The Invisible Library

Think Tank Claims Torvalds Didn’t Write Linux:

Linux wasn’t written by Linus Torvalds, according to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based foundation.

Instead, Kenneth Brown, president of AdTI, claims that Linux is based on intellectual property ‘often taken or adapted without permission from material owned by other companies and individuals.’

The announcement offers no proof of its assertions but says proof will be provided in later announcements� and eventually in a self-published book�that are based on ‘extensive interviews with more than two dozen leading technologists including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie and Andrew Tanenbaum.’

It should come as no surprise that Microsoft is one of the funders of this dubious think tank. I’m sure that’s merely a coincidence, though. After all, why would a sock puppet Prestigious Think Tank who is partially funded by one of the world’s most draconian software providers, long suspected of monopolizing the software industry by strong-arming hardware companies into bundling its slipshod, bug ridden software with all of their machines, have anything bad to say about a pioneer of Open Source operating systems? And what does Linus Torvalds have to say for himself?

OK, I admit it. I was just a front man for the real fathers of Linux: the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. They (for obvious reasons) couldn’t step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off-season.

But when they started with Linux (which they originally called Freax�they do feel like outsiders, you know, and that’s a whole sad story in itself), they felt that they could no longer just let it languish in obscurity.

They started to look for a front man, and since Santa Claus is from Finland, and thus has connections to Helsinki University, and the Easter Bunny claimed, ‘He’s got good ears, if a bit small,’ I got selected.

Since then, I’ve lived a life of subterfuge, always afraid that somebody would find out the truth. I’m actually relieved that it’s over, and that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has finally uncovered the lie. I can now go back to my chosen profession, the exploration of the fascinating mating dance of the aquatic African frog.

The irony RPMs really get flying when we stop to consider that it has long been considered one of Microsoft’s dirty little secrets that Bill Gates stole the Windows OS source code from Steve Jobs (who stole it from Xerox).

The whole thing is just layer upon layer of dirty dealing and hypocrisy. But the new player in this little corner of geek intrigue is the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI), a PR group that first gained notoriety by providing astroturf for Philip Morris Co., against President Clinton’s proposed tax hike on Tabacco products back in ‘94. Apparently, there is no corporate cock too big to be sucked by ADTI.

And John Quiggen at Crooked Timber wonders, What would de Tocqueville Think?

“I deeply resent the way this Administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.”
-Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Gary Indiana, at the Village Voice feels the same way. Posted on the web is part one of his three part essay, Paranoid Nation: No Such Thing as Paranoia, which is a fascinating look at our national paranoia and how the professional Conspiracy deniers are sometimes as pathological as the most extreme true believers.

Mr. Indiana doesn’t fault Bush for the fact that once levelheaded and skeptical folk now find themselves doing the dreaded geopolitical calculus and coming up with weird coincidences. As he points out, it’s mostly the fault of historians, doing the powerful elite’s work for them:

While it is easy to distinguish a belief that aluminum foil wrapped around one’s head filters out alien brain waves from rational but dissident ideas, some modern writers on conspiracy theory tend to conflate nonconformity with the most bizarre and cognitively defective extremes of it. So-called “consensus historians,” following the lead of Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” have effectively pathologized any suspicion of active conspiracies, however defined, into a synonym for “nut job” in public discourse.

Once anyone with an idea more colorful than the ochre melange found on the front page of any newspaper is defined, a priori as a nut job, the idea is tainted. Even when they are, much later, proven to be true. “The necessary proof of such a conspiracy, if we choose to call it that, often turns up 25 or 50 years after the fact, when the release of classified documents churns up no public outcry or indictments” (Indiana). This makes it fiendishly difficult to convince most Americans that there are really some valid conspiracies that we should be concerned about. Since their parents or grandparents were already told “The Truth” (at least the Warren Commission version of it) these slippery and confabulated facts have entered the family history and to contradict them now is to invalidate grandpa’s life.

“Where were you when Oswald Shot Kennedy?” was the defining question of my parent’s generation. Everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot. But by whom, no one really knows for sure. And no one really cares now, forty years later.

