From my Blue Sky feed…

Remember, it was our commercial news media that sanewashed this man and his followers.

This just came across my Blue Sky feed…

Back in 1973 Frank Zappa did a song called I’m The Slime, which was a hilariously brutal take on commercial TV, the essence of which was you, the viewer, are the product not the customer…

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don’t need you
Don’t go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

Television was, and is, a one way street. You sit in front of one as a passive receptor for whatever it, that is to say the networks or the local station operator, decides to feed you. For a while the personal computer and modems, and then the internet changed that relationship. We no longer had to be passive recipients of information about our world. We could speak for ourselves.

Well…we can’t be having that can we? A good rule of thumb is if you’re getting it free then you are the product and some corporate investors are the customer. Also, if your social media is owned by billionaires, then you really can’t trust anything much you read or hear on it, and especially after today, because if our billionaire overlords don’t like it they will make it disappear from your feed and worse, if they Do like it, if it does serve their purposes, then prepare to be inundated with it whether it’s factual or not.

That’s right folks, don’t touch that dial…

What we need to do going forward is log out, and stay away as much as possible, or only log back in to check for messages from family and friends, and to remind them that you have gone elsewhere.

I’m hanging out at the bar at Old Juan’s, a favorite place for good Mexican food and margaritas. It’s a short walk from my brother’s house and by now some of the bartenders there recognise me and know what I’m likely to order. As I’m savoring my margarita I happen to glance out the window by the bar and see a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom (but seriously…it’s a BMW masquerading as a Rolls Royce) pull into the parking lot with three older folks inside. This is something I’m not used to seeing in Oceano, which is a completely wonderful place to stay and to live, but what you’re more likely to see on four wheels there is somebody’s meticulously restored to better than factory new classic muscle car, not that empty status symbol for the rich and tasteless. 

After a while I mention it to the bartender, who tells me that because of the massive fires in LA, a bunch of celebrities and wealthy Los Angelenos have come up the coast and are hanging out in San Luis Obispo.

I can see it. Regretfully. That part of California, to which Oceano, Pismo, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Sun Beach also belongs, and also Morro Bay, is a bit of coastline in paradise that I was hoping to retire back to someday, because it’s where my dad’s side of the family is from and I was born in California. But it’s been “discovered” and if you have to ask what it costs of buy a house there you should be looking at Bakersfield instead. Which I won’t. The term “valley people” has a different meaning where my brother lives.

So best I can do now is visit my brother and the family there every now and then.

As I leave for my walk back to my brother’s house, I see the old folk getting back into their “Rolls”, and I can’t help but think You could have bought a Bentley for that money… Oh well…

#IHangOutAtTheBarForLocalGossip
#ItsNOTaRolls!

The full extent of the horror won’t be known probably for years. Embedded in it are these little stories of absolute desperation. Of course she did. Anyone who has ever loved a pet knows why.

Via Sue Echelmeyer over at That Other Place…

Actress Samantha Rose Baldwin was trying to get home in the Palisades fire to save her 10-year old cat. Traffic was at a standstill so she abandoned her car and ran for 15 minutes straight to get home.

She found her cat who was hiding, put her in a blanket, put her in a cat backpack and fled the house. At this point the route where she had left her car was on fire. So she ran for her life down to the ocean carrying her cat on her back and a roller bag.

She made it. She saved her cat.

From the photographer Ted Soqui: “Samantha Rose Baldwin escaped the Palisades Fire with only a roller bag full of belongings and wearing her pet cat in a backpack. She is standing with the sea to her back in the Gladstone’s Parking lot, and facing the acrid smoke from the fire. Shot this image with my Leica M6 film camera using Kodak Portra 400 film

This post from farmer Edward Westerfield shows us why we need to pay attention to what farmers tell us about the changing weather patterns (paragraph separations are mine). 

Fire about one mile from my home in Baja in the last hour. My home on the beach will be fine but it makes me think about what more than a half century of farming has taught me.

Two weather events marked vegetable production in California like clockwork. One was that rains would start in the fall almost exactly on November 1 after a long summer of no rain – meaning time to make sure all tomatoes and other non rain-tolerant crops were out of the field and on their way to market. The other was the Santa Ana winds. Every fall they would come within a few days of September 21, the fall equinox. It defined our plantings in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border where the salad and brassica crops feed the country every winter. I was trained to start planting the day the Santa Ana winds ended so that the soil temperatures would have dropped enough.

This year no rains have come to southern California or northern Baja in 8 months. ZERO! And the Santa Ana winds came this week – almost 4 months late, and fiercer than any on record. Some people with political agendas are trying desperately to point fingers but us farmers know the problem. The clock is broken.

Global Warming…or Climate Change if you like…is a real thing. Ask the weather forecasters whose models are all mucked up now. Ask the ski slope operators who need to use their snow machines more often now. Ask the farmers. Especially ask the farmers. Their clock is the ticking of the seasons. And the clock is broken.

A short time ago I read a story about the Spiderman actor Tom Holland discussing why he decided to quit alcohol and his three years of sobriety. What interested me about it was that after a discussion with his doctor about his liver scared him, Holland decided to quit drinking for a month to prove to himself he didn’t have a problem. It turned out to be so difficult that he extended his test to another month without drinking. Then it was three. Then, finally after a year without a drink, he was noticing how much better he felt, how much better he was dealing with his personal and professional relationships, his life and its stresses. He says now he’s never going back because he feels he’s having his best life.

Addiction can take many forms, but probably all of them are damaging to some degree. This week the loyal opposition (as opposed to the unloyal in power) have called for a week long boycott of Facebook and all of Meta’s social media properties, to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s not only kissing the Trump ring but belly flopping into the toxic masculinity pool along with Musk, Thiel, et al. The problem for me is I’m not sure I can. I’ve tried it before whenever Facebook has ticked me off about its content moderation policies; I’ve even removed a bunch of my artwork from it. But I’ve always come back to it fairly quickly. It isn’t just because I have a lot of friends on it.

I’ve told this story before, about how a question from a 14 year old kid in the Netherlands posted to a primitive FidoNet BBS echo board awakened me to the power of this technology to liberate gay and lesbian people forever from the identities pushed on us by heterosexual culture and its fear and loathing of homosexual people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I consider “social media”, broadly defined as any computer communication technology that gives individual users a means to access a digital “commons” where they and others can gather and chat freely, as a vital part of gay liberation. Anyone who remembers being a gay kid in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s can plainly see that this technology has done miracles for our lives. It has done miracles for mine. And now I live and walk among a generation of gay people who do not remember a time before personal computers and modems, let alone smartphones and the internet.

But commercial social media is profoundly different from those first amature BBS systems, and then later after the internet became a thing, the first blogs. Prior to commercial social media, the users of various forums and commons were also either the owners, or the maintainers, or were purchasing the hosting of those forums and commons out of their own pockets. Now those commons are owned, if not entirely (thankfully!) by billion dollar corporations, or Elon Musk, whose interest in maintaining them could not be less about the welfare of the gay community, let alone this country, let alone humanity. And we are the products. The lives we live on commercial social media are sold to investors and advertisers. Our loves, our losses, our joys, our sorrows, our fondest hopes and dreams, our deepest fears…it’s all grist for the profit mill.

It was tolerable, barely, when what you could say you were getting out of the bargain was easy access to family and friends you didn’t have when all there was were blogs and AOL Instant Messenger. You needed a decent amount of expertise to use a computer and modem to connect to the greater outside world and a lot of people simply didn’t have, or want, that kind of involvement in computers. Commercial social media made it easy to connect. Also, and gradually, hard to go back to your favorite websites. Initially Facebook made it easy for bloggers to link their posts to Facebook. And when their users all flocked to Facebook it cut the blogs off. I admit the east of use Facebook gives me to knock out posts on my smartphone as opposed to writing this blog post on my personal computer, has left my little life blog suffering.

That ends today. I am joining the Facebook/Meta strike week not only as a show of solidarity against the impending billionaire fascism to come, and against Zuckerberg’s belly flop into toxic masculinity, but also as a test to see how big an addiction to Facebook problem I have. I see lots of people saying they understand the impulse to leave Facebook but they can’t because all their friends and family are there. But this is how it holds us hostage to its business model and it’s the number one reason you Must leave, or at least attenuate your use of it severely. Facebook wants you to believe if you leave it’s clutches you will lose all your friends and family contacts. But if they really love you that much, they’ll follow you elsewhere, even if they decide to stay on Facebook.

It’s easy to point a web browser to your favorite blog. It’s even easier to link a blog reader to it, and to others (I use Feedly these days). Once upon a time there were lots of blogs and websites where like minded people could gather and chat. There were blog rolls where you could see what the folks running the blog liked to read. There was a community of bloggers. I got invited to one such gathering in Philadelphia by Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review blog. There I met other well known bloggers like Fred Clark and Duncan Black (Eschaton) who flips your bogus bit far too quickly. It was a happy gathering and a feeling of comradery I miss deeply. And none of us were beholden to a corporate business model.

I dropped off Twitter completely and it wasn’t hard at all, given what Musk had done to it. I joined BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) when a friend gave me one of their test period invitation codes. I never felt any pain of leaving Twitter because BlueSky was an even better alternative. I give leaving Facebook a week. If it is excessively difficult then a month. However long it takes for me to not feel compelled to visit. After that I’ll only be going back to check for messages and remind people who want to follow me to visit my blog.

Maybe I’ll end up seeing myself living my best life…

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -Mark Twain

People like to say the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies. -Don Miguel Ruiz

A friend on Facebook posted the notice that she’d died, and my first reaction was, Oh…her… There have been so many others since, but all of those are standing on her shoulders. The damage she did wasn’t merely to cancel that Dade County anti discrimination ordinance, or even to spawn dozens more local fights against The Homosexual. What her campaign did was decisively show republicans that they could us as a way to drive their voters to the polls.

She made herself the face of that campaign. They called it Save Our Children. The dark heart of it was a smear attack, utilizing the trope of homosexuals as child molestors. But we were also sexual predators, psychopaths and disease spreaders. During one appearance Jerry Falwell stood with her in front of the assembled crowd and said “so-called gay folks will kill you as soon as look at you.” That was how they intended to win an election to repeal the anti discrimination ordinance.

By 1977 gay people in south Florida had made progress. Police raids of gay bars were ended, The ’72 Democratic Convention, held in Miami featured openly gay San Francisco political activist Jim Foster who gave a speech on gay rights. We were seen in the local papers more as an oppressed minority than a threat. Still, it was thought the vote would be nail bitingly close. It wasn’t.

The day of the vote, from the apartment mom and I shared in the Washington DC suburbs, I watched all the news broadcasts late into the night for anything about the results in Florida. There were other elections going on that night all across the country, but there was nothing in any of the election reports about the Dade County repeal. We were a people not fit to speak of during family hours. Finally I fired up my shortwave radio and found a BBC broadcast that gave me the news. Her hate campaign won 4 to 1 against us.

For the republicans it was an epiphany.  Now they had another tool besides racism to reliably drive their voters to the polls. In some ways it was even more effective than race baiting, which also used the image of the black man as a sexual predator. Decades later that Save Our Children message would work for them during the fight over California Proposition 8. It still works for them. 

The day after the vote, as I walked to the store for some snacks and a soda, I counted off 4 people to 1 as I passed them by on the street, still trying to grasp the magnitude of it. All those people I would never know just to look at them, who would vote me and everyone like me out of existence the moment they had a chance. I would have to go on knowing.

And now she’s gone, but the evil she set into motion lives on. What is the profit in winning the world but losing your soul? She won her victory and it destroyed her. The obituaries when they mention her life before the rampage give it little more than a passing notice. She died known more for the hate campaign she waged than for anything else she ever did with her life. That is what hate does. It does not share power within a person. The pop singer became the hate monger, because that was all that hate would allow her to be.

She eventually withdrew from the public spotlight. The singing career was over, which she probably missed. She could have turned it all around with an eventual apology and declaration that gay and lesbian citizens are our neighbors, and that we are all equal in the eyes of her god. She had the entire rest of her life to make amends. But she never apologised for what she did, never moderated her views when asked, and when she died I am certain she regretted nothing about that campaign.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, Facebook Memories aren’t nearly as painful to read as the ones in my own blog…

This came across my BlueSky feed a few days before the New Year…

I dunno…was the NY Times ever really the paper of record they’ve always claimed to be? All the news that’s fit to print is it? Whatever.

One of my first contract software engineer jobs was for a utility company that had a timesheet/work measurement system that would have absolutely failed after December 31 1999 if it wasn’t fixed. It stored and sorted dates as YYMMDD strings, which means that 000101 (January 1, 2000) would sort Below 991231 (December 31, 1999) since its the smaller number. It would look to the system as though January 1, 2000 came Before December 31, 1999, not after. Time does not flow that way but, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.

Instead of fixing that system they moved to a new third party system that tied into their mobile data terminals and which of course was Y2K compliant. I wrote a bunch of updated Visual Basic stuff using Microsoft’s 32 bit date-time serial number functions. I worked on that migration years before Y2K. Lots of work had to be done years before they day the rollover happened.

People snarking about how Y2K was a non-event almost never understand the scope of the problem and how there were lots of systems that had to have the fix in Years before midnight December 31 1999. Things that had to calculate over the Y2K boundary years in advance. I read stories about retired COBOL programmers who came back to work on it and made some money fixing some big iron stuff. So the fixes were rolled out over a period of years beforehand.

But there was also a bunch of stuff that needed fixing Just for the millennium turnover. And it got fixed. I think the day after I only heard about a couple minor things like a bus token system that failed somewhere.

I’m surprised people are Still snarking about it. I shouldn’t be I suppose, given the last election. We fixed the problem, those of us in the trade. So everyone taking pleasure at snarking about that non-event…you’re welcome.

Excerpted from a previous blog post…

It’s almost not worth looking for that first love, or any of the other might have beens from back in the day. But I can see why gay people of my generation and before do it despite the risks. Something was taken from us when we were young, some deep and essential part of our humanity was cut out of our lives. So offhandedly. So thoughtlessly. So very righteously. So other people could make their stepping stones to heaven out of the broken pieces of our hearts. It is only natural that we try to reclaim it. All the vocalizing about politics and discrimination in jobs and security in the workplace and in our homes and on the streets and even the right to marry, flows like a bottomless sorrow from the one central fact of our struggle: we were not allowed to love.

Not even to imagine it. Others got the happily ever after. We got the gutter. Other kids got Prom Night, school dances, boy meets girl stories, love songs on the radio, in books and magazines. We got every filthy lie that could be imagined hurled at us, at our deepest most tender feelings of love and desire and hope, and taught to believe them. The part of our lives that makes everything worthwhile was reduced to dirty jokes and sneering obscenities, so they could point at us and call us broken.

It’s only natural now, so many years after Stonewall, now that we can marry, now that we can be people, that we try to reclaim the parts of our lives we lost to that mindless hate. Even if it means getting cut even more deeply. I don’t think any of us can stop ourselves. We’ve won so many of the battles we never thought we’d live to see won. There is hope. But beneath it, for so many of our generation there is a bottomless sadness that never goes away. Never.

I saw in my server logs that someone several weeks ago went looking through my older blog posts and came across this one and I revisited it. There’s a nugget of truth in there about me that I don’t think anyone who knows me gets, and I’m all alone with that too.

So now I’m two and a half decades past the year 2000. You should have seen what the future looked like when I was a 1960s teenage boy.

I began the year 2024 two years fully retired, vagueing out on life and unable to be creative about anything.That first year of retirement was pretty good. But I began to spiral inward after that. 2024 began to resemble a bad period of my life back in my twenties when I just sat all night in my bedroom listening to music and zoning out. I couldn’t draw, my photographic eye would not open. The difference between then and now is I’m in my 70s and a heart patient, and I’ve given up finally on ever having a boyfriend, let alone a spouse. It never happened and never will now. So once again I was just coasting along spiraling inward.

But then I ended the year back at Space Telescope working part time. That’s perked me up somewhat, but the initial thrill of being back among people and places I knew for decades is wearing off, and while I still love this job and the workplace I’m still that lost empty soul when I’m back on my own time. I took a train ride to Oceano (I love train rides), bought a small sketchbook here to try and do something, anything, to get that creative spark going again, even if it’s just practicing drawing hands, but it’s excruciatingly hard. I brought the Leica M3 along (it’s good for travelling light) and I think I managed to get a few good shots while I was here, so my photographic eye has opened up a tad. I have the office laptop with me and work to do that I enjoy because I don’t yet have enough leave time banked I can just take the holiday weeks off completely.

I’m 71. How did I make it this far without someone to love and be loved by. I feel like I died years ago and I just never noticed it so I’m still going through the motions of a life. I’m in reasonably good health. I just got a good review from my cardiologist, who would probably disapprove of the Cuban cigar I smoked tonight, let alone my intake at Old Juan’s. I should count my blessings, but I feel so empty. And given the situation here in the United (sic) States I am not looking forward to 2025. I can’t bring myself to wish anyone a happy new year considering, though I’ve wished it back whenever someone passing by has wished it me. Sorry. It just seems unreasonably optimistic.

Soon I’ll be back in my little Baltimore rowhouse, my solitary life, and a job I love for as long as the Republicans will let NASA have a budget for space telescopes, or they get Executive Order 10540 restored, and someone comes to my desk and tells me I can no longer legally work for a NASA contractor. Drifting along through the rest of my life is probably for the best. Paying attention to the world around me is only going to make me unhappy, which I really don’t need.

Happy As Best You Can Manage New Year!

Facebook Memories shows me this one from the end of 2015…

Why do I stay on Facebook anymore? I left Twitter after Musk turned it into a fascist playpen and went to Bluesky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). But most of my friends and classmates are still there and that Memories feature is a nice way of looking back. But not always.

So this was when I realized the Christmas card wasn’t just late…it wasn’t coming at all. They say hindsight is 20-20, but I knew something was up then. I knew it years before when we sat at that table where he worked and passed a ski ticket I found back and forth like a talking stick, and he tried to explain to me how living in the closet fucked him up so badly he didn’t know some days who it was he was looking at in the bathroom mirror, and I needed to look elsewhere. But whenever I came into his presence I fell back to being that awkward clueless teenage geek I was in 1971-72 and I kept coming back anyway. And some visits he seemed grateful for my company, and others he was icy cold. By then our conversations were not private and I realized that it was when I told him I was coming down that Icy Guy appeared, and when I just showed up unannounced it was all smiles and conversation like it used to be. But that was not sustainable. 

So anyway that was the year I sent a card and he didn’t. He was being told, just like when we were schoolboys and the family learned somehow that he was talking to that faggy kid at the school… We agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras. I never said that. Yes you did. I just don’t know why you’re calling me. You gave me your phone number. Well I didn’t think you’d use it. Two and a half months after this Facebook memory he told me never to contact him in any way, shape, or form, and I felt betrayed and angry and I lashed out, and said things maybe I shouldn’t have, but he said things to me that cut deeply and after everything we had said to each other it was completely unfair. 

So it goes. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to when he said life in the closet had fucked him over. I’d seen how it did that to other gay guys of our generation, I just didn’t want to see it in him.

I was sitting down to a lovely Kobe beef steak when I got his angrygram. What I should have done then and there was send him a shape.

Regards your angrygram of March 6, please accept this truncated dodecahedron by way of reply…

Then I should have drawn up an Affinity Return/Exchange form for him to fill out. Please include original receipt…

…which gives me an idea.

I saw this some years ago…

Which is good, but I think we’re (the sane part of humanity anyway) beyond this point even. This came across my Facebook feed the other day…

A good many years ago, after I got my first Internet account and discovered USENET news groups, I got into it with homophobic bigots on one of the ‘alt’ groups created specifically so gays and lesbians and the ‘phobes could have at it with each other. What I quickly discovered was the arguments you got from them were empty of all reason, morality and logic. All they had was a bottomless hate (almost always not just toward us either) that would not suffer self examination and would not be moved. They’d dress it up in religion, thump their bibles, throw out the anti-gay junk science du jour, do it over and over again no matter how often it was debunked, and just not stop. But there was nothing behind any of it more then contempt, loathing, and hate.

I was asked often back then why I bothered arguing with them. But it was a different time and place. You knew there were other gay people watching these arguments and I was doing it for them. I knew I wasn’t going to change any hearts or minds among the ‘phobes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. There was no changing their minds about us, ever. But I could show the lurkers that the ‘phobes weren’t anything to be afraid of, that they had nothing and especially did not ever have the moral high ground. 

That was the middle 1980s and 90s. It’s almost a different world now, at least for LGBT people. The ‘phobes of course, have never changed. And they elected Donald Trump to a second term as president.

With the help of a couple white racist South African billionaires and silicon valley tech bros who think they’re running the world now. 

So a bunch of people have ended up over at BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) after Elon Musk turned Twitter into a fascist playpen and began babbling about mind viruses. And now that a significant percentage of Americans decided reelecting Trump was what they wanted we are done with arguing with all of them. I mean how do you discuss Anything really, with Anyone who thinks that man is presidential material, let alone anyone who thinks ‘free speech’ means you promote nazis and silence anyone who speaks out against them. And now were hearing complaints from the howling monkey tree that we’re building an echo chamber, which is really rich considering the right wing one they’ve been living in ever since Reagan and Fox News.

This is not about the “low engagement” voters, it’s about the ones that are completely engaged in the politics of it, just immersed in that Fox News cocoon because that’s where they want to live, and if they can’t make the rest of us live there too, they’ll insist that we have to play along. But no. A lot of people now are tired of them. I’m tired of them, and I did my time in USENET.

It’s different now. I don’t see any plus to getting into it with a Trump voter. I see them in the social media comments and I block them. Block block block blockety block. The notion that by blocking and not engaging with them we’re choosing to live in a cocoon is ridiculous on its face, considering all the hostility toward science and the humanities the rest of us have to listen to whenever they open their yaps. By cutting them out of our lives, online and off, we are choosing not to live in theirs.

Ruben Bolling strikes again…

This is the best one yet!