Today's COVIDiots

Windemere Florida

Gizmodo:

The protesters said many things during the rally that simply aren’t true, including a claim that the disease has a “99.6% recovery rate.” The mortality rate for the disease may indeed be below 1% at the moment, but the word “recovery” is misleading. Some people who contract covid-19 suffer for months and the long term effects of the virus, especially in children, are still unknown. There’s also evidence that some people are experiencing significant cognitive impairment from the coronavirus, including vivid hallucinations in some cases.

“This is a virus that is very well contained, this is a virus that the CDC is removing epidemic status from,” one of the unnamed protesters told Global News. Neither of those things are true, of course. The disease is running rampant through the U.S. with no end in sight and is far from “contained.”

“Everyone is responsible for their own health care decisions,” one of the protesters said, another idiotic talking point that is simply false on its face.

The logic of “personal responsibility” doesn’t work during a viral pandemic. There’s no such thing as a choice that only impacts you when there’s a virus that spreads easily from person to person, especially as many people have no choice but to return to work as the virus spreads uncontrollably.

How It Works

Protesters don't block traffic in an attempt to gain our support. They do it so you can get an idea of what it's like to be stuck in a situation where you're powerless.

How do you respond to this? Are you calm and peaceful? Do you intend to spend the next several years organizing political rallies and looking for ways to negotiate with the leaders of your government?

No. You wanna run over those protesters. Kill 'em. Kill 'em all.

If you feel like killing protesters who have you stuck in traffic, imagine what you might do to a whole system that patrols, harasses and kills you.

The sooner you learn a little perspective on this shit, the sooner protesters stop fucking up traffic.

On That Rioting Thing

Branden Michael Wolfe

Mercury News:

A St. Paul security guard was wearing stolen police gear when he was arrested Wednesday, six days after he’s accused of helping to burn down the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct during riots following the death of George Floyd.

Branden Michael Wolfe, 23, was fired June 3 from his security job at Menards on University Avenue after the store learned of social media reports that identified him as a participant in the May 28 rioting.

A Menards employee called police after Wolfe tried to enter the store later that day wearing stolen body armor and a law enforcement duty belt and carrying a police baton, according to a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court.anden Michael Wolfe.(Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)

St. Paul police found him in a vehicle several miles from the store, still wearing the body armor and duty belt, which was affixed with handcuffs, a baton, a knife and an ear piece. His name was handwritten on duct tape attached to the back of the body armor, according to the complaint.

In a police interview, Wolfe admitted he stoked the 3rd Precinct fire by pushing a wooden barrel into the flames.

He also reportedly admitted to stealing several items from inside and identified himself in multiple photographs that showed a man standing in front of the East Lake Street precinct holding a police baton as the building burned behind him.

Was the whole "rioting" thing a put on by agents provocateur? Of course not.

But there's an obvious attempt going on to paint the demonstrations as "left wing mob violence", and that's just not true.

“Radical left-wing mobs seek to tear down our monuments & our memorials—everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass & even Gandhi. Misguided movements such as ‘Defund the Police’ seek to leave our communities more vulnerable than ever.” -@PressSec pic.twitter.com/nvbv2lbdgX

— GOP (@GOP) July 7, 2020

Progress

WaPo:

Richmond’s grand statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson came down Wednesday in a sudden thunderstorm and a burst of mayoral muscle, becoming the latest Confederate monument toppled amid a national reckoning on racism and injustice.

Hundreds gathered to watch crews dismantle the statue, one of five honoring Confederate icons on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Onlookers cheered, and bells rang out from the nearby First Baptist Church.

One supporter of the monuments cried.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D), bucking advice from the city attorney and relying on emergency powers, dispatched a crew to take down the statue after the City Council delayed a vote on removing it along with three others owned by the city along the avenue. The fifth Confederate statue is owned by the state

Once the equestrian statue was lifted from its base and lowered to the ground, just after 4:30 p.m., Stoney compared the moment to the end of the Cold War.

