The Only Home We've Ever Known

(the Ultra HD 3840x2160 version is attached)

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives."

In trying to keep things in perspective lately, I can't help but think about Carl Sagan's speech about the "Pale Blue Dot" - the image Voyager I took of the Earth from about 6 billion km away, where it appeared smaller than a single pixel.

This high resolution 3D model might be a little more gaudy than a single pixel (especially with the Ultra HD resolution containing 7.5 million pixels), and my favorite picture of Earth is not the Voyager one but "The Day The Earth Smiled" from the Cassini probe we sent to Saturn. But in any case I think it's fair to say the Earth is a beautiful place when you're too far away to see the daily struggle.

Or as Joseph Campbell said, the suffering is "foreground to a WONDER."

(This image, by the way, is the background to another wallpaper I'm working on for this month that I hope will be pretty wonderful - it's got naked girls in space)

If you don't want to hear a poorly structured rant about politics, that was the end of this post.

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, I live in the United States (for now), and the United States just "elected" a pretty transparently troubling presidential and vice-presidential candidate, and they have gone on with making plans and floating possible appointees for positions in their new administration. I've honestly been trying to avoid the news for a while, but my wife is out in the city and at her college campus protesting multiple days of the week.

Here are some of the troubling things we're looking forward to currently:

-The new administration has promised important roles to various cronies, flunkies, and toadies, not surprisingly, a few of whom are pretty bad. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions failed to qualify for a federal judgeship during the Reagan administration because of his history of racial bias (which includes calling white defense attorneys of black defendents "race traitors") but the new administration thinks he'll be a good Attorney General of the United States, in a justice department that only in the past few years finally admitted what statistics and a lot of people's personal experiences have told us for years - that there is already a problem with racial bias in the justice department.

Ex-general Mike Flynn believes ALL Muslims are dangerous terrorists and that Islam is a "cancer", and that prejudice carries over to Muslim-Americans. Since this administration has discussed monitoring Muslim neighborhoods and houses of worship (forgetting all about our Constitutional freedom of religion in this country) putting all Muslim-Americans on a "registry", and said they wouldn't rule out "interrment camps" using our interrment of the Japanese during WWII as a model (something I THOUGHT most Americans agreed was not only stupid, and useless, but a stain on our history), it makes sense that they want this idealogical fanatic and conspiracy theory believer to be our new National Security Advisor.

Newt Gingrich has left the short-list of cabinet nominees to focus on the Republican party, who he has suggested should bring back the House Un-American Activities Committee famous for the Communism "witch hunt" that got a lot of American intellectuals, philosophers, artists, entertainers, writers, and gay folks, arrested as "suspected communists" in the mid-20th century - because they were "Un-American". That's another thing I thought most Americans agreed was an ugly stain on our history. He also agrees with the new president-elect that the United States should abandon our treaties to defend our allies in eastern Europe if Russia wants to take them over (it does - it's part of their "Eurasian Union" plan).

The administration really seems to be going for a "basket of deplorables" sort of arrangement. They've been having meetings with prominent white supremacists and alt-right neo-Nazi supporters... out neo-Nazis in the U.S. have been CHEERING this whole time, because they believe it's Springtime for Hitler these days. About the election they've said that they've gotten "more than they ever could have hoped for". Everyone else is so sick of hearing about the election that they're pretending this is all fine.

-For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, I'm gay. LGBT folks have enjoyed some progress in the last few years. The incoming administration, in particular Vice President-Elect and fundamentalist religious fanatical fuckhead Mike Pence, wants to undo all of that. They've already said they would eliminate all LGBT civil rights protections passed by President Obama. Since, instead of any notion of fair play, congressional Republicans swore to stonewall and oppose President Obama on everything no matter what it was for his entire presidency, some of what happened was based on executive orders he issued personally. Remember that his opponents are conspiracy theorists who believe (completely falsely) that he over-utilized executive orders or abused his power - or is a secret Muslim who wasn't born in this country. They've already talked about rescinding all of his executive orders.

They've also already drafted a bill... not to abolish gay marriage per se (since that would involve the courts), but to allow individuals and organizations the "religious freedom" to ignore the marriage status of gay people whenever they fucking feel like it. Basically, anyone who feels like discriminating against gay people will have free rein to do so - it's Pence's Indiana anti-gay pro-discrimination law that made his state a fucking disgrace, only it's at the federal level, and it's been amped up a bit.

This affects me because I am married, and for example I'm on my wife's health insurance. If that bill passes (through a House and Senate both of which are controlled by the new administration's party, so... of course it will), my wife's insurance company could decide that it's cheaper for them to have "religious beliefs" that do not include accepting gay people as being married, and drop me from coverage - with no legal repercussions. I mean, this affects not just spousal benefits, it also affects next-of-kin and visitation rights (which have often been denied to gay couples before that became illegal in some places) if anything should happen to either of us...

Basically, our marriage, a hard-fought legal right, would be up to other people to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it is valid, for any value other than the paper it's printed on, based on their own phony interpretation of their religion (which as written is not nearly as discriminatory as they make it out to be... but does have a lot more slavery).

