Tuesday March 29, 2005

Housekeeping

I've been meaning for a while to update the blogrolls at left. Here's a start at it. Jeanne D'Arc's Body And Soul. Hullabalooo by Digby. And Daily Kos. You should add these to your daily dose of bloggy goodness.

Monday March 28, 2005

Notes From The Culture Of Life

Your culture of life at work:

Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays

(Lansing, Michigan) Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.

The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.

The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.

The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don't agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.

Three other three bills that could affect LGBT health care were also passed by the House Wednesday which would exempt a health insurer or health facility from providing or covering a health care procedure that violated ethical, moral or religious principles reflected in their bylaws or mission statement.

Opponents of the bills said they're worried they would allow providers to refuse service for any reason. For example, they said an emergency medical technicians could refuse to answer a call from the residence of gay couple because they don't approve of homosexuality.

Rep. Chris Kolb (D-Ann Arbor) the first openly gay legislator in Michigan, pointed out that while the legislation prohibits racial discrimination by health care providers, it doesn't ban discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation.

"Are you telling me that a health care provider can deny me medical treatment because of my sexual orientation? I hope not," he said.

"I think it's a terrible slippery slope upon which we embark," said Rep. Jack Minore (D-Flint) before voting against the bill.

Paul A. Long, vice president for public policy for the Michigan Catholic Conference, said the bills promote the constitutional right to religious freedom.

"Individual and institutional health care providers can and should maintain their mission and their services without compromising faith-based teaching," he said in a written statement.

They tried this last year too. Looks like they may succeed this year. Culture of life.

Ha..Ha..

So I generated my Wu-Name:

Bruce Garrett from this day forward you will also be known as Bitter Desperado

Sunday March 27, 2005

Confused? You're Damn Right I Was Confused...

I've put up the first two pages of my high school slice of life story in the cartoon section. There are three more pages to go. When it's done, if I haven't busted the bank on my storage space here, I'll move it to it's own page.

This represents a break for now, from the political cartoon. I've said I'm not giving that up and I mean it, but it will be an occasional thing for the foreseeable future. I can only sustain so much outrage for so long. Just this morning, I come to find out via Atrios, that Tom Culture Of Life DeLay actually pulled the plug on his own terminally ill father some years back. This is the guy who was smearing Michael Schiavo on the floor of the United States Congress, without a doubt just and only just to keep the news focus on Schiavo, and not on the many criminal investigations slowly closing in on him. Words like Creep and Thug do not even remotely begin to describe this man. And this is what we'll all be swimming in for the foreseeable future. I need to back off from politics for a while. I just can't stay this angry all the time.

And truth is, I've wanted to do some cartooning like this for ages. I think it's important that gay folk tell our stories, not only to each other, but to the world at large. Each story is unique, and every unique story helps break down the stereotypes. I grew up in a time of nearly pure ignorance about homosexuality, but I wonder sometimes how much better off high schoolers are today. Right wing religious cranks are putting stickers in biology textbooks telling students that evolution is "only a theory" (god if any string of words screams at you "I am a knuckle dragging dumbass" more then "it's only a theory" I'd like to know what it could be). Now I read that IMAX movie theaters aren't screening some science films, because the facts in them might offend fundamentalists. So how much better off nowadays, can gay kids really be?

I only know how it was for me. I can be thankful that all these years later I can laugh at a lot of it. I had good friends, and a supporting mother. And I came of age in a time when it was good to question authority, and when science and reason still had some claim to power over ignorance. But for all that, I still had to fumble and flounder my way into adulthood. There were few resources for a gay kid, and most of those were incredibly ignorant. The popular culture stereotype of the lisping faggot was everywhere, and when he wasn't mincing and swishing he was evil and predatory and psycho. Seeing none of that in me, I just assumed that I was as heterosexual as anyone else, a perfectly logical assumption that led me down all sorts of wrong paths. As I said, I can look back on most of it and laugh now, but some of it wasn't funny at all, particularly how brutal it was, having that one magical part of life, the discovery of love and desire, all fucked over. I still have scars. Deep ones. I want to document some of all that while I can. And partly, I am still trying to make sense of some of it.

I have a whole story arc about growing up gay in the 70s, and falling in love for the first time, mostly planned out. This five pager is a first installment. Think of it as the pilot.

Check it out here, and tell me what you think.

Friday March 18, 2005

Friday Baltimore Blogging

Apartments - Roland Park Avenue

Power Plant - Johns Hopkins

Thursday March 24, 2005

It Could Happen To You

To my heterosexual readers:

Have you been watching the Terri Schiavo debacle with a kind of numb horror? Does it prick a fear somewhere deep inside, somewhere you don't want to go, because you really, really don't want to look it in the face? Have you shaken your head, disgusted, and wondered what you would do when faced with such a massive assault on your relationship, in the courts, in the statehouse, in congress...all the while trying to keep the door closed on the fear inside by thinking that it probably won't ever happen to me...?

Welcome to the reality of your gay and lesbian neighbors.

But you knew that...right? The Defense of Marriage Act. The Federal Marriage Amendment. All the various state amendments to outlaw same sex marriage, written explicitly to prevent the courts from giving your gay and lesbian neighbors the justice that Terri and Michael Schiavo have found, time and again all these years in the courts. Many of those anti same sex marriage amendments actually go much further then taking away marriage rights from gay and lesbian Americans. They outlaw not only civil unions, but forbid the courts from giving same sex couples any right a legally married couple has. In Virginia, they may have made it impossible for a same sex couple to even hold a joint checking account.

You can imagine, right, what would have happened in the Schiavo case, had it been a gay or lesbian couple instead of a legally married heterosexual couple, can't you? Nothing. The nation would never have heard of the case, because right away the brain dead partner would have been taken away from the healthy one, and that would have been that. It would have been over almost at once. And afterward, the brain dead one would be kept on life support indefinitely, while their parents told themselves that every drooling brainstem smile they saw was real, and their child's lover would live in constant anguish for their beloved. It happens all the time. You just don't hear about it, because the news media doesn't consider what happens to our households important enough for you to know.

I know for a fact that a lot of you are supportive of my rights. I have family and friends reading this who frequently express outrage at what the republicans are doing to the lives of gay and lesbian Americans. Straight folks I wouldn't know from Adam have written me telling me how angry they get at this or that outrage toward their gay and lesbian neighbors, and how determined they are to fight for our rights. I very much appreciate all of that. What I'm telling you now, is that you can be outraged for yourselves too. Now you know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that they'll kick their way into your intimate lives too, that they'll take a crowbar to your household, your family lives, the most intimate decisions you make as a couple, whenever, however, and destroy everything about your relationship that you cherish, everything in it nourishes and sustains you. They'll do it because they believe they have more right to control your life then you, because they are the righteous, because they are the right hand of God. They'll do it because they can.

Next time one of them starts yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, and how marriage is the bedrock of a healthy society, think of Terri and Michael Schiavo. Think of what they did to them. You've always known what they'll do to my household. Now you know what they'll do to yours.

Wednesday March 23, 2005

Well, What A Surprise Seeing You Here

Via MyDD:

The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix, famously identified by Rob Stein and David Brock, is the source of almost all funding behind the wingnut Schiavo push. A two-week old article from Jon Eisberg identifies how the Philanthropy Roundtable is involved with the case, among other familiar faces of uber-rich conservative donor fame...

If you read nothing else today you Have to read the Jon Eisberg post.

For the past 12 years, Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, and her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, have been locked in a bitter dispute over whether to withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration from Terri, whom the courts have determined is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. The Schindlers want the doctors to keep Terri alive; Michael does not. Late last year, in Bush v. Schiavo, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush violated the constitutional separation of powers when he attempted to overturn a court order to remove Terri's feeding tube. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

I filed an amicus curiae brief in the Florida Supreme Court on behalf of 55 bioethicists and a disability rights organization opposing the governor's action. Two months later I participated in a public debate on the case at Florida State University. Among the participants supporting Gov. Bush's position were Pat Anderson, one of multiple attorneys who have represented the Schindlers, and Wesley Smith and Rita Marker, two activists whose specialty is opposing surrogate removal of life-support from comatose and persistent vegetative state patients. I found myself wondering: "I'm doing this pro bono; are they?"

