I retired from NASA at the end of 2021 with 34 years of service. I started co-oping in summer 1985, while working on a Masters in Electrical Engineering, so it was my only professional job.

I felt good about my career. It was challenging, interesting, and growthful for me. I could probably have made more money in the private sector, but pay and benefits were good and I was serving my country.

But, now it turns out I was actually a thief and layabout. The United States government is not, according to the leader of the US government, an indispensable component of a healthy, thriving country. It’s just a bunch of thieves and incompetents standing in the way of good Americans making money. Most federal employees really ought to be pushed out and find “productive” work.

From the OPM Frequently Asked Questions page about the “Fork in the Road Letter,”

Am I allowed to get a second job during the deferred resignation period?

Absolutely! We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.

I wasn’t a “civil servant.” I was actually a deep state lacky. Allies are our enemies. Dictators are our friends. Vaccines make people sick. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Currently, the war on federal workers is aimed at eliminating vast swaths of the people who provide government services (also known as “corruption”), especially anything a Democrat might approve of.  At least thousands of probationary employees are currently being sacked, through no fault of their work and almost certainly illegally. This includes a friend of mine’s daughter who recently changed Agencies and moved from New Orleans to Denver for the new job. 

I do expect they will eventually turn to clawing back the benefits those employees and past employees are/will be sucking from the good people of America, like retirement savings and health care. That’s when it will directly affect me. Treating government like a business obviously includes sacking pensions, running up debt, and then abandoning the husk, as virtuous corporate raiders do.

I get that the fear and uncertainty is most of the point. Even the whole “Gulf of America” nonsense is to sow chaos, to make everyone uncertain of reality. It’s a cultural revolution, and truth is whatever our great leader says it is today.

In our new Orwellian reality, the US Government is the enemy. Has it ever done anything good? Can you think of anything the American Government has ever done to benefit you, or anyone you know? Let’s see if we can remember anything, before the history rewrite is complete.

If you don’t have a dose of Narcan in your home, purse, or possibly car, order some now.

If you are in Alabama, it’s available for free from a Jefferson County Department of Health site by mail after watching a short video.

Narcan is a drug, provided in a single-shot nasal inhaler, that can block the body’s uptake of opioids. If someone collapses from an overdose, a dose of Narcan will typically bring them back to consciousness and breathing within a couple of minutes. If that wasn’t why they collapsed – it won’t do anything at all. There is no downside to having taken it.

There is currently a lot of fentanyl in the US, which is currently the primary cause of opioid overdose. Overdoses killed over 1000 people in Alabama in 2020 (over 3000 in Tennessee), with the provisional numbers for 2022 higher than that (1394 and 3786, respectively). Besides people purposely using illicit drugs, there are possibilities of accidental or intentional contamination of other drugs, food, or drink. 

I just ordered a dose to have around, just in case I see someone collapse. I’ll keep it in the car until it gets hot out again. Here’s the article that inspired me to put in the order and write this post.

I bought the 3M Ultra Headlight Restoration Kit from Amazon and used it on my 2012 Prius. It took a bit longer than the 40 minutes on the box (though I did wash the whole car at the same time), but made a huge difference in the clarity of the light covers and the brightness of the headlights. 

However, I did find that because the light covers are such an odd curved shape, I wasn’t good at coloring inside the lines and damaged the paint in multiple spots. The kit provides a roll of narrow green painter’s tape/masking tape which I used. I would recommend adding to that a wide roll of the blue stuff to give yourself a wide margin for slips of the drill with the sanding pads.

This is at least my third run on writing about my thoughts on Donald Trump. I’ve gotten tripped up on there just being too much to say, with something new every day. It’s easier, with him out of office (no longer my boss!) and no longer a flowing cesspool on Twitter. I certainly hope his time in the driver’s seat of anything more dangerous than a golf cart is over, and a retrospective is appropriate.

