World’s Pissiest Beer

Hungry Hungry Hippos!

Hippo kills poaching soldier in DR Congo park

by Staff Writers
Kinshasa (AFP) Sept 12, 2009
A hippopotamus killed a member of Democratic Republic of Congo government forces at Virunga National Park while he was fishing illegally, a local environmental NGO said Saturday.

link to article

—————–

When I saw this article I couldn’t help but hear the jingle from the commercials for this game from back in my day.

This begs for a new version of the game – one where instead of “marbles”, you eat marble-shaped “poachers”.

Burned or faded?

“My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It’s better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.”

- Neil Young (courtesy kthxbai)

1. Michael
2. Ed
3. Farrah
4. David
5. Billy

Burned, or faded?

And which is better?

Thing 3

“Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

A multi-part series…

Thing Three

Do you believe in ley lines?

Me neither.

However I can observe that, for whatever reason, some places have proven to be “stickier” for me than others. When I say sticky, I mean that these places have a statistically abberrant presence in my life. They stick to me, or I stick to them, I don’t know which… In some cases the reasons for this are quite obvious, but in others the reasons remain a mystery. I have a few places like this. (If Google maps wasn’t such an absolute piece of shit, and I hadn’t spent the past hour trying to create something to share with you, well, then I’d share all of them with you… as it is, you will have to settle for live.com and just one place…)

That one place is, nearly exactly, right here. I’ve had 5 memorable experiences within streaking distance of this spot so far in my life. 3 of those events are the basis for stories which I tell now, and which I will likely be telling the day before I die. These stories are, in chronological order, “The Kegger on the Freeway”, “Strip Penny”, “Stranded”, “The Frogmen”, and “The Giant Dude with the Rake”. (I don’t tell “Kegger” and “Stranded” often because they aren’t really in the same class as the others. Pretty normal high school OMFGLOL.)

All of these stories – in fact nearly all of my stories – have particulars that I include or exclude, depending on the audience, to make them “age appropriate”, to protect people who haven’t given me permission to talk about their roles, or to try to keep from giving anyone any smart ideas. So if you know any of these stories, you may notice some slight changes or omissions, that’s why: The interwebz are forever.

This is the story of “Giant Dude with the Rake”.

It was a pleasant evening, about 10 PM, sometime in 2000 or 2001. I was driving from Broadmoor, out the back gate and heading to the Big White House on Capitol Hill. As I approached the intersection of Foster Island and Lake Washington, my internal alarm bells started going off. There was a small line of cars in front of me, and they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Not the right time for a traffic jam…  Beyond them, there seemed to be cars moving very slowly along Lake Washington Blvd. Hmmm. I thought “Accident?”, but there were no flashing lights, no aid cars, no cops.

Back up a little bit: I lean towards the “get involved” side of the engagement continuum. Okay, not just lean, kind of veer. I do like to be a hero, but I also know that there’s nothing more annoying than heroes looking for problems to solve. As it happens, at this exact time in my life I was trying to push the needle on my knight-in-shining-armor gauge more towards the “normal people” end of the spectrum. I was actively working on not stepping in…

Back up even more: I have lots of weird but, to me at least, interesting training and real world experience. I was involved with the Seattle chapter of Q-Patrol in the early 90’s, first as a recruit and later as a trainer. It was there that I learned, in some very hard-core and indispensable training as well as on patrol, how to be a good witness. I know what details to look for, to note when they happened sequentially as well as in relation to an unfolding series of events, so that I can recount them for anyone, including the police or in court.

In Q-Patrol we frequently role-played dozens, probably hundreds, of scenarios. A few people would be “mutants” (our code word for all bad guys), some victims, others  just participants. The rest was patrol. Mutants would come up with a real-world based scenario together, something we’d seen in real life, and then they’d start acting it out. If it was a guy beating up his girlfriend, that’s what the mutant role players would start to do. There would be screaming, hair pulling, slapping. Bloody lips, noses, bruises, scratches, scrapes, all par for the course.

This sometimes (but not always) got very physical. It was always extremely intense. The goal was to make it so real that when someone vastly bigger than you gets in your face and says “fuck you, you fucking faggot”, you’ve done that before and you neither punch the guy nor do you start to cry.

This training is called “Force on Force” training now (to be clear, we don’t think we invented it!) and if you want to be good at dealing with real-world problems, I strongly suggest you find a way to do it. Seeing Q-Patrol train this way is what got me interesed in the first place – I ran into them training in Volunteer Park, and I was soon hooked.

Once we were training in Volunteer Park and a rookie cop, fresh out of the military with his hair still cut very short, drove up on the grass and drew on us because he thought he was interrupting a real gay bashing. About a dozen cop cars and lots of talking later, I heard him say “I just got out of the Marine Corps, and we never trained that hard! You guys are crazy!”

In addition to Q-Patrol, at that point in my life I’d studied, in some cases seriously, in others less so, a bunch of martial arts, including, but not limited to, fencing, medieval sword fighting and weapons, at least 3 flavors of jits (some seminars, some belted) and Cuong Nhu. I’ve done a bunch more stuff since rake-night, including adding guns to my repetoire and airsoft-based Force On Force (FoFAST).

