Writing
- Obsidian - an extensible note-taking app that is also well suited for writers. I've composed more than 500K words in it during the past year.
- Clean Shot X - the best screenshot utility
- Raycast - an app launcher that handles much more
- Keyboard Maestro - the ultimate Mac automation tool
- Vivaldi Browser- my choice for web browsing for reasons
- PopClip - a text selection utility
- TextExpander - a snippets app
- Drafts - a text automation app
- Day One - the preeminent journaling app for macOS
- Default Folder X - an enhancement for open and save dialog boxes
- Hazel - a Mac automation tool for file management
- DropZone 4- a file shelf utility
- Toyviewer - a Preview replacement for images with editing capabilities
- Qspace | AppAddict - a substitute for Finder
- Scratchpad - a menu bar utility for floating notes
- BarTender - I didn't buy into the hysteria, I just set up some Little Snitch rules
- Better Touch Tool - multi-purpose automation app
- Find Any File - a search utility
- Things 3- a task manager
- Kiwi for Gmail - Not a well-known email app, but one I've used off and on for years
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - The death penalty is not a deterrent.
- The death penalty costs many times what alternative punsihments cost.
- For every eight executions, someone is freed from death row after their innocence is established.
- Their is a long history of racial discrimination in applying the death peanlty.
- There is no way to rectify a wrongful execution.
- Asking medical staff and correctional officers to participate in executions is immoral.
- Jason Kottke - one of the Internet's OG bloggers who posts regularly and who alwways seems to be finding the best stuff. - RSS Feed
- I've been reading NextDraft for well over a decade. Dave Pell says "I pluck the most fascinating news items of the day and then create a modern-day column which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight." -RSS Feed
- Feedle is a search engine for the IndieWeb where any search you fo can be turned into an RSS feed. Try it for any subject that interests you. In the meantime, subscribe to their curated feed of some of the best blog posts they've found -RSS Feed
- BearBlog is the home of two of my own online endeavors. It's also the home of many fine bloggers. Reading the most popular posts on the platform each day is a good use of your time and a good way to discover new writers - RSS Feed
- Murmel is a service that tracks the most shared stories on social media. The main feed covers a giant cross-section of the Fediverse, but you can subscribe to a personalized feed to see what the people you follow are sharing. - RSS Feed
- The last feed on the list is in way over its head. If you have a hard time sorting out where all the stuff I write about is being posted, you can subscribe to a single RSS feed and get it all out of one fire hose, including my weekly bookmarks and my updated /now page in addition to AppAddict, Living Out Loud and Linkage. - RSS Feed
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Did You Ever Get in Trouble for Reading?
Reading to my grandson
I can't claim to having been an early reader. I learned in school, not as some precocious toddler. My mother read to me all the time but rather than learning how to do it myself, I just memorized my favorite books. I didn't go to kindergarten because it wasn't mandatory when I was of age. I didn't get put into the smart kids reading group to start off with because I switched schools early into first grade. Once I got the fundamentals down, though, I wanted to read more than I wanted to eat. I was way into adulthood before I stopped carrying a book around with me everywhere.
I rushed through every assignment for years so that I could read whatever book I was interested in at the time. There are comments on my elementary school report cards about me neglecting other responsibilities to pursue what my teacher called "pleasure reading" an activity she complained that I put before everything else. My excessive reading bothered her so much that she would assign me dictionary pages to copy by hand just so she wouldn't have to look at me with my nose in a book. There were always books in our house. Both of my parents have been voracious readers my whole life. My siblings are also book people. So are my kids.
When I was growing up, my favorite of all the many towns we lived in was the one where we lived closest to the library. We spent so much time there and the staff got so fond of us that years after we moved, they called just to see how we were doing. We spent two summers in that little town and both years I won prizes for reading the most books for older elementary kids and my little sister won the prize for the younger grades. The money I made selling newspapers and recycling glass soda bottles went for books, including comic books. When we would make trips to the used books store in a larger town an hour away, I would agonize over which of my new books I would read first. I went to that same used book store for 40 years. My kids grew up going there and I even got a chance to take my grandchildren. It finally closed about five years ago, sadly.
I have pretty sizable bookshelves in my home. I've yet to read quite a few of the books I own, but that in no way will keep me from buying more. Amazon's recent decided to make it impossible for its customers to download the books they've bought after this month. I just had to go through the nearly 500 Kindle editions that Wonder Woman and I have accumulated since we started a joint account in 2012. We have about the same number of audiobooks, which totally count as reading in my estimation.
Since I can be a bit obsessive about things I like, I've read the complete works of several prolific authors, including Robert A Heinlein (32 books, 59 short stories) and Ed McBain (55 books in his 82nd Precinct series). The worst thing that ever happened to my reading habit was the Internet. It competes for my attention more than anything else ever has. It's just another form of reading, however. It's horrible for my attention span, but i resist the urge to go on frequent YouTube binges, preferring a steady mix of blogs, news and social media.
