My laptop computer is driving me crazy.

It’s like it has been invaded by those evil clowns you see in television commercials. You know, the ones with white faces, fiery red lips, wicked red smiles and tufts of curly red or blue hair framing a bald head.

They sneak about in the shadows, concocting new ways to make life difficult. They work quietly and efficiently, grinning mischievously while driving you whacko.

They are not just in my laptop. They’ve also invaded my cell phone and my iPad.

Most people call clowns Bozos. I call the ones in my computer equipment Spam.

Spam, in the form of dishonest text messages, emails and telephone calls, is increasing. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre says that last year it received fraud and cybercrime reports totalling $530 million in victim losses. That was almost a 40-per-cent increase from the previous year.

Those figures don’t actually reflect the full extent of spam fraud because the centre says most people don’t report spamming that is minor or just annoying.

There really is no defence against email and text spam, or the spam phone calls that come at any time of day or night. You can’t stop them. If you do find ways, the spammers come up with ways around them.

I now have roughly 500 blocked spam addresses on my cell phone. However, once a spammer discovers the block he changes the address slightly and starts again.

Some of spam is not just annoying, it’s downright dangerous. It can contain malicious links or attachments that infect your system with malware or viruses.

The purpose of most scams is to get at your information and use it to get money from you.

We put our email and text addresses up for sale or trade when we accept the privacy policies of services or websites that we visit. Those policies are long, painful reads that often include your agreement to your information being passed on to others. Who reads them when you simply are trying to find something simple on a company website?   

Email addresses are worth money to scammers. They buy them in bulk to add to their mailing lists. A simple push of a button sends spam out to tens of thousands of innocent people and just one sucker falling for the scam makes it all worthwhile.  

Phishing – pretending to be a legitimate major retailer or service – has become a favourite way for scammers to trick consumers. 

Scammers copy a company logo and use it in a phony email. The message might say you have a $45 credit from a recent purchase. Click a link, fill in your credit card or bank info and the $45 will be deposited for you.

Retail giant Walmart has become the most imitated company.  Its brand name was used in 16 percent of all phishing schemes globally during the first quarter of this year, says a study by Check Point Research, a California-based cyber threat intelligence company. That’s an increase from 13 percent in the last quarter of 2022. 

Other top companies imitated by scammers are the delivery company DHL, Linkedin and Netflix. I’ve also blocked phishing schemes from Lowes building supplies, Costco Best Buy and a variety of pharmaceutical companies.

Scammers also hack the accounts of people you know then send you fake messages that appear to be from someone you trust.

Basically we are alone when it comes to fighting these cyber crimes. If you report a phishing attack or other email fraud to police you’ll likely be told to call the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre  by telephone at 1-888-495-8501.

When you call that outfit someone will take down your information and say thank you. The centre simply collects information on fraud and identity theft and compiles details of past and current scams to pass on to the general public. 

There’s little direct action any government agency can take. We are all on our own on this one. The best any of us can do is be very watchful and cautious, don’t open anything that looks the least bit suspicious and if a company wants something from you, give them a call or go into one of their stores.

Scenes of utter devastation from Maui, Hawaii, the Yellowknife, N.W.T. and B.C. wildfire evacuations, plus the Halifax flash flooding bring to mind a single word: Apocalypse.

We are living a real life apocalypse as fires, floods and drought bring destruction and death. Record wildfires in North America, killing heatwaves in India, Pakistan and Australia, typhoons in Asia and record-breaking rainfall in the U.K. and parts of Europe confirm today’s apocalypse as a global event.

Elon Musk, the business magnate baptised Anglican but now claiming no religious affiliation, issued an apocalypse warming last year, predicting the end of mankind.

Apocalypses are common in Biblical texts and usually refer to an intense confrontation with God in which destruction of evil and the end of time bring divine justice and the visibility of God’s rule.

I prefer to understand apocalypse as a revelation, which is the true meaning of the Greek word apokálypsis from which the English word is derived.

Apocalypses are devastating events but they reveal how our lives can be better by changing the lifestyles that brought about the apocalypse in the first place.

Surely no intelligent person doubts that global warming is causing the damaging weather events we are witnessing. And, there can be no doubt that human lifestyles are major contributors to climate change.

We are beginning to accept that our ways of living must be changed if we are to avoid what Musk calls the end of mankind.

Many governments are committed to reducing climate changing emissions to zero by 2050. They are investing in renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels, reducing environment damaging items such as plastics and promoting more ways of green living.

But governments are cumbersome and slow. They are incapable of reducing global warming on their own. They need a committed partnership with business to effectively change policies and practices. Businesses exist to make money, however, and changes will hit corporation bottom lines.

Collective action is needed and will be achieved only when individuals become deeply committed. That requires individuals to make better choices about where they get their energy, what foods they eat, what items they buy and how they travel.

More than that, individuals need to pressure governments and businesses to change policies and practices. Governments need individuals to vote for them and businesses cannot survive without customers so individuals can be a powerful force in making change happen.

Will individuals take today’s climate apocalypse as a revelation that we must make major changes to the way we live? That’s questionable.

Think about how filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola warned us back in 1979 about the futility and absurdity of war. His brilliant Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now portrays war’s damaging psychological effects on humans and how it indulges the darkest, ugliest parts of human nature.

Yet here we are more than half a century later with Encyclopedia Britannica posting an article on the eight deadliest wars in the still young 21st century: The Second Congo War. Syrian Civil War, Darfur Conflict, Iraq War, Afghanistan War, The War Against Boko Haram, Yemeni Civil War, Russia-Ukraine War.

Those are just the eight deadliest of the 32 conflicts now ranging in various parts of the world.

Whether we learn enough and make the changes needed to stop the current fire-flood-drought apocalypse from destroying the plant remains to be seen.

There is hope, however.

A 2021 study of 10,000 young people 16 to 25 in 10 countries found 59 per cent said they are extremely or very worried about climate change. Most of those also said their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily lives.

Youth organizations such as Zero Hour, Earth Uprising and Climate Cardinals have been growing in recent years and are working to find solutions to global warming and climate change.

The United Nations has expressed confidence that youth will find a way to make changes that will prevent the planet’s final apocalypse.

Says a UN web page on climate actions:

“Young people are not only victims of climate change. They are also valuable contributors to climate action. They are agents of change, entrepreneurs and innovators. Whether through education, science or technology, young people are scaling up their efforts and using their skills to accelerate climate action.”

Here’s hoping!

Some good news: Despite weather disasters and war the world apparently has become a happier place.

The annual Gallup Global Emotions Report shows people around the world generally more positive in 2022 than they were a year before. More people felt well-rested, experienced enjoyment, and smiled or laughed than in 2021.

That finding is supported by the market research company Ipsos which says global happiness is six points higher than one year ago. It says 73 per cent of adults across 32 world markets describe themselves as happy.

I'm taking all that with a grain of salt, or more likely a shot of whiskey.

The happiness polls show pockets of unhappiness that are deeper and wider than the pollsters realize.

Gallup, an analytics and advisory company, has reported steadily rising negative feelings since 2006 when it reported a negative experience of index of 23. The index rose steadily to a record 33 in 2021 and remains there.

  Gallup also found that 41 per cent of people last year experienced worry while 32 per cent said they experienced daily pain.But this year’s increase in global happiness is driven by a few unlikely areas. Latin America, notably Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Columbia, has seen a remarkable year-over-year happiness increase. Western counties are showing decreases with the number of Canadians feeling happy down six per cent in the last year.

In 2012 Canada was listed as the world’s fourth happiest country. Last year we were rated 15th happiest.

The reasons why Canadian happiness has fallen so far should be fairly obvious. Ask anyone close by you and you’ll likely hear complaints about high food prices, absurdly high housing costs, increasing crime and violence and a feeling that governments have made little progress in solving those issues.

Unhappy feelings will continue until political leaders start tracking the wellbeing of their citizens. The standard political game now is to smile into the cameras, and talk about statistics on inflation, Gross Domestic Product, unemployment and other statistical trends. 

They should spend less time tracking statistical dumps and more time face to face with the people they are elected to serve. Listening to people and tracking their wellbeing will get governments a lot more insight into solutions than will bare statistics.

Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, has said that the job of leaders is not to make people feel happy.

“The role of leaders should be to reduce misery,” he says. “And the problem in the world today is that misery is rising.

“Measuring how people feel must be a priority of world leaders if we are going to reverse this global rise of misery.”

Good thoughts but governments alone cannot improve our lives or our sense of well-being. 

Canadians have assumed that governments can effectively provide everything people need, from protection of rights to preventing violence to maintaining a strong economy.

We should no longer assume that. Few of us are even aware of what the issues are or how our governments are approaching them.  We’re information lightweights.

People today view important issues in video-clip form. We are too busy to gather and absorb details that make a complete story. We form opinions with little information.

Perhaps we just get tired of hearing problems. Global warming is killing us. The health care system is failing us. The grocery company czars are fleecing us. 

The news often is so depressing that we turn to the lighter stuff. 

A stunning example of how we look away from important happenings and give more attention to lightweight matters was shown recently by London, England’s Guardian newspaper.

The Guardian reported that a Google news search found that the news media ran more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television celebrity who resigned over an affair with a young colleague. Another Google search recorded a global total of only five news stories about a scientific study showing the likelihood of major world crop losses caused by climate change are being dangerously underestimated.

Giving less importance to the real world in favour of celebrity gossip won’t help to find solutions to the serious problems facing the world.

We all have to get better informed.

A very old guy with snow-white hair and snow-white beard fishes the ocean for weeks without catching anything. Finally, he catches a mighty marlin, but sharks eat it before he can get it to shore.

Tough luck. Stuff happens. Move on to the next story.

That’s a likely Internet simplification of Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea. A quick scan. No details. No context. No messages. No learning. The kind of thinned out, often inaccurate, stories we see on social media sites every day.If you went to a library and read the book you’d discover the full story and its valuable messages. The main message being that life is a struggle with an inevitable end, but perseverance and dignity can help us through it.

Sadly, many of us don’t go to libraries or get our information through print sources. We scan and skim smartphones, tablets and PCs for news and information on which we base our opinions and decisions. Brief, incomplete, often manipulated stuff presented as fact.

The majority of people living in the developed world now have fingertip online access to just about all factual information that exists. Yet we are moving farther away from consuming complete, balanced, factually-based information needed to help solve the many difficult issues facing today’s societies.

Research has found that individuals instructed to find specific information online found it faster than others using printed encyclopedias. However, the online searchers were less able to recall the information accurately.

A New Zealand university study concluded back in 2014 that online reading has a negative impact on people’s cognition. The study, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, found that concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates were much lower when people read text online.

Research shows that the digital age also is reducing our attention spans. Some experts say the attention span of a learner now averages 20 minutes.

So, when we skim and scan online we go through more material, but comprehend it less than if we had read it on paper. That’s not good news considering that we face major issues that demand action supported by thoughtful and accurate information.

The move away from reading printed newspapers, magazines and books has happened astonishingly fast and is increasing. U.S. newspaper and periodical revenue has fallen 40 to 50 per cent in the past decade, and Canadian figures are believed to be similar.

A Canadian Book Consumer Study says19 percent of Canadians borrowed a book from a public library in 2021. Also, The Canadian Pediatric Society has said that while 20 percent of adolescents never read a book, almost 50 percent frequently read blogs. 

Print has tried to fight back by offering their products digitally, with little success. Many newspapers, for instance, are offering skim and scan headlines that encourage one- or two-minute reads that don’t come close to giving readers a full sense of what is happening.

Nothing is gained in bemoaning this change in society. We are living through a Digital Revolution, also being called the Third Industrial Revolution. Digital life online is here to stay, shrinking the importance of print.

The goal now should be to build the benefits of online reading while restricting the detriments. Young people especially need to learn how to avoid the negatives of online reading and increase concentration and absorption.

How can that be done? Good question but few solid answers.

There are suggestions like doing more online reading on a large screen, rather than a cellphone. Taking pencil and paper notes during online research is another suggestion.

The Internet is only 30 years old and there simply has not been enough research on how time spent on computers affects cognitive development, especially in children. More research is needed to find practical ways to ameliorate the detrimental impacts.

Libraries perhaps hold part of the answer. They are places where print and digital share space, offering the advantages of book learning and online learning.

Libraries also are great equalizers. Many people who can’t afford books or a digital devices get access to information, print or digital, with a library card.

 There are signs that the animal kingdom is fed up with us and beginning to rebel. 

Two-ton killer whales are ramming yachts and fishing boats. A sea otter has been stealing surf boards from surfers on the California coast. Sharks are terrorizing people on the east coast and alligators are mauling people in Florida. 

Closer to home, coyotes are more visible and bolder, while groundhogs are devastating vegetable and flower gardens. Wire mesh fencing hasn’t stopped them from consuming my wife’s parsley patch.

News reports of animal rebellion now are so common that the shouts of the rebelling animals in George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm are echoing in my head.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell’s animals shout during a rousing speech by Old Major, a big old boar, calling for a revolution. 