The problem of course is only made worse by the fringe thinkers who have spent the last forty years concocting one lurid scheme after another to try and explain what did really happen, sometimes with far less evidence than the Warren Commission, sometimes with far more, but always with the stench of incredulity clinging to their ink stained hands and jittery, coffee colored thoughts. How did this, “monumental apathy and programmed ignorance” come to dominate the landscape of conspiratorial thought? Mr. Indiana (and others) suggest that it is the grandstanding of one tweedy intelectual, Richard Hofstadter, whose 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” set the attitude for the next four decades:

Hofstadter’s essay, written in the aftermath of the McCarthy witch hunts and the Kennedy assassination, with an eye on the then marginal but scary realm of right-wing plot-weavers, has been eerily assimilated by a certain idling pedantry, which rummages through the historical debris of arcane conspiracist subjects (the Knights Templar, Jesuit intrigues, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, alien abductions, the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg meetings, the Knights of Malta), often recounting the same narratives at numbing length, with little fresh insight. Only a few contemporary writers drastically depart from Hofstadter’s historical itinerary, or his parochial vision of America as a “pluralist democracy” whose institutional framework is essentially benign and immutably fair, rational, and systemically mistrusted only by paranoid schizophrenics. “One need only think of the response to President Kennedy’s assassination in Europe to be reminded that Americans have no monopoly on the gift for paranoid improvisation,” Hofstadter declared, 15 years before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Kennedy’s murder was indeed the result of a conspiracy.

Hofstadter’s prescience is amply evidenced in Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003). Barkun has ingested Hofstadter’s imperious tome whole, and his book does little more than regurgitate its polemical eurekas. Barkun informs us that the ‘essence of conspiracy beliefs lies in attempts to delineate and explain evil.’ Ergo Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most other organized religions qualify as conspiracy beliefs, though Barkun neglects to say so. Barkun identifies three principles ‘found in virtually every conspiracy theory,’ to wit: Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected. Clearly Freud, Plato, Leibniz, and Einstein all suffered from at least one symptom of conspiracism; fortuitously, without mentioning any of them, someone has finally exposed these thinkers as mentally ill.

The end result is that the general public only trusts information that come from the Experts, except that the Experts all work for the Conspiritors. And those of us who still posess critical thinking skills are left with doubt, cinicsm and a desire to find out What’s Really Going On but without the means to discover that slippery truth.

So now, we’re all nutbar conspiracy theorists, finding connectivity and conspiracy in what we are told, time and again (by the handful of media outlets owned by rich white men who are friends with the powers that be) that all the world is nothing but unrelated events; that they seem related and interconnected is merely coincidence. Surely that and nothing more.

Lucy has just woken up from a nap. She’s probably upset because I pulled her tail.

Amnesty International’s 2004 report is out and the United States of America is not looking so hot. And this was compiled before the story about prison torture broke, so next years report is already going to be just as bad, if not worse.

Go, USA.

From Corrente, I learned this morning that the NYTimes thinks blogs are smelly and they smell funny and they’re stupid and smell, too:

…For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research’s estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied bloggers, said that for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.

“The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism,” Mr. Jarvis said. “It’s that you’re involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog.”

It’s ironic that the “Expert” on blogging that they find is a grad student at Berkeley’s SIMS, a Library Science Department that lost their ALA accreditation. Further ironical twists ensue when we visit Mr. Hall’s webpage and discover that he is not a grad student, but a PhD candidate.¹

Before I started blogging, the only people who read my writing were me and my wife. In the year since, I’ve had over 6000 visitors, with an average of 39 a day. Grant it, some are repeats and that’s not a whole lot, compared to Atrios’ 30,000 visitors a day but it’s more than I had before, when I was just an obsessive writerly sort of freak, reading my novel-in-progress aloud to my cat.

blogging is Radical Democracy in action. Absolute freedom of the press. And it scares the soiled pants off of the likes of ‘journalists’ who realise they can no longer coast on their byline and have lost all credibility, by sucking at the corporate tit. That there are bloggers out there, like Atrios and Kos who are read by more people than traditional journalists and have earned their credibility by actually reporting facts and checking sources, unlike a certain paper of record who just copies and pastes the proclomations of certain Iranian Spies pretending to be Iraqi Disidents.

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1. Note to editor at the Times: Keith Kisser, 27, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies (fully accredited by the ALA) is an actual blogger, who has done research on blogging. He also knows how to use Google to do basic fact checking. Maybe you should consult someone like him next time you need to fill a few column inches in your technology and lifestyles pages on this whole weird, loser blogging fad that’s so popular right now.

Hesiod has a great two part review of Troy over at Counterspin. His gripes reflect my own: Helen was week, Menaleus was killed, they gloss over Achilles invulnerability and change his motivation for killing Hektor from guilt to revenge. Overall, I agree with Hesiod: it wasn’t a bad movie, it just wasn’t the epic it could have been with a little more fidelity to the story and imagination on the part of the filmmakers.

Apparently, this Sunday, May 29th is Jesus Day.

For those of you who believe a dead Jew on a stick with magical healing powers¹ still influences world events 2000 years after Mel Gibson scourged him to death with broken glass (and filmed the whole thing, for posterity), this is a Jubilation Day. For those of us who still cling to the tattered remnants of sanity that dealing with such superstitious nincompoops on a daily basis has left us with, it’s just another day.