So he did a little digging. The kind of digging anyone who can google can do. The kind of digging that reporters once upon a time in America did, before they were all bought by big corporations. And what he found, surprise, surprise, was that matrix of right wing billionares, Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Coors, et al, who've been pumping their money into the American political process like drug dealers pumping crack into slums for decades now. This right wing money matrix is a large part of the reason why we have Smirking George in the white house, and American kids dying in Iraq for no damn reason other then a war what what the right wing wanted.

And they've been funding the political war against Schiavo's husband for years, buying his wife's parents their high powered right wing lawyers, putting cash into the pockets of their bought politicians, and directing the usual right wing smear machines against the husband. That's why this thing has gone as long as it has, but more tellingly, that's why the entire fucking republcan party seemed to jump like lemmings off a cliff this week, getting involved in something almost nobody wants them involved in, and scaring the bejesus out of more Americans then they can afford to in the process.

They had to pass that law. President Smirking jackass had get out of bed to sign it. The daddy warbucks who own the republican party demanded it.

Meanwhile, Tom DeLay is just full of complaints:

And so it's bigger than any one of us, and we have to do everything that is in our power to save Terri Schiavo and anybody else that may be in this kind of position.

And let me just finish with this: This is exactly the issue that's going on in America. That attacks against the conservative movement, against me, and against many others. The point is, it's, the other side has figured out how to win and defeat the conservative movement. And that is to go after people, personally charge them with frivolous charges, and link that up with all these do-gooder organizations funded by George Soros, and then, and then get the national media on their side. That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only and that's to destroy the conservative movement. It's to destroy conservative leaders and it's, uh, not just in elected office but leading. I mean Ed Feulner, today at the Heritage Foundation, was under attack in the National Journal. I mean they, they, this is a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in...

[Emphasis mine] That's Do-Gooder organizations funded by George Soros, as opposed to Do-Evil organizations funded by Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Coors and so on. And what is being done to Terri Schiavo and her husband is evil beyond question.

Here's another piece of this puzzle you may not have been aware of, thanks in no small measure to our whorish mainstream news media. After Terri Schiavo became incapacitated, her husband went to school to become a nurse, so he could take care of her. It was while he was studying to become a nurse, that he learned his wife would never recover.

And now you know why the American Right wants to destroy education in America.

Monday March 21, 2005

Feeding Tube

I glance at the network news just to see how horrible the coverage of the Terry Schiavo case is. And I see that it's every bit as bad as I'm hearing it is. The republicans are allowed to claim they're standing up for a culture of life, and the opposition is shown as being merely intransigent. I watched while one Maryland democrat called the republican politics vicious and brutal, but without the context for making that claim, that democrat just looked churlish.

Via Mark Kleiman, here's a little context:

Sun Hudson, a six-month-old boy with a fatal congenital disease, died Thursday after a Texas hospital, over his mother's objections, withdrew his feeding tube. The child was apparently certain to die, but was conscious. The hospital simply decided that it had better things to do than keeping the child alive, and the Texas courts upheld that decision after the penniless mother failed, during the 10-day window provided for by Texas law, to find another institution willing to take the child.

Next time you hear Tom DeLay puffing about saving Terry Schiavo's life, think of Sun Hudson's. DeLay would have pulled that kid's feeding tube himself.

Matthew Yglesias adds:

The double-dealing here is vile, but not entirely unexpected. Somewhat more noteworthy is the decision of the organized Christian Right in the United States to willingly play their part as hack partisans rather than genuine advocates for the culture of life.

Why is that noteworthy? Hey Matt...you're looking right into the heart and soul of the American Religious Right there. Go on....look at it. They call themselves a cluture of life, but they hate life. They want to throttle it. What they are, is a culture that's power hungry. They want the power to direct our lives in every way, great and small. They want to tell us what kind of music we can and cannot listen to. They want to tell us what kind of clothes we can and cannot wear. They want to direct the most intimate aspects of our love lives, from who we can marry, to what kinds of sex are allowed within our relationships. They want to tell us how to live, and naturally they want complete control over how we die. They are not the culture of life, but of its opposite. They are the culture of stifling life. They're not trying to save Terry Schiavo. They're trying to stick their feeding tube into her, because helpless suffering people, and all their families' pain and tears, make them hungry.

Sunday March 20, 2005

Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow...(continued)

This is exactly why I don't bother with the mainstream news media, and you shouldn't either. Check this Digby post, via Atrios:

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schivos because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Dig it. Bush, while Governor of Texas, signed a law that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. Then there is the tort reform and bankruptcy legislation that the republicans favor, that would make it nearly impossible for families who suffer these kinds of catastrophic illnesses to cope. But do you hear about any of that in the mainstream news media. Nope. They don't think any of that is important. What's important is that the republicans are "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo". Only...well...they're not actually. They're using this brain dead woman, her suffering husband and family as stooges for political gain, with no shred of concern for any of them. But to see how monstrous their playing with other people's lives really is, you have to know the whole story, including the part the mainstream news media doesn't think is important. The part where the republicans, when the camera lights go off, set about actually kicking that family, and thousands like them, in the teeth.

There is just no reason to pay any attention to the mainstream news media anymore. They're taking all of you for rubes. They're laughing in your face, along with Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Smirking George.

Saturday March 19, 2005

How To Piss Off A Bishop

In San Diego, a gay catholic was refused a catholic funeral by the Bishop of San Diego's Roman Catholic diocese. Ostensibly it was because he ran a gay bar. But dig a little deeper:

The 31 year old businessman owned two clubs in San Diego. Club Montage, attracts a mixed crowd. On Friday nights it is mostly heterosexual and on Saturdays is primarily gay. The other club, ReBar, is gay.

"To avoid public scandal Mr. McCusker can't be granted a funeral in a Catholic church or chapel in the Diocese of San Diego," a statement from Brom's office said.

On Saturday the bishop's office said that Club Montage had been used as a location where a gay porno film was shot and that ReBar used advertising slogans that included, "Real Men, No Rules!" and "Tired of Playing With Boys? Come Play With Men!"

Tired of Playing With Boys? Come Play With Men! That had to hurt.

They've held funerals for organized crime figures, and they can't hold one for a gay man who runs a couple of gay bars? Right. Ask the good Bishop how many pedophiles he's covered up for, how many he's Still covering up for, and if that scandal means He, and a few of his fellow Bishops, won't get catholic funerals. I bet they'll be buried with their hands clutching their Indulgences.

Friday March 18, 2005

Friday Baltimore Blogging

[Update] Images for this week have been removed. Check this week's postings for new images.

Thursday March 17, 2005

The Difference Between Fundamentalism And Science

Fundamentalists like to think they're putting science in its place by waving its many unknowns around like a bloody flag. Ha! You See? They don't know nothin'... That is, in essence all Intelligent Design theory is...a theory of how life came to be that is not so much a theory as a catalogue of evolution's question marks. But imagine for a moment, a fundamentalist publication printing an essay titled, Thirteen things in the bible that do not make sense, and you see the right away the difference between science and dogma.

Here, from New Scientist, are Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense. If stuff like this does not make you feel threatened, but rather curious and intrigued, then you are probably a witch.

Comrade Horowitz Says Report Political Deviancy At Your College To Party Headquarters

For those of us who think the GOP intellgencia is looking more Stalinist every day, particularly in its ferocious attacks on scientific and academic integrity, Billmon provides us with these contrasts of the current attacks on academia of the American right, with similar attacks by communists of days gone by. It is brilliant. You should read it.

Scritch...scritch...scritch...scritch...scritch...scritch...scritch...

Still no cartoon for the week...sorry. I'll have two for next Monday probably. I'm prepping for my midterms, and my free time is mostly all about that now, although I do try to take a drafting table break when I can.

I've aluded to this before; I'm working on developing a new cartoon series for this site. Something different from my editorial cartoons, a little more personal, and hopefully a little more light hearted. I want to do some slice of life cartoons about my high school years, and growing up gay in the early 1970s. It was a whole different scene back then, and not just because of how deeply ingrained systematic discrimination against homosexuals was back then. It was a whole different world to grow up in. No home video, no cable TV (at least not as we know it today), no cell phones, no video games, no personal computers, let alone computers in cars. The pocket calculator was a slide rule. Instant Messaging was you passed a note. It was a time of mimeograph machines, dial telephones, 33 1/3 high fidelity LPs, vacuum tube testors at the local drug store, the Soviet menace and Apollo astronauts. I lived through all the changes since, and it amazes me sometimes how much even I take the new technologies for granted nowadays. But they changed our way of looking at the world, changed how we interact with it, and with each other. I want to get down on paper some of what it was like to be a gay teen back then. Maybe as the series goes on (if I have enough steam for it) I'll get into what it was like to ride into gay adulthood on the wave of emerging technology, and the bitter crash of the Reagan years into our hopes and dreams.

It'll all start with a five pager I'm working on now, when I can squeeze the time out for it. Here's a peek at part of the first page:

[Update] You can start reading it here.

As you can see (those of you who read my editorial cartoons anyway) I'm trying a different technique with it, that is all pen and ink. I'm hoping this will make a positive difference in time and reproduction. The charcoal and ink style I use for my editorial cartoons doesn't reproduce well unless I keep the image resolution high. It is also a bit messy and sometimes requires several stages of masking and spray fixitive to pull off. I was hoping a simple cross-hatching technique would save me some time, but that's not happening. I've never committed myself to a fully sequential art cartoon before. It's always been single panel, one-off stuff. Partly that's because I love the old single panel editorial cartoon form. But Ted Rall once said that cartoonists work around their limitations, and my big one is I'm a kind of wired, nervous energy type that gets distracted quickly. A multi-panel cartoon means I have to maintain focus on a single cartoon for longer then I'm often able to manage. Ironically what I'm finding out now, is that taking longer to do a cartoon is actually calming. It's kinda weird.

Cross-hatching, which has always struck me as horrifically monotonous, is actually a somewhat soothing thing to do, if you just make yourself do it. I work on small masonite drawing boards that I tape a piece of Bristol board to. This allows me to turn my drawing this way and that while I'm working on it, and keeps my wrist from cramping. I'm finding I can cross-hatch for hours and not get fatigued. Howard Cruse once told me he found cross-hatching to be a soothing, almost trance like kind of thing and I just couldn't see it. I just couldn't see myself having the patients for it. But last night after days of studying for mid-terms, I developed a serious case of nerves and remembered what Howard said. I went down to my drafting table and worked on some panels that needed a lot of cross-hatching (and which I'd been putting off because of that) and damned if I wasn't feeling Much better afterward. The trick is not to get impatient with it. I played some music and just let it zone me out a bit, and got oodles of work done on that board (not the one above).

So hopefully I can have the whole thing ready for you to see in a few weeks. After that, I plan to do a weekly, based on a story arc I've scripted out on what it was like for me coming to terms with my life as a gay teen in the 1970s. It'll be something different. Not sure if I'll post it right here in the blog or give it it's own page like the editorial cartoon yet. And no, I don't plan on quitting the editorial cartoon. I really need that one as a vent on current affairs. It keeps my head from exploding.

Tuesday March 15, 2005

Fox News Democrats

Atrios uses the term this morning, and I think it's perfect. They're not conservative democrats, they're not independently minded democrats. They're democrats who echo republican talking points about democrats. They're democrats who use republican tools to attack other democrats, without a shred of conscience or concern for the good of the party, or defeating the republicans. The Nation has an article about the iconic group of Fox News Democrats, the so-called Democratic Leadership Council, which seems some days to be nothing but a Fox News outlet. And Steve Gilliard has written righteous fire and brimstone down on them here, and here. It's perfect. It says it all. Fox News Democrats. That's exactly what they are.

Monday March 14, 2005

Fag

Blogs are wonderful things. We get to share this and that about ourselves with the world, and in turn get to see a portion of the rest of the world for ourselves, one to one, first hand. So Iraqi bloggers can tell their own stories of their lives under U.S. occupation. So we Americans can read for ourselves what it's like for them. We can hear each other's stories, and each of us tell our own, in our own words, for ourselves.

I've written before about the power the computer revolution gave to the Gay rights movement, and the breathtaking liberation it has been for us, as a people, to at last be able to see ourselves, for ourselves. We no longer have to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I knew how profound the implications of this were the moment I saw it.

Back before the Internet became commonly accessible to everyone with a PC, there were amateur computer bulletin boards, or BBSs. These ran the simple MS-DOS operating system, which was never intended to be run on networked computers. But through an ingenious mechanism of message forwarding, the amateur BBS operators developed their own networks, such as Fidonet. BBS software programs, such as Opus and RBBS, were developed to utilize these early primitive networks. Eventually, there evolved many topical "echo" message boards, most dedicated to various aspects of PC computing, some merely social. Echo boards sprang into being for fans of Star Trek, and fans of Marilyn Chambers. One day, I happened across an echo board for gays, called Gaylink.

It was being distributed all over the world, or at any rate, as much of it as had modems and PCs in those days. There were posters from all over the United States, some from various parts of Europe, and Australia. I still remember vividly the moment I saw how this technology was going to change the lives of gay people forever. It happened on the day a young poster from the Netherlands left a message for the group.

He said he was fourteen, and that he thought he might be gay. But he wasn't sure. How, he asked us, did we know about ourselves? What, he asked us, was it like?

And from literally all over the world, this kid got stories, not coming out stories, but self acceptance stories. Some stories were full of pain and hard to read. Some related a slow, but growing awareness of difference. Some people had an easy time of it, others painfully hard. Some parents and friends were accepting, others not. I posted my story along with the others, and later developed it into an essay.

It went on for two weeks. Then one day the kid posted another brief message. He thanked us, and said we'd all given him a lot to think about. We never heard from him again.

Now, he may or may not have been what he claimed to be. But sure as hell there were hundreds of others reading that exchange on that primitive BBS echo board those two weeks in his same position, some older, maybe a lot older even, and hungry for those same answers.

And I saw it then. I saw what this technology meant to us as a people. I came of age in a time when the only things I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, and about the life I'd have to live as a Gay man, were what heterosexuals had told me. Some well meaning, some not. And in a little more then a decade I saw a time come when we no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. Once upon a time it was fairly easy to teach us to hate ourselves. Those days are over. If you understand nothing else about our struggle, and why we keep fighting despite all the odds against us, understand that one thing.

Now we have web sites and online chat rooms. Now we have blogs. A few weeks ago I chanced across one by a gay teen, just in the process of coming out to family and friends. He seems together and articulate, and a completely decent kid, and reading his blog has driven home for me, how in many ways things are much better then when I was his age, and in some ways they are worse. When I was his age, a lot of stuff went right over my peer's heads, that never would today. Even if you want to hide until you're out of school now, it's going to be hard. And adults who should know the hell better, are telling the bullies now, that they won't mind a bit if they pick on the gay ones. Maybe I'm just getting old, but they all seem so vulnerable nowadays. So bright and hopeful and so terribly, terribly vulnerable.

Lets see what is new? I got to school today and found someone had written FAG onto my locker. That was nice. I know who did it. One of my friends saw the guy do it and had told me about it, but apparently they didn't stop him before he wrote the word on my locker. What's up with that?! I mean if I had seen somebody hanging around my friends locker and wrote something derogatory on it, I would have stopped him. I don't know. Sometimes people suck I guess. So anyway, I ended up having to leave it up all day since it was written in black permanent magic marker and couldn't be scrubbed off. I was pissed off! I still am. The vice principal said the janitor would paint over it once all the kids left after school and by the morning it would be off. I guess we'll see. I knew once word got around school about me being gay and all that, things like this were bound to happen. It just isn't right, you know? I'm a good kid. I don't do this sort of thing to other people, so why do they do this to me or anyone else for that matter. I haven't told my parents yet.

Some days you just want to punch your fist through a wall.

Hey...George...Smirking Boy...yeah, you. You wrote that word on that kid's locker. And you Dick. Bill. Tom. Rush. Mike. Cal. Jacoby. Krauthammer. Sowell. And you Rowan Williams. You too Karol. Jerry. Pat. Billy. Franklin. Fred. You Iowa State Senator Paul McKinley, and your fellow senate republicans. And you...you reading this right now...the one who voted for Bush last November. Yeah...you. Especially you. You wrote that word on that kid's locker too. The next time you open your trap about morals and values, somebody should spit in your face.

[Edited a tad]

Go Ahead. Make It Official. Far As I'm Concerned You Killed It Years Ago.