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing,” Old Major says, urging the animals to take control of their lives back from humans.

Relating the current animal behaviour to Orwell’s Animal Farm is perhaps an overreaction. However, something definitely is going on with the world’s animals.

Since 2020 there have been 500 reports of killer whales ramming boats off the coasts of Portugal and Spain. Several have been so badly damaged that they sank.

Last month a whale attacked a yacht off the coast of Scotland. Pods of whales have appeared off the east and west coast of North America and there is concern the whales will start attacking boats there.

Alligator attacks in Florida have increased 66 per cent in recent years. And earlier this month a 69-year-old woman walking her dog in South Carolina was attacked and killed by a gator.

Shark attacks also have increased. 

Globally an estimated four dozen people have suffered shark attacks this year, six fatally. The number is on course to exceed last year’s total of 81 attacks. The annual high for attacks is 111 in 2015.

On the July 4th weekend a 15-year girl was attacked by a shark at a New York beach. She survived.

Coyote populations have grown, as have sightings in human populated areas. Researchers say coyote density in some parts of Canada has risen to as high as 2.3 coyotes per square kilometre. 

There have been two noteworthy coyote attacks in the last few weeks. A nine-year-old boy was mauled June 24 in the North Kildonan area of Winnipeg. One week later a four-year-old child was attacked in the same neighbourhood. Both children were treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries.

Some people believe that increasing wild animal-human interactions are caused by growing wild animal populations. Others say human populations spreading into animal territories is causing conflicts.

Climate change also is said to be a factor in increasing wildlife-human conflicts. Global warming is melting sea ice in the Arctic, causing polar bears to spend more time on land and creating more encounters with humans. Earlier this year a mother and small child were killed in Alaska by a polar bear.

Whatever the reasons, strange animal behaviour is another sign of Nature trying to tell us something.

Nature is a wise grandmother who can teach us much, if we are willing to listen. (The numbskulls who continue to toss Tim’s coffee cups and beer cans from car and truck windows obviously are not).

One of her important lessons is for us to abandon the human ego that makes us think of things in Nature as either useful to us or useless in general.

Everything in Nature has a purpose and is useful even if it doesn’t benefit we humans in some way.

As has been said many times by many writers: Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

We are Nature, albeit only one part of it. So when we spit on Nature, we spit on ourselves.

Perhaps our poor understanding of Nature and the way we mistreat it is the reason the animals appear to be rebelling.

To quote again the rebellious Old Major in Animal Farm:

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word– Man.”

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Thumbs up to my little sister. She can turn mud pies into chocolate cakes. Or, a bad experience into something helpful to others.

She was bike riding with her daughter recently in eastern Ontario when her bike’s front wheel hit a crumbled piece of pavement. She was thrown over the handlebars and landed hard, breaking her arm.

She was immobile on the road’s edge with her daughter trying to help when a car approached. It didn’t stop to help. It didn’t slow down and it narrowly missed hitting them.

When told the story I went into my “world gone crazy” outrage. It’s a sick, sick society when a driver races past an injured person lying on the edge of a road.

My sister had a different take. She told how some nice people came out to help from a nearby house, arranging for an ambulance, trying to make her comfortable etc.

Then came the hospital story, one much different from what we so often hear these days.

The emergency room was packed, as many are these days. But instead of taking my sister’s OHIP card and telling her to take a seat, a nurse immediately set her up with a comfortable sling, gave her pain medication, then had her take a seat.

She didn’t complain about having to wait to see a doctor because the sling and pills made it easier to bear.

My sister is a person who believes people who do their jobs thoughtfully and with kindness should be thanked and told how their work truly helped. So, she called the hospital communications department to have her appreciation passed on to ER staff and the one nurse in particular.

There she stepped into the madness of our computer-controlled world. She was told to go to her laptop, tap this, tap that and eventually end up at a screen displaying a form. Fill out the form, then tap some more to send the completed form into the miasma of hospital bureaucracy.

My sister believes there must be an easier way to pass along appreciation and thanks. 

I suppose one could still use the old-fashioned approach of writing a letter, searching for an address, addressing an envelope, inserting the letter, licking the envelope seal and paying $1 plus for a stamp then posting the letter and hoping it might find the right person.

We now live in the digital age surrounded by software engineers who work daily at changing the way we do things. Surely some of them can design a digital way to say thank you quickly and directly.

