Sometimes Schulz says it best

It’s 8:33pm, Central Time, Tuesday evening, April 22. I’m sitting in my living room, my dogs laying on the floor nearby, the house mostly quiet (save my son talking to his Xbox in the next room, as he does), thinking about Friday.

Friday is when our idiot Republican governor, no doubt following the lead of the maniac in Washington, D.C. who calls himself President, will begin “opening up” Texas. And I’m wondering what will happen next.

I’m completely convinced in a few weeks there will be a surge of new virus cases and deaths, this time in Red states with Republican governors. Perhaps this will be mitigated somewhat by the fact that the hardest-hit states on the coast have Democratic governors who took firm action and are not easing them too soon or too radically, and the idiocy of the Republicans won’t be as damaging. God watches over children, drunks, and the United States, Bismarck supposedly said, and maybe that will be the case once more. But I don’t think so.

So we’ll have another surge of cases, this time in late May, which will lead to another set of closures, which will last until June or July, which won’t ease until August. Which is what I told my disbelieving daughter the other day, who has tickets to some show in Boston in August. Well, I don’t like it either, my girl, but I don’t control the 33% of the population that seems determined to do whatever idiocy floats through Trumps head at a given moment.

I’m sitting here thinking about my son, who in spite of being on the autism spectrum is doing damn well overall, but is basically terrified to leave the house at all. I explain to him about the risks of taking walks with me (low), or going to the grocery story, or going out on drives, but he doesn’t want to risk it. And really, I don’t blame him.

I think about these utter morons on Twitter who try to make it about “freedom” and the Constitution and their “rights.” How they’re just repeating nonsense they heard from microcephalics like Hannity or Limbaugh or the complete nitwits on Fox & Friends when what their arguments really just boil down to is, “I wanna go to the movies; I wanna go to the gym; I’m tired of staying inside; you can’t make me; you’re not the boss of me; wah wah wah!” That they’ll put others and not just themselves at risk doesn’t matter; that this is a deadly pandemic and not some cooked-up hoax to make their Great Leader look bad doesn’t matter; that their arguments are illogical and stupid doesn’t matter. They want to go outside, Fox News is telling them it’s safe, their Great Leader is demanding it, so out they’ll go!

It never occurs to them that all these people telling them to go out don’t give a damn if they live or die. That the GOP and the various large corporations and big banks and other plutocrats have said, explicitly, over and over, that a 2-3% death rate is a reasonable price to pay to “save the economy”. These Trumpers have no conception they are the blood sacrifice the 1% is demanding so they can remain the 1%. After all, in their mansions, gated communities, and luxury flats, the 1% is safe; it’s the blue-collar folks at the meat-packing plants that will die. But with cold disregard the 1% has convinced the gullible that this will, somehow, “own the libs,” and for them that’s enough. Off with the masks, out into the world, and let’s go to the movies!

Such thoughtlessness was no doubt common in Pompeii as the smoke was rising from the cinder cone on the upper slopes.

I worry about going to the grocery story after Friday, surrounded by these nitwits, these chowderheads, serene in their stupidity. Will they try to squeeze by us cautious, reality-oriented people in the aisles? Will they be there with their masks off, rubbing their eyes and faces, wiping off sweat as they come fresh from the gym? I don’t know, and apparently my idiot Governor doesn’t care.

Sometime in the next 24 hours the number of dead in this country from this calamity will surpass that of all those killed in 20 years in Vietnam, a war that, IMO, broke this country for good. Two months. Not all of it can be laid at the feet of Trump, of course; as much as I despise that prancing, lying, self-aggrandizing, psychopathic fool, he is not solely responsible. But just as Johnson and Nixon bear the brunt of the folly of Vietnam, so does he bear the brunt of these deaths. The blood is on his hands.

I worry for my friends and family all over this country. My mom up in Olympia, near the hot spot of Seattle, her lungs already compromised. My sister down in LA, surrounded by 10 million other folks. My brother and many many friends in the Bay Area. My friend Geoffrey in Georgia, with their own noxious governor. My bff Tim just outside DC. The seemingly-unlimited progeny of F.J., Sr. & Elizabeth Moran all over the Northeast and elsewhere. My beloved Bastian relatives in Colorado and elsewhere. You all know who you are. All in danger, all doing their best during this crazy time. I haven’t gotten in touch with you all; I don’t think I could. But I think of you, all of you, all the time.

That’s what I’m doing right now, here, in my living room, the dogs at my feet, this evening, at 8:58pm, Central Time, Tuesday, April 28. Thinking about you all. And the future. And hoping and yes, even praying (in the very non-orthodox way that I do) that we make it through.

We’ll make it through. We’re a strong, smart, ornery, determined bunch. And we’ll make it through.

Washington couldn’t tell a lie; we can’t recognize them

I’ve often wondered what era we’re in, that my life is lived in. When studying history in school and later on my own, I learned about the Classical era, the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages. The Age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the the Industrial Revolution. The Dark Ages, the Biblical era, the Victorian period, the Edwardian period, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the 50s, the Vietnam era, the Edo period in Japan, the Age of Sail, the Colonial Period, the Belle Epoque, and God alone knows how many more. Recently we’ve had the Modern period, then the Post-modern, and then…what.

Well, I think I’ve figured it out; we’re in the Post-Truth period.

I can’t put a hard start on this war. Like any other, it has its beginnings a while before. In the West, I would point to both the Communists and the Nazis, experts at modifying reality to suit their political purposes. Stalin of course was famous for erasing people not only from the world, but from history, even to having them eliminated from photos and portraiture. The Nazis attempted to erase an entire people from the Earth, but then that’s hardly new; there are accounts of that going back to biblical times.

Certainly this tendency had been going on my entire life, from the complete quantum mechanical probabilistic fog of information surrounding JFK’s assassination the very year I was born, to the mass fog of confusion of the Vietnam war, to Watergate and the absurd tap-dancing Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler did during those ridiculous press conferences.

The real insanity was touched off—as was so much of the post-fact world we’re seeing today—during the Reagan Administration. An administration filled with criminal acts and reversals of long-standing oversight that put us onto the road leading to our current disastrous administration but which I believe was completely encapsulated by that befuddled man himself who, when asked about the arms-for-hostages deal, accepted blame but insisted he didn’t remember doing it.

Though Reagan and the Republicans bear the lion’s share of the blame, it was the George W. Bush Administration that really weaponized outright lying. And it was the spineless ness of the Congressional Democrats for allowing it then that has allowed it to run rampant under Trump. You pull up the weeds when they’re small. If you let them grow for 16 years as the Democrats have done, it is far, far too late.

Now we can’t even agree on basic facts, like the fact that Trump, who has broken multiple laws and Constitutional restrictions, is a criminal. Or that the Earth’s temperature, which is rising, is actually rising. Basic, indisputable facts are no longer being accepted by huge chunks of the population. We really are very close to the place Goebbles bragged about, where a Trump admin official can claim black is white, and his followers will believe it. Or in Trump’s own words, he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and not be charged for murder.

In my opinion, we can even put an exact date on when we entered this era: When Merriam-Webster decided that the definition of the word “literally” could include “figuratively”. Which in English basically is like saying black can also mean white. At that point, the fight was over and the concept of truth had lost.

So we have gone from Modern, to Post-modern, to Post-truth. God help us all.

Illustration courtesy of tommycovix

With epic events comes epic changes. Or so I think. A global depression; a world word; the collapse of an empire; a global pandemic. In its wake, there are massive changes to a society that would have seemed impossible even a few months prior. The Roman Empire probably seemed eternal, until it collapsed. The economy of the 20s seemed bulletproof, until Black Thursday. September 1, 1939 (and it’s American follow up on December 7, 1941); the European Black Death; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand followed by WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. These all caused unbelievable and basically unpredictable shifts in social patterns that, up until they happened, were completely unimaginable. Some were good, some were horrific.

We’re facing something like that right now, I think. The entire globe is caught up. Despite our idiot President’s glib assurances otherwise, things will never go back to the way they were. And no one can really predict what changes will be wrought in the wake of this disaster.

And I’m not just talking about the virus here. I’m talking about the disastrous response of the US Government; the disaster that has been the Republican Party’s perspective on the entire thing; the disaster that our entire version of capitalism has shown to be in responding. This virus has stripped away the skin, muscles, and tissue of our society and laid bare the bones underneath. Some of those bones are not just admirable, but downright heroic: The behavior of the ordinary working class folks, like nurses, grocery store clerks, garbage collectors, agricultural workers, delivery people, warehouse workers, and the like. Blue collar people all. The people who, to be blunt, are at the lowest end of the wage scale in almost all cases and are shit upon by the right-wing.

