Lee's Blog

The One runs an ad claiming that Senator McCain is out of touch because he doesn’t use email. Within days, Governor Palin’s email account is illegally accessed and her personal emails, including the cell phone number of her daughter, are spread all over the Internet. Oddly enough, no one appears to have put those two things together and observed that maybe there’s a good reason why a well-known Republican politician would not want to use email.

I must say, there’s one thing I’ve learned from the criminal hacking of Governor Palin’s attack: don’t answer the security questions correctly. If asked for your mother’s maiden name, answer with something else: your best friend’s maiden name, for instance. As long as you know the transformation used to get the name you actually gave, you can still answer the question but no one else can.

I must also say that Yahoo seems extremely insecure, and I would not use it. I have user accounts in various places, and if I have forgotten my password, they allow me to ask for a password reset, but then they email me the temporary password (to a different account, obviously) and make me log in again. In order to interfere with an account like that, you have to guess the security question and then somehow glom onto the temporary password email.

I know of another on-line organization that goes one step further: they call your registered phone number with a temporary password, and they don’t leave a message. You have to press a key to acknowledge the call before the password is given. In order to mess with that kind of account, you’d have to actually steal the person’s phone.

All in all, though, the invasion of Governor Palin’s privacy reminds me of why I am not particularly fond of email — or anything else online — for anything sensitive.

I’ve been asked if it is true that The One refused to salute the flag. It is true. Note where his hands are, by the way. I would not have thought it appropriate for a man to place his hands in that position in a public place, but of course I am not The One.

So, The One has an ad criticizing Senator McCain for, I guess, not changing along with the world since 1982. In particular, for not using a computer and not being able to send an email.

Various people have pointed out that, thanks to his war injuries, it is painful and difficult for Senator McCain to use a keyboard. Way to keep his wartime sacrifices in the public eye!

Others defend The One by pointing out pictures of Senator McCain using cell phones and blackberries … uh, doesn’t that kind of undercut the whole “not changing along with the world” thing? Not to mention that using a cell phone or a blackberry requires different muscles from using a keyboard and is less physically demanding — I say this as someone who uses a keyboard, cell phone, or blackberry all day long.

But what seems to be less often brought up is, why in world should he use email? Yeah, to the generation The One wants to appeal to, email and IM and MySpace and blogs and Twitter may seem like necessary parts of existence, and it may seem unimaginable to just not care about them, but to Senator McCain’s generation (and to me, actually), they seem like conveniences, at best.

Email is not as permanent as snail mail — you can’t file it away unless you make the effort to print it out; it can get lost if your computer has a problem; indeed it can get lost before it ever gets to your computer; it’s much more difficult to prove that this person sent this email than to prove that this person’s signature appears on this snail mail. And if you are willing to settle for something nonpermanent, a phone call or meeting will do. So while there are various devices and programs that allow someone with physical disabilities to use a computer and send email, it isn’t necessarily worth Senator McCain’s while to make use of them.

I myself never had an email account until I started at my current job. I never had an email outside of the corporate email until I got this website (the email account came with it). I simply never saw any reason for it. And yet I was and am a computer programmer.

Why should a Senator need to send email? Why would a President need to send email? When would he have time to use a computer? Frankly, the notion of the President of the United States surfing around on the Web as a part of his presidential duties rather makes my skin crawl. Doing it for fun — sure, whatever he wants; the President needs some diversion from his burdens — but doing it as part of his presidential duties? Can you even imagine what decisions a President might reach by googling the major issues of the day? *Shudder.*

Update: Oh, and this is priceless:

I think they spent months trying to figure out how they can position Obama as better qualified than McCain, and basically came up with the fact that Obama can type.

Update: And did Senator McCain entirely accidentally lead The One astray about his Internet knowledge? It has to be accidental because the various articles people have been citing about his Internet knowledge and ability (or not) to type have predated the campaign. It appears from all the various blogs that I’ve found, that he really can’t type with any facility and may have relied on others to do the manual labor of operating the mouse and keyboard, but nevertheless is very well acquainted with the Internet — and that anybody who knows how to use Google would know that as it has been reported several times over the years.

It happens that I am a fan of the Repairman Jack series. Since a new book is coming out in October, I am rereading the existing series. I don’t know anyone else who reads this series, so I can’t comment on it to anyone in person. But I’ll comment here.

Sometimes Jack drives me nuts with his obtuseness. For instance, in The Haunted Air, his problem is that his girlfriend is pregnant, and in order to marry her and be a real father to the child, he needs to “come up from underground” — become a full member of society. But he can’t do that using his own actual identity, because if he did that the IRS and all other authorities would wonder where he’d been for fifteen years and why he hasn’t filed any tax returns in that time.

So he needs a new identity. Here are the requirements for the new identity:

• Male
• White
• Within ten years either way of Jack’s age
• Sincerely and deeply dead, but death is unknown to the authorities and will never be discovered by them
• No inconvenient friends or family that will come looking for him

Here are some nice-to-haves:

• Native English speaker (since Jack doesn’t speak any other languages)
• U.S. citizen
• Paid his taxes until his (recent) death

Let’s think long and hard. Do we know anyone in the Repairman Jack universe who fits these requirements? I can think of at least one, possibly as many as four.

