I got your drinkin' money, tune up your Dobro.

 It's the weekend of the Fourth of July, so if you're going to do something celebrate, have a good time and be safe. I would say avoid big crowds so as to not give the COVID-19 Delta variety a fertile field to grow, but we are way past that, son. But let's move on and get started.

 Good week for the news. We touched on the discussion on medical marijuana in the state senate, the collapse of the condo in Florida, the vagrancies of the law concerning celebrities, and the massive amount of shit Black women have been catching from the Olympic folks. Lots of good stuff there, so go check it out.

 Before I get too deep into it, I just have to get something off my chest. I don't get Nick Cage. I think he's a so-so actor, as far as I can judge those things, when he's being serious (like, say, The Rock) and just irritating when he's being Wacky Nick Cage, like in everything else he does. I'm not crazy about anything he's done, even the iconic roles like in Raising Arizona. If you dig him, fine but I ain't on board. Seriously, Ghost Rider is terrible. Everyone involved should be embarrassed.

 Okay, then. Today's Twitter star is the Intellectual Dark Web darling and editor of the phrenology enthusiasts' publication Quillete Claire Lehmann decided that Sha'Carri Richardson wasn't actually popped for weed but for steroids. Her reasoning? Only steroids could account for Richardson's big hair and long fingernails. No, really. She double-downed on it by claiming Florence Joyner, the late icon, died due to drug abuse. For the record, FloJo died due to an epileptic fit and no one seriously thinks she was juicing, particularly not the coroners who examined her corpse.

But of course, neither she nor her reply guys are backing down on this even in the face of not only having no evidence but all evidence available to the contrary. The only answer is illegal performance-enhancing substances, and nothing else fits, especially for someone like her. You know, "those people" really can't succeed without cheating.

Let's get this out of the way. Yes, I think this is a prime example of pure, uncut racism. If you don't believe so, I do not care. You're probably racist, as well, but don't feel bad. Racism is woven far deeper into American society and it's something most of us have a difficult time recognizing, like a fish explaining what water is. This goes double for anti-Black strains of racism. We don't want to admit it, - see the hoo-hah concerning "Critical Race Theory" - but that is American culture's Original Sin along with genocide and betrayal of the indigenous population.

Again, if you disagree with this perception, I really don't care one way or another. I'm tired of arguing with you assholes and there is plenty of resources available to learn for yourself. There are better people than I who'll spend time trying to save you, but as far as I'm concerned, you can all go skip rope.

One thing that gets me about these discussions is how a lot of people seem to think if there isn't a bonafide slur involved, it can't be an example of racism. I think that's why the "dirtbag left"-slash-IDW-slash-"identity politics" crowd likes things like Quillete so much. It gives them not only an air of legitimacy but isn't as crude as, say, Stormfront. The '90s saw the rise of the Conservative Citizens Council, which rode the same horses as the Klan - white supremacy with a neo-Confederate edge - but wore nice suits and drove expensive cars. A better face on the same old shit, and that's what Quillette is. Plus, it's poorly written, but that's just how things are.

Okay, that's plenty. This has gone on all day and I'm bored with it. Again, if you think I'm being unfair or close-minded concerning Lehmann or the publication, I really don't care and don't waste my time with your jibber-jabber. Keep that in mind if you're experiencing a case of the red ass here. I've been giving Kingdom Come: Deliverance a shot, and goddamn, that's tough. Almost as bad as Outward. It's amazing how much one relies on normal CRPG devices like quest markers and on-screen maps.

But hey. Stay safe, y'all.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Tambourine.

 Weird. This is a new layout for the posting page. We'll see if it's just cosmetic, but I will say I don't like the left-hand side all the way up against the edge of the screen.

 Goddamn internet's still acting up. Had a guy come out and look at it, and while I hate to be mean, he was as useless as tits on a rooster. The replacement modem he gave me didn't work. Furthermore, I learned the local telephone company that provides the DSL - which, at its fastest clocks in around 12 Mbps at best - has to reuse and repair equipment. They only cover Itawamba County and only provide DSL to my area because someone with ties to the owner wanted it. They're putting in fiber-optic cable, but they're going to stop a good five miles from here. On the upside, Tombigbee Power is coming from the other direction with fiber optic, so hopefully by the end of the year, this will be a thing of the past.

 Okay. So much for that. I'd usually wait until the weekend to shine on the News at the WordPress site, but I think yesterday's monster is particularly noteworthy. Because it wound up being so long before all was said and done, I broke it up into two chunks each concentrating on one topic. First is a rundown of the frankly risible welfare scam currently afflicting Mississippi and further weakening Gov. Tate Reeves' stroke in Jackson. While poor folks in the poorest state in the union getting shafted once again by conservative politicians and crooked rich people isn't something to laugh at, this involved Christian wrestling organizers and that just cracks me up. Don't know why. Plus, it goes over all the other dirty deeds by Republicans currently befouling my fair home state.

 The second isn't much funny at all. It's concerning the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, by two white men in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia. I think I did a particularly good bit of journalism, so please do read for the lowdown. In a nutshell, Arbery was running down a street in this neighborhood, and Gregory McMichael and his son Travis chased him down, tried to get him to stop and "talk" to them, got involved in a physical altercation with Arbery involving Travis McMichael and a shotgun when he didn't, three shots were fired and two hit Arbery in the chest to leave him dead in the street. The McMichaels claimed he fit the profile of someone they thought had been robbing different houses in the neighborhood and claimed to have seen him look into the window, alternately using "stand you ground" and "citizen's arrest" as justification. Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper, said her son was jogging and indeed had jogged through that neighborhood before.

 This all happened Feb. 23. The original prosecutor had to recuse herself because Gregory McMichael used to work as an investigator for her office. The second prosecutor had to recuse himself because his son worked in the first prosecutor's office. The second prosecutor was ready to drop the charges, citing Arbery's high school arrests for shoplifting and having a gun on school campus and claiming he had "mental issues," though without any proof. The case only really got due attention after a video of the shooting - filmed apparently by a friend of the McMichaels - surfaced on a Georgia radio station's website and became viral on social media earlier in the week. The case is now in the hands of a third prosecutor from a county 70 miles away and he's announced he intends to fully investigate the shooting and, if necessary, bring charges against the McMichaels.

 Now.

 As with every time this sort of thing happens, legal geniuses on Twitter and Facebook who claim they're either "waiting for all the facts" or that for some reason, shooting a man dead because you think he might be someone who might be a robber is okay because he reacted poorly to two white men with guns chasing him down is perfectly reasonable. Either way, they're infuriated if you call either the shooter or them racist, and bemoan how liberals have tarnished the word because blahdy-blah-blah. Seriously, you sort of wish they'd get a new tune.

 To refresh everyone, I am a white man who was raised and currently lives in the South. Mississippi, in fact. Furthermore, I've not only lived in Georgia but I've never lived anywhere other than the South, either in a rural area, a college town or New Orleans. What I'm saying is, I feel very confident on making a judgment as to whether anti-black racism played a part in this, as well as the overall white supremacist leanings of both Georgia and the United States in general. For the "all the facts" crowd, I think there are enough for me to render judgement without fear of being unfair.

 This is nothing but racism. Aside from the judges' bullshit - and the first judge made the news last year for aggressively prosecuting a black woman who voted in the wrong district because she was given wrong info - the shooting itself was racist. The McMichaels are racist. Now, they may not be cross-burning, fully paid up Klansman. They may have black friends. They still thought a black man running down their street was not only probably the guy who they think had been robbing the area, though even that said robber's black is an assumption, he was worth going after armed and intending to shoot, if necessary, to make a citizen's arrest. Even then, a citizen's arrest is only valid if one sees someone committing a crime or has personal knowledge of a crime committed. Records show 911 was called, but all the McMichaels did was say "There's a black guy running down the street" as justification. Indeed, even the claim that Arbery looked through the window is supposition on their part.

 Furthermore, if you're trying to find why the McMichaels were justified in chasing down and shooting a man for no discernible reason, you yourself are racist as hell, white robe in your closet or not. That's a lot of the problem with American racism. We've relegated it to toothless hillbillies and made it almost comical, when it's a real thing most People of Color deal with almost constantly. Particularly black people who, if you read your history with an honest eye, know we as a nation have royally fucked them other from the days of slavery until the days of James Byrd, and did so with vim and gusto. No, you don't have to drop n-bombs left and right and, no, you don't have to have a Rebel Flag hanging on your wall.

 But if you think it's okay that two random yo-yos shoot someone because they think he's a burglar because he's black and running, then yes, you are as racist the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe even worse, because he's at least honest about it. We pretend anti-black racism ended with the Civil War or, if we're generous, Martin Luther King's work or, if we're stupid, Barack Obama's election to president. But that just ain't so. Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, John Crawfod III, Philandro Castile, and now Aumaud Arbery and Sean Reed are all dead because we're a racist culture that doesn't care if black people get killed and white people get away with it.

 Doesn't matter if they have a gun permit. Doesn't matter if they were minding their own business. Doesn't matter if they needed medical care. Doesn't matter if they were in their own home. We as a culture are fine with white people shooting black people and suffering no consequences for it. And if you try to justify the shootings, either as a natural part of police work or people who're defending themselves, you're saying you're fine with it, too. You can try to deny it and claim all the black friends/relatives/sex partners you want, it's still so.