I carried books in my Army rucksack when I was in the service. I used to carry a book up in the guard tower of the prison I worked at when I was on third shift. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I gladly packed the extra weight of a Kindle Paperwhite and so did my wife. We agreed early in our marriage to never say anything to each other about buying books. That was a sacred promise and one we've kept. I believe that my love of reading and my constant desire to learn about all the many things that have interested me is what allowed me to be successful in life without a formal education. I could have made more dough with a degree of some sort, but not a lot more. Truth be told, a life reading whatever I wanted sounds more to my liking than having to read what some stuffy professor assigned me any way.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center, Needed Now More than Ever
Since my political wakening in my 30s, I've done my best to financially support charities and organizations who I consider to be not just beneficial for society, but downright heroic. These include:
American Civil Liberties Union Brady United - Campaign Against Gun Violence Southern Poverty Law Center During the 1980s, my home state, North Carolina was plagued by white supremacist groups. The worst of these was led by a former Green Beret master sergeant named Frazer Glenn Miller. The White Patriot Party, Miller's organization was eventually sued out of existence by the Southern Poverty Law Center, led by Morris Dees, an attorney that Miller plotted to kill.
The SPLC, founded in 1971 in Alabama has successfully shut down numerous Klan and Nazi groups, winning large judgments against them in court and distributing 100% of the proceeds to the victims of racism and their survivors.
The SPLC also maintains Hatewatch which actively monitors the far right movement in the United States. President Trump pardoned two national leaders of active hate organizations, The Oath Keepers and The Proud Boys who had received long prison sentences for anti-government activities around the 2020 election. Monitoring these types of groups is vital in the current political climate.
You can also refer to the Extremists and Ideologies section of the SPLC website to track what hate groups are active your area.
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Good People, It Seems
I am indifferent to celebrity culture most of the time. While I admire talented people who can act or sing or hit home ruins and free throws, I don't find anything particularly heroic about it. I am all for athletes and entertainers extracting as much wealth as they can from billionaire sports team owners and the stock holders of movie studios. I'm a little less enthusiastic about concert ticket prices, but then, the cost of music is pretty cheap otherwise. I don't think for a minute that most celebrities are just regular people, only richer. Living with constant adulation is bound to end up making you weird after a while. None of my minor brushes with celebrity have been terrible. As a kid, I watched a minor league baseball game with Bob Feller, a baseball Hall of Fame member who talked to me for the whole game. I walked by Will Smith and his son in San Francisco and was delighted to see them beat boxing to one another, just goofing off.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan opening new doctor’s office in North Carolina - Today, there was a news article about one of North Carolina's biggest celebrities, Michael Jordan, who jas a bit of a reputation for being prickly. He just funded a medical clinic here, the fourth one he's done that for. The clinic is in Wilmington, where he grew up in the same neighborhood where some of my grandkids live. They attend the same high school that he did. I think opening medical clinics that serve uninsured people qualifies you for good person status. Sure, MJ still has plenty of money, but he's doing more than many rich athletes do.
Other celebrities who seem to have a good heart:
Lebron james - I Promise School - Lebron James Family Foundation and Akron Public Schools
Dolly Parton - Dolly Parton's Imagination Library
Robin Williams - A Tribute to Robin Williams - St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
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Work Friends, Real Friends
We spend so much of our lives at our job, often more than we spend with our families. Somehow, it has become common in this country to place an impersonal distance between ourselves and the people we work with. Folks are quick to tell you that your co-workers are not your friends. I suppose the rationale for that is simple. People depend upon their jobs and can be expected to look out for themselves first and foremost in relation to employment. Although they may seem friendly and personable, given the chance to earn more money or to look good to management, coworkers can almost be expected to chuck you under a bus. Being loyal only to one's self seems to be expected. I think that's a horrible way to live, and I struggled with it all my working life.
In most jobs I had, I left the relationships behind when I moved on to the next opportunities. That is a good demonstration of the difference between friends and coworkers. Thankfully, there is an exception or two. On the job I held the longest (20 years), There are a couple of people I grew close to and with whom I stay in touch. I am about 15 years older than both of them. We hired them when they were pretty fresh out of school. I knew them before they were married, and I've watched them become fathers and move on in their careers.
Peyton came onboard as an intern, wearing a backwards baseball hat and his beloved Cheerios tee shirt. He had a degree in history from our state's flagship university in Chapel Hill, but his interest had turned to tech. He had a knack for figuring things out, and he was exceptionally polite. A very likable guy, it was easy to make him laugh, and I tried to do that at every opportunity. Coincidentally, he grew up living in the same house where I'd lived back in the 70s. He was relatively apolitical, and I harangued him for years with my left wing outlook on life, even taking him with me to organizing meetings out of town. When he and his first wife split up, and he was at a low point, I loaned him my spare bike and took him out riding. He fell in love with the sport and is still riding today. We even rode across the state together one year on a bike tour. He eventually moved on to other and better paying tech jobs, ending up working in higher ed. Now in his mid-40s, he recently became a father for the first time (to twins). He shares pictures of them with me and a few other folks constantly.
