An article about this TV show came across my Facebook feed this morning, and for a moment it took me away from MAGA America back to a better time and a better America. It’s memories of that better America that are the most tormenting now. But if anything they need to be held even more dear if we are to stand any chance of prevailing, and winning our country back.

Before there was Bill Nye there was Mr. Wizard. This was a favorite Saturday morning TV show back when I was a kid.

Lounging in front of the TV set back then I would have been about the same age as the kids who came to visit Mr. Wizard.

It was a different time, the post Sputnik period of the Cold War, and providing school kids with a grounding in science was important for the national defense. So science was considered to be a subject even elementary school kids should learn as part of a comprehensive education, along with geography and math. I remember doing my science projects with classmates in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. But there is also this: I grew up in Maryland, in the Washington DC suburbs, and I have to wonder what my grade school memories would have been had I gone to school elsewhere, especially the deeply fundamentalist south. Let me explain…

There was another science series I used to love watching, which were the Bell Lab’s Science films. You knew it was going to be a good day in class when they brought out the Bell & Howell 16mm film projector, and especially when you saw the film cans had one of those Bell Lab’s titles on them. The episodes touched on different subjects, such as how the sun creates light and heat, how blood moves through the body and brings oxygen and nutrients to the cells, and what cosmic rays are and where they came from. Every one of the episodes Frank Capra directed ended with a plea to regard science and religion as not just compatible, but that science itself was an expression of mankind’s faith in God…

From the beginning of the project, Capra had insisted that the films would explore the relationship of science and religion. In his autobiography, Capra paraphrased his early comments to a meeting of the scientific advisory board assembled by AT&T and N. W. Ayer: “If I make a science film, I will have to say that science research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit that works in all men. Furthermore, I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.” At a later stage in the project, Capra wrote that the films would have “the obligation to stress or at the very least to acknowledge the spiritual side of man’s make-up—to acknowledge that all good things come from God—including science”.

-Wikipedia, The Bell System Science Series.

I’m sure Capra firmly believed all this, but it’s probably the only way those episodes could have been shown in the deep south.

And now look at where we are…

My initial impressions about returning to DVC have not been wonderful. In my previous incarnation I would spend February/March in Saratoga Springs because it gave me walking access to Disney Springs, and my birthday week at Boardwalk because that gave me walking access to my two favorite parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. I have fewer points this incarnation, but more than enough for a week in Saratoga Springs, which is now my “home” resort. This trip I shelled out extra points to get into a room I thought would be right next to Disney Springs. But no…the extra points put me right next to the main building, which I guess was a premium spot but not what I wanted. And the view off my balcony might as well be a brick wall.

So maybe extra steps to Disney Springs benefits my overall health. Fine. Whatever. It’s not crippling, just annoying. But I came back into this expecting better than I was getting now.

This morning I attempted for the first time to use one of the laundry rooms here, only to discover they don’t put nearly enough washers and dryers in them here. At Port Orleans Riverside they have lots at every pool. I reckon the thinking here is there are enough rooms that have their own washers and dryers in them they don’t need a lot of those in the common laundries. This was an unpleasant surprise. 

Previously I either wasn’t staying long enough to need a laundry or, if I was staying on hotel row for a few nights and then going to my DVC room, I would use the excessively long time between DVC check-in and check-out to go to a local laundromat and get my things clean. I would pack lots of clothes for my birthday week at Boardwalk because Septembers in Florida can be sweltering. This was so as not to need to do the laundry until I got back home. My birthday falls on peak hurricane season…hahahahaha…but the points and hotel stays are cheaper then so…okay.

When I discovered how easily I could get into the laundry at Port Orleans I decided to pack fewer clothes and use the resort laundries instead. I’ve been trying for years now to limit the amount of luggage I take with me on my road trips, all to no avail. But fewer clothes in the main luggage helped a bit.

I began checking out the laundry rooms after I got here, and discovered they were tiny by comparison. But also mostly empty. So this morning I tried getting into the laundry across from my room, which was somewhat larger because it’s in the main building and pool complex. It was fully occupied. But there was a web app I could use to tell me when the machines became available. I figured that app was also how you paid, similar to payment to use the machines in Port Orleans, and other hotels nowadays. (which is Very Nice because you don’t need a lot of quarters…)

Oh great…now I can do my laundry!

