Ruben Bolling strikes again…

This is the best one yet!

…and you have a head cold. I have often remarked on how lovely city life is when you can just walk to everything you need on a day to day basis. That’s not as much fun however, when it’s below freezing cold outside and windy and you have had a bad night because your head cold wouldn’t let you sleep.

In other news, I’m out of eggs and I need to go to the store and it’s currently 34 degrees outside. Hey…two whole degrees above freezing!

“The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.” -Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

There’s a lot of ruminating going on, as you would expect, regarding how the hell this country, which put human footsteps on the moon, managed to elect Donald Trump to a second term in office. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of it in the months and years to come. Already I’m seeing that it was a woman at the head of the democratic ticket, or that democrats are insufficiently willing to throw hated minorities under the bus, which naturally gives republicans an edge among the voters. Some point to the right wing media cocoon. Others that too  many voters simply don’t pay attention. Complaints about billionaire disinformation campaigns are being raised.

I’m sure there is something to all of that. But something more disturbing is developing among researchers who dig deep into the mindset of Trump voters. Yet it’s something we have all seen throughout our lives, and maybe it needs closer looking at, but the frustration factor is so great most of us would rather not even bother with them.

Think of the flat earthers, or the anti-vax nutcases. The ones convinced that the moon landing was faked. That global warming is a hoax. That UFO Aliens are real and walk among us. Every one of us who has had to engage one of these quickly realizes that it’s a mug’s game. Arguing with them is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Good faith is a good starting point with someone, but you are allowed to see that it isn’t there when it isn’t there.

Trump voters are not all kooks, but we are finding out they all seem to have something terribly rotten in common with kooks, which is Facts Be Damned And I Have A Zillion Ways Of Denying Anything You Tell Me. As it turns out, they were not unaware that they were being fed lies by the republicans. They just didn’t care. If anything, they embraced the lies. The lies validated a choice they were always going to make anyway. They were not ignorant of the facts, they are hostile toward the facts. It is not a healthy skepticism, it is a willful rejection of truth.

You can pour a firehose of facts at this particular subset of the human family tree when it comes to their political notions, and not a bit of it will get through to them. They’ll change the subject. They’ll argue beside the point. They’ll throw junk science at you that both they and you know is bogus but as long as it’s something to throw back at you that’s what you get. You will hear the complete catalogue of informal fallacies out of them but not one single solitary acknowledgement of a fact. And the favorite, You Just Disagree With Me But I’m Entitled To My Opinions. And yet they are not kooks in the sense that they know the earth isn’t flat and leprechauns aren’t breeding intelligent goats to replace mankind. But they have the same exact response to facts that kooks do. It isn’t just simply I don’t believe you, it’s I don’t care if what you say is true or not.

The root of it, of course, goes deeper. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. De Gaulle said that patriotism is where your country comes first, and nationalism is when hating other countries comes first. There are perhaps many poisonous springs from which this effect comes forth. But they all have that mindless hate at the core, and you can tell which of them is worth spending time discussing politics with…or anything else…and which are not, by the way they play this particular game: If you can’t make me change my mind, I win…if you can’t make me admit I’m wrong, I win.

So…I propose an update to the Voight-Kampff test. Let’s call it version two. It’s still about sifting the humans from the look alikes, but without assuming that just because one Is human, that they haven’t discarded, as Jacob Bronowski said, what it is to be human, whenever the facts offended them.

I’m seeing a bunch of posts on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) lately, from people who are astonished that so many voters, let along politically aware newspapermen, columnists, pudits, just don’t see what’s coming down the road with a second Donald Trump presidency. How can they not see it, people ask, when he’s been making it clear as a bell what he intends to do with power once he gets his hands back on it. It’s reminding baby boomer me, ominously, of how clueless people were said to be in the aftermath of the second world war. 

So many excuses for what happened. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. No one could have seen all that coming. We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them. Nobody could have predicted that he would actually do everything he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf… 

I remember the documentaries I saw in school. A common thread was that Hitler’s speech had “strange powers” to sway the masses, almost hypnotic, as though that was supposed to excuse the belly flop into the human gutter. No. Just no. Watch the few speeches with english subtitles. He’s a moron. I have read Mein Kampf…granted an english translation and German isn’t easy to map directly to english…but you read it and what you see is a common bar stool bigot who can’t shut up once he gets going. This is no mystical hypnotic orator. What he was, is a street thug, a brawler, an outsider who walked into German culture with its emphasis on formality and process and order and set about trashing everything about polite orderly middle class German society he could. The magic was he had no rules. Just hate. Lots and lots of hate. In the wreckage of post World War One Germany, his act found its audience. And one day Germans awakened to discover there were more thugs among them wanting to trash it all then they’d supposed.

I’m seeing it now. It’s pretty hard to fit Donald Trump into the image of a master orator, but some try. They talk about how Trump is going to take down the cultural elite. That was Hitler’s promise to his thuggish base too. They talk about Trump’s spiritual connection to the common man. Here’s your common man.

The scene is in Mary Renault’s novel “The Charioteer”. The main character, Laurie Odell, a wounded survivor of Dunkirk, has just crossed paths with his schoolboy crush Ralph Lanyon. But time has passed, Laurie is crushing on a hospital orderly, a young Quaker named Andrew, and Lanyon has a boyfriend now…who becomes instantly very jealous of Laurie. We learn later he’d been breaking the lock and reading Lanyon’s diaries. At a small gathering of friends, Lanyon’s boyfriend (oddly nicknamed “Bunny”) spikes Lanyon’s drinks, getting him too drunk to drive Laurie back to the base before curfew. This allows Bunny to get Laurie alone in the car with him, at which point Bunny starts putting the moves on Laurie.

Laurie is furious. As they drive back to the base in silence, this is what’s going through Laurie’s thoughts…

With a cold barren weariness that quenced the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go.

Not wicked, he thought, that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. They are just runts. souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the light of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on the Exmoor, and go on holiday leave the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and one and on…

Then he stops himself, thinking of the young Quaker he’s fallen in love with…

No, Andrew wouldn’t like that.

I’m seeing it now. The excuse making for not seeing a common thug for what he is, and all his devoted followers for what they are. All the looking the other way by everyone who should and can know better. All of them taking for granted that he doesn’t mean to do what he has always said he would do.

I wanted to chew a bit on what happened to me yesterday before I wrote about it. But I never felt more alone at a thanksgiving table than I did yesterday. Not my host’s fault though. He worked hard to put out a great thanksgiving table. He’d have sat there and talked my ears off but he was too busy. The others…well…they talked past me, they talked around me, they talked over me. Whenever I opened my mouth to contribute to the conversation someone would immediately start talking over me, and then yank the conversation to a different topic. Fact was I didn’t really know any of them, and they apparently knew each other but not me, although I’d seen some of them at previous gatherings. So that put me on the outside looking in from the start. I tried, but could not break through.

The worst moment came when one of the guests asked to take a group picture of all of us at the table, and the guy sitting next to me quite deliberately put his head in front of mine so my face wouldn’t be in the picture. I had to ask for a second take. What I should have done was get up and leave. But I didn’t want to offend my host, who I’ve known since the BBS days. It was no accident, he knew I was sitting there, he kept crowding my space at the table and I kept having to move away. This is something all us weird outcast kids get to experience over and over. But this was a Thanksgiving table for gay guys who didn’t otherwise have family to be with on that day. I expected some sense of…you know…Family.  

I have never felt more alone at a Thanksgiving table.

Later I saw this post from Father Nathan Monk, who I follow on Facebook…

Some of you had a rough day because you were alone. Others choose to be around family that isn’t supportive because that’s easier than the alternative. There are those of you who had to sit at tables with those who hurt you. Then again, this might be your first holiday alone because you finally stood up for yourself. Maybe you are a seasoned veteran of the Black Sheep Society. Perhaps you’ve long ago found a chosen family and never looked back. You might be the person who has to show up because you are the only one who protects your vulnerable sibling who can’t bring themselves to walk away yet. Whatever your situation is as we step into the holiday season, whether you are alone or surrounded by people who despise you, just know that I love you just the way you are.

No one can replace a family with a status or undo all the pain with a few words; I won’t pretend to have that power. I just hope, that if you’ve snuck behind the tool shed to catch some of Willie Nelson’s breath with your cool cousin, or are hiding in the bathroom for just a moment, that as you look down at your phone after being told, “We said no politics!” because you were responding to the thing your uncle said about abortion but it’s only politics when you take the opposing view so he’s not in trouble for bringing it up, but you are for responding, that when the screen glares brightly as you check out of the hell you are in for just a moment, you look down to these words and know I’m thinking about you, I see you, and I love you.

If you fall into one of those cracks know that you’re not alone. But remember that cultivating chosen family requires digging below the labels that get put on all of us at one time or another. I might be gay for example, but that won’t mean we have anything in common with each other apart from a political battle, and you might even disagree with that.

I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my little crew of high school classmates. We have gathered semi regularly, those of us who still live in the area, and it is always a good time. We knew each other from when we were teenagers. Those are good friends to have and keep. I would have loved to have had Thanksgiving with my brother in California, and that part of my family tree out there. I’ll be there for the Christmas and New Year holidays though, so there’s that. A casual post Thanksgiving happy hour with some of my co-workers at Space Telescope would have been lovely. Maybe some other year. Assuming I have a few of those still left to me.

I made myself a nice turkey dinner yesterday, to somehow make up for the miserable one I had on Thanksgiving. Yes, I ate by myself. But it was delicious. I made myself a drink and settled into some fond memories before going to bed. I reckon this is what solitary old men do. Then again, I often did this when I was a young man too.

“Acquainted with the Night”
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

This is why my art photography is so dire.

This came across my Facebook stream just now, via Heather Cox Richardson’s Book Club page…

And yet…and yet…I have met, online and off, many religious people, Christian and otherwise, who also believe these things. I am an Atheist, but it’s not because I have a grudge against religion. It’s just that belief in an all powerful creator of the universe and all living things God just stopped making sense to me. It may be different for you and I am fine with that. Maybe someday I’ll find myself strolling along Newton’s beach and pick up one of those prettier seashells he spoke of and find God inside of it and think oh…there you were. But I don’t think so. I’ve been like this, entranced by the world as I see it, as science and curiosity has revealed it to me, as long as I can remember. It is an awesomely beautiful universe we live in.

But there are times, like as I’m reading the script on this…what is it, a bench, a monument of some sort…that I wonder if you can be a Christian even if you don’t believe in God. I think you can. I think the carpenter’s son would tell us that it’s better to build a hospital than a church. If you have to pick one or the other, build the hospital. I think the carpenter’s son would say it’s better to work for the good than just to pray for it and wait for God to do something about it. I think carpenter’s son would tell us to be the good the world needs, feed the poor, care for the infirm, treat the stranger with kindness, because they are your neighbor. Make peace, be peace. I don’t need to believe in an almighty god to know these are good things, necessary things, if we are to have civilization, if humanity is to have its tomorrows. 

But I know there are those who think tomorrow is much less important than eternity. I think this is why they’re willing to let children, who are our tomorrow, starve to death, die of completely preventable diseases, become war’s collateral damage. It was god’s will. But no, it was indifference. It was the belief that belief alone is all you need to be a good person. Belief excuses indifference, forgives bigotry. But no, it does not.

You hear a lot since the election about being willing to disagree and still be family. But details matter. What are we disagreeing about? Is it about God, or about deeds? There are those that say good deeds won’t get you into heaven. But belief does not make anything happen all by itself. Belief can just be an excuse for not doing what you didn’t want to do in the first place. If you want to help make the American dream of liberty and justice for all real, do the work of civilization, and make all our tomorrows happen, I will walk with you. I will be your neighbor. We can be family. We can disagree about god.

This came across my Blue Sky feed this morning…

This idea that raising the standard of living drives the birth rate down is something Bill Gates has been saying and when I first read him arguing it I was surprised at how much sense it made. Some ideas just get into your head at a young age, and then you realize later in life it was just about rich and powerful men pushing you in a particular direction. Let’s not be trying to raise the standard of living for the poor because we need them to keep the middle class scared.

I’m pretty sure that’s Steven Pinker of the Blank Slate being talked about in that quote. The Blank Slate was my first exposure to him. In it he argued against a model of human consciousness that denies that our evolutionary heritage has any influence on our behavior. I was already thinking that model was wrong after reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis which argued that if we sought a deeper understanding of ourselves in times of need then we should to explore those animal horizons “from which we have made our quick little march.” This was during the Cold War, so you can appreciate what those times of need were.

