They think, "Those rubes won't know we're pulling a fast one! All we have to do is say 'science!' and they'll fall in line!"
COVID-19 is still a public health crisis, you see, but racism is a bigger public health crisis than COVID-19 is! And the virus isn't racist and it knows this, so it will magically stay away from people who are protesting!
"Our leaders and their health professionals believe 100 'Protesters' are equally 'deadly' and equally likely to 'kill their granny' as 12 'non-protesters'...." COVID-19 math!
...I think it's much more likely that the asshats who are making this claim think there's a bigger benefit to "protests" (read: "rioting and looting and general mayhem") than there is to shutting off as much economic activity as they can. The objective of all of this is to get rid of Trump, not to save any lives or anything. If they thought it would mean that Trump would lose the election, and given no other choice but A: "four more years of Trump!" or B: killing an entire school full of innocent children, the Democrat party would hit Option B so fast it'd make your head swim.
* * *
They just undermined the case for lockdowns with this shit.
* * *
My response would approximate "LOLGF". Chicago's lesbian-of-color mayor is begging the retailers who were looted in the rioting she would not lift a finger to stop not to leave Chicago.
If it's me, I say, "Mayor, all due respect and all, but if you can't keep people from looting my store, I can't afford to do business here. You get the crime and the other stuff under control and I'll think about coming back, but until then, no."
"Why, exactly, would major retailers choose to rebuild and re-open stores that were burned to the ground or otherwise destroyed by rioters?"
* * *
Of course Pritzker has banned the journalist who discovered his wife was violating lockdown. I support any politician's right to ban journalists from their offices etcetera. Any time a reporter acts like a shithead and tells lies about you, and distorts what you say, and in general acts like a dickhead, I think a politician has every right to deny him access.
But I also note that Pritzker is doing this not because the journalist lied and distorted and took cheap shots at him, but because he simply told the truth about Pritzker's wife breaking the lockdown. Pritzker is punishing this reporter for asking an inconvenient question, one that made Pritzker look bad.
* * *
Here's a thought: if you're worried about the health effects of tear gas DON'T RIOT. Try not throwing rocks at police, and listen to them when they tell you to disperse, and they won't fire tear gas at you. Amazing, how that works!
No sympathy, here.
* * *
Game company shuts down its servers for two hours "to honor the legacy of George Floyd" and I need to stop the tape RIGHT THERE, because I want to know what that man's "legacy" is, exactly. He did a nickel for taking part in a home invasion where a woman was held at gunpoint, moved to another state "to get his life together", and then resisted arrest when he passed a bogus $20 bill.
How is shutting down a couple of games going to stop racism? What legacy did this man leave behind?
* * *
Abolishing the police is straight out of Lenin's playbook. You have abolished "the police" but you still have a force of people who enforce the law; the only difference is that instead of being officers of the courts they are officers of whoever is in charge, and they enforce laws according to his whims.
My niece, over on Faceboob, posted a link to this nonsense:
...which is a bunch of "abolish the police" horseshit. Each one of those things ends with, "Isn't this public safety?"
My response was the "HA HA" reaction.
IMAGINE what happens when the "trained responders" can't get the person to do what they want. "Someone seems to be snooping in car windows on your block. IMAGINE...calling your neighbors who are trained in self-defense and deescalation & approaching the person. An hour later the conflict is resolved & the person responsible is getting the support they need. ISN'T THAT PUBLIC SAFETY?"
Okay. IMAGINE calling whoever it is who is "trained". They approach the guy...who whips out a gun and shoots them dead.
I guess that leads to this one: "Incidents of gun violence are rising in your neighborhood. IMAGINE...a trauma informed crisis intervention team works with community activists to disarm and deescalate conflicts. People doing harm are connected to services that address the underlying problem. ISN'T THAT PUBLIC SAFETY?"