I'm friends with another former co-worker from that job because of his extreme open-mindedness. Jeremy grew up in the Pentecostal Holiness Church in a small town east of where I live. When I met him, he had very traditional conservative values. I more or less harassed him for years. Those were the days before I quit drinking and my personality, to put it mildly, was a bit abrasive. When I finally sobered up and started treating people more like I wanted to be treated, we became friends, talking at great length about religion and politics and actually listening to each other instead of trying to score points. He went through an examination of his faith that had little to do with me. He came out of it still a believer, but with a much less traditional outlook on life. Jeremy has a real knack for analyzing people, and I always respected the conclusions he came up with. He started his own business when he left our shared job, and it is still doing well. We strike up conversations at random times about random things. I have no doubt that we will never lose touch.
I hear many men say that as we get older, it becomes more difficult to make new friendships. That's true, I think. Holding on to the friends we do have should really be a high priority. I can think of few things more valuable.
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On Identity
Reflecting on the complexity of personal identity and the use of labels, expressing indifference towards their application while acknowledging societal biases and assumptions.
Genealogy Why?
The first time I heard of someone who'd done genealogical research, was in the 70's when Alex Hailey's book, Roots was made into the most talked about TV series ever produced up to that time. Despite all the obstacles faced by scant records for enslaved people, Hailey famously traced his ancestors all the way back to West Africa.
Today, genealogical research is an industry involving multi-billion dollar companies and often DNA technology. It's entirely possible to sit at a computer and trace your family back through generations without any of the hassle of visiting cemeteries, courthouses and your great-aunt Betsy. That's the "How" part of it. What is the why?
For me, it was a life long interest in history, coupled with an interest in the stories my grandparents told. I am the furthest thing you can get from being a candidate for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, even though my ancestry would support membership. My mother's side of the family is descended from Quakers who were abolitionists. My favorite relation from that war was drafted more than once. He served three shorts stints in the Army and always came back home as soon as he could. I could not find any record indicating that he deserted, but he wasn't eager to be there, that much is definite.
Another ancestor from the 19th century named Moses Parker got married and had 12 children. Then his wife died, so he got married again and had 12 more more children.
If you are interested in looking over old census records and finding out how many cousins you have, you can get started today.
NGS Recommends...17 Important Free Websites for Genealogy Research - The National Genealogical Society (frequently referred to as NGS) is here to help individuals learn about their family history. We are a non-profit organization headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. For 120 years, we have been the leader in teaching genealogical research skills and providing a pathway to scholarly work
Find your family. Free Genealogy Archives - Everything on FamilySearch is Free. A completely free genealogy database website. You can use an Advanced Search tool by surname, record type, and/or place to access millions of records. The FamilySearch Wiki is a “go to” resource to find what exists for a wide range of family history topics, even beyond FamilySearch’s extensive databases.
Ancestry | Family Tree, Genealogy & Family History Records - Start your family tree for free. Connect with your family story on Ancestry® and discover the what, where, and who of how it all leads to you.
Genealogy related news/articles and discussion - A subreddit about all things genealogy
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Learning Linux
If you have an old computer lying around, so what i did, for less than $100, I bought an SSD and 32MB of RAM and had a machine perfectly capable of running the free operating system, Linux. Not only is the operating system free, there are also a great many apps available at no cost. If you enjoy tech and would like to expand your horizons a bit, try this experimint in your spare time.
Create a bootable USB stick with Rufus to install| Ubuntu
New Here? Let's Get Started! - YouTube
How to Build a Linux Media Server - A step by step guide -
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Moments Worth Savoring
I decided not to let the never-ending fire hose of WTF coming out of Washington ruin every moment of my life. I still read the news once a day. I still reach out to people affected by all the random craziness. There are numerous federal workers in my hometown, Most of them work on Ft. Bragg, but there are also quite a few who work for the VA, including our daughter. Her job is safe, she's told. For my own mental health, I've been trying to be mindful when doing things that bring me joy, to really savor them and to take in the experience.
Picked Out a Concert
Wonder Woman and I haven't been to a concert in recent memory. As much as I love music, the prospect of dropping a thousand bucks for a weekend's worth of tickets, lodging, parking and restaurant food took the appeal out of the experience. Tonight, on a whim, we went through a list of upcoming shows to see if there was anyone we could see without having to sell a kidney. Bob Dylan is coming to Raleigh in May, and we thought about that for a minute. We kept looking, opting out of a long list of senior citizens like Rod Stewart, Billy Idol and Rick Springfield. We finally found a home-grown band I dearly love, Old Crow Medicine Show, playing a couple of hours away at a venue with festival seating. Sold! Now I have a show to look forward to and a few albums to put on repeat until we go to the show.
Building a Home Lab
I got my hands on a couple of old computers, spent a few bucks on some extra storage and RAM, and now I have a little mission control center set up in my new home office. I installed Linux on one of the machines, the first time I've messed with that in years. I upped the speed of my home Internet connection, since I won't have any more of that sweet fiber optic action from my job any more. I'll have fun trying to figure out new uses for this old hardware.