And on that basis I picked up Pinker’s first book expecting to read some elaboration of what Ardrey said. But he lost me when he began approvingly quoting Thomas Sowell, who called homosexuality a deathstyle (hello Dick Hafer) and incongruously argued that allowing gay men to marry would help the spread of AIDS. Yes, let’s not be encouraging gay men to get married and settle down. Sowell, who fancies himself as a recovered Marxist, also liked to bellyache about how American Marxists haven’t actually read Marx…oh yes they do, ad infinitum, and their arguing with each other about what Marxism is, let alone with what Marx’s critics say he is, reminds me of arguments over the Bible I had to listen to. How many Hegels can stand on the head of a dialectic…

So I wasn’t terribly surprised that Pinker spent some time on Epstein’s island, only to get his self important ass self booted off after telling his host he was wrong about something. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day (or once if it’s a military clock). If you want to slow down the birthrate, improve everyone’s standard of living.

And…yeah…Trump and Epstein seem to have had lots in common. Fragile egos of a feather sexually prey on teenagers together. Why were you even there Steven Pinker??

The more you know…

It all started with a little Commodore C64 I bought so I could pick up shortwave radio teletype signals. That eventually lead to my building my own IBM PC compatible from parts, and teaching myself how to use and program it.

And that led me to this place you see in this image I found in today’s Facebook Memory…

…when, 26 years ago, while working an unpleasant contract for an insurance company in Reisterstown, I got a call from a recruiting agent at the agency I was contracting with, asking me if I’d be interested in a side gig at the place where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated.

Well he didn’t have to ask twice. And not just because I’d been wanting out of the contract with that insurance agency ever since I saw what I’d been brought in to work on, as opposed to what I was told I’d be working on. I’ve been a little space cadet ever since I watched the first Mercury astronauts going up on TV. I called the number he gave me and arranged an interview with the person leading development of the new Grants Management system they were about to start work on. At the time it was going to be based around Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Word and my skill set by then was all about the various dialects of Microsoft Basic and how they’d evolved ever since that first Commodore with its PET Basic interpreter. So the job requirements hit the bullseye of my skill set. The interview went pretty well.

Later that insurance company project manager snuck up to the door of a conference room I’d entered to have a private conversation with my agency recruiter. He got mad when he overheard me complaining to the recruiter about being mislead and that the source code I was being asked to maintain was a crazy rats nest of GOTOs and GOSUBs and global variables and no attempt at all of scoping and he fired me on the spot. In part I think because he was actually quite fond of that programmer, who had recently converted to a very conservative Mennonite faith and had resigned to go live in one of their communes. But also he probably didn’t like his deceptiveness being called out. So I got fired. I was delighted. Now I could pursue the job at Space Telescope as a full time gig.

I was brought me on board to the GATOR project 26 years ago today. I worked it as a contractor for a bit over a year, then they brought me on board as AURA staff (after negotiating my release from the contracting agency I was working for). I’d only been expecting the contract to last a few months, as they usually did. My agency recruiter asked me if I was okay with leaving the contractor world, and I told him if it was anything else but a space project I wouldn’t bother with it. But…Space! My first day as AURA staff was January 1, 2000. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

In February 2022 I retired, after having worked slightly more than two decades, first on Grants Management and then for James Webb, which included running tests in the Mission Operations Center. There are three posters somewhere in the STScI office spaces with my signature on them, that went into space on various Hubble servicing missions. My den wall is festooned with service awards I earned while working at STScI, including four large service awards for 5, 10, 15 and 20 years service, and a poster with two mission patches that flew, and a piece of heat shield foil from Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 after the camera was brought back to Earth. I had a lot to be proud of looking back after retirement. And it all started with that little Commodore C64. Wish I still had it, but I gave it away.

A few months ago I was asked if I was interested in coming back part time. They didn’t have to ask twice.

You should say Hi sometime.

(It works equally well in both English and German)

Bridges burned can always be rebuilt.

I really need to keep in mind that I’m part-time and only getting a part-time salary, and so I really need to not let myself get drawn into things during my off time that aren’t urgent.

I’ve hit my 40 for this pay period but I still needed to complete some back to work on boarding stuff before midnight tonight, so I went ahead with that. Then because I was already logged in I started fiddling with some code I need to get working again so the reporting overnights can start running again. All of that is a code base I created back when I was full time and hadn’t yet retired.

So I start looking at things in the code with an idea that I’d just get a better idea of what I needed to do next week. Next thing I know I’m immersed in that report code, and I had to force quit myself. Because today all of the time I spend working on it would have to be non-comp time if I kept at it…which I really wanted to do because I can’t stand a software problem I haven’t figured out yet.

But no. I’m not hourly, I’m salaried and that means no overtime. I’m fine with that, and if I have to work non-comp for urgent things I will. I did that back in the day and especially while I was working on JWST. But sometimes I just did it whether it was urgent or not because I could not stop myself until I get it figured out.

See…that’s going to bother me…

I knew when something was going to nag at me all night long if I didn’t figure it out. A shrink would probably have a field day with me I suppose. But it did get me good performance reviews.

I have to pace myself now. This isn’t urgent Get to it next week…

Firstly…

I am not nearly at his level of accomplishments, but this is how I feel, and especially now that I’m getting myself back to doing my political cartoons. And I’m even more focused now on this blog, and the idea of blogs as an alternative to the commercial social media that helped deliver us to this moment. Blue Sky exempted ( @brucegarrett.bsky.social ). Lots of people are decamping Twitter for Blue Sky now, because its user controls allow you to keep the trolls out of your feed, keep them from reposting you to their followers, keep them from seeing anything you post. Unlike Musk’s Twitter which has removed all of that entirely because…Musk. Which brings me to…

I finally deactivated my Twitter account on the eighth. I’d been holding onto it after Musk took over because I’d been an early Early user and had an account name that was actually my name and not my name plus a string of numbers. Maybe that sounds like a strange reason but I like my name. I’ve never been comfortable using a handle, although for a brief time I went by “Coyote”, which was actually a reference to a character in the book of the same name by Peter Gadol, not the Coyote of native myth and legend or the Warner Brother’s one. It didn’t last long but if I ever went back to using a handle it would be Coyote Gato.

Digging in my heels and insisting on going by my own name wherever I happen to be online might also have something to do with how often my bitter maternal grandmother used the fact of my having my dad’s family name against me. Yes, my name is Bruce Garrett. What of it.

Anyway, Twitter became too much Musk (musky…pungent…). I think I knew I was going to drop Twitter back when the hurricane hit inland and all the disinformation came pouring out like an overflowing sewer, where once there was useful and immediate emergency information. The damage Musk had done to the service became sickeningly clear.

So that deed is done but however much I despise Musk and his kind I still felt it as a loss. I was there at the beginning. (I was there when USENET was a thing…) But it was over some time ago.

I didn’t bother getting a zip archive of my time there. I have my own website here and that’s personal history enough.

As I said…I’m getting back into doing my political cartoons. Here’s a work in progress from a few days ago…

This is about one of the few bright spots in the election day aftermath. Larry Hogan, former governor of Maryland, was running for the senate in a state where a democrat seemed certain to win. Our Maryland republicans are batshit crazy, but Hogan stood out for being somewhat moderate-ish and was much respected for standing up to Trump during the worst years of COVID and getting our state the tools we needed to cope. He had the good will of lots of democrats and moderates here and he eventually term limited out of the governor’s house. So standing up to Trump you’d have thought our republicans would not have anything to do with him, but they wanted to turn the Senate badly (and alas they did, but not with him), and that snake McConnell got him to run and Trump even endorsed him.

Of course during his campaign he kept all that on the down low. He made a big deal of his alleged support for abortion rights and how he would stand up to Trump like he did during COVID. But it was all a sham. At a private GOP fundraiser he made a big deal out of getting Trump’s endorsement. But the fear was all that goodwill he got from Marylanders during COVID would get him elected.

Thankfully our voters saw through it. We didn’t give our votes to Trump either, although I am well aware of the subset of my neighbors who most likely did. All you had to do was drive anywhere outside the urban zones to see the Trump/Vance signs. As I said, one bright spot post election.

Lastly (for now…), this from my Blue Sky feed…

Can I get any more stark mad liberal democrat American? I dunno, but I intend to make it fun.

Well that was a short stint at being alcohol and tobacco free…

As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H. L. Mencken