So I kept checking the app to see when the machines in that laundry room were available. But it kept reading zero machines available. So I checked the other Saratoga Springs laundry rooms and the only one showing any availability was way on the other side of the resort. I began to think I’d need to go to that Laundromat in Kissimmee again, and what the hell am I spending all this money to be back in DVC again??

Get me started on the pathetic welcome package they gave me when I rejoined…

So I decided to walk over and check. Sure enough the web app was broken and all the washers were available. There was a couple using the dryers (there were Lots more of those) and I asked if they’d tried the app and is that how you pay. Oh no, says they, the app isn’t necessary and the machines are free.

Well okay…that’s a perk. I guess it makes sense given that some rooms have washing machines in them, so maybe it isn’t fair to those of us staying in the studios to charge us for using the ones in the common laundry rooms.

So maybe now I’m not so unhappy being back in this thing again…

Am I really the only one noticing the appalling symbolism that the most technologically advanced and record holding fastest Atlantic passenger service ocean liner, bearing the name SS United States, was towed to a scrap yard for partial disassembly so it can eventually be sunk and become an artificial reef!?

I had a surprisingly nice dinner at Biergarten yesterday. I say it was surprising, because I’d just assumed that all the servers I used to know there (excuse me…Cast Members) had either retired or left Disney by now. But no…several who remembered me and a certain someone were still there and I got to talk to a couple of them about what was going on with me, and what was not going on with me and a certain someone. One of the servers came over to chat with me for a bit and congratulated me on my return to work at Space Telescope.

I’ve had the theme song for the first series of The Littlest Hobo (the one I grew up with, not the second series music) going through my head all night for some reason…

Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me. 

And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.

So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?

Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.

I really dislike doing this because it seems so much like begging for attention, but I have a story I’ve been working on for years and I would really like some feedback on it.

It’s a sorta-kinda ghost story but in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House where the frights don’t come cheaply from blood and gore and monsters that pop out at you, but instead some strange creepy occurrences and things that go bump in the night. Sorta-kinda.

I play with some tropes. The story takes place not an old victorian mansion but a modern office building. The timeframe is the worst of the subprime mortgage collapse which is important to the background of the plot.

My main characters are a young gay male couple going through a bad patch due to money problems brought on by the meltdown, and also the spending habits of one of them. That one accepts a part in a cheap reality TV ghost hunter show to make a few bucks, but also he’s a computer geek…I play some with that trope too…and a rationalist with an obsession for debunking what he considers occult balony.

There are also a handful of other characters, amature ghost hunters and reality TV charlitans. And lurking in the background, a bunch of brutal predatory capitalists involved in building this luxury office building that nobody, including themselves, wants to spend the night in after it was completed. Or any other time of day.

What I’d like to know is the writing good enough it doesn’t bore you to tears reading it? Do my characters seem realistic? Is the dialogue convincing? Does the story make you want to read more as you go along? I’ve only finished (somewhat) six chapters of it and it’s hard to keep going without any feedback. And truth be told I’m still working on the middle part. I know what it has to do, not just how to do it.

The first chapter, which I’ve posted elsewhere, and got some Very good feedback on, is only one page. It basically tells you what the story is about. If it doesn’t interest you it’s okay to bail after that. The second chapter is background for my two main characters and why they got themselves into this reality TV thing. If they don’t interest you go ahead and bail there. The third chapter is exposition, as they’re driving to the site, on the history of the building that’s allegedly haunted. Does this interest you? If not go ahead and bail there. Things don’t really start happening until the fourth chapter and maybe that’s a mistake but I wanted to set the stage and lure the reader in.

Comment on this post (it’s the React! link) or email me if you like at bgarrett@pobox.com (the brucegarrett address is whitelisted so I would need to add you first) and I’ll send you the links to the Google Docs.

Otherwise…pointers to a good editor I can hire to look it over would be welcome too.

In an appreciation of Alan Rickman’s role in Die Hard, a cinema page I follow on Facebook relayed a factoid about the movie I hadn’t known. The basis for that movie was a novel that was a sequel to the novel that the Frank Sinatra movie, The Detective was based on. I’ve written before about how the oppressive static a gay kid growing up in the 60s/70s and later was one part vitriolic hate and the other part a kind of rancid pity. The Detective fits neatly into that other part. And the pity in that one is exceptionally rancid.

