Turn around, dummy.

My house is near the corner of a residential street and a major thoroughfare.

A few hundred yards up the road, the intersection with another road is being rebuilt into a roundabout. Consequently both roads are closed for 10 weeks while the construction is taking place.

The next major intersection is about a mile to the south, and there is a detour in place to route drivers around the closure. The road is still open for local residents (like me) to reach their homes, but there are signs and barricades. Specifically, to get to my house from there, you have to drive around one barricade with a ROAD CLOSED, LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY sign on it, change lanes and drive around another barricade with the same sign, pass a huge electric sign warning of the closure, and then drive past nine more bright-orange signs also warning that the road is closed before you reach the final three barricades blocking the road at the construction zone.

Do you think this prevents people from trying? No, it does not. My house is about 500 yards from the final barricades, and the main road is visible from the backyard. We sit on the deck in the afternoon, watch cars zip by, and make bets on how long it will take before we see them go back the other way. Or we go out to the corner where we can see the barricades, and watch them get to the end of the road, stop, pause for a moment as if wondering how such a thing could actually be real, and then turn around and drive off the way they came.

The reason the bets are so much fun is that about half of them drive into the nearby residential neighborhoods (ours and one other) looking for shortcuts to the crossroad. There are no such shortcuts, and the brand new NO OUTLET signs the village put up last week rarely make any difference. (If they didn’t see the barricades while they were slaloming around them, or the electric sign, or all the orange warning signs, it’s not surprising they don’t see or believe the NO OUTLET signs either.) You can make an educated guess on which cars will go full Magellan when faced with the actual road closure. Expensive sports sedans, high-dollar SUVs, and testosterone boys in sketchy cars with loud stereos often go looking for the Northeast Passage; mommy vans, old people in land yachts, and young women in economy sedans generally just drive back the way they came. Commercial vehicles and pickups are a crapshoot, though the pickups’ behavior seems loosely tied to whether they are working trucks with dents and rust or show trucks with stripes and chrome wheels.

We sit and watch and laugh. But I wonder what causes this behavior. We estimated about 2/3 of the cars that drove past on the first day we watched were turnarounds. How can it be that this many people, who presumably can read signs well enough to be issued driver’s licenses, don’t seem to understand that ROAD CLOSED means the road is closed? I don’t understand it.

Do you see a difference?

Up until recently I was using the Platform theme for WordPress. It allows a lot of customization, but I liked the simple white look of the theme pretty much stock.

Unfortunately, it has some bad code in it. PHP still renders it, but every time the site was accessed it would fill up my error logs with warnings. “PHP Warning: Creating default object from empty value” over and over. Google searches for how to turn these error messages off usually landed me on pages advising people to fix the code rather than mask the error.

Well, I don’t want to go searching for bugs in Platform’s code, so I switched to another customizable theme called Vortex and tweaked it to look pretty much the same. I took the opportunity to change the header font a little, but otherwise it’s pretty similar. Did you notice the difference?

If I’m lyin’, I’m Dyn

Service by service, I have been bringing my internet services in-house.

Years ago, I just did what most people do; bought hosting service, uploaded site files to the host’s server, and used their POP/IMAP and SMTP servers. And this worked fine for years, until my host aplus.net got sold to the Deluxe check printing company (of all things) and their service went to hell. This was a few years back, and at the time I didn’t have any significant web presence; I mainly used my domains for email, so I slowly worked my way through setting up my own mail server using flurdy.com’s excellent guide, dropped aplus.net, and transferred domain registration to Dyn so as to have dynamic domain resolution to my residential broadband.

Over the course of the ensuing years I set up blogs, webmail, streaming, proxies, other web services; I got static IPs and moved my domain registrations away from Dyn to cheaper registrars; I moved from residential services and hardware to commercial devices and service, including enterprise-grade networking hardware and security appliances. I even have my own local DNS server. But through all this I retained one last outsourced service: SMTP relay from Dyn.

It’s very convenient to have one relay you can use wherever you are, without changing setups depending on your network connection. Years ago this was mainly useful for laptops; now I mostly use the webmail interface from the laptop, but I still need an SMTP relay for mobile devices. Although my mail server was perfectly capable of being set up as a relay I could use that way, I had never done it, because it just wasn’t worth the effort when dyn.com’s outbound STMP relay service (formerly called Mailhop but now for some reason called DynECT) was only $20/yr. Sure, it’s only 150 emails a day, but I never came anywhere near that limit. So it was fine.

