I just read 'Gone With The Wind'

 I just finished reading ‘Gone With The Wind’.  Why, I hear you ask, in this day and age, would you read such a horrible piece of racist trash?  My answer is because it’s both a great work of American literature and an important historical narrative.  

For all of the disturbing imagery contained in ‘Gone With The Wind’, there’s no doubt that it’s a beautifully written book.  The images evoked by Margaret Mitchell’s writing are vivid and easily draw the reader back into Scarlett O’Hara’s world.  The characters are rich and complex.  Mitchell’s description of far off historic events from Scarlett’s perspective from the streets of Atlanta or the steps of Tara both capture the impact on Southern society as well as the confusion and anxieties her characters experience as their world is turned upside down.  From that perspective, it’s a masterfully written story.

From another perspective, ‘Gone With The Wind’ is a fascinating illustration of the difference between history and memory.  Margaret Mitchell wasn’t a historian.  She was a storyteller and  journalist who grew up in an affluent part of Atlanta in the early 1900s.  She heard stories about the war from her older relatives as well as surviving veterans.  She was educated, going to well-regarded Atlanta schools before one year at Smith College.  ‘Gone With The Wind’ didn’t spring from the mind of some fringe author.  Mitchell’s portrayal of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction captures the popular memory held by many, including some historians, in the 1920s.  Her book reflects the early 20th century popular memory of the Civil War and reflects the power and invasiveness of the Lost Cause mythology.

‘Gone With The Wind’ depicts part of how the Lost Cause was born and how it took such firm hold.  For people not familiar with the Lost Cause, it was a historical ideology that held that the Confederacy’s cause was just and honorable, and that those that fought for the Confederacy were heroic.  It essentially ignores the role of slavery in triggering the war, and focusses on states’ rights, unfair tariffs, Northern aggression, and other reasons for why the war began.  Supporting this central thesis are other nonsensical arguments like slaves were happier as slaves, slaveholders were all kind and gentle, the Ku Klux Klan was an honorable bunch of men who were just protecting the honor of the South, and so on.  Quoting from the book, “The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts that it had ever been at the height of its glory.  Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans.”  It was this Lost Cause philosophy that formed the ideological basis behind the implementation of Jim Crow and justified the two-tiered segregationist society that gripped the Deep South for a century after Appomattox.  ‘Gone With The Wind’, in a way, documents the birth of the Lost Cause, in some ways celebrating it, and lets us see just how this pseudo-history gripped popular memory and formed the basis for so many people accepting white supremacy and segregation as simply how it was supposed to be.

It’s this peek into mainstream memory that fascinates me so much about Mitchell’s book.  ‘Gone With The Wind’ was a huge bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize, above and beyond being turned into a hugely successful Hollywood blockbuster.  This was the antebellum South that many Americans in the first half of the 20th century looked at and said, “Yep.  That’s the way it was.”  It reminds us of how easy it is for popular memory to be fooled into believing a beautiful myth rather than an ugly reality.

Should you read 'Gone With  The Wind' too?  Maybe.  If you're thin-skinned and the movie horribly offended you, I wouldn't recommend it.  The movie was downright pleasant compared to the book.  The book was astonishingly racist and held absolutely nothing back.  Every trope of the Lost Cause was front and center and shouted from the rooftops.  However, if you can get past that, and want to explore the dichotomy between history and memory, 'Gone With The Wind' is a great case study.

Untwisting Lincoln

Untwisting Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents the United States has ever had, gets regularly attacked by neo-Confederates, Confederate apologists, Lost Cause true believers, white supremacists, and a host of conspiracy nut jobs, antigovernment hate groups, and other wack-a-doodles that have somehow convinced themselves that the man who saved our country and ended slavery is somehow the most vicious tyrant to ever walk the land.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The scholarship that these deluded souls fall back on is sketchy at best and outright lies at worst. One technique that the Lincoln bashers use is to pick and choose their sound bites, carefully selecting snippets and then taking them out of context and using those out-of-context quotes to back whatever contrived motivation that they want to ascribe.

For example, a commonly twisted quotation is:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Lincoln bashers frequently trot out this quote to show that Lincoln didn’t give a damn about the slaves and he didn’t give a damn about African Americans. All Lincoln cared about was his “unjust” war to stop the Confederate states from exercising their (non-existent) Constitutional right to secede, blah, blah, blah.

Out of context, you can certainly draw the logical conclusion that Lincoln didn’t give a damn about the slaves. Your conclusion would, however, be incorrect.

First, you have to look at the context of the quote. This quote is from a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on 22 Aug 1862. This letter was in response to a sweeping abolitionist editorial that Greeley had published entitled, “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”. Greeley was a leader of the Radical Republican movement and the editor of a widely read newspaper in New York. His editorial referenced the millions of people in the North and called for Lincoln to move decisively on the destruction of slavery and complete emancipation.

At the time of the exchange, the Second Confiscation Act had been passed but the Emancipation Proclamation was not yet public, although Lincoln had circulated preliminary drafts among his Cabinet. Lincoln was still trying to find a middle ground and was advocating a gradual elimination of slavery, along with compensation for slaveholders (which had been the British model) as well as possible colonization of emancipated slaves to either the Caribbean or Africa. Lincoln’s fear was that sudden and complete emancipation, which Greeley called for, would cause the border states such as Kentucky and Maryland, to secede as well.

The entire text of Lincoln’s letter is as follows.  It's short and well worth reading.

Executive Mansion, Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley: Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours, A. Lincoln.

The key part that gets ignored by the Lincoln Haters Club is the last sentence of the letter. Lincoln’s position was what he thought was legal, what had been passed by Congress, and what he saw as Constitutional.  Lincoln's position was what he thought was appropriate for a President who was trying to save the Union.  Lincoln’s personal feelings were as he had stated on multiple occasions before and would state multiple times after, that he was an abolitionist and he believed in emancipation.

Lincoln wanted emancipation done legally and in such a way that it could not be undone by the courts. Remember, in 1862, the Supreme Court was still under slave-sympathizer control and Chief Justice Roger Taney had been the one that wrote the Dred Scott decision. Taney’s summed up his pro-slavery and profoundly racist position in that decision by stating that blacks were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”  Knowing that any legal challenge than ended up getting to the Supreme Court would undoubtedly end up in a pro-slavery ruling, Lincoln had to walk a fine legal line.  Lincoln may have personally wanted emancipation, like Greeley did, but Lincoln was bound by the duties and limitations of his office.

