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Monthly Archives: October 2009

Mass Market Appeal

“There doesn’t seem to be any “Any” key.” – Homer Simpson

Even by the low stands of this site I am not informed enough to comment knowledgably about Windows 7.  I have not yet used it, and while I did follow its development I don’t have any really strong opinions on it one way or the other.  For the lowdown on Windows 7 I read this review at Ars Technica.  And while I have no ground to stand on when it comes to the functions and features of 7 or the accuracy of this review, one thing about the article did bother me.

Here’s a quote:

Probably the biggest source of whining about Vista—bigger even than compatibility issues or performance concerns—was User Account Control, the new feature that meant any attempt to use superuser privileges gets blocked unless you specifically permit it when prompted, with deliberately annoying prompts. Though this could on occasion result in seeing a plethora of UAC prompts (especially when installing and configuring the system in the first place, which just happens to be the scenario that most reviewers experience), the reality was that normal usage scenarios resulted in few prompts, certainly not enough to be a daily annoyance.

[…]

If you do this—which you probably should—then you’ll find that Windows 7 has virtually the same number of prompts as Vista does. By making it “less annoying” for Administrator users, Microsoft has just made it more likely that home and SOHO users will just run as Administrator all the time, which is precisely what the company was trying to prevent with UAC in the first place.

This attitude is, if not quite prevalent, at least common among professionals in what we’ve loathsomely dubbed “IT”.  It’s this wildly false assumption that every install is a well thought out and well maintained one, note the scare quotes around ‘less annoying’.  Obviously this is a review that’s been published on a website that expects at least a modicum of technical understanding from its readers.  But the problems it is describing are those not of the kind of people who read Ars Technica, but of the less technically inclined, of the great technologically unwashed.  Windows Vista, and by the looks of it Windows 7, were designed with the properly configured and tightly run IT environment in mind.  How could they not be?  But a great deal of systems, in everything from homes to large offices, won’t be run or configured that way because doing so is expensive, time consuming and, for many people, wholly unnecessary.

Sitting at home behind the built in Windows firewall and whatever firewall is built into their router most people are quite secure so long as they don’t fall for a phishing scam or take pity on any down on their luck Nigerians.  This is true whether they’re running XP, Vista, or 7.  Conversely, if someone does “confirm” their password or open an e-mail attachment they shouldn’t then no amount of built in security features will stop them all.

And thus we arrive back at the essential problem that IT people find so endlessly frustrating: you cannot stop the users from acting stupidly.  If you’re running a large network you can restrict what they can do, but if it’s just some random ordinary citizen sitting behind a desk in some random ordinary living room, they’re on their own.  They have full privileges to be completely ignorant of the power at their fingertips and inevitably some of them are going to destroy their systems.

The article is written from what I think of as a typical high level IT viewpoint that all too often is afflicted with a blind spot masquerading as annoyance when it comes to this essential flaw in all security systems.  Here’s another example:

“Everything “bad” about Vista—and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, because the things that garnered most complaints have negligible legitimacy—is still “bad” in 7.”

It’s the “negligible legitimacy” that gives away the myopia because a serious IT person understands the meaning behind all the prompts and all the security features.  To a non-technical user they are simply annoying and that means that they also fail as a security measure because asking a person to render a judgment on a security question they don’t understand is no kind of security at all.  It’s like flashing a warning about two choices that reads “Click only the left box, clicking the right box will result in certain doom!”, only it’s written in runes.  Many of the people who found Vista frustrating can’t read the runes and blaming them for the poor reception it received isn’t much of a solution.

Microsoft is certainly far from blameless when it comes to the foibles of Windows, but to some extent they are caught between a rock and a hard place.  Their systems absolutely have to meet the approval of serious IT people, but at the same time they have to be usable by people who don’t know anything about computers.  The features of Vista, that have been carried forward into 7, that the Ars review finds so important and defends so vehemently, are indecipherable to ordinary people.  Until that gap can be bridged, until the sharp corners of independent computing can be smoothed out a little more without ordinary users being bothered, problems like this are going to persist.  Things like UAC are stopgaps masquerading as solutions.

Harbinger of Doom (R-Arizona)

“The problem with both parties is that they always want to give your tax dollars to the less fortunate.” – Prof. Farnsworth

Today Thomas Dewey is best remembered for a cameo in what is perhaps the most famous picture of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, “Dewey Defeats Truman” screamed the banner headline of the November 3rd, 1948 Chicago Tribune.  Before he was an incorrect newspaper headline though, Thomas Dewey was one of the standard bearers of what was left of the Republican Party after Franklin Roosevelt got through with it.  He was the governor of New York for more than a decade and was heavily involved with the effort to run Dwight Eisenhower as a Republican in 1952.  He was a giant of what is now an almost extinct species, the socially liberal, fiscally conservative Northeastern Republican; the event that marked that sadly departed group for extermination was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

In “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” Rick Perlstein chronicles not only that campaign, but also the enormous amount of political work required to bring it about.  Hovering over all that hullaballoo is a quote from Thomas Dewey that Perlstein uses to both open and close the narrative, one that may be very relevant in the age of Barack Obama and the rodeo show of his right wing opponents.  Dewey said that if the two American political parties were ever realigned along their ideological axes, “The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.”  That thought was on the mind of many professional political observers in the wake of Goldwater’s 1964 annihilation by Lyndon Johnson.

To the true believer conservatives in Perlstein’s book, however, that defeat was in an inconceivable future.  They saw Eisenhower as a lukewarm conservative who had done nothing for their cause and they felt marginalized within their own party.  After the 1960 election, which many believed John Kennedy had stolen (to be fair to them it wasn’t a clean election, and even if Kennedy would’ve won anyway it wasn’t a fringe position to think chicanery had made the difference), they were tired of playing second fiddle in their own party.  After all, if they weren’t going to win by trotting out moderates like Dewey and Nixon, why on earth shouldn’t they be out front?

Who were these people and what was their cause?  By and large they were businessmen who’d chafed under both the New Deal and the wartime restrictions on private enterprise.  (They were also strong isolationists.)  They wanted to roll back the government that had grown up around Roosevelt and Truman.  That they were also violently anti-Communist and none too keen on civil rights (which they attacked as a further increase in federal government power) goes almost without saying.

Perlstein documents, blow by blow, how the true conservatives (just like today they were financed almost exclusively by a few wealthy individuals) took over party organ after party organ.  From county and state level committees to auxiliary groups only loosely affiliated with the Republican Party they engaged in an old fashioned political war, door by door, ward by ward, dollar by dollar.  They conquered the Party through enormous amounts of hard nosed political work the likes of which is rarely seen.  The result was Barry Goldwater’s nomination, a landslide that buried the traditional poobahs of the party.

Much like “Nixonland”, its de facto sequel, “Before the Storm” is filled cover to cover with catnip for those interested in American politics.  For example, when the 1964 nominating process got to the Oregon primary, Richard Nixon was not officially running.  Though his name was on the ballot in Oregon he wasn’t openly campaigning, preferring instead to play the disinterested elder statesmen whom, should the party ask, would be a good soldier and step into the nomination.  Nixon’s advisors told him to play his part and not make any effort in Oregon, victory was unlikely anyway.  Instead:

Nixon decided to make a stealth campaign in Oregon whatever the risks.  Nadasdy [a young PR man and Nixon backer] reflected with wonder that so careful and shrewd a politician could also relish harebrained cloak-and-dagger schemes that could easily blow up in his face.

In addition to wonderful little nuggets like that there are a number of incidents that eerily parallel our times.  Once it got off the ground Goldwater’s campaign was sustained by small donations from people with more passion than money, “A thirteen-year-old sent $5 from his allowance, a twelve-year-old $15 earned cutting grass, a seven-year-old girl a card with three pennies taped on it and the message “I say a prayer for Senator Goldwater every night.”  Two young steadies pledged to give up their Saturday night movie and donated the money they saved.”  To have donations of such meager amounts make up an important part of the total would be almost unheard of in high level American politics until the rise of on-line fundraising the last few cycles.

But the parallels don’t stop with the money.  Giving a right wing radio address before President Kennedy’s fateful trip to Dallas, the oil man H.L. Hunt, an outspoken conservative, warned that if strong, federal civil rights protections were enacted then the next step would certainly be the confiscation of firearms.  One need only look at the sales figures for guns and ammunition since the last election to see the perennial nature of that unfounded fear.

The right wing paranoia doesn’t always take the form of “they’re coming for my guns” however.  One 1960s rumor, given its first wide exposure in a newsletter sent out by Orange County Republican Representative James B. Utt, had it that the UN was secretly training 100,000 troops in Georgia (including 16,000 “African Negro troops, who are cannibals”) that, with the connivance of the lefty Democrats, would dissolve the Constitution and make the US part of a world government.  (The troops were at an Army base receiving training before going home to friendly governments.)  As insane as that was, it was believed by millions of Americans.  Their gullible successors are the ones spouting off about Obama’s birth certificate, ACORN, and the socialist/fascist/communist plots of Barack Obama.  It’s not too difficult to imagine FOX News circa 1964 running a chyron along the lines of “16,000 African Troops Train in Georgia, Officials Says ‘Everything Fine’, Local Residents Worry”.

After Goldwater went down in flames the doyens of the American political establishment moved in to declare conservatism dead.  And if you were taking in the whole view that was indeed the way things looked in 1964.  Vietnam was still barely on the political radar (though Johnson had already decided to escalate it once the election was over) and the racial issues that were to shred American political assumptions for decades to come were still largely confined to the South.  The Watts Riots, with which Perlstein opens Nixonland, happened in 1965.

Massive defeat and all, the Goldwater campaign remains the seminal event from which modern conservatism is descended.  Not only did Nixon do tireless work on Goldwater’s behalf (for which he was lambasted at the time but which did him a world of good four years later), but Ronald Reagan, then still merely an actor, made his national political debut giving what was known simply as “The Speech”.  It’s a 30 minute harangue that is the perfect distillation of the mid-1960s conservative world view.  (Goldwater, on whose behalf it was televised, isn’t even mentioned until halfway through.)  As would be his custom through later campaigns and his presidency, Reagan’s facts were often flat out wrong or heavily distorted, but even with that knowledge and forty odd years of hindsight it’s difficult to watch that and not agree with the guy.

And, of course, from Reagan came Bush the Elder, and from Bush the Elder came Bush the Younger and the present sorry state of the Republican Party.  The question today is whether or not the conclusion from 1964 holds true because the parties are now, for the first time since then, aligned along their ideological axes.  The Republican Party has driven out all the heretics and consists of naught but hard core right wing conservatives.  The Democratic Party consists of pretty much everyone else.

After 1964 the Republicans stormed back to power on racial resentment and foreign policy fiasco.  Off and on they’ve been leaning on those two crutches for the last eleven presidential elections.  But the ground has shifted underneath them, the foreign policy fiascos are now theirs and the racial resentments are a faint echo of what they once were.  Can an ideologically pure Republican Party compete on the national level?  We’ll find out in the next couple of elections, but Thomas Dewey didn’t think so and he was in a position to know.

How To Kill Children Legally (Even Your Own!)

“According to Fretful Mother magazine if Maggie doesn’t talk by age one we should consider a corrective tongue extender.” – Marge Simpson

Amy Wallace has an excellent article in Wired about the irrational, wasteful and dangerous creature known as the anti-vaccination movement.  It’s an excellent piece of reality-based journalism because it not only points out that these people are wrong about everything but it also shows how amazingly stubborn and vicious they can be in defense of their wrongness.  And it’s funny:

At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.

To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).

“infrared sauna”?  Awesome.  “neuro-feedback machine”?  Sounds science-y.  But the winner has to be “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism”.  Such a wonderfully math-y looking slogan, and it employs precise scientific concepts like “more”.

What the article only touches on briefly, however, is why.  What would possess relatively prosperous and well educated people to trust their children’s health to provable quackery?  Here’s the brief touch:

Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

This, combined with the perennial susceptibility of human beings to slickly peddled easy answers, is the real crux of the problem.  It was a mere fifty years ago, after all, that the polio vaccine began to be widely administered.  It essentially wiped out polio in the US and it was rightly hailed as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine.  There weren’t a lot of overly concerned parents trying to keep the vaccine away from their kids and one of the big reasons is that polio was fucking scary.  It killed, it maimed, and it was all too common.