My sister wonders why there isn’t a system with which any company that deals with people – not just hospitals – has a simple-to-reach site just for compliments. It takes in messages of thanks and appreciation and directs them to the employee.

Something that bypasses the nests of bureaucracy and computer systems that complicate simple living. Something that you can do quickly on your cell phone while the experience is still fresh in your mind.

It’s an interesting thought. Perhaps someone will pick up on it and one day we’ll be able to send a kudo to a helpful person without the usual rigamarole.

Meanwhile my sister turned to social media to try to thank the nurse for her exceptional kindness. Her post included the following:

“You will never know the impact your kindness had on me that day. You could have just as easily taken my info when I came in and had me go back to a seat. Instead you gave me a new sling to comfort me while I waited and gave me medication to relieve the excruciating pain the fractures in my arm were causing. Thank you for making the rest of that day tolerable. I hope this message finds you somehow.”

I too hope it finds her.

It’s a harsh world out there where excellent and intelligent job performance mixed with kindness are not easy to find. When we do find it we should celebrate it and have better ways of passing along our thanks and appreciation.

 Our spring and summer of smoke is being called abnormal. It’s not. It’s a new normal that scientists predict will become an even more normal part of our lives.

“This is our potential future,” Morgan Crowley, a Canadian Forest Service fire scientist, said in an interview with the Vox media service recently. “It’s real. It’s really important that we prepare for our future and find ways to reduce the effects on our vulnerable populations.”

This year already is the worst forest fire season in Canadian and North American history. Canada has suffered more than 3,000 forest fires since the end of March, burning about 20 million acres. And, we are not quite halfway through the fire season.

It’s going to get worse. More forest fires and more smoke clouding our skies and affecting our health will be a fact of life. We need to listen to, and act on, Ms. Crowley’s warning to prepare for the future and work on finding ways to protect vulnerable populations.

Changing climate is creating conditions that increase wildfire potential. Higher temperatures and increased wind have been drying out our forests, turning them into tinder boxes.

A key factor in recent forest fire history is something that the public has heard little about. It’s called VPD – vapour pressure deficit and is the difference between the amount of moisture actually in the air and the amount of moisture the air could hold.

When the air has much more room for moisture it sucks it out of trees and other plant growth. The larger the moisture deficit, the drier our forests become.

Drier forests don’t necessarily mean there will be more fires, but they definitely mean much drier material for a fire to burn. That’s why recent fires have been larger than usual and creating more smoke.

There is increasing concern about how wildfire smoke is affecting our health. Breathing in the smoke causes running noses, scratchy throats, irritated sinuses, coughs and headaches. The smoke causes more serious problems for people who suffer asthma, bronchitis, and pulmonary disease.

Wildfire smoke can be seen and smelled but it contains tiny toxic particulates that are invisible to the human eye. These particulates can be comprised of acids, sulphites, nitrates, soot, metals and other things can travel deep into the lungs and the bloodstream.

Some medical researchers suspect that breathing wildfire smoke can increase cancer rates – notably lung and brain cancers. They don’t have much solid evidence of that yet and say more study is needed.

There also are suspicions that wildfire smoke is more harmful to infants and also can affect developing fetuses.

New research published in the June issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment says smoke particulates from wildfires could cause 4,000 to 9,200 premature deaths a year in the U.S.

What has not received much study yet are the effects of wildfire smoke on our mental health.

The constant talk about smokey grey days and waking up to discover you can’t see the far shore of your lake can be stressful and create anxiety. 

Some studies of general air pollution have found that bad air can cause unhappiness and depression. One study has said that air pollution is linked not just to depression and anxiety, but causes some functional changes in the brain.

Especially disturbing is a 2022 study that found wildfire smoke exposure during the school year lowered standardized test scores slightly. 

Older studies of people affected by wildfire smoke in British Columbia and California found no increase in mental-health-related doctor visits or hospitalizations.

Today, however, psychologists are increasingly reporting patients reacting to natural disasters with feelings of loss and grief.

Global warming, drying climate despite wild rain storms and the smoke are triggering worries about the future. How long will this last? What’s next and will it be worse? All questions many of us have and which are questions that disturb our mental well-being.

“Climate change is a mental health issue,” says Nancy Piotrowski, a licensed psychologist representative for the American Psychological Association’s Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology.

So wildfire smoke is not just getting into our throats and eyes. It’s getting into our heads.