For a much more in-depth treatment of Lincoln's views on slavery, I strongly recommend Eric Foner's outstanding book, "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery".

Nathan Bedford Forrest Day

Nathan Bedford Forrest Day is a National Embarrassment

July 13th is Nathan Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee.  Each year, by law, the governor of Tennessee is required to sign a proclamation declaring the anniversary of Forrest’s birth as a “special day of observance”. 

Celebrating the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest is a national disgrace and Tennessee should be ashamed of itself.

Confederate memorials and Civil War remembrances are a hot topic these days.  How do you remember the positive contributions of some men without commemorating their rebellion?  Do you honor Jefferson Davis for being Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce or Robert E. Lee for 32 years of distinguished service to the U.S. Army including being Superintendent of West Point?  How do you reconcile Stonewall Jackson’s record as a Confederate general with the fact that he knowingly broke Virginia law by teaching slaves to read or that in the 1850s he helped start a Sunday school for black children, which he continued to fund with his Confederate army pay?  Most men aren’t all good or all bad, but somewhere in between.  Trying to remember the good without celebrating the bad makes these Confederate remembrances all that much more difficult.  The exception to that problem, however, is Nathan Bedford Forrest.  That man was all bad.

Wait! Is this the same Nathan Bedford Forrest that Shelby Foote so fondly remembered in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary series?  How can that be?  Didn’t Foote called him one of the authentic geniuses of the Civil War era?

Shelby Foote, along with the state of Tennessee, is wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I love Shelby Foote’s writing.  I’ve read several of his books and they were remarkable pieces of narrative history.  I think Foote’s narrations adds depth and a degree of beauty, for the want of a better term, to Burns’ Civil War (and I think that documentary series ought to be required watching for every high school student in America).  I agree with virtually all of Foote’s observations about the Civil War, about its impact on us as a nation, and on how we remember it.  But where it comes to Nathan Forrest, I vehemently disagree with him.

There is nothing worth celebrating in the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  His life was without merit.  He was a hateful man, an unabashed racist and white supremacist, and a man who made two fortunes from the sweat of black men’s brows.  His supposed military prowess is vastly overrated.  Even his supposed enlightenment at the end of his life was nothing more than a sham.

Let’s examine the highlights of Forrest’s life.  He was born poor but became wealthy as a planter, using slave labor, and as a slave trader.  By the time the Civil War broke out, he had become one of the richest men in the South.  He recruited and equipped cavalry units, rising to command his own group of raiders.

Forrest was militarily most successful as a raider.  He was a savage fighter, fearsome in battle, and personally killed many men.  But his military success beyond raiding was limited.  As a cavalry commander as part of the Army of Tennessee, for example, he was an abject failure.  He understood small unit tactics and taking advantage of the ground in front of him but he didn’t understand large scale operations or show any sort of strategic skill.  He didn’t understand the role of cavalry within a larger army context.  His savage nature and callous disregard for human life peaked at the Battle of Fort Pillow, where he and his men massacred several hundred U.S. troops, black and white, after they had already surrendered.

After the war, Forrest continued his racist and white supremacist ways.  He joined the fledgling Ku Klux Klan in 1866 or 1867 and became the Klan’s first national leader and Grand Wizard.  He was a delegate to the 1868 Democratic Convention where the motto of the convention was “Let White Men Rule”. (The 1868 presidential election was easily the most racist in history.  President Trump would have to multiply his rhetoric by about a thousand to even come close to 1868.)

Forrest would persist in supporting white supremacist causes and candidates and resisting Reconstruction into the 1870s.  In the mid-1870s, as his health was failing him, Forrest defenders will claim that he had a change of heart and began to embrace reconciliation.  As proof, they offer up speeches that Forrest made, such as the so-called Pole-Bearer’s Speech.  However, what Forrest said and what he did were two different things.

While Forrest was publicly talking about reconciliation, we’d call it being politically correct today, he was building his fortune on the backs of people who were being treated barely better than slaves.  Forrest started farms that leveraged Mississippi’s new Convict Lease System, a system that would be used during the Jim Crow era to arrest black men on trumped up charges, then lease them out to local landowners for far less than those landowners would have to pay if they had to actually use hired labor.  The Convict Lease System, the chain gangs, would persist in various forms throughout the South until the middle of the twentieth century.

I firmly believe that we need to take a deep breath, slow down, and rationally approach what we want to do about Confederate monuments and commemorations.  We need to have a dialog that engages all of the constituents so that we can find common solutions.  However, I don’t believe that at all about anything to do with Nathan Bedford Forrest.  The Tennessee legislature should revoke their 1921 law.  If the law isn’t revoked, the Governor of Tennessee should refuse to enforce it.  Monuments to Forrest should be removed and melted down.  Let’s end the national embarrassment of commemorating this man.

When in Gettysburg

When In Gettysburg

If you find yourself in Gettysburg, it’s easy to get caught up in the grand stories of clashing armies, of Pickett’s Charge or Little Round Top, in the valor and the bravery of the men who fought and died there.  However, if you look closely in the quieter corners, you can find poignant reminds of the true cause of the Civil War.  That cause was slavery, plain and simple, the evil need of one group of men to build their society on the backs and the labors of others.

On Cemetery Ridge, the location of the main Union defensive line, just a few hundred yards north of the Angle, the so-called High-Water Mark of the Confederacy, is the Abraham Brian Farm.  If you find yourself in Gettysburg, you should stop there and spend a few moments reflecting on the family that lived there and how the Civil War had been at their doorstep for more than a decade before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Abraham Brian was a free black man who, in 1857, bought a small farm just south of Gettysburg, the bustling small town county seat of Adams County, Pennsylvania.  Despite living in a free state, Abraham worked his land knowing that just 10 miles to the south was the Mason-Dixon line and slavery.  In the 1840s and 1850s, Northern free blacks were routinely kidnapped, dragged south and sold into slavery.  Abraham Brian didn’t need to look any further than his own family to be reminded every day of that sobering reality.

Abraham’s wife, Catherine “Kitty” Payne, mother of two of his children, had passed just a few years before and she was his constant reminder.  Kitty stands as a vivid illustration for all of us that in the mid-1800s, free didn’t always mean free.

