τεχνοσοφια

I don't ordinarily post pictures around here but I am making an exception.  Elizabeth and I recently spent a week in Anchorage, AK, where my in-laws were gathered for a family reunion.  Eliz took a bunch of pictures and has uploaded a few to Flickr.

Boy, but it is gorgeous up there.  A fellow sure could get used to all those mountain vistas and free-range zucchinis (?!).

Dear Future Me,

You've forgotten how to decode (or unescape) HTML or XML in Python again, haven't you?  My, my, that old age does catch up with you.

Well, it turns out that xml.sax.saxutils.unescape() works like a charm.  I'm certain that edge cases lurk here and there, so caveat, um, coder.

I've been using my time at RepoCamp today to get the OAI-ORE plugin for WordPress validating again.  I'm having some trouble using the validator so I say that with some diffidence.  But the latest code which is now checked in to the WordPress plugins svn repo ought to be close, if not fully conformant, to the 0.9 version of the ORE spec.

I'm not sure the plugin is really useful; it's just an Atom feed of all posts and pages in a WP instance.  I can think of some ways to make this more useful, by allowing blog authors to create their own aggregations, pulling in content outside of the particular instance.  I am certain that others can come up with even better uses.  I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks to Jay Datema for prodding me a bit, if indirectly.

About a month ago, I read on my colleague's blog that the Emory University Digital Library published a new book on sustaining digital libraries.  I've finally started reading it and figured I would post a note here.

The articles of this monograph provide resources for digital library stakeholders who seek to better understand how to effectively evolve such efforts from short-term projects to long-term sustainable programs. The monograph includes contributions from leaders in major digital libraries that have made such transitions or which are systematically considering the question of programmatic sustainability, including representatives from the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

I might also note that the book is available for free as a PDF.

So far I've read the introduction by the editors and the abstract from Leslie's paper, and the book looks like a high-quality read from cover to cover, with articles based on actual digital library experience.  It's a pragmatic approach for how to sustain digital library initiatives, looking beyond technical concerns towards the more challenging social and economic ones.  To some extent, we are getting pretty good at preserving bits and relationships between collections of bits — it is yet to be seen how good we will be at preserving the preservation systems themselves.

I have been meaning to write up some of my thoughts from the Revolution March and Rally and more generally on my evolving impression of the phenomenon that is the "Ron Paul Revolution," with which I have been involved to some small extent and fascinated to a larger extent.  I don't have the time or clarity for that just this moment.  But one of the things on my mind, spurred in part by Tom Woods's speech at the Rally and his new book, "Who Killed the Constitution?", is the tension that sometimes exists between "doing the right thing" and following the law as it was meant to be interpreted.

Reflecting on the constitutional transgressions of the executive and the judicial and the legislative branches, of the Democrats and the Republicans and the Whigs, I wonder what is the right action to take when the aims of justice are counter to those of moral rectitude.  Contrary to public opinion, the United States of America is not a democracy; we are a democratic federal republic, a constitutional republic, the operative word being "republic."  We ought not to bow to the whims of the masses, as in democracy — which, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, may be defined as "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."  Rather, we are subject to the rule of law, and the Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.  Whereas the Declaration of Independence breathed life into the union, the Constitution (and Bill of Rights) provided its skeleton and its life-blood.

What recourse do we have, then, when the Constitution prevents legislators, the judiciary, and the executive from doing what they, or the masses, deem "the right thing?"  Does the end, some morally sound outcome, justify the means even when the means involves sidestepping constitutional restraints?

We have a number of philosophical frameworks available to us to evaluate this issue — various theories of rights, justice, and morality — and I flit from one to the next with regularity.  If nothing else, I hope it enables me to see the many sides and nuances of the argument.  For instance, I might think that ending slavery was a moral necessity, that Brown v. Board of Ed. was a net win, that putting an end to the Nazi regime and liberating the concentration camps was the right thing to do.

But I'm also uncomfortable with the federal government's repeated stepping on the Constitution, its disregard for states' rights, and increasingly activist roles in excessively powerful executive and judicial branches. There are numerous examples,  many of which are in Woods's book: Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's war against the secessionists, Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, Truman's grab of the steel industry, the SCOTUS interpretation of the Equal Protection clause in favor of Brown v. Board, the examples go on and on.

When the framework for our very government is the Constitution, that which the government it was meant to restrain so openly flouts, I am taken to believe that we flirt with tyranny the more we side with rectitude over justice.  (I am playing a bit fast and loose as my time to write draws to a close by referring to the strict Constitutionalist perspective as that of "justice.")  I don't meant to hint here that the government ought not to have ended slavery, or kept the union together, and so forth, but that there were other, perhaps more difficult, ways of achieving these same ends within the bounds of the law as it was written.  When the government acts as though it is above the law, it establishes a very dangerous precedent.  The greater the amount of power in the government's hands, the less liberty in the people's — isn't this the tyranny our Constitution was supposed to protect us against?

It is often said that America is a grand social experiment, and I find myself agreeing.  Is the experiment predicated on America being a nation that strives to do right at all costs?  Or is it more about the lofty principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and codified in our Constitution, and how well our republic stands up to the natural progression towards empire, and towards tyranny?  I believe very strongly that the American Revolution is not bound in time but that it continues to this very day, and that the Constitution, and adherence thereto, is the very best chance we have to protect us from the base instincts of humanity and sustain a system of government that instead appeals to "the better angels of our nature," as Honest Abe would have put it.