“The Berlin Wall fell, but also the system fell with it,” the 39-year-old mayor said. “Now for us, as elected leaders, alongside our community, it’s our job to rip out the systemic racism that is found in everything we do — from government, to health care, to the criminal justice system.”

There are no statues of Lenin or Saddam or Tojo or Mussolini or Rommel.

We should not be putting up monuments to exalt "the noble losers" - no matter how valiantly they fought in service to a cause that proved out to be little more than the usual desire of evil men to impose a gross injustice on an unwilling populace.

BTW, that's how you do it. You make a political decision based on the outcome of an election. You remove the offending article in broad daylight, under peaceful conditions.

I think I understand the impetus for protests and the impulse to destroy the symbols of oppression and hatred.

But we have rules. We even have rules on how you break the rules.

Don't throw rocks and then hide your hands

Tiny Desk

Josh Ritter
Jason Isbell
Amanda Shires

3.5%

Don't let the gun nuts fool ya.

The 2nd amendment is not - and has never been - about an armed citizenry being able to resist its own tyrannical government.

Non-cooperation:

They can have my dead broken body, but not my obedience.

Today's GIF

With plenty of our own shit to deal with, it can be hard to stay open to what else is going on out in the world.

We've got brothers and sisters in the streets of Hong Kong protesting the kind of Daddy State takeover that we're trying to get people to understand is happening right here in USAmerica Inc.

Today's Tweet

I'm lovin' me some of our British cousins.

Aerial view of today's Anti-Trump protest London.

Thousands of Protesters March down the Streets Of London against Trump's policies & recent Visit.

I'm guessing this wasn't the Parade Trump was hoping for lol pic.twitter.com/k1RJOrOocv

— Terrence Daniels (Captain Planet) (@Terrence_STR) June 4, 2019

Moving Past It

A Nazi asshole killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others when he drove his car into a group of people here in my home town August 12, 2017.

That asshole made a deal and changed his plea to guilty for 29 Federal Hate Crime charges.

As part of the deal, prosectors didn't ask for the death penalty, and the judge is reviewing the thing now.

James Fields could be sentenced to life plus 419 years in federal prison.

WaPo:

James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in a case that has come to symbolize the violent resurgence of white supremacism in the United States. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.

Late last year, Fields was convicted in state court of first-degree murder and other charges for killing Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens at the chaotic Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. The jury in that case recommended a life sentence, and a state judge is scheduled to formally impose it in mid-July.

The kicker, and a little taste of something I can't quite put my finger on:
Attorney General William P. Barr approved the deal.

It's Not About The Dying

It's about surviving and remembering what happened - and why it happened.

It's about making sure we always link the outcome to the causes of the outcome. 

WaPo:

The counterprotesters who had gathered in this city’s downtown were cheering, chanting and hugging one another. The white supremacist rally had been stopped before it was supposed to begin. “These are the happy people,” Marissa Blair Martin remembered thinking, as she, her fiance and her friend Heather Heyer walked to join the marching crowd.

Blair Martin live-streamed the scene on her Facebook page. She said she wanted people to see the celebration, and she wanted friends who were concerned for her safety to know there was nothing to worry about.

Then, she heard the sound of tires screeching, and the joy turned to “moments of terror,” Blair Martin testified.

As the murder trial of James A. Fields Jr. entered its second week here Monday, Blair Martin was among the witnesses who continued to describe the chaos of Aug. 12, 2017, when Heyer — whom Blair Martin described as compassionate, “always outspoken but not argumentative” — was killed.

Fields, a self-professed neo-Nazi who had driven from his apartment in Ohio to the “Unite the Right” rally, roared his car into the counterprotesters, killing Heyer and wounding 35 others, some seriously.

The death capped off a violent day of hate that captured worldwide attention and forever tied this quiet college town to the emergence of white supremacists emboldened by the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Daddy State always rouses the rabble. By now, we have to know 45* will always follow the pattern of Stochastic Terrorism.

He'll always stoke the paranoia. He'll always speak vaguely (and not so vaguely) in terms of violence, intending to impel violent action while maintaining a plausible deniability.

