Category: Uncategorized

Covid19 is powering back up. The last month of it not being taken seriously has really rustled its jimmies, whatever the hell that even means. Some states are slowly starting to close things back down:

Quarantine: Phase 2 might just be around the corner.

A few of the “red” states are starting to institute basic closures, limitations, and mask requirements, and the citizenry aren’t taking it all that well. Texas has finally issued a mask requirement while in public, and the conspiracy theories are pouring out of the woodwork.

Evidently it’s a liberal position to believe that masks can control the virus, at least according to Val🌴🤠🐚Life’sabeach over here. She should probably stay away from the beaches for a minute if she doesn’t want to end up contracting the ‘rona. This is of course assuming she even believes it actually exists and isn’t just an elaborate government mind-control conspiracy.

A lot of the conspiracy theories surrounding Covid19 are quite ridiculous. Most tend to revolve around the government using it to control us. There are others who claim that masks are actually harmful and cause “carbon dioxide toxicity”, despite a large portion of the medical industry wearing masks all day and being just fine. They commonly believe that masks don’t work, often citing those early tweets from health officials that in fact said masks don’t work:

It’s here that I have to point out for the 7th time, that the “experts” really screwed up royally around February and March. We’re still dealing with the repercussions of this. Masks have literally always worked to varying degrees, but because of tweets like those above, swaths of people think that masks don’t work, hence the conspiracy theories about this being a control issue.

Something else that really clouds the Covid19 discussions, is that people tend to solely focus on either the numbers of cases, or number of deaths. Both are relevant stats. Number of cases can go up merely from increased testing. Plenty of people have Covid19 and are asymptomatic. It’s hard to get good data on where we are because people who want to over sell, or under sell the virus tend to focus on whatever stat fits that narrative.

Tony ain’t gonna wear no mask. I thought this was America. The founding fathers didn’t sign the Constitution so that I gotta wear a mask.

😢 CHAZ Update 😢

Hey guys. I don’t know how to break this to you… uh… The CHAZ aka the CHOP isn’t with us any more. It finally got shut down due to it being a phenomenally dangerous shit hole and all. There was one more murder and one wounding right before it shut down, bringing the number of shootings to four.

Rest in piece the CHAZ aka the CHOP. You will always be remembered for your pizza parties and scuffed attempts at gardening. Too bad the power-hungry Che Guevara LARPers had to start running around with guns shooting things and doing ironically fascist things. Maybe next time some trained, accountable (hopefully) group of people can handle security. We’ll call them “the pulice” or something like that.

Oh yea. Here’s some weirdo Seattle voted into the city council with an astronomically bad take on the tragedy at the CHAZ aka the CHOP:

Yes. She’s blaming “capitalism” for two shootings at the hands of designated armed security within CHAZ. Security that I would assume Raz Simone installed (he was handing out guns a few days earlier), who shot up a car two teenage kids were joyriding around in. This was a completely CHAZ related incident. Based on her profile, she appears to be nothing more than an anti-capitalist grifter, so actually, this make perfect sense. The last few years have been an absolute boon for grifters.

☭ CCP Update ☭

China has found itself back in the news recently. It turns out all those Uyghurs they rounded up and put in “re-education” camps are also being systematically sterilized to control their population.

There was another government who once put people into concentration camps and practiced eugenics. I can’t quite remember which one it was to save mein life. Oh well. Maybe it’ll come to me later on.

China did something else completely, totally, non-fascist lately. They penned a “National Security Law” that criminalizes anyone who speaks out about the politics surrounding Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This means all the free Hong Kong protestors are now subject to imprisonment, merely for protesting, and the penalty can be a prison sentence of up to forever. Sounds reasonable.

It actually gets worse though:

China is out here taking draconian measures to unforeseen new heights. If you’ve ever expressed any pro-Hong Kong sentiment on your social media, you should probably just go ahead and cross China off your list of vacation spots. There’s no telling what type of gulag or camp you could end up in if they’re maintaining some sort of database of dissent.

It seems they’ve already started snatching people up over there:

Wait just a minute. What is that? Computer… enhance.

What a curious account. No picture of any sort. Lets take a closer look at that profile.

Hmmmm. Interesting. This account only has 1 tweet, yet it was created five months ago. That certainly seems suspicious. It doesn’t quite seems like the account of an actual person. Lets see the 3 people who liked that “Well done, They deserved” tweet:

Interesting. Computer… enhance.

Two more iffy accounts. The first has no tweets, no followers and is following nobody, yet it somehow found and liked minfengxu’s “Well done, They deserved” tweet. I don’t need to state how suspicious that is. The other account has been around since 2016, but has only tweeted 4 times? Probably not a bot account, but perhaps a wumao account.

Wumao are people online who are paid by the Chinese government (CCP) to spread propaganda, or to like pro-CCP posts and dislike anti-CCP posts. I’d be open to the idea that this is just a conspiracy theory, if not for they fact that these accounts are literally everywhere and often not very convincing.

This account also commented on the Wall Street Journal tweet above:

Yes, “great jobs” indeed, real actual human being. Let’s look at those likes. Computer.. enhance.

Two of the same accounts who liked the last tweet, plus a new one. Let’s look at one more account that commented on that Wall Street Journal tweet:

Similar to “great jobs” from above, but this time with decent grammar. Let’s look at those likes, shall we? Computer… enhance. *beep beep boop boop beep*

Yes, it’s the same 3 accounts that liked the last tweet, and yes I copied and posted a separate screen capture for each list instead of just reusing the same image from above.

Here’s the accounts from the last two posters:

The dog account now has zero followers a day after I took this screenshot. That seems completely natural.

I’m gonna end this here. I could keep this going until the end of time, but you get the point of the massive tangent I just went off on. There’s tons of propaganda accounts all over twitter, liking and posting on all sorts of political tweets, mainly from news agencies. I do find it kind of funny that so much was made of Russian meddling on facebook, yet twitter is flooded with these types of accounts and they don’t seem to be concerned about it in the least. What if..

Hey. How’s it going? Cool. Me too.

I fixed the images on the last 6 months of posts. In the last version of WordPress, images were automatically set to enlarge when clicked. In the current version, you have to manually do this for each picture via time consuming unnecessary steps. Now you can enlarge those twitter post images and read all that small print. You’re welcome.

Covid19 is making its triumphant return, and the media can’t decide whether it wants to do actual journalism, or tow agendas. Let’s take a look.

So, was Covid19 spread among people at the various protests? That wouldn’t seem to be the case according to these two outlets:

Both are deliberately misleading headlines. Based on the replies under these tweets, people seem to be of the mind that the virus was not spread at these events. They evidently didn’t bother to read the article. This is an excerpt from the BuzzFeed article:

The protests themselves have resulted in an increased spread of Covid19. The overall numbers haven’t jumped as high as expected because during the protests, non-protesters overwhelmingly stayed home. Essentially, there were less people out and about, so the infection rate wasn’t as high as if everybody who would normally be outside, was outside. Both articles also should have included a “yet” in their titles.

California has tripled its daily Covid19 cases since the start of the protests. Keep in mind, this is with most people largely staying in during this time as stated in the article above.

So, yes, it appears there have been spikes in Covid19 cases over the last 2 or 3 weeks.

Media outlets are fighting over who is worse, the red states or the blue states. Those trying to paint the red states as worse are deliberately ignoring the spikes in blue states, and vice versa. Meanwhile, most states are doing rather poorly in containing the virus, with Texas up there in the top 3, along with California and Florida. There are about 30 states that have had spikes over the last few weeks.

Beaches are another potential factor in some of these spikes. As of the first week in June, about half of California’s beaches were open. As of the first week in May, all counties in Florida had their beaches open except 3. Most of these beaches merely require social distancing guidelines, but obviously that does no good if those guidelines are ignored or not enforced.

This isn’t only a problem in the US. This is the current situation in England:

We’re gonna end up on quarantine again, aren’t we?

🏴‍☠️ CHAZ Update 🏴‍☠️:

The CHAZ has evidently changed its name to the CHOP, removing the “Autonomous Zone” and replacing it with “Organized Protest”. This is likely due to the fact that the CHAZ was in fact not autonomous in any capacity. Most folks still call it the CHAZ though, because it’s still the CHAZ in our hearts. Meanwhile, the official CHOP twitter account has been posting goofy stuff like this:

In addition to mostly being nonsensical word salad, most of the “facts” in these posts don’t debunk, let alone have anything to do with the “myths” they are attempting to debunk. It’s like the account is run by a badly programmed artificial intelligence. The above posts are both wrong regardless, seeing as how businesses affected by the CHAZ are suing the city:

The mayor of Seattle is finally coming to her senses after the rampant nightly crime in the CHAZ finally became too much to ignore. Only ten days prior to this she was downplaying concerns about this very thing stating “Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.”

Someone on twitter jokingly pointed out that technically the CHAZ has a higher per capita shooting rate than any place on Earth currently. We did it guys! We solved police violence by shooting more people than the police do!

Nooses! Nooses, Everywhere!

Finally, in “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” news, there have been not one, but two hoaxes involving nooses in the last week alone. The first happened prior to my last post, but I held off posting about it, figuring the other would inevitably ended up being a hoax as well. Noose hoaxes tend to be one of the most prevalent types of hoaxes these days. Jussie Smollett anyone?

First up, a few “nooses” were found around Oakland. Except it turns out they were literally just regular ropes that were commonly used for exercising. The two look nothing alike, but once again… when all you have is a hammer.

The second noose hoax of the week was NASCAR related. The racing team of Bubba Wallace moved into a new garage and promptly reported a hate crime pertaining to a noose hanging in said garage. Bubba himself never even saw this “noose”, but that didn’t stop the outrage machine from shifting into high gear. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it turned out the noose was just a rope to pull the garage door down.

It’s extremely hard to believe that anyone who works in a garage for a living could possibly have mistaken a garage door pull cord with a noose, but it sure was great publicity for everybody involved, and the media got their clicks and sold their ads. So all is well, and we can repeat the process again countless times, and nobody will ever learn not to jump to conclusions.

Whoa! I finally changed the look of my website after like 5 years. It’s about time. I’m still messing around with it a lot and trying different things out, so it might look completely different later on, or it might not. WHO EVEN KNOWS.

Who cares though, bro. We’re in the middle of a *reverb engaged*…

Remember the pandemic? The pandemic the media somehow forgot about for the last two or three weeks? There’s an explanation for that. You see, evidently the virus went away as a sign of solidarity for the protests, as viruses are wont to do. Granted, there are still huge protests going on right now, but according to the media, these people are magically safe. People gathering for any other reason are still in danger and endangering other people though. That’s just how science works. Deal with it, dude.

It was a mere 2 months ago that people were being arrested for things like walking or paddle-boarding alone on the beach. Both activities have a 0% risk of infection. You can’t infect anyone else if there’s nobody around you. Ironically, police intervention actually increases the chance of infection. Can’t arrest anyone while also observing the 6 foot rule. These types of arrests were gross government overreach, and completely not in line with the science on the matter.

Now we’re at the point where these arrests have all but ceased as the number of violations has become astronomical. Nothing has changed as far as how viruses thrive. Not wearing masks and not maintaining a distance of six feet are still the prime spreaders. Every protest has been in gross violation of both of these rules. From a moral standpoint, most would argue that these transgressions are justifiable. The law doesn’t always operate on morality however. If anything, this just shows that if enough people violate a mandate, the government will just shrug its shoulders and move on. They can’t arrest everyone after all.

A common argument for the protests is that “everyone is wearing masks” and that “the virus is worse indoors”. Both of these are half-truths.

First off, not everyone at these protests has been wearing masks. Not even close.

A decent amount of people in the above photo aren’t wearing masks, quite a few have their masks down, and there’s no way of telling if those currently wearing masks left them on for the duration of the protest. It’s hot outside most places, and it’s hard to breathe through a mask in the heat. Six feet of distance obviously isn’t being observed here either. It does you no good to have a mask if it isn’t covering your nose and mouth, especially in a crowd where people are chanting and/or yelling, which spreads the virus. The above photo might in fact be a viral disaster. It’s also fairly par for the course given the number of photos I’ve seen from different cities, states and countries.

Once again, you can acknowledge that these protests might be disastrous from a transmission standpoint, while also holding the stance that they are warranted.

Protests are also primarily safer outdoors than indoors. One of the reasons Covid spreads easier indoors is due to the fact that it’s harder to engage in social distancing outdoors, i.e. the six-foot rule. If people are standing shoulder-to-shoulder outdoors for extended periods, this benefit is largely negated however. The only safety measure you have in place at that point are masks. Unless there is a breeze, the virus really isn’t going to be dispersed upward. The particles can remain in the air for quite a while; most reports I’ve seen say up to 3 hours.

During an indoor gathering, air conditioners merely blow the particles around without decent re-circulation and filtration. This is partly why most of the initial spread took place in office buildings, churches, and other indoor areas. It also turns out that sunlight does kill the virus to a degree, a point that was initially disputed:

Which brings us to now.

Trump is about to have a rally in Tusla, and it’s most likely going to be a disaster. Trump has made it a point to downplay the virus at every opportunity and avoid wearing masks because it’s become a part of his “too cool for school” image. Predictably, a lot of his die-hards have also become anti-mask and sometimes even downright conspiratorial about the severity (or existence) of Covid19. The BOK center holds almost 20,000 people, and the place will probably be packed. Between the lack of distancing (6 feet) and masks being optional, we’re about to witness an experiment in viral transmission.

Not to take responsibility off of Trump, because he has all the latest information at his disposal, and should know better at this point, but once again, the medical authorities have dropped the ball countless times during the last few months. I’ve posted numerous instances of people within the medical community downplaying the effectiveness of masks, including the US Surgeon General. Here’s one more instance of the mask flip-flop in effect:

This type of flip-flop is fueling the conspiratorial nonsense. Masks have always been effective. That’s why they’ve been common-place in parts of the world for decades. They help reduce the spread of airborne diseases, from the common flu, to past epidemics, like the swine flu. It’s pretty damning that any doctor was downplaying the effectiveness of masks at any point during the last few months. People who saw masks being downplayed initially are probably more prone to disregard further information from these sources, or any medical source for that matter.

In addition, you have non-science based policies like this:

The virus doesn’t care about why people are gathered together. It’s not only going to infect people who are having a backyard BBQ. These arbitrary policies aren’t making anything better. They should be reinforcing the importance of masks, soap, and the six feet rule, not pulling random numbers out of a hat. Also, what’s to stop any random gathering of people from merely stating that they are protesting something? 100-person protest-BBQs, here we come.

On top of that, we’re implementing pointless contact tracing measures:

New York is at it again.

It does absolutely no good to implement contact tracing unless you’re being thorough about it. Ignoring that someone potentially spent all day out in a crowd of 1000+ people completely defeats the purpose. This is why this type on contact tracing will never work. It isn’t going to be thorough enough. Contact tracing works in places like South Korea because it’s done via GPS, not a people filling out questionnaires and purposely ignoring critical info.

It’s unlikely that the U.S. could ever implement contact tracing of this type because it would be seen as invasive and unconstitutional. I doubt too many people on either side of the aisle want our shady government tracking our every move and peeping in on our credit transactions. Probably wouldn’t be a problem if we stopped electing people we can’t trust into office, but then it wouldn’t be America. *sick guitar riff plays*

After two weeks, the protests are still going strong.

We’ve (mostly) moved on from torching fast food restaurants and throwing bricks though Verizon windows, to pulling down any statue that even vaguely resembles a person. Thus far, most have been confederate statues, but we’re already on the cusp of losing the plot.

A bunch of statues have already been defaced that somewhat undermine the point of the protests, including these two abolitionists:

This is why aimless destruction for the sake of mob justice usually isn’t the best policy. There’s always plenty of people willing to jump though hoops to justify this kind of thing though, because the ends justify the means, or some such platitude.

25 actual confederate statues have been removed by state governments thus far, with Virginia and Alabama leading the pack, and many more are slated to be removed on the horizon. It’s also worth noting that despite it making for a rad photo op, it’s probably better to pressure the government into removing statues, otherwise something like this could happen:

On a more whimsical note, a bunch of kids in Seattle have taken advantage of the almost non-existent police presence in the area to create a utopia of sorts. They call it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ for short.

For the most part, it seems to be kids hanging out, watching movies, eating pizza, and living out their Lord of the Flies fantasies. The people within the community who are taking it a little too seriously are providing an unlimited source of memes however.

As is the scenario in every Communist utopia that has ever existed since the dawning of time, inevitably someone steps up to install themselves as the de facto leader, and immediately starts abusing their authority. In the CHAZ, this someone is called Raz, and he’s evidently a soundcloud rapper. A mere 24 hours after the CHAZ was founded, it’s already embroiled in a power struggle.

Another problem in the CHAZ is that absolutely nobody has any discernible life skills, outside of spray painting, rolling blunts, and setting things on fire. This is a substantial hurdle when attempting to create a new society. Their reddit page is full of comedic gold including pictures of a “garden” that was planted.

Yes, that’s just dirt poured on top of cardboard, with plants that were no doubt yoinked from a nursery somewhere planted in that two inches of dirt. Unfortunately you can’t just plant HotPockets™ trees.

Overall, it seems pretty harmless though. As long as the revolutionary LARPers trying to live out their Che Guevara fantasies are kept at bay, it might remain chill. There are quite a few dubious types with guns within the CHAZ.

Finally, Minneapolis has decided to “abolish the police”.

That’s quite a bold move. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. I keep seeing people using Camden, New Jersey as a model for police reform, but evidently that city isn’t necessarily the success story it’s being propped up as.

Good luck Minneapolis.

Here’s one final nugget before I leave:

So apparently quarantine is over, and boy is it over in grand fashion.

We went from: “Covid-19 is a pandemic, how dare you go out in public, I hope the police arrest these people putting everyone else at risk”, to: “Oh well, fuck it”, in the matter of like 24 hours. Now the police are suddenly the bad guys again, and the people gathering outside are the heroes. What a plot twist to end all plot twists.

Obviously there’s a reason for all of this, namely continued police brutality and the subsequent lack of accountability that always seems to follow. That series of events that happens over and over again like in that movie Groundhog Day ™ starring Chris Elliott and also Bill Murray. Cop uses excessive force, civilian dies, cop gets put on paid leave, people get outraged, cop is finally held accountable, cop only gets a slap on the wrist, it turns out the cop had a long history of bad conduct, repeat the process again next month.

Now we’re gathering outside in cities across America as if Covid-19 was nothing more than a fad or meme that had lived past its expiration date.

Which bring us to now. When I originally started writing this post a few days ago, it was merely chronicling some of the events that had transpired. I wrote about the peaceful protests, the opportunists hijacking the movement to “smash capitalism” and steal shit, and how the different media outlets were choosing to portray these events.

When I was almost done with the post, I realized something. For all the tweets and pictures of gatherings and destruction, I had like 3 times as many pictures of outright police brutality that had occurred in the just the span of a week. So I scrubbed what I had already written, and am posting this instead.

I’ll write about some of the other goings on later, but for now I’m just going to catalog some of the more egregious instances of police overreach. This entire situation started over police brutality, so it’s ironic that so much brutality has transpired during protests against said brutality.

And now for some bonus police shenanigans:

Good times.

It’s been close to two months since the quarantine started. I can no longer stand upright without the use of crutches. I weigh 87 pounds currently. I look like a much handsomer version of Christian Bale in The Machinist.

Not too much has changed since the last post. Things are still boring. I’m still spending way too much time on the internet. I’m also actually missing work for the first time in my entire life.

Perhaps one of the most interesting factors of this pandemic, is how much blatant over-reach certain authorities are exercising. When people have been whipped up into a high enough state of fear, they tend to relax their morals and let authoritarianism creep into their lives. They become more inclined to give up their freedoms for some minuscule sense of security.

We’re inching ever closer to that dystopian form of government wherein authorities use facial-recognition software to single out the “bad apples” and keep people in line. Similar systems are currently employed in China, tied into their glorious social credit score system:

Police forces in numerous countries are currently using drones to check up on people, even going so far as to peep into people’s backyards to make sure the lower classes aren’t gathering in groups. How very 1984:

These authoritarians often create and impose rules on others that they themselves refuse to abide by. The examples from the last month alone would be enough to fill an entire post, so here are two that happened to revolve around personal grooming:

It also turns out that most first world countries handled Covid19 about as incompetently as humanly possible, with very few places having actually taken effective measures. One such place was Taiwan. The same Taiwan whom the World Health Organization decided to actively ignore back in December. Taiwan then proceed to actively ignore the WHO and do things their own way. Here is an explanation as to why Taiwan barely had to employ much of a lockdown and is currently living life normally:

The WHO didn’t take Covid19 very seriously until March 11th, as outlined in my last post. They actively warned against travel bans and consistently downplayed the virus at first. Taiwan ignored all this advice and started treating this like a serious outbreak since the beginning of February. Part of their reasoning had to do with being hit so hard by SARS 15 years ago. They didn’t want to make the same mistakes, so they were extra cautious, and it paid off.

It’s also important to keep in mind that most Asian countries already have a culture of wearing masks in public. Masks work, so these countries already had a layer of protection in effect from the beginning. Meanwhile the “health experts” were providing this information elsewhere:

Who knows how many lives would have been saved if: a) we had an adequate stockpile of mask beforehand, and b) the above misinformation hadn’t been so widespread. Hopefully these mistakes aren’t made again, and more countries are properly prepared the next time this happens.

Finally, before I head out, here is China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department™ calling Covid19 the Wuhan virus, only to start railing against the term a month later:

This change of heart lines up conveniently with the time Mr Zhao starts to push a theory that the coronavirus was brought to China via the U.S. military. The CCP narrative changed from “this is our fault” to “this is their fault”, so he starts using the WHO as a shield to deflect any criticism of the CCP on social media. It’s quite the clever tactic.

Despite the impressive title, this account is seemingly just a means of propaganda propagation. It’s to give the optics that China has an open representative on twitter. The funny thing about this, is that twitter is blocked in China, as are most non-Chinese social media sites (they use Weibo). The CCP doesn’t want its citizens using any platform that it doesn’t have ultimate control over the information on. The average Chinese citizen isn’t seeing anything this guy posts. He’s employed by the CCP to broadcast on China’s behalf on non-Chinese social media.

For all the talk of Russian meddling, and constant accusations from blue state boomers about people being “bots”, I have yet to see any suspicious Russian accounts on twitter. Ever. I’ve definitely looked. Perhaps I need to look harder. Meanwhile, it’s amazing how many accounts like this there are on twitter:

“Kate Carter” here is responding to Mr Zhao’s post about the U.S. Military bringing Covid19 to Wuhan. She also just so happens to “Love Chinese Fantastic Government System”. Seems like a totally legit, organically-created twitter account. It makes me wonder if there are U.S. government officials on Weibo with handles like 中国是最好的 actively spreading American propaganda. There probably are. I’d go looking for some, but Weibo is kind of a nightmare to navigate.