Who at UMD has Milton’s stapler?

I noticed something odd yet familiar at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). The header on this page appears to include photos of all staff…

…yet the MITH Staff page does not include the person in the fourth photo from the left:

I recognized the missing individual as one Milton Waddams. MITH, you should make absolutely sure that Milton is still receiving his paycheck and that he has his red Swingline stapler. Your records may show that he’s no longer an employee. If you can’t find him, his desk may be in a closet a storage area. However, if that’s the case, it may already be too late:

 

Follow-up: “Confederate Flag: Symbol of Heritage or Hate?”

On Thursday, September 23, 2010, I attended the talk “Confederate Flag: Symbol of Heritage or Hate?”, given by Todd Torkelson to the Minneapolis Skeptics. Both the talk and the ensuing discussion were fun, thought-provoking, and full of arguments, many made by me. In this post, I give attribution and further supporting information for some counter-arguments I made to a couple of specific claims.

“Robert E. Lee was anti-slavery.”

"Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee though his Private Letters", by Elizabeth Pryor Brown

We need to be careful about saying things like “Robert E. Lee was anti-slavery”, as Torkelson did. That statement requires mountains of qualification and context. Present-day audiences are likely to interpret “anti-slavery” as “abolitionist”, which Lee certainly was not. Lee was “anti-slavery” in a certain sense, a sense that probably would be very surprising to most people today. In her 2007 book “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through his Private Letters”, Elizabeth Brown Pryor argues that Lee considered slavery a “necessary evil” that was harder on whites than blacks, that for Lee “African-Americans were poor workers and a time-consuming emotional handicap, more trouble than they were worth.” But slavery was part of God’s grand design, so the suffering slave-owners would just have to accept it, and hope that God would lift their burden at some unspecified point in the future. This quotation of Lee by Pryor is especially revealing:

Even in 1865, his world nearly shattered and slavery abolished, he would write that  he considered “the relation of master and slave, controlled by human laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, as the best that can exist between the white & black races.” Concluded Lee: “I would deprecate any sudden disturbance of that relation unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity to both.”

I’m relying on Pryor to support this counter-argument because she had unprecedented access to, and made unprecedented use of, Lee’s private correspondence. In Chapter 9, “Humanity and the Law”, of her book, Pryor addresses Lee’s views on slavery in great depth; I’m barely skimming the surface here. She acknowledges that her work contradicts many previous claims about Lee, and explains how some of those incorrect claims may have originated, in a fascinating talk about “Reading the Man” at Arlington National Cemetery on May 19, 2007.

But what about Torkelson’s strongest evidence that Lee was “anti-slavery”, that he “freed the slaves he inherited”? Pryor again:

Just how long he owned human property is unclear. As he departed for the Mexican War, Lee wrote a will in which he freed the much maligned [by Lee] Nancy and her children, though what he intended for the others he owned is not stated, nor is it clear whether or not we should assume that a special relationship had inspired Nancy’s preferential treatment. Douglas Southall Freeman thought that he liberated all of his slaves after 1847, since he found no tax listing for them after that date. According to a Dr. John Leyburn, who claimed to have interviewed the general before his death, Lee “had freed most of his Negroes before the war”, sending some to Liberia. Another account, written by Robert E. Lee Jr., stated that “General Robert E. Lee inherited three or four families of slaves and ‘let them go… a long time before the war.’” The account states that the reason no formal paper was executed at that time was that he did not want them to have to leave Virginia, which state law required. Hiring records, however, show that Lee himslef still owned slaves at least until 1852, and that he used enslaved blacks as personal servants until the end of the Civil War.

“The Civil War was not about slavery.”