It's what an asshole like 45* does. And so, weirdly enough - though it's not weird at all - he can talk the talk of personal responsibility and self-reliance, having provided himself plenty of Smarm Space to blame a simpleton like Fields for doing something along the lines of  what 45* had in mind the whole time. 

For normal people, what Fields did was almost precisely what we all know 45* expected some "lone wolf" to do.

None of this is new - I've said all this before - lots of people have said it all before. And I don't care if it sounds too familiar or it's boring for you or whatever. 

45* sent his fucking goons to my home town, and they killed Heather Heyer. 

This will not be forgotten and it will not be forgiven - go ahead and talk to Jesus for that one if you feel the need, but you're not gettin' it from me.

We make this about the living only if we survive it and remember the dead.

Today's Tweet

"I want you to be nice. Until it's time to not be nice." --Dalton, in Roadhouse

Just gonna say it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with confronting elected officials in public. Nothing. Zero. We should do more of it.

It is who we are as Americans.

Channel Thoreau. Do it.

No politician was conscripted to serve. They asked for the opportunity.

— David Jolly (@DavidJollyFL) October 21, 2018

 

The "Rallies"

What if they threw a Racist Asshole Shindig and nobody showed up?

This is the “Unite the Right”’rally crowd. All of them. pic.twitter.com/flgi9jqZQ2

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) August 12, 2018

 

Meanwhile, in Charlottesville yesterday:

I guess the good news is that very little happened yesterday.

And there were no military-looking snipers that the cops were really reluctant to acknowledge on top of any buildings (none that I could see anyway) - that in itself qualifies as a big improvement over Saturday.

And I guess the bad news is that plenty of people showed up looking for a fight.

Anniversary

Joe Heim, WaPo:

CHARLOTTESVILLE — There are no visible scars on Charlottesville. It remains a beautiful, leafy town of 50,000 residents with a thriving core, great restaurants, a bustling nightlife, and the cultural and intellectual amenities of being home to the state’s signature university and a major hospital. 

But if the outward appearance is unchanged, those who live here know how injured the city is and how strained the recovery has been. On Aug. 12, the city will mark one year since racial hatred bared its fangs here, menacing a community and a country. There will be prayer services and music and tributes to the injured and the dead. It is being billed as a day to remember and to heal after a tumultuous and often painful year.

Charlottesville has spent the better part of the past 12 months remembering and recovering. It also has been taking stock and placing blame. There has been plenty of that to go around. Blame for law enforcement that didn’t protect its citizens. Blame for the city council and the local and state government that planned ineffectively. Blame for the university that didn’t communicate the danger to its community. Blame for President Trump for not speaking out unequivocally to condemn the marchers who had spewed their racist views.

- and -

The violence of last August shattered the conceptions some here had of their home. There was a desire to look at the white supremacists as invaders and outsiders, even though two of the organizers, Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, were U-Va. graduates and Kessler lives in the city. The city had to more closely examine what it represented.

“We lost our naivete,” said Kathy Galvin, 62, a city councilwoman who has lived in Charlottesville since 1983. “It is easy to kind of take comfort in all the accolades we got up until that point. ‘Most innovative city, the happiest city.’ But there were many of us who knew that we had entrenched pockets of poverty that were also aligned by race and were legacies of Jim Crow.”

While the process has been difficult, it has also been illuminating, Galvin said.

Today's Tweet

I don't know how long it's been going on - I'm thinking it's been at least a coupla weeks - and I just hope it goes on for a good while longer.

Trump hates T-Rexes pic.twitter.com/lmmWu58tZm

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) August 2, 2018

 

Today's Tweet

You know it's a party when the mariachis show up.

I dare you not to sing along. A Mexican Mariachi band sings “Canta y no llores” (aka “Cielito Lindo”) outside the White House on this 3rd Day of anti-Trump protests following Trump’s disastrous summit with Putin in Helsinki.#OccupyLafayettePark pic.twitter.com/NhYGbN1Cnv

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) July 19, 2018

 

Today's Corporate Overreach

Albert Breer, Sports Illustrated:

ATLANTA — On Tuesday, NFL owners put three hours aside for a privileged session to speak—amongst themselves and family members—about the most sensitive of topics.

