What a fucking couple of weeks. Everything just keeps going, new things just keep happening, it's so hard to keep up on anything. Multnomah County here in Oregon has entered "Phase 1" of reopening despite a strong week of new Covid cases but apparently "The hospitals are well below capacity" and that is the metric for justifying death that we are using now. I can't fucking stand it. I see people all the time ignoring masks, social distancing recommendations, and advice from actual doctors and it drives me crazy, and the thing is, so many of them aren't deluded or assholes, they know they shouldn't be doing it and they just... do it anyway. When confronted they give a sheepish look and just sort of mumble incoherently and change the subject. It drives me crazy, those of us who are able to stay home have a power to entertain ourselves unmatched in human history and yet we apparently can't possibly be happy without going camping, or to the bar, or to get a fucking haircut. How fucking spoiled are we.
I nearly became that which I hate, I've been wanting to visit my friends in Colorado for a while and was hoping to do so in a month or so. I was thinking of driving so I could avoid the airports and also because I like driving. I talked to some friends and we agreed that perhaps I could manage it safely. My wife wasn't super comfortable with it though and since I respect that I agreed to keep an eye on cases and see what happened, then everything started spiking, now 30+ states, including Oregon, are showing large increases in Covid cases, more than we had at the beginning of this ordeal in many cases. And I just can't justify it anymore, I can't be the guy who becomes a disease vector across half a country. Even if there is a 1% chance that happens I can't take that risk. I'll have to settle for our weekly movie nights instead for the time being.
It sucks because I don't really see another time to go traveling coming soon either. Summer is looking horrible, and all the epidemiologists are pretty much in agreement that we'll see another spike in the fall, folks, if we see a spike from what we have now, we are totally fucked. I don't see travel being a thing until early 2021 at best, and honestly maybe not until a real good treatment or vaccine rolls out will travel be a responsible choice.
As this all goes on protests are still happening, fortunately you want to be masked at a protest usually anyway, so I hope that they won't be super-spreader events, we'll start seeing data for that pretty soon I think. We haven't had a ton of news coverage of the protests lately, this is because without carnage there isn't a lot to grab attention, so the major networks are kinda just ignoring things. It's hard to sustain rage and after the initial chaos both sides have calmed down a little. The police are at least trying to hide their excesses somewhat, and the protesters aren't breaking things. I don't think this is a good situation mind, I preferred the breaking things, that is what got people making even the mild changes we have seen over the last month.
The situation is unlikely to remain stable though, just like how we can't control ourselves with the virus, the cops are inherently unable to stop being fucking monsters for very long, so they will do something blatantly egregious soon, assuming we are all desensitized to their bullshit and not paying attention anymore, they will be proven wrong rather quickly. That or they will decide not to press charges against someone who clearly murdered a black person on video and things will blow up again from there, and can I say by the way, that the fact that I don't have to specify I specific obviously murdered black person on video should terrify everyone? We have multiple to choose from in the last two months alone, to say nothing of the spate of "suicides" where black men just happened to hang themselves from trees outside major cities.
Really liking the various reports of cops being whiny little idiots when they discover that the entire public isn't gonna immediately suck their dicks for murdering people though, like the one who decided it was a good idea to post a video of them crying because they had to wait for their food at McDonalds and got scared that the employees would do something to it because they were a cop, or the SWAT team in Florida that quit because a police chief took a knee with protesters, despite it clearly being a pandering stunt. Like, you're gonna quit because we don't thank you for your boot? Don't fucking threaten me with a good time. Fragile fucking babies. Will you die screaming in your own shit like a baby does if we ignore you? One can only hope.
Speaking of fragile screaming babies, glorious leader had a rally the other day and it went beautifully, the following picture sums it up pretty well I think.
The video is better, seek it out if you want to watch a defeated man walk across a lawn for 45 seconds, I won't judge. A lot of commentary has been made about how people online, specifically Kpop fans, screwed up attendance by preregistering for tickets in the hundreds of thousands and just not going. This is all very funny and good, and I respect the hustle, but it ignores a bigger and more important fact: Trump rallies have been super well attended and had tons of overflow for the duration of his political career, and tickets for those rallies pretty much always run out, despite all that getting into them has pretty much always been on a first come first served basis, so the fact that tickets "ran out" shouldn't have prevented him from filling his arena, there is always overflow, they were even counting on their being overflow and scheduled Nigel Farage of all people to do a speech to the anticipated overflow crowd. This never happened, which means those fans didn't show up. In Oklahoma, a state he got 65% of the vote in.
It's the start of the summer and it doesn't really mean much as a singular data point, but outside of hearing that he caught Covid and is choking on his own fluids while on a ventilator it's some of the better news we can get right now. So it's a high enough note to end on.
No comments:
Post a Comment