Let’s start with (drumroll please) Richard Westphalen.

• Richard is certainly male (he fathered a child).
• He appears to be white, since Gia is white (she’s a blond of Italian descent) and there is no mention that he or Vicky is racially different from her.
• There is no mention that either Jack or Richard is dramatically different in age from Gia, so presumably they are both close to her age and therefore to each other’s ages.
• He is sincerely and deeply dead, but the authorities don’t know that and they will not find his body as he was eaten by rakoshi.
• His only living relatives were his aunts and Vicky; Kusum killed his aunts, Vicky won’t go looking for him, and he appears to have had no actual friends who cared about him (he offered his current girlfriend’s life to Kusum in trade for his own).
• He was English and a native English speaker.
• He became a U.S. citizen after marrying Gia.
• Since he became a U.S. citizen in order to pay U.S. taxes instead of U.K. taxes, presumably he actually did pay his taxes.

Taking over Richard’s identity would appear to me to be a simple matter of identity theft (and Jack demonstrated in Crisscross that he could do that) and then smuggling Jack into England. At that point, he could just return to the U.S. using Richard’s passport (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). He could mark time for a few months while using Richard’s money to hire accountants to straighten out the tax situation, then legally change his name to Jack something, making it harder for anyone to notice that Richard Westphalen seems to have … changed. At that point, he could marry Gia and proceed with life.

Assuming he doesn’t want to use Richard’s identity, there are the other possibilities of Lew Ehler, Miles Kenway, and Jim Zaleski, all of whom were eaten by the Otherness in Conspiracies. They are all male, appear to be white and roughly the right age, are certainly dead with no inconvenient bodies, and were native English speakers and U.S. citizens. They may or may not have friends and family, so Jack would have to investigate that before adopting any of their identities.

Since the new identity is supposed to be a major problem for Jack, I can see that the author (F. Paul Wilson) has to prevent him from using such easy solutions. But he doesn’t prevent him — Jack simply never thinks of the possibility even though he has months to do so. Taking over Richard’s identity was the first thing I thought of when the possibility of rejoining the citizenry was mentioned, and it annoys me that Jack never, ever thinks of it, and neither does Abe, who presumably knows something of Richard’s fate.

I have received a complaint that this blog has not been updated in a while despite all the events of the past week … well, I was working all week and spent last night and most of today watching Ike. As mentioned before, my grandmother lived through the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and told me the horrific stories that came out of that day. I was terribly afraid that we were seeing a replay, but it appears that the hurricane jogged at the absolute last minute, sparing Galveston the worst.

On a lighter note, there was a song about the Galveston Hurricane. I learned it as a child, and it has been running through my head all day. I tried to find a CD of the record we had (Mighty Day on Campus). It is not available at Amazon but I could get it from Barnes and Noble.

Treason never prospers,
What’s the reason?
For if it prospers,
None dare call it treason.

The Washington Post, which I had (wrongly) supposed to be a reputable newspaper, published this astonishing screed which demonstrates why women can never be successful or politically powerful in the United States:

Her [Palin's] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.

She possesses female secondary sexual characteristics (for which she has been criticized) and she has demonstrated possession of primary sexual characteristics unless the author means to claim that she and her husband have been kidnapping children to raise as their own — but no, she acknowledges that Governor Palin possesses a functional womb.

But of course! Governor Palin is successful and politically powerful; therefore she is not a woman. QED.

I wonder if Congressman John Spratt of South Carolina and his good buddy former National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (and this year superdelegate) Don Fowler are yukking it up over the fact that Hanna is about to hit northern South Carolina or North Carolina.

Even if Hanna actually hits in North Carolina, South Carolina will get heavy rains and high winds. Innocent people will lose their homes or suffer severe economic loss. Probably someone will die — usually there is a fatal car accident or two in severe weather.

Hurricanes are not a joke.

Otterly adorable

I happen to know I have readers who do not comment, and also don’t roam about the Internet as I do. (You know who you are …) So for your benefit, I am giving links to the Hot Air TV videos. In these videos, Jason Mattera goes undercover (in tie dyed shirt, orange jumpsuit, etc.) to survey the wildlife outside the DNC:

Encounters with the left (August 23)

Marxists unite (August 24)

Levity and levitation (August 25)

Gitmo orange jumpsuit (August 26)

Reconquista (August 29)

My grandmother survived the great Galveston hurricane of 1900. She was only a toddler at the time and told me that all she remembered of it was water pouring into the house. She said her mother told her when she was older that the roof had been ripped off and the rain had poured in. They were not on the island itself but on the mainland, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

The people of Galveston had no idea what was bearing down on them. The hurricane had been observed as it barreled across the Gulf, but communications were so poor that they weren’t warned in anything like enough time. Even if they had been warned, their means of transportation were so primitive that they likely could not have gotten out of the way (though the island surely could and should have been evacuated).

Today, I am sitting in my apartment a thousand miles away and watching Gustav (and Hanna, and Ike) in real time. I watched Gustav stomp across Cuba, observed every jog as it worked its way across the Gulf, and went to bed feeling confident that it wouldn’t hit New Orleans or Galveston but would hit in between, and that nearly everyone had been evacuated out of its path.

What a difference 108 years make.