Month: April 2023

Identity Chaos

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April 23, 2023

Password management, strong and secure protection. Computer laptop keyboard and weak password on memo sticks, office desk background

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Bob Winston’s day began like any other day. He woke early, at 4:30 am, shaved, showered, and dressed before heading downstairs for his usual breakfast of coffee, a banana, and a yogurt. His commute to work was uneventful, and as he sat at his desk, he had no inclination that today he would save the world.

“I sat at my desk, turned on my computer, completed the company-mandated password challenge, then entered my username and password to log in to the network,” a humble Bob said when asked about yesterday morning. “After that, I simply entered a different password into the computer to access the group folder. Then it was simply reentering my usernames and passwords six more times to bring up the day’s files. To be honest, and don’t tell my boss, I did a little online shopping and read the news! That was just me entering my usernames and passwords on the four websites I was shopping, trying to find a gift for my wife. I like to catch up on the news by entering my usernames and passwords on the three news sites I read.”

Bob does not say that when signing into his Amazon account, he accidentally mistyped “Amazon,” which brought him to a covert dark web portal operated by the Russian FSB responsible for maintaining and, if necessary, activating the Russian nuclear arsenal. “I had no idea!” said Bob, laughing at his innocent mistake. “At first, it looked like the normal Amazon front page. I try to be an attentive husband, and my wife had mentioned in passing that she was interested in reading Atomic Habits for work. I entered Atomic Habits in the Amazon search field and was brought to a subfolder that had nothing to do with the book! I figured Amazon had a glitch on their site and decided to try again later. Claire, my wife, had also mentioned that she had spoken with Mildred, our neighbor, who said her husband Martin was planning on playing in an Under 35 softball league this summer. Being a bit older than Martin, I wondered if there were any Over 35 leagues, as I loved playing baseball. I thought I typed in “U35 leagues”, but I must have accidentally hit the 2 and 3 together and typed “U235″ instead. Well! Let me tell you, that brought me to an exciting site! My screen filled with schematics of missiles in bunkers and aboard submarines. What the heck is this, I thought!”

At the same time in Virginia, Virginia Sims began her morning at the NSA. “Yeah, just another manic Monday, I thought,” said Ms. Sims. I spent the first three hours of my morning, just like every other morning, signing into the various networks, folders, and files. I’m no different than anyone else. Just an endless series of usernames and passwords! Every day, three or four sites require me to update my password because they are outdated.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to develop a new variation on a password. There are just so many to remember!” laughs Ms. Sims. When she signed on to the last network, Ms. Sims’s screen was filled with a red background and the words “Russian Nuclear Arsenal Operational!”

“Well, you can imagine, my heart jumped into my throat! I had been listening to an audiobook on the way to work and hadn’t caught up on the news, so I was entirely in the dark about whatever geopolitical drama was unfolding!

I called my boss, but he needed to remember the password to his network. He reset it on Friday, but he forgot to write it down! He struggled to remember it, and more than once forgot to enter that he was not a robot which kicked him back to the beginning. Once he did remember it, he told me he was booted twice again when he didn’t correctly select all the photos containing stoplights or, what was it, crosswalks?”

“Anyway, he finally got signed in and saw the message I had sent him. He called me immediately and said he was unaware of any crisis but would contact the CIA and Pentagon to confirm we hadn’t missed anything.”

As Ms. Sims waited to hear back from her boss, Bob Winston struggled to get back to what he thought was a search for a softball league.

“The screen with the missiles and submarines looked real enough, but my son sometimes plays video games on my computer at home. I figured maybe the sign-on information he used for his Xbox had migrated to my work computer because the credit card was tied to me. Anyway, I’m curious, so I clicked on one of the missiles.”

“Instantly, the missile turned red, and I was brought to a different screen showing a list of coordinates. I’m not a cartographer, so I didn’t know what the latitude and longitude numbers meant! All I saw was SS-27 Mod 2 (Yars) and many numbers. It looked fun, so I clicked the big red button at the bottom of the screen to see what would happen! The screen started blinking green and then returned to the previous screen. Well, that was anticlimactic, I thought! No inflight cut-scene, no BOOM! Nothing! What struck me was that after all the usernames and passwords I had used all morning, you would think I would need some authorization to launch a missile in what I thought was a game! Poor game design, I figured!”

