Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And in Google’s 10-point philosophy, under the heading Our philosophy, point number 6 says: You can make money without doing evil. Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. (And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can look up what Google has to say, but if we repeat it, you’ll get bored and move on, and we’re trying to make a point of our own, so please keep reading.)

Over the past several weeks, visitors to the Google search page have repeatedly been informed, “We’re changing our privacy policy and terms. This stuff matters.” Visitors are given a chance to click on Dismiss, or Learn more. If you click Learn more, Google will tell you, “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.”

Who could object to that, right? And if you read the entire policy, which Google put there so you could read it, you’ll learn more details. From Google’s business point of view, the policy is certainly good because Google will have all the information about you in one place.  But for people who use Google, it’s not so good.  Because when you gather small bits of information about a person from a lot of different sources, and  put them into one big heap of information in one place all about that person, you know a lot more about that person than when the information is scattered. Yes, bringing all the scattered bits together does make a difference. It’s a lot easier to put a jigsaw puzzle together if you have all the pieces in one place.

Look at it this way, US intelligence agencies had sufficient information in different places about terrorists, but the agencies failed in their mission because the information was scattered and they “didn’t connect the dots.” Google’s new privacy policy allows them connect the dots about you.

If you’d really like to Learn more about privacy and Google, you might look at Knowledge @ Wharton, the research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Google’s new privacy policy is scheduled to go into effect on March 1st, but on the other side of the Atlantic the European Union authorities have asked Google to give them more time to investigate the effects of such a change. That’s a Good Idea.

You’re probably aware that there are a number of saints named Valentine on a variety of lists, and you probably know that no saint, with or without the name Valentine, began the tradition of sending love notes to the beloved, or red roses, or cards printed with fanciful red hearts, or heart-shaped candies, or heart-shaped red boxes of chocolates, or even heart-shaped strawberries dipped in chocolate. We know all that. Nonetheless, we looked into Catholic Online and came across a section called Saints Fun Facts and clicked on St. Valentine. We read the fun fact that St. Valentine was a kind-hearted Roman priest who “aided young Christians being persecuted by Claudius II and was imprisoned. While in custody, he converted 46 members of a guards family to Christianity. Upon discovering this, Claudius sentenced him to death.” Frankly, we didn’t find much fun in those facts at all, especially the sentenced-to-death part.

So,  to cheer us up,  we’ve decided to post just a few more anonymous photos of lovers kissing.  And please don’t destroy our cheer by telling us the photos are staged.  Of course they’re staged, but that’s not the point. The point is to get you to leave your computer and go kiss someone you care for. Below is a photo which replaces the snow with lots of yellow flowers. Winter or summer, clearly the season doesn’t matter.Now scroll down for some acrobatic kisses. First, the bicycle kiss. And don’t try this unless you’re very experienced at riding a bicycle, good at judging distance and have fine reflexes. We admire how the young man has stamped his left foot on the front wheel, halting his bike at the last moment and causing it to rotate up, just as we admire the young woman raising up on tip-toe to meet him. And, of course, the handstand at the beach kiss. We do like the couple pictured below — the serene welcome of the young woman and the exuberant display of  affection by the young man.  Indeed, there’s an exuberance about the kiss in both these photos and that’s a delight. Frankly, we have no idea how that young man got up into his handstand position and we haven’t figured out how he’s going to get down.

Outside a Debtors' Prison in England

You’ve probably heard of debtors’ prison, a prison where people who hadn’t paid their debts could be kept under lock and key until they paid their debt or got somebody else to pay for them. It was a dreadful system. Charles Dickens, whose father was housed in a debtors’ prison for a while, wrote eloquently about it.

We had similar prisons in this country until around 1831 when the United States government abolished imprisonment for debts owed to the federal government, and most states soon dropped the practice too. To imprison somebody for failing to pay a debt is fundamentally crazy – OK, let’s say it’s just fundamentally counterproductive – because it deprives the debtor of the ability to earn the money to pay off his or her debts.

What brings debtors’ prisons to mind in these paragraphs is the way debtor nations are treated these days. It’s called austerity. It’s equally counterproductive – or, in a simpler word, crazy.

A good example of the craziness is what’s happening to Greece. Greece has got some big, bad debts and hasn’t got the money to pay them. Now the grand institutions that can loan Greece money aren’t throwing the nation into debtor’s prison. But they are demanding ball-and-chain austerity. They won’t loan Greece anymore money unless that nation continues to fire thousands of state workers, cut the wages of thousands and thousands of others, drastically reduce workers’ benefits and slash their pensions.  Of course, when you do that to a nation, the entire economy declines, more and more people loose their jobs or have to take dramatic pay cuts. That’s what’s happening in Greece today.

As every taxpayer knows, the way a nation gets money to pay its debts is by taxing its citizens, the ones who are actually making money. But when the economy sinks and people earn much less or nothing at all, the tax revenue plunges. In other words, as the institutions that loan money to Greece insist on these austerity programs, the Greeks are less and less able to pay off their debts.

Republicans, who haven’t shown a deep grasp of economics over the past 100 years, are eager to have the United States immediately “put its fiscal house in order” and “cut the deficit.” This means slashing government payrolls and cutting or eliminating government programs – except those for sacred national defense, of course. But because we have a Democrat in the White House and because Democrats control Senate, Republican suitors haven’t been able to completely have their way with the economy.

Interestingly, the conservatives did win big in England and they immediately imposed an austerity budget on their fellow subjects. They believe it’s imperative that England immediately “put its fiscal house in order” and “cut the deficit.” As a result, the country has slid down and backward economically. But England, despite its grim stagnation, isn’t in the desperate situation that Greece is in. Greece is in the new version of debtors’ prison.

A Variety of Old Books by a Variety of Publishers

Most readers believe there are a variety of well established and independent book publishers in the United States. Certainly,  it would increase artistic and intellectual diversity if there were a lot of different publishers. Actually, there are only six.  While it’s true there are many very small publishing companies,  six big ones dominate the US and in the publishing industry they are known as The Big Six.

Readers often think that the “imprint” under which a book is published is the name of a thriving, independent publisher.  Alas, the imprint is usually the name of a vanished publishing house — a publishing house that was bought  up by an international corporation — and the name of the global corporation, which owns many such imprints,  may or may not appear anywhere in the book.

The names of The Big Six may be familiar to you as distinguished old publishing houses. They are Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Random House, Macmillan, The Penguin Group, and Hachette. Only two of The Big Six are US companies: Simon and Schuster, and HarperCollins. The others are foreign: two are German, one is British and the other is French.

Simon and Schuster, for example, was established in 1924 in New York City by a man named Richard Simon and another named “Max” Schuster and it was one of many such unique, stand-alone publishing houses. Now the name is owned by CBS Corporation which under the Simon and Schuster name publishes over two thousand different books a year. Those books come out under 35 different “imprints.” Those imprints are what most people believe are the names of separate and independent publishing companies — which they may have been long ago.

HarperCollins looks, from its name, as if it were simply two well-known publishing houses side by side, a nice Anglo-American merger. Harper was founded in New York City way back in 1817 by the brothers James and John Harper. They prospered and in 1962, the company then known as Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Company, and became Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. After Harper & Row went on a buying spree and acquired the publishing houses of Crowell, and Lippincott and Zondervan and Scott, Foresman, the Harper company was itself bought by Rupert Murdoch’s gigantic conglomerate, News Corporation Limited. Eventually, the company acquired the old British publishing house William Collins & Sons which was founded in 1819 by William Collins. The distinguished old name Harper was typographically joined to the equally distinguished old name Collins to make HarperCollins, a huge subsidiary of News Corp, the largest media company in the world.

Now for the foreign four:

Random House may be one of the most widely known publishers among ordinary readers in the United States. The company was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. In the early 1960s Random House acquired two other publishing companies, Knopf and Pantheon, and in 1998 it was bought by Bertelsmann, a privately owned German media business. Bertelsmann started as a publisher in 1835, was modestly large by 1939, and soon became the single largest publisher of Nazi propaganda. The company also benefited from slave labor provided to them by the Nazi party. Bertelsmann’s US Random House Division has a very long list of imprints, some of them quite well known, such as Dell, The Dial Press, Doubleday, Knopf, Modern Library, Pantheon, Vintage — all often mistaken for independent publishing companies.

