MemeMachineGo!

Mickey Herskowitz was contracted to ghost-write George W. Bush’s autobiography (‘cause, y’know), interviewed him some 20 times, and was replaced after he submitted 10 chapters Bush’s handlers found to present Bush in an insufficiently positive light. According to Herskowitz:

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Bush after his “re”-“election”:

“And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it…”

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you disciplined?

Duckworth and Seligman conducted a two-year study of eighth graders, combining several measures of self-discipline for a more reliable measure, and also assessing IQ, achievement test scores, grades, and several other measures of academic performance. Using this better measure of self-discipline, they found that self-discipline was a significantly better predictor of academic performance 7 months later than IQ. […] Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA, compared to a .32 correlation for IQ.

The blog entry I’m quoting is titled “High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought.”

I went to an engineering school. I’ve spent a lot of time around a lot of very high IQ people. These results aren’t in the slightest surprising to me, nor do I imagine they would be to anyone else who’d done so.

If scoring well on standardized tests were actually a valuable life skill, I’d be a much more successful person by now.

Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union. — Samuel Goldwyn

Not anymore.

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company’s web site, if you click on “Telegrams” in the left-side navigation bar, you’re taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: “Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”

Several years ago, I wondered if one could still send a telegram. I looked it up on the Western Union site and saw that the price really wasn’t competitive with sending a document by FedEx, so I’m not surprised it’s gone the way of the passenger pigeon.

This is a sad blow for time travel stories, which have so often relied on people being able to reliably deliver messages decades in their future by Western Union. (SF writers will have to be more clever about it in the future.) And what’s poor Bugs Bunny to do?

American Telegram is still offering a telegram service, advertised alongside candygrams and balloongrams.

(Via Follow Me Here)

Yubnub is “a command line for the Web.” In the search box on their front page, you can enter “movies 94111” to get movie listings for San Francisco (or just “m 94111”), or “weather 10007” to get the weather in New York City (or just “w 10007”). Or “wp tesla” to look up Tesla in the Wikipedia; “imdb it happened one night” to look up a movie; “am john crowley” to look for John Crowley’s books on Amazon. And there are hundreds more. Here are one user’s picks, notable commands, most-used commands.

None of which is all that useful if you have to make a special trip to the site to issue your command. You’ll want to install it in your browser. I followed the “adventurous” advice:

Add YubNub to your Firefox address bar by typing about:config in the Location Bar then scrolling down the list and changing keyword.URL to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= You haven’t lived until you’ve turned the address bar into a full-fledged command line.

And if you do that, remember that Ctrl-l or Alt-D selects the existing URL, so you can just start typing, hit enter, and you’re there.

This site and that bit of Firefox configuration have changed the way I browse. I like command lines.

I was telling my friend, Debbie, that I had recently discovered three conspicuous holes in Pocahontas’ movie comedy literacy: Arsenic and Old Lace, The Court Jester, and… I blanked on the third one.

“Kind Hearts and Coronets”, she said, without missing a beat. Of course the third element of the series that begins Arsenic and Old Lace and The Court Jester is Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Pocahontas and I have since corrected those holes, and she loved all of them, to no great surprise. I especially enjoyed seeing Kind Hearts again. The premise is that our hero is the son of a disowned daughter of a duke, placing him personally at about 11th in the line of succession. When the family refuses to let his mother be buried in the family crypt, he vows to murder them all (neatly gaining himself a duchy.) Much of the movie is given over to his carrying out these murders, one by one. (That’s no more spoiler than the trailer offers — the fun is in the journey.)

Roger Ebert writes:

The methods of Louis’ murders are in the spirit of George Orwell’s famous essay “Decline of the English Murder” (1946), in which he regretted the modern practice of simply shooting people and being done with it. Praising the ingenuity of an earlier generation of English murders, Orwell examines those crimes “which have given the greatest pleasure to the British public,” finding that poison is the preferable means, and that an ideal murderer is a member of the middle class who hopes to improve his social position or get hold of a legacy.

There was some talk of remaking Kind Hearts; I’m relieved to find no mention of it subsequent to 2000 — it looks like the plans fell through. (Remember, what’s killing Hollywood is too much originality. Did Connie Willis have to be so right?)

