July 21st, 2008

Three to Read #1

  • In Slate, Christopher Hitchens writes an unsparing, unsentimental remembrance of Jesse Helms, who died earlier this month at the age of 86:
    It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.
    And it gets better from there. Read the whole thing here.
  • My partner and I recently watched the seven-part HBO mini-series John Adams, which, aside from a few quibbles, like treating Adams a tad too gently for the Alien and Sedition Acts, and rushing through his legendary correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in the last seven years of his life, we liked. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney vanished into their characters, and David Morse’s scenes as George Washington pull off the almost impossible task of communicating what it must’ve been like to set eyes on the man. The effort at historic accuracy was impressive, right down to the rotting teeth as characters age (despite a nasty little continuity error in which, in an extremely important scene, Giamatti is without his dental makeup).


    One episode deals with the breast cancer and eventual death of the Adams’ daughter, Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smith, which offers a cringe-inducing look at the state of medicine in 1811. The TV series, by necessity, takes an abbreviated view of her illness. Jim Olson, a history professor at Sam Houston State University, looks in more depth at the story of her illness and medical treatment. It’s interesting to see what they knew and didn’t know about breast cancer then:

    In June 1811, with the lump visible to the naked eye, a desperate Nabby returned to Massachusetts, accompanied by her husband and daughter Caroline. As soon as she arrived in Quincy, she wrote to Benjamin Rush, describing her condition and seeking his advice. When Abigail Adams first looked at her daughter’s breast, she found the condition “allarming.” [sic] The large tumor distended the breast into a misshapen mass. John and Abigail took Nabby to see several physicians in Boston, and they were cautiously reassuring, telling her that the situation and her general health were “so good as not to threaten any present danger.” They prescribed hemlock pills to “poison the disease.”
    Read the whole essay here, but be warned it’s not for the squeamish.
  • Finally, how much trouble can a really disgruntled IT guy cause the government of the City & County of San Francisco? Quite a lot, actually, as we see in the case of Terry Childs:

    Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored. Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.
    Authorities made good on their threat of arrest, and Childs is now a guest of the city jail, but he’s still not talking. Now that’s disgruntlement. Read the stories here and here.

    How a guy with a robbery conviction got into a position of such techno-responsibility is one of many questions people will be avoiding in coming weeks.

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Thoughts, en passant:

"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study, and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think." —John Stuart Mill

"Earnestness is stupidity sent to college." —P.J. O'Rourke

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." —H.L. Mencken

"This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there as no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world's history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men." —C.S. Lewis

"Politicians taking credit from what they’ve done for the economy are like little kids working the controls of video games without putting any money in. There’s all kinds of stuff happening on the screen of the video game and they think that it’s all due to the frantic work of their fingers." —Tom Foreman

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." —Ed Howdershelt

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big." —Daniel Burnham

"Careless exaggerations are a million times worse than the Nazis." —Merlin Mann

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