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Good news, hackers!

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Great news for hackers, folks.

My hard drive crashed a couple of days ago, and I tried desperately to restore my stuff to a new HD.  First up was the re-installation of Windows 8.1.  Not a problem?  Easy for you to say!  As it happens, I had downloaded it in the first place, and so had no installation disc.  I had, of course, been diligent and created recovery media, including an image of my system, that, according to all accounts, would allow me to restore everything, just as if nothing had happened.  My computer would be new inside, but no one the wiser.

I loaded the recovery flash drive and booted up.  Immediately a message came up: cannot restore, missing sector on drive.  Well, hello, it’s brand new.  Must be a mistake; tried again.  Same message, this time with the helpful suggestion that Windows would have to format the drive before I could restore on it.  Except, of course, I didn’t have Windows anymore, did I?!  No worries, though.  I had also diligently written down the activation key for Windows; I could download a new copy on my laptop, and install from that.

Or not.

That key was no longer active, probably because I had never uninstalled Windows from the drive that crashed.  Had I known it was going to, I would have deactivated Windows moments before, but, oddly, I got no warning (sarcasm alert).  What to do?  Call Microsoft.

Ever try to find a contact number for Microsoft on their website?  After running you around in circles for a sufficient time, they offer a “chat” instead.  Sounds delightfully cozy, a nice chat with your buddy from Microsoft.  Of course, it takes awhile; 20 minutes, to be precise, before your buddy becomes available.  I pressed the button that said I would prefer that they call me, and gave them my number.  After another 20 minutes, they did.

“Hello, this is —- at Microsoft Office support.  How may I help you?”

“But I want Windows support, not Office.”

“I’m so sorry. I’ll have a representative from Windows support call you.”  Another 15 minutes passed.

“Hello, this is —- at Microsoft Office support.  How may I help you?”

Arrgh!  Was this the “chat” I had been promised?

Eventually, I got through to a nice fellow in India, which is where Microsoft has determined to be the most secure spot in the world, apparently, because that’s where you go for any sort of meaningful help.  Even so, even after I had reluctantly given him control of my laptop remotely, it took the nice fellow 4 hours to download a new copy of Windows 8.1, complete with a new activation key, to my laptop and save it to a flash drive.  Yes!  Now I could install it on the new HD, and restore my beloved desktop, with all the software I love!

Or not.

Long story short, restoration from the image could not be accomplished, because it had been made from an earlier version of Windows.  Nor could I use any of the regular restore points to at least get my documents back, because THEY WERE ON THE OLD DRIVE, WEREN’T THEY?

I threw in the towel, utterly defeated.  Off to Best Buy, where they had a nice computer for sale for $400.  I now have to re-install all of my software, half of which have secret keys and codes to which a mere mortal such as myself, who doesn’t even live in India, has no access.

The good news is, I can now verify that computer software and the internet are totally and completely secure from legitimate users like me; only hackers can get access.

Note to anyone who even whispers the word “Mac:”  for $400, you might be able to get a keyboard.

The myth of The People

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So much of politics is sheer romanticism.  With the exception of the cadre of professional cynics who actually run things, we all willingly blind ourselves to reality.  Of the true, died-in-the-wool ideologues, this is so obvious as to merit barely a mention, but it’s no less true of the vast majority of the rest of us as well.  Those on the right imagine themselves as hard-bitten realists. on the left as compassionate champions of the disadvantaged.  The vast “middle,” which is not really between any of the alternatives, but simply uncommitted to either of the major parties, sees itself as a last bastion of reasoned judgment, too smart to buy into the programs of the ideologues.  Never mind that any consistency with regard to policy has long been abandoned by all concerned.

What is fascinating is that all sides regard themselves as typical of The People, and claim to speak for them, or at least on their behalf.  This belief is resistant to any attempt at refutation, even scientifically conducted polls which clearly demonstrate otherwise.  The only time attention is paid to a poll is when it corroborates the affiliation of a party with The People on some particular issue.  Otherwise, it’s “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” to quote a meme attributed to virtually any famous person sufficiently dead to forestall denial.  It’s really a symptom of our hog-wild, post-modern ultrarelativism, on which I have droned sufficiently elsewhere, I believe.

In this case, however, that relativism is grafted onto some time honored political tropes, ready made for bandying about when necessary to muddle things up.  It has long been noted that when someone dies, what the dear departed would have wanted coincides marvelously with what the survivors want.  Frequently, people claim that they are not really fighting over who gets the Rolex, but over what Dad would have wanted.  So, too, in politics, it’s never about whose agenda gets advanced, but what The People want.  And so we get the spectacle of Ted Cruz, in the face of poll after poll showing the majority disapproved of the government shutdown, swearing he was in it to do The Will of The People.

