The epicenter of all this madness and sickness is still Florida, where our beloved governor Ron DeathSantis continues to try to block the mandating of masks, as if this was some sort of horrible burden imposed on his freedom-loving base, as apposed to being a sensible and easy enough act (wearing a mask) to control the spread of the deadly delta variant among his poorly vaccinated base. DeathSantis was stopped in his tracks by Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper (see https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/569726-judge-blocks-desantis-from-banning-school-mask-mandates ); school districts will now be allowed to impose a mask mandate as needed. God knows we need it.

In the mean time I read as people like me were chastised for not waiting eight months before getting our boosters; I got mine at six months along with my wife, who is immune compromised. Now it would appear the feds are recommending six months, so thank you for coming around to my way of thinking. I will sleep easier at night.

I note the complete US clusterfuck withdrawal out of Afghanistan, with the additional ISIS-K terror attack at the Kabul airport. This only goes to reaffirm the critics who’ve been saying all along that this would precisely happen if and when we withdrew. And, of course, the Republican lying sons-of-bitches are now gleefully rubbing their hands together over the political fallout they feel will help them to regain the House and Senate come the 2022 midterms. Let’s unwind that a bit.

We all knew that withdrawing from Afghanistan was going to be a complete and utter clusterfuck. Afghanistan has been a political clusterfuck for foreign intervention going back to the Greeks and Alexander. But nobody learns from history, and of course, we are doomed to repeat it, up to the present day.

And it was Trump and Co. that were negotiating with the Taliban, who promised to pull out of Afghanistan, and who betrayed the Kurds (see ‘Trump Betrayed the Kurds. He Couldn’t Help Himself.’ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/trump-betrayed-kurds-whos-next/600004/ ) by withdrawing US troops from the Syrian/Turkish border in 2019. Which of course gave the Russians a free hand to perform military operations in support of the Syrian government as icing on the Kurdish betrayal cake. This of course would require the Republicans to know the definition of hypocrisy and of having a conscience that would feel some shame in that, but then we know that today’s Republicans don’t know what hypocrisy means and of course they have no conscience. Just look at the “southern border” debacle and Trump’s disintegrating wall…

But to get back to Florida… I’m watching Ida make landfall in New Orleans on the anniversary of Katrina’s landfall on 29 August 2005. The only difference, if you want to make that call, is that Katrina was a Cat 5 hurricane, while Ida is ‘only’ Cat 4. But this is a difference between a large bomb and a slightly smaller bomb; the explosion is still devastating.

To my few friends still living in that area, get out if you can, and hunker down if you can’t.

Dear OUC Customer,

A regional shortage of liquid oxygen linked to the surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations is impacting OUC’s ability to treat drinking water. Health systems use liquid oxygen (LOX) in the respiratory treatment of COVID-19 patients, while OUC uses it as part of a water treatment process for ozone generation. Ozone is used to remove hydrogen sulfide, a naturally occurring compound that yields an unpleasant odor, from water pumped from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.

With COVID cases soaring across Florida and the Southeast, OUC fully supports LOX vendors diverting supplies to health systems in Central Florida as a life-saving measure.

With our customers’ immediate participation, we may be able to avoid water quality issues.

We are asking all of our water customers without reclaimed water systems to immediately limit irrigating their lawns, and refrain from washing vehicles and performing non-critical activities such as pressure washing or filling pools.

We realize the significance of this request and appreciate your support for this drastic measure because the medical industry needs to be the priority user of liquid oxygen to treat patients.

We also ask that you please be prepared to continue water conservation measures over the next few weeks.

Should you need additional information and water conservation tips, please visit OUC.com/waterinfo.

Sincerely, OUC—The Reliable One

This was NOT a problem we had to contend with last year during the initial COVID infection. Mask mandates were enforced as was social distancing. We got through that period, enough that I was ecstatic to get my dual Moderna vaccination (as was my wife). I honestly thought we were going to beat it this year, until it because too obvious that the conservative/Republican side decided that not only was common sense mask wearing too onerous, but so was getting the vaccine.

It is enough that the willingly unvaccinated are disease vectors for the delta variant of the corona virus. It gets worse that we have to put them up in our hospitals, taking all the beds in our ICUs and forcing the hospital staff to once again go well beyond the call of duty to care for these ignorant and selfish bastards.

