“Even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

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Everyone should go read this Vanity Fair piece on airport security, in which the author interviews perennial Heathen favorite Bruce Schneier.

As has been pointed out abundantly before, and by smarter people than I, NOTHING being done “because of 9/11” is at all useful from a security perspective except these three point:

  • Reinforcing the cockpit doors;
  • Positive luggage matching, such that it’s no longer possible to have your bags fly if you don’t board; and
  • You and I and everyone else reading this knows to resist any potential hijacker, period, full stop.

Literally everything else the TSA is doing — and they spend billions a year, including over a billion on the cancer-and-porno scanners — is a complete waste of time, money, and awareness. The expenditure, both in real dollars and in inconvenience and lost productivity, is far, far out of scale with the potential threat. In the last decade, orders of magnitude more people have drowned in their tubs than have been killed by terrorists. It’s a real “boy who cried wolf” situation — we’re watching the wrong things, at the wrong places, and in so doing making it less likely we’ll notice real threats. Remember, the terrorists’ goal isn’t to blow up or crash airplanes. The terrorists’ goal is to sow terror. Harden airports? Maybe they’ll hit malls.

And, as the title notes, we’re not even making airports secure. (Not that it matters.) Here’s the full quote:

“We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this–and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

Wise words on strategic default

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Go read the whole thing. I’ve never faced the kind of financial black hole that would make such a default a good move for me, but I believe I’d make the same analysis the author has.

We normally say that a company “went bankrupt,” implying that it had no choice. But when, recently, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy, it did so deliberately. The airline had four billion dollars in the bank and could have kept paying its bills. But it has been losing money for a while, and its board decided that it was foolish to keep throwing good money after bad. Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load and allow it to break its union contracts, so that it can slim down and cut costs.

American wasn’t stigmatized for the move. Instead, analysts hailed it as “very smart.” It is now generally accepted that when it’s economically irrational for a company to keep paying its debts it will try to renegotiate them or, failing that, default. For creditors, that’s just the price of business. But when it comes to another set of borrowers the norms are very different. The bursting of the housing bubble has left millions of homeowners across the country owing more than their homes are worth. In some areas, well over half of mortgages are underwater, many so deeply that people owe forty or fifty per cent more than the value of their homes. In other words, a good percentage of Americans are in much the same position as American Airlines: they can still pay their debts, but doing so is like setting a pile of money on fire every month.

These people have no hope of ever making a return on their investment in their homes. So for many of them the rational solution would be a “strategic default”–walking away from the mortgage and letting the bank take the house. Yet the vast majority of underwater borrowers keep faithfully paying their mortgages; studies suggest that perhaps only a quarter of all foreclosures are strategic. Given how much housing prices have fallen, the question is why more people aren’t just walking away.

Welcome to the Police State

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Just so we’re clear, it turns out that it’s totally legal for the cops to roll up on you, search you without any cause, and beat you silly, and you have utterly no right to resist. In fact, they may charge you with a crime, just for fun.

I’m not kidding.

This is, of course, especially true if you happen to be black.

End immunity. Now. No agent of the state should enjoy such protections not afforded to our citizens.

Well, color me surprised

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I’ve enjoyed the work of David Milch for years, especially Deadwood. Longtime Heathen also know of my deep affection for the work of Richard Yates, and even that I knew him a little, in the last years of his life, when he was the writer in residence at Alabama during my time there.

It’s only in reading this bit here, about the wildly bizarre connection Richard Yates has with Seinfeld, that I discover something else:

When Yates was teaching at Iowa, Milch was one of his students.

All we’re going to say about Hitchens

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The Onion, 2003: Christopher Hitchens Forcibly Removed From Trailer Park After Drunken Confrontation With Common-Law Wife:

Noted author, social critic, and political gadfly Christopher Hitchens was once again the focus of controversy Monday, when he was forcibly removed from Happy Trails trailer park following a drunken confrontation with Noreen Bodell, 39, his common-law wife of 14 years.