...except the gun violence is caused by rival gangs fighting over turf, and they don't give a fuck about "deescalation". Unless the "service" that these "people doing harm" are connected to is twenty-five years in the joint with no parole, the only way to deal with the "underlying problem" is to kill off one of the gangs.
It's all 100% pie-in-the-sky nonsense. It won't work, because in order for it to work it would have to be employed against a society of white college graduates. Unfortunately, the places that these kinds of things are problems are not the places that white college graduates tend to gather. This fuzzy-headed claptrap won't lead to utopia. This all sounds perfectly lovely, but just remember that a lot of the public schools in our country are staffed by true believers, people who became educators because that's what they truly wanted to do with their lives...and yet our schools are the worst in the industrialized world because good intentions don't do anything but lead to perdition.
What you end up with is a gang of stormtroopers who are not bound by the limits that the civilian police force had. Their solutions to these various problems ends up being going in and shooting people until everyone else surrenders, at which point the survivors are bundled up and sent off to the gulag. This is what happened when Lenin did this; I have no doubt that the result would be the same anywhere it's tried.
If you want to abolish your police force, please do us the courtesy first of building a very high wall around your city, with no exits. And armed men on those walls ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape.
* * *
Supposedly a majority of blacks approve of Trump's performance.
I am leery of all polls. I am not going to make the mistake that the Democrats did in 2016 and think that the polls are gospel; I approach the polls thinking that they are political propaganda, nothing more. I like it when they say Trump has high approval ratings, and can believe them to some extent because Trump really is a transformative figure in American politics.
...but when they start contradicting conventional wisdom? That's when I suspect they're being massaged to convince Republican voters to stay home.
Mind you: if it's true, then it's fantastic.
The media were all set up to pan the economic news released today. They were all set to report that unemployment hit 20% and lay it at Trump's feet. But unemployment went down rather than up, because the lockdowns are slowly lifting and people are going back to work, and the disappointment of the media was palpable.
Today's news is encouraging: it's looking like the economic downturn is going to be V-shaped after all, and that once the restrictions are fully eased everything will roar back to full speed again.
So: expect the Democrat-media complex to try to find reasons to extend the lockdowns. "There's a big surge in cases! We have to lock down again!" But hopefully the "protesting is okay!" asshattery will be waved in their faces.
Jerkoffs.
* * *
As for me, had a bit of a day today. Not a bad one, just...kind of clanky, I guess.
Right now it's 80 outside and humid.
...went out to the garage to putter a bit. Put Buttercup's battery on a different battery charger, then hooked the trickle charger to a battery and checked its output.
60 milliamps.
It's supposed to do an amp. I looked at the charger and verified that its rated output is 1 A of current at either 6 or 12 volts. Fine; the DMM can handle ten amps, so let's see what happens if I just check the output of the thing across the DMM!
It should have smoked it. I wouldn't really care--$4 Harbor Freight DMM--but the DMM reported a nice steady 50 milliamps, which is enough to charge a AA cell (MAYBE) but not a motorcycle battery, damn it. In fact, the case could be made that if the battery had any juice in it at all, it would simply shove current through the charger such that the net current was "battery output current" less 50 milliamps. *whimper*
With Buttercup's battery hooked to the #2 charger (the one that used to be for a battery backed sump pump) I expect it to be full of electrons in the morning. If being hooked to that little charger didn't kill it.
...and it might just be that the same thing happened to the battery for Mrs. Fungus' motorcycle. One thing is sure: I'm replacing that battery charger!
Meanwhile, the battery I ordered has not arrived. "Delayed" is all the thing says. Reason? Asshole riots. I mean, they don't say that; they just say "delayed", but it's not hard to figure out why when there's a bunch of shitheads all over the news stealing whatever isn't nailed down. (It may have been looted, in fact; you never know.) Anyway, it's not here yet, and I can't ride the bike without it.
But, oh well. Supposed to have nice riding weather this weekend, and my bike works, so hopefully I'll get some seat time in.