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

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H. L. Mencken.

Last night’s nightmare was vivid, intense, and very unwelcome. Not that any nightmares are welcome, but this one which clearly sprang from all my stress and fear over the coming election was one I could have done without. I won’t retell it, partly because some of its details are almost comical in their surreality. I’ll write it all down in a private dream diary I keep later today. But the essence of it was I was among 14 others being rounded up to be taken to a place where I was pretty sure we were all going to die. I tried to slip the line but was put back into it by an idiot who was also in the line and thought he was being helpful. I escaped once, was recaptured, escaped again, almost recaptured, then finding my way to a safe hideout, only to realize that one of the others there, by a slight slip of the tongue, was a betrayer.

When I awakened from that last moment, it reminded me of a meme I’ve been seeing lately on commercial social media. The one about being disappointed to realize that you had friends you would not want to know where Anne Frank was hiding…

I considered reposting that except I don’t have any friends or family (on my dad’s side) that I would feel that way about. We would all keep Anne hidden, of that I am certain. But there’s another side to that coin.

Turn it around. Put yourself in Anne and her family’s place. If You had to hide, let’s say because the hate mongers have been painting a target on You for decades, and now suddenly they have free reign to do with you and everyone like you as they please, who out of all the people you know would you worry about turning you in?

Well…again…nobody among my friends or family (paternal side) would do that to me I am certain. And yes, there are a couple on the maternal side who I’m pretty sure would resist…which would make them just as much a target as me. But there are those others who have occasionally walked into and out of my life that I’m pretty sure would.

But even more disturbing than that are the ones I’m not sure about. I can see their faces as I type this and I honestly don’t know what they would do. It’s a very creepy feeling.

Ever have that feeling?

I’m part time at the Institute now, theoretically three days a week up to 40 hours per pay period, which is every two weeks. That actually works out to just five days per pay period. So my weekends are Very long by comparison. Today is the end of my first pay period, but I have been off since last Wednesday at 1 because I hit my limit that soon. So I’m off work until next Tuesday, apart from an hour web tag-up on Monday. I put the final touches on my front yard Halloween display Thursday, and fed the goblins Thursday night. But starting Thursday was also the beginning of a few days I could slow walk myself out of bed, and then take my morning coffee walk around the neighborhood.

I can feel myself starting to stress once again about work and I promised myself I would not let that happen. But I reckon it’s just me. Understand that my workplace is an exceptionally good environment, I just stress over every little thing. I can keep telling myself that whatever happens I can always go back to being retired with enough retirement income I can live comfortably, but it doesn’t work. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of just letting whatever will be…be. Que Sera, Sera…but not right this moment. I’m going to be a mess on election day.

My thoughts this morning as I took my walk weren’t helping.

Nowadays, they call it The Lavender Scare. That McCarthy time in the 1950s when the witch hunts for communists and homosexuals in government and private industry contractors was, shall we say, energetic. The newspapers of the day referred to gays and lesbians obliquely as “security risks” because you don’t actually use Those Words in family newspapers.

Now comes Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 and all the fascist energy to tear down our democracy and rebuild it in their image, and it’s going to make the McCarthy years and all the witch hunts and black lists look positively liberal.

And here I am thinks I as I’m having my morning coffee walk, an open and proud gay man, working for a government contractor.

I remember when I was living in a friend’s basement, dialing around looking for whatever likely work I found in the want ads. At that moment in time I had enough programming skill I could plausibly apply for computer work so long as a degree wasn’t required…which wasn’t often. But one day I saw one and called the number in the ad. A man on the other end asked me about my skill set…what programming languages had I worked in, and did I have any database experience. When he seemed satisfied enough to schedule me for an interview, he asked if I could pass a background check for a security clearance. And I told him honestly, because I have always dug in my heels at moments like this, that my police record was spotless, but that I am an out gay man, so not vulnerable to blackmail but if it’s going to be a problem anyway then no. He assured me that it Would be a problem, and hung up.

Is it going to be a problem again in my lifetime? I hope not. But don’t be telling me it can’t happen here. In my lifetime it Was happening to people like me. It did happen here. Yes it can happen again. You bet it can happen again. A lot of decent god fearing oh so sinless and righteous people who vote are praying for it to happen again.

It isn’t just me. I have a few young gay friends on Facebook that I worry about. I saw the before Stonewall time…

(The above panels are from A Coming Out Story)

I feel grateful sometimes that I lived to see a better world for us emerging. Now it’s this. And unlike me my young friends have their whole lives in front of them.

Is it going to be this again for them?