Kitty Payne had been born a slave in 1816, property of the Maddox family of Huntly, Virginia.  After Samuel Maddox died in 1837, his widow Mary continued to live for a few years in Virginia before moving to Adams County in 1843.  When Mary moved north, she brought Kitty and her four children with her.  Once settled in Pennsylvania, Mary freed them.  Records are scant on where Kitty lived or what she did during the next two years but presumably she lived a quiet life and raised her family.  That quiet life, however, wouldn’t last long.  Mary Maddox’s nephew, feeling like he had been unfairly stripped of his inheritance, sent bounty hunters north and on July 24, 1845, they kidnapped Kitty and her children, returning them to Virginia and slavery.

Gettysburg was stunned and the kidnapping made local headlines.  Quaker abolitionists took up Kitty's cause and gathered enough money to assist Kitty in her legal fight to remain free.  Kitty ended up being one of the very few victims of southern kidnappers to be fortunate enough to win back her freedom, being declared free in 1846.  Kitty and three of her children (one had died during her captivity) returned to Gettysburg and she eventually married Abraham Brian, having two children with him during their short time together before she passed away in 1851.

When the Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North in 1863, free blacks living in Pennsylvania knew full well the fate that would befall them if the Southern Army caught them.  Some 1,000 free blacks would eventually be rounded up and sent south as part of Lee’s plunder of the state.  Brian and his family fled Gettysburg when they heard of Lee’s invasion, returning after the battle to find their home wrecked and over a hundred soldiers buried on their property.  The farm was never the same.  Brian sold it in 1868, taking a job in Gettysburg and living there until his death in 1879.  Abraham and Kitty are both buried in the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg.

For more information about the Brian farm, see this page on the Stone Sentinels website.

You can read more about Kitty Payne on this National Park Service page.

The Failed Promise of Big Data for IT Security

[I started thinking about applying Big Data technology to security-related data when I was first asked to write security guidance for a proof-of-concept Hadoop implementation.  Nothing ever came of my efforts.  The nut was too hard for me to crack with the limited data sets that I had and only a beginner’s understanding of R.  Then security product vendors started coming along claiming that their data analytics engines were going to turn the world upside down for security operations teams.  That never happened either.  I ran into a few articles recently that delved into the dismal record of security analytics and I’ve tried to capture their essence, along with a few thoughts of my own, in this post.]

Big Data systems, or, more correctly, data analytics techniques applied in an IT security context to Big Data-style repositories of log and sensor data, promised to transform IT security by giving organizations and IT security teams deep and automatic insights into malicious behavior.  Vendors touted data analytics for intrusion detection, insider threat activity detection, malware behavior detection, and phishing prevention.  Data analytics techniques (advanced statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, and so on) would reveal insights that manual methods were simply unable to produce.

This promise remains unfulfilled.  Some theorists have begun to argue that fundamental limitations of the data set itself will prevent the highest hopes of security analytics from EVER being realized.  How can that be?  And what should IT security teams be doing with security analytics products?

In an IT security context, it’s not so much the data management aspects of Big Data solutions that we care about but the analytical methods we can apply to our collected security data.  The purpose of data analytics, from a general perspective, is to achieve some form of insight by extracting interesting or meaningful patterns from large and perhaps dissimilar data sets.  Security analytics applies data analytics methods to security-relevant data in order to assist in.identifying the fingerprint of bad actors, malware, and malicious insiders so that incident response plans can be triggered and further action can be initiated.

What exactly do we mean by data analytics?  Data analytics, in this context, means applying methods such as statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing to computer system and application logs along with security sensor data (primarily network traffic sensors)  in order to detect and identity improper behavior.  Despite products having being available for years (mostly in the SIEM and DLP spaces), the promises of security analytics are still largely just promises.

“The noise about security analytics has grown deafening in the industry, but operational reality still lags far behind.”

- Gartner, 27 Mar 2017

In the cybersecurity space, the boundary between normal and anomalous behavior isn’t always obvious.  There are specific challenges and limitations inherent in the available data the impact the applicability and accuracy of data analytics techniques.

Some specific challenges in using data analytics with cybersecurity data include:

• Data set availability – There are few reference data sets available for things like insider attacks.  Many patterns that current tools look for are only theoretical.  Attack patterns available on the internet are often either sanitized or only applicable to a given enterprise’s IT fabric.
• Asymmetrical costs for errors – Depending on the use case, mistaken categorization can have a disproportionate cost.  For example, in phishing detection a legitimate email being classified as a phishing attack is an annoyance but has little cost.  Most mail filtering products allow filtered emails to be easily viewed and released.  However, allowing even a single actual phishing attempt through can have significant consequences, should the targeted user release the malicious payload.
• Active adversary – Most data analytics activities are applied against a stream of data whose characteristics are relatively constant and where observing the data doesn’t effect the data generator.  In the cybersecurity space however, malicious adversaries are constantly modifying and upgrading their techniques.  They know their footprint is being scrutinized.  They actively camouflage attacks (e.g. polymorphic viruses) and try new methods when old ones fail.  This adversarial learning means that the value of training data sets for machine learning, for example, will degrade quickly.
• Dynamic and complex environments - Data analytics methods rely heavily on ‘normal’ activity happening in regular repeating patterns.  Known-good business processes happen over and over in regular, knowable patterns which make anomalous behavior stand out, right?  If only our IT environments behaved that way.  IT environments are messy, constantly changing, noisy, fraught with one-time events, and almost always are poorly inventoried (despite what the guy who runs your CMDB tells you).  Virtual technologies, mobile devices, and cloud services have aggravated the situation.  Servers and services will be spun up, run for a bit, then vanish, never to be seen again.  Was that a new production feature or malware?  Only a long and tedious investigation MIGHT tell you whether it was one or the other.
• Base rate fallacy – Base rate fallacy is a formal logical fallacy that occurs with detecting low probability events.  Adversarial attacks are by nature low density, where there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of legitimate transactions to each handful of actual attacks. The nature of trying to classify these low density events will lead to false positives greatly outnumbering actual positives.  This can be frustrating for security staff who investigate alert after alert without finding an actual attack.
• Attack time scales – The time scale of malicious activity varies widely.  Attacks can take place in seconds or a patient adversary might deliberately slow his pace to allow an attack to proceed over the course of days or weeks.  Analysis methods dependent on time ranges can fail depending on the attacker’s mode of operations.

Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that security analytics products have largely failed to deliver the value we were promised.  It’s not that they can’t deliver value.  It’s more that the marketing hype, given the reality of the nature of detecting security events, has never been realistic.

So what’s an IT security professional to do?  They key right now is to focus on specific use cases and avoid general purpose solutions that try to boil the ocean.  Set manageable, measurable, and specific detection targets then use metrics to gauge (and demonstrate) your progress.  Make an active effort not to overwhelm your follow-up team with false positives.  Finally, make sure that you, and your boss, understand that using data analytics isn’t the security panacea that many security product and managed service vendors would have you think that it is.