The Regular
On Saturdays (and Sundays), I usually go to the diner at the end of my street for breakfast, They were exceptionably busy this morning, and it took the server a little longer than usual to get to me. I wasn't bothered in the least. When she came to the table, she brought me my usual drink order without even asking me what I wanted. Then, to make me feel extra special, she asked which of the two meals I alternate between was going to be my choice today. Hundreds of people are in and out of this place every day. It feels good to be remembered and treated with such warmth.
Keeping Up with the Kiddos
I've been hearing from my kids a lot lately. My son's 10-year-old Prius finally died and he was excited to send me a picture of its replacement, a nice looking Jeep that will serve him well driving around the Texas Hill Country outside of Austin. My poor daughter waited until now, she's soon to turn 40, to get poison ivy. What's worse was that she got it on her face. I had to offer up some sincere fatherly sympathy for her plight. I've also started texting some of my grandkids more regularly lately. I love to send all of them pictures I find of them "back when they were cute." Of course, they are still cute now, but teasing them is my love language.
Good Email
I have a few folks I exchange messages with regularly these days—all people I've met through blogging and Mastodon. My app review blog gets many visitors and sparks some conversations, but on good days, the tech people who have questions and comments about what I write there, open up a bit and we move on to other subjects, not that I mind chatting about tech. I like having folks who have similar backgrounds and opinions to get to know. Typically we just talk about life experiences, with only a little moaning about the fascist takeover. No one is losing sight of the country's precarious position, but we aren't resigned to living in a gloomfest either.
So, there you have it. I looked for a few good things, and I found them. I encourage you to do the same. We will survive this together.
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This Week's Bookmarks - 50 Movies, How Many Cigs, Outrage Fatigue, Cringe Matrix, Photo Creepiness, WikiTok, Font Generator
50 of the Most Rewatchable Movies Ever Made | Lifehacker - Because sometimes, you just want a known quantity, and some movies seem designed to be watched again and again. Others simply go down so agreeably that you can't help but find them comforting.
Catalog – HOW MANY CIGARETTES? - There were 124 cigarettes smoked on Casablanca, 54 in Fight Club. Look up your favorite movie and find how soon the starts will dies of lung cancer.
Outrage Fatigue Is Real. Here’s Why We Feel It and How to Cope | Scientific American - Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion. An expert who studies online outrage says there are ways to cope
The Cringe Matrix - by Haley Nahman - Despite being treated in the popular imagination as something specific—earnestness, maybe—I think cringe is more layered and complex than that.
They See Your Photos - Your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo. See what they see.
WikiTok - Instead of doom scrolling midlessly through some corporate owned social media mind number, spend your time on this endless feed of Wikipedia articles and learn a bit when you get bored.
Font Generator - 𝓒𝓸𝓹𝔂 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝓟𝓪𝓼𝓽𝓮 Fancy Cool Text - Make your text fun and stylish with our fancy text generator 🌟 featuring a wide variety of font styles ready for easy copy and paste.
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I Picked My Top 20 Apps
I'm not really bothered by having more than 500 apps installed on my Mac. According to Lingon X, I have 102 apps either as login items or running in the background as helper apps. I write app reviews on my other blog, AppAddict every day, always something I have downloaded, installed and used on my personal Mac. I love my Setapp subscription because it gives me an ever-growing library of high-quality apps to try out for the same monthly price. But if all this goodness evaporated suddenly and i was forced to run vanilla macOS plus twenty apps to get my work done, which out of all the ones that own would I choose? Answering this requires some tough choices. Many of these apps I have been using for more than a decade, although a few have been adopted in the past year.
Since I am retired, I no longer need any networking, development or analysis apps. I use my Mac primarily for research and for writing. The graphics work I do is simple and straightforward. Even though I have Pixelmator and Acorn, I end up using simpler tools most of the time.
The Story of How I Didn't Murder a Drunk Professional Turkey Killer
For a while before I went on active duty, I was in the National Guard, assigned to Headquarters Company of an armored battalion of M1 tanks. My military job at the time was being part of a crew operating an armored personnel carrier with a 4.2 inch mortar mounted in it. That's the biggest mortar the Army has. It fires a round larger than 105 Howitzer. There is no trigger mechanism on a mortar. Instead, a firing pin is mounted at the bottom of a long tube. The ammunition bearer fixes an explosive charge to the bottom of the mortar shell. He hands it to the assistant gunner who fits the rear end of the shell into the mortar tube. When the gunner, who is responsible for using a telescopic sight to aim the weapon, gives him the go ahead, the assistant gunner releases the round. It slides down the tube until it hits the firing pin. This detonates the charge and the shell is launched with a range of about 4000 meters.
There are four types of shells that can be fired from a 4.2 inch mortar: high explosive, white phosphorus, smoke and chemical weapons. I fired all of those except the chemical rounds which, although manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, were never used. If the gun crew didn't keep the tube clean, the debris could interfere with the round sliding down the tube, resulting in what is known as a hang fire. While I was in this unit, another crew of mortar gunners firing from the same range where we trained had a hang fire while firing white phosphorus rounds. The resulting explosion killed everyone in the gun crew and badly burned members firing from nearby positions. It's dangerous work. You're dealing with stuff designed to be as lethal as possible, and there isn't a lot of room for error.
