Unstuck in time

Alright—this is just beyond the beyond.

Giant has Christmas trees (the formerly live ones, not artificial) for sale more than a week before Thanksgiving.

I just do not know what to say.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Fall in

I believe we are just past peak Autumn colors now; probably a week or so later than “normal”. (Which, I hope, means that my cluster landscapers should be out blowing away the foot-deep carpet of leaves in my back yard. Come on, people: I have birds to feed here.)

So here are a few shots of the panoply this year. 

And this is why we need the leaves blown:

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: human connections

Interesting thing happened last week. I’d finally said out loud what I’ve been feeling for months: that I have no skills that any employer would value, so there’s no reason for me to be competing in a hugely cutthroat job market. I’d stopped even looking at the job search alerts LinkedIn sends me five times a day.

But the thought of having to depend on Social Security (which the Republicans have been trying to kill since FDR implemented it during the New Deal), Medicare (which they’ve been trying to kill since LBJ got it passed in the 60s) and my 401k (as we head into administration whose policies the vast majority of economists say will tank the global economy) really wigged me out.

I was in a bad way.

Then, Wednesday I saw a listing for a PM job that I thought I could do, generally useless though I be. But their applicant tracking system crapped out every time I hit the submit button on the application. (Tried multiple times on three browsers.) I looked on LinkedIn for a connection, and there was a product manager connected to a friend/mentor of mine. I reached out to the latter for an introduction, which he graciously gave. Thursday morning the PM responded, saying he’d already passed my “very impressive profile” to the hiring manager, who’s already in interviews, but was interested. He sent me an internal referral link to the application, but I still encountered the submit problem. He also contacted a recruiter, who at least looked at my LI profile.

I can’t tell you how much this basic interest and acknowledgement lightened my perspective.

But then, also on Thursday, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and came across this tweet:

It had only been posted a few minutes before, so I was the first to stick up my hand. The poster DM’d me with the job description and a link to the internal referral. It’s a job I cautiously think I might be able to do, and my background at least carries gravitas in this field. As I was filling out the application, a guy I know only on Twitter, CISO for a law firm and an elder in cybersec, tweeted, “Recommend!”

As of time of writing, I’ve heard nothing further on that first job (remember—they were already interviewing), and I have a screening call tomorrow with a recruiter for the second job. (The tweet got 17 replies, and several were from people also interested.)  I’m not delusional—scores of people go through multiple rounds of interviews for every job in tech out there and still don’t get hired. But the fact that—after months of considering what I need by way of Plans B through R to feel financially secure in the coming chaos, to have two actual human connections, from people willing to help me, is such grace; it makes me cry. Whatever the outcome.

And that’s my gratitude for today.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Those that burn crosses

After a week of taking-the-piss choices for the Kleptocrat’s new kakistocratic high government posts (plus his announced plan to evade the constitutional requirement of Senate confirmation for same), seems to me that the only choice for today’s earworm is Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name”.

So, here it is. Crank up the volume.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

My boarder

In addition to the beautiful, I’m also looking for the cute. So meet Scooter, who is a part-time resident of my back yard.

You will note that his cheeks are full of safflower seeds. (I toss them for the ground feeders, as squirrels don't like them. But apparently chipmunks do.)

©2024 Bas Bleu

Look for it

I was on my morning walk Monday (a day in November when we reached into the 70s), when I glanced down and caught a glimpse of some sparkles on a leaf. I was already about ten paces further when I stopped and literally muttered, “Go back and shoot it.”

So I did.

It’s beautiful, and I need all the beautiful in life I can get.

  

©2024 Bas Bleu

We value your feedback

Here’s a follow-up to my saga about getting my flu vaccination. The gist of it was OneMedical (now owned by Amazon) screwed up on the dosage, even though my records indicate I get the high dose and I specified high dose when I made the appointment, and I had to return the following day to get the job done.

When they sent me the obligatory Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, I gave them middling scores (indicating I am not a promoter of their product or service, based on my recent experience). I also laid a few choice words on them in the verbatim sections and answered “yes” to their “may we contact you for more information” query.

So—here’s their outreach: from “Valerie” at “Amazon OneMedical” (all previous communications have come from the OneMed only domain):

I would have said that this was AI generated, except I don’t see much intelligence of any origin. It absolutely does not address the issues I brought up and I am at a loss as to what she means by “a greater experience”. Possibly, English is not her first language.

However, as in all the Jeff Bezos empire, she gives the appearance of a response, without the expense of the substance of one, so all’s well, eh?

 

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Gratitude Monday: It's called service for a reason

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other.

But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever was not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of only two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. They are not now, nor have they ever been, suckers or losers; they are men and women the practice of whose profession is called “serving”, a concept unknown to the members of our future administration.

Who also do not understand the concept of gratitude.