One was how the league will handle players kneeling during the national anthem going forward. An idea being floated in the room goes like this: It would be up to the home team on whether both teams come out of the locker room for the anthem, and, should teams come out, 15-yard penalties could be assessed for kneeling.

The league is currently being sued by Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, with the two unsigned free agents alleging that NFL teams colluded to keep them unemployed. Kaepernick was the first NFL player to kneel during the national anthem, to protest police brutality, starting a trend that swept across the league in 2016 and '17.

The NFL addressed the anthem issue at its meetings in October and March, with plans to further discuss it at this meeting. The league also met with the Players Coalition in October, and agreed to a seven-year, $89 million social-justice partnership.

According to sources, the owners also discussed how to move forward its partnership with the players and finalized the terms of the deal.

My dearest NFL,

Fuck you.

Even if you decide not to go thru with it, you're seriously considering it. Add this to all your other attempts to manipulate and control players to the point where most of them lose everything no matter what they're willing to sacrifice in order to play a game that makes a very few people obscenely wealthy, and I can only conclude one thing - fuck you.

Your pal,

Mike

Today's Today

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

--Edward Abbey

May 4, 1970

And not to be too obvious...

Yesterday

First this:

Then this:

NBC29 WVIR Charlottesville, VA  News, Sports and Weather

So maybe ol' Pete was just fuckin' with me - dunno - but at least he reported it pretty well once he got it on the air.

Turnout

I was a little worried that this year's Women's March numbers might be down, and it would indicate that we're sliding into normalization due to Trump Fatigue.

Looks like I didn't have to be concerned at all - except that I haven't seen a great level of solid confirmation, but that could be a priority conflict with the Press Poodles having to decide between the protests and the shutdown.

Still, marches went off as planned, and (apparently) exceeded my expectations.

Vox:

Crowd estimates from Women’s Marches on Saturday now tally over 4 million and political scientists think we may have just witnessed the largest day of demonstrations in American history.

According to data collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut, marches held in more than 600 US cities were attended by at least 4.2 million people.

- and -

The turnout at events outside the US was significant, too. Chenoweth and Pressman have recorded over 200 international Women’s Marches with an estimated attendance of more than 307,000.

Half the town of Stanley, Idaho (pop. 63) came out in a snowstorm to march in peace & solidarity w/ men, women, & children on 7 continents. pic.twitter.com/tLPCognu2t

— Carole King (@Carole_King) January 22, 2017

The Nation, John Nichols (pay wall):

A review of the president’s approval ratings from the states that provided Trump with the narrow margin he gained in the Electoral College found across-the-board evidence of decay in enthusiasm. With 55 percent disapproval of Trump in Michigan, 53 percent disapproval in Wisconsin, and 51 percent disapproval in Pennsylvania, a credible case could be made that, were Trump on the ballot today, he would lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote by considerable margins.

But Trump is not on the ballot today, or even this year.

If Trump is ever on the ballot again, it will not be until 2020.

What matters now is who else is on the ballot. The 2018 mid-term elections will be a critical test for the president’s Republican Party and, if patterns hold, they could see a turn in the electoral math sufficient to check and balance the president in Washington while removing his allies in the states. That’s an essential combination because it is not just Trump but Trumpism–as practiced by presidential allies such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker–that must be addressed if the crisis of conservative hegemony is going to ease.

Refresher

A little more on the protests going on during the anthem before football games.

Here's Mike Ditka providing further proof of the latent manifestation of brain injury symptoms a player can display after nearly a lifetime of taking blows to the head.

“All of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression,” Ditka told Jim Gray on Westwood One’s pregame show ahead of the Bears’ “Monday Night Football” loss to the Vikings. “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”
Or maybe he's showing the inner workings of the average GOP rube's mind, but that requires me to ask: How am I supposed to tell the difference?

So let's hear Tim Wise again as he tries to explain some of these things to us: