lol, it’s like saying, “Nuh uh! Bundy didn’t kill anyone. He said so himself!” (pre-confession).

How funny!

My brother’s former employer (Jim Justice, current governor of West Virginia) once laid off nearly everyone in the mine he worked at. With their last paycheck was a letter, (paraphrasing) “If Barack Obama is elected, we may never return to work.”

I took it as, “Well, vote Republican or we aren’t opening the mines back up and you won’t have a job.”

Wasn’t long after Obama won that they called most of them back.

It’s crazy how often my brother and his coworkers had to chase their paychecks too. Justice is known locally for stiffing his workers, yet somehow he’s qualified to govern the state. Beats me man. I need to look at the election results and see how many people voted for him in towns where he employs people. It would shock me if he got a significant post job of the vote in those towns given his reputation.

Before he was governor I only ever heard his name in a negative light.

As a musician I used to say, “Leonard Cohen began his music career in his 30s. I can do this.”

I’m not Leonard Cohen in any imaginable way. Oh, and I’m past that point now too. :p

Like when your mother and I conceived you.

No one believed I was your father.

…because I wasn’t.

And we’re still making stuff and slowly realizing it’s slowly killing us. Isn’t that neat?

Maybe one day we’ll have it all figured out. :p

And besides, he’s probably had to be treated for stds multiple times recently and just doesn’t want the world to know.

I mean, he was hanging around with that walking genital wart Laura Loomer recently.

Holy shit I was thinking about it and decided to google. Just wanted to come back and share this with you. There were around 400 bears in the state of West Virginia 40 years ago. I said I never seen them as a kid but I see them constantly now. Well, today the population is around 14,000. That’s crazy.

I agree with you about bear meat. I’ve had it once in my life and I enjoyed it. My cousin, the dude who killed it, didn’t make a trophy out of it. He used everything that could be used.

Would I kill a bear? No. But do I think limited hunting is evil? Also no. I’m not for wholesale slaughter of bears, that’s for sure.

I never even seen a bear in Appalachia during my childhood, not one. Good hunting laws have made it so I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen in my adult life. They’re everywhere, including carrying trash bags out of my cans.

The point of “perverse incentives” is that the plan doesn’t create a solution at all and isn’t remotely effective because it can can lead to things like some dude catching young females and throwing them in an enclosure with a male, letting them go once they’re pregnant, actively kill off the produced males, and repeat with the females.

If you tell a city to bring in dead rats for a reward, someone is going to start breeding rats in his basement.

Edit:

To make it clear, I’m for no tag limit, but I worry about rewards. Let the sadists go wild with blood. :p Not that I think hunters are sadists, it just takes a different kind of person to massacre on a scale like that.

Oh yeah, I seen it. Thank you though. I got caught smoking my first cigarette at four years old in my cousins bedroom. So I’m really not that far off, not that it’s any kind of contest.

No shit, I was about his age when I started smoking. I grew up deep in hillbilly Appalachian country and all of the kids I grew up with smoked. I only knew two kids in my whole neighborhood who didn’t smoke and one of them started in their 30s for some reason.

My brother and I robbed a delivery truck when we were 11 and 13 and stole two full boxes of Camel cartons.

That is religion. It is crazy to me that we live in this age with endless knowledge at our fingertips and people still believe all of this nonsense.

We can look into the belief systems and religions of people from all over the world, and somehow the majority of us can’t look at our own systems and realize that it’s all bullshit.

You can hear the teachers in rural India say, “The caste system is the will of God! How can you question the will of god?” A couple clicks later and you can hear a child Imam saying, “How can there be any god besides Allah?!” A few more clicks, you can hear a rabbi say, “We are the people chosen by god!” A couple more clicks and you hear the preacher say, “All other gods are false gods. Only our son of god is the one true god!” Hell, you can go down a rabbit hole of all the “gods” currently living with lucky followers of the one true living god right here, right now. Vissarion in Siberia gave those lucky bastards the Last Testament they’ll ever need to read. Imagine being lucky enough to shake your god’s hand and watch him prance around in white and burgundy robes and grow old before your eyes.

There are so many one true gods out there. You’d think that alone would make people think and question their own one true god. Nope. Not only do the majority of us keep putting our hands together and saying amen, we got folks out here making brand new gods today for future people to fight and die for.

It’s amazing.

I worked at a gas station for years in a poor town and I bought and sold several used computers that sometimes ended up being stolen. I always did my best to make sure that didn’t happen. I’d check the personal info on the drives before I’d clear them and try to get up with the people who originally owned them. I probably returned at least 15 of them over the years.

It’s crazy to think that I could have ended up being charged with murder if I had been pulled over with some shit in my car.