The rules of succession to the British throne are somewhat complicated:

The basis for the succession was determined in the constitutional developments of the seventeenth century, which culminated in the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701). […]

The succession to the throne is regulated not only through descent, but also by statute; the Act of Settlement confirmed that it was for Parliament to determine the title to the throne.

The Act laid down that only Protestant descendants of Princess Sophia - the Electress of Hanover and granddaughter of James I - are eligible to succeed. Subsequent Acts have confirmed this.

Parliament, under the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, also laid down various conditions which the Sovereign must meet. A Roman Catholic is specifically excluded from succession to the throne; nor may the Sovereign marry a Roman Catholic.

The Sovereign must, in addition, be in communion with the Church of England and must swear to preserve the established Church of England and the established Church of Scotland. The Sovereign must also promise to uphold the Protestant succession.

Wikipedia, incredibly, lists the first 865 people in line for the British throne. On the occasion of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, the Guardian sought to interview the Queen. When she refused, they thought they’d get someone in line for the throne, and invited everyone over 18 years old in the top 38. When they all refused, they kept going. Eventually, they found Raggi Lorentzen.

All of which explains why I am making this absurd day trip to San Francisco to talk to a woman who, like our Queen, is the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but whose resemblance to her distant cousin ends there. Raggi Lorentzen is 34, tanned, blonde, very Nordic in appearance and co-owns two tapas restaurants in downtown San Francisco (one, the Thirsty Bear, doubles as a brewery). She was born and brought up in Rio, where her mother, Princess Ragnhild, moved soon after marrying her bodyguard-turned-businessman husband. They originally went there for two years; they have lived there for almost 50.

Raggi has dual Norwegian-Brazilian citizenship; is fluent in Norwegian and Portuguese; speaks somewhat haltingly in English and has no designs on the British throne. She did not know she was 66th in line, although she realised that as a descendant of Victoria she was somewhere on the list; nor did she realise that if she marries her Irish Catholic boyfriend she forfeits her place. The relationship is not in immediate danger.

I always wondered if she’d seen Kind Hearts, but she has since given it all up for love.

The Washington Post’s title for this story was Bundles of… Misery.

[A] study of 13,000 U.S. adults found that parents, from those with young children to empty nesters, reported being more miserable than non-parents. The researchers analyzed data from a national survey of families and households that asked respondents how many times in the past week, for example, they felt sad, distracted or depressed. Unlike earlier studies, this one found moms and dads equally unhappy.

So: After all the sleepless nights and drowsy mornings, the cycles of feeding and throwing up, the American Girl doll accessories bought on credit, the toothpick models of the solar system and the algebra tutors … we would have been happier without it all?

In a word, says study author Robin Simon, an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, yes. “Parents don’t do as well as non-parents,” she said.

Reservation gambling in California means that being a member of an Indian tribe can offer substantial dividends. And so can revoking others’ memberships.

In April of 2003, Eddie Vedolla got the letter telling him he’d been kicked out of the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians. The tribal council informed him it was revoking his membership, and that of his 86-year-old mother, two sisters, and niece. The family was no longer eligible to vote in tribal elections, and Vedolla’s niece lost her tribal scholarship to San Francisco State University. Most notably, they each would no longer receive the $2,455 quarterly dividend checks that tribe members get from California’s Indian casinos. […]

Since the tribes are sovereign entities within the United States, tribal members who feel mistreated by their governing councils find themselves with little recourse. State and federal courts have rejected lawsuits brought by disenrolled members, saying that membership disputes must be appealed to tribal officials — usually the same people who made the original decisions. […]

Members of tribes with small memberships and particularly successful casinos have gotten wealthy very quickly. For many Indians in such tribes, the last ten years have rocketed them from a life of struggle and scraping by to a comfortably plush existence. For instance, the roughly 75 members of the Table Mountain Rancheria get a share of the monthly profits from their Table Mountain Casino near Fresno. Kathy Lewis, whom the tribe has refused to recognize as a member, said tribal members get about $20,000 every month, as well as tax bonuses in March, vacation bonuses in May, and a Christmas bonus every December that has climbed to $200,000 per person.