But to get an email telling us to limit water usage because oxygen, normally used to treat our water, must be diverted to help treat intubated patients who refused free vaccines that would have stopped the worst of COVID from afflicting them, is for me the last straw.

I already have cut back watering my lawn because I’ve always recognized the incredible waste of such an action, so it’s not like I have to adjust in that area. But to have to read this and realize why, is more than I can put up with.

As the saying goes, you can’t fix stupid. But I hope after all of this is passed that a good bit of stupid has died off.

Trying to keep a reasonable writing cadence is tough, but it can be done if your mind is active with ideas chasing themselves around. My mind has, it would seem, gone dry of ideas. I’ve had several, but nothing like I’ve had in the past. Even when I sit down to begin to think about writing a post, no specifics suggest themselves. I’m left with the broad idea for a post, and nothing else.

The problem for me is dealing with the continuing COVID Delta variant pandemic in Florida that is decimating the unvaccinated. Florida is in the top five states with infections (if not number one), and has been for weeks. I’m back to wearing a mask, this time N95 class masks, and going out as little as possible. Which is what I did last year.

I did go to a local Publix pharmacy today where I was given a Moderna booster shot. My wife, who suffers from an immune deficiency, got her’s two days ago. I would have gotten mine the same day except Publix insisted I give them my Medicare insurance information, and when they entered it in their system came back saying my Medicare information was incorrect and to call the Social Security Administration.

I called today, spoke with a very nice and competent individual, and was able to ascertain that my information, specifically my name, was correct as printed on my Medicare card. Nothing was amiss in the system.

Turned out that someone at the SSA entered my name ‘oddly.’ Let me explain.

My name is ‘WILLIAM H BEEBE JR.’ That’s the way it is on my Medicare card and all my other correspondence with the SSA. But… it turned out that to enter my name correctly into the SSA system via Publix, it had to be entered as ‘WILLIAM JR’, HENRY, BEEBE. That’s right, boys and girls. SSA put my JR suffix in with my first name. Publix couldn’t figure it out the first time, and when I went to a Walgreens, they ran into the same problem. The problem was finally solved on my second trip to Publix because a new pharmacist was at Publix today and she knew how to solve that problem. Once they entered my first name as ‘WILLIAM JR’ in the first name field, everything went through.

Which begs a second question: the COVID shots are supposed to be free and to be given without insurance. So why ask for my Medicare insurance to begin with? That’s a good question, but the bigger issue was discovering this problem and the solution. I certainly didn’t know anything about this.

I know that WHO is really upset that the US is giving out booster shots, but I don’t care. I live in Florida, with crazy people who won’t get their first shots and who are acting as disease vectors for the Delta variant. And they’re being led by an idiot governor in Tallahassee. So I’m going to get my booster and wear my mask and keep out of crowds and social distance like crazy. The signs are already up to do masking and distancing where I need to go, such as drugstores and grocery stores.

I got the booster so that I can be as immunologically strong as possible for my wife’s sake. Hopefully with my booster, if she still gets ill with COVID I can care for her and myself. I have to be as strong and prepared as possible for both of us.

Hmm… I wrote a bit more than I anticipated. But not as much as I would have liked.

I had hoped that we would be well past the coronavirus pandemic, but such was not to be. As of today, one in five, or 20%, of all new cases come out of Florida. Look at Florida county-by-county and the hottest spots are around Orange County/Orlando, Miami-Dade, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee.

The two hottest are also the two with the greatest tourism draws, Orange/Orlando with Disney and Universal Studios, and Miami because it’s Miami and that’s where all the money is. Florida now has no mask mandates. Florida has a boot-licking MAGA governor who is determined to kill the rules that would keep us healthy and safe, and in the process, kill as many of us as possible.

We also have tourists coming to Orlando from all over without masks with many carrying the virus, willing to spread it around in super-spreader events such as Orlando the theme parks. While not in a theme park, I was at a local store near Universal to pick up groceries on Saturday when I heard a group near me speaking Portuguese. The group appeared composed of parents, several children, and an older man who I assumed was a grand parent, none of them wearing masks. I had my mask on, but added some social distance between myself and that group. Orlando is a top destination spot for Brazilians, so you’ll forgive me if I give anyone from Brazil, one of the world’s COVID-19 major hot spots, a fair amount of social distance.