The bulk of Torkelson’s talk laid out a strong argument that the Civil War was about slavery. However, some attendees seemed to disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor of the Atlantic, demolishes the argument that “the Civil War was not about slavery” with quotations from many declarations of secession and other evidence, in a beautifully-written article that I encourage everyone to read: “The Ghost of Bobby Lee” He also brilliantly addresses the fundamental flaw in this entire line of argument, including his own previous belief in Robert E. Lee’s oft-claimed anti-slavery:

It’s weak to manipulate the dead in order to reconcile our present, to force men to play our Gods. Robert E. Lee was a man, and a product of a time and place that turned people into, quite literally, the most valuable resource in this country… These were the kind of forces at work in his world, and I’m not convinced we have the intrinsic right to expect someone like Lee to oppose them. Likewise, I may think that it was sinister for people who “looked like me” to sell me into slavery, but that presumes an expectation of racial unity which almost certainly didn’t exist at the time. Again, it summons the dead to do the work that I would shy away from.

Coates clearly strives to be objective and to confront strong counter-arguments and his own pre-conceptions. Another good example is “Slaves Who Liked Slavery”, also well worth reading, and “Stolen Legacy”, posted just today. Coates says, “The broad reclamation of a Civil War equally shared by all Americans is, at this moment, the work of my life.” Can’t wait to read more.

Stolen Legacy: 'Andrew Jackson Smith, born a slave, fled, when told that his "master" would be taking him with him into the Confederate Army. Instead, Smith fled 25 miles through the rain and presented himself to Union forces.'

AMERICA IS OVER! We are now living in EUROPASTAN!

“AMERICA IS OVER! We are now living in EUROPASTAN! We must wear burqas to the doctor and recite the Pledge of Allegiance backwards, while drawing a pentagram on the floor, in order to get ED pills!”

— Hal Sparks, on the Stephanie Miller radio show this morning

Auto-loading Drupal CCK Nodes

Now online: Auto-loading Drupal CCK Nodes slides for the presentation I gave at the Twin Cities Drupal user group last week.

Simplifying Sofeng’s Python Recursion Example

In Python recursion example to navigate tree data, Sofeng presents this solution…

def outer(data):
    class Namespace: pass
    ns = Namespace()
    ns.level = 1

    def inner(data):
        print ' ' * ns.level + data['text']
        if data['count'] > 0:
            ns.level += 1
            for kid in data['kids']:
                inner(kid)
            ns.level -= 1

    inner(data)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    outer(data)

…for traversing a dictionary of the form:

data = {'count': 2,
        'text': '1',
        'kids': [{'count': 3,
                  'text': '1.1',
                  'kids': [{'count': 1,
                            'text': '1.1.1',
                            'kids': [{'count':0,
                                      'text': '1.1.1.1',
                                      'kids': []}]},
...
}

Since his blog doesn’t seem to support code formatting in the comments, I’m repeating my comment here:

You actually don’t need the ‘count’ keys in the data dictionary, nor do you need the “if data['count'] > 0:” block. The code can be simplified even further by using a closure instead of the ‘Namespace’ class, eliminating the need for two (“outer” & “inner”) routines:

def traverse(data):
    print ' ' * traverse.level + data['text']
    for kid in data['kids']:
        traverse.level += 1
        traverse(kid)
        traverse.level -= 1

if __name__ == '__main__':
    traverse.level = 1
    traverse(data)

Python Packages via Easy Install for a Unified-Installer-built Plone

Because Plone/Zope requires an older version of Python than comes out of the box with many OS’s, some people recommend installing Plone with the Unified Installer. On Unix-like systems, the Unified Installer builds Python, Zope, Plone, and some dependencies from source and keeps the whole shebang relatively segregated from the rest of the OS.

This is great until you need to install an additional Python package for a Plone product. For which of your multiple Python versions will your installer build the package? This question would be frustrating enough even if there weren’t at least five different installers for Python packages.

The installer I use, and the one I’ll write about here, is Easy Install, which comes with setuptools. Having much experience with Perl, I chose Easy Install because it’s supposedly “the closest thing to CPAN currently available for Python.” One problem with Easy Install is that it tends to install packages in the system Python site-packages directory. Here’s how to easy_install packages for the Python built by the Unified Installer:

1. cd $ZOPE/bin
2. wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
3. ./python ez_setup.py
4. ./python -m easy_install $package_name

Voila! See the Easy Install docs for details about why this works.