Back to the Arboretum! (I think my old writing teacher Rick Mar would call that “foreshadowing”.) My immediate instinct, sitting in the car, stopped, a length or so behind this small traffic jam, was “something weird is going on, I should jump out and help!”, but I caught that before I acted on it. Remember, I was trying to be Less Involved.

To the right of the traffic and headlights and concentrated energy of “something” was the shoulder, and so I decided to pull into the shoulder, skirt the of backed up cars, to skip whatever was going on… to just head home. So I pulled over, and slowly drove in the shoulder, heading for the Montlake cut. As I pulled through, to my right there were about a half dozen people on the grass, at least one on a cel-phone, others talking to each other or just staring. (For you young whelps, this was before cel-phones had cameras. I wish someone had video running, it would have been really fun to watch later!) They were all staring, looking or pointing into the center of the traffic conflagration.

As I drove past them I could now see what they were looking at. I have a vivid memory of it, but I also know that we sometimes make terrible witnesses. On the flip side, I’ve actually studied being a good witness, and I’m kinda OCD about recording things in my head. Here’s what I vividly remember from that moment, as seen through my car window and then, as I got back onto the road driving away very slowly, out of the rearview mirror:

A man, very large. Probably 6 foot 5, 300 pounds. He was wearing a tank top or a t-shirt and shorts. Maybe flip flops on his feet? I want to say his shorts were red, but I’m not sure. He was holding a large landscaping rake, the kind that only the pros seem to have. The pic isn’t exactly right, but close.

He alternated holding onto the rake like a bat or a wand (like a conductor). Like a bat, he would pound on the hood of a stopped car he was nearly on top of, and as a conductor he’d wave traffic along past the stopped car with the rake. The ushering part was very poetic, actually, nearly graceful, even, especially as it was contrasted with the pounding. He had one leg braced against the stopped car, as if he was holding it back. He would pound on the car, then usher cars past with the rake, then maybe take a swing at one of the passing cars, then hit the stopped car again.

Okay, so. As I am occasionally prone to holler in paintball: “wudda we got?”

1. Giant guy pounding on cars with a lansdcaper’s rake.
2. Stopped car, which presumably could drive over him at any time, but which hasn’t yet.
3. People watching, at least one of whom has a cel phone, presumably having called the cops.
4. Lots of cars.
5. No sign of cops.

I drove on. End of story! Ha ha ha.

Yeah right… I made it a little ways down the road, then I stopped and turned around. (It was easier to turn back then – they keep making it harder and harder to whip a youee around there.)

The stopped car was what bugged me – everything else was pretty much okay. No one was in visible jeopardy, they were just driving away, and the bystanders were young and fit looking and far enough away to run from the dude, and really, they chose to stop and watch… It did piss me off that they seemed so willing to look, but not do. That bothered me.

But that car? Why was it stopped? Maybe it was broken down? So I drove back and pulled over on the shoulder of the road beside the mutant with the rake and the stopped car. I was maybe about 30 or 40 feet away now.

I could now see the driver of the car, she was a little old lady, I swear to god, white hair, blue rinse, the works. Aunt May.

Olay, so, this guy is Aunt May’s grandson, and he’s throwing a tantrum. That would make sense and explain why she didn’t just run him over. My window was already rolled down, so I kind of leaned out and yelled to her, and she rolled down her window.

Me: “Do you know this guy?” (Smash, rake hits car.)

Aunt May: “NOOO! HELP ME! HE’S GOING TO KILL ME!!!!!!!!!”

Okay, so. Really, up to this point, I was totally rational about what I was doing. If she’d said “he’s my grandson!” I might have just been, okay, your family, you get to solve the problem. One thing Q-Patrol had drilled into my head is that you don’t get involved in family disputes if you can possibly avoid it.

Really, I swear, that’s what I was intending. This was a new me, a no-lycra-wearing normal guy, driving home.

But.

I came up with a rule for what happened in this moment. It’s Peter Biddle’s “little old lady clause”. Most of us have things inside us that can cause us to do something that we wouldn’t otherwise do, events or circumstances that significantly alter our behaviors. Taking a look at the chart from the last “Thing” post, these things are manipulations which push us away from “do nothing” towards “do something”.

In this case, it wasn’t just the little old lady.

• I have a predispostion to heroic action and even specific training for it.
• In the immediate moment, I had bystanders standing around doing nothing (WTF????)
• a crazy mutant bad guy that is so bizarre he wouldn’t be believable in anything but real life
• a little old white haired lady pleading for her life.

Yeah, I was pretty much fucked. I was going to Do Something. <sigh> I can’t remember my own circumstance of 911 and the cops. Maybe I called them, maybe my batt was dead (that would be nothing new!) or maybe I forgot my cel? Don’t know. Help other than me didn’t seem to be immediately forthcoming, and in the “means, oppty, motive” equation, he:

• clearly had the means (the dude could have torn her in half with his bare hands)
• oppty, well, yeah, she’s just sitting there like 10 feet from him
• motivation? No clue, but clearly whatever it is, it’s allowing him past the general inhibitions that keep the rest of us from beating on cars with a rake.