In other news, former Florda data scientist and bad Florida decision making whistleblower Rebekah Jones is running against sexual predator congress-bro Matt Gaetz in 2022. We need that idiot Gaetz out and someone in his place who is competent. I wish Rebekah all the best.

• Florida Covid-19 cases spike in latest state data – https://www.local10.com/news/florida/2021/07/16/florida-covid-19-cases-spike-in-lastest-state-data/
• Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz will face congressional challenge from COVID-19 whistleblower Rebekah Jones – https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2021/07/14/florida-rep-matt-gaetz-will-face-congressional-challenge-from-covid-19-whistleblower-rebekah-jones

When I fired up Vivaldi yesterday to add Instagram as a web panel, I noticed I still had a tab opened to the COVID-19 dashboard, so I looked at it. It looks pretty much the same, only worse, than the last time I looked. And then I noticed there’s a couple of graphics devoted to vaccination levels. That large green number at the top is over two billion doses administered. That’s not a one-to-one person reference, as many of the vaccines require two doses (I took the Moderna two-dose vaccine back in January and February 2021). It helps to counter a bit seeing the United States still number one with cases and deaths.

This screen capture highlights another Vivaldi capability: at the bottom of the browser window are additional controls, one of which takes a screen shot of the web page you’re viewing. This web page screen capture was made that way. I much prefer having Vivaldi do it because all the extraneous outer chrome and tabs is trimmed away, leaving just the page itself. And all at the click of a button.

Biden has promised to “toss eligibility lists” in order to get everyone vaccinated by May 1st. Tonight as I was out getting a few things at a local Publix, I saw this for the first time. I know it was new as of today because I’d been in there earlier to pick up a few necessary housecleaning items, as well as a bit of lunch for my wife and I. Tonight was to pick up coffee filters I’d forgotten earlier in the day.

I think this is great. I had to get told by Orange County in an email, and my wife and I had to go through the process of registering via a county-run website, then go over to the Orange County Convention center for our two Moderna shots, one 6 January, and the second 9 February. That helped open up my wife getting her back surgery the end of February, so I can’t complain about how we got ours. But right now, if we all want to put this pandemic behind us, then we need to get all those vaccine doses out to everyone as quickly as possible. I think Publix is stepping in to help with that.

The headline speaks for itself. Over 500,000 dead from covid over the last year. How many more will die because of what 45 didn’t do to help contain this? And that bastard is showing up in Orlando for the CPAC conference. And the Republican rank-and-file (heavy on the rank) still support and believe in him.

Unfortunately infections continue, as do the deaths. Nationally we’re up to nearly 500,000 dead from COVID-19. And now we’re being told about the ‘variants’, i.e. the mutations that have developed because a sizable portion of the population were too damn stupid to just wear a mask and keep a six-foot distance from others, to block the transfer of the virus.

We will continue the use of face masks and social distancing until such time as the infections and deaths really do go down to nothing. I don’t know when that will be.

I don’t normally do selfies, but this one was important enough. My wife and I drove down to the Orange County Convention Center on International Drive to receive our first Moderna vaccinations. It was an in-car affair, where we drove a carefully cordoned path past various checkpoints, where we were checked and questioned and then finally directed to a spot inside one of the car garages where we both received our shots. It was highly professional, absolutely fast and totally painless. I took a quick selfie right before the person who gave me my shot injected me. No pain, no muss, no fuss. We left and then sat in an outdoor parking lot for 15 minutes to make sure we weren’t going to have a reaction, and then we drove home.

So far I’ve had a short spell of soreness, followed by a bit of itching. Right now as I write this I don’t feel a thing. Neither does my wife.

Our second shot is scheduled for 6 February.

I wish a lot more of this was going out to people, a lot faster.

In the mean time we will continue to stay masked and exercise proper social distancing, as well as staying away from crowded areas and only going out when it’s absolutely necessary. Although we’re no where out of the woods yet, I feel a solid sense of progress since this pandemic started. My wife and I have been following this since late December 2019 when the very first reports started to surface from Wuhan, China.