You may also want to set up some aliases for your various Pythons.

Zope debug-mode: designed to produce silent failures!

Much to my bemusement, a minor change to a Plone product I’m writing caused Zope to silently fail to start. Why no error message? Since I was running Zope in debug-mode, this seemed like a problem. After exhausting what I thought were the obvious approaches to diagnosing the problem, I finally decided to review what debug-mode does. From the zope.conf that comes with Zope 2.9.7-final:

# Directive: debug-mode
#
# Description:
# A switch which controls several aspects of Zope operation useful for
# developing under Zope. When debug mode is on:
#
# - The process will not detach from the controlling terminal
#
# - Errors in product initialization will cause startup to fail
# (instead of writing error messages to the event log file).

So Zope debug-mode is designed to produce silent failures for “errors in product initialization”. Absolute fucking genius. Principle of Least Astonishment, anyone?

“I am your father.”

So my dad’s watching Judge Judy now. Not just for laughs, either. He seems to adore her no-nonsense, tough love, take-no-prisoners approach to TV justice. I wonder if he has a crush on her. Just when I thought we couldn’t have much less in common.

This is becoming a pattern. A few years ago, Dad was there when a few friends of mine and I were discussing classic comedy TV: Monty Python, old Saturday Night Live, the Honeymooners. Dad joined in with “The show I really liked was Knight Rider. That talking car was really neat!”

Is this man really my father? Maybe I was adopted…

Dad: No. I am your father.
nihiliad: No. No. That’s not true! That’s impossible!

Howard Nemerov and the Rainforest Cafe

The following is a minor rewrite of an email message I sent to a friend a few years ago. Since then, several friends to whom I’ve forwarded it have urged me to start a blog. What better for a first post?

---

I went to the Rainforest Cafe the other night. I never would have, had I not received a gift certificate for a free dinner from a relative. I won’t be going back, and I’m scheming how to get even.

It should have been a tip-off that the gift certificate described it as a “Landry Restaurants, Inc. owned concept” [my emphasis]. The same company owns Joe’s Crabshack, which is almost as obnoxious. The Rainforest Cafe is covered in faux flora and fauna, in more ways than one. When was the last time you saw lions and giraffes in a rain forest? Anyway, a lot of this cheap, plastic crap was animatronic Disneyland shit, and accompanied by loud, high-school-play-quality sound effects, thunder and lightning and stampeding cud-chewers of some sort. There were some live animals, but they were all coral reef sea creatures. I don’t know what they have to do with the rain forest, either. What a fun atmosphere!

What really got me, though, was when our “safari guide” informed us that today’s “special” was a steak. That’s right, a fucking steak special at the Rainforest Cafe. When I asked our server/crocodile hunter if he saw any irony in that, he replied “Oh, I know. All of the food we serve here isn’t even from the rain forest. It’s all American.” A little while later, he added “Most of these animals we have here aren’t from the rain forest, either.” I’m not sure that whoever named the entrees is aware of even that much, given such titles as “Canopy Chicken Salad”, “Tree Top Filet”, “Sudan Shrimp Salad” and “Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Wrap”. Whoever wrote the “educational” part of the menu must have been aware, at least long enough to copy it down, that “20 years ago, rain forests covered 14% of the earth’s land. Today they cover less than 6%”, and that “at the current rate of destruction, rain forests could be wiped out in 40 years”. Whether or not the Rainforest Cafe is contributing to that destruction to make more room to raise cattle for their “Rainforest Burgers”, the menu didn’t say.

The whole experience reminded me of this poem:

Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket

This God of ours, the Great Geometer,
Does something for us here, where He hath put
(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,
Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,
Making the roast a decent cylinder,
Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,
Getting the luncheon meat anonymous
In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled
Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,
Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives
They come to us holy, in cellophane
Transparencies, in the mystical body,
That we may look unflinchingly on death
As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.

— Howard Nemerov