Hal - Deliberately Basic

Why I Read History

When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. died February 28, 2007, the world lost one of the greatest historians who ever lived. When I was in school, the teaching of history was qualified as “not an exact science.” Schlesinger saw history as a continuing effort to solve an insoluble problem, “Because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important.”

Not long ago a friend told that he was interested in the present, and cared nothing about what happened in the past. I never bothered to present the fact that history is merely a repeat of soap opera that has gone before us, and continually dumbed down by the current media. At present it is calculated that “the news” is formatted to an audience of 16 year olds, as is the target audience for advertising.

Thoreau said, “To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.” For me, it is hard to bear the local television news, and I don’t watch it. How many rapes, murders and muggings can we stand before becoming numb to the redundancy?

Relying exclusively on current news, just as unreliable as any history ever written, is insufficient information to formulate an educated understanding of the world. Without the benefit of at least a minor understanding of major historical events in human history, we are handicapped making decisions in the present.

I was motivated to write this post by a recent article in Harpers Magazine written by Lewis H. Lapham. Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harpers, and editor of an upcoming quarterly, “Lapham’s Quarterly.” On his web site he states,
“In an age beguiled by the joys of forgetfulness, our absorption in the excitements of the present tense cheats us of our inheritance.”

For a much more in depth look at why history is an imperative study, have a look at Historians.org.

“Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.”
Cicero

The Sad State of a Stressed Man

Men are pressured to release the pressure that plagues nearly everyone. We are incessantly reminded that pent up stress is the reason we die younger than women. Medical journals, magazines, television, and the Internet generates as much about men and stress as they do cancer.

This is not to imply that women do not experience as much stress as men; but accordingly, women have a different mentality about the whole thing, and talk to other women. In other words they vent, bitch and complain.

The gist of the way men and women differ in their approach to dealing with stress is this. Women tend to “befriend” while men use the “fight or flight” syndrome. This is all very nicely laid out in an article at ScienceDaily.

I believe there is more to this than a simple UCLA study can confirm. Women talk and women listen, and they seem to like to talk and listen. In our society men are not given the same liberties to complain. If a man talks about his issues, or stress, it better be to a therapist, else he will be labeled as a chronic complainer, and quickly become a pariah. No one wants to listen to someone vent, bitch, and complain, unless its woman to woman.

So, what does a man do to release stress? Many of us vent, bitch and complain anyway. Then we apologize for it, hope we haven’t been pigeon-holed as a complainer, and look for other ways to relieve our tired minds. Most of us suck it up, internalize it, and return it in the form of anger. Whatever we do along this line is obviously a negative reaction, and in the end, it kills us. Along the way, we hurt others, especially our families and friends.

There is an abundance of information available about how to deal with stress. Most of it is pop-psych bullshit that lists things at the level of a third-grader. There is no one size fits all for stress. Some of the things suggested are undoubtedly worth looking into. Maybe they will help some men deal with this problem common to all of us.

In the end, you need to take an active role and find your own way. Yes, that is about as cliché as any statement can be. But if you have to deal with serious stress, and you know its affecting your life in a damaging way, you have an obligation to get involved with your own well-being.

Will most men actually get involved and find a way? Probably not. We will continue to act as we always have. Change is just too damned hard, and most of us don’t need the added stress of having to go through any life change.

Meditate on that, and the consequences of not dealing with stress. Maybe it is worth a look.

Is it really possible to secure your computer?

According to the FBI, computer crime cost US business 67.2 billion dollars in 2005. A CNN report indicates this was a record bad year for security. Well, dang, I’d say it was indeed a bad year. In 2007, the situation continues to escalate. Will business ever be secure with your personal data? I don’t see any way that is possible. Insecurity is a fact of life, and that same dark peril spills over to your computer as well.

Individual users spend billions each year to secure personal computers. Security is not a mom and pop business, but a leviathan industry built on the misunderstanding and incompetence of home users. The very people who should be reading about security have no interest or understanding of the most basic aspects of it. Speaking as one who worked in IT for many years, I long ago came to the conclusion that apathy is the cause of nearly all computer related problems, including security.

A report from the Sans Institute indicates that user apathy is the number three reason for computer insecurity. My experience tells me to move that to number one. Conversely, I believe there is a reason for this indifferent attitude from users. Security is so difficult to understand, only security experts have an interest, and users should not have to be engineers to implement it.

Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, one of the first claims made is, the issue of security has finally been solved. This version is much more secure than the last. That may be true, but I’m starting to wonder if these claims are made with an ulterior motive. Even before a particular version is released to the public, every aspect of it has been cracked by the cyber underworld.  This is no different than pad locking a door and daring someone to break the lock. From a historical point of observation, forget about security with any OS, but more especially Windows. It ain’t gonna happen.

Users today have come to expect that malware is simply a part of the experience of having a computer. I know people who take their computer to a shop every six months to a year to have it cleaned of malware. For these folks, this is as normal as taking the car in for an oil change. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Thousands of articles and information about security are available on the Internet that show and tell how to secure your computer. That is not relevant to the problem. User education is likewise irrelevant. You can lead a horse to water, but… you know the story.

What the computer industry needs is an idiot proof system. For people who are not tech oriented, who will never care to learn, and who cause the rest of us problems, force-feed them a simple system that controls their habits. Make it impossible to do all those annoying things that create havoc and cost billions. In other words, allow only executable code to run that is pre-installed on the computer. Any downloaded applications would not run unless approved by a certified technician. No script would run from a web site unless pre-approved.

Will this ever happen? Of course not. How would an industry as big as security continue to make all those billions?

R Rated Diets, Are They Effective?

For the longest time I thought only nouns and verbs could be combined with the word diet to make a new diet. Now I think any combination of letters in English can make a diet. Since I’ve already been exposed to all the popular diets, I went looking on the Internet for weird diets. What I used to consider a weird diet – eating only one food for example – is not at all that strange any more.

The first one to catch my eye was “The Sex Diet.” That might actually work for me since I like sex to begin with. I became excited just clicking the link… that is, in the sense of anticipation. But as it turns out, this is a chic diet, all about love and tenderness, and hokey effeminate crap that I couldn’t connect with. Sorry gals, if this was the “sex workout diet” I could get into it, but  I had to pass on this one.

Next was the “Roadkill Diet.” This is a form of aversion diet, where you purposely go looking for dead animals on the highway in hope that you will think of this when you eat. Or that is try to eat without hurling. Again, not for me, although I thought it exotic, and even considered a short trip around the block just in case that damned cat next door had used his ninth life.

My next stop was “The Jesus Diet”, and no I am not making this up. You won’t find it because you will be redirected to hell, or a fundamentalist religious site; as my illiterate, mouth-breathing neighbor (the one with the cat) says, “same difference.” Because of that, I will never know if the Jesus diet had any good advice to offer for weight loss. I went to this site because of the spiritual anomaly of Christ having a weight problem. How disappointing not to find it.

For those more inclined to the Old Testament, there is “The Genesis Diet.” The thing that stuck with me on this site was: GENESIS 9:3 “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.” Think about that for a moment. If your taste runs to eating the neighbor next door, well there you have it. Her pussy cat is fair game as well. I’m sensing a Freudian undertone in this  piece. Better have another look for sex and dieting.

“The Palaeolithic Diet” aka the caveman diet requires eating, well, like a caveman. My first thought was dinosaur meat because I get a hankering for that so much. I’d love to have a huge grill, steaks that took two men to carry about, and several gallons of barbecue sauce. Dinosaur meat? How about that sex diet gals.

This one was so ghastly I had to have a look. “The Tapeworm Diet.” You see, this huge worm lives in your guts and eats your food, thus making you thin for lack of calories. This, combined with the “Roadkill” diet could be as effective as banding your stomach with a bungee cord and duct tape.

After surfing through a number of these bizarre methods of losing weight, I stumbled upon “The Fuck It Diet.” Apparently, the gentleman in question has tried every diet in the universe and all have failed him. At last he simply said “fuck it, I’m going to eat whatever I want, when I want it.” He found that by not trying to diet, he didn’t crave the foods he loved so much, and actually ate less and lost weight. This weird logic was a little scary because it in fact made sense to me.

I have decided to take a different approach and combine some of these diets. Here then is my latest diet, and you may use it at your discretion. The “For Christ’s sake, fuck it, eat the neighbor and screw the cat” diet.