techcafeteria

Robert Egger’s brilliant response to Rush Limbaugh’s recent diatribe against nonprofit employees. is a must watch, particularly the last five seconds or so, which neatly sum it up. Limbaugh claims that nonprofit employees are “lazy idiots” and “rapists” of the economy. Wow, like what he does for a living is so healthy…

This a month or so after a madman was stopped on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco with a car full of weapons, headed to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. Both of these organizations work to protect people’s rights, the ACLU being the better known of the two. Lesser known Tides’ mission is to promote social justice and maintain a healthy, sustainable environment. Why did the killer target them?

Glenn Beck makes his living by standing in front of a blackboard and espousing paranoid-inducing theories about democratic cabals aimed at destroying the American way of life.  His rants have succeeded in getting White House officials, such as Van Jones, removed, and, along with other Fox News conspirators, ACORN, a voter registration organization, disbanded.  In the first case, the White House, shamefully, asked Jones to resign in the face of all of the ridiculous criticism.  In the second, Fox News aired doctored footage alleging that ACORN helped pimps and prostitutes, creating falsified scandals that drove the nonprofit under.  ACORN was investigated, and the investigation found some evidence of tax evasion and questionable destruction of documents, but, notably, absolutely no consulting on prostitution practices or, as was widely alleged, improper handling of voter registrations. But all of this started when Beck chose them—as he did with Tides—as fodder for his unsubstantiated and false conspiracy theories.

I sum up Limbaugh’s comments as his standard, poorly-thought out rambling.  He meant some particular nonprofit or sort of nonprofit, and chose far too broad a term to make a lucid point.  But I question whether Limbaugh is ever capable of making lucid points. If we didn’t have the evidence of the bust for Oxycontin abuse, it wouldn’t be hard to still recognize drug-addled behavior.

What Beck does is far more insidious and dangerous. Like Limbaugh, he’s not concerned at all with honestly portraying the people and groups he discusses.  He’s building a narrative, one that the viewers can watch and feel that they have a special stake in, relayed by his tear-filled eyes and cautioning tone. This intimate dialogue is really engaging.  But Beck is entirely unwilling to be accountable for the lies that he spreads, even when they come close to inspiring mass murder.

It’s completely unintuitive and bizarre that nonprofits—poorly resourced organizations that struggle to do the work that our government does less and less of—are lambasted and threatened by the people that rally loudest for eliminating government programs.  We’re the ones who are getting important work done with funding that is volunteered, not assessed.  Most nonprofits have no leftist or rightwing agenda—they have clearly stated missions that they’re trying to serve (as Egger’s video makes clear).  Maybe Beck and Limbaugh should be a bit more appreciative of the fact that we enable mouths to be fed, museums and parks to stay open, and air to continue to be breathable in a country where the government can get fewer and fewer social services funded.

I’ll happily give Kentucky’s Republican Senatorial candidate, Dr. Rand Paul, a pass and assume that he is no racist.  In fact, his objection to the portion of the civl rights act that denies businesses the right to discriminate based on race is very consistent with Libertarian views. The problem is that those Libertarian views are based on an idealistic world view that is so radical that electing them to high offices would be the first step towards armageddon.

In this MSNBC interview, Rachel Maddow tries to pin Paul to a yes or no on the question of whether he would support a modern-day F. W. Woolworth’s right to refuse to serve blacks, and he dances around the question so deftly that you’d think he studied under Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, mostly by throwing his own red herring back by equating race-based discrimination with the right to bear arms.  

I think Rachel missed the talking point.  The question is, if he takes the absolute Libertarian view that Government should not regulate private businesses, then is he saying that health inspection should be abolished? Zoning ordinances? Safety standards?  It seems so, as, early on in the segment, he’s quoted as saying that the ADA might have gone too far, and suggests that requiring that a business install an elevator for a disabled employee would be unnecessary if they just gave the employee a first floor office.

What is so surreal about the arc of the Tea Party from rage-filled yahoos upset that “the America they grew up in” wouldn’t have elected a black man President to their adoption of Libertarian, “government should keep it’s hands off of everything” ideals is that they are pushing this just as the world is reeling from disasters caused by lack of governmental regulation.  The financial crisis occurred as Federal regulators ignored people who were screaming at them that Bernie Maddow was running a pyramid scheme while the big banks were playing additional con games.  The gulf has just been traumatically infected by the largest oil disaster in history because the Mineral Management Service was too busy partying with the execs to regulate them.