You read the sycophant Microsoft IT press, and you think that Basic developers everywhere think that VB.Net is the Greatest Basic Microsoft Ever Produced. I didn't believe it when .Net was first introduced, and I especially don't believe it now when even the sycophants are having to admit that it's still having a hard time winning popular acceptance among Basic developers. Once upon a time you had computer book shelves packed with various VB titles. Now it's down to a thin trickle. VB.Net may be winning adherents, but compared to the stunning popularity of Visual Basic at its height, VB.Net is a colossal flop. People hate it. It is costing Microsoft developers.

And Microsoft couldn't care less because, well, it doesn't think it has to. What are you poor dweebs going to do...write software for some other platforms? Use some other non-Microsoft tool when we're so obviously the best there is?

Well...yes...as a matter of fact...

Developers slam Microsoft's Visual Basic plan

More than 100 influential developers using Microsoft products have signed a petition demanding the software company reconsider plans to end support for Visual Basic in its "classic" form.

The developers, members of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional program which recognizes influential members of the developer community, claim the move could kill development on millions of Visual Basic 6 (VB6) applications and "strand" programmers that have not been trained in newer languages.

Microsoft said it will end standard support for Visual Basic 6 at the end of this month, ending free incident support and critical updates. Both services will be available for a fee for another three years.

But MVPs hope Microsoft will reconsider not just VB6's support options, but will continue to develop the language alongside its newer Visual Basic.Net.

Fat chance. The people Bill put in charge of his .Net tools hate the Basic language. They have nothing but contempt for it, and for those of us who have used it all these years. That's been staringly obvious to many of us since we first took a look at VB.Net, and saw what Bruce McKinney rightly described as its many gratuitous insults to the language and its culture. They don't merely misunderstand us. They have nothing but contempt for us. But that blind, idiotic contempt is a blessing to Microsoft's competition.

The problem, say the dissenting developers, is that when Microsoft made Visual Basic.Net (or Visual Basic 7) the successor to VB6, it actually killed one language and replaced it with a fundamentally different one. It's effectively impossible to migrate VB6 applications to VB.Net, and for VB6 developers, learning VB.Net is as complex as learning a completely new programming language, critics say.

"The .Net version of Visual Basic is Visual Basic in name only," wrote developer and author Rich Levin in a recent blog entry. "Any organization with an investment in Visual Basic code--consultants, ISVs, IT departments, businesses, schools, governments--are forced to freeze development of their existing VB code base, or reinvest virtually all the time, effort, intellectual property, and expense to rewrite their applications from scratch."

And if you're going to have to start over from scratch, if you're going to have to learn a completely new language anyway, Why Stay With Microsoft? Because they make better tools? So Fucking What If They Won't Stand By Them, And The Developers Who Use Them? Seriously. So Fucking What? I'll use Java and NetBeans, or Eclipse and know that I'm using tools created by developers who actually believe in them, thank you.

Microsoft continues to develop C++ alongside C#, the language's .Net counterpart, and the company should do the same with "classic" Visual Basic and VB.Net, the petition argues. Microsoft introduced VB.Net in 2000, and since then, developer use of VB6 and older versions has declined steadily. Many of those leaving the language behind are migrating not to VB.Net but to non-Microsoft languages such as Java, according to some surveys. For example, a November 2004 survey of developers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa by Evans Data found that Visual Basic had lost 25 percent of its developer base in those areas since 2003.

(Emphasis mine).

No shit Sherlock. I reckon Microsoft thinks it's so big now, that it doesn't need all those developers who helped make its platforms and office products so ubiquitous. There were years when all I ever did was write custom office applications, integrating various MS Office applications with this and that corporate back end, to automate some process and improve someone's workflow. That's what killed off all the great stand alones of years gone by...WordPerfect, WordStar, XyWrite, Lotus 123, dBase... With an amazingly small amount of effort, I could write custom applications that read from a database, stuffed data into a spreadsheet, generated charts and graphs and put them into documents which could be printed or emailed, with no user intervention save double clicking on a desktop icon...but only if all the applications were Microsoft's. Oh...you could do it using the stand alones...but it was a hell of a lot more work, and developer time is expensive. VB made integrating various office applications a simple, straightforward process, and in doing that made Microsoft's office applications a business standard. It was more then just owning the OS, it was more then just integrating all their office applications with a single language, it was VB. VB made the concept of Rapid Application Development a reality, in a way no other language, and especially no other C style language, could have.

But everyone who shakes hands with Microsoft gets stabbed in the back sooner or later. Its developers are no exception. We served our purpose and now its eat shit or die. But I'm not eating, and I'm not dying. I'm one of many, who are working elsewhere. If Bill had simply made improvements to the language, I'd have had years of experience as a reason to stick with Microsoft. But those years don't count for spit in Visual Studio .Net, so I have no reason to stick with Microsoft, and plenty of reason to stay the hell away.

"The future of programming is clear, and object-oriented languages designed from the get-go for Web and Internet-enabled functionality are the future," wrote one developer in response to Levin's post. "No amount of romanticizing VB6 is going to change that."

I remember sitting in a Structured Analysis and Design seminar in 1991, where our instructor solemnly warned us that if we didn't learn Case Tools now, by the year 2000 we would be unemployable. So the above quoted developer can just contemplate his object oriented navel and screw off for all anyone should care about his take on the future. I don't have anything against the object model. In some ways I like it, and in others I don't. But that's neither here nor there. The future is whatever makes the bottom line for businesses work. I've earned my living freelancing often enough to understand this in a way some Computer Science folk don't really seem to, or care to. If you spend X squared to develop software that only gains you X in return, you're in the hole. So what if it's a technologically sweet application. You can't afford to keep doing that and stay in business.

That VB gave Windows application developers more bang for the buck is beyond question, and that's why it was so successful, despite how deeply CS wizards and gurus everywhere loathed it. "Basic? Basic? Why no serious programmer uses Basic..." Bullshit. So I wasn't a serious programmer. I was a productive one. And I was hardly alone in that. At the first Basic developer's conference in San Francisco in 1993, we heard from a couple of developers who worked for a company that made hydraulic cartridges for industrial applications. They put their entire catalogue on a CD-ROM, complete with ordering software that allowed customers to call up blueprints, exploded machanical drawings, and images of the products. They'd won an award for it, and at the presentation amazed their audience by telling them that they'd written the entire ordering system in two weeks. They told us that they gave the two week figure because they reckoned no one would believe how long it actually took: one week.

Microsoft's Basic IDEs had always made writing clean solid code easy, by among other things checking your syntax as you wrote it. I could run and test my code in the IDE before compiling it. I could edit code while debugging it at the same time. Then came VB and we could create graphical user interfaces graphically, dragging, dropping and sizing buttons, lists, text windows, whatever, onto our forms and moving things around on the fly until we got something everyone, developers and users liked. These innovations streamlined the development process in a way the CS guys never thought necessary, let alone desirable. But just as importantly the language itself was clean and elegant and readable in a way that reduced development and maintenance headaches. Good well designed and written Basic code reads almost like pseudo code. No language is self documenting, but Basic can come damn close.

No amount of romanticizing your favorite computer science religion is going to change the bottom line of business, which is the bottom line. Case tools once upon a time probably made a lot of theological sense. They just didn't work on the real world desktop. VB did. That's the fact everyone who hated the language because of it's CS heresies just couldn't bring themselves to look at. It did the job. It did it Better.

And in giving the language over to the very people who had always hated it, Microsoft has cut themselves. Now they're loosing developers. Worse, they've turned what was a clean, fast, rapid integrated Windows application development tool into another Microsoft bloated pig (those of us who complained once upon a time, that the changes to VB6 made it too big and clumsy, may never forgive ourselves for not considering the alternative). It could be they're just big enough now that it won't bother them for years to come. But some day it's going to bite them royally in the ass. It wasn't just owning the operating system. It wasn't simply integrating everything with everything else. It was the tool that made the integration useful. It was VB. Microsoft might well have won the Office Suite wars without it, but it would have taken them a hell of a lot longer.

Now Microsoft's front line business development tool is one that is essentially Java in look and feel, and it's one big claim to superiority is that it is more tightly integrated with Microsoft platforms then Java is or ever will be. But is that a selling point anymore? Basic on Windows isn't dead, there's always PowerBasic. But RAD is no better or worse in .Net then in Java. So it comes down to, do I learn a new tool that chains me even more tightly to Redmond, and which lets me write applications that chain my customers ever more tightly to Redmond, or one that does not?

Ooh...hard one.

I Am...I Said...Malware

Fair warning... There's Spy/Ad ware out there now that installs with any browser that runs the Sun Java plugin. For all that this still seems to be a Windows specific issue. But what makes this one particularly obnoxious is that it infects and runs IE, even if you're not using it. It adds a bunch of malware sites to your trusted sites list, and to add insult to injury, it adds a bunch of bogus malware removal sites to your favorites list. Of course, and what the article doesn't make completely clear, is that you still have to accept a certificate from an unknown and untrusted source for this to work.

But as we know, some people will just blithely click 'yes' to anything. The article tells us that this initial attack seems to be targeting Neil Diamond fans. So some dark genius working for a malware outfit figured out that Neil Diamond fans would say yes to just about anything that pops up on their computer screens.

This could lead to a disturbing trend in the malware wars. In the future, to keep home and business computers secure, login screens may start asking people random pop culture questions. If you answer certain ones correctly (What band performed the song "White Bird"?) they won't let you log on.

Housekeeping

The media sidebar on the right, where I post stuff I've been reading/ viewing/ listening to/ hasn't been updated in a while, so I took a few moments this morning to do that (and make sure I had my office scanner configured correctly for Mandrake). Stonewall is still up as the book, because I want to wave it around for a while longer. Seriously, if you haven't read it yet you should.

"I'm Hans Canried, Baltimore's answer to Richard Burton..." I stumbled across the Fractured Flickers DVD set while browsing Amazon and had to have it. It's such a stab from the past. I was just a kid in elementary school when it came on the air in the early 60s, and thought it was the most hilarious thing on TV. Not all childhood TV joys age so well, but I found I still liked Fractured Flickers. The humor straight Jay Ward (Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle), with lots of visual puns and cheap gags. Hans Conried makes it shine as host, and it's still a lot of fun hearing the voice actors from the Jay Ward cartoons adding dialogue to old silent films.

I'll try to get Monday's cartoon up by the end of the day today. It was another long night working on a class project. I have midterms this week, but then a short break, which will hopefully let me get caught back up with my life.

Sunday March 13, 2005

Yes, Freedom Of Religion Actually Does Mean Freedom From Religion Too...

Some notes on the struggle against religious totalitarianism from a guy named Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about the subject:

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a novelist from the Indian subcontinent, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. Now, 16 years later, religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us.

For those of us who grew up in India in the aftermath of the partition riots in 1947, the shadow of that slaughter has remained as a dreadful warning of what men will do in the name of God. And there have been too many recurrences of such violence, in Meerut, in Assam, most recently in Gujarat. European history, too, is littered with proofs of the dangers of politicised religion: the French wars of religion, the bitter Irish troubles, the "Catholic nationalism" of the fascistic Spanish dictator Franco, and the rival armies in the English civil war going into battle, both singing the same hymns.

It's a good essay. As to his ultimate stand on the question of God, I'm with Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said "I believe in God, but I spell it Nature." When the bird, and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.

Saturday March 12, 2005

Another Busy Weekend

Lite posting for now. I'm preoccupied with Schoolwork mostly, but also with miscellaneous work here at Casa del Garrett.

[Geek Alert] I got fed up with SuSE 9.2 the other day and wiped it from its hard drive pack. I'd bought a copy of 9.2 after I upgraded Mowgli, my main workstation, to a 64 bit AMD motherboard. I wanted to try running a 64 bit Linux on it. But SuSE does things just differently enough from the standard Linux form, that fooling with its quirks while setting it up gets frustrating. We run mostly Red Hat on our Linux boxes at the Institute, and SuSE puts things in different directories, and its boot routine is somewhat different. You keep having to work around the differences and it you find yourself spinning your wheels over things that should be simple.

The final straw came yesterday while I tried to set up my Palm organizer. I use JPilot, which acts a lot like the software that came with my SmartPhone. But it just crashed every time I tried to synchronize. So I tried the others (I really don't like Evolution, precisely because it imitates Outlook so well and I don't like Outlook one bit). Then I ran into conduit issues that JPilot had long ago fixed.

For weeks SuSE had been giving me a funky problem with my Fat32 data drive. That's the drive I share between my Windows and Linux systems. SuSE would run for a while, then throw a file system panic on that drive, claiming that it got a bad cluster computation. It would then (sensibly) mark the drive read only, which meant my mail client (Thunderbird) would stop fetching mail because it couldn't write it to the mailbox files. After many weeks of fussing with it, I discovered that the fstab file entries SuSE had created for that drive were wrong. After I fixed it, I had no problems. But that shouldn't have happened in the first place

So when I ran into problems with jPilot I just threw up my hands and gave up. I tried downloading Fedora Core 3 for the AMD 64 and it would install just fine but then hang on reboot, while it tried to initialize my LAN card. I suspected some issues with 32 to 64 bit recompilation, but I was in no mood by then to fuss with it. 64 bit Mandrake 10.1 is only available to it's paying customers it would seem, so I ended up installing from my Mandrake 10.0 32 bit disks.

Mandrake is nice, because it does things pretty much the way Redhat does, but with a much more ease of use grace. I've always noticed this about Mandrake. I had Firefox and Thunderbird up in no time, and the Sun Java SDK and Netbeans. I had some initial trouble getting Firefox to run with the Java SDK plugin, then I remembered that you have to use the one compiled with gcc 3.2. Everything I usually run installed without a hitch including jPilot which syncs just nicely now, and I am nearly 100 percent back and running again with Linux.

VB.NOT

I ran across this Dr. Dobbs article on Slashdot, which gave me a moment of intense pleasure.

While I am on the subject of Visual Basic, I may as well give my opinion about that language. It has to be said that Visual Basic (classic) was getting rather tired. The language was inherently single threaded and had serious problems with COM (certainly as far as creating COM servers). In fact, when I had finished writing my book on MTS (published in 1999), I came to the conclusion that MTS had been designed to allow Visual Basic developers to write objects that could benefit from threading and security, and COM+ took this a step further. Visual Basic could call Win32 functions, but it often had to use dirty hacks to use them effectively. But with COM, and COM security, it had gone as far as it could and could not provide what C++ could do in a few lines of code. Any situation where C++ can provide a facility in a few lines and VB cannot is embarrassing to VB. However, most of the problems are so inherent in the language and the runtime that the solution had to be radical. And that lead to VB.NET.

Well, a search of the Internet will give you most of the details of the furor that the release of VB.NET caused. The best site is Karl E. Peterson's (http://www.mvps.org/vb/rants/vfred.htm). VB.NET simply isn't VB: As Karl's site shows, there are multiple incompatibilities between the language of VB and VB.NET. Further, VB is single threaded, does not have exceptions, and was typically used to write non-OOP code. VB.NET was provided with a “porting” tool, but most people I know who have used it (including me) have found that the tool simply comments out large amounts of the incompatible code. My advice early on was that VB developers should not port their code, and instead they should convert it to VB classes that could be called by .NET code through COM interop. That way, the VB code remained in the environment where it was designed to work. Microsoft, of course, perpetuated the myth that VB.NET was VB and promoted the porting tool.

Some people regard VB.NET as wonderful. I really don't see the reason for the language. There are a few features that other languages do not have (exception filters and renaming interface methods are two), but these are not good enough reasons for a new language. There is the argument that VB developers would be more comfortable with VB.NET, but as I've said, VB.NET is not VB, and since a developer would have to learn principles of OOP and .NET principles like threading, exceptions, and delegates, the developer may as well learn a new language. C# is the natural language to use for .NET and there was no need for VB.NET. Semicolons and braces are not so difficult to get used to! Instead, we have a language that's .NET, but not quite all there. In my opinion, the Common Language Specification (CLS) was created simply to make sure that other languages could create code that would work specifically with VB.NET code, rather than making all languages work with each other. I understand that signed integers are useful, but so are unsigned integers! I do not understand why VB.NET cannot have unsigned integers as part of the language. I think that case insensitivity is juvenile, there is no excuse for using Option Strict Off (“late binding” is a synonym for “hard to find run time bugs”), and it’s easy to lose track of your variables if you don't explicitly declare them. VB.NET has serious flaws that are not counteracted by the few benefits it gives.