Security is a process, not a product, and no amount of vendor promises will make your environment either more compliant or more secure.  Just buying tools and implementing them without an understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish will just add to the noise, not increase the signal.  Improving the security of your IT environment, using security analytics or any other technology for that matter, requires time, resource, and manpower commitment and should be driven by your use cases and your security framework, not by having tools for the sake of having tools.


For further reading, I recommend:

• “Security Analytics: Essential Data Analytics Knowledge for Cybersecurity Professionals and Students”, Verma et al, IEEE Computing Edge, May 2016
• Gartner Research Note, “Demystifying Security Analytics: Sources, Methods and Use Cases”, 27 Mar 2017
• Gartner Research Note, “Solution Path for Implementing Threat Detection and Incident Response”, 7 Jan 2019

For more information on particular subjects:

• For a good explanation of base rate fallacy, take a look at the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy 
• For more on AI and machine learning subjects like Bayesian methods and deep learning, see “Making AI More Human” in the June 2017 issue of Scientific American.  The article includes a discussion of applying machine learning techniques to spam filtering.

The Chicken Tax

Ever wonder why you see TV commercial after TV commercial for pickups when light trucks make up only about a sixth of the vehicles on the road? Ever wonder why pickups seem to be so expensive as compared to cars and why there are far fewer pickup truck models to choose from as compared to car models? As with any economic phenomenon, there are lots of reasons but a big one is the leftover tariffs from a long forgotten trade war that filled the headlines in the early 1960s. That trade war was primarily between the US and Western Europe and became known as the Chicken War.

Prior to the 1950s, chicken wasn't anywhere near the staple food that it is today. Chicken was expensive. The Hoover political slogan "A chicken in every pot" was a promise of luxury for all. Chicken farming methods advanced rapidly in the post-WWII years and soon the U.S. dominated the world chicken market. Cheap U.S. chicken exports particularly hit small Western European farmers hardest and their governments responded with tariffs on imported American chicken. The U.S. responded with tariffs of their own. One such tariff was aimed at West Germany's Volkswagen, particularly the incredibly popular VW Bus (ever wonder why they vanished from the roads?).

Over the intervening years, virtually all of the tariffs from the Chicken War have been repealed except for the U.S. import tax on light trucks and pickups. Car companies have moved to circumvent the tariff, to one extent or another, by either manufacturing their trucks in North America or at least doing final assembly here. Some cargo vehicles are even manufactured overseas as passenger vehicles, brought to the U.S. and then their seats are ripped out and cargo beds installed (which is still cheaper than the tariff).

Protected from competition, some economists argue, light trucks have become a huge profit center for U.S. car companies and their incentive to develop new models and keep prices down has been curtailed... all because of cheap chicken.

Securing Big Data Systems

Big Data is one of the buzzes in the cybersecurity space, both in terms of using Big Data solutions for improving overall IT security as well as securing Big Data implementations.  IT security needs to provide guidance to the applications teams that are implementing Big Data solutions so that these new applications are implemented with security built in from the beginning, rather than trying to bolt on security later.  Many Big Data products haven't had security on the top of their development list as the products rapidly evolve so it's up to users to make sure that these products gets implemented and used correctly.

What is IT security's role in Big Data solution implementation?  In the context of Big Data, the security teams's primary deliverables are (1) security guidance for the Big Data solution architecture and (2) direction for implementing existing security controls and tools into a new technology environment.  What the security team, particularly the security architecture function, needs to do is to use existing patterns and guidance as a baseline and generate draft guidance based on those patterns, on research, and on vendor input.  That guidance should be updated based on feedback from the functional teams and initial informal audits.  As your guidance cycles through the various teams, it will firm up and will eventually become concrete enough to add to your security standards.

The Cloud Security Alliance (www.cloudsecurityalliance.org) Big Data Working Group has does great baseline work related to Big Data and security.  If you're responsible for securing a Big Data implementation, reading their "Expanded Top Ten Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges" is a must.read.

Consider a generic Big Data solution ecosystem:

You can map your security concerns using the CSA taxonomy.  They map as:

When you apply these concerns to the generic ecosystem, you get something that looks like:

This mapping can give you a jumping off point for any security guidance document that you develop.  Apply your set of basic security practices (e.g. RBAC, centralized authentication, encryption, server standards, etc.) and categorize them according to ecosystem components and the CSA top ten and your guidance will have a pre-built skeleton that will be easy to flesh out for your specific tools and solution.

I Have A (Cooking) Confession

Confessions of a Reformed Cheese Snob

I was a parmesan cheese snob.  There, I said it.  And not for just any parmesan, mind you, my cheese had to be Parmigiano-Reggiano and had to be aged at least 24 months.  Nothing else would do.  Ever.  Under any circumstances.  God forbid that I subject my completely unrefined palate to anything lesser.  If I was at an Italian restaurant and wanted to put cheese on my pasta, I could feel the cringe run up my spine as I sprinkled on whatever unworthy white stuff they had in the cheese shaker.

Until recently.

A couple of months ago, I decided to up my pasta game.  I sometimes made fresh pasta but my pasta definitely wasn't great.  Even my best efforts turned out to be just okay.  The only thing making it worth the effort was that even mediocre fresh pasta (like mine) beats dried pasta any day, but my work definitely wasn't memorable by any standard.

I wasn't sure what to do until I thought back to an episode of 'Chef's Table' where Massimo Bottura brought in a little old lady from the Modena neighborhood where his restaurant is to teach his chefs how to make pasta.  If anyone knows how to make pasta, it's little old Italian ladies who have been making pasta every day for the last sixty years, right?  They're the quiet Masters of the Art.  And where do you find little old Italian ladies making pasta?  Why, YouTube, of course.  YouTube, literally, has videos of anything and everything.  God bless the internet.

Sure enough, after a few false starts, I found 'Pasta Grannies'.  'Pasta Grannies' is just what it sounds like; it's videos of Italian grannies making pasta.  Vicky Bennison, the creator of the channel, is a British lady who tools around Italy making short and very watchable videos of Italian women, many in their eighties and nineties, who make pasta that I could only dream of making.  I watched a bunch of videos, went to Sam's Italian Market to get some specialty ingredients, and began to cook.