Polio isn’t scary to most Americans any longer because they have no experience with it.  The same is true for the rest of the diseases the vaccines for which the anti-vaccination crowd fears.  Of all the frightened people who read sites like the reprehensible Age of Autism how many of them have ever known, or even heard of, someone who had a serious case of polio?  Or rubella?  Or the mumps?  Or any of the other mostly childhood diseases that have been kept to such insignificant numbers by large scale vaccinations?

They don’t see these diseases as any kind of real threat and that makes them vulnerable to the kind of horseshit that anti-vaccine people peddle.  Snake oil salesmen, of all varieties, have always employed two main tools: false hope and scary consequences.  In the case of the anti-vaccination people the false hope is the shimmering mirage of a risk free childhood and the scary consequences are the parental nightmare of a damaged child.

This myopic thinking, that puts the diseases themselves out of mind and concentrates on the tiny risk of the vaccines, is a byproduct of the “perfect parent” complex that’s developed in this country.  All the Fretful Mother magazines, talk shows, and websites have implanted the idea that if you show your kids flash cards when they’re infants they’ll go to Harvard, that if you keep them away from anything even the least bit dirty they’ll never get sick, that if you do everything just right you can ensure what every parent wants out of their kids: a healthy adult.  That it’s a fiction, that life is always messy, and that there is no way to eliminate risk, or even to minimize it since everything is tradeoff, gets lost in the shuffle.  No amount of organic food, safety nail clippers or anything else can 100% guarantee that your child makes it to adulthood.  It is an impossibility.

Vaccines are not risk free, but neither is anything else.  Information is Beautiful has a great chart (via) displaying the relative risks of another vaccine, the one against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer.  The number of people vaccinated is a great green sea on your screen whereas the number of people dying within one year of vaccination (there isn’t even any mention that they died from the vaccine) is so small that it wouldn’t even take up one pixel on your monitor.

Meanwhile, not vaccinating your kids is like patrolling your neighborhood for panel vans while Cousin Steve, the thrice convicted child molester, stays home to babysit.  Except it’s actually worse than that because every child that isn’t vaccinated raises the risk that other kids will become sick.  So Cousin Steve isn’t just watching your kid, the whole play group is under his tender care.

Vaccines are about as safe and logical as things get, but that isn’t enough to deter the lunatic fringe and it’s good to see mainstream journalism exposing them for the nutters they really are.  That it’s an understandable form of nuttery just makes people that much more susceptible to it and makes detailed, point-by-point articles that much more welcome.

Of Football, Dog Fighting, and the Chewbacca Defense

“But more importantly, you have to ask yourself, ‘What does this have to do with this case?’  Nothing.” – Johnnie Cochran

Writing in the current issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating and gruesome story about the sometimes severe prices paid by men who play organized football.  Unfortunately, as a hook, he attempts to draw a moral equivalence between dog fighting and football that simply doesn’t make sense.  His argument is basically that dog fighting is an immoral breech of trust between a dog and its owner and that football players are subjected to similar breech of trust when they are left to deal with the after effects of playing.  It’s both sensationalist and tenuous and it’s really too bad because it distracts from an otherwise serious topic.

The better parts of the article, which to be fair make up the bulk of the word count, deal with not only the hideous mental after effects sometimes suffered by football players but also how the blows to the head that cause those injuries are sustained.  It’s worth reading in full, but long story short the repetitive and unavoidable head trauma that comes with football can cause serious brain damage that may not manifest itself for years.  Autopsies performed on ex-football players show brain deterioration of a kind usually associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but to an even greater degree.

Science is just beginning to understand both how these injuries are sustained and the parameters of the risk associated with them.  Since these things are still so ill understood it means that all of the guys who have played football (or are playing football) were (or are) subjecting themselves to considerably more risk of long term health problems than they understand.  It is in relation to that last point that Gladwell attempts to link football to dog fighting.

What he’s trying to do is demonstrate that we’re being hypocritical in so vehemently condemning dog fighting while looking the other way on football and the damage it does to the men who play it.  In order to do so he glosses over one critical difference between the two and completely ignores another.  Gladwell brushes right past the first one here, in a single sentence:

No amount of money or assurances about risk freely assumed can change the fact that, in this moment, an essential bond had been broken.

Football players, especially at the professional level, are pushed to play beyond what may be morally condonable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are people and have more options than a dog.  Gladwell quotes ex-NFLer Kyle Turley’s description of playing with his eyes crossed, of playing concussed.  It’s not pretty.  But Turley cites an incident form 2003 and he didn’t retired in 2007.  Now, would he have retired earlier if he knew more about what might happen?  Maybe, maybe not.  Should he have been better informed and should we make the risks more explicit for current and prospective players?  Absolutely.  But either way Turley has more information and more options than a dog whose owner forces it to fight.  These two things are not two faces of the same coin.

The critical difference that Gladwell outright ignores is the fact that a lot of the information about just how brain damaging football can be is relatively new.  It’s not like there was some organized conspiracy to cover up the fact that football players get concussions (or that some of the really unlucky ones can be paralyzed or worse).  Pete Rozelle never sat back in a large leather chair, knotted his fingers Bond-villain style and said, “Many of these men will suffer and die and I care not a whit!”  The results of dog fighting, on the other hand, are immediately apparent.

Nobody ever gets into football, especially at the professional level, thinking it’s going to improve their long term health.  It is no secret that it is a violent game that chews up and spits out bodies.  That these particular risks, of multiple repeated blows to the head commonly suffered most by linemen and linebackers, have until now been overly discounted seems true.  All that means is that these risks need to be mitigated as much as possible and then factored into the price of playing football.  The nature of the game isn’t about to change, nor is the fan’s enthusiasm for it.  Gladwell concludes:

There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.

Exactly.  We cheer those men on precisely because they do things that ordinary men cannot.  Doing the extraordinary is and always has been extremely risky, whether it’s a race to the South Pole, up Everest, or into the last uncharted jungles on the planet.  We reward those who risk danger with fame (and often money), it has always been so.

Current players should be monitored better and retired players should be treated better by the league (and the financial juggernaut) they helped build.  But trying to draw a moral line from dog fighting to how football treats its players just doesn’t work.  Gladwell has still produced an article that is very much worth reading, but the dog fighting angle is both unnecessary and nonsensical.

Your Televised Afghan Primer

“Our license renewal is on the bubble, we need educational programming, fast.” – TV Executive
“What about that Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour?” – Krusty the Klown
“That’s barely legal as it is.” – TV Executive

PBS’s Frontline has long been one of the few bastions of genuinely thoughtful television.  (This is particularly true in a teevee lineup where the increasingly ironically named “History” channel runs specials concerned with lunatic apocalyptic scenarios (via) and easily disproved Hitler conspiracy theories.)  Last night they ran a heavily promoted piece on Afghanistan titled “Obama’s War”.  It doesn’t contain a whole lot of new information for anyone who actually keeps up with the news from Afghanistan, but it does provide a fresh look, and reminder, of just what our involvement entails.

Because we live in the future you can watch the entire thing on-line at PBS.org.  The whole of it is worth your time, but if nothing else at least watch the first segment.  A cameraman embedded with a Marine company – in combat – in southern Afghanistan and in what may be the most telling shot of the entire hour, a Marine, prone against an embankment, finishes firing his fully automatic machine gun and then asks “Where’s it coming from?”  The joys of guerilla warfare.

A close second for “most telling shot” comes just a few minutes later as the show leaves Afghanistan for Washington D.C. by way of a simple dissolve.  Through the magic of television American troops in full combat gear walking along a dusty Afghan road becomes a conference in Washington complete with officers, guys in suits and, naturally, Power Point presentations.  It’s one thing to know that the rear echelon is a world apart from the actual combat, it’s quite another to see it quite so starkly.