My section leader, a sergeant, was named Larry “Big Dog” Evans. His full-time civilian job was killing turkeys in a poultry processing plant in town. To my knowledge, I never saw him completely sober, ever, not once. He was funny and profane and didn't have a mean bone in his body. I wanted to kill him. He made live fire exercises a nightmare. All of his mortar training had been on the job. Whereas I had actually been through indirect fire school at Ft. Benning. Big Dog had been a specialist 5 clerk-typist who was converted into a sergeant and squad leader when the unit's mission and the Army rank structure was changed. He had never been to an NCO class. Such was life in the National Guard in the decade after the end of the Vietnam War.
This particular drill weekend, we were live firing high explosive and white phosphorus rounds at Ft. Bragg. Our platoon leader was a nervous second-lieutenant who ran a convenience store for his father-in-law. He was scared of enlisted men and was seldom seen. Big Dog was drunker than Cooter Brown and couldn't get the sights lined up with aiming stakes, no matter how hard he tried. It's important when firing big weapons that you know where you are aiming because of the whole thing about them killing everyone in the location where they land. I was having to do my job and his, a situation I loudly protested, even though I was just a PFC.
My situation wasn't made any better by the situation at home. I was 19, married, with a son already and a daughter on the way. My civilian job had just ended unexpectedly. It was one I'd uprooted my entire family to move several counties away from where we knew people. I had no idea what I was going to do about that, and now I had the stress of trying not to die at the hands of a drunk professional turkey killer. Finally, someone called the company First Sergeant on the radio and told him that he might want to come prevent Big Dog's death at my hands.
When he arrived at the training area in his jeep, he called a cease fire and training stopped. He summoned me to the vehicle and asked me to tell him what was going on. I could hardly talk, but I sputtered out the story of the dangerous incompetence I felt was endangering everyone. The First Sergeant promised to take Big Dog off the range and talk to him about drinking during training. Since this was a wholly normal situation because being inebriated was his normal state, the First Sergeant wanted to know why this particular instance had gotten me so wound up. I told him about losing my job and not knowing what to do. He immediately told me that he was a building superintendent for a commercial construction firm. He said that if I would come to his job site on Monday, he would hire me. All I had to do was promise to calm down and quit threatening to kill his NCOs. I told him I thought I could handle that.
The following Monday, I showed up where the company was building medical offices and went to work. I kept that job until I finally enlisted in the regular Army. I'll always be grateful for that man's leadership and guidance. He was old school and I learned a lot from him.
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The Death Penalty
I've been to a place few people ever go. That place is death row. In my home state, death row is located in Central Prison in Raleigh. It has been more than 30 years since I was there. IN those days, guards like me who were at Central because we'd transported prisoners to the hospital there for treatment were sometimes pressed into service if they unit was short-staffed. The death row inmates were not under strict segregation from the rest of the population and when they had medical appointments or visits with their lawyers, they were escorted there, walking the halls right along with other inmates. You knew they were on death row because they wore bright red jumpsuits instead of the brown clothes other felons wore. While I was there, I saw two prisoners I recognized. They were a pair of brothers who killed two law enforcement officers during a traffic stop. The younger one later had his sentence commuted because he was a minor at the time of the crime.
Despite having a more intimate knowledge of the true nature of convicted murderers, I have never supported the death penalty. There are people who should never be let out of the prison, but the state should not be involved in killing people. I believe that for many reasons.
Executed But Possibly Innocent | Death Penalty Information Center - It is now broadly accepted that the judicial review provided to death-penalty cases in the United States has been inadequate to prevent the execution of at least some prisoners who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Some cases with strong evidence of innocence are listed here.
Innocent Lives in the Balance - Equal Justice USAince 1973, at least 200 people have been freed after evidence revealed that they were sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit.1 That's more than one innocent person exonerated for every eight executions
On Jun 16, 1944: Fourteen-Year-Old George Stinney Executed in South Carolina - On June 16, 1944, George Stinney Jr., a 90-pound Black 14-year-old boy, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina.
Wrongful Execution – TCADP - A documentary film, The Phantom, tells the story of how Texas executed Carlos DeLuna, a likely innocent person, in 1989. It is available to watch on Netflix. In addition to the case of Carlos DeLuna, there is strong evidence the State of Texas has executed several innocent people, including Ruben Cantu, Cameron Todd Willingham, Gary Graham (Shaka Sankofa), Larry Swearingen, and, most recently, Ivan Cantu, who was put to death on February 28, 2024.
Capital Punishment or Life Imprisonment? Some Cost Considerations | Office of Justice Programs - Florida has estimated that the true cost of each execution is approximately $3.2 million, or approximately 6 times what it would cost to keep the person in prison for life
Prison officers traumatized by rate of executions in US death penalty states | Capital punishment | The Guardian - The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help
DOES THE DEATH PENALTY DETER CRIME? - In 2004 in the USA, the average murder rate for states that used the death penalty was 5.71 per 100,000 of the population as against 4.02 per 100,000 in states that did not use it
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Celebrating the Decade
Age 50 / Age 60
This is my last week in my 50s. Looking back over the past 10 years, I am grateful for a great many things, lots of travel, three additional grandchildren, the conclusion of a career and the continued health of everyone in my family.