Okay, so:

1. make sure that if you die, they can find your ID. So, out comes the wallet, it goes into the passenger seat.
2. Then you want to make sure you can drive away later if you aren’t dead or in an ambulance, so the car keys go on the dash board.
3. Keep the window rolled down so you don’t wind up locked out of your own car when it’s all done
4. turn off the headlights so your battery doesn’t die.
5. Empty your pockets of everything: change, money, pet frog, 3 loose bolts, stray busines cards from Japanese executives… the usual stuff you are carrying in your pockets.

You’ll note I didn’t have a knife, pepper spray, nor a gun. I did carry a knife back then but I started losing them to airport security a lot (they had savvied onto all my tricks!) and so there would be times I didn’t have them. Very annoying. Pepper spray and guns I didn’t ever have with me back then, that was when I was just a latent gun nut. Pepper spray might have been really nice.

So:

Get out of the car. Put your hands up in front of you, palms outward, in a highly defensible, but also non-threatening manner, arms bent, appearing relaxed but alert. Smile confidently!

Start walking slowly. Say, and in your Voice of Command Authority: “HEY! WHAT’S GOING ON!” You do this to get his attention, to divert him from everything else. You want to see his eyes, to see if you can talk him out of this activity. This is something that most martial arts and self defense training miss – sometimes you can talk your way out of it. In fact, most times you can.

Your whole attitude is now that you two are having a relationship (whether he likes it or not) and in this relationship, it simply isn’t acceptable to be hitting cars with rakes and holding poor little old ladies hostage. It’s just not done.

He looked at me, and I saw his eys, and there wasn’t really a person there. Pupils the size of plates, he couldn’t even focus on my face, just sort of scanned past me, looking for whatever that annoying noise was. I think I actually snapped my fingers at that point, like you do when you are trying to take a picture of a fidgety toddler or a dog, and said “HEY! OVER HERE!”.

Nothing. Okay, he’s a particularly stupid dog. Not even a toddler. Not much to reason with. Crap!

Well, as I said, you’ve already decided that rake-assault is not an approrpriate behavior in this new relationship. You’ve given him a chance to talk things through, he’s, erm, declined… So if you can’t talk to him, then you need to get him away from the things he clearly wants to damage (cars) and the things he might decide to damage (little old ladies, damn them and their blue-rinse maniuplations!). Then maybe you can sort things out, have a cup of tea.

Keep walking, keep talking with your Voice of Command Authority.

What is this magic voice? It’s the voice you use, if you are dog owner, to make your dog sit. If you are a mom it’s the voice you save for when you use their entire name, including the middle names, in full. “MICHAEL PHILLIP SAMUEL SMITH! Come here RIGHT NOW.” If you are a dad it’s the voice you use when your kid is running towards the street… It’s NOT JUST YELLING!!!!!!!. In fact, it may even be somewhat quiet. It will usually be lower in tone, and always steady. It is your projection of power. I once watched a 110 pound young woman make a drunk and violently brawling guy at least twice her size sit on the sidewalk by pointing at him and saying “SIT!” and then pointing at the ground. (Julia, you rock!) He just sat.

For this to work, you have to really mean it, and you have to believe it yourself.

If you have kids, this voice is one of the most important first steps you can take to teach them to take of themselves. It’s extremely important. Dogs can really help with this. If the dog sits when you say “Sit!”, but not when the kid says “uhm, please sit?“, you need to teach your kid how to compel the dog to obey with her voice. Kids need to earn respect from dogs, dogs will naturally consider them to be part of the pack.  If the dog only obeys them because of you, then the dog may still think they are second in command, rather than last, which is where they should be, behind you and all your kids. Your kids should be able to make the dog do anything you can make it do, even when you are 100 miles away.

As you approach the mutant, formulate a general plan. Mine went something like this:

• Avoid getting hit by the rake, punched by those ham-sized fists, or grabbed. (Later I had to add “bitten“. Those were situational tactics, rather than an over-arching strategy.)
• Control the mutant so you can keep him from hurting you too badly and so you can compel him to go away from the scene and towards somewhere else.
• Choose somewhere that won’t hurt as much when you fall down, possibly with 300 pounds of drugged out and/or insane whack-job on top of you. Real fights are sloppy and ugly, and it seemed quite possible that this might now be a real fight.

Note that I’m not saying take him out where he stands. I control this relationship, if were are going to conflict, I make it where I want it to happened. He picked this place, my next step in asserting my dominance over him will be to compel him to go somewhere else. Also, he’s Very Big, I am Not So Big, and pavement and cars are very hard and have sharp edges that will hurt if you hit them. So, those are bad.

Grass is nice and soft comparatively speaking. So grass is good! Fortunately, there was grass just beyond the mutant, pretty much in a straight line. The grass currently occupied by the Innocent Bystanders.

Well, they are just going to have to move off of your grass, because that’s what it is now. Yours.

First things first: negate the rake. As I got to him, I shot my hand out and put it over one of the hands he had on the rake. He hadn’t decided to smack me yet, that was nice. As soon as I grabbed the rake, he tried to smash me in the face with it, but that didn’t work, because I was on the rake too. It’s now our rake! We share, so nice. So the rakes negated for the moment.

