Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Should we go back to paper ballots?

My latest article at Intellectual Takeout

Barbara Simons is a female computer scientist, which means she’s in a minority in the male-dominated computer field.

But she is also a part of a significant minority of tech minds who think that we ought to go back to paper ballots in order to ensure proper security.

Simons, a retired pioneer researcher at IBM is the subject of a feature article in The Atlantic magazine. According to the article, Simons’ has been a voice in the wilderness on the issue of the risks of electronic voting systems. But with concerns about Russian hacking of voting systems that have arisen since the 2016 election, that is now changing.

At the annual Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas, Simons participated in a staged attack on voting machines. “I lose sleep over this. I hope you will too,” she told the participants, mostly hackers.

Four voting machines had been secured for the event, three of them types still in use. One team of hackers used radio signals to eavesdrop on a machine as it recorded votes. Another found a master password online. Within hours of getting their hands on the machines, the hackers had discovered vulnerabilities in all four.

Reporters who before the 2016 election would have ignored her, crowded around her after the event.

“The problem with cybersecurity,” said Simons, “is that you have to protect against everything, but your opponent only has to find one vulnerability.”

In addition, ballots must be “anonymous and yet verifiable, secret and yet accountable,” says Eric Hodge of CyberScout, a security-services company that advises states and counties.

Paper, Simons said, is the best answer to this riddle. Marked clearly and correctly, it’s a portable and transparent record of voter intent, one that voters themselves can verify, at least while the ballot is still in their possession. It’s also a permanent record, unlike computer memory, which can always be overwritten. “There’s no malware that can attack paper,” Simons said. “We can solve this. We know how to do it.”

Sometimes the most primitive technology is the best.

Monday, November 06, 2017

Has Motherhood Been Politicized?

My most recent post at Intellectual Takeout:

The chief characteristic of postmodern secular liberalism is its tendency to openly deny reality.

The most recent occasion of opposing the obvious is Psychologist Erica Komisar, whose new book, Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, has come close to causing fainting spells among the Cultural Authorities.

What did Komisar claim in this seemingly innocuous book that has so traumatized our cultural elites?

That “mothers are biologically necessary for babies.”

She also claimed that a mother provides different benefits to a newborn child than a father, and that the absence of mothers can lead to developmental problems for the child later in life.

Komisar came to these conclusions after treating families for three decades, first as a clinical social worker and then an analyst. As she told the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

“What I was seeing was an increase in children being diagnosed with ADHD and an increase in aggression in children, particularly in little boys, and an increase in depression in little girls. More youngsters were also being diagnosed with ‘social disorders’ whose symptoms resembled those of autism—‘having difficulty relating to other children, having difficulty with empathy.’”
Taranto says Komisar “started to put the pieces together,” and found that “the absence of mothers in children’s lives on a daily basis was what I saw to be one of the triggers for these mental disorders.” She began to devour the scientific literature and found that it reinforced her intuition.

Of course, this should come as a surprise to no one with any experience of family life. But while Komisar’s opinions are based on both experience and research, there are those who oppose it based on ideology.

Her book has been welcomed on Christian radio and Fox & Friends, but shunned by NPR, and covered coldly by Good Morning America, whose interviewer (according to Komisar) told her before going on air, “I don’t believe in the premise of your book at all. I don't like your book.”

Literary agents rejected her book because it “would make women feel guilty.” She was rejected from a speaking engagement for a similar reason and told, “How dare you.”

Unfortunately, Komisar is an outlier in a world in which ideology now trumps reason, evidence, and common sense.

Thursday, November 02, 2017

Why the pedophile scandal in Hollywood was hushed up

My post today at Intellectual Takeout:

According to Hollywood logic, if you sexually harass underage boys, for Heaven's sake don't also say that you're gay.

In recent days, the floodgates have opened, and the cesspool of sexual harassment inside Hollywood is being revealed for all to see.

Hollywood... you know: the people who like to give the rest of us sanctimonious lectures at their self-congratulatory awards ceremonies about how we should act?

It started out with Harvey Weinstein, a film producer and former studio executive. The news about Weinstein has been followed by actresses' accounts of sexual harassment that they received at the hands of other Hollywood figures. 

But as it turns out, Hollywood's male sexual predators are not out only for young (adult) women, but boys. We've moved from sexual harassment to pedophilia.

The first revelation came when Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of sexual harassment when Rapp was 14 years old. Now it is coming to light that the scandal is much bigger.

Matthew Valentinas, an entertainment lawyer, has produced a documentary film about the sexual abuse of teenage boys in Hollywood called "An Open Secret." On an episode of the WEMU public radio show "1A" that aired on Wednesday of this week, Valentinas described a world in which boys run a gauntlet of sexual predators.

There is, says Valentinas, a "well-coordinated, planned out grooming system in Hollywood which is very well organized." Boys are lured in by the promise of fame and fortune, are then given drugs, get "passed around," all the while having their careers carefully controlled by their abusers.

And, as the title of Valentinas' film attests, this is not something other people in Hollywood didn't know about. But despite this having gone on for years, none of the people who are constantly lecturing the rest of us on our political and social priorities thought to say anything.

They didn't have much to say about the systematic sexual predation that infected the whole industry, but they have plenty to say about one errant remark by Kevin Spacey.

Spacey's depredations are one thing. But you know what many in Hollywood are really steamed about? That he announced he was gay after his lechery was discovered.

Everyone knows it is absolutely impermissible to imply that there is any relation between being gay and pedophilia. Pedophilia is bad, but attributing it to homosexuality is the unforgivable sin.

Why did Spacey reveal this about himself when he did? For the same reason Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida did it in 2006 when it was discovered he had been sexting teenage boys. For the same reason that former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey announced in 2004 that he was a "gay American" in the wake of revelations that he had had an affair with a former male aide.

This is what in-the-closet gay men do when it is publicly revealed that they are pedophiles. They do it because they know that being gay usually earns them cultural bonus points. What they don't count on is that their bonus points are taken away by the very people they're trying to impress, all of whom are standing behind the television cameras mouthing "Shut up, you idiot!!!"

Ever wonder why the "open secret" of male-on-male pedophilia gets hushed up in places like Hollywood? Maybe because it might look bad for a favored political group.