 Some say racism, particularly anti-black racism, is America's Original Sin. That may be so, but a large part of it is the different rules we hold for white people and everyone else. Last week saw armed and masked "protesters," many kitted out in ill-fitting combat gear, demanding to be allowed in the Michigan capitol to scream in cops' faces about how unfair it was they couldn't get a haircut. The same sort of people regularly parade around with their high-powered weaponry, going to shopping centers or even gun control rallies. These same people protested a recent vote on a gun law in Virginia and were so unhinged they ran a pro-gun Libertarian state senator into protective custody because they didn't understand the bill being voted on.

 Not a one of 'em gets shot or even asked to maybe not go to Starbucks loaded for bear. Indeed, we're told to be thankful that these "protests" don't turn into violent blood baths, the implication that maybe we shouldn't push them too far. But gun control is another issue, and really doesn't concern the police nor the law enforcement system. Both are not only riddled with racists, active and passive, but both were in large part designed in such a way to keep black people "in their place". One of the largest gun bans ever passed was by Gov. Ronald Reagan in the '60s once Black Panthers started walking around strapped and loaded. Morons claim Jim Crow wouldn't have happened if black people had access to guns, conveniently ignoring the fact the reason they didn't is because the racist white power structure set the law up that way. Black people who couldn't find work were charged with vagrancy, making finding a good job to keep them occupied that much harder.

 This isn't just a conservative issue, either. Mainstream liberals regularly ignore the black female voting block that often decides elections and as often as not, soi-disant leftists dismiss the concerns of the black community as "identity politics" not as important as universal health care or American foreign policy. We say "pimp" and "ghetto" and "ratchet" and "sleep" and don't care how a black person might feel hearing us throw those words around to describe nothing important.

 When it comes to racism, especially against black people, we are all guilty, we are all culpable and we are all responsible for fixing it. Stop asking black folks to "meet you halfway" or to "understand where you're coming from". They don't owe you the benefit of the doubt. We done pissed that away, neighbors. Stop saying you don't see color or that you judge people by their merits. You do and you don't, and neither does anyone any good whatsoever.

 All right. I believe I've made my point and, no, I don't care if you disagree. You'll have to either learn to live with being wrong or maybe reassess your behavior and ideas. As for now, I think I'll take a nap and then play some Phantom Doctrine. Cold-war era spy in an XCOM-like set up. It's pretty decent and Steam is offering it for a killer price, 80% off. Otherwise, wash your hands, cover your face and stop being shitty to service industry workers who ask you to not cough on them.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

 Okay, so in the past 48 hours or so the freakout level of the world has increased a good bit over this coronavirus business. While we have touched on it in the past, the basic squirrelliness quotient of the human condition  has got to the point where I think it'd do us all a bit of good to step back, take a breath and give this some serious thought.

 First and foremost, be selective about your sources, people. Most of us have a Hitchhiker's Guide in a pocket and it's good for more than being a dumbass on Twitter or Facebook. Google and other search engines aren't that hard to use. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control has a very lovely website that's easy to parse. And if you got some sort of hang up about using governmental sources for information, even though that's their job, private interests like John Hopkins University and the Mayo Clinic also have websites that even the dumbest stump could use.

 If you're inclined towards media sources, I'm going to recommend The Guardian and Al Jazeera, but that's up to you. What you don't do, friends and neighbors, is listen to your racist uncle go on about biochemical weapons on Facebook or even your dumbass wingnut cousin claiming that it's all because we don't keep brown people out of America. Also, be selective in your YouTube choices. I personally like SciShow for my information. Do not, repeat, do not pay attention to some dingbat who spends most of his time complaining about a dearth white babies or female video game characters with reasonable-sized breasts. Those guys do not have your best interests at heart. Plus, they are, for the most part, extremely stupid people.

 Now. Let's look into this a little bit. On December 29, 2019, four people in Wuhan, capital of the Hubei province in China, went to their doctors complaining of flu-like symptoms. In fairly short order, doctors realized they were dealing with something new and unprecedented. Not that coronaviruses themselves are "new and unprecedented". We actually know a good bit about them. "Corona" means "crown" and they look like little crowns under a microscope. Past epidemics like SARS and MERS are coronaviruses and we've dealt with them before.

 Basically, they're respiratory diseases. Coughs, breathing difficulties and a fever come around and pneumonia can spring from since it lowers your immune system's strength. This particular little booger - dubbed CORVID-19 by the eggheads - is following this path so far. Infected complain of pneumonia-like symptoms and it does a number on their immune systems. In fact, the vast bulk of people infected with CORVID-19 who've died have done so because of that lowered immune system. They either have something like heart disease already and their not strong enough to deal with it or they develop full-blown pneumonia which knocks 'em out because, again, lowered immune systems.

