and the editorial
notes are in German.

Donald Sensing, a Methodist pastor, has posted a Christmas Quiz
covering prophesy, Puritans, and commercialism. It’s quite
challenging. The answers are also available—but I found it
worth doing the entire quiz before looking.

Gosh. Maybe I should have bunched all of the Dresden files together,
like Kat did. The titular
character spends most of the book dead—a pity, since he sounded like
a neat character. We find out more about the Nevernever here, and
about Harry’s origins as a wizard. Some bits of the cosmology aren’t
covered on screen—I’d like to know more about the deals-and-gifts
obsession of the Faeries, and about their Call mechanic.

These really are candy: light, one-evening books with lots of geeky
references. Indiana Jones makes a quick appearance here, a few pages
from J.M. Barrie. The series is improving since Fool Moon, passing
Storm Front in quality.

Books read this year: 40

This is the first book of The Deed of Paksenarrion. It makes a
wonderful complement to Black Company for me: a view of a mercenary
company from a grunt’s-eye view, rather than the captain and his
immortal sorceress lover. The jacket cover gives the impression that
Moon has some personal experience with the social issues here. Paks
herself is very clearly not a John Ringo character: she isn’t the
first up in the morning, she doesn’t magically know about inspections
ahead of time, she isn’t obviously a squad leader in training, and
when she has doubts about her place in the military, the sergeant
can’t easily dismiss them.

Books read this year: 39

The sequel to Storm Front improves upon it. Lea,
Dresden’s fairy godmother, gets her on-screen introduction. I’d
rather have Don Bruce! As Kat says, it also introduces the
series’ best companion so far: the knight Michael. In fact, all of
the supporting cast are more richly handled here than in Storm Front
or Fool Moon. It’s still necessary to scream at them sometimes for
their obtusity and tendency to keep secrets for no good reason—but
now at least we get to see a bit of Harry’s internal reasoning for
this.

The vampire metaphysics and politics presented here are
inspiring—much like Guilty Pleasures, before Hamilton stopped
building a coherent world and started writing straight porn.

Books read this year: 38

Werewolves! Loup-garou! And a talking skull named Bob! Gosh, this
series makes me want to break out Ars
Magica (Hey, ArsM4 is
free!) and a map of Chicago. Most of the relationship exploration
focuses on Dresden’s cop buddy, Karrin Murphy. So far, this has felt
like the weakest book of the series—though I may just be
disappointed that it introduced less interesting world features than
Storm Front or Grave Peril (or for that matter Summer Knight).

Books read this year: 37

Tim Powers is getting more complicated—not that I would complain.
Here he does to Charlie Chaplain and Albert Einstein what Declare
did to Kim Philby and T.E. Lawrence. The plot is harder to follow
than that of Anubis Gates—in his medieval books, general,
Hollywood-style knowledge of magical practice can ground and explain
some of the convolutions. Even in Last Call, that’s so. But Three
Days from Never has more in common with Earthquake Weather’s
reliance on modern, chaos-style magic.

This book is not as good as Declare or Anubis Gates. I read it in
two sittings, for example, whereas each of those kept me up all
night. It’s still way, way better than most books I’ve read this
year.

Books read this year: 36

Dan Savage uses a word in this week’s column that I haven’t seen
before: Christianist. By analogy with Islamist, its meaning is
clear. I like it quite a bit. I’m happy to see any term that helps
make clear that Pat Robertson doesn’t represent most Christian
Americans—that for most Christians in this country, our perception
of Jesus Christ as the light of the world and our desire to build
America as a city upon a hill are completely unrelated.

I’m pretty sure Savage didn’t originate the word. Wikipedia
references it and connects it to Dominionism. That’s a bit less
catchy, for all its 1220
connections. Just as we should discourage Islamist government abroad,
we should discourage Christianist government here—and encourage good
Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Pastafarians, and anybody else into
government based on their political policies..