On the other side, the mask has not just been torn, but utterly ripped off and stomped into the ground as far as that right-wing is concerned. Long have they dog-whistled their racism, bigotry, anti-semitism, and xenophobia. Their classism, elitism, and disregard for the poor, the homeless, the elderly (unless it’s their elderly), and the helpless. They have hidden this disdain and disgust behind catch phrases, clever marketing, and misdirection, but it’s always been there if you’ve wanted to see. But no longer; they’re not even pretending any more.

Now we seen the bones underneath. The absolutely blatant attempts to force people back to work even thought it would mean the literal death of millions. “I’m hoping to see the churches packed on Easter,” said Donald Trump, apparently not caring that would sign the death warrant on hundreds of thousands. “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in,” said the Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, blithely willing to sacrifice my mother, among millions of other senior citizens, in favor of the economy. And they have hardly been alone; the GOP backed up this call for the death of the weak and indigent all across the country.

Everywhere, the skeleton is blatantly revealed, as if the speed of the virus’ spread is forcing the right to give up on their usual policies of misdirection and dissembling and just grab while they can. Ladling the relief bill meant for ordinary people with billions in pork for their corporate friends. Using the virus as a cynical play to attempt to deny abortions at the state level (something even Trump and Bush court appointees found too raw to allow). McConnell, that master of playing the system, tried to convince his right-wing judge friends to stay in office in case the Democrats used this period to slip some left-wing judges through. Several Republican senators used insider information to make money on stocks because of the virus. Republicans are trying to manipulate election and voting rules using the virus as cover. And on and on.

Everywhere, the right is using a national health crisis as cover to steal money, push their right-wing agenda, curtail voting rights, and perform their other usual tricks, only the virus has forced them to be blatant about it. To reveal the bones beneath, rather than the pretty bodies they usually cloak their ugly agenda in.

I know you all have a lot bombarding you right now. A lot to worry about, a lot of stressors in your life. I know local, state, and national elections are probably the last thing on your mind after, say, toilet paper (found some yesterday!), keeping your kids healthy, calling Nana, and figuring out what to do now the the grocery store is out of dog food or Uncle John is sick and there’s no one nearby to take care of him. I totally get it.

And these bastards, under the cover of our national emergency, are trying to steal our country out from under us. Fortunately, the bones of their plan are exposed. Don’t let them. Be vigilant. Keep an eye on them. Call them on it. Because when this is all over, we want to move forward, not back to the damn dark ages.

Image courtesy of The Lexington Leader

27 years ago this January, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina releasing Mosaic, the first fully-realized Web browser and, in one of the few times in which this phrase is actually not hyperbole, changed the world.

Now of course you can search for information, reach a book, watch movies or TV shows, chat with whoever you want, get weather information, check your email, get traffic updates, and do any of a hundred other information-related tasks from a hand-held device you can carry with you at all times, almost anywhere on Earth. In the Hindu Kush, for all I know. I mean, that’s changing the world. In my life there have been a very few times when I’ve watched something happen and known it was history and felt the shiver of the realization run down my spine. Watching Apollo 11 lift off; being shown the Palm Pilot for the first time (for me, the iPhone was Steve Jobs gluing a Palm Pilot to a cell phone; a brilliant combination, but the Palm Pilot was the real innovation); and watching Mosaic being demonstrated by my friend Nate. I saw the world changing right there on his desktop.

We all know what this has brought to us as we text our friends across the country while in a virus lockdown. Hell, I talked about it in a blog post just a week or so ago. Not everyone recognized it for what it was at first, of course. I had a head start as a nerd, and of course Nate showed it to me. It took music companies a notoriously long time to adapt to online downloading, and only really got a grip once Apple came out with the iPod and Steve Jobs used his famed Reality Distortion Field to convince them to do it his way long enough to get things going. TV and Film companies eventually took it well enough to create what is now being called “The Golden age of television.” Eventually the world tends to adapt to new tech, even the Amish if they so wish. (They use roller skates, after all.)

25 years after wide adoption, however, print media is still flailing.

I’ve been watching almost since the beginning, and frankly it’s made me pretty angry. I love newspapers. I’ve been reading newspapers since I were a wee lad, growing up under the shadow of the Nixon administration just outside of DC in Alexandria, Virginia, during the Watergate era, reading the Post and enjoying four pages of comics. I love them. When I left home, I made sure my dorm subscribed to a newspaper. I moved 12 times during my years in Santa Cruz, and the first thing I always did on moving was to subscribe to a paper. And I continued that policy after getting married, and after moving to Austin, lo on up into the 2000s.

But the print media, they didn’t adapt. They just…didn’t.

Print media, historically, is a bit…well, weird. In ye olden days, it was built around one rich guy. Think Citizen Kane. I know that’s a fictional film, but it resonates because it’s based on a true story, specifically that of William Randolph Hearst and others of his ilk. A rich guy would start a newspaper, usually with a particular agenda, and would publish it and “encourage” stories and editorials of his liking. Later, papers evolved and they became less supported by one rich guy and rather a combination of subscribers and advertisers. Later, advertisers because a much bigger part of their cash structure, and rich guys less.  Much later came corporations who consolidated papers, so that dozens of local papers were owned by one giant company, who continued to fund them from advertising (both local and national) and subscriber fees. But the important thing here is, advertising was a big component in paying for your news.

Now, a knowledgeable person would tear this to shreds in the minute details, but this is an overall picture, so just bear with me here. The key point stands: Advertising made up a huge percentage of a newspaper’s income.

With the coming of the Web, suddenly you’re able to publish online for very little. No more did you need giant printing presses, tons of paper, lots of ink, fleets of trucks, and a bunch of paperboys on bikes. Now—just like me here at my laptop—you could file and send out a story by typing it and pressing a button, and literal millions could read it on their laptops. Advertisers, naturally, didn’t want to pay as much for online ads. The amount papers got in advertising money totally cratered.

So okay: Print media needed a new model.

And that’s what the situation has been for 25 years! The music industry—reluctantly, kicking and screaming, crying poverty the whole way—adapted. The TV and film industry adapted and are making spectacular amounts of money. What is the print media doing?

Well, starting in the 90s they began holding meetings. Convening think-tanks. Having conferences. Suggesting solutions. Making recommendations. And they came up with an idea: Pay walls.

Tech people had already tried this model. In tech, we had been doing online content for a while—I’d been doing it since 1991 or so—and we’d found it didn’t work. People hated it. You needed to do something else. But print media was convinced they could make it work. So for the last 25 years they’ve been trying it, in various flavors. (eg The NY Times pay “wall” is more like a sieve; there’s any number of ways around it. Some other media sites let you access current content but not old content. Others make you see advertising if you don’t subscribe but turn it off if you do. Some let you see X number of articles per month for free then you have to subscribe. Etc. No consistency; it various from site to site.)

It hasn’t worked.

The industry has been contracting severely over the last 25 years. There’s been mass layoffs consolidation. Dozens of local papers have closed. Media people—high-visibility media people such as Rachel Maddow—have now taken to begging publicly for people to please, please subscribe to their local papers to help keep them alive. We need our local papers, people like Rachel say; they’re critical to the health of our country!

I couldn’t agree with Rachel more. But unfortunately, begging for people to subscribe based on their altruism is not a viable business model. It’s going to be even less successful than paywalls. I’m not saying this to be a harsh jerk; I’m saying it because it’s obvious and true.

Print media needs to do now what it seemed incapable of doing for the last 25 years: Seriously examine it’s business and make the changes it must in order to continue to survive. And the most critical of these is: No one is going to save it except the people themselves. The journalists and editors and reporters. Not the subscribers, the advertisers, the executives, and certainly not the publishers, who notoriously are rich jerk-weeds like Jeff Bezos. It’s the “individual contributors” (as we say in high tech, of which I am one!). You folks have to save yourselves.

And as I’ve always hated people that kvetch without suggesting things and, while I’m not a journalist, I do have a few thoughts. These are the thoughts of a naive technonerd, a non-journalist, who is well aware of his lack of journalism training. But I am trying to help, okay? Really. And yes, I do subscribe to a number of media. So here we go.

First, it seems to me are quite a few areas of cost that maybe you could lower in your current model. For example, what is the profit and loss of your print runs? Do you actually make money by maintaining all those printing presses, delivery trucks, drivers, paper boys, and what not? Seems like a lot of overhead to a nerd like me, who does his own publishing by pressing a button.

Another thing I often wonder about is coverage. Does every paper really need to have a White House reporter, a DC bureau reporter, a London bureau reporter, and so on? Can’t the various papers & magazines band together on this kind of reporting, especially the international reporting? Why the heck are there 200-or-whatever White House reporters? That’s just absurd. To be perfectly blunt: It seems like that huge corps of reporters only exists for the ego of the reporters themselves. Couldn’t the salary of one Jim Acosta be better spent on three local reporters covering city halls? Nothing against Jim Acosta, who I like, but do we need 200 Acostas?

The same thing goes for any bureau at a paper. Do you all need duplication of science desks, entertainment desks, etc? Wouldn’t it be much better to have those folks out covering local news? I’m hearing all these journalists begging for subscribers to local papers. I’m down for that, so long as local papers are covering local stories. Local government, local entertainment, other local stuff. Anywhere there’s duplication, that seems like wasted effort to me.

I’m sure some of these ideas are dumb because of my ignorance of the business. My goal here is to get these journalists thinking outside their standard model a bit. That model has been in place an awful long time, and when you’re in a bubble that long, it’s hard to think outside it. In tech, we don’t really get that luxury. (eg the White House press corps is ridiculously big; from the outside, it just seems stupid and redundant.) Because I’m serious: After 25 years, if the best you have is to beg for more subscribers, you’re screwed.

To hell with your advertisers, your publishers, and your executives; figuring this out is up to the members of this business. I love the industry. I don’t want to see it die. We can’t save it for you. So buckle on your damn thinking caps, journalists, and get thinking on how to save it for yourselves and us!

One never knows when a moment may come

In this time of fear and stress and panic, sickness and death, heroism and cowardice, wisdom and stupidity, moments, brief moments, can stand out and take on outsized meaning.

I’ve written a bit about some of these moments I’ve noticed. The quiet that seems to have descended on all of us, some of which can be frightening, but some of which can be blissful. I’ve written about the comfort that can come from the most mundane moments in life, and how it can tether you to reality, and help you to keep from drowning in your own fear and panic and those internal voices that threaten to overwhelm you. I’ve written and will keep writing and keep publishing in the hopes that these small personal insights will help the folks that read them, help you all keep your demons at bay, as they help me with mine.

I’m a romantic slob. It’s a part of my nature. I cried in Star Trek II when Spock died. I watch Sound of Music sometimes and turn off my snark circuit, because sometimes you need to bathe in the catharsis of schmaltz. And deep down, I think the most cynical in us needs those moments, just to reacquaint ourselves with the fact that, yes, there is real beauty out there, and it’s okay to appreciate it. It’s okay, in fact, to let it overwhelm you. Even if it’s just for a minute or two, when no one’s watching.

I was walking the dogs and listening to my iPhone on my headphones. As I was passing under a tree, The Beatles’ Blackbird came on, and a bird above me was singing along with it. All through the song I stood there, entranced, the song and the birds on the track in my headphones singing along with the real bird in the tree above as the light was fading slowly from the evening sky.

It was such a powerful moment of transcendent, heart-stopping beauty, right now, amidst so much fear and suffering and death, I just burst into tears from the sudden loveliness of it. I stood there, listening to the bird and the song and a young Paul McCartney singing alone, accompanying himself on the guitar, tears literally streaming down my voice, overcome. Nature, and a bird, and a song, all combined just for a moment of perfection, and I was there.

And I wanted to share it. Share it with you all.

I hugged myself there, on the sidewalk, the dogs waiting patiently, the light still slowly fading, my eyes wet. I paused the music after the song ended and pulled off the headphones. The bird had stopped singing too, as if she had sensed she needed to acknowledge something too. There was a faint rumble of a truck on the road, a ways away. A runner turned into the road heading towards me. A squirrel gave me a look. The dogs waited. The world kept turning, as it does.

Life can be so hard sometimes. And then it can touch us, just like that.