Until they screwed it up.

One day I wrote an email, pressed Send, and had a message come back from Webmail immediately: “Can’t send message.” Tried again, same thing. Tried email to another address and it worked fine. Checked domain resolution for the destination, and that was fine too. So I opened a support case with Dyn, and without knowing it stepped onto the merry-go-round.

At first they told me their relay couldn’t resolve the destination domain. I pointed out that I could resolve the domain just fine using Google open DNS, and asked why their server would reject the mail instead of storing it until it could resolve. They said their relay resolved using a different server. I asked what the address was for that server so I could test the process when it failed again. They refused to tell me.

Then they told me that their relay was fine and it was the destination server that was rejecting the email. I asked them how the destination server was involved if their relay wasn’t even accepting the message to begin with.

We went back and forth like this for a while, each time with Dyn insisting it was someone else’s problem. There’s a problem with the sending domain’s DNS records. There’s a problem with the receiving domain’s DNS records. The destination domain’s server can’t validate the sender. The destination domain server is refusing connections. All sorts of excuses, mostly contradicting each other, most of which fell down on the simple fact that their relay was not even completing the SMTP session to accept my message in the first place. But they wouldn’t accept this; I kept pressing them and they kept sending me back different stories. Eventually I got this explanation:

  1. The user sent an email. That email contained headers giving the FQDN of the initial email server.
  2. Our server received the email, validated the user, added its own FQDN to the email headers.
  3. Our server sent the email to one of the MX addresses listed at the destination domain.
  4. The destination email server looked up the FQDNs of all servers in the email headers.
  5. The destination server looked up the PTR records of all IP addresses received from #4.
  6. The destination server compared the two results and found the FQDN listed from #1 did not match the PTR record.
  7. The destination server REJECT’d the email based on #6.

Once again I knew this could not be right because the sessions were being terminated too soon. But they would not do anything more without more evidence. They were asking for email headers for the bounced mail, which was impossible because the mail had never gone anywhere; there were no bounced replies to get headers from. I let it drop until the problem recurred a week later with a different destination domain. I captured logs from the webmail client, did host lookups, proved airtightly that their server was the problem, and opened a new case. I sent them logs showing their server aborted the session immediately on receiving the destination address, without accepting the message body. On the average, only 1/20 of a second elapsed between my server sending the destination address and their server aborting the session – far too quickly for all seven transmission and validation steps they claimed were taking place.

Finally they admitted the problem. Their server does do recipient validation; it does a DNS lookup on the destination domain before accepting the mail. These lookups are cached for speed. So far, so good; but it caches failures as well as successes. So if the relay does a lookup, and it fails, email to that domain is rejected until the cache is refreshed. From my testing, that was taking hours or days to happen.

Dyn finally owned up, but didn’t promise to do anything to fix it. $20 a year for outbound relay is fine, but $20/year plus periodic random complete failure is not. I was disgusted at being brushed off with bullshit answers over and over. This finally overcame my inertia and I set up my own relay. It accepts inbound SSL connections, validates with SASL, and passes the mail along to my ISP’s relay; they’re fine with that, and so am I.

It’s not like Dyn cares about losing me as a customer. $20 probably means even less to them than it does to me. But there’s a certain symmetry in the fact that it was a hosting service screwing up that put me on the beginning of the path, and it’s another that brought me to the end of it.

Turn it off! Turn it off!

At my work, there is a TV mounted on the wall in the break room.

By itself this would not be a bad thing.  I’m irritated by TVs all over the place, restaurants and malls and everywhere, but usually I can just stay away from them.

Unfortunately, I have the bad luck to have a desk close enough to the break room that I am always hearing the TV’s constant yammer.  And usually it’s yammering to nobody.  At least 15 or 20 times a day I have to get up from my desk, go to the break room, and turn down (or turn off) the maddening idiot box that some inconsiderate co-worker has turned on, turned up, and walked away from.

When did we become so inured to television?  Am I the only one left who remembers how to turn one off?  Or wants to?