I have written a column on VB.NET and I have spoken at VB.NET conferences, so I know the language well. However, it's not a language I am comfortable with: I find that whenever I use the language, I tend to swear a lot. It just doesn't work the way I expect it to, and I am not the only one. This is the most common complaint I have heard from people who moved from VB (classic) to VB.NET and this backs up Karl E. Peterson's statement that VB.NET is just not VB. So why did Microsoft create VB.NET? The answer is that in 2000, the number of VB developers exceeded the number of users of Microsoft's other principle language, C++, by at least a factor of 10 (these were figures I saw at an internal Microsoft meeting). Microsoft made a big point in announcing that C# was another language "from the C++ family" and the marketers judged that they could not get all of those VB programmers to use a C++-like language. Instead, they judged that they would be more likely to get a fair proportion of those VB programmers to move over to .NET if Microsoft generated a VB-like language. In other words, the reason for VB.NET was marketing and not technological

I'd say I hate to say I told you so, but I'd be lying through my teeth. All my longtime friends will tell you that I love to say I told you so. So...ahem...to all you docile sheep who have followed Microsoft's line about VB.Net being the next generation of Visual Basic...I Told You So! It is not Basic, let alone Visual Basic. I could vent for hours on this one subject alone, but Bruce McKinney, MS Basic master, author of Hardcore Visual Basic has done it so much better then I ever could, so I won't bother. But. Well. Just so you know. I Told You So!

And while I'm on the subject. We Basic programmers had been asking Microsoft for years to give us unsigned integers. PowerBasic has them. It also does threading. And it has structured Try Catch Finally error handling. There is no earthly reason why Microsoft couldn't have put those features in the language, they just choose not to. And yes, you should never write code without Option Explicit turned on...but I'm sorry...a language that thinks mycat, MyCat and Mycat are three different variables is one that's asking for maintenance and debugging problems. And yes, semicolons and braces are not so difficult to get used to. I know, because I've been getting used to them ever since Microsoft stabbed VB developers in the back. But they are inane. Seriously. Inane. Semicolons I could figure out. They're what a compiler that doesn't know what a line end is uses. But for years when looking at C code I was stumped by those damn braces. I couldn't figure out the rule for using them (I could have just looked it up, but I get on these kicks sometimes where I get determined to figure a thing out from the outside looking in. I've been trying to figure out the game of Cricket this way for years now...). When I started learning Java I learned what the damn brackets where for. All this time I thought it was some big important deal that only the real big boy languages that all true code warriors used needed. Come to find out it's a goddamn kludge. That's right. You use brackets because the damn language flow structures, the if statements and for-next statements and while statements and such like, only accept single statements. So for example, this conditional in Basic:

IF condition THEN
statement one
statement two
statement three
ELSE
statement four
statement five
statement six
END IF

...wouldn't work in a C kinda language, because in C (and Java and presumably C#) the if then else structure can only accept one statement:

if (condition) statement one; else statement two;

...is all you get.

Sweet. So what the hell do you do if you need to execute more then a single statement if your condition is true (or not)? Well you could just bundle them all up into a function and make the statement a call to that function. But then your code starts becoming a rats nest of calls here and yon, and functions that just exist because the language can't handle simple things that even toy languages like Basic have been able to handle for decades now. But instead of fixing their damn compilers, the inventors of C gave us those damn brackets as a work around. That's right. That's all they are. A goddamned work around. All the brackets do is bundle a number of statements together, which the compiler then treats as a single statement. Thus:

if (condition){
statement one;
statement two;
statement three;
} else {
statement four;
statement five;
statement six;
}

Note that even though the brackets form a single statement out of many statements, they are themselves immune from the rule that statements have to end with semicolons.

However, class definitions are enclosed by brackets which are required to have semicolons after them. Even if the class definition is empty. The following is perfectly valid:

class EmptyList {};

Screw that. I'm sorry...but screw that. It's pathetic. But now I have to live with all this crap I suppose, because McKinney is right, Visual Basic is dead.

Yes...I'm still pissed off at Microsoft. Developers...Developers...Developers... Feh.

In other words, the reason for VB.NET was marketing and not technological.

They told us we had to throw away everything fine and good about Basic so we could move on to the next generation of object oriented programming languages. Goodby clear, concise, readable code. Hello brackets. Hello string buffers. Hello

if((String)((UseList)numComponents[components]).getObject().equals(((String) ((sentList)vList.itemAt(selection.getIndex()))).toString))

(Hey...don't look at me, I didn't write it)

They said we had to embrace the changes, so we could continue to grow and expand our horizons. So...I embraced change. Wholeheartedly. I figured if I had to throw everything I knew away and go learn a Java-esq language, it might as well Be Java. Where once I had five Windows machines on my household LAN, now I have one Windows XP box, a Win2K laptop, three Linux distributions and an Apple Macintosh G5 tower. Where once I could only write software for Microsoft platforms, now I write software that runs on a variety of platforms. Where once I only used Microsoft tools to develop software, now I use a variety of commercial and open source software tools. Thanks Bill, for expanding my horizons.

A Java Editor

So I was talking about this Dr. Dobbs column with a co-worker and we began discussing how Visual Studio.Net isn't written in C#, whereas there are a number of good Java development tools, like Netbeans, that are themselves written in Java. Which for one thing means they run on Linux and Windows and Mac OSX. It got me to thinking about my hassles finding a good multi platform general purpose programmer's editor. So I did a little hunting and found JEdit. Dammed if it isn't just about perfect. I wish I'd found it sooner. Just download the current jar file and (assuming you have Java installed) just run "java -jar [jar file name]" to install. It has oodles of plugins to give it all sorts of functionality. The plugins are all Java jar files, and you install them simply by putting the plugin jar in the JEdit jar directory. Simple.

A nice, multi-platform editor has been my holy grail now for years, and I think I've finally found it. It's not as comprehensive an IDE as NetBeans, but it's a great general purpose editor. It handles all the line end formats gracefully, which is critical for a multi platform editor; something even the ubiquitous emacs doesn't do well at all.

And thanks once again Bill. If it wasn't for .Net, I might not ever have discovered how nice a real multi-platform language is.

New Car Love

A final note, and then I have to get back to my schoolwork. My car turned its first thousand miles today. It's been a great ride so far, and I'm still feeling amazed every time I open the door and step in. I'm sure part of it is spending most of my life behind the wheel of subcompact economy cars. I went from the basic Geo Prism to a dressed up Accord. I just never expected it to be that much of a step up. It was one of my better decisions I think, to spend the extra to get the dressed up version. Except now I'm beginning to feel like I really need to get the car it's own parking pad in my backyard. Maybe on with a little frame roof to protect it a tad. There are others in my neighborhood like that. Shouldn't cost much, but I don't have much of a back yard so that would basically eliminate it. I haven't had a back yard long enough to want to pave it over.

The car has track lighting! Well...kind of. I was driving home from visiting friends last weekend, and noticed a pale amber glow around my shifter, which I thought was just the streetlights shining down from my open moonroof. But it never moved. So I put my hand over it and followed the beam of light to a little glowing dot of light near where my dome lights live. It's a dot about the size of a small LED, and it seems its only purpose in life is to softly illuminate my stick, and the seat heater buttons on either side of it. Wow.

And don't get me started on the little door lights on the bottom of my doors that light up when you open them.

I sound like such a bumpkin. You grow up in a Baptist home and it gives you a thoroughly ingrained suspicion of materialism. And it's good to have that wariness of the material life. But it's not all a striving for status. Some things we buy, we buy them because they embody for us the exuberance of life, the joy of motion and creation. I'm told you can tell in the old caves where the first humans began to appear, because their tools were unnecessarily beautiful.

So many hands made my car. I wish I could thank them all.

Thursday March 10, 2005

A Crazy World

As I said in another post, fundamentalists all across the nation are going to be assaulting our Pride festivals more this year, and in the coming years, then ever before. Expect it. Agape Press is now marketing what they call a "new resource...for Christians who want to be bolder in their witnessing efforts":

Last summer, Mark Cahill headed to the annual "Gay Pride" festival in Atlanta and spoke to hundreds of people about their beliefs regarding heaven and hell, God, and the afterlife. Cahill released the DVD of his conversations titled "Pride Goes Before Destruction: Witnessing on the Streets of Atlanta."

You really have to hand it to him, to have someone follow him around with a video camera while haranguing gay folk at a Pride Festival, and then market DVDs of it to people with the title Pride Goes Before Destruction. Uhm...present company exempted I take it Mark?

The evangelist explains another of his techniques. "One of the things we try to do is kind of go to an extreme place, so to speak, so [others] can watch and then ask: 'If those guys can go a gay and lesbian festival in Atlanta, who can't I share my faith with?'