Going to Washington is how “Obama’s War” begins to put what those Marines are doing into a larger context and it’s as decent a summary as I’ve yet seen.  Confusion and buzzwords back home?  Indeed.  Karzai government corrupt beyond measure?  Check.  Election fraud of enormous proportions?  Oh yeah.  Pathetic little speeches from Afghan and American mandarins out in the provinces?  Bingo.  What are we trying to do and is there a plan?  Um . . . hey look at the time!  We’d better get to Pakistan.

It’s in Pakistan, and about the Pakistani connection to the Taliban, that “Obama’s War” stumbles.  They interview a myriad of American and Afghani officials who are all seething (some conceal it better than others) over Pakistan’s ongoing support of Taliban militias.  The Pakistani spokesman, of course, denies everything.  Again, none of this is exactly new information if you’ve been following the war.  But it’s here, and only here, that a simplistic conclusion is offered: oh, those darn Pakis, if only they’d stop supporting the Taliban everything might get better.

No effort is made to understand Pakistani reluctance from a Pakistani point of view.  No mention is made of the fact that Pakistan itself is an ethnic polyglot with brain numbing internal political complexity.  The fact that Pakistan was, prior to the 2001 attacks, one of the only governments on friendly terms with the Taliban is glossed over without explanation.  Pakistan had its reasons then, and it has its reasons now, and while I’m no expert a hint at them can be summed up in one sentence: Pakistan has to live next to Afghanistan.

Before the Western invasion in 2001 the Taliban had done what no other entity had managed to do in over two decades: brought a measure of order to Afghanistan.  It was a brutal, nearly medieval sort of order, but order nonetheless.  The advantage for Pakistan in that is self evident.  They have to live there, we do not, and, by our own admission, the Kabul government controls only 30% of the country.  From a Pakistani perspective it would be irresponsible to line up wholesale with a bunch of dilettante foreigners who can pack up at any time against an organization that, while less pleasant, has proven its effectiveness and is native to the area.

Despite that imperial myopia, however, “Obama’s War” is still a very good summary of what we’re doing and trying to do in Afghanistan and well worth watching.  It is television at its best, using the power of moving images to convey a story in a far more explicit way than words or even pictures can accomplish.  Contrasting the endless blather from officials on all side (and the possibly insoluble mess that it describes) with the daily reality of Marines sleeping on concrete is something that cannot be done nearly so well in any other medium.

An End Note on Language: As one would expect the “fuck”s fly fast and heavy from the Marines in combat.  No attempt is made to censor it.  This is a good and welcome change from a few years ago when this was actually a controversy.

Simple Troubleshooting

“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
“All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2

The other day I did a small favor for my sister.  We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop.  The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before.  (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.)  She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly.  Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.

I told her she should switch to Firefox.  She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it.  I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead.  Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE.  She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I.  I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster.  Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.

None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it.  But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person.  Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way.  She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.

Of course she’s not alone in that.  Millions upon millions of people feel the same way.  Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people.  On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself.  She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.

Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life.  We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free.  On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle.  That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.

Note: Posted slightly late on account of all kinds of shit.

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“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia

“Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2

“All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia

“All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2

The other day I did a small favor for my sister.  We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop.  The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before.  (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.)  She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly.  Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.

I told her she should switch to Firefox.  She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it.  I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead.  Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE.  She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I.  I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster.  Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.

None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it.  But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person.  Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way.  She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.

Of course she’s not alone in that.  Millions upon millions of people feel the same way.  Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people.  On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself.  She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.

Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life.  We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free.  On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle.  That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.

The Fat Profits of Unrealistic Expectations

“Your skin is so smooth, what’s your secret?” – Geraldo Production Assistant
“I scrub my face vigorously with a steel wool pad.  Then I stick my face in boiling water for two minutes, exactly.” – Eleanor Sherman

According to Webster one of the definitions of the word “model” is “an example for imitation or emulation”.  That’s definition number five; number nine is “one who is employed to displayed clothes or other merchandise”.  Of course, the latter definition flows from the former, models sell clothes and other merchandise by making others want to emulate or imitate them.  Strictly speaking then, the purpose of “models” is to move product by making lesser people try to be like them.

That is the context in which the following story needs to be placed.  In Germany this week the women’s magazine Brigitte renounced the use of professional models in favor of, well, amateur models:

Germany’s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.