Macmillan is usually thought of as a British publishing company, and in a sense it is, but it’s owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck of Stuttgart, Germany. The original Macmillan was founded in England in 1843 by two brothers, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. The company published a long list very distinguished writers. It remained an independent company until 1995 when the huge German media company Holtzbrinck Publishing Group purchased 70 percent it, and bought the remaining 30 percent in 1999. In the US they issue books under such well known imprints as Faber & Faber, Henry Holt and Company, Palgrave Macmillan, St Martin’s Press, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hachette Book Group USA is owned by French company Hachette Livre which, in turn, is owned by Lagardère Publishing, the French media giant. On their US website, the Hachette Book Group says that the story started in the United States in 1837 when the firm of Little, Brown & Company was founded. In 1996, Little, Brown & Company and Warner Books merged to become, eventually, Time Warner Book Group, which in turn was acquired by Hachette in 2006. Properly, the story began not when Little, Brown & Company was founded, but in 1826 when Louis Hachette opened his book shop and publishing company in France.

The Penguin Group is the largest publisher in the world. From the perspective of the US, this story began in 1838 when John Wiley and George Putnam founded Wiley and Putnam. The company split in 1848, and Putnam went on alone. The company did well and in 1965 the Putnam company bought Berkley Books, and in 1975 the Putnam and Berkley Groups were acquited by The Music Corporation of America as their publishing division. Ten years later that division was sold to the Penguin Group which was itself a division of the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC, which is headquartered in London. Perhaps the best known Penguin imprint in the US is Viking, formerly an independent New York publisher.

None of this is secret, of course. It’s just not well known outside the world of publishing.

Bill Maher – Irritable Bowl Syndrome from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

You’re probably aware that as you drive through the city certain cameras, often mounted overhead at cross streets, record your car’s plate number and, in many instances, they record your face as well.

Maybe, like most people, you do feel a little uncomfortable about being kept under watch, but you shrug it off because you’re just one individual in a city of thousands or millions and they can’t keep track of every single one of us all the time. I mean, sure, they have the technology to listen to our phone conversations and the technology to photograph us as we move around, but how can they store that ocean of information? Besides, the cost of storing so much data would break the bank.

And you’re right. At least for three more years. But you do remember George Orwell’s 1984 and Big Brother. Back in 1984, it cost about $85,000 to store a gigabyte of data. Today it costs about five cents. That means it costs about 17 cents to store all the phone calls made by an individual over the course of a year. But the cost of storage is falling and by 2015 it will cost under 2 cents.

Cameras produce photos and photos have lots of pixels and that means a security camera generates a mountain of data. On the other hand, your phone, GPS and Wi-Fi connection give away your location but that information requires comparatively few ones and zeros. The data identifying the location of each of a million people every five minutes, 24 hours a day for a year, can be stored in 1,000 gigabytes. That would cost around $50 today.

It costs more to store all those pixels from all those cameras, but governments can afford it. In China,  a government “safety” project will use around 500,000 video cameras to keep watch in the city of Chongqing which has a population of 12 million — that’s one video camera for every 24 people.  Right now, it’s expensive to store that much high-quality video and they’ll have to use lower quality images. But in a few years, say by 2020, they’ll be able to store a year’s worth of high-quality video movies of every one of those 12 million people for about 25 cents per person.

These numbers come from a very interesting report produced by John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and in the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. He is also professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. You may want to read the full report ; you’ll find it well documented. Professor Villasenor’s report is phrased in terms of how much it would cost a repressive regime, such as that in Iran, to keep a close watch on each of its citizens. Fortunately, we live in an open society where such issues as government surveillance and individual privacy are vigorously debated. Or, maybe we should say, ought to be vigorously debated.

Roger Greenblat’s The Swerve, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2011, and at the same time brought popoular attention to another book, the two-thousand-year-old On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. 

To the contemporary reader, the most astonishing thing about Lucretius’ philosophy is that it is based on an atomic theory of physics. Certainly it’s a marvel that a Roman poet writing around 50 B.C.  should understand the natural physical world as being the result of atomic interactions, but Lucretius was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, himself an inheritor of the atomic theories of Leucippus and Democritus, all of them believers that the basic unit of the material world was the atom —  meaning “un-cutable” in Greek.

Whereas our contemporary atomic theory is based on experimental evidence, the Greek and Roman philosophers arrived at their theories entirely through reason and speculation.  Seeing the world as composed of complex structures built up by aggregates of simpler elements (look around you; you’ll see the same)  those thinkers worked down to a theoretical solitary building block  and down below that to nothingness.  That’s where Lucretius begins: there’s the void and atoms falling endlessly through it, occasionally swerving to hit other atoms, and over time those atoms hook together to build up the material world we live in. Furthermore, says Lucretius, the void is so large and atoms so numerous that other worlds have also arisen, many other worlds, in addition to our own.

