SOB_Van_Owen

1. The degree of health I’ve been able to reclaim

2. The perspective going through awful stuff has gifted me

3. The knowledge that there are decent, clearheaded folks in this trainwreck of a world and some of them are my friends

And I’m cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.

Yeah. But the bar was set low, being Sunday. Took a hike, poisoned some awful yellowjackets for the second day running -hoping to destroy the colony wherever that might be.

Koo-Koo, Katchoo.

Appalachian here. No doubt curbing demand for coal and doing little to take up the slack in viable livelihood has dropped an economic bomb on an already historically depressed region. All of the programs you hear about teaching coal miners to code and such are superficial window dressing and often non-profit grifts that fold in a short time leaving executives to float away on golden parachutes. Whichever way you turn it, people here are exploited and propagandized. Most often attributing their woes to the wrong sources. Folks that are for sure feeling the effects of a changing climate with frequent severe storms, 1000 year floods, etc.

Sadly, the sociopath/idiotic formula does seem to resonate with the algorithms and/or the public. There is a local creator that I know to be a thoughtful, well-rounded person, yet they had to reduce themselves to a cartoon caricature in order to get traction. But that approach seems to have worked out for them, at least initially through Tik Tok and YouTube. Now I see them taking on increasingly sketchy sponsorships as their 15 minutes fades. And of course audience capture indisputably steers media makers into conspiratorial niches they can’t escape without sacrificing views/payout. Authenticity be damned.

We lost our oldest last Friday. But we had nearly 15 years with her. A long and healthy life for a German Shepherd. Thankful she was active to the end. An awfully good girl.

Chickens are doing alright. The new australorps are really overdue to be moved out of their temporary digs. Old enough now to join the others. We got a rooster this time and he’s just started crowing.

Whoa. “Going to Hell in a handbasket” just got literal.

If only. We knew lots of folks that died after refusing Covid vaccination. They’d been told batshit crazy stuff by the media they took to be gospel.

Picard’s alternate life on that doomed world inspires some deja vu bumping up against current events.