There’s one guy in the office who’s made it his mission to see to it that the TV is always on.  He wants it on when he enters the room; can’t wait that four seconds for it to start up when you press power. What do you say about someone who can’t wait four fucking seconds for the stream of junk to start?  What is there to say?  Here’s what I would like to say, if I could speak my mind without causing an office ruckus: “If you can’t spare four seconds for the TV to start up, why are you in the break room?  Get back to work if time is that tight.  And I don’t want to hear one more word out of you about how it’s inconsiderate to turn the TV off, when I’ve had to get up and deal with it left blaring by a dozen inconsiderate people already today.”  Of course, he works on the other side of the building and doesn’t have to listen to it all day, but I don’t think it would bother him if he did.  Apparently he doesn’t mind the constant stream of blather over whatever make-news story’s being pushed today, isn’t bothered by the strange mix of self-importance and folksy condescension of the newsreaders’ voices.  It’s like being locked in a room with a crowd of narcissistic kindergarten teachers, preening and talking down to you.

Why does this not bother people?  Why doesn’t anyone want to turn it the hell off once in a while?

What was wrong with quiet?

What’s on the internet tonight?

It’s been obvious since the beginning of the internet that the major media companies don’t like or understand its two-way nature. They don’t want their audience to speak back to them, or to each other; they want us to sit like good little consumers and suck up what we’re fed. They want to talk, and us to listen.

Because of this I think streaming media is the way of the future, and not because it’s a good thing. I think a streaming-only world will be what we call in the tech world a “functional regression.”

Consider Amazon streaming video. The convenience of being able to navigate to any movie in their streaming library on your Roku seems very enticing, until you understand that you don’t own anything any more. If you bought a DVD, you know you can always watch it. But if you paid for a streaming movie on Amazon, sooner or later they will shut down the service or take the movie offline or whatnot, and then you have nothing. Or consider Netflix, or Amazon Prime. These are more like cable channels than they are purchases. Yes, you can choose what you want to watch from what’s offered, but what’s offered constantly changes; there’s no guarantee that what was in your Netflix streaming queue yesterday will be there tomorrow.

This is a step backward, all the way to the time before the VCR, and the media companies would sure like that. If it gets to the point where this is the dominant model, it will be like it was in the 1970s – you watch what’s on, meaning what the program directors have chosen to make available. Choice is limited to what will garner the best returns, and the consumer has less say in the matter. Voting with your dollars is a lot more difficult when you’re paying a flat fee for whatever they want to give you rather than paying for specific titles, like we did with DVDs.

I can see this model migrating to other media. Already services like Spotify and Pandora are taking over from downloadable digital media files. Increasingly you’re as much a fossil for building an mp3 collection as you were ten years ago for continuing to buy CDs. The convenience factor is there, because you just get music without having to worry about where it’s stored and so on, but again, you’re listening to what’s on, not necessarily what you would seek out given a full range of choices. If Netflix is like a cable channel, streaming music services are like broadcast radio; and, like radio, if the song you want to hear disappears from those services, you’ll never hear it again.

Given this, I wonder how long it will be before digital books go the same way. Already Amazon can delete books from your Kindle if it wants to, and the licenses to those files don’t give you many rights, but they’re still files you store locally. There’s no reason why e-book sellers can’t go to the streaming model. You don’t download the file, you just stream the book to your device when you want to read it, and if the keepers decide not to offer that book anymore, well, too damn bad for you.

Taken as a whole, this is functional regression on a huge scale. Gradually it will take the ownership of individual copies of anything – books, music, film – out of the hands of individuals and put them in a central cloud-based repository instead. This enables central control of what is available and what is not, what survives and what does not. The flaw of such a plan can be imagined by recalling what happened to the Library at Alexandria. Two thousand years ago this was unavoidable just because of the costs of reproduction of works, but in the modern age, when every one of us has a perfect copymaking machine at our fingertips and the accumulated knowledge of the species can be densely stored in the space of a shoebox, it is inexcusable to relinquish personal copies of art, music, and literature just because the commercial interests selling them to us would prefer us to be passive. Turning the internet into just a wider pipe for one-way transmission of Honey Boo-Boo and Jersey Shore is not a good idea anyway, and putting that crowd in charge of our cultural commons just to make it easier for them to achieve it would be tragically stupid.