-Another frightening piece of legislation coming up - we should HOPE it doesn't get through anywhere, ever - is not from the administration but from some fascist GOP rando' out west. The new proposed law (a Pandora's Box of stealing away people's Constitutional rights) suggests that if a protest - a legal act protected by the First Amendment - is associated with any damage or disruption of business, ALL protestors and protest organizers can then be arrested.

I've known protestors for years, and I've heard plenty of stories of how the FBI sends in plants (also revealed as a tactic in now-declassified FBI documents from the 1960s), black block anarchists send in troublemakers, and idealogical opponents send in spoilers to mess things up for peaceful, legal protestors. It happens all the time. My wife has met phony protestors, and FBI plants in her time, since going to the Occupy protests a few years ago (all kinds of shit has been happening downtown lately). If there was a law saying that if ANYTHING bad happened ALL protestors could be arrested, every protest from then on would be seeded with troublemakers specifically there to just shut down every protest and get everyone arrested. That kind of thing already happens, to make peaceful protestors look like dangerous rioters whose greivances therefore don't need to be listened to or taken seriously.

That is an end-run around the Constitution, as bad as the PATRIOT Act, and would take away one of the most fundamental rights that separates us from autocratic regimes - the right to protest, the right to "assemble and petition the government for a redress of greivances".

For now, it's one bill in one state. Let's hope it never gets farther than that.

-Oh, the biggest point I could make about DISASTER FOR YOU (yes you, if you're in the U.S.) is that the new administration has said they want to model the economy on the state of Kansas. KANSAS. Kansas, the state that was run by a 100% Republican administration who claimed they were going to create unprecedented surpluses but since Republican economic policy literally always fails, BANKRUPTED THE STATE. Kansas is bankrupt. It had no Democrats, the Republicans there said "We can run this state as an experimental proving ground for Republican economic policy" - and that's what they did. They projected hundreds of billions of dollars in surpluses, they got hundreds of billions in deficits, year after year, excuse after excuse, re-election after re-election, and the state went BANKRUPT. Because of course it fucking did. "Trickle down economics" the derogatory term for the Republican economic policy that hands money to the rich and saddles the poor with the tax burden where they wait for the gains to "trickle down" - HAS NEVER WORKED.

Also, their new tax plan actually increases the tax burden on the poorest Americans.

-I'm not that worried about my safety since I don't actually go out as much as I used to. But I worry about my wife. There have already been hate crimes locally, including on her college campus - she's already had to deal with men in red hats following women around harassing them (but that is mostly happening to visibly Latina or Arab women), and there has already been violence against peaceful protestors. Locally, but also nationally. Of course, the apologists for the new administration claim every single one of those incidents is fake, orchestrated by some conspiracy-running billionaire. What a load of horse shit.

Some of those same people say that we should "get over it", and claim they didn't protest when President Obama was elected. Horse shit, again. If the election went the other way, they wouldn't "get over it", we'd have another Civil War (the one good thing I can say about the results of the election). AND, when President Obama was elected half the country lost their god damned minds. It has been basically a continuous protest since he was elected, and a lot of them have never recognized his legitimacy (despite winning both the popular and electoral vote, something their party's last two winning candidates have failed to do), or even paid him the basic respect of referring to him as "President Obama". The congressional Republicans and everyone in the right-wing propaganda echo-chamber of "news" has always called him "Mister Obama". Fuck those assholes.

They don't get to say, "Hey, you have to respect our candidate" now. Well, they get to say it, because for now we still have Constitutional rights. But I still get to say it's a load of horse shit.

I respect people who want to stay and fight for this country, to not let it the Bible Belt tighten around us any further, to try and preserve SOME of the civil rights gains of the last few decades that are going to be seriously challenged in the coming months and years. I feel for people who have to stay because they won't have the means to leave, and I wish them peace and safety.

As for me, I'm getting the fuck out of here. I love my wife, I'm pretty fond of being married to her, so we're keen to go live in a country that will let us stay married. Basically, it'll depend where she's able to get a job as a scientist - at least my work travels with me pretty easily.

My only other prerequisite is that my work has to be legal. Porn producers are on shaky ground in the U.K. and I think Australia, porn is outright illegal in some countries or heavily restricted in others, but other than the United States, Canada is probably fine, New Zealand, Ireland, maybe Scotland if they decide to stay with the E.U. and separate from the U.K. (when they voted for independence, I know the U.K.'s EU membership was a big part of why they stayed - they also voted almost unanimously against the Brexit)... I think that's about it for English-speaking countries.

We could go to a non-English-speaking country, since so many people around the world speak English now... but that would be a harder decision. The people might be fine (MIGHT - there's a lot of hatred for immigrants going around right now), but the government might not be so welcoming, at least until we learn the local language.

I don't know exactly what's going to happen, or where we'll end up. I'm just trying to get my papers together. I haven't had a passport since I was 17, so I need to get that... I haven't even been to another country since... um... since a friend and I went up to Montreal for a concert, maybe in 2005-ish.

I'm pretty pro-New Zealand. They seem nice. And they seem far away from the northern hemisphere and its nuclear weapons the incoming president DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHY WE DON'T USE. I don't want to sound paranoid, but there is a pretty bad "worst case scenario" that we'd love to avoid.

Anyway, I THINK this is it for the "political" themed posts. I don't feel like talking about all this horse shit anymore. I want to get back to just posting art. Next post will be art. <3