Where I Went
I spent my 50th birthday in Charleston, SC, a great city even if it was one of the coldest weekends they'd ever had. Wonder Woman hired a photography teacher as a guide. The three of us spent a day walking all over the old part of town with our cameras. I learned a lot and managed to take some photos I still enjoy looking at.
We took several other trips, flying to New York City, Colorado Springs, Anchorage, Santa Fe, Austin and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Wonder Woman started running competitively again when she turned 50 in 2017. We spent many weekends at races and places where she likes to train. She ran a lot in the Francis Marion National Forest in the South Carolina low country and in the Uwharrie National Forest in central North Carolina. We spent a lot of time in southwest Virginia, an area we fell in love with when he hiked through there on the Appalachian Trail.
Three New Babies
On my 50th birthday, I already had 10 grandchildren. I wasn't sure if any of our kids planned to have anymore. Our youngest daughter, Jennifer, surprised us first, and she had Tristen, a wee little man who vacillates between being earnest and very silly whenever it suits him. Anna really surprised us, since her only child was already nine before she decided to have another baby. She had James, a blue-eyed, blonde headed handful of a little boy who brings me nothing but joy. Finally, Elizabeth, who has three boys and also waited a long time before having another baby, announced to us that she was expecting. To everyone's delight, she had a little girl, our Evie, who already dances, plays the piano, does gymnastics and martial arts. She is amazing.
Work
I wrapped up a 27-year career as a civil servant in 2020. I'd spent seven years as a correctional officer in a state prison and twenty years working in IT for the county school system. I opted for the security and benefits (a pension and health insurance for life) over chasing higher paying jobs in the private sector. I spent a couple of restless years being retired and then went back to work in 2022 at the small private university where Wonder Woman Works. I'm only a few days away from retiring from there too, this time with a better plan to make use of the time.
Family
This was the decade when I suddenly realized that everyone was aging right along with me. All the big movie stars I'd enjoyed for most of my life are now relegated to playing old people in their films because, well, they all got old. Our kids are either in their 40s or getting ready to hit that milestone. Our two oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school. My ageless mother managed to not only walk across Scotland in her early 70s, she went to Spain and hiked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago a couple of years later. My Dad had a more difficult decade. He's now the caretaker for my step-mother, who has memory related issues and needs a lot of attention. My siblings continue to make me proud. One of my brothers, Todd, lives and works in Marin County, California giving nature tours at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. My other brother, Matt, a physician assistant for the State Department, did a tour in Athens with his family and is starting a tour in London this year. My only sister, Mitzi, a Methodist pastor, continues her ministry as the type of Christian who believes in loving all people, feeding the poor and helping the immigrant — you know, the stuff Jesus preached about.
I don't know what the next decade holds in store for Wonder Woman and I. In a few years we will be able to be retired together, and I can only imagine the places she will want to wander to. She's already talking about visiting the Alps and making the long flight to New Zealand. Her running career continues. She intends to run twelve 5Ks in one day just next month. We will probably become great-grandparents at some point in the next ten years. I'm going to keep writing and helping where I can in the struggle against fascism. Life is good, if challenging.
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Researching Retirement
I have five working days left before I finish working out my notice at work. Hopefully, they will be uneventful. My boss, in a move I did not see coming, has given me the silent treatment since receiving my letter. I'm sorry he is being a weirdo, but it doesn't bother me too much. I've gotten some warm farewells from the people I've helped over the past couple of years, which is something I'll hold on to.
I've been putting a lot of thought into creating a workspace for myself where I can look out over my backyard, which abuts a wooded patch of wetlands. I can do some birdwatching from where I plan to set up and even go out on my deck with a cup of coffee when the weather permits. I have music, a good chair, a coffee pot and natural light.
As I have shared, I'll be doing a lot of writing. I have a PC that I'm going to set up as a home server so that I can experiment with some self-hosted services. I've been thinking of what kind of daily schedule I want to adhere to and even giving thought to a few meals I would like to cook for Wonder Woman.
How to Enjoy Retired Life: Creating a Retirement Routine
10 Tips to Create a Perfect Workspace at Home
Backyard Birding – World Sensorium / Conservancy
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Working in a Village
Most of my working life has been spent working in education, mostly for a K-12 school system in a large, mostly rural county but also for a small, private university. The goal of both organizations was conveying knowledge to build an educated citizenry. There's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved and by their very nature, bureaucracies sometimes lose sight of their intended purpose in their struggle to be self-perpetuating. Mostly, though, the people I've worked with have put the focus on doing what it takes to help students learn.
School systems more moving parts than you might imagine. The biggest group of employees is the faculty, the people who have to get up in front of the students and teach them. I've known so many good teachers. The one characteristic they all shared was a palpable sense of excitement when they were preparing to teach a lesson they thought their students would get into. A lot of thought goes into lesson planning. People usually teach subjects they enjoy. When they think they have a good strategy to really get their point across, they act like athletes before a big game. I always tried to be patient and listen to them share when I could tell they were fired up.