 

Why the batshit religious right is quitting the Boy Scouts

So here’s an essay by a religious-right reactionary, titled Why My Family is Quitting the Boy Scouts. I want to respond to it, but unlike the last post, I’m not going to repost the whole thing – partly because it’s too long, partly because it’s not well organized, and mainly because this guy seems like the kind of person who would sue.  So instead, please go read through his essay, and then come back here, where I will quote only a few sections in my reply.

Done?  Excellent, let’s proceed.

The BSA had never discriminated against homosexuals. The BSA membership application did not ask about sexual orientation, and there has never been a witch hunt in the BSA to find or remove its gay members.

The first part of this is just a plain lie.  Until the new policy, gay scouts were explicitly forbidden.  The second part is disingenuous.  They may not have asked, or even gone looking (though I seriously doubt that has never happened in the entire history of scouting), but if they found out, that boy was expelled.

Further, the new policy forces every chartered Scouting unit, irrespective of religious convictions, to facilitate open homosexuality among boys in their program.

This makes it sound as if the Boy Scouts are now obliged to conduct gay orgies.  I picked this as a representative sentence, but he returns to this theme multiple times over the course of the essay.  Over and over, he tries to give the reader the idea that the scouts will be obliged to have gay sex with each other.  I’m surprised he hasn’t brought devil worship into it too, but he comes close:

The policy fails to respect or revere the religious beliefs, values and theology of the vast majority of Christian churches, which charter more than 70% of all Scouting units.

I don’t think the “vast majority” of christian churches are raging homophobes like Stemberger.  In spite of my occasional inflammatory anti-religion rhetoric, I acknowledge that most christians are just trying to be decent people, like anyone else, and don’t want to judge or hate others.  I know more christians who are accepting of gays than condemn them, but it’s people like Stemberger, spreading lies and hate, who get all the press.  From what I’ve seen, it’s mainly Baptist churches who have their undies bunched over this.  Did you notice the part about failing to “revere” their religious beliefs, as if everyone owes them reverence no matter what?  That’s religious right, meaning Baptist, from the get-go.  But even if what he wants you to believe were true – even if every one of those 70% are ready to pull the plug on the Scouts to keep out The Gays – that doesn’t make it right.  We had this same argument a couple of generations ago over whether The Blacks should be allowed to defile majority-white organizations with their presence, and the same type of people were hysterically objecting in the same way.  I see this as a positive thing for the Scouts.  If some churches (or any chartering bodies, actually) want to pull out of Scouting because they can’t teach the boys to hate The Gays any more, good riddance.  Children don’t need that kind of “guidance.”

Any Scouting unit that refuses to accept or abide by the new policy will either have their charter revoked by national BSA leadership or become fully exposed to legal attacks for alleged violations of nondiscrimination ordinances. Litigation would permeate the organization.

Yes, you have to follow the rules, or you get kicked out of the club.  That wasn’t a problem for Stemberger when the rules specified that gay kids should get kicked out, but now that the rule is otherwise, following rules is suddenly a terrible burden.  And obeying ordinances?  How unfair!  We’re religious, we shouldn’t have to obey silly old ordinances!  It would be too much trouble!  Waaah!

This is why my wife and I have decided to disengage from BSA and remove our children from its programs. We are concerned for the safety and security of our boys, as are many other parents who are considering leaving as well.

This is where the essay veers away from garden-variety homophobic paranoia and into deliberate character assassination.  The “safety and security” of boys?  This is a veiled reference to the poisonous canard that gay males are pedophiles.  If Stemberger is willing to allude to it when writing for a CNN blog’s general audience, how deep does that belief really go?

And then there’s this:

Most important, the new policy robs parents of Boy Scouts, like me, of the sole authority to raise issues of sex and sexuality with their kids.

Are the Scouts turning into a sex education organization?  No.  It’s still about the same things it has always been, it just won’t shut out gay kids any more.  But this is still enough to freak Stemberger out.  He doesn’t even want to let his kids see the Scouts treat gay kids as people.  What he’s really saying is that he wants to be able to teach his kids that The Gays Are Evil, and expects the Boy Scouts (and the rest of the world, I’m guessing) to back him up, or at least not let his kids see any examples to the contrary.  Typical of the religious right; there’s no room in their worldview for any other way, and if they can’t impose their rigid religious rules on everyone else, they cry that they’re being oppressed.

Yes, a change is ahead for the Boy Scouts.  A lot of Baptist churches will stop sponsoring Scout troops, and that’s fine; the Baptists don’t need another recruiting outlet for their messages of religious hate.  And a lot of hateful parents, like Stemberger, will pull their kids out, and that’s fine too.  They’re on the wrong side of history, and everybody but them knows it, and the Scouts are better off without them.  They can go ahead and start their own organization (which Stemberger’s group plans to do), so all the intolerant bigots can go off in a corner to lick their wounds, spit venom, and gradually fade into irrelevance.

Hurry up, won’t you?

Suffering, evil, and violent destruction. Rejoice!

Well, I’m back. Did you miss me?

What finally brought me back was this essay, from a Dallas minister, trying and failing to rationalize away the “Problem of Evil” that’s been vexing smarter christian apologists than him for centuries. It’s titled “Why Does God Allow Tornadoes, Tragedy and Suffering?”  It’s such an egregious example of the religious tendency to say nothing and prove nothing, but with great certainty and authority, that I simply had to write a rebuttal. You can go read it there first, and then come back, or you can just dive in here, because I’ve quoted most of it.

The agnostic philosopher David Hume claimed that tragedies in the world such as the tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma last week constitute prima facie evidence that God is either evil, impotent, or non-existent. Admittedly, reconciling the reality of suffering with faith in a loving, all-powerful God is difficult.

I would say impossible, but let’s continue.

The late rector John Stott claimed that the existence of suffering in the world posed the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith.

When Lee Strobel was preparing to write [a book I won't help him plug here], he conducted a nationwide survey asking, “If you could ask God anything what would you ask?” The top response was, “Why is the suffering and evil in the world?”

I think the actual question is more like, “Why does god create suffering and evil?” The use of the word “allow” in the essay’s title is disingenuous, because (as we will see) this essayist credits god with creating the tornado, not just “allowing” it. He probably hopes you don’t notice that part, but don’t worry, we’ll get there in a moment.

As a pastor for more than 30 years, I realize that when people pose that question they are not as concerned with suffering in the world in general as they are with the reality of suffering in their own lives. If there is a God, why would He allow this unwanted divorce, undeserved termination from a job, or unexpected illness?

This appalling claim is the part of the essay that most moved me to respond. Is this really his experience? Are his parishioners so self-centered and narcissistic that they’re only concerned with their own suffering and don’t care about anyone else’s? That’s certainly not the case with most atheists I know who ask this rhetorical question of the religious. It’s not the case for me. When I ask, why would the hypothetical all-powerful and all-loving god create so much suffering?, I am not talking about the relatively insignificant problems of my own privileged American life. Unwanted divorce or undeserved firing? Really? I’m thinking more about children dying of preventable diseases while their parents watch helplessly, or people in Africa getting their hands chopped off by soldiers for daring to vote. I’m thinking of Kim Jong-Un, not Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Never once have I asked that question with my own petty complaints in mind; it would literally never have occurred to me, and I’m amazed that this guy would even suggest it. Is this truly how he sees it? Or is he just trying to reframe a difficult question into a easier one that he can answer?

One night my wife and I were traveling on an interstate highway in the middle of West Texas in a driving rainstorm when our headlights went out due to an electrical malfunction in our car. We could not see two inches in front of us, but we were hesitant to pull over to the shoulder of the road for fear of being hit by another car. Thankfully, we spotted an eighteen-wheeler in our rear-view mirror. We allowed it to pass us, and then we simply zeroed in on its taillights and followed it safely into the city limits of our town.

Once, when I was a kid, I was walking to school and I saw a spot on the sidewalk. It was a medium-sized spot, a little bit brown in color… oh, sorry. I thought we were telling irrelevant and pointless stories here. Never mind. Let’s move on.

God is loving. The psalmist declared, “The earth is full of your lovingkindness, O Lord.” Even apart from the Bible, the world is filled with the evidence of a benevolent Creator. Yes, occasionally floods and tornadoes bring indescribable heartache and even death. But such disasters are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time rivers stay within their banks and winds are held in check.

Most of the time? Why not all of the time? Surely that’s within the reach of an all-powerful being. What a mealy-mouthed piece of verbal sleight-of-hand. “God is benevolent, except when he isn’t.” This is like letting a serial killer go because he didn’t kill most people.

The outpouring of help by first responders and the financial support for those whose lives are destroyed by the occasional disaster are a reflection of the goodness of God in whose image we are made.

Wait, what? God throws a tornado at a town, and other people rush to try to undo the damage, and those people are a “reflection of the goodness of god”? Maybe only in the sense that a reflection is the exact opposite of something.

God is all-powerful. Again, the psalmist claims that God is in control of all His creation. Some people find this truth troubling. If God has the ability to prevent natural disasters and human tragedy, why doesn’t He?

In an attempt to acquit God of responsibility for evil in the world, a growing number of people think of God as a loving but impotent old man who would like to help us, but is incapable of doing so. But do you find any comfort in the belief that you are simply a victim of random events and people? Fortunately, the Bible assures us that there is a God who is in control of everything that happens in our lives.

This section asks the question again, and purports to answer it, but actually explains nothing. In fact, it lays all the death and destruction directly at the feet of god. “There is a god who is in control of everything that happens in our lives.” Then he’s saying god deliberately sent the tornado to kill those people? That’s sure what it looks like. I don’t see any other way you could interpret those statements taken together. In fact, he specifically says he does not want to “acquit god of responsibility for evil.”

He asks rhetorically if there is any comfort in the belief that you are “a victim of random events.” Well, even if I were religious, I’d sure prefer that interpretation over the idea that god has a plan to kill me and a tornado with my name on it. Better the uncertainty of randomness than the notion that the creator of the universe has it in for you personally.

God’s ways are beyond our understanding. One of the most famous analogies about God’s purpose in suffering is that of a bear caught in a trap in the woods. [Excisions, excisions; it's a story about a hunter who frees a bear from a trap.  Go read the original again if you want.]

At some point God will seem unfair to those of us trapped in time, but we make our judgment too soon. One day, perhaps not until heaven, we will understand what the Hunter was up to in our lives. Until that time, God says “Trust me. I have a plan I’m working out in your life, even though in the darkness of the storm you cannot see what that plan is.”

Leaving aside the bizarre analogy – god is a hunter who carries a tranq gun to free bears? What is he hunting then if not bears? – this part of the essay is the most frustrating non-explanation of all. “God works in mysterious ways” is basically saying, “We got nothin’.” It’s religionists admitting that even they can’t cook up a rationalization to explain something. Instead, we are now asked to assume we are too stupid to understand why millions of people must suffer and die. Yes, god created a world full of misery and suffering, and yes, he dropped you into it like a meat grinder, but hey, if you can’t see why you should have to go through a meat grinder, well, it just shows how dumb you are. You should be happy to go through the meat grinder. Maybe you should offer to help turn the handle.

What a crock of self-serving crap.

The essay offers various explanations, and as is common to religious arguments, they tend to contradict each other.  The third part, for example, would have us treat “evil” as good in disguise, part of god’s perfect plan.  In that case, why call it evil, as he does in the second part?  And why consider it as something god needs to be “acquitted” of?  If god’s violent and murderous actions are really “good,” as the third part argues, then why are the actions of the first responders described in the first part as “a reflection of god’s goodness”?  Surely they are undoing god’s work.  God wrecked the houses and killed the children on purpose – the essayist says so in the second part.  Therefore those emergency workers and rebuilders should have stayed home.  God wanted the houses wrecked and the people hurt.  If you believe in god’s perfect plan of universal benevolence and goodness, you should want to leave them that way.  Don’t clear the wreckage, don’t help the injured, don’t bury the dead children.  Don’t interfere with god’s plan.  And if we are unable to understand why evil is actually good, as the third part would have us believe, why doesn’t all-powerful god set it up so that we can understand it?  This is where the hunter analogy breaks down, by the way.  If the hunter were to the bear as the religionists claim god is to us, then the hunter would have the power to magically make the bear understand that it was being helped.  Instead he shoots him with darts and freaks him out.  Why?  Not explained.

Let’s review the arguments, shall we? God loves you, and he can do anything, and he is in control of everything that happens to you, and he sent a tornado to kill you, and you should feel happy about that because most people don’t get killed by tornadoes, and if you don’t like it you’re stupid. Does that about sum it up?