At NORAD and worldwide, screens started screaming. People began panicking over the seemingly unprovoked first-strike launch of a multiple-warhead nuclear missile from the Vladivostok peninsula in eastern Russia.

At the Pentagon, line officers began calling their superiors. Within minutes, it is reported, though unconfirmed, the President was relocated to a secure bunker in an undisclosed location conferring with the Joint Chiefs on both an intercept mission and a counter strike with nuclear munitions located in eastern Europe. And, as has been reported, the bunker was slowed in being brought online due to password issues with the secure internal network. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Miley, with a nervous chuckle, recounts the fifteen minutes it took his staff to sign on to the network because a Lt. Commander misspelled “Analytics” three times in a row, forcing him to reset his password using an email link, an authenticator, proving he was not a robot, and identifying all the photos containing peanuts.

In Virginia, Virginia Sims received confirmation from her boss that a nuclear launch had been verified by NORAD and geostationary satellites orbiting in low earth orbit over North Korea. Her mind flashed to a similar situation she had read about in school.

On September 26, 1983, at the height of the Cold War, engineer Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces waited rather than responded when confronted by notification of an intercontinental ballistic missile launch from the United States and four subsequent launches. While awaiting corroborating evidence (which never came) rather than escalating the situation to his superiors, Lt. Col Petrov prevented initiating the world-ending mutually assured destruction doctrine. What turned out to be a false reading of sunlight on high-altitude clouds was mistaken by the new Soviet early warning system as a nuclear attack. Lt. Col Petrov saved the planet that day.

Ms. Sims, with Lt. Col Petrov in the back of her mind, began, essentially, reverse engineering the situation to back beginning. After signing into the NSA internet monitoring system using a handheld token of rotating numbers, verifying she was not a robot, and identifying all the photos of chickens, Ms. Sims quickly traced the IP address to Bob Winston’s insurance company computer in Burke, Virginia.

However, in a twist usually saved for cheesy Hollywood movies, the situation ended as quickly as it began.

“Yeah, I heard the coffee machine in the break room and knew either my boss or my colleague Barbara had arrived for work. It was time for me to get out of the game. At least, I thought it was a game! I clicked the back button on my computer, bringing me back to the screen showing the missile. A popup screen appeared, and I clicked Terminate, which I honestly thought was an overly dramatic way to say End Game. Then a second popup appeared with a space for a password. I have no idea, I thought. I heard my boss’s footsteps approaching me and just entered “password” into the computer. My browser closed just before my boss said good morning. Whew!”

High above the Pacific Ocean, the SS-27 Mod 2 ICBM carrying multiple nuclear warheads detonated in a harmless fireball, splashing pieces into the ocean, witnessed only by sea life and a lone longline trawler.

“It could have been much worse,” said Ms. Sims in a monumental understatement. “Thankfully, Bob entered the right password -“password”!”

The Spectrum of Art

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“All art conspires toward the condition of music.” Walter Pater

I agree with Mr. Pater, one of Oscar Wilde’s influences and a proponent of Aestheticism (Art for art’s sake, i.e., neither social nor political).

Artists must create. It is in their blood and must be birthed onto the canvas. I use the word “birthed” purposely. I have seen the great effort artists willingly undertake to create art from nothing. As the blank page stares back at the writer, so does the white canvas mock the artist. The effort required to transform nothingness into art is akin to birth.

I once needed help with where to rank photography in the order of the arts. Artists must labor (pun intended) over their work to bring their vision onto the canvas, but the photographer “simply” captures the world before them. Now, I do not dismiss the intimate understanding the photographer has over their instrument nor the “eye” they must exercise when capturing the scene before them. However, historically at least, once the shutter is activated, most of the artistic influence of the photographer is exhausted. True, in days of old, efforts could be taken by the photographer with the development process (more additive here, more time there) to bump up the contrast or wash out a double exposure. And today, image editing software can transform any photo into a masterpiece with masking, editing, filters, and many other tools. But is that just window-dressing of an existing property? When I was younger, I would have agreed. However, I now believe photography blends perfectly well into the prism of art without hesitation or equivocation.