Released in the late 1960s The Detective was billed as a more “adult” crime drama, which after Preminger’s Advise and Consent in ’62 released the topic/plot device of homosexuality from its taboo status in movies as long as it still was…you know…taboo…The Detective tells a story of big city corruption, murder and suicide all tied together by…you guessed it, homosexuality.

It starts with a grisly murder of a man whose head was crushed and his dick cut off. New York City police detective Joe Leland, played by Frank Sinatra, figures it must have been the victim’s “roommate” because of course that’s what homosexuals do to each other. They track the roommate down and grill him and because he’s a bit of a nutcase (aren’t they all?) pressure him into confessing. He is executed for the crime.

Later a suicide across town gets the detective’s attention because the dead man’s wife thinks there was something more to it. The dead man, Colin MacIver (played by William Windom in flashbacks), is deeply involved in some sort of real estate corruption and the Powers That Be want the detective to back off the case.

It turns out MacIver really did commit suicide after all because he was…guess what…a closeted homosexual, and what is more he had in fact brutally murdered the victim at the beginning of the movie, not the roommate the detective sent to die the chair.

They play the tape recorded confession MacIver recorded for his therapist and in flashbacks, while William Windom, the actor playing Colin MacIver voices over, we see him first getting assaulted by some street thugs who call him a faggot, which inexplicably drives him to pickup a guy for sex at the docks.

William Windom played commodore Decker in the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine and you saw there what a first rate actor he was, and you really see it in the flashback scenes in The Detective where he plays the tormented homosexual who thinks “just one more time” will get it out of his system. As gobsmackingly awful as this movie is, I have to say Windom is stunning in those few scenes at the end of it. He makes you believe it:

The thought of turning, turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me and made me sick with anger. I went down there. I had heard about the waterfront. People giggle and make jokes about it. I had had only two experiences before, once in college and once in the Army. I thought I had gotten it out of my life, but I hadn’t.

I looked at them. Is this what I was like? Oh God, twisted faces, outcasts, lives lived in shadows always prey to a million dangers.

People don’t realize what we go through. I was raised in a family that would not even admit that there was such a thing as a homosexual in this world. And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop.

I thought if I could have just one night  I could get it out of my system. Just one more time.

That part about “People don’t realize what we go through” was supposed to make the movie more progressive in its attitude, but it’s really a barge load of rancid pity. I suppose in 1968 people thought we were lucky to get even that.

So…yeah…to say I’m surprised at the link between The Detective and Die Hard would be an understatement. The article says Sinatra was offered the detective role again for Die Hard but declined saying he was too old for it. So they rewrote the story to break the link with the previous novel and I think it’s better for it. Sinatra just would not have played it the way Bruce Willis did.

As a side note, I have a Mark and Josh cartoon I’ve been dawdling over for years to post eventually during an academy awards ceremony, that riffs on that bit of horrible self hating gay dialogue, with Mark holding a can of spray paint, chewing the scenery, telling his boyfriend tearfully that “the thought of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me and made me sick with anger” and “I thought if I could get it out of my system. Just one more time.” And he sobs into his hands and Josh says “Let me guess…you’ve been tagging Exodus billboards again” and Mark shrugs and says “Just a little” The last panel is an Exodus “I questioned homosexuality” billboard but now it’s all psychedelic and it says “I questioned reality…turn on tune in drop acid.”

I try to make lemonade out of the homophobic lemons life gives me however I can…

It’s taken me a long, long time, but I finally got my hands on a good, excellent actually, copy of Rhythm In The Ranks, a George Pal Puppetoon I remember from early childhood, mostly for how scary the villains of the story are.

When George Pal, a Hungarian, came to the States to escape the Nazi takeover of most of western europe, he brought with him a very unique method of stop motion animation. Rather than using clay figures, or ones with armature skeletons you could reposition between each exposure of a frame of film, Pal used a “replacement” method wherein many individually carved wooden figures were used to represent motion. A scene with a figure walking across the frame might use several dozen carved figures, each in different stages of walking, replaced one after the other as each frame of film is shot.

It gave the figures in the cartoon shorts an amazing degree of apparent flexibility, and yet they looked solid. You could tell they were wooden figures, and yet they not only walked and talked, they breathed, their faces stretched as the painted on mouths and eyes moved. Their legs and feet extended out as they walked. It made wooden figures seem as if the very wood they were carved from had come to life, and it made the Puppetoons fun to watch.

Pal made many of these while Europe was burning under the Nazi onslaught, and some of this cartoons spoke directly to that, employing a creepy stand-in for actual Nazi soldiers in the cartoons: The Screwball Army.

The Screwball Army was literally just that…an army of cannonballs with legs and arms that had screws stuck in them with nuts on top that spun while they marched across the screen, destroying everything in their path. Seems weird, but it was an effective stand-in for the real thing in a cartoon mostly aimed at children, but enjoyable by adults too. Added to the effect was they usually marched across the screen to the tune Powerhouse which anyone who ever watched the old Warner Brothers cartoons would recognise. They really creeped out six year old me.

The Screwball Army’s most well known appearance is in the Puppetoon Tulips Shall Grow, but Rhythm In The Ranks is the one I remembered most from way back when, and the hardest to find a copy of.

When I finally got to see Rhythm In The Ranks again after so many years had passed, I saw I’d correctly remembered much of it, including the hilarious singing telegram declaration of war, and the Screwballs marching across the hills. But dig it…I remembered everything reversed left from right. It’s a trick my memory plays on me over and over again to this day. I have no trouble reading, it’s not any sort of dyslexia. I have no trouble telling left from right. It’s just in my memory, and more pronounced the further back the memory is. There’s probably a name for it somewhere. This image of the Screwballs I got from a website article on Rhythm In The Ranks (go read it…there’s another shot in there of the hilarious singing telegram) is a good example. 

I remembered this scene perfectly all these years in every detail, but as a mirror image of what it actually is.

…from Joshua Marshall over at Talking Points Memo.

Something really striking about the attack on federal institutions like the Treasury and the IRS is that it’s always the same youngsters doing Musk’s work. I was just assuming that they’re bedazzled true believers that Musk can get to work for him cheap. Now Joshua Marshall opens our eyes, yours and mine, a bit more. And it’s ugly. Really, really ugly.

Why these kids? Here’s why: It’s not just that they’re firmly in the cult of Musk, but that they’re young and have all the foresight of kids with a fifth of rum an ounce of pot and a final exam the next morning. Or in other words, they’re willing to do things, very very illegal things, things you wouldn’t want on your resume, that the members of the Musk cult who are older and smarter and way more capable really don’t want to get their fingers dirty with. Yes, Trump has their backs…for now. But as Marshall says tomorrow is a long time and Trump suffers no loyalty to anyone. He may thumb his nose at the courts but the law is still the law in the real world, and those older and smarter members of the cult have careers and a mortgage and a family which might just make them a tad reluctant to just walk in somewhere and do whatever the Reich Musker wants.

But those eager young things over there, like virgins entranced by sugar daddy attentions? Sure…the man who has had 12 kids by three women, and all his older and smarter cult members, will let Them do it. And they’re thrilled to get recognition from The Man.

It’s so obvious…

I’ve actually restarted work on an art piece I began several years ago and I can’t tell whether that’s improved my head space or that a better headspace has somehow made it possible for me to go back to my drafting table. I suspect it’s the former because I have no idea what could have possibly improved my mindset at this time. But it could be anticipation of my upcoming Walt Disney World DVC vacation. But there’s pain there too, this particular visit.

The art piece is an absolutely unique one for me, in that it’s a pencil and charcoal drawing, no ink, and there will only ever be that one original. Only my oil paintings have been one-offs up to now. The artwork doesn’t scan well but I’ve no plans on making high quality scans anyway. I wanted to try something entirely in pencil and charcoal on high quality cold press paper, not the Strathmore board I usually use for my artwork. That sort of paper is usually used for water colors but I thought the texture would be good for how I work with charcoal. I wanted to try something without ink, all grey scale in graphite and charcoal, and I wanted it to be a finished piece, not something I would tweak later in the computer. Something frameable.

But that caused my innate fear of failure to bring a halt to it after I got only a third of the way through it. The computer has turned into something of a crutch over time, and it’s why I don’t use media I can’t easily erase and redraw over. Some of the most amazing political art I’ve seen employed Conte Crayon or grease pencil and once you put something down with one of those that’s it, unless you’re working for publication and can get away with white gauche correction like Herblock did (you should see his originals…they’re full of that…but it didn’t show up in the halftone newsprint process so he knew what he could get away with). One of the grand masters of the form, David Low, once said that every cartoon he did took three days to complete, two spent in labor, and one “removing the appearance of labor.” I have tried over the years to take heart in that. Instead I’ve felt badly all the time about not getting over my fear of making a mistake on the drawing and learning to use those old techniques of the masters. This was going to be an attempt at making a start on that and I choked.

