The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place. What we can say for sure is this: Access to our data can no longer hinge on secrets—a string of characters, 10 strings of characters, the answers to 50 questions—that only we’re supposed to know. The Internet doesn’t do secrets.
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The Internet doesn’t do secrets.
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You’ll feel worse
There are two in every package so you learn the nature of regret. After you eat the first one, you know enough to stop, but you already know how this is going to play out. The second Twinkie is a promise that no matter how bad you feel, after you eat it you’ll feel worse. And yet, you will.
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The heroic entrepreneur
The Republican story about how societies prosper — not just the Romney story — dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations: an important story with which most people do not identify. The ordinary person does not see himself as a great innovator. He, or she, is trying to make a living and support or maybe start a family. A conservative reform of our health-care system and tax code, among other institutions, might help with these goals. About this person, however, Republicans have had little to say.
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Contempt for the reality of human suffering
We can … know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.
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Additional Thoughts on the Kindle Paperwhite
I posted some initial thoughts about my first couple of hours with the Kindle Papaerwhite a few days ago, and after some more substantial use, I have a few additional thoughts on what I think is an important device.
First, the hardware really does feel good to hold. The finish of the back feels different from the finish of the bezel, and they feel very different from the texture of the screen (a papery matte finish, almost, yes, pulpy), and all feel just right.
It’s just — just! — on the border of being a touch heavier than it ought to be, especially in comparison to the vanilla Kindle 4, which delightfully, is barely there. But this means that the magnetic cover makes it just a smidgen more awkward to hold in one hand than would be utterly idea, but we’re in ultra-micro-femto-nit-picky territory here. That said, the Amazon-made cover is itself really excellent. It wakes and puts to sleep the device, and feels sturdy and, well, classy.
I also mentioned the “blotchiness” of the screen light that appears at the very, very bottom. It is a touch distracting, just barely, but I’ve found I find it less annoying when I change my thinking from “this is a disembodied screen illumination” to “the light emits from the bottom so that’s why there are sight shadows,” it somehow mitigates how much it bothers me. Again, very small stuff.
Most importantly, I’ve found a way to make the most of the higher resolution of the new display and the new menu of fonts. I noted in my first post that though Amazon was offering additional typefaces, they seemed to me to look blocky and sloppy, unlike the much-improved default font. Turns out the real problem is the frequency of page-refreshes for the e-ink. The default setting for the later-generation Kindles is to only do a complete screen refresh (see the screen go black for a split second as every pixel refreshes) every six pages. Though I suppose this speeds up page turns and removes what some see as a distracting black-flash for five out of six pages, it also compromises the integrity of the lettering on the non-refreshed pages. The characters look, well, pixelated and craggy.
By going to the device’s settings and turning off the option for a delay on the full refresh, what you get is, yes, a quick flash of black with each page turn, but also a huge improvement in the resolution of the typefaces, and, more importantly, a huge improvement in the consistency of the typefaces’ quality with each page. No more degradation. Suddenly, the additional font choices, which I had poo-poo’d initially, look much better and cleaner. That said, they’re still not as solid as they ought to be, and the default font still looks best, but now the additional fonts are genuinely usable options.
Allowing the device to refresh the screen with each page turn probably has a detrimental affect on the Kindle’s battery, but given that it’s supposed to last for something like two months, I’m willing to take the hit.
Thinking more globally, as much as I’m enjoying the Kindle Paperwhite, I find myself wishing it wasn’t necessary. The iPad 3 I have has an amazing display, but it’s too big and heavy for really comfortable long-form reading (though I’ve done plenty of that on it). Meanwhile, the Kindle is, by design, less functional as it is exclusively an e-reader. What I wouldn’t give for a device that had the size and comfort of the Kindle and the display quality and functionality of an iPad. Such a device will likely exist soon, but it’s not the iPad mini in its current form. Not with that crummy display. And so I wait.
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Entrenched unfairness
A capital gains tax rate (making money off money) that is lower than the earned income rate (making money off work) is just not fair. Bestowing that rate on hedge-fund managers through a specially designed loophole is just not fair. Allowing the rich to take mortgage deductions for second and third homes, or for homes worth over $1 million, is just not fair. Allowing business owners like me to take myriad deductions that our employees cannot take is just not fair. But, most of all, allowing the wealthy to pay very low tax rates while interest on the war debt accumulates, deficits continue, and middle-class incomes deteriorate is just not fair.
… The GOP can recruit candidates with Hispanic surnames, tone down its platform, prep its members on talking points, and try to duplicate the Obama turnout machine. But if it remains the party of entrenched unfairness, it will never win another national election.
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The art of crawling uselessly
Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.
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Affirm my enlightened opinions
The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook… it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within the bounds of what we already believe, affirms the enlightened opinions we absorb every day in the quality media, the educated bromides we trade on Facebook. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb—the definition of a true avant-garde—our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world.