I live in Orange County, Florida, which as it turns out is relatively enlightened compared to most of the other Florida counties. An example is the disbursement of corona virus vaccines. Orange County set up a relatively organized system for its at-risk citizens to create an appointment to receive the two shots. Other counties decided it would be an ad-hoc first come, first serve, and those were disasters with many at-risk citizens camped out in long lines waiting to sign up at certain respective locations. Here in Orange, my wife and I got an email alerts from OCAlert (Orange County Alert) on 28 December about the availability of the vaccines and to create an appointment as soon as possible. I, along with my wife, signed up by the morning of 29 December. Both of us will get our first shots this coming 9 January (a week from today) and the second on 6 February. As it turns out, all of those allocated doses for Orange County were spoken for within 24 hours.

With reports now saying that the more infectious variant of the corona virus has been circulating since October 2020, our concerns with regards to mask wearing and social distancing are at an even higher level. That makes the vaccines even more vital. The two of us are in the high-risk category, which explains why we got the OCAlert emails; as it turns out not everyone got them, just the identified high-risk Orange County citizens. Even after we get our shots, we’re still going to responsibly practice mask wearing and social distancing, as well as minimizing our travel away from home. Moderna’s 94.5% efficacy is not 100%, and anything is still possible, especially without proper diligence.

Animal Crossing is a far cry from my earlier gaming experiences from Quake, Doom, and other FPS games. There is no running around and fragging characters (although I sure have wanted to on occasion). Instead, it’s a very non-violent deliberately slow-paced game with way too much dialog that repeats itself. In spite of that I’ve managed to build all the rooms possible in my house and I paid for the storage extension for my house, so I can store all the crap that comes raining down from balloons that float over the island.

I’ve managed to play all the seasons so far, starting with Halloween, through Thanksgiving, and into Christmas. Except it’s not called Christmas, it’s called Toy Day. No mention of Christmas. I guess this is Nintendo’s War on Christmas. Whatever.

It sure looks like the commercial side of Christmas. For example I was able to buy a Santa suit.

My island even has a Christmas tree with ornaments and I can stand around with some of my zombie characters and “sing” Christmas carols.

I even participated in delivering gifts for Jingles the black-nosed reindeer, and as a reward I was gifted this sleigh with presents you see me sitting on. By the way, note the ice bar with some sort of beverage to the right. If Animal Crossing is a kid’s game, then why are we creating adult ‘toys’?

How could it be Christmas without the trashy ornamentation we have here in America? One of my rewards in-game was DIY instructions for building these lighted snowflakes you see my avatar standing between. I liked them so much I built two.

I’ve also learned to build ‘perfect’ Snow Boys. You can see me standing with three of them, created on three consecutive days. I use the high-as-my-ear method for the head before pushing it up on the body (see here https://animalcrossingworld.com/guides/new-horizons/how-to-build-a-perfect-snowman-snowboy-every-time/ for different methods). Every time you create a ‘perfect’ SnowBoy you get a season-specific DIY recipe and a large snowflake. Then every following day after creation, when you visit, you get another large snowflake. The SnowBoys do melt over time, so after three days the SnowBoys are gone, meaning you can only get three large snowflakes before the SnowBoys go away. Or at least that’s been my experience.

Game Observations

• It takes a very long time to do anything. Whether a short task or a long task, a lot of time is wasted in exposition from the characters. I find Isabella to be particularly annoying, but at least she on shows up once when you first open the game up for the day.
• I have an intense dislike of nearly all the visiting creatures. Savanah (who sells rugs), the creature who sells turnips, the creature who catches bugs, the creature who fishes, the seagull who keeps washing up on my beaches, the owl sister of the museum manager… the list goes on. I deal with the regular inhabitants, and that’s enough. All others I ignore.
• The lone visitor I tolerate is Redd the Art Dealer. Every time he shows up I go check Polygon’s list of paintings and statuary ( https://www.polygon.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-switch-acnh-guide/2020/4/23/21231433/redd-jolly-museum-art-fake-real-forgeries-list-complete-painting-statue ) before I make a purchase. I purchased a copy of the Mona Lisa early on which turned out to be fake. I couldn’t sell it or gift it. I finally went to an island and left it there. I tolerate Redd because I’m slowly stocking my museum’s art section.
• There’s also the creature that sells seedlings. I occasionally purchase plants to place around my island.
• Every once in a while one of the island’s inhabitants starts running towards me, yelling my avatar’s name, to get my attention. It was OK for a while, but I got tired of new emotions or new nicknames. What broke the came’s back so-to-speak was when I was beating on a rock getting out bells, and one of them ran right up to me while I was hammering away. Needless to say pressing ‘A’ when the character was slow enough completely stopped me from hammering the rock and missing a lot of bells. Since then I just run away from any of the characters who start yelling my name.
• My island’s rankings. Right now it’s four stars out of five. I’m not going to push to get five out of five, especially if it means I cut down all my trees (Isabella keeps complaining how the trees make the island look too rural; good).