Allow me to diverge into another art form, music. Here, Mr. Pater is spot on. I have always said musical genres speak to the individual emotions of humans. Whatever mood I am in, there is music that matches it. A sad song can spark creativity in me. Black Sabbath can assuage my anger. Jazz can even out my temperament. Classical can elevate my senses. Smart, clever lyrics can drive me to my keyboard. A David Gilmour solo can transcend words altogether. Unlike other art forms, music elicits emotion from the audience via the ears rather than the eyes. Certain composers can tell a story with their music without the employment of any other sense.

I once attended a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, where a fully-fledged story presented itself in my mind. As it began, the piano sounded very playful, almost childlike, not in its complexity but in how it meandered in and out of the string instruments behind it. At some point, I imagined the piano as a child and the stringed instruments as the parents and extended family. The strings would play a piece first, and the piano would respond, often playful but still in keeping with the string direction. It was always strings first and then piano. Sometimes the piano would go off into a new direction without accompaniment as if a child was wandering around in the safety of the family’s embrace.

The second piece introduced the wind instruments (who’d been there all along but had yet to stand out). Because of the increased complexity of the music, I envisioned the piano as a teen beginning to interact with the wind instruments, which I saw as friends/schoolmates/lovers/colleagues. The piano would sometimes lead, and the wind instruments would follow. And then the strings would return with the refrain, telling the piano to come back into the fold and remember its responsibilities.

The third piece saw the ascension of the piano to a full-grown man (I say man because Emanuel Ax was the pianist, it could have been a fully-grown woman). The piano-led, and the strings followed. The piano assumed the refrain to which the strings (and sometimes the winds) would follow, but always with a sense of individuality and playfulness in the piano. It was as if the piano was now the patriarch/matriarch of the family and responsible for it, but it had never given up its individualistic flair. Perhaps I heard what I wanted to hear to make the story fit, but after the first piece, I anxiously awaited the next piece to see if my storyline fit- and it did every time.

By the end, I was in tears, weeping for the story Mozart had told me that day, written 234 years before. I had listened to the concerto over the previous few months, anticipating the performance. Still, there was something about seeing the piano up front, the strings extending as wings behind it, and the wind instruments centered in the back that made the story explode before my eyes. If this all sounds incredibly corny and uncultured, or if I’m missing the true intent of the concerto, I apologize. But as I sat there applauding, tears running down my face, I knew I had seen the storytelling power of music.

Painters can do the same thing with their medium. Stand before a Bierstadt landscape, and I swear you can hear far-off thunder or birds chirping. Stand before a Monet, and I promise you’ll see the wind interact with the haystacks. Stand before a Michelangelo, and I swear you’ll see muscles tense before your eyes.

Ultimately, the difference between painters, sculptors, composers, and photographers is one of perspective. Painters and sculptors offer you their vision. Impressionists do not provide you with a photorealistic version of the scene before them. Instead, they offer you their interpretation of that scene. You, the viewer, can choose what to see in the offering. Stand up close, and you’ll see the artist’s effort, brush strokes, and palette knife sweeps. Stand back, and you see sunlight where a smudge was, passion where disparate colors touched up close. Same with the sculptor. Go to a museum and listen as a docent regales a group with seemingly pretentious interpretations of the work before them. But do listen! Because while you may disagree with things being said or not “get” specific points, they offer you a vision into the artist, a glimpse into their intent.

The difference between viewing a painter’s or sculptor’s interpretation of the world before them and the photographer’s is a shift in perspective. As a viewer of paintings and sculptures, we are a passive audience of another’s life. As a viewer of photography, perhaps because it is easier for our 3D brains to insert us into a realistic 2D scene, we are the center of the world, active rather than passive. We see a photo of the shore and envision ourselves in that place. We see a picture of the mountains and ourselves on the plains before them. We may recollect a memory from a photograph of a familiar subject that fills us with the accompanying emotions. Alternatively, we may inject ourselves into an unknown scene, envisioning ourselves in that space and projecting matching feelings.

