Infrastructure? We don't need no stinkin' infrastructure...

I wonder how much $500 billion to $1 trillion could have bought. Probably would have been enough to cover this. But why protect the "homeland" when you can try to build a new one for someone else?

Potemkin Echo Chamber

What? Really? ...I didn't think so. Heh, perceiving reality must be a symptom of BDS.

A New Justinian

Legislation, legitimacy, and legibility are fundamentally interrelated concepts. Legislate and legitimate are both derived from the latin legis or law. Legibility is derived from legere (to read) or legein (to declare). While I'm certainly no legal historian or evolutionary linguist, obviously these roots share a common ancestor that can likely be traced back to the Code of Hammurabi or its predecessors which both influenced the Abrahamic and Greco-Roman legal systems. The fundamental property of law is that its legitimacy is derived from its legibility; citizens could no more plead ignorance of the law than a ruler modify it on his daily whim.

Yet whether by arrogant power or the passage of years, the law has a way of evolving from an initial concrete statement of rules into a grotesque leviathan of obfuscating refutations and contradictions of objective common-sense. So the law, like any ecology, grows and contracts: Hammurabi's single tablet became 12 in Rome, Justinian revised the expansive body of Roman law in his Corpus Juris Civilis in the 6th century, the Magna Carta was meant to check an abusive 13th-century monarchy, and our own 18th-century Constitution was an 18th-century correction of the injustices sanctioned by the aforementioned. But what of the state of modern American law? While the Constitution is obviously the highest law of the land, the citizen must also navigate an various acts of legislation modifying disparate portions of the indigestably large United States Code, to say nothing of the state and local laws.

Before we ask "Who makes sure this is all consistent?" it may be appropriate to remind ourselves that as we stand here in the 21st century at the summit of human achievement with a bounty of tools for storing, communicating, and organizing information, the law remains very much two-dimensional. But to answer the initial question, we allegedly elect learned citizens to deliberative bodies to ensure a more perfect Union and so forth. Does it work? No. Why? Fairly obvious and well-documented reasons:

1. Term limits. There are none. Representatives are pre-selected based upon party loyalty, fundraising ability, and some unquantifiable charismatic "electability" characteristic. Once in office, they have to begin fundraising for the next election in 2n years. Once in Washington, representatives have to navigate entrenched committee assignments and chairmanships.
   
2. Congressional ghost writers. Because the representative is off fund-raising for the next election cycle, congressional staffers and lobbyists are generally the ones who do the actual writing/coding of the legislation that appears before the body. As a result, representatives rarely read (2006 PATRIOT reauthorization and subsequent attorney dismissal scandal?) the enormous omnibus legislation that appears before the body, much less discussing the legal intricacies.
3. F.A.M.E. Fun Acronyms Make Elections Legislators seem to enjoy either (a) imagining quasi-apropos acronyms for their sponsored legislation if they haven't made a name for themselves or (b) if they have a "name," splattering it all over it (McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.). As a result, opposing the bill must "necessarily" imply some political vendetta against either "PATRIOT"s or the sponsoring representative/senator.
   
4. Illegible legislation. In turn, these unelected staffers and lobbyists are lawyers, whose collective love of teleological debates predisposes them to attempting to codify every possible subgenus of exemptions. As a result of lawyers writing the law, only other lawyers can understand it.
   

My next post will be on what can be done to solve these problems.

Michael Scott is GWB

I've only recently started watching The Office (only the U.S. version) on DVD and nearly always bust a gut at the glances exchanged and overwhelmingly awkward moments . But I started to wonder if this quasi-documentary might be understood in a different light: is there another subtext in which we might interpret the staggering ineptitude of Michael Scott, the fanatical obedience of Dwight Schrute, the romantic sideshow of Jim and Pam, and the overwhelming indifference of the rest of the workers? Can The Office be understood as a parody of the Bush administration and modern American political discourse?

Allow me to propose that Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin is a tidy microcosm of America: Michael Scott is our inept Dear Leader, Dwight Shrute is the boot-licking wingbat, Jim and Pam are the distracting sideshow of faux news and reality TV, Ryan represents the international community that has no clue how to react, and the rest of the workers represent a populace too blinkered and bored to care. Similarly, there is this "Corporate" apparatus embodied by Jan who ostensibly has the power to correct or balance these injustices but is initially indifferent then later seduced by the endearing machinations of Michael as well as a "Warehouse" of underclass laborers. Most important, however, is the acknowledged presence of the camera which serves to record the incalculable tedium and pointlessness of witnessed events in a society on the verge of collapse that it might be viewed later as a lesson.