The proof that people would suffer if government didn’t regulate private businesses is screaming from the front page headlines.  And Rand Paul, a guy whose more idealistic than any hippie ever was, has secured a senatorial nomination.

Terry Childs is Guilty.

In mid-2008, Terry Childs, the (then) System Administrator for the City of San Francisco, was called into a meeting with the COO (his boss); the CIO of the SF Police Department; a Human Resources representative; and, unbeknownst to Terry, by phone, a few of the engineers he managed. He was ordered to share the system passwords for the network. He made them up. Subsequently challenged with this fact, he refused to reveal the passwords, ending up in a city jail cell.

Close to two years later, Childs has been found guilty of felonious computer tampering and faces up to five years in prison (he’ll likely be let off in two, with his racked time counting toward the total).

Open and shut, right?  The city claims, and the court found it believable, that Childs’ obstinate refusal to provide passwords resulted in over $200,000 lost city revenue.  He lied to his employer.  He held the city ransom.

Childs’ defense has always been that he was protecting the city’s network.  He wasn’t going to share sensitive passwords with people who, in his estimation, wouldn’t respect the sensitivity of those passwords, and would likely share them other employees and contractors.

To my mind, while that’s a valid concern, it doesn’t clear him.  He still works for the person who was asking for the passwords, and he was obligated to provide them.

The real crime here, though, is not that Childs’ hoarded the keys to the system. It’s that the meeting occurred at all, and the reasons that it came to the point of a stand-off are all too criminally common.  Was Childs guilty? Sure! But others shared guilt in bringing it to that point.  Consider:

• The System Administrator reported to the COO.  No CIO? No VPIT? No IT Director?  This means that there was a gap between the absolute tech and the non-technical businessperson, and that’s a critical layer, particularly for an organization as large as the government of a major U.S. city.


• There were no policies governing use of system passwords. The fact that Childs was allowed to be the sole keeper of the entire network was a lapse in operations that never should have been allowed.


• Childs was a city employee for ten years.  If there were concerns about his trustworthiness or reliability, shouldn’t they have been addressed earlier in that decade?

All too often, IT departments are isolated from the organizations they serve.  Part of this is due to the nature of technology work and techies—we speak a language of our own; enjoy working with the tools that many people find obstructive and confusing; and the majority of us are not very good at casual socializing. More of it is due to the fact that most people—including the CEOs and VPs—don’t get technology, and don’t know how to integrate technology tools and purveyors into the organization.

But that lack of comprehension shouldn’t be a license for persecution.  Everyone’s a loser here, most personally Childs, but the city suffered from a situation they created by not investing properly in technology.  And, by investing, I don’t just mean hiring the right amount of staff and equipment—I mean that CEOs, COOs and everyone up the chain has to step out of their comfort zone and either learn more; hire staff and consultants to vet and translate; or, optimally, both.  The CEO doesn’t have to be as knowledgeable as Bill Gates, but they have to have educated oversight on how IT is run that “gets” what IT is about and how the technology practitioners operate.

As much as Terry Childs is guilty of a crime, he’s tenfold a victim of one, and it’s a cautionary tale for any of us who work in environments where management is happy to let us build a big, isolated kingdom.

What drove Terry Childs to commit a felony was a crime unto itself.

This blog doesn’t get a ton of comments – the most active posts tend to be the ones leading up to this weeks Nonprofit Technology Conference.  But I’ve been getting a bunch lately that I’ve decided not to post, as comments, at least.  So this is to clarify the comment policy, and respond to some borderline conversational/offensive comments left in the last day or so.

Comments are moderated here, mainly in order to weed out the obvious spam that slips through my Akismet filter on occasion.  I don’t publish spam or link spam, so if you’re one of the people leaving innocuous comments about my writing style, note that I don’t believe that you’re sincere, and I won’t publish your link to your viagra site.

But the comments I received this week aren’t spam.  Instead, they appear to be the work of someone looking to provoke me.  They’re in reply to my post “The Offensive Bardwell Defense“, in which I spoke about segregation, my marriage, and the legal battle to allow same sex marriage underway.  The first message was easy to ignore, because it was pure vitriol, equating my interracial marriage with numerous controversial sex acts.  The writer, one “DMTS” of gmail, followed that up with a more measured comment that, while continuing to make personal comments about my marital status, argued that, while it’s fine for me to “hook up” with people of non-white ancestry, I have no right to blog about it.  ”Don’t ask, don’t tell”, as it were.  The full comment went:

“Peter Campbells marriage (if still intact) is just an exception to the way things really work in mixed marriages. I don’t want to deny him any success or happiness with his nice wife and child pictured (great pic btw), but he does not have any rights defending something that is clearly wrong for the majority, when he is in the minority of working mixed marriages(for now). If I hook up with a different race partner, I will just do it, and not advertise it as normal, or make a big deal and use someones legit comment as a scapegoat. WHO CARES ANYWAY PETER? no one is making laws that specify you can’t hook up with dreadlocks, beehives, or skinheads, so what are you worried about? when has anyone persecuted mixed racials? sounds to me you are looking to MAKE TROUBLE by drawing sympathy to yourself that is totally unjustified. Blog about something else that is important, like what your son is planning to do with his future, to help make this a better world without blog script shills making trouble for all races. Shalom”

I’d point out two things to Mr. (I presume) DMTS. The first is that, while he can suggest that my marriage is some kind of exception to the rule, I’m not aware of any evidence that it is.  Divorce is rampant in this country, but I’ve never seen a statistic that suggests that it’s higher among interracial couples than same race. Mr. Bardwell didn’t cite any statistics for his assumptions, either.

The second thing I’d point out is that DMTS completely missed my point.  I used my interracial marriage, and interracial marriage in general, to point out that the same sex marriage debate underway in this country is a parallel, and, as with interracial marriage in the 60’s, the bigots, of whom I assume DMTS counts himself among, are going to lose the battle.  He seems to have skimmed my message and misread my conclusion that this type of bigotry—be it about race or sexual orientation—will be overcome.  It’s a slow process. It clearly still exists, as DMTS chooses to illustrate.  But, today, his attitudes and comments are sad.  In 30 years time, they’ll be outrageous.  Racism and hatred/bigotry based on assumptions about race (or race relations) is on the wane.  Interracial marriage is now accepted in the U. S.. It’s a slower course for a lot of the institutionalized racism in our schools and justice system. But most of the vitriol comes from old, white men, and two trends are clear: whites as a percentage of our population are shrinking, and old people will die sooner than the more enlightened young ones.

As to publishing comments like this: I’m interested in dialogue, and if DMTS responds to this with something that doesn’t use language that I wouldn’t want my Mom (who reads this blog) to see, I’ll certainly approve it.  If he provides some backing for his unverified claims that interracial (“mixed” is an offensive term) marriages are at higher risk of failure than same race marriages, a claim that I find very suspect and unlikely, I might even reply. But if DMTS actually isn’t invested in his arguments, and is just trying to get a rise out of me, it only takes a second to mark a comment as spam.  And rude, unconstructive conversation, like DMTS’s first message, which I will not publish,  is spam here; that’s the policy.

Yesterday I received a letter from the State of California alerting me that my Census form is due next week and that I should be sure to fill it out and return it, as is decidedly my intention. That form will include the page that drives many Americans crazy—the one that offers you a bunch of ethnic backgrounds that you can identify yourself on. As my spouse of African-Cherokee-Jamaican-German and who knows what else decent says, this is not a multiple choice question for many of us. Personally, I always check the “white” box, which is not lying, although I always have a nagging doubt that the Semitic parts of my genetic makeup aren’t fairly represented by that choice.

Today, skimming through my news feed, I starred this article by Michelle Malkin, passed on by Google Reader’s “Cool” feed, and I just found time to read it. The gist of the article is that Census filler-outers should refrain from allowing the government to peg us by ethnicity, instead choosing “Other” and filling in the comment squares with “American”. Take that, Gubmint statisticians!

Now, this is interesting, because while Ms. Malkin proudly describes herself as a Fox News Commentator, I don’t think this question lands on a liberal/conservative scale. Discomfort with being pegged by race straddles all ideological outposts, as it should. But data is data, and the ethnic makeup of our country by geographic area is a powerful set of data. If we don’t know that a neighborhood is primarily Asian, White, Black or Hispanic, we don’t know if the schools are largely segregated. We don’t know if the auto insurance rates are being assessed with a racial bias. We don’t know if elected officials are representative of the districts they serve. And these are all very important things to know.

It might seem that, by eschewing all data about race, we can consider ourselves above racism. But we can board our windows and doors and dream that the world outside is made of candy, too. It won’t make the world any sweeter. If we don’t have any facts about the ethnic makeup and the conditions of people in this country, then we can’t discuss racial justice and equality in any meaningful fashion. We might hate to take something as personal as the genetic, geographic path that brought us to this country and made us the unique individuals that we are and dissect it, analyze it, generalize about it and draw broad conclusions. It is uncomfortable and, in a way, demeaning. But it’s not as uncomfortable and demeaning as being broadly discriminated against. And without evidence of abuse, and of progress, we can’t end discrimination. We can only board up the windows that display it.

So, I’m not going to take Ms. Malkin’s advice on this one, and I’m going to urge my multi-racial wife and kid to be as honest as they can with the choices provided to them. Because we want the government to make decisions based on facts and data, not idealizations, even if it means being a little blaze about who we really are.

You might have read about Keith Bardwell, a man out of his time, who, throughout his 35 year career as a Justice of the Peace in Louisiana, has steadfastly denied marriage licenses to interracial couples. For their own good, of course. And for the good of any children they might bear. Some might consider Bardwell an old coot who means well, when he defends his cruel and discriminatory behavior as being based on his concern that interracial marriages generally don’t last, and that it’s cruel to subject children to a world where they will be pariahs to blacks and whites alike. But I can’t listen to his defense of bigotry with anything but an understanding that he has a choice. He can “protect” children from the hate he perpetuates, or he can stop being hateful.

Clearly, Bardwell doesn’t get out much, if he thinks that life for interracial couples and children is all that bad. Apparently, he can’t—or won’t—imagine a culture like the SF East Bay, where my wife, son and I live happily amongst many other interracial families and suffer no more or less discrimination than most of our single or multi-cultured peers. But I’m not buying his racism dressed up as concern for the children defense. I suspect that all of Bardwell’s good buddies, including a State Attorney General who passively condoned his illegal actions, generally agree that hey, we can deal with multiple races, as long as they don’t cross-pollinate.

It’s striking to me that Bardwell’s defense is based on the usual trifecta of bigoted justifications: He “doesn’t believe in mixing the races in that way”; he doesn’t believe that interracial marriages will last, questioning their validity (in relation to single race unions); and he seeks to protect the children. This sounds a lot like the recent Proposition 8 campaign in California, which amended the state constitution to ban gay marriage, not because there’s anything wrong with gays—“We love them!” the Prop 8 backers exclaimed—but because they don’t approve of that sort of union, and it’s not valid, and, if we condone it, we’ll harm the children.

Unlike Bardwell, who had his rationalizations for racism at the ready, the Prop 8 types look like they’re grasping at straws. Asked by a judge to explain exactly what the threat that homosexual marriages hold for heterosexual unions is, an attorney for the Prop 8 coalition admitted that he didn’t know. But, he protested, there might be a threat! We can’t allow two people who love each other to be treated as equal with two other people who love each other because, um, well, there might be some unforeseen consequence for the other people!

My son’s first exposure to racism came a few years before we were planning to teach him about it, when we attempted to stay at a cliff-side inn on the Oregon coast, only to find that another family had gotten down to the beach before us and had taken the opportunity—after seeing my dread-locked wife—to etch, in large letters, “N I G G E R” in the sand, in plain view from anywhere up the bluff. We had to explain to our four year old why we had to leave the nice hotel and get back in the car. Because of the bad people; the ignorant ones, who will insult and threaten us for irrational reasons.

He’ll run into this again. In fact, we’re certain that he already has run into subtler forms of racism. But he’ll suffer less of it than I did, as a Unitarian boy growing up somewhat ostracized in a school where 75% of my classmates were Jewish (unaware, until I was older, of my Jewish roots). I clearly remember the single lunch table where the black kids sat, bused into our 99% white school from Boston. I comforted my interracial friends who were beaten by other kids for being too light-skinned; or stopped by the police for being too dark-skinned in their own neighborhood. There’s still plenty of this type of racism around, but there’s less of it than there was, and it’s easier for us to shelter our son, appropriately, from it.

And it beats what our parents went through. My Jewish heritage was a secret because, after being chased out of the Netherlands by the Nazi’s, my mother and her parents shed their religion like a blood-soaked frock. My wife’s grandmother and aunt signed the earliest petition in what became Brown vs. the Board of Education, and lived through the firestorm that signing that petition incensed in the white community. We are both still very much products of a history of discrimination, and it tempers who we are and what we want for our child.

But we have hope for the future, because, while I don’t find age and naivete to be justifications for discrimination, I do see the generational trend that seems to be eradicating it. It is a better world for my interracial son to grow up in than it was for his racial parents. But it will be an even better one if we work, actively, to resurrect a media that used to pride itself on not taking sides. And we can’t tolerate the Bardwell’s and the Prop 8 bigots who are so sure of their superiority that they can easily justify denying others the same rights and privileges that they have. This is the world that my son is growing up in, let’s make it one that he’s welcome in.

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is Climate Change. Here’s my pitch for an immediate step that could be taken to reduce the production of greenhouse gases significantly, while promoting good health; improving the economy in rural America; and reducing cruelty to animals. In fact, this suggestion is so logical that it’s a travesty that I have to suggest it. It makes Sarah Silverman’s recent hunger-ending proposal look paltry in comparison. Here’s my suggestion:

Close down Factory Farms.

Elininate Agri-Business.

The Humane Society reports that as much as 18% of all geenhouse gases are produced by agri-businesses. Agri-business practices increase air pollution, water pollution, and create general health risks.

The variety of public health concerns include Swine Flu, Diabetes and childhood cancer. As to our general health, the meat produced at these farms has doubled our intake of protein and contributed to the huge increase in obesity.

As if that isn’t enough, the healthier, sustainable family farms that once fed the nation have languished, destroying the economy in rural America. If the health of ourselves and our families, and that of our planet, weren’t enough, wouldn’t this be a case for dismantling this industry?

But, as the Humane Society points out, our lawmakers are giving Agri-business a free pass and stripping the EPA of their authority to regulate them. It’s the equivalent of the Tokyo police escorting Godzilla to the city. If we care about our future, we need to take drastic steps to contain the damage that we are doing to our planet. And we should start with the big, easy, bang for buck solutions. Like this one.

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the news reports about how the Obama staff reacted to the technology in place at the White House. If you haven’t been tracking this, you can read the full story, but the short story is this: the Mac/Blackberry/Facebook-savvy Obama staffers were shocked to find ancient systems and technology in use at the White House – Windows XP, MS Office 2003, traditional phone lines, and web filtering in place – in other words, the same stuff my org uses. I found myself both sympathetic and skeptical regarding their plight, because I am a big fan of all of the new technology that they are familiar with, but they walked into a network that is a lot like 90% of the businesses out there. The Bush Administration, perhaps surprisingly, was fairly current in their use of technology.

Some quick things I draw from this:

• The Obama campaign distinguished themselves by their smart use of modern, internet technology, and that use played a major role in their successful campaign.

• The shock they’re facing is less about the technology in place than it is about the culture they’re moving into. Political teams run freely and nimbly, and Howard Dean established the Web as the infrastructure of choice in 2004. Businesses, like the White House, do not drive so close to the cutting edge, for a variety of good reasons, such as the need for standardization and security.

• Over the next few months, the Obama-ans are going to compromise, and I’m dying to learn what choices they’ll make.

In my work, I’m on both sides of that fence every day, working with staff to understand why we have to standardize in order to manage our systems, stay a little behind the curve in order to avoid risk, and stick with applications like Microsoft Office because they have the mature feature set that we require. At the same time, I rally my staff to be creative in finding tools and solutions for our people, to stay abreast of which new tools are going to be worth the risk in terms of the benefits they offer, and understand that, should we get too far behind, it will be as risky as being too far out on the technological edge. We don’t want to fall off of any cliffs, nor do we want to stand still as all of the other cars race around us.

Some of us, like the leader of the free world, can’t imagine a day without a Blackberry; others, like a former free world leader, don’t even want an email account. Most of us live in this world where we have to creatively embrace the new while we tighten our grips on the traditional, because technology platforms thrive on stability while they obsolesce rapidly. Where the Obama White House winds up might be a good indicator of where we should all be. I hope we’ll have a window into that.