Now, I want him on the grass, that’s behind him. He was just too big to actually carry there on my own, so I want him to want to head towards the grass, or away from me, and based on his total lack of humanity, I needed to rely on lizard-brain-stem responses. Choking should be good. Lizards will try to get away from choking. I took my other forearm, the one not attached to the hand attached to the hand attached to the rake, and I shoved it, hard, against his wind pipe, which was as high as my forearm would go. He was tall.

Then, you lean forward and shove as you walk. He’s choking, it’s unpleasant, so he pulls his head back. Now, if he doesn’t take some steps backawards, he’ll fall down on his ass, so he’ll take the steps. You, you just keep walking.

All this shoving and choking and controlling behavior will start to annoy him. He was having a perfectly fine time doing the rake thing, and here you are, RUINING EVERYTHING! Sooner or later he may decide that he’s not having anymore of it. He decided this in my case by trying to punch me in the face with his right fist right about when we got to the grass, and the Innocent Bystanders were moving out of the way.

It’s a big roundhouse, head under the punch, then head back up when it passses, now the back and side of my head are against his tricep and I push on him with the rake hand so he spins around. This actually works! So he’s now standing with his back to me. I want to choke him out, but there’s no way I can get an arm around his neck from behind him, so I need to be higher or he needs to be lower.

I take lower, so I reach around his face to find his nose so I can use that to tilt his head back, then I can drag him backwards onto his ass, but now he’s all riled up, and I barely have any control of him. He drops the rake, and is turning, when one of the Innocent Bystanders – one whose little old lady clause has now gone off and standing around is no longer an option for him – sees what I’m doing, so he runs up, bends down, grabs the guys ankles, and pulls. So I’m pulling back on the face, but his feet, while planted, aren’t moving anywhere.

I’m pulling back over the with the bridge of his nose, +1 dude is pulling in the opposite direction on his ankles, and down he goes. We are scrambling around on him now, me and the +1, when two more +1’s jump on. We now have a guy on each leg, one on his chest, and I’m on his right arm, and now he starts trying to bite me, I’m trying and failing to get an armbar while I’m avoiding his foaming mouth and his biting, and now he’s yelling, he actually speaks now, in English!

He yells “get off of me!” The guy on his chest, bless his heart, actually says “stop struggling and we’ll let you go!” I look at him and say something like “are you fucking crazy? we’re not letting this guy go until the cops get here!” At which point the dude on his chest, who seems to want to actually strangle the guy until I tell him to knock that off too, says “okay! we aren’t letting you go!” <sigh> Giant dude then tries to bite me more, and do stuff with his left, but we’ve pretty much got him pinned, all 4 of us.

Finally – and it was minutes on the ground, it felt like hours but I think the total elapsed time of the entire event was about an hour – a cop car shows up. We cheer. Yay, cops, woo hoo! FINALLY! Out of the cop car steps a single, 100 pound female cop. No partner. She shines her mag lite at us, shines it in the guys eyes, they don’t dilate. She steps back. The mutant now speaks: “Get these guys off of me!!!!!!!!!”. She says something into her radio, something like “please send about 20 really big guys to the arboretum” and then says to us “you guys doing okay?” we say sure. She says “Then I think we’ll wait for backup.”

A few minutes later, all of the SPD shows up. After some brief talking amongst themselves, one of them walks over and shines his light in the mutants eyes. Still no dilation. He says, in his Voice of Command Authority, and I swear to go he had this great NY accent: “Okay, here’s how this is going to work. On the count of three, these guys are going to let you go, and you are going to WALK over to that police car. If you do anything else, I’m going to have these guys kick your ass some more.”

Recall that there were many cops present now. He repeats these instructions, and as he does, like magic, the mutant starts to calm down. It’s amazing, he’s like a horse whisperer, a drugged-out-mutant-with-a-rake whisperer, and when he says three, we step away, and a small crowd of cops walks with him over to the car. It’s like he’s in a trance. But the trance breaks when he puts his hands on the hood of the car. He takes a swing at one of the cops, and then, of course, it’s all over for him. He goes down in a pig pile of blue.

We give our statements. The head cop, NY accent dude. says that calls to 911 about “someone running around the arboretum with a rake” aren’t given top priority. Calling back and saying the same thing doesn’t get their attention any faster. Calls that say something like “there’s a guy trying to kill an old lady with a rake” get more attention.

I drive away. No one ever calls me back, I don’t even know the names of the guys who were involved.

I really do think, if it hadn’t been for these things, I never would have gotten out of that car:

• The car just sitting there.
• Those do-nothing, just watching losers on the grass.
• The old lady’s cry for help, which by itself might well have done me in.

The thing that I really appreciate from all this, is that I now know that I HAVE a little old lady clause.

It’s not just little old ladies, it’s more than that. But I know a lot more about it now than I used to, and that means that when I find myself about to do things that I haven’t fully thought through, or that I may be about to undertake, things that aren’t clearly in my own best interest, I have more tools to examine myself and the situation, and I think that makes me at least more intentional and less prone to any manipluation that seeks to take advantage of my good nature.

Remember those 419s? They are all about finding our little old lady clauses. It turns out that some of them we all have – we are all at least a little bit greedy, for example.

