Dog blog and encouraging links

Comments on last week’s blog got me down. Between the vociferous guy who wanted the rest of us to start shooting (but who himself was best at standing on the sidelines verbally sniping) and the vociferous guy who complained that our brave, newfound allies in resisting government diktats weren’t philosophically pure enough for him, I despaired.

Oh, as always there were also great comments — and a lot of them. But it’s like when your day goes 90% wonderful but is 10% overrun by a**holes … well, in that case it’s 100% overrun by a**holes. You don’t go home from one of those days at work exclaiming, “Gosh, I had such a fine, fine day and accomplished soooooooo much! That guy who smashed the windows of my car and that co-worker who backstabbed me to the boss barely even qualified as a minor annoyance.”

Yeah, like anybody ever feels that way.

—–

I was on a roll, feeling as if I had (have) renewed ideas and enthusiasm. Now I ask myself, as I do periodically, if any of what I do is worthwhile.

OTOH, there’s a lot out there — perhaps an increasing lot — that truly is worthwhile.

For instance, this week Adaptive Curmudgeon, who’s one of the millions waiting to be fired over his refusal to submit to either an experimental inoculation or a (currently suspended, though many private employers are still enforcing it) diktat mandating the same, wrote two of the best-ever pieces on the unexpected benefits of taking a daunting stand.

A silver lining in the sh*tstorm, part I

A silver lining in the sh*tstorm, part II

I don’t know the odds of keeping my job. Each day I wait for the other shoe to drop; a carefully phrased legalistic response: “Pursuant to policy XYZ, your heartfelt request was ignored and shredded the hour we received it. You’re denied. You’re fired.”

Like everyone, I don’t have a magical “prepper plan” that’ll save my bacon. (Though things could be worse.) Nobody is adequately prepared to lose their livelihood.

Yet I have no regrets. Society went off the rails at the spiritual level but I didn’t. Your soul comes before your paycheck. Each person is different so if it doesn’t affect you in the same way, that’s fine. As for me, it was a spiritual fork in the road. When you know what’s right, all that remains is being man enough to do it.

Then, over at Rintrah (a Dutch blog, but with posts in English), a Rotterdam native comments on the riots in Rotterdam.

Contra last week’s uber-purist, a one-issue outrage can produce meaningful alliances, however fleeting and tentative — and unlikely! — they may end up being.

The grand irony perhaps is that wokies have now finally accomplished what they had always hoped for: They figured out a way to get Dutch Muslims and Dutch white trash to respect each other and co-exist in harmony. Geert Wilders, who represents the interests of Dutch white trash, has spent about two decades now, blaming Muslims for every single problem under the sun that affects white trash.

If houses are too expensive, it’s because of Muslims. If you feel unsafe leaving your home, it’s because of Muslims. And Dutch white trash eagerly went along with this, because if they’re allowed to complain about Muslims, it feels like they’re allowed to complain about being turned into an ethnic minority in their own neighborhoods in their own ancestral homeland. Geert even went so far as to blame the coronavirus on Muslims who continue going to the mosque.

But now we’ve seen the resolution of this whole experiment: Class consciousness. We’ve reached the point where indigenous Dutch white trash and Dutch Muslims recognize they now have more in common than what divides them.

And those are some darned unlikely allies.

Sarah Hoyt writes about being the sort of person who truly wants to know the truth in a world that lives on lies and willful fantasies.

She counsels (as she so often does), good cheer.

Yes, they’re keep us in the dark and feeding us sh*t. But you’re not really a mushroom. You have eyes and the ability to think.

Just like there self-obviously are not “covid dead” piled on every street corner, it’s obvious that socialism isn’t winning much of anything. And their attempts to throw more money at it, only make the whole thing crazier.

Be not afraid. Don’t believe the enemy is magic. They gaslight themselves more than they gaslight us.

It’s going to get bad. Very bad. But not as bad as their propaganda would make you feel.

And Charles Hugh Smith notes that societies built on lies and illusions must collapse.

Many people fear collapse, but quality, service and reliability have already collapsed. The washing machine that two generations ago was designed and built to last 25 years now breaks down after a few years–so sorry, the motherboard failed. That will cost you almost as much as new washer, and so the manufacturer, bank and retailer win because the weary, clueless consumer will do the easy thing and buy a new, expensive appliance on credit. The “old” appliance (brand-new by previous standards) is hauled off to the landfill, the ultimate destination of everything in our Landfill Economy of poorly made junk.

Service would be hauled to the landfill as well if it was tangible. Alas, it is simply maddening, as nothing works and Kafkaesque bureaucracies have so much power that they are immune to transparency, competition and accountability. their websites don’t work, they botch the most basic transactions and they perpetuate incorrect information, but too bad–there is no recourse.

So. No matter what I do or say, great voices are calling out great messages. And no matter what I end up saying or not saying, I will continue to DO — as will the best of you and the best of our new allies against totalitarianism.

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Now on to the subject of The Dog.

Before we ever got her, I introduced you to Little Red, the foundling cow dog.

Well, here she is in her new home:

Her name is now Trixie — both because she learns tricks (and everything else) astonishingly quickly and because she can be very tricky herself, particularly when it comes to recognizing when our attention is flagging, therefore enabling her to raid the trash or jump up on countertops to get at unattended food.

We ran through a lot of naming possibilities at first, and were particularly fond of a name suggested by my new partner (who has yet to be given his own blog name). That sadly rejected dogname, Solera, is actually a process for producing wines. That is in her case, producing whines. (She’s very vocal and has a large repertoire of sounds.) But Trixie won out for seeming more doglike.

When I introduced her a week ahead of ever meeting her, I mentioned I hesitated to do so because I didn’t want the fates to hear.

Well, the fates (and Furrydoc and a heroic rescue organization) delivered us one of the best dogs ever. As Furrydoc, who doesn’t much like Australian cattle dogs, noted, “She has all the best traits of heelers without any of the bad ones.”

But the fates still had surprises in store. When Trixie arrived she was skeletally thin despite weeks of efforts to fatten her. We continued the fattening efforts, to no avail.

We fed her at least double what a dog of her size would normally eat, and she remained a bag of bones. No matter what or how often we fed her, her appetite remained insatiable — and abnormal. Yeah, most dogs will eat pretty strange stuff, but this dog simply ate as if she were dying of starvation. Ate anything, including even more-than-usually-unspeakable things.

Then it would all come out the other end of her in the biggest, messiest, ugliest series of daily … well, you really don’t need to know. And she wouldn’t gain an ounce. Some days she lost half a pound. We tried worming, even though she’d already been wormed twice. We tried drugs to firm up what came out the backside. They just came out the backside in the gigantic splooshes, too.

Fortunately, Furrydoc eventually led us to pancreatic enzymes, and within days Trixie was normal. Turns out she has a condition called Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency (EPI). Likely caused by a genetic flaw, Pancreatic Acinar Atrophy (PAA). But possibly the result of some infection or something hazardous she ate while living on her own.

In other words, she can’t digest fats, proteins, or carbs without lifelong help. No matter what she ate, she was literally starving to death.

Well, now she’s got help.

And we’ve got a bright and lovely dog in our lives.

So, bad days and the occasional (or more than occasional) moron aside, life is good.