There are support staff in multiple categories required to operate a school system. When I went to work at my first school, my county was in the process of connecting to the Internet, so I got to usher man, many people into the information age in my IT role. I always made a point to get in tight with several workers at each school: the school secretary because they know everything, the lunch ladies because if you take care of them, they will take care of you and finally, the custodians, because I always needed their help a lot more than they needed mine. There are also other areas to support at the county level, like the huge maintenance department, a bus garage, HR and finance and all the administrators. There were many specialized systems I had to master for those different departments.
The school based professional staff also had various requirements. I worked with physical and occupational therapists to set up computers for students with special needs, including blind students, students in wheelchairs and other impairments. I helped the medical and mental health folks with securing sensitive information and configuring software for testing and medical devices. During the tension - filled weeks of high-stakes online testing, I had to be on standby in case any network issues affected connectivity.
Certain departments had the needs for software that pertained just to their roles. There are music programs for the band director and scoring programs for the coaches. We even had an AS-400, an IBM computer that contained all the district's financial data.
While my job in public school didn't often involve interacting with the students, my higher ed job did. As much as the "get off my lawn" types like to grouse about how horrible young people are these days, that has not been my experience. I've found that most students are polite, good listeners, and they just want to be able to use the tech they need to complete their assignments. Sure, some of the more inquisitive ones have tried mightily, and occasionally succeeded in getting around security safeguards, but then so have I, right?
I like knowing that a good chuck of my life has been in the service of helping people learn. I've done IT work in the medical field, banking and manufacturing too, and none of it was as rewarding as helping teachers and students. After spending the first decade of my adult life in the infantry and as a prison guard, being the helpful computer guy brought me a lot more joy. It really does take a village to produce well-rounded and educated citizens. I was glad to be a part of a good one.
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The Greensboro Massacre of 1979
I'm sharing tonight a repost of a piece I originally wrote last summer about the very real attack by the KKK and Nazis on leftist labor organizers in Greensboro, NC, resulting in five deaths and 10 wounded. Maybe you think that all the recent talk of Fascism and Nazis and white supremacy is a bit overblown. It is not. There are people organizing for change right now who have weathered gunfire and violence from what used to be the extreme right wing. Today, those people are closer to the mainstream.
In November 1979 I was a junior high student in Jacksonville, NC when I heard on the news about what the media initially called a shootout between the Ku Klux Klan, a group of Neo-Nazis and Communist labor organizers in Greensboro, three hours away. I remember being confused that the Klan and Nazis, who in my mind were relics of a dark but distant past, were still active and engaged in violence. And, I'd never even heard of Communists on American soil. It was a tumultuous time in America that month. It was when Iran took more than 50 Americans hostage. Inflation was over 10% and rising. President Carter was not the revered statesman he is today, but a beleaguered man presiding over a country that felt lost.
As it turns out, on that day in Greensboro, there was no shootout. Instead, there was a massacre planned with an active police informant that involved carloads of Klansmen and Nazis, who the police knew were on the way to what turned into a killing ground in a public housing project. With television cameras rolling but no law enforcement present, the forefathers of today's alt-right movement gunned down the labor organizers from the Worker's Viewpoint Organization, who were graduates from Duke and Harvard and in a couple of cases, medical doctors. Having previously faced down the Klan at a China Grove, NC rally. The left-wing activists underestimated the willingness of the fascists to engage in violence and paid for it with their lives. Aside from the five who were killed, 10 more were wounded.
The state and federal government both tried to convict the planners and shooters involved in the massacre. There were numerous eyewitnesses. The Klan was infiltrated with informants. There was ample videotape. In both trials, however, all white juries refused to convict those responsible for the violence and death on the streets of Greensboro. We aren't talking about 1960s Mississippi Burning times. One of these trials happened when Michael Jordan was in college in NC.
Two decades later, when I became involved in activism in North Carolina, some of the same people who had naively been involved in the Greensboro anti-Klan organizing were still committed to trying to do things like establish a death penalty moratorium, ensure affordable housing, ending the nuclear arms race, ensuring same-sex marriage and stopping the US led war in Iraq. My mentor was a Ph.D. economist from Temple University who had worked for 10 years as a lathe operator in a mill while trying to organize workers. His wife was a leading neurosurgeon who had taken a break from medical school to work on a textile mill to organize the people on the looms. Their lives had been upended by the events of 1979 and Kim, the wife, never quite recovered the fire in her belly to organize, Chip, her husband, remained actively working with low wage workers and community activists until his death in 2014.
I was horrified when the Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville in 2017. I know what these people are capable of doing. They've shown us. Hopefully, those who oppose them won't fall into the same trap as the anti-fascists did in 1979. This stuff isn't from the distant past. It's from the here and now.
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5 Great RSS Feeds for Good Reading Every Day
This is a special edition containing links to five of the best sources on the Internet to keep abreast of the latest trending topics and discover new writers. And then there is a bonus feed.