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Behold the New Jerusalem
… make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
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Hollow tower of hubris
Romney was also no doubt dragging his heels because, as he confidently told journalists earlier Tuesday, “I just finished writing a victory speech. It’s about 1,118 words.” He added, just to drive the point home, “I’ve only written one speech at this point.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, aware of how tight the race was right up to the end, had told reporters, “You always have two speeches prepared because you can’t take anything for granted.” So tell me, who in this scenario seems like the gracious man, and who seems like a hollow tower of hubris? I’m asking for a friend. And that friend is AMERICA.
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Please don’t.
For the press corps, there was no power; at first, there weren’t even any chairs. But none of those things were what made the wait unbearable. That honor belonged to the warm-up act, the ever-execrable Dave Matthews, who at one point uttered a sentence that, coming from him, was so horrific it chills my soul to restate it now: “I’m gonna play a few more.”
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Voting is Apparently All the Rage in Small-Town Maine
Jessica and I voted first thing in the morning today, and I decided to bring Toby along. He’s not even three, of course, and he was bored and a little cranky most of the time (I had forbidden him Munchkins from Dunkin Donuts, and that about severed our familial bonds), but I thought it was important for him to see his parents taking this democracy thing seriously.
Plus, he loves saying, “You know what? JOE BIDEN!” So this was a chance for him to see us vote for him.
Here are the pictures I quickly took of our polling place at the community center in Saco, Maine.
Because I was driving, I did not get what would have been the far more remarkable pictures of the cars backed up for blocks, filled with folks coming to vote before going to work. It was much more than I expected, especially when you consider that Maine is not a swing state this year, our U.S. Senate race to replace Olympia Snowe is a foregone conclusion (you could pretty much call him Senator-Elect Angus King as soon as he announced), and of course, our U.S. House race for our district was also without drama, with our popular Democratic incumbent.
Even given all that, all those people showed up. Maybe we’ll see more today across the country than is commonly assumed.
And in Toby’s own words, “That was good voting!”
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A man in full
One of the few things that Christie and Obama share is a palpable sense that their political opponents are lesser men, though in Obama this exhibits itself as an airy idealism and in Christie as an all-encompassing disgust. What the president’s embrace gave Christie was a grand identity—a national leader, bigger than politics—that for once matched his own self-image. And so here he was, Chris Christie, guardian of the boardwalk, canceler of Halloween, bard of the sausage-and-pepper stand, raging against the storm, ministering to sorrow, a man in full.
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Never saw us coming
To my fellow seculars, skeptics, humanists, and nonbelievers, the political class did not see us coming. For decades, maybe centuries, they’ve been avoiding us, ignoring us, or outright reviling us. And then one day in October, they realized that they couldn’t do that anymore.
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What if it All Goes Horribly Pear-Shaped?
In 2004, though I had high hopes, it was not really a surprise that George W. Bush was “re”-elected. Oh, there was despair. I remember the sharp feeling of disappointment at the majority of the electorate — how could they be fooled by this numbnut? — but I knew we’d all kind of muddle on.
2008 was its own thing. On Election Night it was pretty obvious how it was going to go, even if I was afraid to admit it to myself.
It’s different now. It does still seem that the president is likely to win narrowly, but it remains fully plausible that Romney could eke it out. It’s not the most likely scenario, but it would not be a huge surprise.
So what then? How do I handle that? What should be my response? There was a lot of idle chatter about a mass liberal exodus to America’s Hat in 2004, but this time it feels even more dire. I think that’s because even with a Democratic president (and Congress, if briefly), we still couldn’t seem to stop the entire political and governmental system from collapsing under the weight of the astounding cynicism, greed, and heartlessness of the GOP. Real or not, it feels as though a Romney presidency will only push things over the edge once and for all, and we will have ourselves a country we no longer recognize.
Paranoid? Probably. But I also think there’s at least a few grains of truth here. Clearly, things are going wildly off-track, despite the best intentions and efforts of the few well-meaning folks in Washington that are still left. Once the villains run the entire show, at this point in history, I’m just not confident there’s going to be very much left to salvage.
Considering how utterly discouraging the past couple of years have been (yes, despite the important successes, which have felt, however, more like freak exceptions than a sign of potential), I’m not at all sure that I can continue to be as engaged in national politics if a hollow, cynical phony like Romney is elected. I might take some solace in a Democratic Senate, but let’s be honest, the Senate’s Democrats are not exactly a coterie of socialist hippies.
The one glimmer of interest I might maintain in the wreckage of an Obama defeat might be in the cells of resistance to the newly-slavering GOP behemoth. What does a Senator Elizabeth Warren do to fight the tide of plutocracy? What kind of actitivity do we see from folks on the ground like Cory Booker? They will have so much to push against, though, and it may feel futile.
Again, I suspect I will not have to confront this. But if we are looking down the barrel of a Romney administration, I may have to avert my gaze.
pav alexander 