In what is seen as the latest attempt to stamp out the “size zero” model, the editors of Brigitte said it would in future only use women with “normal figures”.

[…]

He said the move was a response to complaints by readers who said they had no connection with the women depicted in fashion features and “no longer wanted to see protruding bones”.

This is a fantastic idea if for no other reason that it will, at least in Germany, break up the homogeneity that exists in women’s magazines in terms of the women on display.  But as long as we’re talking about “real life” women let’s be realistic, this isn’t even the beginning of the kind of change it would take to relieve women of the pressure to feel like pretty, pretty princesses.

Sentiments like this from Feministing were the typical reaction:

Lately, Europe seems to be eons ahead of us regarding their recognition that the fashion and media having a significantly unhealthy effect on women’s body image. The latest is Germany’s most popular women’s magazine’s announcement of their intention to omit professional models from their pages in an effort to combat unrealistic social beauty standards

(A woman from Cincinnati e-mailed in to BBC radio with a similar message but I couldn’t find a link.)  However, congratulations like these, accompanied by calls for more magazines (and advertisements) to take similar steps, are missing a crucial point.  Magazine images of this variety have one purpose and one purpose only: making people feel bad in order to get them to buy shit.  The BMI of the models in question isn’t completely irrelevant, but it’s also far from the center of the pitch.

These magazines are selling things that are essentially luxury products.  Even under a very generous definition of the word “necessity” it would be hard to fit items like designer clothes and name brand cosmetics.  Creams, often enormously expensive, that claim to prevent wrinkles or fight “aging” (whatever that means) have never been scientifically shown to do anything but cost a lot.  The brands that can afford to advertise like this are the very definition of the word “optional”, which is precisely why magazines and their sponsors push them so relentlessly using the only levers they have: female insecurity and competition.

It seems very unlikely that trying to reign in their excesses will have any appreciable effect.  What if you did require models to have a minimum Body Mass Index?  (Or at least all the models in a magazine to average a certain BMI?)  What if you did require a disclaimer on advertisements that had been photoshopped?  What part of the nature of these pitches would change?

A model, even one whose ribs are not there for the counting, is still a model.  She likely has a perfectly symmetrical face (most people don’t), knows how to pose to present herself at her best and, most importantly, is still being photographed in a completely artificial environment.  A woman carrying twenty, forty or more pounds than a typical model is still the beneficiary of professional hair, makeup, wardrobe and lighting.  Even if the resulting image goes into the glossy pages exactly as it was when it hit the CCD it’s still a 100% fake picture.

(Selecting women who aren’t professional models, as the linked story says Brigitte is planning to do, won’t make a bit of difference either.  The editor says they’re going to look for “the 18-year-old A-level student, the company chairwoman, the musician, or the footballer”, but there are plenty of fantastically attractive women out there who aren’t professional models and I will guarantee you that they take up most if not all of the new space reserved for “real life” women.)

The only way people look the way anyone does in a magazine is to be in a completely controlled environment under the careful supervision of professionals with lots of time and money at their disposal.  Making the human props eat a little bit more will change none of that.  People who don’t have those kinds of resources will still be unable to measure up, will still feel bad about it and will continue pumping billions of dollars into the coffers of the people who made them feel that way.

Magazines of this ilk and the advertisements that support them are inherently dishonest mediums.  They are predicated on the warped idea that in order to feel good about yourself, the way you look, or the way others perceive you, it is all but mandatory to spend significant sums of money.  And, as they say, there’s a look for every budget, ranging from the truly grotesque amounts required for name brand items all the way down to the outlet mall.

The defense of this has always been that it’s fun to dress fashionably and try out different looks.  That’s great, and more power to anyone who wants to do whatever they want to do to look how they want to look.  But that’s not what glossy magazines are about; they’re about making you desire things you don’t have, don’t need, and probably can’t afford.  Giving that message a cosmetic makeover by removing the girls with “protruding bones” is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the real issue which is, has been, and likely always will be, making women feel inadequate in order to get them to pull out the credit card.  Couching the inadequacy pitch with slightly more realistic bodies won’t change the fact that the “beauty” industry, in all its forms, is a massive and almost completely useless money hole.

