What year is this, anyway?

I can't decide if I'm living in the USSR, Czarist Russia, North Korea, Medieval Europe, or some combination thereof.  Or at least in a developing something the designers can't make up their minds where they're going with it all.

It's bad enough that Dominionists have been trying to remake American History to show the US as a Christian country.  But now, Oklahoma's legislature is trying to ban AP American History and replace it with some crackpot version of a perfect Christian America.

It seems they object to the technique of learning from the past by pointing out where we went wrong so future generations won't make the same mistakes.

I can understand how seeing your most cherished values being pointed out in school as mistakes and wrong might be upsetting.  But as a past (but reformed) Republican, I can testify from personal experience that one can learn from one's past and one can move on to a better way of thinking.

It really doesn't hurt at all.  It's kind of liberating, in fact.  Oh, sure, one does get the odd pang of regret if current events smack you in the face with something you used to think was cool but was really harmful.  But I see those as reinforcing the initial lesson.  Kind of like reminders:  "See?  Weren't you stupid then?  But you're smarter now!"  In the end, they remind you that you've come a long way, baby!

But I guess some folks just can't get past it.

I can understand that, really I can.

What I can't understand is why you'd want to paint over those past mistakes by turning our lovely country into a totalitarian nightmare.  Remaking the past is something we accused the Soviets and the Maoists of doing.  You know, those dirty commies who painted out the totalitarian rulers of their countries' past and replaced them with monsters to contrast with their own "perfect" replacement?

In our case, the Dominionists want to replace the very real monsters on our own past with visions of lollypops, candy canes and unicorns farting rainbows so their kids will never question Jesus.

Probably because they want to keep making the same mistakes and call them "family values".  Or whatever.

But in so doing, they are destroying what they claim to love about our country.  Its liberty.  Its freedom.  Whatever happened to "Truth, Justice, and the American way"?  Somewhere, on the way to the forum, it got lost.  Or waylaid, or mugged or something.  Probably something, because it sure ain't what I was taught it was supposed to be when I went to school.

Nobody taught me that it was Ok to lie, cheat, and steal your way into office, and when we learned about politicians who did, it was never presented as an honorable way to act.

The one thing Conservatives always forget in their zeal to protect their way of life is that all things come to an end.  People change.  Countries change.  Societies change, often rapidly.  The one thing about American Destiny that Conservatives always are proud of (and justifiably so) is the huge number of technological changes America was responsible for in the 19th century.  We were instrumental in an extremely rapid advancement of humanity out of the horse and buggy days and the days of direct fire based energy into the 20th century where our transportation methods were advanced by hundreds of years in just a few decades, and we marched into the age of electricity almost overnight.

The problem for Conservatives is that such technological changes always - always - bring social changes as well.  Old technologies die.  Remember the old buggy whipmaker example?  As I typed that, Autocorrect wanted to change it to "chipmaker".  So old professions die, too.

A few hundred years ago, the very best swords you could ask for were made with Damascus steel.  A decade or so ago, some guys trying to relearn the old ways of the blacksmiths realized that the techniques for making Damascus steel had been lost.  Nobody knows today how those swords were made.  We have made guesses, but we don't know.  Not for sure.  We may never know for sure.

That's because we can kill people faster, better and from farther away with weapons using gunpowder.  You don't win a war by showing up with Damascus steel swords.  That's how you die.

These changes are not made in a vacuum.  The social changes that come from dying professions, new classifications of devices, better and faster ways of doing things are and have been immense and have caused the old comfortable Patriarchy to be shaken to its foundations.

Young people in America today are overwhelmingly progressive.  They accept and think little about the homosexual issues of the day and are accepting a more equal role for women in jobs, marriage, and politics.  Demographically, the old Conservative way of thinking is dying, and probably won't survive more than another decade or two.

Dominionists and Conservatives (especially the ones who are both) know this, and are doing all they can to stretch out the days before they lose power.  Education of one of their best efforts.

Unfortunately, their efforts are unAmerican and damaging to our democracy to an extreme degree.

We shouldn't really let them get away with it.

The True Genius of Steve Jobs

Today's topic has nothing to do with religion - unless you see the popularity of Apple, Inc. as being somewhat akin to a religion.

Which for some, of course, it is.

One of the biggest disappointments - regarding Apple - of the decade, was the death of Steve Jobs.  Millions of us were dismayed that such a genius could be so stupid as to fail to use his significant fortune to get the best medical care possible, and instead allow quack science to delay that treatment to the point that a very treatable cancer could kill him.  Goes to show that genius has its limitations.

Since then, Apple, Inc. has been watched closely by both detractors and investors with one question in mind. Could Apple repeat its success after the death of its genius founder?  Steve Jobs was seen as the architect of that success - the man whose vision informed and pushed for the creation of some truly world changing devices - devices that have reworked our world into patterns that were comic book sci-fi just decades ago.

Now, lots of words - billions, probably, have been written about this, many of them by people smarter or more educated than I in business and psychology.  I am not under the mistaken impression that I am unique or smarter than any of these folks.  But I have been watching Apple for over twenty years, and I've got some observations about that company that many have not noticed.

So I wonder sometimes.  Most of the articles I have read about Jobs focus on his product genius.  The creation of the products Apple has released and his part in that creation.  How he pushed people to and beyond their limits in making things they never could have imagined they'd produce otherwise.  Products that have been attributed to that genius.

Then, this morning, I read a VERY short article in which the author had been asked one question:  What was the most surprising thing about 2014 to you?

His answer:  Apple has survived, and even thrived, after Jobs' death.

I'm sorry, but my response?

Moron.

I've never seen such a stupid, uninformed, pitiful excuse for an answer - EVER.

So, you ask me, what WAS Jobs' true genius, genius?

It wasn't in making insanely great products, although he was pretty darn good at it.

His real genius was in building the company he built.  He built a company that has survived his death and in fact, is STILL turing out insanely great products.  Without his guidance, apparently.

I say "apparently", because that guidance is really still there.  His genius was in institutionalizing that vision.  Building teams of people and infusing in those teams the vision of how to make insanely great products.

Thats why they made such great products when he was alive - HE didn't make them, his company did - because he infused his vision and his methods into the teams and the people who made them work.  It is the people - the employees - of Apple, who made the products - who designed them, tested them, redesigned them, retested them until they met the insanely tight and high standards Steve helped them set for themselves and their output.

That company - those teams - are Apple, Inc.  As long as management at Apple continues to follow that vision and maintains the institutionalized vision Steve Jobs gave them, they will continue to make insanely great products.  At least until economic or cultural conditions change that challenge Apple's management to alter that vision in order to keep up.

Then we'll see if that vision stands up.  If Apple's management at the time is flexible enough to see whatever handwriting is on the wall at the time.

But for now, continue looking to Apple, Inc. to continue to make insanely great products - it is what Steve Jobs built that company to do.

Thanks, Steve.

Of shirts and comets.

It's been a week since the European Space Agency landed their probe on the surface of a comet for the first time ever in human history.  A proud day for the Agency, a proud day for Europe and a milestone for human space flight.

Which will forever be tainted by the image of a team member wearing a wildly inappropriate shirt emblazoned with images of scantily clad women while being interviewed by the international media.

Almost instantly, social media picked up that image and noted its inappropriate nature, criticizing the man for his insensitivity.  Within a day, the scientist, Dr. Matt Taylor, had apologized profusely, even breaking down in tears on camera.  For many people, that ended the incident.  

But not for the apologists.

Social media exploded with apologies for his behavior, some even going to far as to weigh in with their opinions as to how innocent that shirt was, because the depictions of women were cartoonish instead of photography.  They opined that feminists were overblowing the incident, eclipsing the accomplishments of Dr. Taylor and his team.

And so today, a week after he appeared on camera, the argument still rages on social media.

More and more, louder and louder, the argument rages.  But, wait!  That loud sound you hear?  That roar?  The one that sounds like a hundred airliners going over?

That's not a fleet of 747's.  That is the sound of the entire point missing your heads.

Yesterday, a comment was made on a post on Facebook I have been following.  Here's the important part of it:

The only thing that strikes me as sexist in this is the fact that men don't seem to be expected to consider the implications of what they wear to the office, while women have to take the rest of the office into consideration.  Take a look at your company policy on dress and lateness.