Or perhaps my cynicism is reading too far into this...

Oral History Project

I've begun the MIT150 Oral History Project in earnest in the past 24 hours-- I interviewed Morris Halle and Sheila Widnall who are both extraordinary people in their fields (Linguistics and fluid dynamics respectively). The conviction and dedication that they demonstrated convinced me to start ploughing ahead with my own ideas, so I went ahead today and registered www.legeditmate.com, www.legedimate.org, and www.legeditmate.net.

Legeditmate is now christened. Too bad I don't know how to run a website yet, but I'm about to start learning...

Wikicracy

I was ruminating over what sort of project I hoped to pursue for my Ph.D., I was beset by a kind of despair because explaining my project to lay people elucidated the same sort of quizzical how-does-this-affect-me blank stares as one might get trying to explain postmodern art. Gold farming and virtual property rights? "They're just games!" Transnational and online identity among gamers? "They don't sleep and eat online." Celebrity, governance, and recognition in social networks like wikipedia and MySpace? "Like superlatives in a yearbook?" Consumption and value in post-scarcity economies? "Huh?"

A common thread wove through each: how authority & deviance are constructed, (de)legitimized, and re-appropriated within online (virtual, synthetic, disembodied -- take your pick) collaborative spaces. Or, who gets to make the rules, why are they made, and how are they enforced? This line of thinking had been ruminating in my head for weeks and three major pieces of legislation have caused substantial consternation on all sides of the political sphere during that time: H.R.1591 (Iraq funding supplemental with troop withdrawal), H.R.2206 (Iraq funding supplemental without withdrawal), and H.R.2230 (Comprehensive immigration reform). In each of these examples, small but specific differences between these huge legislative tomes create very real implications. And who put all these stupid pork barrel funding items in? Gosh, I wish I had something like Media Wiki's history tool to track all of this! Then I got to thinking, well who actually writes legislation?

Certainly senators and congressmen have neither the time nor the mental stamina necessary to personally write all of this, they have staffers who write, review, vet, and negotiate and so forth. Since Attorneygate has proved that huge pieces of legislation (ie, USA PATRIOT Act) generally go unread by the legislators voting for them, and certainly the staffers writing this legislation are not directly elected by the legislator's constituents, why not just have the people write the legislation directly and submit it to the representative body for deliberation? For that matter, why have all the debates about it spread out all over the blogosophere/internet when they could be hosted in one place? It seemed like a really good idea to use Media Wiki to draft legislation.

So thinking myself cleverer than I am, I search for wikicracy -- sure enough, people are already on to the idea: Wikocracy.com, Wikitution.org, Openlaw. Ok, but there seems to be some fundamental disconnect between our ideas as I never thought that a wiki constantly in transition could be a reliable basis for law and justice. Rather, the wiki could be used as a collaborative tool by various ideological sects to draft and coalesce around specific pieces of legislation, changes could be tracked, consensus achieved, and debate centered. At some later time, the wiki-legislation (wikilation?) could be submitted by means of a vote, consensus, or administrator for consideration and a vote by the deliberative body. I think of it as a reverse referenda as the people set the agenda and issues to be voted on by the legislative body.

Obviously there are a host of problems that would have to be overcome. Implementation questions about accessibility, security, and usability would have to be addressed firstly: how do you address spammers, sock-puppeteers, and other users acting in bad faith? How do you ensure that only citizens or constituents can contribute or should such restrictions not apply? How do you overcome systemic bias, the "digital divide," and questions of representation? How would highly contentious or partisan issues like abortion and immigration be effectively addressed without massive revert-wars? Who would own or control this legislative interface? How are issues selected to be submitted to the body? What elites would have to be assuaged or overcome to implement this? How would this change the social-political discourse? What other problems does this model introduce?

Questions I hope to begin to address.

Democrats blink

The Democrats blink first. After a whole campaign of tough talk and weeks to get withdrawal legislation on the President's desk, the Democrats blink and are about to pass legislation funding the war without timelines or accountability just like the Republican congresses before them. This is a complete and total collapse and a betrayal of their base who elected them there. It is obvious they are more concerned about perceived as having politicized the war in the next election than actually keeping the ball in the President's court. Now that the President is newly emboldened, do you think those investigations and subpoenas are going to go as swimmingly? I doubt it.