Day 3207

There is no truth anymore. It's gone. All we have left are carefully constructed narratives. Keep in mind that a narrative is just a story. I say this as a person who has spent most of his adult life constructing narratives. I'm an advertising writer. There's a good chance that I might have convinced you to buy something you didn't really need. I might of even convinced you to believe a lie. That'a what a narrative is meant to do. It's really not that hard to influence someone when you can engage their emotions.

This is why I'm deeply distrustful of politics. Politicians have become addicted to narratives, mostly because they are much more effective than looking at things objectively. I have to give the Democrats credit. They are great at creating a good narrative. The threat from Russia is genius. Not a day goes by without hearing about Russian meddling. Hmm. I can't recall the Democrats caring about Russia one way or the other since the days of John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Democrats knew that there were still a few old school Russia Hawks in the Republican Party though, and if they could peel away a couple of them, their opponents might lose their slim majority and legislation could be blocked. It worked. Warhawks like John McCain became allies instead of adversaries and it was McCain who ended up casting the critical vote to save Obamacare.

The Republicans seem to like narratives as well. The need for a border wall is a narrative calculated to appeal to people's emotions. If you really want to stop people from crossing a border, a wall probably isn't the most effective way to do things. A wall is basically useless, but it is a powerful symbol. It got a president elected.

I wish that politicians didn't feel the need to create stories that are meant to fan the flames of human emotion. We are already a divided country and these narratives are just making a bad situation worse. A narrative that is gaining traction now is the idea that under certain circumstances it is perfectly OK to say that someone is guilty until they can prove their innocence. It doesn't seem to bother the people who created this narrative that this is exactly what happened during the Salem Witch Trials. They knew that when you combine a huge voting block with an explosively emotional issue and stir vigorously, you have a witches brew that just might provide you with the kryptonite you need.

I find it a bit distressing that many of my friends seem all too willing to burn the witch. When you abandon due process and have politicians who actively condone mob rule under the guise of resistance, all is lost. What ever happened to the preponderance of evidence standards that have guided our judicial system for so many years? Have we really returned to the McCarthy era or the dark days of the Salem Witch Trials? I thought about these things as Dash and I walked by the pathetic little circus that seems to be still taking place in the park. That's what we've got right now in this country: a pathetic circus.

Lightning is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2412

Another day, another terrorist attack. Throughout the afternoon I kept hearing conflicting reports on social media. One would say the shooter was a neo-nazi who shouted that he hated foreigners. Another would say that he was an Islamic radical who shouted Allāhu Akbar. Clearly one of these reports was a fabrication. Maybe neither of them was true. News is an uncharted wilderness these days. It's all spin. Whenever almost anything happens, someone will quickly try to twist the narrative to suit their needs. Objectivity increasingly seems like a quaint, outdated concept that few people have any use for. Most people, including myself, have no idea what the truth is and just pick the narrative that fits their preconceived notions.

When I flipped back and forth between Fox and MSNBC last night I could have sworn that I was watching two different conventions. One network thought that the event had channeled the inner pulse of middle class America while the other dismissed the whole thing as an unmitigated disaster. I used to think I could discover the truth by listening to both sides of the story, but I'm not so sure anymore. Spinning a story has become an art form and it's almost impossible to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Where is Walter Cronkite when you need him?

Today was slow but it started out nicely. I had Eggs Benedict at my new favorite restaurant and then returned home to finish my remaining website updates. The roofers didn't show up, but at least I got an explanation. It was apparently too hot for the roofers to work. If that's the case, I'm probably not going to get my roof fixed until September.

My pet cam has quit working again. It's so irritating that AT&T keeps tweaking its firewall settings and the apps on my phone keep automatically updating themselves overnight while I sleep. I'll get everything set just the way I want it and then a new version of an app will come out that upsets the apple cart. I have lots of old applications on my office computer for a reason. The apps are stable, don't crash, and do exactly what they are supposed to do. It's hard to keep out outdated apps on your phone, because they update themselves automatically. By the time I get the pet cam working, there will be a brand new version of the app that sets me back to square one again. I often feel like Sisyphus, continually pushing the same rock up the hill over and over again.

I felt like having Pizza tonight, so I went and ordered a nice looking large pie at one of our favorite Italian restaurants. When did ordering pizza become expensive? When I was in college, pizza was one of the cheapest things you could have for dinner. Now, I can order Chinese, Cheeseburgers, or a wide variety of other take-out meals for much less. Pizza still costs less than good barbecue though. We save barbecue for special occasions.

Once again, I screwed up and took my evening meds in the morning. There's a reason they tell you to take Niacin at night. The flushing sensation it can cause can be severe and make you feel like you are burning up. The sensation seldom lasts more than an hour, but it does make me check my meds a little more carefully the next day.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do this weekend.  Anything that involves sleep sounds good to me.

Pongo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2389

Do you feel like you are inundated with an onslaught of spam and phishing scams? I do. Everyday my inbox is filled with e-mail spam and bogus offers. My land line is worthless. Nobody calls the land line anymore except for telemarketers and scammers. Today I received a voicemail that implied that I was in big trouble and needed to return the call immediately to avoid being called before a grand jury. This seemed highly unlikely, so I entered the phone number in the Bad Numbers website and sure enough it was a scam. Hundreds of other people had received exactly the same message today. The older I get, the more I find myself a target of these scams. Scammers target older people because they are more vulnerable. I don't understand the mentality of a scammer. Some scams are very elaborate and require a lot of thought. Wouldn't it be easier to just get a real job and work for a living?

I could tell that Dot was tired today at our physical therapy session. Part of the problem was that she was stressed from riding in the car. When Dot is stressed, she always poops in the car, which makes me stressed as well. It also didn't help that the water in the treadmill tank was too warm. Dot likes the water cold, although most of the other dogs apparently like it warm. At any rate, she didn't bring her A Game to therapy today. When she got home, she pooped in her bed and made another big mess. She's fine now, but it's been a long day for both of us.

I wonder if the new fiber optic lines in the neighborhood are working? I haven't seen the AT&T installation crews for weeks and everything looks finished, but my Internet speed hasn't improved a bit. If anything, it has gotten slower. I'm not even sure who to ask about this. It's not surprising that the AT&T technical support people in India or Indonesia don't know anything about the fiber optic line. Why would they? I thought the folks at the AT&T store a few miles down the road could give me some answers, but they didn't know anything about the new lines either. If I hadn't seen the men laying the cable with my own eyes, there would be no reason to believe that anything had happened at all.

It's amazing how polarized our society has become. I'm a channel flipper and I compulsively use the remote to switch back and forth between channels while I eat breakfast. Sometimes I'll see exactly the same news story explained in three completely different ways. If you only listen to one account, you'd probably believe what you were hearing was true. When you hear competing views presented in real time as fact, it can get confusing. I think we've gotten truth and belief all mixed up. The Internet is even worse. People go to elaborate lengths to make up false stories and present them as true. I'm not talking about obvious satire or websites like The Onion. There are some serious efforts to deceive out there. Why? I'm a simple person and I'd like to know what's really going on without having to check Snopes.com all the time. What if what I'm reading on Snopes isn't even true? That would be really disorienting.

I've got a day of rest tomorrow and then on Friday, I've got to load Dot in the car again and take her to another vet appointment. She's due for her monthly re-check at the cancer center. This time we'll be doing a chest x-ray in addition to the usual Ultrasound scan and blood work. Sometimes I wonder if this extensive monitoring is even necessary, and then I remember how some of our first dogs died suddenly and painfully when nobody realized that they had cancer. It's always good to know what's going on. There will always be a lot that I don't know, but I do make an effort.

Sparky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2170

It is tempting to join the political debate on Facebook. With a presidential election looming and WWIII on the horizon, my timeline is filled with wildly contradictory opinions every single day. How did I get so many friends who can't seem to agree on anything? My desire to clarify things by telling my Facebook friends the "truth" is tempered by the realization that my own opinions are probably just as misguided as theirs. Why join the fray? It's pointless. If Facebook is a proxy for how the world actually works, we are truly fucked.

Without getting into details, I tend to take the long view on things. When Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter were popular memes, only one image spoke to me. It was an icy cold photo of the Andromeda Galaxy with the caption No Lives Matter. Whenever people talk about climate change, I keep thinking that it is pretty arrogant to assume that humans can actually destroy the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years. We've only been here a few thousand. We can certainly destroy ourselves. We're getting closer and closer to doing this every day. The planet will survive however. Earth will clean up the toxic gasses and the radiation on its own time schedule and maybe a wiser, less argumentative species will evolve the next time around. People don't like taking the long view however. They're more concerned about what is going to happen tomorrow. That's why I tend to keep my mouth shut.

Today was a good day for saying nothing. It's a short week and most of my clients are on holiday time already. Even the ubiquitous telemarketers seem to have disappeared this week. I went about my business, making sure the dogs had a nice morning walk and taking an inordinate amount of time to make the perfect fruit smoothie. I've almost sealed the leak in the shower stall, although a small amount of water still seems to end up on the bathroom floor. I've narrowed down the search for the ideal portable dehumidifier to two models, but can't decide which one is best. Neither of these machines is available in Dallas and all I've got to go on are people's comments on the Internet. I'd say my chances of believing the wrong person are about 50/50.

Since today was even slower than yesterday, I took the opportunity to catch up on Dr. Who. This time I watched the show while the dogs were napping and managed to see the entire episode without interruptions. I don't know what to think about Face the Raven. Personally I think Clara deserved a better send off. She might not have been the best companion ever, but she was a good and loyal one. She should have been sent to a parallel universe like Rose or just had her memory wiped like Donna Noble. Although I'm not a fan of the direction that Steven Moffat is taking the show, I'll have to admit that Peter Capaldi is a good actor. There is an intensity about him that Matt Smith never had.

I'm so habitual that's it's going to be harder than you might think to remember that Dot's physical therapy day is tomorrow instead of Thursday. Her appointment is early in the morning too. I'll have to start getting her ready right after breakfast. It's supposed to rain on Thanksgiving but I hope the forecast is wrong. I'd like to enjoy a nice relaxing dinner at our third choice restaurant without worrying about whether the dogs were having a panic attack during a thunderstorm.

Maggie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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