So I put it aside, but somewhere I could see it every time I went down into my art room. I needed it to remind me.

Somehow, the other day, something clicked and I could see a way forward with it, and I got a renewed interest in it coming from who knows where. Maybe it was something adjacent to my sudden interest in developing and scanning in some film that had been languishing for years. Maybe it was a willingness to visit its themes, which are full of so much joy and pain both after watching and reading so many new stories of young gay couples in love. But one day I took another look and I saw a way forward with it, and I put it back on my drafting table for the first time in years. I’ve been working on it in little baby steps for several days now and for the first time in years I’m feeling really good about where it’s going.

The work in progress is here at the end of this blog post, but be warned: It’s not pornography, I don’t do pornography, but it’s probably NSFW either. As I said, it doesn’t scan well but I can snap some shots of it off my iPhone. My intent though is there will only ever be one copy.

There’s a backstory.

Somewhere, possibly a Fark Photoshop contest, I came across an image of someone wearing bluejeans. But the image is tightly focused on just their hips…bare skin above the beltline and these tight fitting blue jeans below…with a product tag hanging off one of the belt loops. The tag reads:

WARNING: Removing this article of clothing guarantees the wearer a portion of your soul.

Most of us, except for low life creeps, know how that works. You lay down with someone and afterward they will be somewhere deep in your soul forever, for better or worse, but hopefully for the better. I thought the image was cute in its way and I made a print and stuck it on the wall behind the art room bar.

Time passes, the universe expands, and one day my brother came for a visit to Casa del Garrett East. While he was here he wanted to go to the local Harley-Davidson dealers to get a t-shirt from each with their locality on it, because collecting those is a Harley thing. So we went to the dealer off RT 40 near White Flint and while he was browsing around so was I.

Time was I really wanted a Sportster, so I was gawking at some of those. Then I walked over to where they had their fashion selection. Leather jackets and various Harley branded items. Over in the t-shirt section where the usual motorcycle culture prints, including one kinda rude one I’d seen many times before…

Gas, Grass, or Ass. Nobody Rides For Free.

And looking at that t-shirt I remembered the image behind the bar back home and thought: there’s two sides to that coin isn’t there.

And immediately an image came to mind.

A young guy is camped camped on the side of a dirt backroad somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It’s somewhere deep in the empty wide open spaces of the American southwest. The road he’s camped beside goes in a straight line and vanishes somewhere over the distant horizon. His motorcycle is nearby, and also his empty sleeping bag and camp stove. The young man stands looking to the sunrise in the far horizon with his morning cup of coffee in one hand, and the other resting on his naked hip; he’s only wearing a t-shirt since he’s just got himself awake and hasn’t dressed yet. His back is to the viewer, his t-shirt drapes suggestively just above his very cute butt. On the back of his t-shirt is a message that reads: Nobody Rides For Free.

This came fully formed to mind in that moment I saw the t-shirt there at the Harley dealer. The only change I made to it when I set down to draw it was initially he had a companion with him who was still asleep in his sleeping bag. But the more I thought about it I decided that, no, he’s alone on his road trip to somewhere.

At first you might think it’s just an effort in sexy art. Which it is, but there’s more to it I hope the viewer sees. It’s not just about whatever struggles he’s having in the romance department (because he wouldn’t be wearing that t-shirt if things had been easy for him), it’s about he’s looking ahead to the life he wants to find…somewhere, somehow, over that horizon. Desire and dreams. Life as a road trip. Nobody rides for free.

It’s interesting how the artistic process works in your head. Or mine anyway. I have such a vivid imagination that I rarely do preliminary drawings and roughs. I think it until I can see in my mind exactly how I want it to look before I start drawing. I do make tweaks once I start, but they’re very few.

So it was really important to me that I get this one right. It had to be my best ever, and deep down inside I don’t see myself as being that good. But I work on it because there’s no other way. I have to get it out of me. And this one says just about everything I’ve ever wanted to say in my art paintings and drawings…if not my art photography, which is just relentlessly bleak (unless I get to work with a model which I haven’t in decades (are you out there Robbie? I bet you’re still beautiful…thanks for nothing Jon and Joe…)). My other art is a lot more positive. This includes A Coming Out Story. The political cartoons are what they are.

So here is the work in progress. Please be kind…it is nowhere near finished, but hopefully you can see where it’s going. Some of this is cropped because of how I had to capture it in the iPhone, so there is more to it on the sides than you see here. There’s probably still months of work ahead because I’m doing this in baby steps. I may post more updates as I go along.

Something seems to be reawakening inside of me. Hopefully it stays away for a while. I feel so much better today than I have in a long time.

Looking forward to my next Walt Disney World DVC vacation first week in March. I’ll be dining at the Brown Derby in Hollywood on the sixth, to reminisce about the angrygram I got while eating a Kobe steak dinner. If the Kobe steak is on the menu I’ll definitely be having it. 

Mostly just trying to forget that my country is circling the drain, because half the country is one half easily manipulated half-wits and one half stone cold bigots that would rather burn it all down than let the rest of us have a share of the American Dream, and the other half can’t decide whether to fight for the Dream, or make peace in our time.

When Walt Disney was alive nobody would have ever thought it would come to this. Conservative man though he was, he’d be spitting nails that a man like pussy grabber Donald Trump was in his Hall Of The Presidents. When I was a young boy and Walt Disney was alive I believed in that great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day. It seemed obvious. We were looking at the stars, and not paying attention to what was in the human gutter.

Gavin Kliger…one of Herr Musk’s young minions…seems to have embraced the dark side after feeding from this trough…

And just what would those Some Things be…?

This guy…Ron Unz…who would he be I wonder…

…hmmm…

Musk not only attracts this sort of young male to his following, he gives them power over the rest of us. Tech Bro is the new Brownshirt.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged John Galt announces he’s going to stop the motor of the world, and set about doing that by leading all the Men Of The Mind out on strike, thereby causing the evil socialist altruist American government and great powers of the world to crumble to dust, while the Men Of The Mind secluded themselves safe and sound in Galt’s Gulch raising pigs, growing tobacco, and building super tractors that could cut a farmer’s eight hour day in half.

But poor John didn’t have a chance. One thing that helped lift the kingdom of Rand vail from my eyes was looking at the architect plans for the machinery of death in the Nazi concentration camps. Those guys were Good…they had a problem to solve and they did it with cold blooded sociopathic efficiency. It convinced me:  There will always be plenty of Men Of The Mind willing to lend their talents and imagination to the bloody murderous tyrant because they are kindred.

The closest Rand came to admitting this are the characters of Dr. Floyd Farris and more specifically, Dr. Robert Stadler, who I suspect was modeled after Robert Oppenheimer. Compared to Farris Stadler was a pathetic chump and you really wonder how anyone could take seriously that he was supposedly the intellectual equal of Galt who’s only moral failing was succumbing to the dark side of government funded science. Farris was the real thing through and through: and that for my money is Musk and his minions. And there are plenty enough of them to keep the world going just fine and dandy without the likes of anyone in Galt’s Gulch helping out, super tractors or no.

It’s not the mind that makes a person decent, it’s the heart. You can suffer a small mind if it has a big heart attached. But a big mind and a small or nonexistent heart is a dangerous combination.

Back in my USENET days I had a signature at the bottom of my posts that read, I do not speak for the militant homosexual conspiracy, I only work here.

Why am I bringing this up now? Oh…no particular reason…

(Via the Florence County Democratic Party on Facebook)

Sue gets up at 6 a.m. and fills her coffeepot with water to prepare her morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With her first swallow of coffee, she takes her daily medication. Her medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of her medications are paid for by her employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Sue gets it too.

She prepares her morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Sue’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the shower, Sue reaches for her shampoo. Her bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for her right to know what she was putting on her body and how much it contained.

Sue dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air she breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

She walks to the subway station for her government-subsidized ride to work. It saves her considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Sue begins her work day. She has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Sue’s employer pays these standards because Sue’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Sue is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, she’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think she should lose her home because of her temporary misfortune.

It’s noon and Sue needs to make a bank deposit so she can pay some bills. Sue’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Sue’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Sue has to pay her Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and her below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Sue and the government would be better off if she was educated and earned more money over her lifetime.

Sue is home from work. She plans to visit her father this evening at his farm home in the country. She gets in her car for the drive. Her car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.

She arrives at her childhood home. Her generation was the third to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

She is happy to see her father, who is now retired. Her father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Sue wouldn’t have to.

Sue gets back in her car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Sue enjoys throughout her day. Sue agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m self-made and believe everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”