In fact, casinos have changed the life of every Indian in California, even though there are seventy federally recognized California tribes that don’t have so much as a bingo parlor to their names. Each quarter, the gaming tribes pay a share of their overall profits into a trust fund administered by the California Gambling Control Commission, which then apportions the money among the nongaming tribes. Each tribe gets a total of $1.1 million each year, which is distributed as each sees fit. Some direct most of the money toward programs such as health care and college scholarships, while others distribute all of their money directly to their members. The Guidiville Band doles out 100 percent of its share to its 112 members, which amounts to $9,821 a year per person.

Vedolla, who has a broad, kind face and an aura of gentle firmness that served him well in his 25 years as a schoolteacher, alleges that the tribal council uses these steady paychecks as leverage to keep the general membership in line. “There are people who support me, but who won’t stand up,” he said. “They all fear that they’re going to be cut off from their benefits, especially the state money. Most of those people are very, very low income. Some of them are almost homeless. So they don’t want to take the chance of giving up their distribution, or their homes on the rancheria, or any future benefits they might get. They’re afraid they’re going to get disenrolled too, if they support us.”

In addition to the members’ fear of losing out on present and future casino benefits, Vedolla thinks they also may have been swayed by the increase in their quarterly checks when the five members of his family were disenrolled. The family’s shares were put back into the general pot and divided among the remaining members. Vedolla said that’s a powerful incentive to stay quiet. “Wow, man, that’s money, and these people need it,” he said. “So it’s hard for them to stand up.”

Gary quotes one of America’s greatest historical political figures:

The American people realize this cannot be made a fight between America’s two great political parties. If this fight against terrorism is made a fight between America’s two great political parties the American people know that one of those parties will be destroyed and the Republic cannot endure very long as a one party system. […]

The issue between the Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn. It has been deliberately drawn by those who have been in charge of twenty years of treason. The hard fact is — the hard fact is that those who wear the label, those who wear the label Democrat wear it with the stain of a historic betrayal. […]

A few days ago I read that [a wimpy senior Republican politican] expressed the hope that by election time in [the next election] the subject of terrorism would be a dead and forgotten issue. The raw, harsh unpleasant fact is that terrorism is an issue and will be an issue in [the next election]. […]

Nothing is more serious than a traitor to this country in the terrorist conspiracy. […]

And wait till you hear the bleeding hearts scream and cry about our methods of trying to drag the truth from those who know, or should know, who covered up a [traitorous terrorsymp]. But they say, ‘Oh, it’s all right to uncover them but don’t get rough doing it, [you].’

Other than the phrases in brackets, he substituted one word for another. You can probably guess them, even without the hint that knowing the correct word would lead you to the correct historical figure, and vice versa.

I just snaked one of our toilets’ drain lines with a mini-rooter borrowed from the Berkeley Tool Lending Library.

Despite feeling middle-aged, I’m also feeling fairly butch.

Then:

Possibly one of the best-kept secrets in the history of science is what was going on in the so-called Dark Ages. […] Early Islam probably encouraged the greatest international, cross-cultural, intellectual collaborations, under the banner of science. A phenomenon that has not been recorded in history of science since. […] By the 11th century, Muslim rulers had established large institutions in all the major cities to preserve their treasury of knowledge. In cities like Gondeshapur in Persia there were international communities of academics and scholars. Some, like the Nestorians, had been forced to flee from Christian lands because of their beliefs. They could speak the ancient languages and found it easy to learn Arabic, so were the ideal choice for much of the translation work. […]

In the early days of Islam, knowledge was actively encouraged and scholars could do more than just translate the manuscripts that came to them, they could develop the ideas further. Less than 400 years after the first Islamic conquests, all kinds of scientists were at work throughout the vast Islamic Empire. They picked apart, catalogued and developed a huge intellectual legacy from the ancient civilisations. From the broadest ideas of the physical Universe, to the invisible workings of the human body, they organised and made sense of it all. They managed to simplify much of what the Greeks and other ancients had started and then improved on it.

Now:

Arab countries are lagging behind much of the world in education. […] Readership of books was limited, education dictated submission rather than critical thought, and the Arabic language was in a state of crisis. […] [The 2003 UN report] cited official educational curricula in Arab countries that “bred submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking.”

No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire millennium, equivalent to the number translated every year into Spanish.

If it weren’t bedtime, I might have further comment or the whole educational curricula that bred submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking thing.