Fanciful Fears and the Slow March of Reality

“According to my uncle, who’s a real whiz with volcanoes, a volcano is coming this way.” – Volcano Insurance Salesman

I recently finished reading Rick Perlstein’s book on the rise of Barry Goldwater.  There will likely be a book review post about it in the near future, but for today I wanted to quote something which, though more than forty years old, speaks directly to our current political climate.  This was an editorial in the newsletter of the American Legion that, in Perlstein’s words, “blasted the alarming rise in political extremism” in the early sixties [emphasis mine]:

I mean those individuals who would save American by forsaking its free institutions.  I mean not just the Communists and neo-Fascists who openly assail our system but, more especially, those who, in the conviction that theirs is the only right view, have lost sight of – and faith in – the fundamental processes of self-government.  They claim to have the one true answer to every problem.  They talk of setting aside the law when the law offends them.  They are quick to cry “treason,” slow to admit error, and indifferent to arguments and facts that do not support their beliefs. They are not really leftists or rightists – but simply anarchists.

That paragraph could just as easily have been written in 2009 as in 1963.  For proof, here’s Michael Tomasky writing in the current New York Review of Books:

Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel are by now familiar even to people who never listen to or watch them. But if you don’t do so, you have no idea the extent to which they very directly fuel talk of socialism, and twist and sometimes invent information, and create scandals that keep their listeners agitated. To liberals, and to non-ideological Americans who might have heard of him, Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded Harvard law professor who might someday be a plausible Supreme Court nominee and who, if anything, is not a lockstep liberal on such matters as civil liberties. To consumers of the right-wing mass media, however, Sunstein is nothing short of a nut, who believes that meat-eating and hunting should be banned, that pets should be able to sue their owners, and that the government should order that organs be ripped fresh from the bodies of people who die in emergency rooms.

[…]

The charge against Sunstein was led by Fox’s Glenn Beck, who now, even more than Limbaugh, is the guru of this new right wing. Beck, famous for saying that Obama is a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture,” now has (on some nights anyway) more than three million viewers and has surpassed Bill O’Reilly as the leader among cable news hosts.[8]

[…]

These right-wing outlets—which include “news” Web sites like Newsmax and World Net Daily, the latter affiliated with Jerome Corsi, a writer connected with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in.

In other words, the reality based community may have retaken the federal government, but fantasy based community still exists.

Much like today, the early sixties were a very harsh time for far right conservatives in this country.  They saw America as under assault and teetering on the edge of utter ruin.  They felt the Republican Party had abandoned them – these people loathed Eisenhower – and that they had no voice whatsoever.  We are at a similar moment these days, not because the true righties think they’ve been shut out of the Republican Party, but because having gained complete control over the Republican Party they’ve seen it shut out of power.

Moreover, this is the moment when the largest number of people will be affected by that feeling of powerlessness.  How terrible must it be to genuinely believe, as millions of Americans surely do, that health care reform will result in government death panels?  No such thing is going to happen, and the years ahead will prove that out, but right now those fears are very real and are constantly reinforced by people like Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann.  All the facts in the world can’t argue against the likes of them, the only thing that is going to calm the fears they so relentlessly exploit is the passage of time.

Proof of this can be found, ironically enough, in Medicare.  The creation of Medicare was a hard fought victory over the intellectual ancestors of the people who are currently railing against health care reform.  Yet today we have an ostensibly conservative senator, Charles Grassley, Republican from Iowa, calling Medicare part of the “social fabric of America”.  It’s easy to point out the intellectual hypocrisy of that and move along, but it’s worth considering just how that rather odd situation came into being.

As it was being created Medicare was decried as socialism, communism and every other affront to the natural order of mom, apple pie and America.  None of the scary predictions came even remotely true and here we are forty years later and it’s almost impossible to imagine mom, apple pie and America without Medicare.  Time and a lack of catastrophe is the only thing that made that so.

Goofy, extremist right wing horseshit has been a cottage industry for more than fifty years now and it isn’t going to end.  But once the sky fails to fall the positions taken by the extremists will slink back to the margins.  Reality typically triumphs over fantasy, even if it sometimes takes years.

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