I believe that Donald Trump is a disgusting human being who came to power by exhibiting some of the worse tendencies of humanity. Before he was elected President, he was an ostentatious, egotistical, boorish braggart who lied, bullied, and generally made the world a worse place. As President, he took all those things to the next level, and did immense damage to the country I most love. He somehow became the darling and idol of the evangelical right wing of the nation while pouring gas on xenophobic, misogynistic, racist tendencies that used to be at least hidden from plain view.

He lost the 2020 election solidly. He claimed, without offering any convincing evidence, that there was voter fraud causing him to lose. This undermined the national trust in the election process, directly attacking the foundation of a democracy (or a democratic republic).  The best evidence he seemed to have was simply that it was impossible that he could lose. His supporters made up more specific claims, but again without any compelling evidence that could hold up even in courts primarily appointed by him.

Sadly, the majority of voters and states turning against Trump in the election did not apply to the Congress and Senate races, significant evidence against corruption in the election itself. If Democrats hacked the machines, or faked ballots, to cause Trump to lose, why wouldn’t they also take down the down-ballot Republicans? Was the corruption by anti-Trump Republicans? If so, was the same corruption there four years ago pro-Trump, and should Hillary Clinton have had Trump’s term?

From the lead up to his 2016 election through the present, Trump has been very effective in the art of bullshit. His communication is full of lies, but they are lies without any respect for the truth. The Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims he made in his presidency. Often, his lies were obviously false, or easily disproven. But the point of bullshit isn’t to be believed, but to be heard, and to drown out other voices. By maintaining a constant barrage of bullshit, he was able to keep Twitter, the news, and the internet full of himself. He made truth seem irrelevant to any discussion, instead “winning” by the emotional impact of his repetition, his attacks, innuendo, contempt, and pride. He is an artist of sorts in his manipulation of media and debasing of communication. It’s not an art I enjoy or respect.

I don’t, of course, attribute the total death toll of COVID-19 on Trump. His complete lack of useful leadership and consistent downplaying and disruption of a helpful federal response to the pandemic caused the needless death of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Americans, but whoever was in office, there would have been a spread and many deaths. The United States could have done much, much better in its response with effective government and leaders who set the nation a good example in working together and caring for each other, rather than polarizing, and championing the idea that not wearing a mask is sign of freedom, rather than self-centeredness. Operation Warp Speed was one of the better things to come out of his administration, and helped enable even the vaccines made outside the program. But managing the wait and the lockdown was a debacle. That was the primary reason he did lose the election, and his reaction to losing the election lost the Georgia Senate races, and thus the Senate.

The Trump administration was actually rather good for NASA, and for space exploration overall. The aggressive push to return to the Moon, the appointment of Jim Bridenstine as NASA Administrator, and Trump mostly staying out of the way except for astronaut photo ops, was good for the Agency. I don’t think Space Force needed to be a branch of the service, but the functions it serves (and has been serving as part of the Air Force and Army) are important. Pence actually seemed to care and pay attention in his position at the head of the National Space Council. Unlike many of the other federal agencies, there wasn’t a parade of different leaders, or no leaders, many with no qualification, and more than a few actively hostile to the purposes of the agency (e.g. Betsy DeVos, champion of taking public education fund for private schools, for Education, David Berhardt the oil lobbyist for Interior).

What most aggrieved me about the Trump administration is the intense loyalty, and in some cases idolatry, that he garnered with the Christian right. His trademark has been to trample simple decency, the idea that to be strong is to be brutal rather than kind, empathic, or, well, nice. The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. It seems to me a pretty good description of the Trump brand, though I will concede that he keeps busy, even if it’s just golfing. His sloth shows mostly in being unwilling to read or listen to anything of substance, and that’s more pride than sloth. He seems so far from the ideal of Christian leadership I learned growing up, so far from any idea of a Godly man. And yet, I see the burning anger and devotion in those who have become his disciples, somehow in the name of Christ, ready to destroy the country to save it. Though Christianity is not the path I’m on anymore, I always had respect for the integrity of those who consistently held to the teaching of the Bible. That many have embraced the kind of bullshit that builds dictators and fuels genocides makes me sad.