One thing I noticed was that the Pasta Grannies rarely used Parmigiano-Reggiano.  They used local fresh cheeses to a great extent and when they needed a dry cheese, they frequently turned to Pecorino Romano.  What were they doing to that beautiful pasta, using cheese unworthy of their handiwork?  How could these wonderful cooks be committing such a cardinal sin?

I wanted to substitute.  I really did.  But I also wanted to be faithful to their recipes, at least at first.  I told myself that I could "fix" them later.  Then I started cooking.

God, was their pasta good.  And the cheese flavor in the cappelletti and the agnolotti... it was like a salty, cheesy explosion in my mouth.  Holy crap, I realized, these ladies were on to something.  If you were in my kitchen, you probably would have seen the proverbial light bulb go on above my head.

Of course these women were on to something.  Any one of these ladies has forgotten more about good cooking than I know  (and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know).  With my epiphany, my preconceived notions about Parmigiano-Reggiano were shattered forever.  Gone was my cheese snobbery in a puff of 00 flour.

What I realized, yet again, was that there was a place for every ingredient.  For pasta in a heavy sauce with lots of strong flavors, I needed the sharper Pecorino Romano to cut through all that and add its note to the dish.  Parmigiano-Reggiano, with it's more delicate and nutty flavor profile, would get drowned out in a sea of tomato and garlic.  Everything was about balance and the needs of the dish.  I didn't stir fry in extra virgin olive oil.  I didn't make beef stew with filet mignon.  Ingredients had their places, their roles in the opera.  There were places for the stars singing their arias but there were equally important places for the wide array of singers in the chorus.  A delicate soloist would get lost in the volume of the chorus but will shine on center stage.

I still love Parmigiano-Reggiano.  To me, nothing beats the rind of old parmesan cheese, with it's intense, aged flavor.  If I'm shaving cheese on top of a salad or roasted asparagus, you can bet I'll have my block out, aged at least 24 months, of course.  But in my cheese drawer these days is also a block of Pecorino Romano, waiting for its call to the stage.

The 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg

Given the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, I thought I'd share one of the many incredible stories of valor from Gettysburg.  If you've watched the movie 'Gettysburg' or if you've watched Ken Burns' 'Civil War' documentary series (which I highly recommend) then you know the big stories from Gettysburg... Pickett's Charge, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top, and so on... but for every big story there are dozens of little stories.  For this one, I chose the 1st Minnesota.

The 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment was made up of officers and men who had joined in 1861 and had seen action at First Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.  On the morning of 2 July 1863 the regiment mustered 262 hardened veterans under command of Col. William Colvill.  They were in reserve as part of the II Corps when the Confederate attack fell onto Dan Sickle's exposed III Corps and crushed it in battles we still remember for their ferocity and savagery; the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil's Den, and so on.

Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the II Corps, was on top of Cemetery Ridge as the Confederates broke through the shattered III Corps.  Advancing rapidly on Cemetery Ridge was Wilcox's Alabama Brigade, some 1,500-1,800 men.  Nothing stood between the Alabama men and the rear of the Union Army, nothing except for the 1st Minnesota.

Hancock knew what had to be done.  He rode to Col. Colvill and ordered his men to attack.  Hancock needed time to find and bring up more troops or the Union line would be split in two and Gettysburg would turn into yet another Southern victory.  The Minnesotans looked behind them at the unprotected supply wagons, field hospitals, and mess tents then looked in front of them at the 1,500-plus advancing rebels.  The 1st Minnesota were not green troops.  They had seen the killing fields of Northern Virginia.  They knew both what needed to be done and what the cost would be... and they attacked.  After the war, Lt. William Lochren would remember, "“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant – death or wounds to us all, the sacrifice of the regiment to gain a few minutes time and save the position.  And every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice."

Wilcox's Alabamans were stunned by the sudden ferocity of their charge.  The Alabamans were forced to give battle, unequal as it was.  Wilcox would later write, "Three several times did this last of the enemy's lines attempt to drive my men back, and were as often repulsed. This struggle at the foot of the hill on which were the enemy's batteries, though so unequal, was continued for some thirty minutes."

Those thirty minutes, paid for in blood by the men of the 1st Minnesota, gave Hancock enough time to bring up additional troops and force the Alabamans to retreat.  When the smoke cleared, only forty seven Minnesotans were still standing.  All of the senior officers had been killed or wounded and the surviving men were under command of Captain Nathan Messick.  Depending on which historical records you believe, between 215 and 240 Minnesotans were killed or wounded.  No other unit in the history of the United States Armed Forces has lost a higher percentage of its men in a single battle.

As if that wasn't enough story for a lifetime...  Hancock gathered the remnants of the 1st Minnesota, the survivors of the day, plus 86 men who had been previously sent to other parts of the Union line.  He organized them and placed them at the center of his II Corps where he thought they would be safe.  That spot turned out to be the center of the Union line where Pickett's charge would land on July 3rd.

Other men might have broken and run.  No one would begrudge the 1st Minnesota if they did.  They did not.  They fought the 28th Virginia hand-to-hand, capturing their regimental colors.  Captain Messick was killed in the fighting, as was their next commander, Captain Farrell.  When the fighting was done on July 3rd, seventeen additional Minnesota men had been killed or wounded.  For their actions on the 3rd, two soldiers of the 1st Minnesota, Corporal Henry D. O’Brien and Private Marshall Sherman would both receive the Medal of Honor.

In an ironic postscript, in the 1990s a group of Virginian descendants of the 28th Virginia asked for their regimental battle flag back.  The Minnesota Historical Society, who still have that flag today, politely refused.  When the Virginia group threatened to sue, the Attorney General of Minnesota stepped in and essentially said that if anyone wanted that flag back, they would need to go through the State of Minnesota to get it.  The request was quietly withdrawn.

History is Changing

History is changing... quite literally.  I don't mean that the way we view history is changing or the way historians do research is changing, I mean that history itself is changing, and it's because of the internet.  The internet is changing the way that historians work, the availability of resources, who can do really good history, and... consequently... it's changing history itself.

A very wise man used to tell me that there is no such thing as objective history.  Being the naive and intellectually arrogant teenager that I was, I vehemently disagreed with him.  Surely there was an objective series of events that happened in the past and if we just looked hard enough, we could figure out exactly what those events were and capture forever a perfect, and objective, view of exactly what happened at a certain time or a certain place.  I had a Newtonian view of history.  If we could account for all of the people and sequences, we could state, beyond a shadow of a doubt, exactly what happened.  Objective history, right?