This.  This is the point.  Somehow, someway, Matt Taylor managed to appear in front of a major media outlet's camera wearing a shirt that should have been considered inappropriate in any professional setting.  And yet, EVERYBODY, from his fellow team members to his team leader, to the head of the ESA (and don't fool yourself, that control room was literally crawling with management before those cameras ever got in the room.) completely missed the fact that he was wearing it.

Even at the last minute, somebody could have tossed the guy a lab coat to cover up The Shirt.  It would have been that easy.

Instead, the ESA missed numerous opportunities to notice The Shirt.  His team leader.  His team leader's boss.  HIS boss.  The ESA Public Relations Office.  Upper management on that morning's walk through.

So, what does that say about the ESA and its policies towards professionalism, given that literally nobody even noticed?  Anybody want to bet how quickly a female team member would have been counseled on her dress if she'd tried to wear something even mildly provocative on camera?  At the very least, she'd have been forced to wear that lab coat.

But not DOCTOR Taylor.  No, apparently The Shirt is so much a part of the environment in that team's space that nobody thought it was important.  That millions of women around the world would be put off by it, and that it might send a message to girls everywhere considering a career in the European Space Agency that sexism is such a normal part of life that a team member can appear on camera, representing the ENTIRE Agency, wearing The Shirt and nobody cares enough to even make him wear a lab coat. 

This isn't just a problem with Dr. Matt Taylor.  It isn't just a problem with the ESA. It is a problem within the entire world of science, wherever this kind of thing can happen.  It is pervasive and part of the culture, so much so that an entire chain of management can miss something that simple.

This very public conversation we are having is important.  You apologists out there, pay attention.

We aren't blaming the good Doctor.  Not now, he apologized and is moving on.

It's the rest of us who need to understand that the issue isn't just an ugly shirt.  The issue is an environment where that ugly shirt is allowed on a guy, ON CAMERA, while women are still judged by the clothing they wear and not on their professional abilities.

That needs to change.  Not only do we need to be more aware of things like The Shirt, but we need to change the atmosphere where men aren't judged by their clothing but women are.  We need for people to see how corrosive sexism can be and just how invisibly invasive it can get.

How unnoticed.  So badly unnoticed that a man can get away with representing his team and his Agency on camera while wearing a wildly inappropriate shirt and it takes someone from outside to see it.

We've got a lot of work to do. This conversation is important, which is why we are having it a week later.

Got the message?

The Negative Consequences of Believing in Superstition - Part III

This is Part III of a three part series.  (Go read Part II if you've not seen it yet!)

Politics/Law

America is in the middle of a severely dysfunctional period of political and social change.

Over the last hundred years, technology has rocketed us from the horse and buggy days to jet aircraft and rockets to the moon.  From simple telephone tech to cell phones and computers in our pockets.

A hundred years ago, information was limited to those who could read, which for the population of the US as a whole was about 90%.  In 1979, that rate was 0.6%.  The ability of people to distribute information was limited.  For a regional audience, newspapers were the norm, and was limited to what the editors would print.  A wider audience could be reached in book publication, but that was limited to what the major publishing house editors thought would sell.

Accordingly, the public picture of what was normal was limited to what people could read, and that was tightly controlled, even with what was then a fairly free press.  The abnormal was easily ignored and any contradicting speech or dissension was often swept under the rug.

Until women got angry, and began working to change things.  By 1920, the 19th amendment allowed women the right to vote after a long and contentious public debate, including protests outside the White House, often resulting in arrests.

Today, information is everywhere.  The Internet allows instant connection to just about any repository of information that has an online presence.  Many traditional repositories of information, including the Library of Congress, are rapidly digitizing their collections.

The Internet has changed communication as well.  In the early 20th century, overseas telephone calls were expensive and rare, requiring coordination by letter so both parties were available at a coordinated time.  While this got easier with time, even as late as the 1960's, calling overseas often required advance reservations of a time slot, and were still not cheap.

By the 1970-'s, with modern satellite communications systems well under construction, such calls became both cheap and easy compared to just a decade earlier.

The Internet changed all that.  Today, there are multiple methods for connecting to people, even across the globe.  Email, texting, land line calls and even cell phones can be used to connect to people instantaneously.  While the online bulletin boards of the early 90's allowed communications by text, today, with such Internet giants as Facebook and Google, communication with huge numbers of people across wide swaths of the globe are as easy as sending an email, posting to a Facebook page or setting up a web site.  Skype and FaceTime allow instant face to face communication across the globe.

Any of this can be done on a cell phone.

This communication explosion has greatly changed the character of our political discourse.  While Americans slowly and quietly moved away from devout religious observance during the course of the late 20th century, the 21st, with the advent of instant internet communication, has resulted in an explosion of secular movements and groups.  The demographic of "None" as related to religious affiliation is the fastest growing category world-wide, not merely in the US.

Many in the movement attribute this to the Internet and the ability of people of a secular point of view to see - for the first time - that they are not alone and are part of a growing and dynamic community.

The growth of secularism, from the 60's on, resulted in a backlash of religiosity, starting with the Moral Majority, and Ronald Reagan's Presidency.  This backlash has grown in political influence, spurred on by the Republican Party allying itself with the religious right in a bid for increased political influence.  Successfully, I might add.

The Religious Right (RR) has gained influence on a regional and local basis through intense local organizing and political activism.  The resulting political power thus gained has allowed the Republicans control of a substantial majority of State Houses, allowing the RR to bend the political discourse far to the right of center.

A movement known as Dominionism (of which I've written here extensively) has orchestrated much of the successful passage of laws undermining education and science, causing much social controversy and political division, especially in the area of abortion and women's reproductive health.  In many States, there is a virtual dearth of any legal means of abortion, and now the fight is being directed towards a subject everybody thought was won decades ago - contraceptives.

So, today, after decades of successful advancement of women's rights, including the right to vote, the right to divorce, including no fault provisions, the right to contraceptives and abortion, and the right own property (largely won in the 19th century), women's groups are now having to gear up and spend vast amounts of money fighting for the continued existence of rights once thought secure.

Most of this is due to religion.  Patriarchy, biblical proscriptions against women (whether real or not) and a Dominionist movement intent on converting the US from a democracy to a theocracy have all brought the American political scene to a complete and utter standstill.

RR's efforts haven't stopped there.  There is a litany of things they are working on.

abstinence-only education - Instead of medically accurate information and thoughtful conversation about intimacy and childbearing, teens get promise rings and slut shame. 

Opposing protections and rights for children.  Thanks to the influence of biblical Christianity, the U.S. stands alone with Somalia in failing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  

Undermining science - The scientific method has also become an existential threat to Bible belief. We know now that the Genesis creation story is myth, neurotransmitters rather than demons cause mental illness, mandrake roots and dove blood don’t improve female fertility or cure skin diseases, and the cognitive structures of the human mind predispose us to certain kinds of religious belief.

Promoting war - George Bush didn’t need to seek input from his earthly father about the invasion, because he asked his Heavenly Father.  Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle East is predicted in the Bible.  That makes it not only inevitable, but—in a manner of speaking—desirable.

Abuse of LGBT persons and refusal of equal rights - They've fought equal rights for these folks for decades, and still are, and it would be bad enough if we were simply talking about history. But homophobic American Christians, thwarted at home, have turned to inciting oppression in Uganda and Nigeria where their hatred still finds fertile ground.

Destroying Earth’s web of life and endangering future generations - Climate change denial and refusal of reasonable methods of keeping our air and water clean and unpolluted is based on biblical scripture giving man "Dominion" (there that word is again) over the earth and all its animals, as well as the believed inevitability of the Second Coming, where God will simply create a new and better Earth guarantees that the RR will refuse to assist in doing anything to protect the environment or protect future generations from the consequences of our irresponsibility today.  Add Republicans' devotion to Corporate welfare, and the die is cast.

(Thanks to Valerie Tarico at Salon.com for her ideas and some of her language.)

I guess the greatest harm in general that religion (right wing fundamentalism in particular) does to this country is through its insistence that we support Israel.  The most vile technique they use is to accuse detractors of being anti-Semitic.  Even people who have reasoned and logical arguments against that support are branded with that epithet.

I am not, in principle, opposed to Israel.  I am not even against some form of support for it.

But our foreign policy regarding Israel is held hostage by the RR for religious reasons (because of the Second Coming) and tolerates no deviation from complete and total support.  Regardless of whether American interests are harmed or even devastated by that support, they insist that we continue to support Israel, blindly and without digression.

This has resulted in anger towards the US and much hatred of us by the Muslim world, and has resulted directly in the attacks on the World Trade Center (both of them), and a continued campaign of terrorist activity against American interests.

Our responses to that have been goaded by the RR to the point that our constitutional rights are now under attack at home and US Intelligence has eroded America's reputation for even handedness and high standards of morality to the point of almost nonexistence.  The RR's toleration and indeed, insistence on, classifying water boarding and "advanced interrogation techniques" as acceptable has completely destroyed the ability of this country to hold other countries accountable for similar actions against our own citizens, resulting in the inability of the government to protect American Citizens overseas.

Even if the Progressive movement (such as it is) managed to gain political ascendancy in the next election by some miracle, it would take decades for us to regain our good reputation for being a humane and law abiding nation.  As it is, forget it.

Obviously, this examination of the negative affects of having the population of this country believe in superstitious Bronze Age beliefs is incomplete.  If I tried to classify it all, I'd have to write a series of books.  One wouldn't be enough.

But the short story is a beginning.  If the only negative affects of religious belief were what I have touched upon here, it would be bad enough to justify organizing the secularists of this country to incite political influence and action to combat it.

But it is far, far worse than this.  The struggle to overcome religiosity and its negative affects on this country will continue into the future, and may never be fully complete.  Christianity, Judaism and Islam have been here, collectively, for over three thousand or more years.  That kind of influence doesn't go away overnight; we've been fighting it since the beginning of the Renaissance in the 12th century.

Let's not allow it to make a comeback.

The Negative Consequences of Believing in Superstition - Part II

This is Part II of a three part series.  (Go read Part I if you've not seen it yet!)

Sex

The subject of sex in the US is so screwed up, and it is mainly because of religion.  The system of patriarchy discussed above forces men and women into gender based roles.  While the social aspects of patriarchy are bad enough, the affects on sex and human sexuality are even worse.

As noted above, men are forced into a false and totally artificial image of "manhood", that is as false and artificial as the image of "womanhood" the ladies are forced into.  This produces mental and psychological stress and often damage that hurts the individuals, their families and their friends - often their employers as well.

Why?  Why is it damaging?

Several reasons.  (Stick with me - I'll get to LGBT issues in a bit.)

I think the most obvious is in personal confidence.  Body image, and how a person portrays him or herself sexually is extremely important in this country.  Heck, for that matter, in much of the world.  It affects our social standing, our family and how it is viewed by the larger society, and eventually, how and whether we are accepted as marriage potential.

Accordingly, we are obsessed by sex, we are obsessed with youth and the sexual aspects of it.  The secular commercial realm tells us that sex is good, it is natural and wholesome and, well, whoopee!

But...

In American society, sexual beauty and attractiveness is so skewed from the norm that millions of Americans, both men and women, suffer from severe lack of self confidence because they perceive themselves as unattractive, through failing to live up to an artificial and false vision of beauty.  No, this isn't because of religion, it is because of rampant and unregulated capitalism.

Religion, or the so-called "Judeo-Christian" or "Abrahamic" religions, especially in this country, as mentioned above, enforce a patriarchy.  A large part of that system is the second class status of women, and therefore, control over their public behavior.

Christianity especially, enforces a view of sex that restricts sex to the role of procreation within a family context.  This comes, probably, from the role of the family, or the clan, as the center of Roman life.  The individual wasn't important, the family or family group, was.  Loyalty to that group was paramount, and for women, that meant only having sex with their husband, to preserve the purity of the bloodline.  Hence the religious obsession with sex as procreation, looking down on both abortion and contraception.  One because it is an "illegal" rejection of the man's seed, and the other as rejection of a man's control over his woman.

So, religion forces us into this weird, twisted image of sex - the patriarchal picture of gender roles, mixed with the god-smacked rejection of women as full humans, subservient to men, and under their full control.

This results in our social culture allowing this culture of rape.  Men are supposed to be virile, strong and manly, which is supposed to drive women into raptures of sexual frenzy.  Women are supposed to belong to men, which means they owe us sex, and they owe us their love and devotion.  Women who reject this and refuse to go along are subjected to campaigns of hate and vitriol, threats of rape and violence.

If a guy doesn't fit that manly, virile picture, he is a failure, and is ridiculed as such.

So.

For women, you have to fit this image of womanhood that reflects the stay at home mother, homemaker, sexy wife and willing brood cow, while the larger social milieu tells you that you've got to be beautiful, sexy, and available to any guy that pinches your ass.  If you don't, you're a prude, and you'll never find a husband, especially if you are ugly.

In the meantime, religion tells you that if you DO, you are a slut, a sinner and you'll go to hell.

Guys, largely, get a pass on the religion thing because, you know, patriarchy.  Unless, of course, they aren't manly, so they're failures.  Or if they allow their wives to "hen-peck" them, they aren't following the bible, so they'll go to hell then, too.

Double-failures.

Especially if they are rejected by the ladies.  Since this isn't anticipated by the traditional patriarchal framework, guys that see themselves as manly and virile who get rejected by the ladies anyway can't comprehend that rejection.  They get mad and blame their failure on the ladies, who, of course, OWE them sex.  Severe mental pain and emotional confusion are common resulting from this condition, and has been known to generate violent reactions.

Is it any wonder that Americans are so screwed up about sex?  The true wonder is how any of us manage to grow up with normal pictures of reasonable and responsible relationships in time to have families.

But wait, I'm not finished.  Not everybody is a cis-gendered, heterosexual human being.  Some folks are homosexual.  Some folks are trans-gendered, and some are bi-sexual.  There are other categories, but I don't feel qualified to talk about them.

These traditional roles I spoke of above, as screwed up as they are, aren't the whole picture, especially since they ignore our LGBT friends.  That alone is responsible for untold misery,  family fights and estrangements.  Since these folks don't fit the "normal" categories, they have traditionally been either ignored or forced into playing roles they were not comfortable with, and often beaten or killed for refusing.  All of them are condemned by religion, and totally ignored by the patriarchal system unless they rock the boat.

The 21st century's success in this country in advancing marriage equality for homosexual couples is a remarkable story of the LGBT movement's ability to go mainstream, but is still being fought tooth and nail by the religious right.

Demographics tells us that the religious will lose this fight.

But wait!  That's not all, folks!

Let's examine some other issues, like clergy abuse of both children and adults, sexually.

Everybody knows, by now, of the Roman Catholic child abuse scandal.  The RCC has spent millions of dollars in the US alone just to make this go away.  Not much to actually stop the abuse, but surely to make it go away.

One wonders, as one examines the issue and how the RCC hierarchy responded to the scandal at first.   How prevalent IS the abuse of kids by Catholic clergy?  And how long has it been going on?

There are some clues.

First, in Ireland, we've all heard of the "laundry scandal", where unwed mothers and their children were warehoused by the Church (with complicit authority from the Irish government of the day) in homes, and were made literal slaves in big laundries.  Scorned by the Church for their sexual sins, their children were as badly treated as they were.

This broke even bigger a couple of years ago and again recently when news broke (over here) of the discovery of almost 800 graves in a hidden graveyard, with an unknown number of bodies even hidden in an old unused septic tank.  Graves going back over a hundred years.

Also in Ireland, the scandal of a few years ago of stories of child abuse and murder in Irish Catholic monasteries. possibly going back hundreds of years.  Horrific stories of terrible abuse, both corporal and sexual, often combined.

In Europe a number of decades ago, there were archeological discoveries of monasteries and cloisters, built fairly close by one another, with hidden tunnels linking the two.  The most horrific part of the discovery were chambers off that tunnel containing the graves of infants and fetuses, most of whom were probably buried hours after or before birth.

All of this is evidence of a terrible epidemic of sexual malfunction in a religious hierarchy, over a thousand years old, denied sexual release and access due to official greed, excused and justified by religious scripture.

(For those who don't know, the RCC finally outlawed marriage not for religious reasons, but to end the bleeding of "church" property through inheritance to families of clergy, especially to noble families with large estates.  With no marriage allowed, thus no heirs, their property was "inherited" by the Church.)

Don't think that only the RCC is involved, preachers of almost every Protestant denomination regularly are arrested and either fired or also charged for either child abuse or sexually predatory abuse of adults.

It's all over the place.

Not to be outdone, Islam isn't far behind, as you may have noticed in the recent re-emergence of the quote of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

He says: ‘A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate vaginally, but sodomising the child is acceptable. If a man does penetrate and damage the child then, he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl will not count as one of his four permanent wives and the man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister… It is better for a girl to marry at such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband’s house, rather than her father’s home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven.’ 

Read more.

Not only is this considered child abuse, but Islam has doubled down on it and authorized it because Mohammed did it.

At least, the Muslims are honest - they'll tell you God wants this to happen.

Talking about child abuse, let's talk about masturbation, something Christianity in most of its forms doesn't like to do.  In many denominations, it is banned and called out for being sinful and of the devil.

But now, scientifically, we know that it is not only a natural urge (even infants play with themselves) but it is known to be actually good for you!  It releases hormones and endorphins that make you healthier and live longer.

Heck, we know, both from scientific study and from statistics that people who have a long term sexual relationship that is happy for both parties not only stay together longer, but also live longer.  Regardless of whether they have kids or not.

So, in summary, religion in this country (and throughout the world) twists sex and sexuality in humans to the point that millions of people are, at best, dysfunctional and at worst, mentally ill and twisted towards pedophilia and sexual predatory practices, even the clergy.

It taints our marriages, our dating practices, and inculcates a culture of rape that regularly threatens the lives and well being of over a half of all women in the United States and probably causes a significant percentage of our divorces.

It directly harms our LGBT friends through violence and intimidation, forcing them into hidden lives and damaging stress by denying them a happy and healthy lifestyle.

And because sex keeps us healthy and can help us live longer, by discouraging sex in most forms and twisting our sexual practices so badly, religion is also killing us.

Are you mad yet?

(Come back tomorrow for Part III)

The Negative Consequences of Believing in Superstition - Part I.

I was perusing Ophelia Benson's Facebook page Saturday morning and ran across a post she put up Friday about the post on Dave Muscato's wall regarding Jaclyn Glenn's Youtube video slamming feminism and how she is disappointed - no, outraged - that AA is supporting Glenn's anti-feminism.

One of the comments (which I can't find to quote, dang it) made a comment about the negative consequences of believing in superstition.  It rang a bell with me, so here we are!

There are numerous negative things religion brings to society which many religious folks either overlook or are brainwashed into thinking they are good, mainly because they believe it's good because they're told it is, but have never actually examined the issues to see what the reality is.

But today, we're going to look at a few things.

As I see it, there are at lease three major areas in which religion (believing in a superstition) brings negative consequences to society.

1. Patriarchy (Part I)
2. Sex (Part II)
3. Politics/Law (Part III)

Of course, these aren't the only things at issue, but each of these are major, affecting broad areas of society.  So, let's take them one at a time.

(This is going to be a long post, so I will post in installments.  This is the first, the others will follow tomorrow and Monday.)

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is defined as:

1.  social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly :  control by men of a disproportionately large share of power
2.  a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy

This sounds very clinical, and almost reasonable, doesn't it?  But what are the consequences of these things?

In the modern context of our present day political scene, the relevant part of that is about the legal dependance of women and children, though we will see other consequences of it as well.

In today's western society, especially the US, the practice of patriarchy is at least partially based on religion.  In the Republicans' "War on Women", it IS based on biblical strictures requiring men to be the head of the household, and women being denied the right to be "in charge of" men.

In other words, they are relegated to second class citizens.

Now, in the larger US society, in the last hundred or so years, we've managed to back some of that off.  Women can now own property in their own names, vote, drive cars, work outside the home (and in fact, at jobs traditionally reserved for men), and can marry (or not) according to their own wishes.

But, I am going to back things up a bit and note some negative consequences of allowing the Fundies to begin denying women those rights, as they seem to want to do - which will highlight some ways in which we have failed to progress into a more modern way of thinking about women.

First of all, think about the term "dependance" in that definition above.  Legal dependance, especially. What does that entail?  Briefly, it means a woman (or a child) has no legal rights of her own.  She has to have a male guardian who has the right to "care" for her, as a legal responsibility.

That has two consequences.  The most obvious is that she has no rights of her own.  He can pretty much force her to obey his every wish, and she has no legal recourse, unless he is neglecting her welfare.  She is, in fact, virtually his property.  In many countries, this is in fact, the case.

But wait, there's another side to it.  HE is obligated to care for her.  That means he is responsible, legally, to feed her, clothe her and provide her with shelter.  This isn't something he has a choice in, it becomes his legal obligation, for which he is liable if he fails.

What if he can't?  What if his resources aren't up to the task?  Sure, he can neglect her to her detriment, but that leaves him vulnerable to accusations of neglect which may, if his society cares, cost him.

Either way, this kind of situation isn't exactly fair to either one.  Worse for the lady, since she is the one losing rights, but if she is prevented by the social or legal rules to not be able to work, the whole family suffers.  In fact, the entire society suffers.

This is actually the worst part of the patriarchal system.  The entire society, from the individual, to the family, to the potential employer, to the city, State and the entire country, everybody suffers, both socially and economically.  To stop half of the population from working is to cut your potential GDP in half, at the very least.  Even if you only go halfway and allow women to work, but restrict them to certain jobs (and, equally, restrict men to certain jobs) you are still preventing people from working in their best way and potentially most skilled career.  The potential of people working at their best level and in a skill that they are best suited for is huge, and the frustration (for both men and women) in being prevented from doing that is as huge as the potential.  The cost of such false restrictions based on arbitrary and unnatural reasoning is perhaps not as bad as a complete ban on women working, but it is a non trivial figure.

Society suffers in other ways.  Women are, actually, as smart as men, and as capable of doing anything men can, save perhaps (on average) some jobs or tasks requiring major body strength.  (...and even there, some women exceed that standard and do quite well in those circumstances, as on the other hand, some guys fail!) In the US, after over a century of women working, there is plenty of evidence that many aspects of society are better off with the participation of women.  Corporations find that women make better organizers, deal better with adversity and are better at mediating conflict.  In politics, women (when allowed to work independently) are often better at compromise and negotiations than men.

As costs have risen in recent decades, women have been forced into the workplace, bringing in much needed resources and allowing single women to raise children alone under better economic conditions than once was allowed.

I could go on, but it is obvious from these examples (which are only a few examples of many) that were women forced back into the home, the economy of the US would take a hit that would guarantee our immediate slide into third world status.  Poverty would become, instead of merely commonplace, rampant and virtually the norm.  The middle class would be destroyed, and those in poverty would be devastated completely.

Notice that I haven't even touched on the health care aspects of women's rights, and the devastation the American family would suffer were women no longer allowed to control their reproductive rights.  In fact, the proposed restrictions on contraceptives would be devastating to not only women, but to the entire country, as it would push us back into a time where women were not capable of stopping pregnancy.  (This does, of course, include the prohibitions against abortion.)  The social consequences of this would be to push many women out of the workforce, and reinstate the social pressures against allowing women to work, with the consequences noted in the previous paragraphs.

I haven't addressed the other side of the issue, which is the damage to men a patriarchal system can and does do.

This system not only imposes restrictions on women, but imposes strict (depending on the time period and the culture involved) roles for the two different genders.  (Note here, the refusal of this system to even acknowledge the existence of the LGBT folks!)  This framework of strict roles is restrictive and limiting for both men and women.  Men may have a larger menu of choices, but they are no less prevented from crossing that line than women are.

Some women are great corporate managers.  Some are great politicians.  Some aren't.  Many men just suck at those roles, and choose to do other things, including these days, staying home to take care of the kids.  Numerous articles have been written by guys who have done this, and it is liberating for them to be able to do so.  As it is liberating for women to be able to be corporate managers.

Some guys are fantastic secretaries, or office managers, or nurses.  Men can be social workers, cooks, day care workers, pole dancers and strippers.  And they can be good at it.

Patriarchy would prevent them from doing all this, as those are not "traditional" men's jobs.

Men are forced into a false and totally artificial image of "manhood", that is as false and artificial as the image of "womanhood" the ladies are forced into.  This produces mental and psychological stress and often damage that hurts the individuals, their families and their friends - often their employers as well.

It also forces men into this culture of rape we all know so well, but I'll deal with that in the "sex" topic.

In short, patriarchy is not a system that is supportive of society, but is damaging and harmful to a society that hopes to progress into a modern, peaceful, and productive society which accords equal rights for all citizens.

In short, it is un-American, in accordance with the ideals declared by us in the Declaration of Independence.

