21APR2024 – OCF Update – Photo of the Day Info

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Our long national nightmare is at last within sight of ending.  Today I added the last three photos from that endless series of rock and mineral show shots I took last year onto the scheduler.  After Wednesday something different will be in its place.  What that something is remains to be seen.  I’ve ruled out cat pictures (because we haven’t got any cats).  But let’s hope I can find something with a warm weather theme.

Scranton Joe Biden on the Stump

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I come before you today to remind you that you have a choice.  You can either vote for me; humble, lovable Joe Biden or for that Dog-faced Pony Soldier Donald Trump.  And as that clean, articulate black man Barack Obama once said, Donald Trump will never be President of the United States.

Okay, sure, that was wrong and he did become president but hopefully not again anyway.  As my Uncle Bosey once told me, “Stay away from cannibals because they’ll eat you and you’ll never be found afterwards.”  And that’s damn good advice.  Now they’re trying to say he wasn’t eaten by cannibals but who other than cannibals would eat him?  Let’s be sensible here.  He wasn’t eaten by vegans, that’s for damn sure.

But seriously folks, you can’t trust Donald Trump.  He never rides on the Amtrak.  He’s always taking first class airline flights.  He’s not one of us.  That’s because he wants to put y’all back in chains.  And if you vote for Donald Trump you ain’t black.  No joke!

When my son Hunter was killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine fighting the Soviets he was dressed sort of like Rambo and with the muscles and the camo, so it was really something.  I remember him saying, “I just want my country to love me as much as I love it.”  And it was beautiful.  And then Xerxes army surrounded us and I threw my spear at him but only cut his face a little and then I was killed by a lot of arrows.  But luckily, I got better and here I am.  And that’s how we won in Ukraine.  Trump has never been killed in war nor have his sons so how can you trust him?

And if you think about it, Donald Trump is a lot like Corn Pop.  They’re both bad dudes who don’t follow the rules and probably don’t even wait an hour after eating before going back in the pool.  If I had the time, I’d like to bring both of them behind the shed and teach them a lesson with my bicycle chain and my boxing skills.  I’m not bragging I’m just saying that’s what I’d like to do but I can’t because of these new laws about fighting and the whole gay thing.  You’ve got to be careful not to say the wrong thing, which is tricky.

But forget all that for a minute, just remember how much better things are now that I fixed the economy.  I fixed the COVID and then I eliminated college loan debt and I got rid of gasoline and oil and now we’ve got electric cars and electric heat and everything is all electric and that’s progress.  Sure, if you’re still using the gasoline and the oil it’s a little more expensive.  And sure, maybe food and rent are up a few pennies but we’re all doing much better now than under Trump.  Just look at your 401K accounts they’re rocketing.  Why all of my green energy stocks are through the roof.  And just last week Nancy Pelosi showed me her stock portfolio and it was worth six hundred million dollars and you can’t hate that!  All these people in the Trump commercials saying they can’t make ends meet must be lying.  No joke!

So as my friend Madame Secretary of State Clinton said a while ago, “basket of deplorables.”  These dead-enders clinging to their guns and their God don’t have the votes to keep Scranton Joe Biden from coming back and finishing up his mission in Washington.  I’m going to fundamentally transform the whole United States of America into Scranton.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that’s what I’ll do.  The whole country will be just like the Scranton you see today.  Full of Amtrak stations, migrant housing, repurposed police precincts and prisons, welfare offices, needle exchange safe places, transgender bathrooms and Section 8 housing.  Welcome to the future.  So, make sure you vote for me every chance you get.  I really need your help.  Help!!!

So Much for Speaker Johnson

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Well, let’s see how the extreme right-wing Mike Johnson did this week.

With the help of his friends in the Democrat party he passed the Ukraine funding and reauthorized warrantless spying on Americans in the FISA courts.

https://rollcall.com/2024/04/19/rule-for-emergency-aid-bill-adopted-with-democratic-support/

https://rollcall.com/2024/04/20/senate-sends-surveillance-reauthorization-bill-to-bidens-desk/

Oh well done Mr. Johnson.