Updated: My bedtime isn’t really 7:54 in the morning. That’s what comes of deciding I’ve posted enough for one evening, and using MT 3.2’s cool scheduled-posting feature to delay a new entry till morning, while being too tired to notice that the entry’s content marks it as having been written at the end of the night.

When it was new, I took The Jane Austen Book Club out of the library. Pocahontas read it, but it came due before I had done so. I returned it unread. Now I’ve bought my own copy, and a Jane Austen omnibus so I can follow along with the characters.

The premise is straightforward — a book club of six people forms to read and discuss the six major novels of Jane Austen.

The very next person she asked was Grigg, whom we none of us knew. Grigg was a neat, dark-haired man in his mid forties. The first thing you noticed about him was his eyelashes, which were very long and thick. We imagined a lifetime of aunts regretting the waste of those lashes in the face of a boy. We’d all known Jocelyn long enough to wonder whom Grigg was intended for. Grigg was too young for some of us, too old for the rest. His inclusion in the club was mystifying.

I’m pretty sure it was Dan who told me of this bit:

“Don’t give anything away,” Grigg said. “I haven’t read it yet.”

Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.

Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.

Grigg had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and God knows how much science fiction—there were books all over the cottage—but he’d never found the time or the inclination to read Pride and Prejudice. We really didn’t know what to say.

That’s me. Well, I haven’t read The Mysteries of Udolpho, yet, but neither have I read Pride and Prejudice, nor any other Jane Austen. I embark on this project wholly a newcomer to her oeuvre (well, I have seen Sense and Sensibility. And Clueless.)

I’m reading Emma now. I’ll let you know how the Project goes.

Ask Metafilter had this interesting question.

Ever since… forever, I have had a naturally-made hole just in front of my right ear. It is the width of a pin, and goes in at least three centimetres. It looks like I’ve had my ear pierced, but the hole goes into my head rather than through my ear. Every few days, I can squeeze white stuff out of it that has the consistency of ear wax - but isn’t. What on earth is it?

The questioner, when asked how he arrived at the measurement of 3 cm, elaborated:

I thought I wouldn’t have to explain. […] To my eternal shame, I put a straightened paper clip down it to check.

One person provided the likely answer: a preauricular pit. Another gave this sage advice:

Does anyone else think it’s a really really bad idea to put random objects down holes in your head?

What if it was a reset button?!

This one by Tom Lehrer goes out to the undisclosed location of a very special someone in the MemeMachineGo! audience. You know who you are.

Almost every day during the hunting season you see at least one item in the newspapers about somebody who has shot somebody else, under the impression that he was a deer with a red hat, perhaps. Maybe a large flesh-colored squirrel. At any rate, it seems to me that this marks an encouraging new trend in the field of blood sports, and deserves a new type of hunting song which I present herewith.

I always will remember,
‘Twas a year ago November,
I went out to hunt some deer
On a morning bright and clear.
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

I was in no mood to trifle,
I took down my trusty rifle
And went out to stalk my prey.
What a haul I made that day!
I tied them to my fender, and I drove them home somehow:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.

The law was very firm, it
Took away my permit,
The worst punishment I ever endured.
It turned out there was a reason,
Cows were out of season,
And one of the hunters wasn’t insured.

People ask me how I do it,
And I say “There’s nothin’ to it,
You just stand there lookin’ cute,
And when something moves, you shoot!”
And there’s ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow.

Pocahontas is a fan of Salon’s advice column, Since You Asked. She told me about the disturbing situation in this question:

Recently, I began taking an antidepressant (Celexa). Like apparently many on this drug and others like it, my sex drive sank to near zero shortly after I started taking it. There’s plenty of advice online for dealing with the impact that this can have on a marriage (it’s certainly having an impact on mine), but nothing about my specific problem: I like not having a sex drive.

You see, since my wife and I married, we’ve had plenty of conflict about the lack of sex in our relationship. I’ve always had a very strong libido, and my wife (especially during pregnancy) never seemed to care much about sex (this wasn’t at all true when we were dating). We didn’t have sex on our wedding night, or during most of our honeymoon, and quite frankly during most of our marriage so far. When we do have sex, the only time she seems to be enthusiastic is when she is getting something from me (be it children when we were trying to have them, or when I’ve caved in an argument). If we have an argument, and I stand my ground or even simply try to compromise, the sex can end for days or even weeks, and she knows I’ll get lonely eventually and make whatever concessions I need to so that she’ll start being affectionate and sexual with me again.

Now that I’m on Celexa, though, I can’t believe how free I feel. Her threats of withholding that she lobs when we’re in the midst of an argument don’t faze me now that I have no desire. I’m also starting to realize how shallow our relationship is; while I was lost in depression, sex was one of the only things that could lift me out of the depths; she knew this and would hold back if I didn’t give her her way. That exchange seems to have formed the basis for more of our relationship than I would care to think. Now that the depression is gone and I don’t have a drive to have sex, I’m finally able to hold my ground during an argument without fearing the emotional isolation that results.

My wife has been bugging me to ask my doctor for a different drug, one that has less of an effect on my libido (this despite the fact that we were rarely having sex before Celexa, by her choice).

I don’t really have any comment, other than that’s a damn sad story.

‘The exception that proves the rule’ turns out to have a source in law. And here I thought it was just an annoying bit of sophistry.

Alan Bliss, in A Dictionary of Words and Phrases in Current English, has the following to say about the origin of this phrase: “Exception probat regulam [Lat.], the exception proves the rule. A legal maxim of which the complete text is: exceptio probat [or (con)firmat] regulam in casibus non exceptis— ‘the fact that certain exceptions are made (in a legal document) confirms that the rule is valid in all other cases.’”

The application is this. Suppose a law is stated in such a way as to include an exception, e.g., “Parking is prohibited on this street from 7 AM to 7 PM, Sundays and holidays excepted.” The explicit mention of the exception means that NO other exceptions are to be inferred. Thus we should take the Latin verb probare in the maxim to have the sense of “to increase the force of.”

The online etymology dictionary on February:

1373, from L. februarius mensis “month of purification,” from februa “purifications” (plural of februum), of unknown origin, said to be a Sabine word. The last month of the ancient (pre-450 B.C.E.) Roman calendar, so named in reference to the Roman feast of purification, held on the ides of the month. In Britain, replaced O.E. solmonað “mud month.” English first (c.1200) borrowed it from O.Fr. Feverier, which yielded feoverel before a respelling to conform to Latin.

Lupercalia:

The Lupercalia was an annual Roman festival held on February 15 to honour Faunus, god of fertility and forests. Justin Martyr identified Faunus as Lupercus, ‘the one who wards off the wolf’, but his identification is not supported by any earlier classical sources. The festival was celebrated near the cave of Lupercal on the Palatine (one of the seven Roman hills), to expiate and purify new life in the Spring. This festival’s origins are older than the founding of Rome.

The religious ceremonies were directed by the Luperci, the “brothers of the wolf”, priests of Faunus, dressed only in a goatskin. During Lupercalia, a dog and two male goats were sacrificed. Two patrician youths were anointed with the blood, which was wiped off with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and laugh. The Luperci afterwards dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran round the Palatine Hill with straps, cut from the skins, in their hands. These were called Februa. Girls would line up on their route to receive lashes from these whips. This was supposed to ensure fertility. The name of the month of February is derived from the Latin februare, “to purify” (meant as one of the effects of fever, which has the same linguistic root).

Happy Lupercalia.

Ah, spin. A commenter in this blog thread explains how hypocritical Democrats are to criticize Cheney for ignoring fundamental hunting rules and shooting a man, when Adlai Stevenson shot and killed a girl, and the Democrats nominated him for president twice!

Hey I’m just saying but you have got to admit Cheney wounded someone after he was elected whereas Stevenson was nominated twice after he killed someone.

Good point! It’s absolutely ludicrous to expect any greater degree of wisdom, responsibility, and foresight from Dick Cheney than one would of a 12-year-old boy in 1912!

And I’m sure the very best intelligence Cheney had available to him at the time was that Whittington was a quail.

This Boston Globe article discusses the decreasing percentage of women among computer science majors, and offers this anecdote:

When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist. Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand.

”I have not built my own computer, I don’t know everything about all the different operating systems,” she said. ”These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.”

She changed majors. In the context of the article, this represents a didactic failure on Tufts’ part.

So, I wonder. If not in an upper-level undergraduate college course, does it ever become acceptable for a school to countenance students asking complicated questions based on independent study, and let their peers take responsibility for their own self-esteem? In grad school, maybe? Not even there?