1 follow my favorite IndieWeb bloggers via RSS to stay abreast of what they are up to, for inspiration and education. I also have an RSS feed that's mostly for curated reposts of the best of the web each day. If you'd like to build a list like that, here are some great feeds to get started with. Keep these in a separate app or however you want to segregate them, but don't mix them up with all your other subscriptions or they will just get lost.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
I have been to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum just once. It was in the 1990s. I took my children to Washington for the express purpose of having them visit. We had to go to the museum in the morning to get tickets to be able to tour it in the afternoon. We spent a little over two hours inside. I've always been interested in history and although I wouldn't say that I studied the holocaust, I'd read many books about World War Two. I knew how Hitler has enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws (modeled on Jim Crow laws from the US). I knew about Kristallnacht , the Night of Broken Glass when the Nazis started a pogrom against Jewish businesses and synagogues in November of 1938. I knew about the death camps like Auschwitz.
The displays at the museum were haunting and memorable. The one that left the deepest impression was a pile of hundreds of leather shoes confiscated from Jews entering one of the camps. Many of the shoes were children's sizes. Most children were killed on the same day they arrived at the camps unless they happened to be twins, in which case their lives would be temporarily spared so Nazi doctors could experiment on them. You could smell the shoes in the exhibit, even from behind glass and even after 50 years of storage. They were a stark reminder of extinguished humanity.
With the rise of authoritarian government all over the world, including the far-right AfD in Germany itself, I think it would be good for any American to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum. See a civilized modern society went mad listening to a popular but insane little man who tooks a country of farmers and industrial workers and turned it into an extermination machine. Think about that the next time you a politician telling you that immigrants are animals and talking about them spoiling the blood of the nation.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
A visit to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. - YouTube
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Tales from the Dark Ages
The recent stories of the resurgence of tuberculosis, first in Kansas and now in my home state of North Carolina, stirred up some long forgotten memories for me.
It seems strange to recount now, but when I went to work as a prison guard in the 1980s, the unit where I worked housed a category of offender known as a health law violator. These inmates were invariably chronic street alcoholics who had contracted tuberculosis and been non-compliant when it came to taking their medication. The state of North Carolina in all of its infinite wisdom decided at some point in the distant past that the best solution to this problem was to make it a crime. They would arrest these men and send them to the prison where I worked where they would receive treatment for TB. When they were no longer contagious, they would be released.
It was a grim situation, made even grimmer by the conditions of their confinement. The men were housed in a single cell segregation unit, the same type of housing used for prisoners convicted of disciplinary offenses. The health law violators only got to come out of their cells for an hour a day, always wearing a mask. They could mix with each other, but not with anyone else from the population. They were not allowed visitors. Eventually, the law was changed and by the time I left that kind of work in 1993, the Department of Correction had gotten out of the tuberculosis treatment business.
I don't know if anyone has figured out the logic behind the recently announced cuts to medical research by the fascist government of the United States. Not only are we getting a certified lunatic who admitted that a worm had eaten part of his brain as a cabinet secretary in charge of Health and Human services in Robert Kennedy, Jr., we are apparently just giving up on cancer. Not to worry because the US has also stopped AIDS eradication in Africa and assistance with other worldwide diseases because…I don't know. Fuck all those brown people. Right?
The tuberculosis comeback should scare people. You see, the prison where I worked in the 80s was originally built to house nothing but prisoners with tuberculosis, not health law violators like I dealt with, but run-of-the-mill bank robbers and cat burglars who just happened to also have TB. There were that many of them. It was only a mile away from a gigantic sanitorium the state operated to treat regular citizens who had the disease.
I remember a time, also back in the 80s when the US government also didn't give a damn about sick Americans, specifically sick gay Americans during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. St. Ronald Ray-gun couldn't even be bothered to say the name of the illness out loud. That's what we are headed back to now, except the American fascists are uncaring about all the non-billionaires. They plan to let idiots of all stripes forego vaccinations. In the face of a pandemic, no one will have to take any precautions against spreading disease. I know this sounds like the rantings of a crazy person, and two months ago, you would have been right if you thought that. Now, I am right. We are screwed, and eggs are still expensive.
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Punching Nazis
Have you ever been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC? Better yet, have you traveled to Europe and visited the sites of former Nazi concentration camps like Dachau or Auschwitz? Did your grandfather or great-grandfather serve in Work War 2? Even if you can't answer any of those questions in the affirmative, do you simply have a gut level understanding that Nazis and their ideology are among the most despicable things to ever exist?
My Grandmother lost her younger brother to Nazi gunfire in Italy. I have proudly organized with survivors of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre in North Carolina where Nazis and Klansmen gunned down community activists marching through a public housing project.
I am glad to support and encourage anyone who is antifascist. If you list Nazi-punching as one of your hobbies on social media, I am sending you a friend request. If actually get to punch a Nazi and I can get your address, I am sending you a fan letter. Celebrate these heroes whenever you get the chance!
Armed Nazis Flee as Local Heroes Burn Their Flags
Antifa Tracked Down and Knocked Out a Neo-Nazi Using Social Media | New York Post - YouTube
Punching Nazis Totally Works | Defiant | Medium
The 'punch a Nazi' meme: what are the ethics of punching Nazis? | Science | The Guardian
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