Some of the last points I raised also apply in the next section.

Come back tomorrow for Part II!

Is it Technology Day again, already?

Yes, it is!

So, what to talk about again?  I know!  Let's talk about something lots of people get mixed up about.

Memory.

Human beings have a lot of it.  We can remember stuff that happened decades ago, conversations, road trips, immense amounts of data, stuck up there, just waiting for a trigger to help us remember.  Problem is, it's not really very well indexed.

With computers, that's a bit easier.  But wait, humans only have one kind of memory - the wet stuff.  In between the ears wet.

With your PC or Mac, there are two kinds of memory, but geeks use two different words to describe them so we all know which ones we are talking about.

In reality, they really are different, so the different words make sense.  First, we've got what is more commonly known as Storage.  Hard drives, flash drives, floppy disks, and a host of other, older types of storage are sometimes referred to by the uninitiated consumer as memory.  It isn't memory, it is storage, because that's what we do with it, store stuff on it.

Your computer's Operating System, the applications (or programs) you use on it, the data that results from your application usage - all of it has to reside somewhere so your computer can find it, read it and present it to you so you can do with it what you wish.  That's storage.

Remember last week when I talked about Megabytes and Gigabytes and so forth?  That's the measuring standard we use to tell how much data we can put on a particular item of storage.  Hard disks are usually of greater capacity, followed by flash drives, floppy disks and other older types of storage.  A newer kind of storage, similar in use to Hard Drives is called Flash Storage.  Similar in its basic construction to flash drives, these new drives have no moving parts, boast faster read/write times and help computers boot over twice as fast as those equipped with standard disk based hard drives.  However, they usually are of smaller capacity, and are much more expensive, due to the more recent entry into the market place.

What all of these things have in common is that they are what we call non-volatile, or permanent storage.  You can turn off the computer, come back later, and the data is still preserved intact.

The other type of memory is called RAM.  That's short for Random Access Memory.  Yep, that's memory!  It is NOT storage, because it is volatile memory - when you turn off the power, the data stored there disappears.

What is RAM for, and why do you need a lot of it?

A computer is, as I said last week, a rather dumb machine.  It needs you to tell it every move to make.  Line by line of instructions, called code, does this.  That's what Programs (or Applications) are for.  They contain the code that allows you to tell the computer what you want it to do.

Those apps are stored on the Hard Drive.  Storage.  Kind of like a book shelf.

Think about the RAM as your desktop.

You have a task to perform, so you turn around, take the book with the instructions in it from the bookshelf and put it on your desktop.  Every time you have to perform one part of your task, you turn to that book for the next set of instructions.  When that task is finished, you put the book back.

That's what the computer does with RAM.  When you open a program, the computer reads the main portion of the code for that program into RAM, where it is more easily accessible.  (RAM is MUCH faster to read than a hard disk is, so it takes less time to read the instructions from there.)  When you finish, it "wipes" that portion of RAM, making it useful for holding another program's code.

The more RAM you have, the more programs you can open at one time, or the more data you can manipulate at once, like video or pictures.

RAM's size is also measured in Megabytes or, these days, in Gigabytes, to show how much data can be temporarily kept there.   More RAM not only helps you open and use more apps, it also makes your Operating System seem faster, since it can store more of the code from the OS in the faster RAM, so it takes less time to read new lines of code.  Less time reading or writing, the faster things seem to be.

I hope this makes things a bit more clear!

Missed Technology Thursday, didn't we?

Sorry about that!  But, here to make up for it, is the missing post:


How does my computer compute?

Computers have come a long way since the days when they were programmed with a pair of pliers and a soldering iron!

(Do you know where the term “bug” came from?  When the government owned a computer big enough to fill a building with, one day, the thing just wouldn’t work.  So they laboriously started searching through the thousands of physical connections and switches to see where the problem was.  It turned out a moth had spun a cocoon so that it impeded the operation of a single switch.  Hence the term “bug” came from having a real bug gum up the works!)

When they were first used, they were thought of as big, fast calculators.  They were used to perform calculations of a size and scope people had never been able to do manually, just because of the scope of the amount of work that needed to done to complete it.

Eventually, someone realized they could be used for more, and someone invented other programs for them, including word processing, spreadsheets, collating and sorting long lists of information and so forth.  Databases were invented for storing tremendous amounts of information where it could be manipulated, sorted, recalled and regurgitated in ways nobody had ever been able to do before.

Why? Because computers are, at heart, big FAST calculators.  But as you’ve probably heard before, they are stupid.  Dumb as a rock.

Then why is your smartphone so smart?  How does it do all that stuff?

Basics.  Lets take a look.

At the very most basic level, your computer only understands two symbols.  A zero (0) and a one (1).  This is called a “binary” system.  Binary meaning “two”.  So, how does it know when you hit a key whether that represents an “a” or an “A”, or a “z” or a “Z”?

Code.  It uses something called an ASCI code to know what letter or number is which.  The very most basic bit of information is called just that, a “bit”.  That is a one or a zero.  So, how does that translate into an A or a Z?  You string bits together.  Kind of like Morse code, only with eight elements instead of three.

A computer chip, or CPU (Central Processing Unit) processes information one cycle at a time.  It does it VERY fast, on the order today of billions of cycles per second, but still, only so many bits at a time.  The first computers were only able to read eight bits at a time.  They were called, therefor, 8 bit systems.  Eventually, that increased, but because of that, even today’s systems are built on the eight bit base.

A single character is represented by eight bits of ones and zeros.  So, for instance, that lowercase “a” would be 01100001 in binary code.  For simplicity's sake, that string of code is called a Byte.  Pronounced “bite”.  The ASCI code, extended today, covers just about any symbol you might want to type, including spaces, special symbols, foreign language letters, and so forth.

So, to unravel a mystery to most consumers, this reveals the meaning of those mysterious bits and bytes you see on the packages of electronics you see at Staples.

It works like this: When you store information on your local C: drive (or your Macintosh HD for Macs), a single letter takes up one byte of space.  If you keep typing, 1024 bytes makes up a Kilobyte (Kilo meaning thousand in latin).  The next step up is the Megabyte (MB), which is, again, 1024 Kilobytes (written kB), which is 1,048,576 bytes.  A million bytes, approximately.  Remember, we are looking at a base of eight characters here!

So, a Terabyte is 1024 Megabytes (MB), or 1,073,741,824 bytes.  A billion bytes.   (Note that the second letter “B” is capitalized.  This because we are working with BYTES.  Bits are abbreviated with the lowercase b.  We’ll see that in a moment.)

So, when you see MB or TB, you now know we are talking storage space - how much storage a hard drive or a flash drive has on it and how much information you can put on it.

Now, I mentioned bits, and how they are abbreviated with the lowercase b.  Why?  Because bits are used to describe the amount of data that can be TRANSMITTED over a network.  So, here, we aren’t looking at the traditional eight bit limitation of the operating system, but we use the base ten we humans use to count.  So, when you see an Internet Service Provider that claims to have a speed of 25 Mbps, he isn’t talking about Megabytes - that would be storage - he’s saying that his network can transmit 25 million BITS of information per second - that works out to a little over 3.1 million bytes (or characters) per second.

That’s pretty decent speed in the US.

In later posts, I’ll explain a bit more about operating systems and such, but I think I’ve stretched the average users’ mind enough for one day!

Technology Day! Story time...

Well, it's Thursday, so it must be Technology Day.

Instead of some tech advice, I've got a story of woe.  It's about me and my day today.

Usually, I see Murphy (as in Murphy's Law) maybe once a week, sometimes less.  He does show up - I do work with high tech, after all (IF you call Micro$oft's stuff high tech!).  But because we've got a good support group, we are rather good at keeping him at bay.

Usually.

Today, he found a way in, and he stopped in MY shop.  Spent all dang day there, carrying this big, black nasty cudgel - you know, the ones they depict in the comix with the huge freaking nail stuck through the end?  Yeah, that one - and he used it to beat me silly every chance he got.  Sadistically.  Wearing a big, smirky smile.

It really started a few days ago, when Adobe Captivate suddenly decided to stop loading.  On any machine, for both versions 5.5 and 6.  No rhyme or reason to it, it just decided to start freezing at the splash screen.

Today, I did get one machine to take 5.5 and it worked!  Hallelujah!  Choirs of angels sang!  So, as we agreed in our trouble shooting conference yesterday, I then installed 6.  Carefully copied the installation files to the local hard disk and unpacked them.  Ran them under my Domain Superman account.  Everything possible.

Rebooted after the install was finished.  Ran Captivate 6 - it stalled.  Damn.  Rebooted, ran 5.5 and IT stalled.  Double Damn!  Back to the beginning, right where we started.  Gonna call Adobe support tomorrow.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

Second laptop.  Lady came to me, complained that all her shortcuts were launching Windows Picture Viewer.  ALL of them.  So, I checked, and sure enough, every dang one had that same icon picture on it, and every dang one opened that same app.  Had one of these last week, ended up re-imaging it, because Windows 7 doesn't allow deleting profiles like XP did - in part due to our restrictive GPOs.

So, I played it careful - I talked to our new Windows 7 expert and he eventually pointed me to a set of instructions.  Remove the profile folder from the Users folder, launch regedit, go to a certain key and kill the hive associated with that user's folder.

Simple, right?  I launch and use regedit a hundred times a week, right?  Not this time.  The OS primly informed me that I had no such access permissions.  Went to the Windows directory, ran it from there.  Same denial.  Put my already privileged account into the Admin group, even though Domain Admins were already there - same error.  Had to re-image this machine too.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

So, I trek upstairs to install a monitor driver for someone whose big 27" monitor was no longer showing her laptop screen, which was supposed to be shared to it.  Logged her off, logged into the Domain Superman account, downloaded the driver from Dell's site and ran the installer.

Rebooted.

Blue screen.

Wham!  Murphy strikes again.

Gotta take this one up to Gaithersburg tomorrow to let the encryption team pull the data off of this encrypted drive before I re-image it.

Tonight, I am going to treat myself.  I deserve it.

It's Technical Information Day - Again!

It's Thursday, so it must be Technical Information Day!

Today, I am going to talk about maintaining your computer.

Apple, Inc. is very fond of using the tagline "It Just Works" in talking about their products, but as a desktop technician for over 20 years, I can tell you that isn't quite true.  In fact, it is pure marketing!

That said, Apple computers have pulled in ratings over the years as some of the best computers to own as far as build quality, longevity, reliability as well as customer satisfaction.  But they do break, and as with any human built piece of machinery, regular maintenance can help minimize inconvenience in case of trouble, as well as often put that trouble off for a while.

Macs use the Operating System known now as OS X (the X being a Roman Numeral, thus pronounced as "ten", not "ecs" as in the letter.  It is the tenth major iteration of the Mac operating system.) with the current version being 10.8.4.  The current version is a very robust system, and is designed to be extremely user friendly.  It helps that it is designed on top of a Unix kernel, which was designed from the beginning as a server OS that was intended to run for months if not years between reboots.

To ensure this, Unix (and OS X) runs certain maintenance tasks on a daily, weekly and a monthly basis to reduce log file sizes, remove system files no longer needed and reduce or remove temp files.  These tasks run at certain times when your computer is less likely to be in use. The tasks are scheduled for 03:15 to 05:30 in your computer's local time zone, if your computer is running at that time and not in sleep mode.  If the tasks do not run, it is possible that certain log files (such as system.log) may become very large in Mac OS X v10.5 or earlier.

In Mac OS X v10.6 and later, background maintenance tasks that do not run when the computer is asleep are run after it wakes from sleep mode.  So, although many people want to save energy (and money) by turning their Macs off when not in use, it is good for it to let it run overnight at least twice a month, if not weekly.

[Note:  Windows does NOT perform these tasks, they are programmed into Unix (and thus OS X) only.]

As for you, the user, one of the easiest things you can do to maintain your Mac is to keep the OS updated and current.  You do this using either the Software Update command in the Apple Menu in the upper left corner, or running the App Store app from the Dock and clicking on the Update symbol at the top of the window.  Your Mac will look for updates to Apple software, the OS and any third party apps you may have installed using the App Store.

This includes any Security Updates Apple may issue for your OS or Apple applications you have installed.  Apple does not issue regularly timed or dated security updates like Microsoft does.  It only issues them as needed, so be sure to check at least weekly, if not monthly.  You can set your Mac to do this automatically in System Preferences in the Software Update preferences panel.

[A word about updates.  Updates are wonderful things, but they CAN create problems by introducing new features and sometimes killing off older features.  If your software is used at all for what you consider critical tasks, be sure and investigate new versions BEFORE you click "update"!  This will ensure you don't do something you may regret later.]

Now, the biggie:  Backups!

No matter how cavalier you may be about your computing habits, you've got data you'd rather not lose.  (Note:  data = your stuff, pictures, email, word processing documents, spreadsheets, everything)

Everybody does.

So, back it up!  Keep copies of everything.  Keep copies on an external hard drive, or a flash drive or in the dropbox app online.  Google Drive is also ok.  Or, if you prefer to not have to think about it, Apple has Time Machine that will take care of the daily scut work for you.

Just back your stuff up!  You won't regret it.

Additionally, you can do the hard work of cleaning up your files, deleting old stuff, archiving things you'd like to keep but hate to delete and keep your stuff organized.

Occasionally, break open a can of canned air and blow out the air holes on your computer to remove the dust and crud that accumulates over time.  This allows a better airflow to keep your Mac cool.

Apple doesn't actively recommend it, but some Mac Techs do - run Disk Utility occasionally to check your disk for needed repairs.  All hard drives accumulate errors over time, as sectors go bad.   Disk Utility, run occasionally, will block these off and prevent your computer from attempting to read or write to or from these sectors, saving your data and keeping your blood pressure down.

Some folks will recommend repairing permissions also, but in my experience, it rarely makes a difference, unless you are having some issues with files not being read correctly or apps not running properly.  If it ain't broke, in this case, better off not fixing it.

Oh, and you don’t need to defragment or optimize your disk when you use Mac OS X. When writing files, Mac OS X optimizes your disk space and avoids fragmenting large files into smaller segments.  This is automatic, unlike Windows.

Ok, for this week, that's it!

Happy Computing!

Technical Information Day!

As a long standing IT technician, I have been advising family and friends for years about cleaning up their computers before selling them or giving them away.  I am very happy to see Apple, Inc. has finally taken the bull by the horns and posted a Support Page document explaining how to do this for a modern Mac, including how to do it without accidentally deleting your data in iCloud at the same time!

Simply follow these steps:

Important: Do not manually delete contacts, calendars, reminders, documents, photo streams, or any other iCloud data while signed in to your iCloud account. Doing so will not only delete that information from your Mac, but will also delete it from the iCloud servers and any other devices you also sync with iCloud. Instead, follow the steps below to remove your iCloud account from your Mac and leave your iCloud data intact on your other devices.

1.  Deauthorize your computer from iTunes (if applicable).
2.  Back up your data.
3.  If enabled, turn off Find My Mac and sign out of iCloud. To turn off the iCloud service on your Mac:

• Choose System Preferences > iCloud.
• Deselect Find My Mac to disconnect your devices from iCloud.
• Click the Sign Out button on the left side.
• The system automatically removes iCloud data from your Mac. 

4.  Reformat your hard drive with Disk Utility to erase all stored data and then reinstall OS X on your computer. For instructions specific to your operating system, select the appropriate article below:

• OS X Mountain Lion
• OS X Lion

Optional: If you want to return your Mac to its original "out-of-the-box" state, so the new owner can set up the computer with the Mac OS X Setup Assistant, follow these steps:

1.  After you reformat your hard drive and reinstall OS X, the Setup Assistant automatically starts and displays the Welcome screen that prompts you to choose your country or region. Do not continue with the setup of your system.

2.  Press Command-Q to shut down your Mac.

Your Mac is now ready for its new owner. When the Mac is turned on for the first time, the Setup Assistant will guide the new owner through the setup process. 

Simple! In fact, so simple a cave man could do it!

(Sorry, guys)

Back on a serious note, you really, really need to do something like this, so your data isn't left on your machine for anybody to steal after you no longer have it.  Once it is out of your hands, you can no longer control it, so be sure it is gone!

Windows users, I can't give you specific instructions like this, but the same principle applies, save your data, reformat the old hard drive and reinstall the Operating System from the original media.  That way, your data is gone, not simply deleted.

Happy Computing!!

My long promised Restoration Saga!

A while back, I mentioned that my Mac had suffered the death of its Hard Drive, and Apple was going to fix it under warranty.  I also promised that I would come back here and relate the experience.

Here I am!  Sorry for the delay, things have been a bit hectic recently.

Anyway, on to the story.

Apple performed magnificently, returning my iMac to me within the promised time period, ironically the same day they released an update to OS X, version 10.8.4.

I went to the Apple store in the Montgomery Mall on Democracy Boulevard, dragging my large suitcase with me. (I was certainly not going to carry the thing, it weighs a ton - 27 inches of screen space comes with a heavy weight penalty - literally!)  I got some odd looks coming in the door, but I wended my way through the crowd in the store easily.

I checked in, having made an appointment to pick it up.  (Note to Apple customers:  If you drop off an Apple product at an Apple store for repair, you do NOT need an appointment to pick it up, they immediately take you to the front of the line.)

I was in and out of the store in ten minutes.

Got home, plugged everything in, turned it on, and...Nirvana!  It worked, as advertised.  They'd loaded 10.8.3 on it, which was no surprise, as the .4 version was released the day after they'd finished the repair.  They never put an unreleased version on repaired machines.  So, I had to do it myself.

As the machine had logged in automatically to an admin account, I simply went to the Apple App Store app and hit the selection for updates.  There were more than one, but the main one I saw was the 10.8.4 system update.

I clicked the "install" button and typed in the password for my iCloud account.  The download began, and took about 18 minutes.

The install itself didn't take long, less than 15 minutes, a restart and the Apple Menu showed in About This Mac that it was running 10.8.4!  Easy-peasy!

Next, I opened the app folder and the enclosed Utilities folder and started the Migration Assistant.  As part of the set up for it, you are asked first if you want to migrate data from another Mac or a backup.  I chose the Time Capsule backup, since that is where mine lives.

Less than two hours later (I've got over 680 gigs worth of data to restore - that takes time, even at Gigabit ethernet speeds), it was finished.

Perusing the files and so forth, I was glad to see my data had been restored, but there were issues.

1.  Missing apps.  A lot of apps I'd bought and installed were missing.
2.  Settings.  Many of my settings, for system and apps, were also missing.  Safari history, settings, extensions, etc., were also missing.

Desktop stuff was right where I expected them to be, though, and my account password, etc., appeared to be correct.

Well, it was late at night, so instead of doing the geek thing, which would have been to blow it away and start over, I had to wait a couple of days for the time to present itself again.

A few days later, that is exactly what I did.  I had NOT re-started the Time Machine backups, especially for this, to avoid any mixups.

I DID go into Time Machine to make sure it could "see" my backups.  They were there and readable.

I booted from a recovery disk I'd made last year, and opened Disk Utility.  Going to the Partitioning Tab, I repartitioned the disk.  This has the laudable and desirable ability to "erase" all the data on the disk in just a few minutes, instead of waiting for it to drag itself through all 680+ gigs of data to do that file by file.  MUCH faster, I can tell you!

I renamed the disk Macintosh HD.

Back at the desktop, I went back to the App Store, opened the Purchased Tab and downloaded Mountain Lion again.  That took another authentication of my iCloud account.

Launching the installer, I installed ML on the Macintosh HD.  This had the desired effect of installing the current version, which was 10.8.4.

After the restart into the newly installed system on the Macintosh HD, I again went to the Migration Assistant and again told it to restore from the Time Capsule backup.

THIS time, around two hours later, my system was back to where it was the hour and day it last did a backup before the HD died.  Settings, apps, data, everything, exactly where it was supposed to be, as if the drive had never died.

What was the difference?  Why did it not restore perfectly the first time?

While I cannot attest to this under oath, I'd bet that the reason is that the first restore was done on an upgraded system instead of a fresh, clean install of the latest and greatest.  In my experience, clean installs are best, as even a system freshly installed that is then updated can introduce glitches in subsequent operations, especially a restore.

Don't get me wrong, upgrades and updates are perfectly fine, and I've had machines that were updated and upgraded for sometimes years in between clean installs without so much as a single glitch.  But this attests to the fact that a major operation like a complete system restore is best done with a nice, clean new install.

So, for those with the stick-to-itiveness to still be reading this far in, here is the take away from my experience:

1.  No matter what your chosen Operating System, Mac, Windows or Linux, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.  None of this would have been possible if I'd not done a backup.

2.  Backup consistently.  Doing it occasionally is a recipe for the disaster of lost files.  Do it regularly.  Be religious about it.  Set your backup app to do it automatically, and CHECK periodically to ensure that it is still doing it right.

3.  VERIFY your backups.  Periodically, find a file at random on your disk, move it to another location and restore it back to the original location using your regular backup app.  This will ensure that when the inevitable happens, your data is still there to be restored.  If the backup is corrupted or somehow been deleted, you may as well not be doing it at all.

4.  Keep a separate off-site backup.  What will you do if a natural disaster destroys your house?  If you have no off-site backup, you may as well have not bothered to waste your time.

5.  Use the Cloud.  Besides the Apple iCloud offerings, there are other companies which offer Cloud-like functionality to allow you to keep email, photos, music, and so forth stored in their servers, completely away from the possibility of anything which might happen to your computer.  This can reduce considerably the amount of local disk space you may need for your backups, too!

Last and not least, I will always, unless Apple does something immensely stupid, advise my friends, family, and readers to buy Apple products.  I can attest to the fact that their normal, standard offerings for regular users like you and me are robust, easy to use, compatible with most other platforms and offer an easy but powerful backup technology to keep your data safe.

There, Mr. Cook, I've earned the two bits you guys still owe me for advertising your products.

Backup, backup, backup!

I won't finish writing about this for a few days, as my dear, precious iMac is still in surgery, having a new hard drive installed.  It's kinda like a heart transplant combined with brain surgery for you or me...

Poor thing.

But, she's lucky being mine, because I am positively anal about one thing: backing up my data.

Fortunately, Apple, Inc. makes it easy to do and to keep your stuff safe.  All you need is a relatively current version of OS X and a backup disk, or perhaps a Time Capsule.  In my case, I have both.  The Time Capsule is the primary backup, backing up my stuff hourly, keeping one daily backup weekly for the long term.  In addition, I also have two portable drives, one terabyte each, which get rotated periodically in and out of the bank vault where our safety deposit box is kept.

That way, I am covered, if I need to recover just one file, or, as in this case, the entire HD goes south and Apple has to replace it.  When they give it back to me, it'll have OS X 10.8.4 installed, and all I have to do is use Migration Assistant to migrate all my accounts and all their data back onto the new HD.

Takes about an hour and a half, depending on the amount of data to restore.  Easy!  In the long run, no data is lost at all, and new stuff saved in the Cloud migrates down back to the requisite apps on the new hard drive once it comes back up.

I never lose a thing.

Why am I so anal about this?  Because I once ignored my backups and, thinking they were just fine, lost an entire year's worth of data, including some photos, because the backup I thought I had was corrupted.

Never again!

So, my message to you out there is, back it up.  Don't take it for granted, check those backups periodically, to ensure that they really do contain the data you think they do, and that they are not corrupted and have good data retention.

If the data you have is irreplaceable, then KEEP IT IN MORE THAN ONE PLACE!!  Pay for a cloud based backup service, use an external hard drive and have an extra one you keep in a safety deposit box.  Three backups are just barely enough IF one of them is off site to ensure you against theft, disaster or fire. 

Data lost is data lost, and it CANNOT BE replaced.  Electronic bits and bytes are fragile and can disappear in an instant.  Don't take any chances, folks, you'll never get that photo of your great grandmother again and your kids will never be so cute as they were at two.  And you'll probably never get that incriminating shot of your spouse as sauced as he/she was last New Year's again, so KEEP THEM SAFE!!

You've been warned.

Your Digital Life - Destroyed?

Over at Wired, there's an article about a journalist, Mat Honan, whose digital accounts were hacked over the weekend.  Entitled How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking, it tells the entire sordid story.

Long story short, there were two flaws in the two company's policies which allowed the hackers to hijack his accounts - all of them, and to erase the data on all of his devices, including his Mac at home.

One, at Amazon, allowed the hackers to use three pieces of easily accumulated data online to reset his password, and using the last four digits of the associated credit card, then call Apple tech support and socially engineer the online tech into letting them reset his iCloud password as well.

With all that, the destruction of his digital life was assured.  He lost over a year's worth of data, including family pictures that cannot be replaced.  He was lucky they didn't clean out his bank account, too, I'll warrant.

His account accuses Apple and Amazon of having security flaws in their systems which made this easy for the hackers.  I'll agree that Amazon's policies of what you can see online and their call center would allow you to use to reset an account password - were deeply flawed.  But Apple's flaws weren't in set, stated policies, but in how their policies were flagrantly ignored by the techs online.  They should have asked a series of security questions, the answer to which Mr. Honan should have been the only one to know.  But the tech was socially engineered to allow the reset anyway, which was actually a violation of set policies.  I am sure that tech is undergoing some serious re-education classes this week, if he still has a job.  So while Amazon's flaws were in written policies, Apple's were in execution.

Apple has promised to review those policies, and Amazon has quietly removed the flaws and issued new policies to their call center techs to close the flaws which were used in this hack.

All well and good.

But my take on this is a bit different, as those who know me well are nodding their heads and getting ready for the blast.

Yes, Mat admitted that the whole issue was his fault, for the manner in which he had things set up and for not backing up his stuff.

I don't blame him for the hack.  That was purely the fault of twisted individuals who do this stuff for kicks and street cred.

I blame him for not backing up.  He lost data as far back as a YEAR!!!  Obviously, it had been that long since he'd backed stuff up, if ever.  Precious stuff, pictures of family.  Things which cannot be replaced.  Yes, the hackers are sleezeballs.  It is their fault for doing this in the first place.

But come on, man, he had a Mac.  Macs come with Time Machine.  Time Machine is drop dead simple.  Attach a hard drive, fire up Time Machine, enter your password to unlock it, set the hard drive as the backup drive, and off Time Machine goes to back up your stuff.

It saves backups every hour for 24 hours, Daily backups for a month, and weekly backups for all previous months, for as long as your HD has room, then it starts deleting backups, starting with the oldest first.  You can potentially have data backed up for as much as two or three years, depending on how much data you are backing up and how big that backup drive is.

THREE YEARS!!!

Personally, I also use portable drives, which I backup to every couple of weeks or so, and trade them out at my safety deposit box at the bank (if you do this, take advantage of the OS X ability to encrypt that backup drive!).  Quick, easy, safe.  Even if some sleezebag steals one of my devices, resets one of my passwords and does to me what they did to Mat Honan, I don't lose a thing beyond the last offsite backup.  Potentially nothing at all, if they fail to erase my Time Capsule (which is separately protected by another password - 16+ digits long.).

I cannot emphasize enough:

BACKUP - BACKUP - BACKUP!!! And when you are finished - back it up again!  You can never have enough or a fresher backup.

Now THIS is cool!

Today, very early, the NASA Mars Curiosity rover landed, right on time, after a multi-million mile trip, to within 220 meters of the target.  While on its way, just a minute or so before landing, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught this picture of the Curiosity Lander hanging from its parachute.

I don't know about you, but this has to be the absolute coolest photograph ever.  The technology that is needed to have two separate spacecraft, launched years apart, in such close proximity at the same time that one can capture a photo of the other while landing is just astonishing!

Go NASA!

Where's my flying car?

Dang it, when I was a kid, they said we'd have flying cars by now.  Robert Heinlein portrayed mankind as living on the moon, with Mars not far behind.  (We'll kind of ignore all the stories about civilizations on Venus and Princesses on Mars, thankyouverymuch - though I DO want to see the movie!)

Periodically, I throw a virtual temper tantrum about all of my sci-fi dreams not coming true before I die.  Especially the ones about longevity treatments.  I do think I'd like to live to a ripe old age of 600, dagnabbit!

So, let's look at this for a moment.  Why not?  I mean, come on, when my mother was born, in 1914, electricity was mostly in the cities, and then not universal, telephones were a rarity for the rich, cars were just beginning their journey to popularity, and WWI had only just been declared (on her birthday, in Europe.)  Computers weren't even thought of in sic-fi (since it was an undeveloped genre), medicine was only grudgingly accepting the germ theory of disease, airlines were still a dream, and the Pure Food & Drugs Act that began the modern era for my employer was only eight years old.

By the time she died in 2005, the iPod was surging in popularity, the iPhone was only two years away, the internet had become a regular part of our lives and the way we communicate had been fundamentally changed and advanced by the connections it allowed.  One could fly between the US and Europe in less than three hours, man had already walked on the moon, flown past Mars so many times the news media yawned every time NASA did it again, and a man-made spacecraft was slowly making its way out of the solar system.  The automobile had advanced to the point where we have the technology for cars to drive themselves, television had run the course of broadcast distribution and was in the midst of an expansion into every pocket in the very near future.

So, doggone it, why can't we invent a flying car?  We've got the equivalent of the Dick Tracy two way TV watch, so what's so dang hard about flying cars?

Geez, people, we can fly drones into foreign countries to kill our enemies silently from ten thousand feet, read a newspaper over someone's shoulder from orbit, we've got bombs that can suck all of the oxygen from the air over an entire square mile and others which can literally turn the earth to glass and destroy half a continent.  We're developing drone miniatures which will look and act like insects so we can eavesdrop on our enemies' conversations undetected, for goodness' sake.  Scientists tell us that in a few years, we may even have the technology to make invisibility a possibility.  And just the other day, they announced the confirmation of the Higgs Boson, which is the key to mass in the universe, and may allow us to finally, FINALLY figure out how gravity works.

So, why can't we...wait a minute, hold it.  Maybe that's it.

Yeah, in the early 1990's, Congress killed the Large Supercollider in Texas.  Because, doggone it, we couldn't afford it!  Yet, in the meantime, we've fought at least three unfunded wars which have cost us many multiples of the amount we'd have spent on that piece of scientific equipment, which has set us back in that research by over ten years.

Yes, I'll admit that military research has often meant an accelerated timetable for the discovery of stuff we'd probably not have found in the civilian sector until later.  But at the same time, it has sucked off so much money and so much talent and killed so many promising young people, that it is impossible for us to truly compare whether that lost money, talent and manpower would have allowed us to find that stuff independently anyway.

It is time to back off on the military adventurism overseas.

I am not proposing "bringing the troops home".  In the midst of a recession, that would send unemployment through the roof and kill the economy for a decade or more.

I am proposing that we stop the adventurism which has sent so many of our kids overseas to die in causes that really make no sense.  Iraq is no better off, politically, than it was before.  Sure, it is no longer a dictatorship, but the political violence engendered by the sectarian strife is killing more folks than Saddam Hussein did.  I know, at least they are free to make those choices.  But we didn't really do what we intended.  We opened a can of worms.  Same thing with Afghanistan.  We allowed ourselves to get distracted by Iraq, which sucked off the troops we needed to finish the job in Afghanistan, which has kept us there well beyond where we should have left.  Which has had horrific affects in Pakistan, which is now in a turmoil, largely due to our drone campaign.  (I guess at least, we distracted them from India...)

Meanwhile in Yemen, the same drones are wreaking havoc with our enemies (yay!) while causing a "heads you win, tails I lose" kind of conundrum for us there.  We'd love to support the popular uprising against a dictator, but we need that dictator to continue our fight against the terrorists.  So, we lose no matter what we do.

Which is kind of the point.  No matter what we do, no matter how well intentioned we seem to be, we just can't seem to stick to an agenda and do what we came to do.  It always seems to get derailed somehow, so that we get stuck in some form of quicksand.  Sometimes, the tar baby that brother fox got caught up in comes to mind.

I am tired of our foreign policy making more and more people hate us.  It is time to stop shooting at people.  The way to friendship is trade.  Exporting education is the beginning of that trade.  The third world is so full of promise, so many people who could be buying American products - and would like to do that - IF they had the money and the products we could buy from them.  All they need is the education to start their own businesses and improving their own economies.

Education WE can provide, if we'd just stop shooting at people.  Instead of soldiers, we should be exporting teachers.

...and building flying cars...dammit.

Forget Porn sites. It's the Religious sites that'll get you Pwnd!

According to Yahoo News:

Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday."Drive-by attacks" in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of "threats" that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

Another reason to stay away from religion!

Seriously, the reason, according to Symantec, is that it's the minor sites put up by churches and religious groups hoping to take advantage of the new medium represented by the smartphone craze, who don't have the money or the expertise to keep their sites safe and clean.  The major religious sites appear to be safe, as their owners have the money to hire professionals to take proper care and both scrub them clean and put up proper firewalls for protection.

As always, caveat emptor!  Let the buyer beware!  Practice safe computing!