All I can say is the Republicans are hopeless.  I don’t know if they blackmailed or bribed or fooled him into doing these things but he did their will and so we can expect more of the same from now on.

Might as well have been Pelosi.  The horror continues.

The Cannibals Ate My Uncle Bosey

photog Biden Humor, Current Events, Humor

The regulars here know how I feel about cannibals. In my mind cannibalism is the necessary signpost on the road to convince people that it’s time to change course.

But only Joe Biden can wield cannibalism as a comic tool to unite us in the knowledge that the man in the White House is no longer firing on all cylinders.

Biden was going down a long road to show that his family are staunch supporters of the military but Trump is a military hater.

Instead what we get is, “Uncle Bosey was eaten by cannibals.” As things stand I’d be worried if I were a New Guinean. Being reminded of Bosey’s fate could spark a new military operation to recover the remains of Bosey. Maybe a few teeth or possibly his wristwatch or something. They could airdrop Hunter in with a duffel bag full of hundred dollar bills and crack cocaine. He’d get to the bottom of things.

Military records about his uncle’s death state that, “For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”

Honestly, I prefer the version where Bosey was lunch. I think all of Biden’s family should end up in the soup pot. It would be their finest hour.

Could I Be an Engagement Farmer?

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I woke today to a panic on X.  Elon Musk threatened, “Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source”.

I thought, “Oh no, the jig is up!”

Then I thought, “What the hell is engagement farming?”

So, I did a search and found out, “Well, to a large extent, we all go to social media either for or to give attention. It is in this context that this phenomenon known as engagement farming crops up. It’s the art of cultivating interactions through cunning tactics rather than genuine content.”

It consists of, “ Leading questions   …  Inflammatory content.   …   Clickbait headlines   …   Desperate pleas.”

Let’s see.  Check, check, check and check!

Dammit, Elon Musk has caught on to me and is coming to get me!

Now maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t the internet, more or less, consist of nothing but those things?  You could say that clickbait is in the eye of the beholder but isn’t that also the basis of the whole news industry?  What is a 72-point headline but the paper equivalent of clickbait?  Now sure, the subject must be something important if you blare it out there but the motivation is the same, get someone to bite the hook and buy the paper.

Now sure, someone who actually cares about what they are writing has a somewhat different result.  Intelligent people respond to intelligent writing and idiots don’t.  They stop at the point where a girl in a short skirt walks by.  Now far be it from me to disparage girls in short skirts.  They basically make the world go round.  But there has to be something afterward to think about.

So, if Elon Musk is saying he’s going to remove the sex bot clickbait from his platform I applaud him.  There are already enough outlets providing that media.  But if he’s going to eliminate the engagement farming won’t there be nothing left at all?

And I appreciate his desire to improve X and try to elevate the content.  But in order to do that he should be working on his algorithms to find out how to differentiate actual engagement from bot traffic.  And I hardly think any of us can help him there.  It seems to me it will require the ability to differentiate AI from human responses.  And to my mind the only way to do that is to monetize the interactions.  In other words, people will pay to be entertained, bots by definition will not.

And that’s a good point.  The advertising model for entertainment has been blown up by the tech lords.  Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising to such an extent that newspapers and television have been effectively driven out of business.  The future will belong to subscription services.  And I’m sure Mr. Musk knows this.  His trick will be to make the transition.  His hope is to turn X into a one stop shopping location for news, entertainment and other information-based activities.  Since he seems to be friendlier to people of my political persuasion I am more or less sympathetic to his efforts.  I’ve even bought a lower tier subscription to X and watch hopefully for some future benefits that his enterprises may afford me.

But now I find Elon is gunning for me!  We poor farmers of engagement are doing our best to absorb what little nutrients we can squeeze out of X traffic.  And instead, we are hounded out of existence by the algorithm!  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the show must go on.

Could I be an engagement farmer?

I wish!