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1. Requires the afflicted roll 2 D10, and subtract the charisma rating of any Dark Wizards in the vicinity.

A little history lesson from, of all places, USATODAY:

It was Barry Goldwater, the revered conservative, who convinced Nixon that he must resign or face certain conviction by the Senate %97 and perhaps jail. Goldwater delivered his message in person, at the White House, accompanied by Republican congressional leaders.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee likewise put principle above party to cast votes for articles of impeachment. On the eve of his mission, Goldwater told his wife that it might cost him his Senate seat on Election Day. Instead, the courage of Republicans willing to dissociate their party from Nixon helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency six years later, unencumbered by Watergate.

Another precedent is apt: In 1968, a few Democratic senators %97 J. William Fulbright, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Robert F. Kennedy %97 challenged their party’s torpor and insisted that President Lyndon Johnson be held accountable for his disastrous and disingenuous conduct of the Vietnam War, adding weight to public pressure, which, eventually, forced Johnson not to seek re-election.

Today, the United States is confronted by another ill-considered war, conceived in ideological zeal and pursued with contempt for truth, disregard of history and an arrogant assertion of American power that has stunned and alienated much of the world, including traditional allies. At a juncture in history when the United States needed a president to intelligently and forcefully lead a real international campaign against terrorism and its causes, Bush decided instead to unilaterally declare war on a totalitarian state that never represented a terrorist threat; to claim exemption from international law regarding the treatment of prisoners; to suspend constitutional guarantees even to non-combatants at home and abroad; and to ignore sound military advice from the only member of his Cabinet %97 Powell %97 with the most requisite experience. Instead of using America’s moral authority to lead a great global cause, Bush squandered it.

I’d like to think that our elected officials might put politics aside and do the right thing. But I’m not holding my breath.

Link courtesy of Norbizness at Elated Hairy Pumpkin Farming and Doorknob Polishing Service.

I just posted the next part of Christian’s adventures in Iraq:

Baghdad - May 25, 2004

I received quite the response from my last e-mail! To begin with, I will clarify some of my positions so people can better understand where I’m coming from and the reasons for my decision to be a part of this effort. After all, generally the first response I received from my friends upon telling them of my plans was, “What? Are you crazy?”

Probably one of the more interesting facets of this venture are the motivations of its participants. We have all types here for all reasons. First, there are those who are here for the money. I know an engineer in his 70’s who is working hard here to buy a an autopilot for his boat back home. Another wants to earn enough money to settle down as a cattle rancher in Indonesia.

Then there are the politicos. (I guess I might fall somewhat into this category.) One such guy is currently residing in the political wilderness after having resigned from a British cabinet post. For him, this is just a pause before he jumps back into domestic politics. For others like myself, this is a means to jumpstart an exciting career.

Then there are those who just enjoy the danger and excitement of the moment. This would include all the security firm contractors and some of the military personnel.

As for me, I signed up for a variety reasons. Career was an important factor as was money albeit to a lesser degree. Today, the factor I want to talk about is the idea of taking part in a great struggle.

I’m tired of rehashing politics, so we’re going to talk about books today.

currently, I’m reading The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. I’m about four chapters in and so far, very much enjoying it. My only quibble is a minor one: his depiction of Anarchists as bomb throwing nihilists bent on the death of humanity. I realize that this was the Edwardian English view of Anarchism and in some respects, not all that far from the historical mark in some cases. It strikes me though, as I have a bit of an affinity for Anarchism, especially of the ontological variety (check out the link on the side for Hakim Bey, under non-fiction). But I realize of course that Chesterton’s book really isn’t about Anarchism. Like I said, it’s a minor quibble, one that manages to underscore my intellectual snobbery, more than anything else.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a fever dream, or “a very melodramatic sort of moonshine,” as Chesterton puts it. Primarily, the story is about dualism and paradox, the flinging of oneself from one extreme to the other in violent reaction. Reaction to what is precisely the question Chesterton is asking us. Take the main character, Gabriel Syme:

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike…. Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left–sanity.

However, Syme becomes too sane and one night is recruited by a philosophical police officer to join a special anti-anarchist brigade, who search the parlors and taverns of London, looking for the roots of anti-establishment thought. In this way, Syme stumbles onto a conspiracy of Anarchists and is accidentaly elected onto their International Council (because a conspiracy of Anarchists would of course, need to have an organizational body to succeed in its goal of world inhalation). Adventure ensues.

As I said, I’m still at the beginning but I’m very much looking forward to seeing where the moonshine leads me.

So, what are you reading right now?