Unfortunately for my teenage worldview, the reality is that we don't... and can't... know everything perfectly.  Heck, we don't even know exactly what words Lincoln spoke in his Gettysburg Address and the Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history!   (There are five known manuscripts that vary from version to version and there are additional versions from contemporary accounts, including an AP reporter's account who wrote it down in shorthand as he listened.)  How can we hope to know what happened in a conversation between two generals at some obscure battle or what was said between two congressmen as they struck a back room deal?  Beyond the events themselves, trying to determine an individual's emotional state, motivations, fears, or other deeply personal feelings is effectively impossible.  What happened here or there and, more importantly, why it happened, is sometimes not much more than guesswork.  That's where historians and the tools of their trade come into play and that's where the internet is fundamentally changing everything.

I recently read "John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General" by Stephen Hood.  I had seen "Sam" Hood speak at several Civil War conferences (thank you, C-SPAN) and I found his talks fascinating.  Sam Hood is a indirect descendant of General John Bell Hood and isn't a "professional" historian.  He's just a smart guy with a love of history who happens to be a meticulous researcher and a pretty good writer.  He's produced a well-researched book about General Hood that's as much an exercise in historiography (the study of historical writings) as it is a history of the life of John Bell Hood.  General Hood had been widely trashed by historians for the last 50 years (to the point where he got trashed in Ken Burns' "Civil War").  Sam Hood thought it seemed a bit unfair and when he started digging, it turned out that it was.

Sam Hood took General Hood's biographers to task and rightly so.  Sam Hood went back through the footnotes in these scholarly biographies, dug back to original sources, and tried to ferret out what really happened in certain situations.  It turned out that, for whatever reason, mid-20th century historians engaged in hyperbole, speculation, and some flat out making up crap when it came to General Hood.  Time and again, Sam Hood was able to cite primary sources that showed biographer bias and how they ignored source material counter to their conclusions.  Sam Hood also turned a harsh light on the intellectual laziness of later 20th century historian who simply repeated, and in some cases, embellished, the unfair or untrue earlier stories about General Hood.  To some extent, the internet made this renewed examination of General Hood possible.

One advantage Sam Hood had was the internet and the vast sources that have been digitized and put online by numerous libraries and projects.  That doesn't excuse earlier historians for not checking primary sources or picking and choosing only only primary sources that suited their story line.  The biographies cited by Sam Hood were largely written by professional historians, history professors at prestigious universities, and at least part of their job was to check their sources vigorously.  It certainly didn't excuse the second wave of historians who simply repeated the stories from the first without doing the additional research of verifying claims.  It reminds me of one brand of false news cycle where a fringe web site states something as fact, two other fringe web sites quote the first, then a mainstream site posts it, claiming that they have an original source and two additional sources that have verified whatever ridiculous claim was originally made.

I was still brooding over Sam Hood's book when I searched YouTube for lectures on General Hood.  Sure enough, there was a recent lecture by one of the Hood biographers that Sam Hood had taken to task.  Sam Hood hadn't ripped him too badly except on the question of repeating fairly serious charges against General Hood without going back to original sources.  The lecture was recent enough that it would have been after Sam Hood's book was generally available.  So I watched it.

At first, the lecturer (and I don't want to name names) avoided the more controversial parts of Hood's military career, which were mostly towards the end of the Civil War.  When he got to that point in General Hood's career, the speaker alluded briefly, and I thought somewhat rudely, to Sam Hood's book.  Referring to Sam Hood somewhat insultingly as a "shirt tail historian", the lecturer defended his practice of using stories from previous biographers as essentially something that everyone does so it was okay.  The speaker did certainly calm some of his rhetoric towards the events around the fall of Atlanta and take a more neutral position so at least in that sense, Sam Hood's book had had some success.

I was still thinking about the Hood lecture and the "everybody does it" excuse, when I saw that there was an upcoming lecture about the Grant presidency (thank you again, C-SPAN).  I decided to watch it.

The lecture was by Charles Calhoun and was in conjunction with the release of his book "The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant".  It turned out to be fascinating to watch and, in part, addressed the same kinds of issues that were raised by Sam Hood.  Dr. Calhoun addressed both the history of the Grant administration as well as the historiography around it.  And, it turns out, the opinion of biographers regarding the Grant administration has changed considerably over time.  Early in the 20th century, Grant was ranked as one of the worst presidents (even below James Buchanan) although over the century rose to be somewhere in the middle.  Dr. Calhoun was just as fascinated with this change in perception as he was in the Grant administration itself.

Dr. Calhoun went on to talk about how it took eight years to write the book.  Among the reasons that he cited for taking so long, he spoke about going back to primary sources to make sure he got the story as correct as possible.  He mentioned letters, diaries, newspapers, and other contemporary sources.  There was no "I copied from this guy because that's good enough".  It was, in a way, a remarkable presentation, especially set against the lecture about General Hood that I had watched only a few days before.  Was easier access to primary sources a factor in Dr. Calhoun's decision?  He didn't answer that question specifically but I have to wonder if it was.  Regardless, Dr. Calhoun made it clear that not going back to primary sources does a disservice to future readers and, if an author truly wants accuracy, they have to do that work.

There is no objective history but there's certainly no excuse for sloppy history.  More and more archives are being digitized.  More and more archival material is being translated and being made available in multiple languages.  The past never changes but our lens into it, and the history we see through that lens, is clearer than ever.

Lee was overrated

Robert E. Lee is overrated as a general.  There, I said it. I'm not saying that Lee was a bad general, far from it. There's no doubt that Lee was a great general, one of the finest to take a Civil War army into the field, but to read many histories of the Civil War, you’d think that he was an infallible military genius who was a mix of Hannibal, Napoleon, and Patton, with a dash of Mars himself thrown in for good measure. It's this canonization with which I take issue.

I’ve been reading a lot of Civil War history books lately and Lee as a military genius is often assumed as a given.  He’s the immortal icon of the Lost Cause, the noble Virginian who led a proud and honorable defense of his homeland despite overwhelming odds against the foul and oppressive Union horde.  As the story goes, he won again and again with nothing more than a rag tag army of barefoot country boys facing off against the mighty Union military machine.  It certainly makes for a good story, as long as you don’t let the facts get in the way of a good yarn.