And that is all there is to life, to this world, to the cosmos, to anything. Lucretius’s materialistic vision was intended, he wrote, to rescue people from belief in the intervention of gods and the fear of death. Gods exist in De Rerum Natura, but they exist off at some distance, rather diaphanous beings, with no interest in the world they didn’t create and the humans who inhabit it. As for death, don’t fear an after life, says Lucretius; you are only your constituent atoms and death merely frees those atoms to regroup, perhaps, in some other form. Not everyone will find freedom from fear or any comfort  in Lucretius.

De Rerum Natura is a long, long poem of some 7,400 lines. Even though it’s apparently unfinished, Lucretius gets around to explaining everything from how sound manages to get through walls to how it is that adolescent boys have wet dreams. Nothing is beyond his interest, from the grandest, such as the evolutions of human society, to the smallest, the infinitesimal wearing down of a statue by the touch of innumerable hands.  Lucretius himself comes through the lines as a man interested in just about everything, a man who apparently loved the things of this world and loved writing about them. The work is, after all, a vivid digressive poem about this world.

Teachers of Latin and their more advanced students are well aware of Lucretius’s book – six books as Lucretius assembles it — and they’re also aware that much of it is difficult Latin. If you had Latin in high school only, you’ll find Lucretius somewhere between exceedingly difficult and impossible. Say Catullus is easy and Ovid is easy, admit Quintillian is not easy and Horace is hard. If so, Lucretius is hard. Happily, there are translations.

Unhappily, translations of Latin poems aren’t wonderful. Yes, Arthur Golding’s translation in 1567 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is admired and is probably the best translation of that work, even after four centuries, but we nowadays read it not to get a sense of Ovid but to relish the wonderful rush and verve of the brash translator’s Renaissance English, a marvelous vulgate.

The most recent translation of Lucretius’s hexameters is by A. E. Stallings and she, like Golding, uses “fourteeners” — lines of fourteen syllables, usually seven iambics — linked in couplets. Indeed, her translation gives De Rerum Natura a certain liveliness and bounce – and possibly a classicist finds the same spirited animation in the original.  None of us here at Critical Pages can read Latin like a classicist, but maybe you guessed that already.  We favor the Loeb edition  of De Rerum Natura  published by Harvard University Press with the Latin on the left-hand page and the plain English on the right. But we admire A. (Alicia) E. Stallings translation. She’s a remarkable poet all on her own, as her many prizes attest.

Dr. Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.

If you crave relief from politics and would like something  completely different, you might be interested in learning a little about sex addiction in women. We learned a lot from an interview in Canada’s National Post. Apparently, women are taking to sex in a big, big way.  In fact, according to Dr. Patrick Carnes, “We are seeing the biggest change in human sexuality maybe in the history of our species.”

 Wow! The biggest in the history of our species! Now that’s impressive. Dr. Carnes, Ph.D.,  ought to know what he’s talking about, because he’s a psychologist. He’s a specialist in sexual addiction and the executive director of the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Certainly the Internet has made pornography available and private, which maybe one of the greatest changes in pornography in the history of the human species. So it shouldn’t surprise us that, as Dr. Carnes says, “We’re seeing women getting into pornography in a way we’ve never seen before.” But sex addiction goes beyond mere fantasy. “Women are engaging in affairs, they’re engaging in sado-masochistic behavior,” he said. They are? Again?

If you’re beginning to think that sexual addiction must be an epidemic, you’re right. For sure, Dr. Carnes thinks it is. “We’re now at a place where we have an epidemic. Two thirds of our kids are watching pornography while they’re doing their homework.” Good grief!Two thirds! Is that possible? 

We were looking forward to Valentines Day.  You know — love and the elective affinities and, well, maybe even  sex. We’re sorry for people who are addicted to anything. But we intend to enjoy Valentines Day, no matter what.

The image below is taken from Nymphs and Satyrs, painted by William-Adolphe Bougereau and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1873. You’d never guess from this painting that the following year saw the first exhibit of Impressionist painters. There’s not much available to illustrate a post about women and sex addiction, so this will have to do.