I’ve Been Trying To Explain The New York Times To People For Years And He Just Tweeted It Out

Atrios points to the following tweet from Clyde Haberman…

@ClydeHaberman
I confess to some ambivalence about Chris Cuomo’s suspension. It’s deserved on many levels. But wouldn’t you help your brother if he fell into trouble, even of his own making?

Yeah. Quite. This is Haberman, who as Atrios points out has a long history with the Times, and is the father of their current White House Correspondent, saying that he’s ambivalent about a fellow Times staffer, and the brother of the governor of New York, helping to cover up his brother’s sex abuse scandal because…family. Atrios responds thusly…

A lot to work with here (“fell into some trouble” lol), but I would submit that most of us would not actually do what Chris Cuomo did, or anything analogous, to help our “brothers.” Sure I would help my brother, but I wouldn’t do *that* to help my brother. Make sure he had a good lawyer. Help him figure out how to stop abusing people. That kind of thing.

And the point here isn’t simply, “oh, well, family is family, you can sympathize a bit,” it’s “since you can sympathize a bit, it seems a bit harsh for the man to be suspended from his job.” This is “there should be no consequences for people who are, in many ways, qwhite like me.”

This is something I would do myself, therefore it isn’t really wrong and there should be no negative consequences for it. QED. Boom!

Who amongst us would not abuse our power to smear victims of sexual harassment and assault (whatever “groping” would legally be in your jurisdiction)? Disobeying my employer’s rules and edicts and lying to them? Why would we ask for anything different from the most powerful people in the country? And should we really face consequences for that? Famiglia.

What would elite journalists do to protect their families and people in their close social circles? People who they cover, but are also quite friendly with, even party with and see on vacation? What happens in the Hamptons… Believe people when they tell you who they are.

This is something that I think many of us who subscribed to the Times figured was what the social strata was like in the top floor offices. Villagers. It’s a term Atrios coined I think, for the Georgetown DC mindset. That DC circuit party schmoozing among media executives, Capitol Hill politicians and their Very wealthy Georgetown money teats. but it can apply to a lot of other places where the same dynamic exists. Villagers. They stick together.

It’s something to keep in mind when you’re reading their newspapers and magazines: You are getting the Villager’s point of view. That’s not always a bad thing, which is why I bought Woodward’s books about Trump. Sometimes you want to know what they’re thinking. But a steady diet of it is disorienting.

Eventually I had enough of it an cancelled my subscription. I’m still subscribed to the Post though.

I know I love mine. This headline was laughing at me this morning…

Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership

Upset that it was being mocked for low traffic, Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery

This cheers me up considerably, and motivates me to take better care of my own measly little readership blog. I haven’t posted to it in almost two months now because I’ve been so plague weary scatterbrained. I do have another episode of A Coming Out Story in the works that I should be able to get up here in a couple weeks. And a photo gig I will hopefully be doing this Saturday for Wayne Besen. I did a political cartoon for him that I’ll post here as soon as he’s got it up on his site.

And a bunch of stuff to talk about that I’ll put up here shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Former president Donald Trump’s blog, celebrated by advisers as a “beacon of freedom” that would keep him relevant in an online world he once dominated, is dead. It was 29 days old.

This blog has been running since 1998 in various forms and on various hosts. I started it when blogs were more of an artistic thing rather than a political and/or commercial thing. It’s a life blog. That is what blogs originally were. People talking about their lives online. If you have no life, there is not much point in blogging. Donald.

…or you’re just your usual brain dead Arizona republican. The quote is Chaplik’s from the Arizona House debate on a bill to allow businesses to ignore local mask mandates.

We did. They’re called condoms.

And by the way, something else condoms prevent is passing on the family dimwit gene. Just saying…

A friend linked me to this today…

Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

By now, you may have heard of the hacker who says she scraped 99 percent of posts from Parler, the Twitter-wannabe site used by Trump supporters to help organize last Wednesday’s violent insurrection on Capitol Hill. What you may not know yet is the abysmal coding and security that made the scraping so easy…

People who know how to code are not all that difficult to find, though it is a specialized skill set. People who can do it well, as it turns out, are. And the problem for managers is you almost have to be as good at it as they are to know which from which when you’re hiring. But then these people would probably not have hired mostly on the basis of IT skills, but political affinity.

Call the above an example of Sturgeon’s Law. But also, if the last four years have taught us anything, it’s the kind of logical, clear headed thinking that makes a good coder is not a skill set very many right wingers have.

My personal experience working on code others have left behind tells me it’s not a matter of education…some of the most brick brained idiotic code I’ve ever seen came from people with their BS in Computer Science. It’s how well you can think logically and above all, clearly. There’s a limit to how well schools can teach that. It’s in a way, an art. And to paraphrase Marx (Groucho) right wing art is to art, as military music is to music.

This came across my Facebook stream today. Some days I just don’t know what to make of people….

I just don’t get people who make up stories about themselves. You only get one life, don’t fritter it away faking it. Look around…your life is probably more interesting than you realize. And nothing in it is worth more than trustworthiness. You lose that you’ve lost everything.

This guy’s going to have this hanging over him for the rest of his life. It’ll follow him past the grave. Don’t be this guy.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Virginia Human Rights Commissioner Kenick El…

Un…

This is why we need to stop giving men in dresses passes.

Deux…

I have daughters and I won’t accept them sharing a restroom with a grown man suffering from this mental illness

Trois…

Men trying to be women and women trying to be men is really confusing our children…

Quatre…

…and I’m tired of seeing this nonsense promoted to our children.

Cinq…

Homosexuality is a mental illness and should be treated as such.

Six…

Homosexuality is an abomination to the Human Race and it corrupts the hermetic principle of gender by interfering with the laws of nature just to gratify the lower self.

Sept…

I felt like it was very important for me just to express my views on my page in a very sincere, polite manner.

Le Curtain…Applaus a vous…

So I’m told, once upon a time in the old west, some good folks decided executing criminals was an act they could not morally put upon another human. To make someone into an executioner, even if the sentence was arrived at in a completely legal and prudent way, was morally wrong. So they devised a system, whereby the condemned would be made to stand on a trap door, the noose around their neck, and their weight would cause a valve to open and water would drain out of a bucket until a lever dropped far enough the trap door would open and the sentence was carried out. There…no human hand pulled the lever, so nobody had that death on their hands. It was the condemned’s own weight that did it. Our hands are clean. We are not responsible.

One of my first jobs as a contract software developer was at my local utility company’s household appliances division, which sold and serviced everything from washing machines to central heating and air conditioning systems. A couple years into the work I was tasked with developing a work measurement reporting system for the field technicians, to work in conjunction with the new mobile data terminals they were installing in the field technician’s trucks. The idea, as it was told to me, was to treat each field technician as a “virtual business”. Track what the expenses were in terms of parts and labor, track the revenue in terms of billing and whether it was a warranty job.

The techs who were, luckily for them, unionized, forced considerations as to the difficulty of the work, and the skills of the technician. If you only did a few jobs that week, but they were among the most demanding, that was factored into the system. It took them 18 months to reach an agreement as to how the system should measure the profitability of the field technicians. I gave them a system that crunched the numbers from their mobile data terminals, the warranty system and the payroll system, just the way they spec’ed it out. But by then it was starting to make me a bit nervous. I was still pretty new at this trade, but I’d started at it by building my own computers from parts and teaching myself how to write programs, and I knew intuitively that there was nothing really all that special about them. They were machines, just with transistors instead of gears and motors. Bazillions of transistors that could do bazillions of calculations in a fraction of a second…but still machines. Tools, in other words. Helpful when used right, dangerous when used carelessly. 

Under all this was the utility company trying to prove that it wasn’t subsidising their household appliances division from the utility side of the company which was a protected monopoly. The appliance division technicians could also do utility side work when needed, or when they didn’t have any appliance work to do that week. All the independent contractors hated the big utility company for this because it gave the utility company a massive competitive advantage over them. Which of course, it denied.

Until they saw the first run of my reporting system. So I was told later, jaws dropped in the boardroom when they saw how much the utility side was actually subsidising the household appliances division. So plans were made to spin it off, before state regulators stepped in.

And then the layoffs came. And they used my reporting system to tell them who were the most costly and least productive field technicians to lay off. And I kept telling anyone who would listen that you can’t just blindly let a blind, deterministic, computer algorithm substitute for managerial judgement. But who listens to a little computer geek? So I saw a lot of good people get laid off, and a few not so good ones stay on board. One really nice guy, who always had a smile for me whenever we crossed paths in the hallways, died so I was told, when he had a heart attack just a couple days after being laid off. He was at the dinner table with the rest of his family and suddenly keeled over. I think about this. Lots.

This is Silicon Valley’s biggest blind spot. Well…this and libertarianism, which is so closely related they might as well be one and the same. Just get the algorithm right and everything magically takes care of itself.  It was my own hallucination back in my Ayn Rand days. We can reduce it all to just a few simple rules and presto…civilization just happens! But no. Computers can crunch the data, but then again garbage in garbage out. In my trade we say beware the hidden assumptions in a system. What do you know, and how do you know it? There are no substitutes for human judgement.

Or to put it another way: you can’t escape responsibility by off loading it onto a computer. Or a bucket of water.

Link to article Here.

Aaannd… She’s back. And I’m feeding her again. And I put out a freshly washed blanket for her. Because I’m a sucker.

Via Facebook friend John Becker…

Seeing this in my newsfeed gives me all the warm fuzzies…

Trump Has Told Syria And Russia To “Get Ready” For A Missile Strike

All those Duck and Cover drills I did in grade school might just come in handy after all…

All you people who mocked the rest of us with those the lesser of two evils is still evil memes…I’ll be thinking of you when the missiles start flying…

At the top of my Google US News Section this morning…

Oh my…the National Review is worried about democratic messaging and just wants to help. This my friends, is a textbook example of what they call Concern Trolling.

I was raised, as I’ve said often, by a single divorced mother. I’m not relating this to wear it like a badge, but offering it as explanation. The attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors we express in our everyday lives may well have their biological roots…as in for example the fact that I’m gay…but they’re almost certainly flavored by our life experiences. Different metals behave differently in the fire, but still the fire changes us.

It makes throwing labels around at people problematic. I understand the human need to identify, categorize, sort, put a name on things the better to understand them. But what you must always keep in mind, what Jacob Bronowski clarified for me in his Science and Human Values essays, is the concepts by which we understand nature are always imprecise and imperfect. You have to treat them with humility. What is a planet?

By this stage of my life I suppose I should be used to having labels slapped on me, and all the baggage that comes with them. In grade school I got the problem child label simply for being raised in a “broken home”. Among various family members I was granted the label of being my father’s son, and dad having died robbing a bank that label came with its own lovely baggage set. My maternal grandmother’s favorite name for me (when mom couldn’t hear it) was Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap…not exactly something that’ll fit on checks or credit cards.

For being a slight somewhat girlish kid in grade school I received a variety of labels. Mom and I lived a very low budget life…another set of labels. In my senior year I came out to myself and earned the gay label, and all the ancillary labels that came with it that Facebook would probably censor if I posted them here. Ever since I can remember I’ve had the urge, the need, to express myself in various forms of art and Artist is the only label I’d willingly apply to myself except it feels so damn pretentious. But there are others: Cartoonist, Painter, Photographer. Sometimes I wear one of those. I took up building my own computers and programming them…another set of labels. I read a lot. I pay attention to political events. I like to travel. I like to explore. Nerd. Geek. Tourist. Wonk. I’m in my 60s. There’s geezer. Old man. Computers have allowed me to suddenly, late in my life, earn a good income. There’s Yuppy. I drive a Mercedes-Benz. There’s Bourgeois. It’s a diesel. There’s nerd again. I should be used to it by now. But it’s not the labels, it’s the baggage that comes with them. You want me to stick the Ignorant label on you, apply a label to me and then expect me to wear the baggage that comes with it. Especially this one: Boomer.

I used to wear it without too much discomfort. That nerd label again. I saw it as merely a statistical description. I was born in 1953, so I am part of the post war baby boom, so I am a boomer. My generation was the reason so many new schools had to be built. So far, so good. But where once I was a trailing edge boomer, benefiting from the struggles of the older kids ahead of me that allowed me to wear blue jeans and long hair in school, suddenly one day I realized I was being lumped in with kids born in the 60s as though we all had the same culture, the same life experiences. Boomer. Never mind the political baggage. Anyone with half a brain who walks through life with their eyes wide open and their mind still curious cannot help but see how generational labels are as superficial and misleading as any other. There’s a history here that separates us Kennedy era boomers from the Reagan era ones, and I can sum it up with the name of a country: Vietnam.

Some years ago I’m quietly standing at the balcony rail of the outdoor smoker’s lounge of one of D.C.’s gay bars, puffing on a mini-cigar. A cute young guy walks over to me and gives me a look…

Me: Hi.

He: Are you a throwback?

Me: Sorry?

He: You lived through the sixties?  You know…the hippies and that stuff…?

Me: Yeah…but I wasn’t a Hippy.  There were a lot of different things going on back then.  Most of us were just along for the ride.

He: I know…I’ve read all the books.

Me: Throwback?

He: You know…from back then…

Me: I don’t understand your use of the term.

He: You’re about my mother’s age…

Well I hope “all the books” weren’t published by the same people who make biology textbooks for Liberty University.

Perhaps Ezra Klein and Sean Illing read the same ones. Klein this morning retweeted gleefully this Vox article: “How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America” Subtitled: “The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it.”

So I go to look and right there at the top of the page is…Oh Goodness There They Are…

Screen cap of Klein’s tweet…this is the photo that leads the article

…The Dirty Fucking Hippies “…dancing during an anti-war demonstration staged by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam at Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Stadium on April 15, 1967.” I’ll just bet they’re all smoking acid too. You two have read all the books…right? I haven’t seen such lazy cheapshit stereotyping since the last time I read an article on The Federalist about Teh Gay.

What the Federalist audience that Vox is apparently going after reads…

Illing’s article promotes A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Gibney. “The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.”

The boomers. The boomers. The boomers. I was raised by a divorced single working mother. My dad died trying to rob a bank. I grew up in a series of small apartments, wearing mostly second-hand clothes and going to public school, where in the 1960s, because I was the product of a “broken home” I was treated like a problem child even though I was pretty well behaved. That didn’t change until high school. I was the first male in dad’s side of the family to finish grade school and get a diploma. I did three semesters of community college and then had to go to work to support mom and me. For most of my life I had no idea how I was going to earn a living and resigned myself to a low income life lived in rooms rented in other people’s houses. Before I started earning a good living as a software developer I had no car, and no prospects. Seen from within, the life I am living now seems an absolute miracle to me.

And I look at what the republicans and their billionaire money teats are doing to All Of Us let alone the next generation with a dull horror, Because I Led That Life, I can imagine perfectly well what it could easily have become had I not had the lucky break that allowed me to escape it, and I don’t want it happening to Anyone Else.

But no…I’m a boomer. And a Dirty Fucking Hippy. Who was doing Manpower temp jobs and living with mom when I was the age Klein and Illing are now, and I am a sociopath who doesn’t care who he’s screwing out of a future.

Whatever. If playing Wall Street’s game of Blame The Other Guy We’re Screwing Too works for Vox, Klein, Illing et. al. then fine. Enjoy the cheap thrills of the blame game while I watch people who wish to bury the past, and people who’ve read all the books, keep on grimly repeating it. And…pay attention now…I don’t particularly care if people who don’t know me from Adam hate me for being something I can’t help being. I was fine with that even before I knew that I am gay. I learned how not to give a flying fuck about that even before my grade school teachers told me I was a problem child because my mother was divorced. I learned how not to care long before all that, while being hated, or at best patronized, by members of my own family for being my father’s son. And I will not wear your goddamned labels, and I will not carry your goddamned baggage. Go to hell.

I feel sorry for this guy. Really.