Mr. Pater is correct in that all art aspires to the purity of music in that music exists beyond our eyes. But in the end, whether it is photography, painting, music, sculpture, poetry, or prose, they all live on the spectrum of art. Ultimately, the spectrum of art is another analogy for the full scope of human emotion.

Memories in a Bucket

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When I was young, my sister and I were charged with going to the Newport Creamery each night to get my father a pint of Maple Walnut and Walnut Fudge mixed. The bottom half of the pint was Maple Walnut ice cream, and the top half was Walnut Fudge ice cream. We did this most nights. It’s a memory my feeble brain still recalls. My sister is a year younger than me. We lived on the west side of West Main Road in Middletown, Rhode Island. The Newport Creamery was about half a mile away on the east side of West Main Road. Getting there required us to cross West Main Road at dusk or early evening when we were 10 or 12. And we thought nothing of it.

Seeing that road now, both with the volume of traffic and speed at which cars travel, it’s a wonder we saw our teens. And that’s one of the problems with viewing yesterday’s events through today’s lens. When we were younger, speed limits meant something. And while Aquidneck Island was always a tourist spot and Navy town, traffic back then was a fraction of what it is today.

The Newport Creamery holds a special place in my heart. Many an evening, after a Little League, Babe Ruth, American Legion, or High School baseball game, or just on a warm summer evening, “The Creamery” was a welcoming place to celebrate a win or lament a loss. I thought they had the best chocolate chip (and coffee) ice cream. And their Junior Hamburger was my favorite. Two, with a side of fries, please! And then a Turtle Sundae my way (chocolate chip ice cream, hot fudge sauce, caramel sauce, marshmallow topping, whipped cream, and a cherry).

They also have a milkshake made with iced milk instead of ice cream called an Awful Awful. Despite its off-putting name, it is so called because it is “Awful Big and Awful Good.” The challenge on the menu said if you could drink three, you’d get the fourth free. How could a teenage boy not accept that challenge? And at least once, I got my fourth free Awful Awful. Always vanilla flavored (for me), the marginal return on enjoyment waned dramatically on the second and third, only to rally for the free one. And then I’d walk home feeling the liquid slosh around inside me like my stomach was at high tide during a named storm.

The Creamery also sells half gallons of their ice cream in plastic buckets. Every home in Rhode Island has a few buckets holding various items (buttons or ribbons in the craft area, multiple nails and screws in the garage, marbles and toys in the kid’s room). And if I had access to the photographs in every home, I could find a photo of every child with the bucket on their head. I know I have them of my kids.

The Newport Creamery has had financial troubles in the past decade or so, and while I don’t know what the future holds for any of us, despite heavier and faster traffic than when I was a kid, I hope The Creamery exists for a long time into the future. There are many Awful Awfuls to drink and plastic buckets for kids to wear. And while my sister will argue that Frosty Freez is the iconic summer ice cream stand on “the island,” especially given that she worked there many a summer (and I concede to making a pilgrimage there a few times each summer), The Creamery holds many more memories for me.

No one has a perfect childhood or flawless life. But there are idyllic memories of youth and raising children, and The Creamery holds both for me.

My Wife Is Dating

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My wife is dating. Not sure how I feel about that. And before this becomes the screenplay for an A&E/History Channel/Oxygen made-for-tv movie, let me explain.

Dating at any time is hard. Finding someone who checks all your boxes is tough. Six numbers and the Powerball are easier. My sister-in-law is learning this again after almost two decades. Wracked with confidence issues and subjected to scammers and men only looking for one thing, she’s enlisted the help of my wife to keep her keel even and search positive as she traverses the pitfalls of online dating.

I can tell you, based on the photos they’ve shown me on one of the dating sites she’s subscribed to, that:

  1. Men post the absolute worst pictures of themselves.
  2. It appears that men think a photo of themselves holding a fish is an aphrodisiac.
  3. Men only want one thing and are willing to skip the 800 steps before that one thing to get it.
  4. They think a photo of them in a costume (elf, coconut bra, etc.) will get them dates, not just a permanent position on aisle 127 at Walmart.
  5. Men post the worst photos of themselves. Did I mention that?
  6. Men only want one thing. Did I mention that?