Responding to a domestic-disturbance call, police arrived at the couple’s double-wide trailer at approximately 2:15 p.m. to find Hitchens and Bodell throwing dishes at each other. When the officers attempted to remove Hitchens from the premises, the leftist intellectual became physically and verbally abusive toward the officers, calling them “shitkickers,” “bitches,” and “effete liberal apologists for the atrocities of late-stage capitalism.”

Having consumed what sources described as “a substantial amount of single-malt scotch,” Hitchens then burst into tears, yelling, “That woman never understood me for who I am. I want to talk to [Harper’s editor Lewis] Lapham. Lapham’s the only one who understands me.”

Go read it all.

Dept. of Cold, Hard, Truth: Branding is bullshit.

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Nobody gives a rat’s ass about your brand.

So HP may or may not be getting a new logo. This is a complete waste of their time. What HP should do to make people care about them is simple: Return to making innovative products that people love, like they did in the 80s and early 90s. They chose not to be that company anymore at some point, and became an also-ran in a field of equally competent printer and PC vendors. Oh, and they do IT outsourcing, which goes about as well as you’d expect, and their fortunes are fading as a result.

So now they’re spending money on a new logo to fix it? That’s sure as shit going to do one thing: line the pockets of starry-eyed marketing and branding people only too happy to cash their checks. It’ll also be nice for the printing companies who do HP’s cards, and the signmakers who do the buildings, but it won’t make one fucking iota of difference to any actual customer, because brand equity is built on experience with the company, not a snazzy Illustrator file and new color palette.

This is very, very close to something people are noticing about magazine treatments on the iPad. Briefly, the Conde Nast or whomever marketers in charge of the interface for Newsstand placement or custom apps are all mad for fancy splash screens that show off the magazine’s logo. And no reader has ever cared about that. They want the content. Popping up a splash screen that eats 2 or 3 seconds every time the user wants to resume reading your magazine says “we care more about Branding than we do about you the customer,” and see above in the value of branding. In this case, aggressive logo displays are DEFINITELY having an effect on how people view the company, but it’s not the effect the crystalgazing marketdroids had in mind.

Branding is to corporate America as fad diets are to those of us fighting the battle of the bulge: a waste, ultimately. To lose weight and be healthy, all you really need to do is move your feet more than your fork. It’s a lifestyle change, not a thing you do once. You can dress it up (more veggies! less meat! more cardio! add yoga!), but that’s it at its most basic point. Switching to an all-lentils-and-spinach diet for six weeks isn’t going to create lasting value or change.

The corporate equivalent of “move your feet more than your fork” is almost as simple: Make good, reliable products that people like. Make sure that, when people have a problem with your product, you take care of them within reason.

That’s it. That’s who HP used to be, but are not anymore. That’s who Apple is now, obviously. That’s who Sony used to be, but aren’t anymore. It’s who Zappos and Amazon are, at least most of the time.

Just like weight loss, there is no silver bullet. You have to do the hard work of actually BEING a good company for people to view you as a good company. Paying a bunch of graphic designers and Flash programmers to rebrand your website is a waste of time if you’re not making real commitments to quality and customer satisfaction — and may still be a waste of time even if you are. Worse, fancy re-branding efforts come off as smoke and mirrors designed to distract customers and investors even if they’re not (and, let’s be honest, frequently they ARE). So skip them.

Do good work.

Make your customers happy.

The brand will follow.

Again, start yelling

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Go read this right now.

The current Defense Authorization bill includes some provisions that would make mincemeat of our most basic freedoms:

One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past. Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.

How many did YOU have?

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On this list of you-might-be-an-early-adopter-if-you-owned-these over at Wired, I find myself batting .500: I had:

  • a MiniDisc player;
  • A Sharp Wizard;
  • Three Newtons, unfairly maligned as they were;
  • An original Palm Pilot.

I missed both eyeglass displays, and all my modems were at least 1200 baud (and built-in, without acoustic couplers). I’m also pretty sure WebTV shouldn’t be on this list — it was a product for technophobes, not people who actually knew technology.

Followup on the Lowe’s vs. Muslims Funtime

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TPM has a rundown that also includes some great quotes from the Florida Family Association, aka the right wing nutjobs who badgered Lowe’s into pulling their ads from the program:

The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.

In other words: “Your show about Mooslims doesn’t show them to be insane freaks like we all know they are! Fix it!”

Wow.

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Urged on by the “Florida Family Association,” Lowe’s has pulled its ads from a TLC reality program about a Muslim family in Michigan because the show isn’t bigoted enough.

The FFA said:

“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish,” the group said about the show, a docu-soap chronicling everyday Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan that debuted last month. “Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.”

Two Must-Reads on the BCS

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First, there’s Pat Forde‘s screed, which is spot on.

Then there’s this extraordinarily delicious BCS takedown from an LSU fan blog. The author would prefer OSU in the title game, but that’s not the axe he’s grinding — he concedes that reasonable people disagree there. After making that point, though, he points out just how fucking broken the entire thing is, how silly some of the ranking decisions are, and how the system discourages any adventurous regular-season scheduling. Example: Stanford is ranked above Oregon in the final tally despite Oregon beating them on the field largely because Oregon has two losses to Stanford’s one. But the Ducks’ first loss was to LSU, the unanimous #1.

Key point: both authors consider this year’s Sugar Bowl lineup to be an abomination before God. And they’re right.

Here We Go

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The rematch is on. Check ESPN — it’s on TV, but not the site yet. Sucks to be the lost-to-Iowa State Cowpokes, but this is the right choice if you want the top 2 teams in the country to play for the title.

It’s Probably Time To Yell

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In the early days of the so-called War on Terror, Heathen was by no means the only place crying foul at the power grabs committed by our government supposedly in the name of keeping us safe. In particular, the idea that it was okay to kidnap people without trial or recourse troubled lots of folks, and still does. Equally troubling was something we all said then, too, which was once governments acquire power, they are loathe to give it up. The damage Bush and a complicit Congress did in this regard is very long lasting, and we see more of that today.

Congress is presently debating a bill that would expand the power of the military to kidnap civilians — even Americans, and even on US soil — in the name of preventing terrorism. The government is hooked on war, and will keep this up unless we make it clear we won’t stand for it. Under no circumstances is it acceptable for an American citizen to be held without trial, without counsel, and without due process of law. It wasn’t okay on September 10, 2001, and it didn’t magically become okay the next day. With OBL dead and Al Qaeda essentially decapitated, there’s certainly no argument to be made that suspension of such basic protections is in any way warranted.

(Did you notice that we assassinated an American citizen abroad a few months ago? Did you notice how the media called him “US-born” So-and-So and not “American citizen So-and-So”? Make no mistake about it; that guy was as American as I am, and could’ve voted absentee. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, it should. Consider not how a relatively benign conservative or liberal administration will act with such power. Consider instead how your least favorite candidate, your worst electoral nightmare, might use it.)

Go read more from Glenn Greenwald, who has some very astute analysis. Even the White House’s threatened veto isn’t all that reassuring, since their reasoning is that these choices are exclusively Executive in nature, and none of Congress’ business.

Our ideals are only our ideals if we fight for them. Our government is getting away with abrogating rights by crying “terrorist” every ten minutes. This should bother you. It sure bothers me.

Your phone is spying on you

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No, really. CarrierIQ is installed on most Android, Blackberry, and Nokia phones, and reports everything you do upstream to CIQ and, presumably, the carrier. You cannot turn it off, and there is no opt-out provision short of rooting the phone and installing a new OS.

Dept. of Menacing Cuteness

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Go check out this MeFi post; it’s video of a guy being sorta played with, sorta stalked by a coyote. Being Canadian, the videographer is unfailingly polite, which is kind of adorable.

It’s not 100% clear to me that this is predation behavior — a man is way bigger than a coyote, so a lone individual probably wouldn’t try to take him down — and the animal’s body language is very, very similar to domestic dog “play” behavior, but it’s still a neat nature encounter.

OOPS!

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Alabama is reportedly reconsidering its anti-immigrant law after it resulted in a white German manager for Mercedes getting the third degree instead of, you know, brown people.

Ah, Alabama.