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

My highest ground

NGL—we are in for it. Faced with the choice between a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, racist, misogynist, lying, unhinged thief of classified documents, who’s cheated at everything from golf to his three wives, and a dedicated public servant with a clear record of advocating for the people—a majority of American voters went with the criminal.

Which means we will have 12 years of rule by Republicans so radical they’d make Edwin M. Stanton blush, handing out goodies to the oligarchs while they clamp down on any non-White, non-cis, non-Christian non-rich, non-native (except for the First People; they don’t count; they never counted) folks in the country and cause chaos throughout the globe.

I’m talking: three SCOTUS picks in the next term; they’ll be ideologues vetted by the Federalist Society, and young. They’ll be ruling for decades. Additionally, scores of judges on federal benches, which will soon look in total like the Fifth Circuit.

Pulling the US out of NATO. Bugger Article 5, we’ll just leave. Which will give Putin and his lackeys permission to do whatever the fuck they want to do.

Tanking the economy. Not just tariffs, not just tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, not just whatever crackbrained idea the Kleptocrat comes up with—it’s all of them together. Plus putting Elon Musk in charge of “eliminating government waste”. He promises he can trim $2T off a $6T budget, although he allows there will be “some hardship” involved in that. Not for him or his ilk; for us.

Destroying the environment. Between handing over whatever they want to big oil, there’ll be lifting of EPA regulations on corporations all over the place. Like hellscapes? Great—one coming right up.

The death of Ukraine.

Utter calamity for women’s lives. It’s not only the death of Roe v Wade, as horrifying as the results have been just in the past few months. It’s the intrusion of state governments into all of a woman’s decisions—if and where she should work outside the house, how many children she should produce, what redress she has in an abusive relationship, what control (if any) she has over money and property. We’re headed back at least one century, maybe more.

Oh—and ditto for people of color: they’ll be put back in “their place”, which will not be anywhere you or I would like to be.

And let’s talk about deporting immigrants. That’s a big promise, and it always got big cheers; no doubt it played a big part in electing the Kleptocrat and the alleged couch-shtuper. Millions and millions of Americans voted to have law enforcement and the goddamned United States military round up “millions” of immigrants (who may or may not be here legally), park them in purpose-built “camps” and then ship them like lettuce or bags of rice to “where they came from”. Millions upon millions of Americans are looking forward to watching that—spitting on the “others” if in person, or toasting the aktion with their cans of Coors if viewing on TV.

They'll start with immigrants and then move on to anyone who dissents. Not deportation; just imprisoning and possibly killing.

Oh—and all you morons who voted for the Kleptocrat because "the price of eggs": what are you going to do when all those people who harvest the crops and work in the meat packing plants are gone and the price of everything shoots through the roof? Yeah, I know—loosening up child labor laws will take care of that, eh?

BTW—let me point out that millions of these people claim to be Christians, and they are looking forward to building out a theocracy that has never been a pillar of our democracy. Right up until the point where they start killing each other over which is the only Jesus-approved form of baptism—foot dipping or full immersion—they’ll enact laws that make fundamental Protestantism the paradigm for behavior. Look—we currently have a Speaker of the House who considers himself Moses; this isn’t such a stretch.

Also BTW—these are the people who are rooting for a cataclysmic war in the Middle East to usher in the End Times. They care deeply about Israel; not at all about Jews.

And I do not forget national security. There will be none—everything discussed in the halls of our government will be blabbed immediately to the Kremlin. Because that’s how these people roll. After four years (with the Kleptocrat’s toadies heading up intelligence and military branches), we’ll be devastated. By year 12 we won’t exist as a power.

Because there’s also a plan to eliminate career civil servants in the federal system—the backbone of government—and replace them with suits whose only expertise is sucking up to Cadet Bonespurs. They wrote this down, that’s how confident they are.

As for the nation’s health—well, RFK Jr. is going to tackle that. He’ll balance removing fluoride from the water with eliminating the FDA (and probably the NIH and CDC) as well as the Department of Health and Human Services.

Finally—let me remind you that, in addition to the absence of guardrails that come with him bringing in only the ideologues who’ve pledged loyalty exclusively to him (not the Constitution), we also have a situation where SCOTUS has declared that anyone whose ass is parked behind the Resolute Desk has absolute immunity for any criminal acts committed in the course of conducting business. We are well and truly fucked.

And that’s what my fellow Americans voted for—a Christofascist autocracy. Because the price of eggs is up and they didn’t want another non-White person in the White House.

So what do I choose for today’s earworm? Stevie Wonder singing “Higher Ground” at this year's DNC. That's what we need to be thinking about. 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Aftermath

TBH, I find myself without words today. I don’t know how long this condition will last; I don’t know whether there’s any point in doing this at all. So here are some photos taken when I thought—hoped—we were better than this.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu