With bullets, I mean--actual lead bullets, probably metal jacketed. Not rubber bullets, not bean bags, not anything other than actual metal bullets, meant to cause as much bodily injury as they can.
Strangely enough, this had the effect of discouraging looting and rioting. It was sort of understood that if you threw a brick or a molotov cocktail at police, you were taking your life in your hands, because they'd fucking shoot you while you were still winding up your throw. It's not "fascism" and it's not "summary execution" but SIMPLE SELF-DEFENSE to shoot someone who is winding up to throw a molotov cocktail at you, for fuck's sake.
This business of just letting people clean stores out is ridiculous. We need to stop allowing this kind of shit. The rioters need to be shot at. The looters need to be shot at. There needs to be severe and immediate negative consequences for mob violence and theft.
I'm absolutely infuriated over this. It's fucking ridiculous that the major cities are allowed to turn into demilitarized zones like this. It's not "justice"; it's not even on the same continent as justice. Justice is the cop who knelt on that guy's neck being fired from his job and charged with second degree murder, and the other cops who just stood there and watched being fired and charged as accessories. A bunch of assholes stealing televisions off a train is nothing but opportunistic theft, and there should have been a hell of a lot of people being shot.
I wonder how they knew that particular container was full of TVs?
Confronted with the actual "well-regulated militia" of Coeur d'Alene, rioters and looters turned around and went home rather than get their lawless asses filled full of lead.
And of course antifa is trying to make fake stories to stir shit up. I'm glad President Trump declared antifa to be a terrorist organization. They need to be stopped.
I'm not surprised that de Blasio is calling police chiefs and telling them not to make arrests. They know who is causing the violence. It's not "white supremecists" nor is it "boogaloos". It's communist antifa that's doing it. And if Trump gets another term I bet that the connection between antifa and the Democrat party will become manifest, and lots of people will go to jail.
The assholes say they're coming to rural America next but apparently they never watched much of Deadwood, because otherwise they'd know about Wu's hogs.
And no, this shit is not unprecedented. If it were, I would not be sick to death of it.
And remember what I said a few weeks ago, about how mainstream many of my thoughts turn out to be? I wonder if I'm alone in this, or if other folks are also fucking sick and tired of this horseshit.
* * *
Today, Limbaugh was saying that residents of the blue cities are getting what they voted for. I thought that's not quite correct. The residents of the blue cities are getting what they actually voted for, not what they thought they were voting for.
Okay: no one votes for more crime. But they might vote for "criminal justice reform", especially if the people they're voting for tell them that they're running for the office to "eliminate racism". And so the politician promising "criminal justice reform" wins, and raises the "petty theft" bar to $950, and changes how bail is figured so most criminals don't need to post bond to be released. Presto: more crime!
No one votes for confiscatory taxation. But they might vote for "better schools!", which is a promise made in every last damned election. The problem is that there is somehow never enough money for the schools to properly educate the children, all of whom must (by law) attend school until age 17, whether they actually have any interest in learning anything or not. Usually "not", of course, because trying to learn is "acting white". So despite ever-increasing school funding, the schools turn into shitholes where no one can learn anything because the kids who don't want to be there do nothing but make trouble for everyone else.
I could come up with many more examples exactly like that. The point is, the people are being promised something by the Democrats, but what the Democrats deliver is the exact opposite of what they promise. By design--because to fix a problem is to disarm yourself in your eternal quest for power. How can you campaign on fixing the schools if someone goes and fixes them? How can you campaign on reducing crime if it's already low?
The Democrat party wants--needs--things to be as bad as they can possibly be, every last damnable day of the next five months. COVID-19 is ending, so right on cue we get this shit.
And from that last link, a credible case can be made that the whole "jogger" thing was supposed to spark the riots:
...just a few weeks ago we had Jogger. This was an off-Broadway effort to angry-up the blacks, but it failed to catch on. Blacks were sort of ready to play their role, but only the dumbest white people fell for it. Those would be the type who declare their pronouns on social media. Normal white people saw through the plot like a bad movie and failed to show up at the theater. Jogger never made it to Broadway.The Democrat party needs things to be as bad as possible because otherwise Trump is going to steamroll them in the elections, and they know it.
My hope--my fervent wish--is that everything they are doing will backfire, just the way it has been backfiring since 2016, and make more people support Trump.
* * *
"Five staff, one of whom is a stripper" are why hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is not being used against COVID-19. I can remember all the posts on Arse Technica about how HCQ wasn't effective against COVID-19. I remember all the leftists saying that Trump was stupid and HCQ didn't work and he was endangering lives because of this study that showed that HCQ didn't work.
This is the post from Derek "In The Pipeline" Lowe about it. The study is total made-up garbage. It was done by a think tank from no data. Not peer-reviewed, either.
Okay? None of the people involved in the "study" appear to have degrees in anything, let alone a salient field of study like pharmacology or microbiology or even chemistry.
Gee--I wonder who paid for that study? It wouldn't be Gilead, the makers of Remdesivir, now, would it?
* * *
Chilling news, pun intended: "The majority of North America has suffered an historically chilly start to 2020, and the cold isn't letting up, continuing through May and busting hundreds of low temperature records as it goes."
If the globe were warming, we would be breaking all-time high temperature records, and in job lots. We are not; at best, we meet a relative handful of them. But we are breaking all-time cold temperature records.
You figure out what that means.
* * *
So, yes, I'm in a mood tonight.
Something that I thought had stopped happening--I would write a story, and have some kind of event or something happen in the story, something I thought was unusual or at least interesting...and then it would go and happen.
In all liklihood it was my subconscious hooking into the zeitgeist and expressing it somehow. You know? I'd think the idea was original, but it wasn't; it was just me looking at the news in the paper and on TV and connecting A and B together. C is inevitable but I didn't know that, so when I wrote about C and then C happened, it blew my mind.
I can't even think of any real examples right now. But it happened many times, years ago; it hasn't happened since something like the 1980s, though...until recently.
See: in Apocalyptic Visions I make a few references to the "Screaming 20s", which is the period from 2020 through 2029 (actually through about 2035). In my SF universe, that was a period of societal decay, mayhem, and general chaos. It coincided with a few things like the development of commercial fusion power ("too cheap to meter") and advanced cybernetics (robust artificial intelligence and fast, dextrous robots) and the resulting replacement of labor with capital (highly automated production). So, a vastly deflationary depression resulted, coupled with civil unrest and other hazards of economic upheaval.
2020, real world: massive pandemic followed by widespread civil disturbances, and the year's barely five months over. *sigh*
In my stories, though, this period results in a rising tide that lifts all boats: everywhere in the world, poverty becomes relative, and by 2060 the first hyperdrive has been tested and verified to work and they're building a starship and-and-and. I have a sort of inchoate idea about what happens to the United States in this period, but the outcome is that the US still exists pretty much intact. When we visit New York City in 2287, it's still basically NYC but with a vastly lower crime rate than it enjoys now (I mean, when "now" is not "DEFCON ONE").
Mainly because if someone tries to loot a store, or cause trouble other ways, he gets shot, damn it!