 Most of the people who've been infected with CORVID-19 or died due to it have been over 40. The youngest reported case was 13. At current count, 80, 598 have been diagnosed with CORVID-19 with 2,712 deaths. The vast majority of the cases are in China, though it has spread to Japan, the U.S., Italy and Australia, among other places. While the first four cases were in Wuhan and researchers do think it's very likely this virus jumped from animal to human, which isn't all that rare, they really don't know for sure. Even how it's spread we don't know, though researchers are treating it as if it's airborne.

 And there lies the rub. We really don't know exactly what we're dealing with, we just know it's serious and needs to be dealt with. We all remember SARS and avian flu and Ebola, and what a massive bummer those were. In some places, the death toll was pretty staggering and, as with how these cases play out, we don't know exactly where will get the worst of it. For example, despite some chicken littles that we inexplicably paid too much attention to, Ebola in the States wasn't that big a deal but it kicked the living shit out of West Africa. Those same chicken littles are doing us a whole lot of not good right now and they really, really need to be ignored this time around. It's a shame they're in positions of power nowadays rather than just being the random goobers on Twitter they should remain, but one must play with the cards one is dealt.

 But here's some good news. Of those 85,000 reported cases, only 49,776 are active with 28,110 discharged. The infection rate is something like 3%, as opposed to the 1917-1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which saw one-third of the world's population come down with it. Indeed, despite the CDC and other organizations being Johnny-On-The-Spot with this, the plain old flu is considered a much nastier bug. At last count, over 29 million Americans have come down with the flu this season and we haven't even got good and started on it yet.

So what should you do to protect yourself or if you think you've got CORVID-19? Well, treat it like the flu. Wash your hands a lot, don't cough on people, stay home from work if you're sick, and if you're feeling particularly rotten, go see your doctor. If you travel a lot or, indeed, live or work around people who travel a lot, be extra on guard about staying clean and safe like you would otherwise during flu season. Maybe go ahead and get that flu shot if you haven't so far. Ya never know. It's here already and will affect more people, but really, this is elementary stuff.

 Though very serious and definitely worth paying attention to, this is not considered a pandemic so far. Furthermore, after dealing with SARS, Ebola and so forth the past 20 or so years, governments around the world are jumping on this and working very diligently to stay on top of this so we don't have another ugly situation like SARS, which saw a 10% mortality rate. Indeed, the Chinese government has been commended by the CDC for their swift, decisive action, giving the rest of the world time to get situated.

 What you should NOT do is spread dumbass racist rumors about the Chinese government brewing up a bioweapon that got out of control. Yes, that is dumbass and it is extremely racist, and if that judgement offends, cry more and then wash your hands. This shit happens and it's happened since time immemorial, and it's entirely possible this virus has lain dormant for thousands of years and is just now deciding the be a pain in the ass.

 Of course, there are some other concerns. Trump's approach to "governing" has left us as a country a bit under-defended and caught off-foot due to his hard-on for defunding anything that Obama had a hand in. It has affected the stock market, causing the largest drop in two years, and is probably got more surprises in store. Most of us aren't really as hip as we should be about our reliance on China to, well, make stuff, so the country clamping down has resulted in problems in everything from food to iPhone parts. That's just how it's going to be until the boffins get their heads around it. Settle down and quit your sobbing.

 And yes, the quarantines have been a stone cold bummer and certain cities in certain states are coming off looking like buttholes for being so ugly about sick people. The former is just the way things have to be while the latter is merely another example of our shit-ass nature taking precedent in this, the Trump Era. A lot of folks are cutting down on travel, mainly because they don't want have to be stuck in their hotel room for weeks at a time. Furthermore, the dumb son of a bitch we have as president doesn't really inspire confidence, partly because he's run off anyone with any sense or spine but mainly because he's a profoundly stupid human being who wallows in his ignorance. Again, the cards we're dealt, what are you going to do.

 Okay for all that. I hope this has been educational and, maybe, a bit comforting. While serious - and this is serious despite my light-hearted flippancy - it does no one any good to lose their shit over anything, especially when people who study this for a living are on the job. Wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough, and don't spread racist bullshit on Facebook like a drooling moron, and we'll all be cool.

 No, really. Calm down, have a candy bar. I wouldn't put the shuck on you. Relax.

Thursday, January 30, 2020

 Man, the Sleep took a-hold of me this morning and instead of trying to fight it off, I let it run wild. I didn't have anything I had to do today besides go to the gym, and I don't really like doing that any way. I need to go, don't get me wrong, and I recognize that, but you will never get me to enjoy it.