"So we try to do this so people can be encouraged and know that if they'll talk with us there, who won't really challenge us in a crazy world with tsunami waves and Johnny Carson dying and an Iraq war."

Tsunami waves. And Johnny Carson dying. And an Iraq war. Mark, you need to use the word 'crazy' with a bit more care then this.

But the video camera thing is a good idea. We should all pack our own video cameras with us to Pride Day, from now on, and follow any of them we find at our Pride Festivals around with cameras of our own, so everyone else can see for themselves the resentful little balls of vitriol and prejudice these people are made of. We should videotape them wherever they go in public, get their relentless incitement of religious passions toward gay people on record, so the world can see for itself why we're dying at the hands of gay bashers.

It's Not Only Hubble

If there's any space science that survives the Bush years it will be a miracle It isn't just Hubble that they're trying to kill:

Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination

Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 are now more than 14 billion and 11 billion kilometres from Earth, respectively. Having visited all the outer planets except Pluto, they are on their final quest - to locate the shifting boundary between the Sun's domain and the realm where interstellar space begins.

A little over 13 hours out from Sol, a veteran of the first space age - Voyager 1 - is working quietly in the depths of space as it travels away from our Sun at 17.163 kilometers per second. But now, NASA has told scientists working on these and other older missions that their missions may be terminated in October to save money, reports Nature.

The decision - which NASA officials say is not yet final - has angered space scientists, who are calling the moves penny-wise and pound-foolish, and that it is being done without a usual formal science review.

According to Nature, NASA officials told seven mission managers (Voyager, Ulysses, Polar, Wind, Geotail, FAST (Fast Auroral SnapshoT) and TRACE (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer)) that there is now no money to keep their projects operating after the current fiscal year ends in October.

...

Nature quoted Lennard Fisk, a University of Michigan space scientist who chairs the National Academy of Sciences Space Studies Board and is a former head of NASA space science, as saying the cuts were "an extremely foolish thing to do".

Voyager, he says, is entering one of the most interesting scientific phases of its long life as its particle detectors approach the edge of the Solar System. "It doesn't make senseā€¯ to turn off Ulysses just as the Sun comes to the end of a 22-year magnetic cycle.

For now, project scientists say they have no choice but to take the threat seriously. Having been told by NASA that there is no money available after October, Stone says, "we are currently developing a plan for shutdown".

The Voyager spacecraft were launched on a grand tour of the solar system made possible by a once in 176 year alignment of the planets. We loose this data and it will be generations before it comes within our reach again.

But if there is one thing that marks every aspect, every decision made by the gang in power now, it is their utter disconcern for the future. Some, surely, are just cheerfully waiting for Armageddon and the end of the world. But for others it's a simple smash and grab operation. Power...money...to the victor belong the spoils, as Dick Army once said. Their fundamentalist enablers are busy cutting science out of the textbooks, but they themselves could not care less. They couldn't care less what's in it for future generations, if there's nothing in it for them, now, right now. This is why we're going to spend billions of dollars flying paper rocketships to the moon and mars for the next several years, while spacecraft that are already at the edges of our solar system are being shut down.

Why We Fight For Hate Crime Laws

Attention...Richard Cohen... the clue department is on the line...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Chad Allen Conyers, convicted killer of Joseph Camber, is free after the State of Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in Knoxville overturned his probation violation.

Conyers, who previously plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the April 2002 death of Camber, local gay activist and employee at the Carousel II, had been sentenced to a term of four years in split-confinement in the custody of the Knox County Sheriff.

In a ruling by Appeals Court Judge David H. Welles, the previous ruling by Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner was overturned, and Conyers will be placed on judicial diversion as originally ordered.

In the decision filed today, the Welles remanded Conyers back to the jurisdiction of Baumgartner's court and the originally planned judicial diversion. Under that stipulation, Conyers will be allowed to return home to Virginia and continue his probation with no supervision from either Tennessee or Virginia courts.

Virginia does not recognize judicial diversion from out-of-state courts. Combined with the inability of Tennessee courts to order supervision in another state, the net effect is that Conyers is free to continue living in Virginia with no legal constraints as long as he does not travel to Tennessee and commit a crime.

Camber was strangled to death by Conyers. DNA from Conyers skin under Camber's fingernails ID'd him as the killer. Lucky for him his victim was a homosexual, and it was Tennessee.

The Moral Crusade

Gay and Lesbian Americans, even those who don't place themselves on the left side of the political scales, can sympathize with liberals and progressives, when they complain nowadays that republicans, Right Wingers and their propaganda organs just make stuff up about them. We've known how that's worked for decades now:

ST. PETERSBURG - A member of the Pinellas County Juvenile Welfare Board has provoked the anger of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups for saying the groups endorse sex between underage youth and adults.

Cecilia Burke, who was appointed to the JWB's board of directors by Gov. Jeb Bush, made her statements in a memo Feb. 7 asking the board to sever ties with the support groups Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

...

Burke said she based some of her statements on the work of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuals.

Joseph Nicolosi, one of that group's psychotherapists, told the St. Petersburg Times that PFLAG was in fact a "very damaging group," but not one that officially encouraged pedophilia.

Heh. Even NARTH knows better then to sign onto her smear campaign. Note that Jeb Bush thinks someone like this belongs on a juvenile welfare board. Surprised? Give yourself a star for the day if you noticed the rich irony in gay bashing right wing republicans accusing groups that defend gay youth of advocating child abuse.

[Update] If you still don't see the irony... perhaps this will help:

(Des Moines, Iowa) A group of Republican lawmakers is holding up legislation that would help curb bullying and harassment in Iowa schools because the bill would include protections for gay and lesbian students.

The issue was scheduled to be debated in the Senate Education Committee on Monday, but Sen. Paul McKinley, (R-Chariton), a head of the panel, struck it from the list of measures to be considered.

Because the 50 member Senate is tied with 25 Republicans and 25 Democrats each committee has two chairs, and both must sign off on which measures will be debated.

McKinley said he's all for safe schools, but said he doesn't agree with including a list of specific groups to be protected.

Right. So long as that list of specific groups includes gay and lesbian kids. Fat lot of concern for their welfare republicans have, don't they?

The Hedonist Within

Remember Michael Bowers, the one time Georgia state attorney general whose enthusiastic prosecution of Michael Hardwick for sodomy led to the infamous supreme court decision in Hardwick v Bowers? Remember how he was once referred to in Georgia politics as "Mr. Clean", how he fought against Atlanta attempts to establish benefits for same sex couples, how he prevented attorney from joining the attorney general's office after he found out she was a lesbian? Remember how he later had to withdraw from his race for governor of Georgia when it was found out that all that time he'd been cheating on his wife? You've seen this pattern of behavior before...right?

He was also the Air Force's top lawyer, a take-no-prisoners people-eater with a reputation as a hanging judge...“ especially when it came to adultery, sexual harassment or any boys and girls in blue caught doing the naughty, nonreg deed.

"Fiscus was known as the Darth Vader of the Air Force's legal establishment for his zealous pursuit of sexual misconduct,"¯ says retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Roger Charles, who recently completed an exhaustive investigation of the former general's formerly secret life.

Charles notes that several years ago, when a married female lieutenant colonel with an impeccable military record was nailed for adultery and her commander wanted to slap her on the wrist with an Article 15 nonjudicial punishment and let her retire, Fiscus fought for a general court-martial...“ at which she was found guilty and sentenced to be dismissed from the service. She committed suicide before the sentence was approved to preserve her retirement benefits for her family.

Last September, Jekyll was revealed as Hyde when the double life of the very-married, by-the-book senior enforcer caught up with him via an anonymous letter to the Air Force chief of staff. The investigation that ensued literally caught Fiscus with his pants down: He had almost as many uniformed playmates as the Air Force has B-2 bombers. He had sweet young things stashed everywhere, including on his Pentagon legal team...“ which allowed for quickies with the chosen, whom he also was kind enough to counsel about their careers and cook for while buck-naked.

Fiscus' sexual inner circle included eager Air Force lawyers and enlisted paralegals, as well as Pentagon civilian employees. Preying primarily on the super-career-motivated Air Force femmes who figured getting especially close to the boss wouldn't hurt their climb to the top, he managed to maintain a harem of more than a dozen girlfriends for at least a 10-year period while rocketing up the promotion ranks and somehow still remaining "a good family man"¯ And all his affairs were consensual.

