FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

What Molly Ivins taught me is that speaking truth doesn't change shit. I'd read her work and think "My god if even half of this is true, why are these people still free?" Yet they kept being free. Her columns are hilarious lists of excesses both in the Texas state and US national legislatures, and in the end, the people she despised and exposed got to vandalize their territories on and on to greater profit, and she was marginalized.

The NYT has an article about the guy who went on a quest about his friend's lost Sidekick. 'Sidekick' is the name for a mobile device that has a small keyboard and a camera and a phone, and everything you shoot with it, or all the websites you visit, automatically get logged onto T-Mobile's web servers which you can check from your desk.

The friend left it in a cab, did not get it returned, logs into the T-Mobile web servers to check what the Sidekick was doing, and, lo and behold, she finds someone has used her device. The whole saga of what happened next is on the page, and it is a fairly riveting read on a number of levels besides just the story itself, like

• Learning the hard way how to handle a high-traffic website,
• Learning the hard way how forums end up working on a personal level
• Learing the hard way to handle reputation-management on the Internet (tip: don't get sucked in)
• How the cops try to game their own system to create the least amount of work for themselves, and can absolutely not stand challenges to their procedures.

It makes me wonder about how pinkfish and I handled our own version of this; when our apartment was broken into and the perp used the phone 30 minutes after the break in. Now the BPD was not as unhelpful as the NYPD -- and a case could be made that no crime happened in the Sidekick case because it was not stolen -- but in our case the BPD wasn't really helpful about a breaking-and-entering where we could give them full stats on the likely perp -- the person who used the phone 30 minutes after the break-in. You think my phone got fenced in 30 minutes or less, hmm?

I should have made a web-page, instead of scattering our finds amongst entries. Collected the info about his hunnies that called me, and become a media sensation. Harnessed the Internet. Instead, we let it go after getting nowhere ourselves; burglaries are really not a prosecuted crime.

"Restored", Nokia, Burlington, 2005

Previous SIM has been deactivated. New one arrived today, borrowed a leftover phone. My email responses will be a bit terse.

Have just been broken into while we slept. Dean heard the slam of the front door as they left. All biological entities ok, but all work & personal laptops stolen save the printserver in the closet (currently being used for this), my mobile phone is gone too.

Don't bother sending me email or calling my cell, it'll be a while.

(What was the legal implication of me raising my right hand and saying "I do" when asked to swear I would only tell the truth? What capacity was that government employee in? What was I? Is that all it takes to put someone 'under oath'?)

Thank you all for your best wishes.

So on an email list I am on, one of the maintainers has a gay state trooper friend (whose big cop dick he got to suck off, and he is all charmed by now) who started saying he would warn the list about upcoming raids on public places. The maintainer, who is the only one who writes, asked him some questions, after other members in the group asked for it, about his work arresting men having sex in public, what he did and felt about it.

In the interviewers, the cop said
a) when he does the bust he comes down *hard* on these guys, repeatedly boasting how he tried to give them the worst 15 minutes of their lives, threatening to call their wives on the spot, tearing the men down totally
b) that he does that because "it is part of the job"
c) that he really does it because these guys having sex in public ruin it for other gay and bisexual men
d) that he puts such dreadful fear in these guys that he sometimes ended up in his own car crying about what he was doing
e) that the straight cops condone and encourage straight public sex when they find it

I was appalled that this was being sent to my mailbox as some example of our brave gay cop 'brother' 'just doing his job'. Having worked on the gay and lesbian helpline I got to take some calls from men who were molested or robbed under circumstances like this, and I felt betrayed: I was told to counsel people to go to the police, that our police gay liason wanted to hear this, and help, respectfully. Now I was finding out that the cops would either most likely approach with an attitude that would create a second victimization, or at least created the impression they would. My callers were probably right not to want to go. If anything these kind of little acts from the police to men having public sex would drive them further underground where they would be even more out of reach from health outreach or the law when they were actually mugged or raped. Terrible disservice. But the cop feels it is ok because he hopes it will scare men away from doing it again and thus he does not have to bring them to the law.

I was furious, furious, furious: about his 'just my job' excuse (that went out with WWII for people in uniform, ok?), the fact that it actually was about certain gay men makingt him look bad, about how I don't think sex makes gay men look bad but gay men terrorizing other gay men are what really makes glbts look bad, about his idea of extra-legal terror-inducing activity being necessary instead of being professional and just performing the law -- guess what: terrorizing people is not a law that was voted on by lawmakers, and is not something he has to do, it is just his choice, much as it makes him cry. I was angry in my email, outlined my objections as stated, and asked to be removed if I was going to have to read more of this.

Well, the next email was the maintainer writing that he had sent the responses to our brave gay cop and that he wanted to react to the negative ones. Well, first of all, of course we didn't understand. And we should walk a mile in his shoes. And he can't ticket the guys, current NH policy is to arrest them and take them to the station and make them face open court. So hiw little schtick -- and he immediatly started downplaying his 8 or 9 minutes of minor hell now -- was far more prefrerable, and what else could he do? Cuz he'd rather not arrest the guys. And about how tough this all was, and about how guys wanting off the list (there were two such reactions it seemed) was "ludichris".

My heart was racing when I got this one. I caustically explained how a policy towards public sex that only put gay men at a disadvantage was actually homophobic, and would not give kudos for it -- especially since it was the gay cop enforcing it while the straight cops let straight people go. That is this man had such leeway that if he could let these guys go after dressing them down, he could also just talk to them and warn them of the dangers, tell them to get sex on the internet as he said everyone who does public places should, and do a full arrest the second or thrid time he found them -- no degrading necessary, no terror necessary, and he still get them off the streets the second or third time he saw them. That I was sickened from reading this tripe, and to take me off the list.

Well, I just got the angry email from the maintainer that on a list of 500 men, after 150 reactions, the other 4 like me that were intially negative now turned round when the trooper wrote his second statements, and I was the only one who in my bitter and twisted mind stayed negative. And that I was off the list.

And that's ok, New Hampshire is too far for me to drive to go to a monthly orgy at a B&B anyway. I mean, really.

I don't subscribe to your framework that designates people 'sinners'. Calling me a 'sinner' doesn't make any more sense to me than calling you a slupferschtumpf makes sense to you.

You are a jackass, though, pres or not. And this little PR stunt won't drive your other blunders off the front page for long. Two years on in your 'War On Terror' and the airplanes are still unsafe. Nice going, jackass.

I wonder what it says about my value system that I am more bothered by the fact that Robert Frisk killed animals he got out of shelters by lying about getting them a good home, than about the fact that he profits from investments made in hospitals that do not ban doing abortions. Plastic tells me the freepers are all over him for that last one, but I am pissed the man killed puppies!

althaea was saying how she wanted to backpack through Europe. So I told her to ask me some time what the stupidest thing was I ever did. She asked.

( The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was participate in a hitch-hiking contest. )