There’s such a thing as a human chimera: a person whose body includes cells as genetically distinct as siblings’. “Blood chimeras” shared blood with a fraternal twin in the womb (and can even have two distinct blood types.) Others are thought to be the result of fraternal twins merging at an early stage of development, resulting in one fetus. A 52-year-old woman learned she was a chimera when genetic testing revealed that her biological children didn’t seem to be hers.

She and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers. […] The cells in her body are a mosaic of genes from both of the original embryos. The cheek cells from which the genetic testing was done were from one of those embryos, but at least some of the cells in her ovaries came from the other. Interestingly this genetic oddity gives her a better-than-usual chance of having a successful kidney donation, as her immune system does not reject as foreign either of two distinct tissue types. She would, however, be a poor candidate as a kidney donor were she in that position, due to the likelihood of two tissue types being present in her kidneys.

Rejected blog entry titles: “No, Bellerophon! This one’s friendly!”

Google code of conduct:

Our informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” We Googlers generally relate those words to the way we serve our users – as well we should. But being “a different kind of company” means more than the products we make and the business we’re building; it means making sure that our core values inform our conduct in all aspects of our lives as Google employees. […]

The core message is simple: Being Googlers means striving toward the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. This is a matter as much practical as ethical; we hire great people who work hard to build great products, but our most important asset by far is our reputation as a company that warrants our users’ faith and trust. That trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rests, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us.

So please do read this code, and then read it again, and remember that as our company evolves, The Google Code of Conduct will evolve as well. [emphasis added — Zed] Our core principles won’t change, but the specifics might, so a year from now, please read it a third time. And always bear in mind that each of us has a personal responsibility to do everything we can to incorporate these principles into our work, and our lives.

Evolution.

Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site. The company is setting up a new site - Google.cn - which it will censor itself to satisfy the authorities in Beijing. […] Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.

I used to have a lot of faith in Google. Then they went public.

Dodge v. Ford set the precedent that the directors of a corporation are legally obligated to maximize shareholder profits.

The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto

This means any number of dodgy practices.

Simply, a corporation can’t choose to not be evil. It is fundamentally, by definition and law, amoral. Humans invented the legal and social structures in which this is so, and then made them our master, abdicating all responsibility. Couldn’t be helped. That’s just business. We’re obligated to maximize profits, within the law. We’re obligated to play an active role in ensuring the law suits our purposes. If it means access to a market worth billions, we’re obligated to aid and abet a totalitarian government in propagating their revisions of history.

In any long term, amoral means immoral. And the greater the scope and power of the amoral entity, the shorter we can expect that term to be.

Rep. Tom Lantos:

It has also been argued Internet companies are entitled to apply the same rules of engagement in China that they apply elsewhere. In Germany, for example, where denying the Holocaust is against the law, access to Neo-Nazi Web pages is impossible via Google. The company notifies its users that not all Web pages may be available. And in its new China services, Google issues a similar warning.

But as the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

China’s appalling human rights record never was a secret. U.S. Internet companies simply cannot claim they had no idea of what doing business there could entail. The Internet has always been a vital tool for human rights and democracy advocates in China, and a vital link with the outside world of its oppressed people.

Our Internet companies should have known, because for years their most loyal customers in China have gone to extraordinary technical lengths to bypass government’s controls of the Internet.

If these companies had stood up to Beijing from the beginning, demanding that they retain physical control of their own servers by having them located outside of China, the picture would be very different today.

John Batelle:

After all, what’s the big deal? Just like a sneaker company, Yahoo, Google, et al all have to play by Chinese rules in order to do business in China. If Nike can do it, why not Google?

Well, let’s break that one down. What happens when Nike gets itself into a PR pickle over, say, child labor or issues of environmental degradation or fair wages? Why, Nike simply pledges to do better, to spend a bit more to nominally clean up the environment, or to pay its workers a living wage, or to not hire children. Such practices cost Nike a bit more money, but don’t raise any eyebrows in Beijing. Nothing wrong with a US company spending more in China, after all.

But companies like Yahoo and Google don’t traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture - expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age - in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.

Orwell:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

In today’s world, search engines are an instrument of control. And Google has laced up their boots.