First, Lee’s opposing generals early in the war sucked.  They might have been the worst crew of generals that have ever led major armies on the winning side of a war.  Prior to Gettysburg, Lee faced McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker.  McClellan was afraid of his own shadow, Pope was so indecisive that it nearly got his entire army killed at Second Manassas, Burnside thought the attack at Fredericksburg was a good idea (across the  Rappahannock against the dug in Confederate troops on Marye’s Heights), and Hooker was more interested in self-promotion than in being a good officer.  It wasn’t until Meade that Lee faced an army with even a passably competent commander, and Meade was just okay (although you could argue that he was actually pretty good, but that's another another story for another day).  When the Union finally found a truly hard-charging commander in the form of Grant, Lee’s winning streak was over for good.

Second, Lee’s subordinate officers, particularly at the beginning of the war, were by and large much better officers than opposing Union subordinate officers.  From the corps commanders to the the division commanders down to the brigadiers and regimental officers, Confederate officers were much more skilled, had better training overall, and were far less political.  The vast majority of southern general officers were military school graduates.  The Union army’s officer corps was stuffed full of political appointees.  On the Confederate side, Lee could lean on Jackson, Longstreet, Stuart, Early, Hood, Ewell, and so on.  The Union got dunces like Dan Sickles, the political general who, without orders, marched III Corps out to the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, abandoning the Cemetery Ridge line and Little Round Top on the second day of Gettysburg, and came within a hair of losing the battle for the Union.  This advantage steadily wore down as the war went on, as Confederate officers were killed and Union political generals were sacked or forced into backwater commands.  Certainly by 1864, this particular advantage had largely evaporated, despite the emergence of a few new, solid Confederate generals like Mahone.

Third, at the beginning of the war, Confederate cavalry was vastly superior to Union cavalry. Armies at the time were dependent on cavalry for a wide variety of functions, most notably intelligence gathering and enemy intelligence denial. Brandy Station in 1863 was the first time that Union and Confederate cavalry fought even close to evenly. Stuart stepped up his game a little bit after Brandy Station but the advantage continued to erode as the Union officer corps improved, the organization of Union cavalry forces was improved, attrition worked against the South, and the Union weaponry (e.g. multi-shot carbines) advanced beyond Confederate capabilities.

Even the strategy of Lee’s greatest military campaigns could be disputed as bad ideas.  Tactically, yes, he won a number of victories, but at what cost?  He left a quarter of his army on the field at Antietam and another quarter the next year at Gettysburg.  The South didn’t have those kinds of numbers of men to spare.  The North did and Grant used that grim calculus to his advantage when he put Lee’s army through the meat grinder of the Overland Campaign in 1864.  By the spring of 1865 it wasn’t a question of if the Army of Northern Virginia was going to surrender, only when.  Would Lee have done better by following a Fabian-like strategy, more similar to Washington’s strategy versus the British?  Perhaps. It's an interesting and on-going debate. You can certainly make the argument that it would have avoided the costly invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania.  However, the political reality was that without recognition from foreign powers, succession was destined to fail, just as the American Revolution might very well have failed without recognition from the French. That being said, there's enough meat on both sides of that particular bone for history students to write doctoral dissertations for decades to come on whether or not Lee's invasions of the North were political necessities.

Lee, especially from a tactical perspective, was a unique and outstanding commander.  He had the initial advantages of incompetent opponents, superior subordinates, and better cavalry but when those advantages eroded, he showed that he was still merely mortal.

F**k Yoko Ono

I Hate Yoko Ono.

I was never much of a Beatles fan.  It's not that I didn't like their music, I just didn't listen to much of it.  I caught what they played on the radio and at one point owned a copy of the White Album but that was about it.

Then one day I was looking through albums to listen to and saw Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the suggestion list, so I gave it a shot.  Wow.  End to end it was a tremendous album.  The background story of how it was one of the first concept albums and how much influence it had on the direction of popular and rock music got me thinking that I really should listen to more Beatles.

Over the next couple of weeks, I listened to a large chunk of the Beatles discography, especially the later albums.  Every album was stunningly fantastic.  I knew about the White Album but Rubber Soul, Revolver, Yellow Submarine, Magical Mystery Tour... they were all great.  And their last two albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be, were absolute masterpieces.

To me, the Beatles were hitting their artistic peak with their last two albums.  The song Let It Be alone is one of the most moving pieces of music that I've ever listened to.  If you aren't moved when listening to Let It Be then you need to check to see if you still have a pulse.  I think it stands up to any piece of music, ever.  Listen to Let It Be and then listen to Fuer Elise.  Which is more moving?  It's impossible to answer.

Which brings us to that screeching harpy, Yoko Ono.  Who knows how many more musical masterpieces the Beatles would have written if she hadn't poisoned Lennon's mind.  What great pieces of art did she steal from all of us?  How much beauty did she destroy just to satisfy her need to be just as famous as artists that were hundreds or thousands of times more talented than she is?

You can make the argument that the Beatles would have broken up eventually anyway.  They probably would have.  Each of the four had different visions and different artistic pulls.  I firmly believe however, that they would have kept it together, at least for a time, if it weren't for Ono whispering her craziness into Lennon's ears.  Who knows?  We might have had two, three, or four more Abbey Road's or Let It Be's in the discography of what may have been the greatest band of the twentieth century.

F**k Yoko Ono.

Frankenfood

Frankenfood

I just finished reading an article from Fortune about the problems plaguing Big Food.  The article, “Special Report: The war on big food” (https://fortune.com/2015/05/21/the-war-on-big-food/) was interesting but I think it missed something.  The author clearly did his research and spoke with quite a few food company executives.  They can’t seem to understand why their mass-produced, mass-marketed, smartly packaged, and heavily advertised brands aren’t selling the way they used to.  They blame the fringe elements who rail against GMOs, who scream for dolphin-safe tuna, and who want their chickens to run free.  They point to how cost effective their strategies are and how slick and efficient their business processes are, producing ever more food to feed a hungry world.  They don’t understand why consumers buy organic, buy from small producers, or… *gasp*… buy fresh.

What they really need to do is look in the mirror.  The reality is… their food tastes like crap.

Think about the most bland, tasteless thing you can eat.  How about a bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread?  I’ll even throw on some cheap yellow mustard.  Crap, right?  No one wants the bologna that they sell at the deli counter.  And why is cheese wrapped by the individual slice?  Hell, it’s not even real cheese.  It’s a “cheese product” that tastes more like plastic than cheese.  And mass-produced white bread might as well be made of sawdust.  Yellow mustard is mustard in name only and probably has more bright yellow food coloring than actual mustard in it.

Now, imagine thick slices of bread fresh from a local bakery, mortadella from your local Italian market sliced thin and piled high, maybe some fontina or gouda, and a hearty, whole grain mustard.  Cripes, just writing that is making my mouth water.  This is the food you *could* have.  The crappy sandwich is the one that Big Food wants you to eat.  Is that really a choice?

UPDATE:  I got into an argument over GMOs and the person I was energetically disagreeing with pulled out the one line that pro-GMO folks use all the time and that irks the shit out of me...  "GMOs are no different than selective breeding.  Humans have been doing this for thousands of years!"

I call bullshit.

Claiming any relationship between what scientists are doing now and what Gregor Mendel was doing with peas is as disingenuous as it is condescending.  Saving the seeds from the tallest or fastest growing plant or the one with the prettiest flowers is not adding DNA from brazil nuts to corn to add resistance to something or other.  Crossing various strains of tomatoes to create hybrids is not the same as snipping DNA from completely unrelated species in the hopes of cooking up something new.  Lord Tweedmouth didn't create Golden Retrievers by adding deer DNA (or whatever) to an existing dog breed.  He carefully bred together existing dog breeds and slowly created the characteristics that he wanted in his hunting dogs.

There are many good arguments to be made for GMOs.  It may very well be that GMOs are going to be necessary to feed the exploding human population.  They may be perfectly safe to eat.  But don't try to rationalize the frankenfood aspects of how these new variants are created by trying to claim that this is the same as selective cross-breeding.

Corporate IT and Top Chef

I stopped watching ‘Top Chef’ a couple of seasons ago.  It isn't that I didn't like the concept of the show or that I don’t like cooking shows, in fact, it’s just the opposite.  I love cooking shows and I love watching talented chefs create amazing dishes from everyday ingredients.  My problem is the ‘Top Chef’ judging system.

In case you've never seen ‘Top Chef’, the contestants participate in various culinary challenges and at the end of each episode; the person who did the worst is eliminated.  All well and good.  The problem is that the judging system rewards mediocrity.  There’s no running score, no collective achievement, no history of performance.  All that counts is how you do on the specific challenge in front of you today.  You can be the absolute best for three weeks in a row, blow one dish, and find yourself packing your knives.

Invariably, as the group of contestants winds down, there's at least one chef left who sucks.  They've never done badly enough to be the absolute worst, but they've been consistently in the bottom half.  Try something daring and fail?  You’re gone.  Try something average and do ok?  Live to survive until the next week.

Unfortunately, this reminds me of a lot of the IT shops I've worked in over the years.  You don’t get rewarded for taking risks or trying to be innovative but sure as hell you’ll get punished for failing.  Big Corporate IT staffs are notoriously risk averse for just this reason.  The problem with this is two-fold.

First, young technical studs who are looking for interesting projects aren't looking for the career safety of doing COBOL code maintenance.  They’re looking for doing something with cutting edge technologies.  Eventually they get tired of working for a management chain that preaches innovation but punishes free thinking and they move on to smaller, more nimble IT shops where they actually can get their hands on some new technologies.

Second, when layoffs come, and they always do in Big Corporate IT, the people that get axed will invariably include anyone who made his manager look bad in the last year.  Hey, didn't Bob try out that new virtualization platform and make me look bad to the boss?  Let’s put him on the list.  Well, yeah, Charlie isn’t the best at his job but we went to college together!  I can’t lay him off!

The net is that our Big Corporate IT staffs tend towards being a cluster of B- / C+ students.  Our executive management can chirp, “We want to be like Google!  We want to be like Microsoft!” until the cows come home.  Until they can get middle management to act that way, Big Corporate IT will continue to be the mediocre ‘Top Chef’ contestant that somehow manages to just squeak through.

Tax the rich? We already do...

In all probability, the tax load on higher income Americans is going up.  It's simply the reality of the current fiscal situation.  However, before we go too far with the "they should pay their fair share" argument, let's look at what higher income Americans already pay today.  My numbers are based on IRS data for 2009 tax returns, which is the most recent that they have posted on their web site.

Let's do some math...

Americans who filed income tax returns in 2009 with adjusted gross income of $75,000 or more made up a little over 20% of all returns (29 of 140 million returns).  That group paid $727B or 84% of all income taxes paid.  In other words, 1 out of every 5 income tax filers paid 5 out of every 6 income tax dollars.  The other 4 out of 5 filers paid only 1 dollar out of 6.  Push the dividing line to an AGI of $100k and it ends up being 12.5% of filers pay $646B / 75% or 1 of every 8 tax filers paid 3 of every 4 dollars in income taxes.  That's where any income tax revenue increase, by definition, has to come from.

The ugly reality of the fiscal corner we've been painted into by decades of irresponsible federal spending is that taxing higher income Americans is inevitable.  Lower income taxpayers simply don't make enough to make a difference even if we all paid higher tax rates.  Let's look at the numbers from the other direction.

Filers who had AGI of under $50k made up 66% of all returns but paid only $61B in taxes or 7% of income taxes paid.  Filers with an AGI of under $75k made up 79% of all returns but paid only $139B or 16% of taxes paid.  Using a cut off of $75k as an example, you could increase tax rates by 10% on everyone under $75k per year in AGI and only generate another $14B in taxes, not enough to even make a dent in the deficit reduction target of $500B that we need.  You might as well leave rates alone on lower income tax brackets because it won't make a difference anyway (at least not as it relates to deficit reduction).

Higher income Americans will just have to carry more of the burden, as they do already.  Before we vilify people for having the audacity to dare be successful, maybe we should thank them first for paying the bills.

Typical Request to IT Security

This is what you sound like, people:

"I put up a new web app and I need your approval.  I already spent $250,000 dollars on it and five business units are running on it every day so we need to get this done quick.  It runs on IIS 2.0 and NT 4.0 but don't worry too much because it runs on the original unpatched versions, not those crazy, patched up, service pack versions that have all those holes.  It's really easy to install because it mostly uses default settings and everything runs on the same server; the app, the database, the authentication mechanism, the works.  And it's easy to manage because all of the programmers from the company we bought it from still have full admin rights to the box.  We don't have to worry about integrating with AD because all of the user ids and the passwords are managed right within the app.  And you can add new ones with a text editor so we don't need complex user management."

"There's only a little patient and doctor data so there shouldn't be any compliance issues.  It has addresses, some basic demographic data (age, sex, height, weight, that kind of stuff), and social security numbers but there are no test order codes or test results so we should be OK on the PHI front.  There's a module for people to enter their credit card numbers but we haven't told anyone about that so if they put their card numbers in, it's their own fault."

"Can you please approve this in the next couple of hours?  I already told people that you did so it's really just a formality."

"Thanks."