But the personalization of them – eg making some Evangelical Christian – is all about trying to boost the chances of sinking a hook in, in exchange for a smaller audience. The more personalized a scam, the better the chances it will work, because it can be tailored to target very specific LOLCs.

If it is targetting ones that I, Peter N. Biddle, have, or better yet combinations of ones that are known to push me from a do nothing to a do something place, then the chances of them working are much higher.

A combination of things not making sense (car not moving), people not doing anything (The Innocent Bystanders) and real jeopardy (thanks little old lady!) were enough to get me involved in a stuation that could have gotten me really badly hurt, or even killed. If mutant dude had gotten the better of me, and the Innocent Bystanders didn’t step in (they only got involved in force when it was clear the danger to themselves was substantially reduced, AND when my actions had shrunk their balls to the size of peas), he could have put a world of hurt on me before the cops finally got there.

This is Really Important. In the next posting, I will try to make it All Make Sense.

The 700 yard shot and ethical hunting

I’ve been pondering this. (Note that I’m NOT currently a deer hunter. Happy to try my hand at it in the future…)

Allow me to summarize: Someone – a young woman, although really that part matters hardly at all – shot and killed a deer at around 700 yards. Some people I know say this is laudable and super-amazing, and yet others I know think it is somewhat irresponsible because the chances of merely wounding the deer, rather than killing it, were too high. (No links or quotes becuase the places I’ve seen these thoughts are private forums and I respect that.) 

700 yards at a deer is a hard shot. It’s not technically super-hard under target-shooting conditions. I can, on a good day, hit “minute of deer” at 700 yards. I will be trying for that as a minimum, aiming for minute-of-boomer at 700, yards next w’end. The target is 7 x 7 inches, which is arond a 1 MOA target, and seems like it ought to be about minute of deer. My stretch goal for next w’end is minute-of-coin at 700 yards, which goes from just hard, to very very hard (and, some want to argue, really just merely lucky… but I don’t believe in luck). 

But it is hard because it’s hunting, and if you miss a killing shot it’s bad. Missing a boomer or paper or coin at that range is just an oh-damn experience, miss the vitals on a deer at 700 yards and it all goes to hell for you and the deer. 

This young woman did exhibit self-control and was responsible, in that she controlled the shot to the degree neccesary to cleanly kill an animal. Snipers do this to people for a living, and they aren’t irresponsible. People who hunt Dalls sheep often have to take longgggg shots too.

If she took other long-range shots at other times that wounded an animal, well that that would likely add up to irresponsibility, but we don’t know that. 

Let’s assume for a second that she’s a total natural. She can always take deer at that range with the same kind of certaintly as an extremely good stalker, but barely mediocre shot, can at 20 yards. Just like the stalker, she won’t pull the trigger if she can’t take the shot. They both have 100 talent points to spend on hunting, she spends 80 on shooting, the stalker spends 80 on stalking… all good. 

If that’s true, then why doesn’t she deserve the same “good job” as someone who runs a deer down on foot and slits its throat – which, near as I can tell, is probably the hardest method of hunting a non-predator for a human?

Aside: That, or hunting boar with a spear… I think it’s probably a toss up as it relates to the sum total of how choose to spend those 100 points of skill, technique, and training. I don’t know how they funnel the boar in those spear hunts. If they run them with dogs until they are too tired to move and then just stab them, well that doesn’t seem terribly hard. But me, a spear, one dog and boar – that is tough…

She took a technically difficult shot and dropped the animal. She didn’t do this to minimize the risk to the lowest possible degree, but she did succeed at the most central and consistent pieces of what I consider to be ethical hunting:

• she killed an animal
• it didn’t suffer
• she touched the animal after it was dead
• somebody ate the meat

There are all sorts of ways to hunt, and frankly many of them attempt to make the experience “more fair” to the animal, or just harder for the hunter. But we are humans and so we rarely make it “fair”. If it was truly fair then we’d call it “attempted suicide“. 

Bow and black-powder hunting both increase the chances of a non-killing hit and so the responsible and ethical hunter who practices these forms of hunting does all sorts of things to minimize the risk of a wound and not a kill…

…but it’s still clearly going to be statistically riskier because it’s just downright harder to do for the human hunter. If it was just about killing, and not about hunting, we’d probably do it quite differently, but we don’t for a number of reasons, not the least of which because the un-regulated killing of animals by modern man has a habit of driving species to extinction. 

So I say: Congratulations and good hunting! May every one of your future hunting trigger-pulls have such a clear outcome.

Social Media Makes Us Lonely?

Kympossible mentions that twitter makes her feel more lonely. There are definitely times that I have found myself seeking some sort of connection via Social Media, and if I didn’t find it, I felt more disconnected than when I set ou. 

(Twitter, otoh, mostly just leaves me dumbfounded. I’m on it, I use it sometimes, but mostly I still don’t really get it.)  

I think that Social Media is often a really pale comparison to the real thing – that is, social, only without the media. I think that social media is at it’s best when it’s a tool to do a thing – for example WoW and xBox live, you are actually doing stuff together. What you aren’t doing is the thing which is the thing… twitter is, in the end, very much about twitter.  