The left doesn’t get a pass on this account either.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard socialists go on and on about The People’s this or The People’s that, oblivious to the fact that most Americans would disagree.  Props to Lenin, for openly admitting to his 3% constituency.

This is not to pass judgment on any particular program or policy; just the pretense about representing people you don’t.

The People, capitalized, almost never coincides with the people, lower case.

Saints preserve us!

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Pope Francis has put two of his predecessors, John XXIII and John Paul II, on the fast track to sainthood.  Well, alright, for all I know, they were fine people, and maybe deserve some recognition.  Setting aside for the moment the question of all the millions of other fine people who were their contemporaries, but not popes or even Catholics, I have a major quibble with the reasoning here.

According to the ancient rules of such things, to even get this far (beatitude) there has to have been an attested miracle.  This can vary widely, from healing the sick to simply not rotting in the casket.  In the case of John Paul II, there have been two alleged miracles, both involving inexplicable cures from incurable medical conditions after praying to him (while dead, of course) to intercede with God on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Here’s what’s weird.  Presumably, had JP II not been in heaven, all those pleas for intercession would have been for nothing, and the women involved would still be sick today, if they hadn’t died first.  But according to the Church, God is perfectly just.  The whole thing seems to resemble a lottery, in which your health depends not on medicine, or even on your personal faith or the extent of your prayers, but on whether you guessed right as to the eternal disposition of some dead person.

Of course, this is just a minor quibble, in the face of the idea that God, presumably the creator of the universe and hence all of the laws of physics, will suspend those laws on the request of someone from earth.  And not do it for anyone who doesn’t ask nicely, or even for the vast, vast majority of those who do.

Mysterious ways, indeed.

Why not to call a pox on both houses

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It’s quiz time again, boys and girls!

Consider this:  You have a tree in your yard.  It’s fine and healthy, but a neighbor keeps getting drunk and running into it with his car.  Soon, you begin to worry that it might be causing lasting damage.  Do you

a)  Move your tree,
b) If he hits it again, move it again,
c) Throw up your hands, denouncing the sorry state of drivers, or
d) Try to get your neighbor off the road until he stops drinking.

It may or may not be true that all politicians are corrupt, but this observation does nothing to improve the situation we find ourselves in.  I read a blog post the other day that maintained that the real problem was that public servants should be selfless, and they’re not.  This brought to mind two observations: when I hear people criticize someone for being selfish, what they usually mean is they’re not paying enough attention to their needs; the other thing is that hardly anyone, let alone politicians, is selfless to an ideal degree.  Our elected representatives are going to have their own interests at heart; after all, don’t you?  The problem is how to structure things so that doesn’t conflict with the public interest.  Never mind that we don’t all agree with what that is.  After all, those 40 or so Tea Party congressmen were voted into office, and, by all accounts, their constituents tend to agree with their actions.

In any case, the irony is that these people are apparently acting out of principle — that is to say, out of a feeling that they are doing what the country desperately needs.  You can always reason with cynics, by convincing them what they’re doing is not in their best interests.  If someone is acting out of principle, however, forget it.

If you say the whole government is corrupt and irredeemable, you are really falling in line with the Tea Party.  If that’s what you want, say so.  If not, don’t muddy the waters and let the real perpetrators get away under the cover of cynicism.

Rude awakening?

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The Egyptian army cracks down on the Muslim Brotherhood; the majority of the population approves.  Greece arrests members of the fascist Golden Dawn party, including members of parliament; their popularity crumbles.  Not much to go on, if you’re looking for a trend, but it’s enough to ask the question, are we getting tired of extremism?

Up til now, to be extreme has been the height of fashion.  Even the dullest events and pastimes have jumped on the extreme bandwagon.  Extreme knitting would not have raised an eyebrow.  No limits, all out, leave it on the field.

It’s my suspicion that all this tolerance, and even preference, for extremism is a by-product of the unprecedented prosperity of the two decades prior to the 2008 meltdown.  When things are going well, why impose limits?  Wasn’t “no limits” the mantra of the feel-good 90s?  It was fully entrenched by the time people were engulfed in recession; it must have seemed the right approach to bring the crisis to a close.  There was a lingering suspicion that the problems were caused by timidity, in any case, and all that was required was more bullishness.  It’s a commonplace that the first reaction to an ideological crisis is retrenchment.  We’re having problems?  We haven’t been true enough to our principles.  The Peasants are rebelling, reaffirm the authority of the aristocracy.  Religious fanatics commit mass murder, hurry off to church.  We see it time and again down through history.

Seen in this light, our devotion to the extreme looks less like a devil-may-care embrace of uncertainty, and more like a conservative retrenchment.

But in all such cases, there comes the creeping realization that not only are things not improving under this program, they are actually getting worse.  Retrenchment collapses under its own burdensome weight.

If what we are seeing abroad is the first faint glimmering of this collapse, we can only hope it reaches our shores before the lunatics destroy our government beyond redemption