Month: March 2013

On Blogging Technology

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I have been working with blogs and blog-like technology for many years. The transformation of the tools in terms of cost, ease of use, and capabilities has been amazing to watch.

We have blogs on the “blogger” platform run by Google and the “wordpress” platform, which can either be self-hosted or run on the wordpress.com free sites (you get ads in some of your posts, and can pay a bit more to have those ads removed).

Regardless of the usefulness and / or future of the blogging format, here are some of the advantages that have come up over the last 10 or so years in terms of technology, cost, ease of use, and capabilities:

1. Cost – the software has always been free from either Blogger (Google) or Word Press (Open Source). However, many people chose to self-host for many reasons, and the cost of hosting has gone down dramatically over the years. The “free” alternatives are also extremely robust
2. Performance – the performance of the sites have exponentially increased in terms of speed, although it is difficult to quantify the differences in terms of the general increase in overall processing speed (bandwidth) on the part of the consumer as well as the provider, which is also tied to the reduced cost / MB of a high speed connection
3. Stability – Stability used to be wobbly on some of the sites, particularly from the administrative perspective. We used to have to save our posts all the time in case the site crashed, and fixing items like categories / tags used to be a lot of effort and painstaking. Many of these problems seemed to have gone away or are significantly reduced on the major platforms
4. Features – Many, many things you’d want a blog to do are built in. Not just the traditional items like links, categories, tags, photos, polls, but also more exotic items like linking to different media and different sorts of geographic data. Advertising is also built in, but since we don’t advertise, I’m not an expert in this, although I assume this is crucial to many people
5. Coding – you used to need to know some HTML or other languages in order to work effectively with blogs or to deploy the most advanced features, but since many of those capabilities are now built into the tool, this is less important or hardly needed at all

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“It cannot be too often repeated that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

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Few people have the leisure to undertake a systematic and thorough study of history, but every one ought to find time to learn theprincipal features of the governments under which we live, and to getsome inkling of the way in which these governments have come into existence and of the causes which have made them what they are. Some such knowledge is necessary to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship. Political questions, great and small, are perpetually arising, to be discussed in the newspapers and voted on at the polls; and it is the duty of every man and woman, young or old, to try to understand them. That is a duty which we owe, each and all of us, to ourselves and to our fellow-countrymen. For if such questions are not settled in accordance with knowledge, they will be settled in accordance with ignorance; and that is a kind of settlement likely to be fraught with results disastrous to everybody. It cannot be too often repeated that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. People sometimes argue as if they supposed that because our national government is called a republic and not a monarchy, and because we have free schools and universal suffrage, therefore our liberties are forever secure. Our government is, indeed, in most respects, a marvel of political skill; and in ordinary times it runs so smoothly that now and then, absorbed as most of us are in domestic cares, we are apt to forget that it will not run of itself. To insure that the government of the nation or the state, of the city or the township, shall be properly administered, requires from every citizen the utmost watchfulness and intelligence of which he is capable.

John Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to its Origins (1890).

We consulted this book when drafting the historical section of our book, America 3.0 which concerned the establishment of English cultural, legal and political practices in North America.

Cross-posted at America 3.0.

Progress in closing Guantanamo

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In his campaign, president Obama famously promised to “close Guantanamo Bay prison ” early in his administration. It didn’t happen. Then Eric Holder determined that he would try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal court in New York City. That didn’t happen.

The death blow was struck by New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who had previously pledged his support to Holder. On January 27th, Bloomberg distanced himself from the Justice Department, saying that a trial in New York would be too expensive. For months, companies with downtown real-estate interests had been lobbying to stop the trial. Raymond Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, had fortified their arguments by providing upwardly spiralling estimates of the costs, which the federal government had promised to cover. In a matter of weeks, in what an Obama Administration official called a “classic City Hall jam job,” the police department’s projection of the trial costs went from a few hundred million dollars to a billion dollars.

Eventually, the conservative movement relaxed and concluded that the idea of granting terrorists American style civil rights had lost. Not so fast.

In another of those Obama fast moves, the concept of civilian trials just won the contest. As Mark Twain said, the lie is half way around the world, while the truth is still getting its boots on.

In the blink of an eye, the second Obama term has turned the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when al-Qaeda was a law-enforcement problem, not a national-security challenge.

Of course, it was a Friday afternoon. That’s when Obama does his best work.

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History Friday: Houston and Lincoln

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It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, to look at the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of them almost entirely self-educated, as lawyers among other things, and from reading accounts by their contemporaries, it is clear that each possessed an enormous amount of personal charm. In their own time, though, each of them also acquired equally enormous numbers of bitter enemies. In fact, for a hero-founder of Texas, Houston attracted a considerable degree of vitriol from his contemporaries, and a level of published vilification which was not bettered until Lincoln appeared on the national scene as the presidential candidate favored by the north in the 1860 election. And both of them had ups and downs in their political and personal lives, although it’s hard to argue that Lincoln’s personal story arc was anything as eventful as Houston’s – the ADHD child of Jacksonian-era politics.

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