A hit to your self-confidence can make you believe the hurtful things others have told you about yourself. Worse, it can make you accept less than you deserve, potentially setting yourself up for future heartache when you finally realize you deserve better. Maintaining your self-worth while enduring the endless line of “not in your wildest dreams” losers on these sites is critical and borders on the impossible. You truly need an advocate, someone in your corner to counter your wavering self-esteem, and a sounding board to give you unbiased opinions on the horribly photographed individuals on your screen as you swipe from one “Man with Fish” photo to the next. Seriously, what’s with the fish? Here’s an idea! How about a photo with you in front of a bookshelf or you holding a picture of you and your sixth-grade spelling bee participation certificate?

Look. I get it. There are all types out there. I’m sure there are women looking for men who hold fish or men on a Harley, or men who can’t spell. Some women can’t spell, ride Harleys, and like fish. However, when my sister-in-law is looking for love, she’s looking for a companion with whom she can spend the rest of her life. She’s looking for someone to travel with, watch movies with, discuss books with, describe her day at work with, and grow old together. Someone who will love her as much as she loves them, someone who respects her. It’s not easy to find that person. Does anyone want a Powerball ticket?

And so, my wife is dating. She’s texting on her sister’s behalf on dating sites, keeping the conversation respectful and probing for that kernel of honesty, that proverbial needle in the haystack. She shares with me what they write, and so many of them flame out within 24 hours when they cross the line (skipping those 800 steps) or reveal themselves as scammers looking for money or someone needing a dictionary.

Here’s some advice for the men out there from a guy who knows how to fish, ride a motorcycle, and spell. Lose the fish, guys. Put on a clean shirt and ask someone to take your picture (or learn how to use the 3-second delay on your cell phone camera). If you want a relationship, don’t ask them whether they “landscape” in the first text. That’s not a relationship. Texting is hard enough because it is devoid of emotional intent. Proofread what you type and try to project how your writing will be interpreted. Take the extra few seconds to ensure you spelled everything correctly. Seriously, it’s not that hard! You’re making all men look bad when you skip the steps and can’t spell “steps.”

Incredible women are looking for their Mr. Right. Self-esteem is always on the line when dating, on both sides. You leave yourself vulnerable and subject to hurt every time you engage with someone on dating sites. Put your best foot forward. Take a good picture. Spell correctly. She’s out there. I know one. And then my wife can stop online dating. Thanks.

Today

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“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

With these words, quoted from Aeschylus, Robert Kennedy consoled African American campaign workers (and millions worldwide) in Indianapolis on this night 55 years ago after having announced to the crowd that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated earlier that evening in Memphis.

If you get a chance today, watch the speech he gave. It is shocking in its beauty and honesty. It was reported that the Secret Service told Kennedy they could not guarantee his safety if the crowd became violent. He gave the speech anyway.

He said, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. was 39 years old on that day. Imagine a different universe where he lived. What would the United States look like today? Would we have faced the horrific stain of slavery head-on and ensured equality among all our citizens? Would we finally be living in a nation where his (now grown) are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character? Maybe. Probably not. Intransigence and ennui ossify both the disengaged and unaffected. It is worth noting, Robert Kennedy was dead two months later, himself the victim of America’s gun violence.

At 58 years old, after a decade of railing against gun violence, that uniquely American disease, I am still haunted by the following sentiments when tending to my own heart and not the soul of our troubled nation:

Robert Kennedy:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Christopher Hitchens:

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t be neutral. It’s that you won’t be able to stay neutral.”

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my ‘race,’ unless I was permitted to put ‘human.’ The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put ‘white,’ which is not even a color let alone a ‘race,’ and I sternly declined to put ‘Caucasian,’ which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King’s campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you ‘black.”

Today, a former president was arrested and indicted on criminal charges in Manhattan. Donald Trump is the antithesis of Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. because while they carried the torch of justice to move society ever closer to a bright future, he chose to pour gasoline on smoldering embers and moved us backward toward our dark past.

At a time when our country is as divided as ever, short of outright conflict, I hope there are more of us whose “purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better” than those who want to see it burn.