One time I got a sob story, “I lost my job bro. You can get my Xbox 360, my tv, my laptop, and all these games right now for 100 bucks.” I lost that 100 bucks because I contacted the Xbox account and found that the stuff had all been stolen and I returned it. Imagine if someone had killed someone to get that stuff and I got pulled over with it.

They gave me a cheap guitar for returning it. They didn’t have to do that and I’ve always appreciated it. It’s risky being in a poor town and buying things for resell.

Reeeeheeeeeeee. Pfffft. Excuse me, sorry about. I’m a horse after all.

Being in school was wild when that happened. My school banned baggy pants over night and required us to carry clear backpacks. We weren’t allowed to carry more than the book we needed for the next class, and cameras went up.

I was overheard telling a friend (jokingly) that I was going to kill myself if I had to take another timed test. Police showed up soon after and handcuffed me. Some girl overheard me and swore I said I was going to kill other people. Luckily one of the officers was from my neighborhood and believed me, but I was still suspended and he drove me home.

You know what really sucks though? All these years later and people are still terrified. Last week I woke up a few minutes after my teenage daughter got on the bus, my wife said, “Maybe you should go get her. Someone has threatened to shoot up the school.” I drove over and got her, fortunately the officer guarding the door just let her leave with me and was understanding. A day later and another threat hits. Someone says they’re going to shoot up the pep rally. I didn’t send her to school. Two unexcused absences in one week at the beginning of the school year over that shit.

She did online school last year and it was a nightmare, but I’m all over the place on that right now. I want her to be able to make friends and things. It wasn’t healthy for her last year. I only did that because her mom had recently died and I wanted to give her a break from everything.

I guess some kids thought it would be funny to do that last week. I just wish no one had to take them seriously.

Oh no, the only computer that is working right now is the one that keeps us alive.

Our heart rates increased because we were terrified for like, 7 minutes. Ok, 2 minutes, I’m sorry! Fine! 30 seconds. We’ve been stuck up here for so long. It isn’t my fault. You can secretly get yours, mines leaves evidence!

The whole “small town on the edge of dying” bit. Holy shit have I experienced that firsthand.

See, what happened with a lot of these towns is that their industry became a part of their pride and culture. Where I’m from it’s coal. Trucks everywhere have a decal of a coal miner with one of two phrases. “Coal keeps the lights on.” and “6 inches from hell.”

My grandfather was a coal miner, so was his father, and his father, on both sides of my family. My father realized that the industry was dying so he left (and left us here haha). My brother did it for awhile but left it behind because of the drug problems in the mines. There was a whole underground urine market that kept things moving.

Even the poor fools who never worked in the mines go on and on about coal like it’s some kind of idol.

I would imagine the same thing happens in other places. The people fear big changes until their fear backs them into irrelevance. I’m getting older, so I can relate to that, only I vote for my kids, not to make me feel less afraid. Whatever world they grow up in won’t be one that I’d be perfectly comfortable in. It has always been that way as far back as we have been recording history. No sense in fighting where the world is going just because I don’t understand it or relate to it.

In my town at least, we’ve got it right, that is if we could get more funding and help everyone.

The system that I went through has tiers, and it’s mostly drug addicts, but man I’ve seen it turn people around completely.

If a person ends up arrested because they’re tweaking, paperwork is immediately filed to get them into a specialized local hospital. It’s very small, but the people involved really do work hard to get things moving.

Once the person is in the hospital, they keep them until withdrawal ends or psychosis subsides. Then they enroll them in a very strenuous program that pretty much takes up their entire life for a bit. They try to get the person on Medicaid, but if they don’t qualify the hospital actually has a fund to pay for their treatment. They are provided with a ride to drug classes and group therapy multiple times a week and drug tested daily. If they fail a drug test they take them back to the hospital, unless they’ve been charged criminally, then it’s back to jail first, but ultimately they’ll end up back in the hospital.

Assigned case managers will visit them at their home at random daily. If the person doesn’t have a home, we have several “sobriety houses” in the area where folks are sent until they can get on their own feet.

Their case worker files applications for low income apartments and other programs like HUD. The person will ultimately end up in a home if they work the program.

In my time with the program I seen way more success than failure. The only failures I seen were those people who just made criminality their entire life. I’m talking drug dealing, robbing, constantly fighting. There are some people you just can’t help. I might be wrong there, but I seen a personality type that didn’t seem like it could be helped anyway. It was those folks who found their source of pride in a criminal lifestyle.

I probably do have some bias on the success of the program because they stick you with people who have progress similar to yours. If you’re a success in the program, you’re generally going to have appointments scheduled alongside people who are doing at least roughly as good as you are.

When I left the main program in 2020, I always had my appointments with the same people. We were the “no failed drug tests in years” group. Several of those people were homeless but they aren’t now.

Did I ever tell you about nuclear?

Oh, well that I don’t know. That’s fun.