Go read the whole thing to see how the Air Force treated him after they found out about the behavior behind the "zealous pursuit of sexual misconduct". The heathen libertine degenerate that the sexual puritan wages war against, is themselves. They are not the polar opposite of sexual degeneracy, they are the other side of the coin. If you've ever noticed that they seem to hate people who have accepted joyfully their own human sexuality, and who deal with it honorably, more then those who do not, here's why.

Tuesday March 8, 2005

Quick...Find Me A Reason For Making The Decision I'm Making

Now why is this not surprising?

NASA officials have claimed they performed a risk analysis before deciding to cancel the last space-shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, but no such analysis was ever done.

Worse, sources told UPI's Space Watch that NASA also has ignored at least one proposal to reduce the risk of sending a shuttle crew to Hubble - in order to justify its decision.

Over the past few weeks, several NASA officials have stated publicly the agency's decision to cancel further servicing to Hubble was made on safety issues alone, not cost.

...

As [acting NASA administrator Fred] Gregory told Congress, "Administrator O'Keefe made a very conscious, deliberate and well-informed decision that the shuttle would not service the Hubble."

When asked by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chairman of the science committee, and Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., for a copy of that risk analysis report, Gregory agreed to provide it.

Yet, one day later, NASA historian Steven Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.

Dick had interviewed all of the NASA officials who had been involved in the decision to cancel the shuttle mission to the Hubble, a discussion that came to a head in December 2003 when those officials had been working on NASA's fiscal year 2005 budget.

According to Dick's interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, "The decision was made (by O'Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk."

In other words, O'Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee's requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

[emphasis mine]

This is eminently typical of the way the Bush gang operates. They have their agenda, but they don't want to tell anyone what it really is, so they make things up on the fly that they hope will put it over on the public. And when later events prove they're making things up on they fly, they just make up more things on the fly to cover up the cover up. And they know they can get away with it, because the mainstream news media won't call them on it.

Disclaimer...yes, I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute. I don't speak for it, I just work for it. I'm an American and I don't speak for America either. And someday I'd like to live in an America that has a government that thinks science and the pursuit of knowledge are good for a nation and a people. We used to have one of those once. As I recall it was after the Soviets scared the hell out of us with Sputnik.

Sunday March 6, 2005

No Cartoon For Monday

Much, Much too busy with school work this week...

Saturday March 5, 2005

If Gays Did Not Exist, Republicans Would Have To Invent Us.

Homosexuals are to Bush Republicans, as Jews were to Nazis. That's not hyperbole, it's the plain truth. There were the vitiriolic haters, and there were those who knew the political uses of hate. Those last didn't necessarily share the hatred of the others, but with deliberation they enabled it, inflamed it, and turned it loose on a nation, on their families, friends and neighbors, the better to destroy every vestage of the democratic institutions they despised. That was antisemitism in 1930s Germany, and it's homophobia in George Bush's America.

Let it be said that the stench of it is starting to really disturb those Americans who still believe in America, and in the American Dream. Tom Tomorrow breaks his short hiatus to post about something he saw on Hannity & Colmes the other day, because he just couldn't keep his silence:

...while hunkered down in the Fortress of Solitude, I have continued to sporadically monitor Fox News broadcasts--oh! the things I do for you people--and as a consequence of this regrettable habit of mine, I am compelled to break radio silence.

Hannity & Colmes had a story last night about a high school teacher in Brick Township, New Jersey, who lost his cool and yelled at some students who would not stand when the National Anthem was--for reasons which were never made clear--played in his class...

...

Our guest pontificator on the subject was one Bill Cunningham, a second- or third-tier radio guy out of Cincinnatti who would mostly not be worth the pixels required to acknowledge his existence--except for one throwaway line, used to set up a contrast between our sinful modern era and the conservatively correct paradise of his youth:

"In the good old days, back when AIDS was an appetite suppressant and "gay" meant you were happy..."

Now, understand, this was a totally gratuitous remark. The story they were discussing had nothing whatsoever to do with AIDS or gay issues. This was just shorthand, the way Bill Cunningham indicates the deliniation between his ideal world and the cesspool of sin and liberal corruption and disrespectful high school students in which he finds himself today: you didn't have any gay people, or any of their nasty diseases.

You should read the whole post (for one thing, if you're a tad younger then me you won't understand the pathetic reference there to AIDS (actually Ayds) as an appitite suppressor). This is what the republicans legitimized with the last election. This is what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings legitimized when she told PBS that caring, loving same sex households were unfit to be shown to the nation's children. This is what George Bush's Health And Human Services Department legitimized, when it demanded that references to gays be eliminated from the title of a program on preventing suicide among gays. We are the offical national scapegoats, bearing within us the burden of every social evil anyone can name, so that republicans, conservatives, right wingers, can remain themselves, forever blameless. And here's what happens to scapegoats:

Man beaten in gay bashing clings to life

The 21-year-old Santa Fe man who police say was savagely beaten in a gay-bashing incident last weekend is clinging to life in critical condition, a family spokeswoman said Wednesday.

"We're not out of the woods yet," Rachel Rosen said. "The doctors say he will be getting worse before he gets better."

At least four young Santa Fe men beat James Maestas early Sunday morning in a Cerrillos Road motel parking lot, police said.

An Albuquerque man with Maestas suffered minor injuries during the assault, in which police say the attackers repeatedly called the two men "faggots."

Maestas apparently was kicked so hard the food in his stomach came up his throat and went into his lungs, Rosen said. Stomach acid badly burned his lungs, she said, and he is breathing with the help of a respirator.

He has been running a fever and must be monitored closely, because the risk of infection is high, Rosen said.

Maestas' face and mouth are bruised and swollen, she said. "They haven't even been able to see if he has all his lower teeth because his lower lip is so mangled."

Two gay men were assaulted in the parking lot of a Denny's in Santa Fe, where they had just eaten. One of their attackers was a teenager who worked at the Denny's, and overheard them talking about where they were staying. When the gay men fled the Denny's their attackers were directed to their hotel by the Denny's employee. There they were able to continue their attack, nearly killing one of them. Maybe ABC news will call this one nothing more then a robbery gone bad too.

And I wonder some days, whether or not this is how it felt to be a Jew in 1930s Germany, in the days before the terror engulfed everyone. I ask myself some nights, if I would know when it was time to get the hell out.

Burt...Quit Calling Me! You, and Mark and Lynn and Webb and Craig and all the others who voted to unleash this darkness on me and thousands like me and our friends and our families...you have no right to even think of yourselves as ever having been friends of mine. It never was. I do not know you.

Friday March 4, 2005

Friday Baltimore Blogging

[Update] Images for this week have been removed. Check this week's postings for new images.

Thursday March 3, 2005

Update...Gay Is Okay...But Only Because It's Really A Name

The NFL has reversed itself and decided that "Gay" isn't a dirty word after all. "Lesbian" however, still is. The rational? "Gay" is actually a family name. One of the players on the Super Bowl winning team last season was named Gay, which made their banning the word more then a tad pathetic. Now the NFL is saying that their custom jersey's are for personalization only, not political expression, which is a nice excuse, but they can't really believe that customer's won't use them for exactly that too, and expecially if they think they're getting something past an NFL censor (sounds like a FARK contest).

As always, it seems to have started with some management dweebs who don't understand that just because a computer can do something automatically, that doesn't mean it should:

In response to my original article (see below), I spoke with a technology consultant who helped the NFL set up its online shop in about 1997.

"I did technology strategy at IBM while we were building the custom jersey ordering system for the NFL," said the consultant, who asked that his name not be used. "We tried to tell them that a naughty word filter was a bad idea because it was impossible to catch everything and you'd keep people from ordering legitimate names (like Gay). We had learned this lesson the hard way in trying to automate profanity filtering in online forums instead of hiring people to screen comments, but the NFL was insistent that they had to have it and it needed to be automated instead of a human approval process.

"The project manager was showing off the functionality when it was first developed and I bet him I could get an offensive jersey order through in less than two minutes. I won the bet and it's the reason 'smegma' is on the list."

Jackasses. You can understand them not wanting to have truly offensive language on their products, but sweepingly defining any references to sexual orientation as innately offensive is bigotry. If they're going to let customers write their own "names" on those jerseys