Social is dinner parties, late nights around a camp-fire, going over to a friends house to play lazertag for the afternoon. Board games, walks on the beach collecting dozens of sand dollars, Sunday morning at Shoreditch House, spending hours laughing while you weigh brass, singing “kung fu fighting” while accompanying yourself with a 3 string medieval lute-ish thing. Couch time. 

Video games with your oldest son. Sitting on the shooting star rock with Jed, just watching, feeling the warmth of the rock hours after sundown, just talking. 

I’m sure there are plenty of examples people have of Twitter being this great, amazing, connective tissue that binds a blind Mumbai nun to ab Albino truck driver in Topeka. Fine, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions.

But really, Social Media is at it’s best when it rewards and reinforces healthy patterns that exist in our lives. It’s at it’s absolute worst when we turn to it to provide the patterns themselves. We mistake it for being the thing itself.

Social media is a fine medium, conduit, highway. Not a fine destination.

WFH & RB2

Thing Two

“Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

A multi-part series… 

Thing Two

I introduced 419s in my last post.

Fortunately, 419s aren’t a perfect scam. If they were, most all of us would be quite poor, having been fleeced out of house and home… They aren’t perfect for a few reasons, starting off with their reliance on Very Big Numbers.

Old-school meat-space direct mailers had something like a 1% response rate, and that has probably gone down, as most of us now just put shredders under the mail slot. There’s a start-up idea right there! An RFID-reading, mail-slot shredder! Send RFID stickers to your friends, everyone else’s mail just gets insta-shredded! You heard it hear first, folks! 

419s belong, IMNUVHO, in the same category as Spam and Phishing attacks.

Spammers, last I heard, had a response rate that is somewhat less than 1%. 1 in 12.5 million. This is so low because spam has huge hurdles to overcome from a technological and logistical perspective.

Think of spam like human sperm trying to get into a human egg. It’s a long, long journey which starts long before anybody takes off their underwear (or pants, for my British readers… my oldest brother, during his year at boarding school in England, famously insisted that a clothes shop provide him with “corduroy pants” – which probably both titillated and appalled the clerks, pronounced “clarks” for my American readers).

Even when people HAVE taken off their underwear and have significantly increased the chances that sperm and egg will join, each individual sperm still has a ridiculously daunting task. Birth-control, fertility cycles, children interrupting their parents and the rumored significant increase in the popularity of non-penis-in-vagina “unsex” (we can thank Bill Clinton for establishing, once and for all, that if she spits, we must acquit), all play their part in keeping sperm and egg apart.

One thread of evolution has hurled impediments between every sperm and egg, giving us fertility cycles, birth control, and deeply fickle eggs. But another thread of evolution has fought back via Marvin Gay, MySpace, alcohol, charming accents and, critically importantly, by making sex really fun.

The fun part of sex goes back to Very Big Numbers. If you hurl as much sperm as you possibly can, over and over again, into the proximity of eggs, sooner or later you should get a hit. (This is a slight variation on the theory behind the Phalanx CIWS).

There’s a concept in computer security called “surface area”. It’s very important, we will take more about it later. The surface area for one sperm reaching one egg is actually quite small, all things considered. Sometimes it’s so small that it really is non-existent. This all adds up to making pregnancy hard and unpredictable, and one of the best ways to cope with unpredictability is to throw Very Big Numbers at it.

HAH! So there! SO MANY SPERM you can’t count them!

One spam faces similar challenges to those faced by one sperm, but not all, because spam doesn’t actually want a baby. Spam doesn’t really want to get into the egg… spam just wants to go much of the way there.

Spam, frankly, is a slut. Spam just wants a hook-up. The goal of spam is to get me to click on a link, or buy some vitamins which will make me smarter and give me a larger penis. Spam is consensual sex with good birth-control.

Phishing, on the other hand, in particular phishing which seeks root, is most like an STD. Phishing uses spam techniques up to the moment where I respond (we are dating) but then it slips me a roofie and when I wake up I’m not quite sure what happened.

Phishing doesn’t even pretend to make me smarter or to give me a larger penis. It offers me nothing. It breaks past my surface area into my vulnerable core and then it does whatever it wants to me. (Yuck!) Phishing leaves me with an increasingly unpleasant tingling in my nether regions and a commitment to not drink so much next time I go out.

Of the three – spam, phishing, and 419s – 419s are most like sex-for-babies. 419s must go from Very Big Numbers – millions and millions of the same emails (sperm) in search of a single target (egg), but ultimately a 419 is quite personal. It’s about a real relationship, actually, a real relationship between a scammer and a victim. This relationship is entirely based on lies, of course, but it is real, and so you can’t just “phone in” a 419 scam.

419s are personal. 419s actually want a quickie whirlwind marriage after the pregnancy, but they then file for an even quickier divorce and join the French Foreign Legion.

So why do people respond to any of these three things? Why do what this email asks? 

There are lots of reasons, but I think they all fit on the following chart:

To think about how this works in your own life, imagine this:

You are in your home, and you get a call on the phone. The caller is a voice you don’t know and they are telling you that there’s a bank just down the street – a bank you’ve never heard of, BTW – and they are giving free money to the next 1000 new accounts but only if go right now! Funnily enough, the voice on the other end sounds more like a recording than a real person. What do you do? Duh, you hang up, of course. You hang up because you don’t trust them (who’s to trust? It’s a recording!) and there’s no evidence that it’s true. (I get spam calls on my cel-phone that are recordings, usually starting off with a fog horn. This leads me to believe that at least some people actually do respond to even something as utterly stupid as this. <sigh, shakes head>)

Now imagine that you are in your house and you get a call on the phone. It’s your absolute bestest friend, someone you trust more than anyone. They are, in your experience, completely unflappable and (remember, very important!, trust isn’t transitive) they are directly experienced in events of civil unrest, having worked for the United Nations on several peace-keeping deployments. So, for you, and for this scenario, they are highly trusted. They tell you that there’s a rampaging mob running down your street towards your house, burning, looting, raping and killing. You hold the phone away from your ear, and now that you are paying attention, you notice that you hear car horns and yelling outside you hadn’t heard before. Maybe you look outside the window and see a few people run by, people running fast and not wearing jogging clothes. What do you do?

You freaking respond, that’s what you do. If it turns out to be a false alarm, you can make your best friend buy the next time you go out. (If you don’t respond, you kinda deserve whatever comes next.)

I have some friends who, if they were to call me and tell me the above, and I were to look around and see absolutely NO evidence of impending mayhem, I would still be very inclined to drop everything and respond as if there were a rampaging mob. I trust them that much, and if they were wrong, they’d so owe me, which has its own dividends.

Were I to look outside my window and see a rampaging mob right now, I’d respond in the absence of needing to trust anyone but myself… I think that, when pushed to the extremes, total trust carries with it some evidence, and vice versa. It has just enough to get us into the “do something” versus “do nothing” category.

For a 419 to work, it must artificially create enough trust, and provide enough evidence, to push you into the “do something” category, and it must keep you there. The scam starts with however much trust and evidence a victim has, which is a complex equation.

You will see, if you get enough 419s, that they play different tricks. For example there are deeply religious 419s, playing the god angle because it can artificially boost trust towards the “go” zone. People who believe in god are already prone to doing things with less evidence (after all, that’s what faith is all about, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be called faith if there was clear evidence, it would be called science).

But this is a trade off, by personalizing a 419 email to increase the chances of success with someone who has a high degree of faith in god, a 419er may significantly reduce the chances that they will ensnare anyone else, in particular someone of another faith, or a devout atheist. We all have our things.

This is a problem I call uni-directional personalization – it’s damn hard to make something everyone likes. It’s even harder if you are trying to get people to give you their banking information.

419s must suffer from an even lower response rate than spam, which is good for them, actually, because at the end of every 419, there’s a scammer, and it takes work for him to get you to give him your money. If he wanted to work, he’d get a job, not be a criminal. Sheesh!

Okay, so we now know that we all have a little graph in our lives, it’s called the “Trust and Evidence Index“. (I made that up!) And of course, your TEI is highly contextual and can vary based on things as varying as the weather, your mood… all sorts of things.

Spam, phishing, and 419s all try to find people who, for some reason, have a TEI in the green all the time, making them primer fodder for a scam, or they try some hook to get people to move their TEI into the green, so that they can be victims.

Of them, 419s are the only ones which are personal, and which require that real people have a real (but based on lies!) relationship. This personal touch is what keeps them from being really awful – there just aren’t that many 419ers out there, thank god… 

Next up: It’s on to Peter’s Rule of Little Old Ladies. There will be rake assault, the police will be called, and even some fighting!

thing one

“Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

A multi-part series… 

Thing One

I remember my very first 419.

I had the (mis?)fortune of having posted on Usenet before any but the most incredibly prescient, experienced, or paranoid of us had figured out that we shouldn’t use our real email addresses. My earliest postings date to around early 1991, although the earliest ones you can still find in google groups were from 1992 (and what a cornucopia of geekdom they are! I really liked the early 90’s…).

One of the places my MSFT email address was listed was one of the early rec.martial-arts FAQs, and after that FAQ got broad distribution, I simultaneously heard about “daemons” and “spiders” and I got my first spam from a FL martial-arts gear distributor.

I switched most social postings to a non-work address, and changed my .sig to disguise my email as peterb7@m7crosoft.com, figuring, incorrectly as it turns out, that most people who would want to reach me would be able to figure that out, because usenet had been invaded by hoards of AOLers who Just Didn’t Get It.  

All of this meant that my official MSFT address became part of the fabric of the interwebz, where it lives to this day, along with some of my posts. I’ve been on the bleeding edge of spam management (solely as a user) as I was getting spam before many people knew what it was, actually since well before most of us associated the word “spam” with “unsolicited broadcast email”, although the term has been in use since well before then. 

Because my work email addy was so easy to find, eventually I was  inundated with waves of spam that were then thwarted by the mighty engineering forces deep inside the bowels of the MSFT email system.  It was interesting watching this war. The waves would hit, I’d get 100s of spam in just a few minutes, and I would read some of them to try to figure out what counter-measures they were using to get around the MSFT filters. Fairly quickly (props to whomever was doing that work!) the spam would be stopped again, with the cycle to be waged anew days or weeks later.

My first 419 came after I started getting spam but before anyone I knew personally had ever gotten one. I remember calling people into my office and showing it to them. Someone wanted me to actually email them, and give them my bank account information…

I printed it and put it on the wall outside my office. Why? I had never done that with spam before. 419s felt interesting and different somehow from spam… I’m not sure I really understood why then. I realize now that it’s because they attempt to lead me down a road that ultimately has a very intimate connection with an adversary who wants to take things from me, ideally wants to take everything I possess, everything I own, doesn’t care if it destroys me or not, just wants wants wants. 

All 419s are variants on “The Spanish Prisoner”, which dates back to at least 1910, however I personally believe that as a scam, it must date back to cavemen. 

“I is Thag! I make for my tribe 1000 flint spear heads, but I no like dem no more! Chieftain is total wanker! But I not able to carry 1000 spear heads! How ’bout you loan me some beasts can carry 1000, I bring them back here, you take 25%?”

“What 25% mean?”  

“It mean you be loaded in spear heads!” 

“Sound like good deal to me!”

So, why did 419s feel so different from spam? Why did those go up on a wall outside my office, where spam never had? For a 419 to work, someone needs for me to believe that they are someone they aren’t, and they need to use my belief to string me along a path, interact with me, talk to me… 

I think it’s because 419s are personal and deceptive, whereas most spam is impersonal and transparent.

To be continued… 

TEOTWAKI

Dan Gillmor is guest blogging over on BoingBoing. He posted something here about civilization failing, which has an interesting comment thread… this line of thinking and the ensuing debate are becoming more and more frequent on Boing Boing… and really, who doesn’t like a little apocalypse fantasy meme now and then? 

People get all up in arms about this stuff, and when they do, here’s something I’m noticing:

The people who are most passionate about society not failing are usually the ones who are most screwed if it does. (EG they tend to be city-folk, bankers, etc). The ones who keep saying it WILL happen are the ones who at least think that they are least screwed if it does. (These people are sometimes well ready, other times they are kidding themselves. Some wouldn’t last a second, they probably can’t even walk very far on their own.) 

Both sides love to argue about whether or not it’s going to happen. It being TEOTWAWKI, of course. (short hand for The End Of The World As We Know It)

Societies are poorly understood complex man-made systems, and if there’s one thing we know about those kinds of structures, it’s that eventually they fail.

Denying the possibility of TEOTWAWKI happening is, quite simply, dumb. OF COURSE IT CAN HAPPEN. No math in the world that anyone should rely on can prove that it can’t happen, because it can. If there’s one thing we know about societies, it’s that they crumble. ALWAYS. 

Der. It’s just a question of when, not if. JUST ASK THE MAYANS. 

Now, do I think society will collapse tomorrow? Next month? This summer? No. Seriously, predicting when society will fail is just straight up crazy talk. Apocalyptic fantasies. End of Days BS! Fear mongering! Profiteering? It’s not science. 

This brings us to my next rule of trust: Complex man-made systems can fail and they will fail eventually, but we don’t know when. 

You really shouldn’t trust anyone who says that they know exactly when a complex system will fail, and equally you shouldn’t trust anyone who says that a complex system can’t fail.  

No one actually knows when we will crash. NO ONE.

Okay, there may be one person out there right now who does, but he looks, acts and sounds like every other compelling nutter who was wrong before him. You can’t tell the difference until it’s too late, there’s no way to tell the difference, between now and TEOTWAWKI, between the one right guy and everyone other crazy whack job.

Every prediction of total societal failure we’ve heard in our lifetimes has been wrong. If someone says we should do or don’t do something because they know WHEN society will crash, they are crazy or wrong. Don’t listen to these people!

But conversely, if someone says do or don’t do something because they know society WON’T crash, they are also crazy, or wrong.  

So we must assume two things: Society will evenutally fail (because they always do), and we won’t know before it fails when it will. It could happen next month, it could happen in 200 years…

So us practical folks should take the middle road… Be ready, but not TOO ready. You should have a plan, think through the scenarios, have the knowledge you need.

Don’t plan for it to happen, just plan that it can happen. 

If it were to happen today, right now, somehow we’ve gone from my typing this to looters in the streets and no electricity, I have a plan, both specific and general. I know who I’m getting, I have a place to go. I’ve had some skills that will come in handy since I was a lad (I grew up in the country, I’m no farmer but I’ve eaten food I’ve grown and animals I’ve killed) and I’ve picked up lots since then that are also potentially handy. I like to be better at stuff, it’s fun, so I do things, like get my HAM radio license, or learn to build houses, or wire electricity, or run plumbing. It’s fun and geeky, and it might turn out to be really handy… but really I do it all mostly because I think it’s fun and lots if it is useful here and now, not just there and then.

Sometimes I say it’s for the zombie apocalypse, but that’s just me being dramatic. Do I really think it is going to happen, like, tomorrow? Zombies? This summer? Next year? No! We both know that’s total crazy talk. I have no idea when our society will crash, it probably won’t happen in my lifetime, and I hope it doesn’t! I like TV and my car and the interwebz and cel phones and modern medicine and all those stuphs. 

But all complex systems will eventually fail, so will I be shocked to find that this one has failed? No, I don’t think I will.  

Will you?