One in-game hook that keeps me coming back every morning are the bell trees. I find 1,000 bells buried in the ground. I dig them up, then put a 10,000 bell bag back in the hole. Three days later if I come back I have a bell tree with three 10,000 bell bags on it. And this happens every morning. Which means I need to keep coming back to get my steady 20,000 bells of in-game money (remember I seeded with a 10,000 bell bag, and doing this continuously means dropping 10,000 bells in another hole). I also dig up all my fossils, have them certified, and then sell them at Nook Corner. That’s usually another 10,000 to 15,000 bells. It builds up quickly.

I’m now building the in-game swag and sending it around to my two daughters who also play this game. I sure can’t use more than one of any item.

I’m to the point where I’m about ready to walk away indefinitely. It’s been a nice distraction during the pandemic, but I don’t know I would have ever played this game without the pandemic. I’m glad I played the seasonal parts of Animal Crossing, but at this point I think I’m done.

This is the front of my home in Orlando. Yes, I am indeed a Democrat, if that hasn’t become obvious already. I’m showing this right now in part because I’m amazed the signs are still there. In the past in this neighborhood whenever I put up any signs for any Democratic candidates, those signs were either stolen in short order or else vandalized and left in place. This year, up to this point in time, those signs have been up all of October.

Does this mean I believe Biden will win Florida? I have no idea. I tried believing in the prognosticators back in 2016, and we all know how that worked out. This time around I’ve donated time and money to get out the vote, in spite of the pandemic. I’m hopeful, but I’m not taking anything for granted. And neither, it would seem, is anybody else. A number of states have set records for early voting. For example, in Florida, at least 9 million have voted early so far, surpassing the 6+ million that voted early in 2016. But for shear chutzpa, Texas has surpassed Florida with nearly 10 million early voters, 108 percent of the total vote count in 2016. Watching what happens in Texas is going to be interesting…

I’m frozen in the moment, waiting for today to pass, then for tomorrow to come and all voters get a chance to cast their votes, followed by waiting for the results. Nothing else matters at the moment. I have no idea who will win this election year; trying to predict an outcome is a fool’s game we lost horribly in 2016. All I can say is I hope for the best, but I fear for the worst.

Vote! Vote! Vote!

I’m getting ready to vote in Florida. I’ve got my ballot marked, and ready to place it entirely in it’s Secret Sleeve, which will then go into the Special Envelope. It arrived last week, and is part of my wife and I’s setting up so that we get our ballots mailed to us until 2022. That will cover us until the 2022 midterms, which I suspect are going to be even more energetic and important than the 2018 midterms.

I would have dropped it off today at a local early voting location, but Florida shortened the early voting time from three weeks to two weeks, just one of many voter suppression acts, both big and small. My wife and I can’t drop our votes off until Monday, 19 October, at the earliest.

Why drop it off? Why not mail it back? Because the Postal Service is being actively sabotaged by Trump and his minions to make vote by mail as difficult as possible. One of the side effects of this is the slowdown in the receipt of medications and other important mail. Dropping off our completed votes is a hybrid solution to ease the burden on the post office. So our process is to ask for the ballot early enough so it comes as early in the voting cycle as possible, then fill it out as soon as possible after it’s received, finally dropping it off by hand at a local early voting station which happens to be located just five minutes from where I live. We did this for the local primary and it worked out just fine.

Also, I voted a straight Democratic ticket where I could. There are a number of amendments on this ballot which required careful research before I voted one way or another.

I’m not taking anything for granted any longer. I’m not believing the polls, even if they say Biden is ahead by double digits everywhere. I’m focused on voting for Biden and all Democrats, and in getting others motivated to at least vote, and hopefully, to persuade them to vote Biden and Democrat in general.

I’m “locked and loaded” with the most powerful weapon against Trump, a vote against him and all his minions. I can’t wait to turn it in.

The last time I wrote about the pandemic was back in late July, when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll stood at 144,000. That was terrible enough that I stopped doing any kind of notional tracking of it on this blog. Until today. And the deaths keep ticking up. There is some speculation that the number of dead will double again to 400,000 by the end of the year (see https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/us-covid-19-deaths-just-topped-200000/ ).

There’s nothing left to say or add that hasn’t already been said.

I don’t even know where to begin. The last time I wrote an entry on the Pandemic, it was on 11 June, and we had half as many confirmed cases. Even the number of world-wide cases has more than doubled, from 7million to over 15 million.

For the first time I’m including a dashboard just for Florida. This is being maintained by the Rebekah Jones, who was fired by the Florida in May because she refused to massage the statistics and make it look better than it really was.

Here’s the link: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d1c643c195314e/

Here’s her story: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-scientist-launches-a-coronavirus-dashboard-of-her-own

So much has been going crazy in this country over the last six weeks. Even Trump has finally given up holding the Republican convention in Jacksonville because it’s a grand coronavirus clusterfuck here in Florida. Yeah, look at those charts above, and see that Florida has 1/10 of the US’ total confirmed cases.

And by the way, keep this in mind: We could be off by as much as an order of magnitude, or to put it another way, we could have ten times as many coronovirus cases as officially documented.

It’s time to vote out Trump and DeSantis. It’s time to vote all the bastards out.

• Total confirmed cases US: 2,000,464
• Total deaths US: 112,924
• Daily worldwide cases still increasing, and have been since early March.

What can I say?

• Florida has been clamping down on reporting both confirmed cases and total deaths. Anything now coming out of Florida is very under-counted. As a reward to our own Governor Asskisser, the GOP now wants to hold its convention in Jacksonville. This is so that Governor Asskisser, a.k.a. Ron DeSantos, can give a national, public, performance of him groveling while planting his lips on our Grand Idiot in Chief’s broad white ass.
• The Grand Idiot in Chief, through his meat puppets on his re-election campaign staff, is demanding an apology from CNN as well as a cease-and-desist action. CNN’s crime? Reporting that Biden is 14 points ahead nation-wide of the Idiot in Chief in a poll CNN conducted ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/politics/trump-campaign-cnn-poll/index.html ). This is a classic attempt at censorship of the news, which our nascent crop of fascists is trying so hard to execute against anything they deem as politically unacceptable to them and their goals.
• The overwhelming protests around the world of the death of George Floyd at the hands of US Militarized Institutional Racism otherwise known as the Police has stirred up a hornets nest that needed stirring. And the wonderful police, instead of backing off, met peaceful protesters with more violence. The most egregious example was when The Idiot wanted to walk to a local church and hold up a Bible for a photo op ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/06/08/timeline-trump-church-photo-op/ ) and all the peaceful protestors were teargassed and hit with rubber bullets and other “non-lethal” weapons. This, of course, fooled absolutely no one. Now the general who appeared with the Grand Idiot on that walk apologized for being there with him ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/milley-trump-appearance-mistake/index.html  ).
• Further damning the Grand Idiot’s position is his inflammatory tweeting towards his critics and those who don’t act the way he wants to act towards the demonstrators. For example, he criticized the mayor of Seattle for pulling back the police while all the pretesting is going on. This worked in Seattle to keep things in order, but the Grand Idiot didn’t think so; he felt the “anarchists must be stooped [sic].” The mayor of Seattle told him to ‘go back to your bunker’ and basically STFU ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/seattle-mayor-trump-protests/index.html ).

November 2nd can’t come soon enough. I now have enough masks to last until next year, so I’m going out to campaign locally against the Grand Idiot.

When Donald Trump came out of hiding this week, he didn’t do it to bring us together or heal the nation.

He wasn’t there to offer words of calm and comfort.

Instead, he became what we always feared.

Evoked the worst of our past.

Threatened our governors and states.

He ordered our own soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan to flood the streets, instructing them to turn against Americans.

Used churches and the Holy Bible as political props.

He didn’t invoke the Lord to give us wisdom but to boost his polls.

Ordered an attack on unarmed protestors using gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades.

Washington transformed into a war zone for this coward.

This is a time for choosing.

America or Trump.

This goes without saying that the current administration is doing its best to gaslight the entire country, and possibly the world, and to move attention away from this administration’s horrific failure to manage, let alone to contain the coronavirus epidemic. But that won’t happen. George Floyd, who’s senseless death at the hands of racist police started all of this, tested positive for coronavirus and COVID-19. It’s no wonder he died. He should have been in hospital, not in jail where he died.

Mattis equates Trump attempts to divide with Nazi slogan

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/jun/03/george-floyd-protests-us-live-news-updates-donald-trump?page=with:block-5ed8284d8f08cadb604009ed#block-5ed8284d8f08cadb604009ed

In perhaps the most extraordinary passage of James Mattis’s extraordinary condemnation of Donald Trump, which was published by the Atlantic an hour ago, the former Marine Corps general and US defense secretary seems to equate the president’s behaviour in dividing Americans with the aims of the Nazi regime during the second world war.

Mattis writes: “Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis – confident that we are better than our politics.

James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

Pentagon chief opposes Trump threat to deploy military at protests

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/george-floyd-mark-esper-opposes-trump-threat-deploy-military

The US defence secretary has opposed Donald Trump’s threatened use of the Insurrection Act to allow active duty troops to be deployed in American cities.

Mark Esper was speaking to journalists in the Pentagon amid mounting disquiet about the increasingly militarized response to the George Floyd protests, and confusion over the role of the troops.

About 700 troops from the 82nd airborne division, mostly military police and combat engineers, were flown to bases around Washington on Monday night. The Associated Press reported that 200 would fly out on Wednesday, but then with a few hours that decision was reversed and the airborne troops stayed put in the bases on the outskirts of the capital.

Trump has threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act that would allow him to deploy troops on city streets, against the wishes of state and city authorities. The president said he would use the law if local authorities failed “to defend the life and property of their residents”.

Esper categorically opposed using the act on Wednesday.

“I say this not only as secretary of defense, but also as a former soldier, and a former member of the national guard, the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” the defense secretary said. “We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

A dangerous new factor in an uneasy moment: Unidentified law enforcement officers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/03/dangerous-new-factor-an-uneasy-moment-unidentified-law-enforcement-officers/

But it wasn’t only components of the Defense Department that had been brought to the nation’s capital to help with the “domination” that President Trump sought to display in the wake of the turmoil. Washington residents have also been confronted with a number of other heavily armed law enforcement officers who share an unexpected characteristic: Neither their affiliation nor their personal identities are discernible…

As it turns out, each of these encounters was apparently with elements of the Bureau of Prisons, called to the region by Attorney General William P. Barr this week. Friedman confirmed with BOP that the men he encountered were with the agency; Haake’s Twitter followers picked out BOP insignia on their clothing.
“The idea that the federal government is putting law enforcement personnel on the line without appropriate designation of agency, name, etc. — that’s a direct contradiction of the oversight that they’ve been providing for many years to local police and demanding in all of their various monitorships and accreditation,” former New York City police commissioner William Bratton said in a phone interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The prospect of government agencies involved in policing the city seeking to obscure their identities, Bratton said, was “very concerning.”
The vagueness of their identity and their disinterest in identifying themselves introduce specific challenges and risks, as former Army officer and FBI special agent Clint Watts explained in a phone interview with The Post.
For one thing, Watts pointed out, a civilian might refuse to respond to an order from a law enforcement official who doesn’t identify themselves in that way.
“If I go out and I pull out a gun and I say, ‘Freeze,’ and they say why, I would have to say, ‘I’m an FBI agent’ or law enforcement officer or whatever,” he said, “because otherwise they would be totally in the right to defend themselves potentially.”

So here we are, 1 June 2020. The first day of the sixth month of the year. The middle of the year. Some might say that 1 July is the true start of the second half. Maybe. But to me the sixth month out of twelve is a little more regular.

Regardless, the only thing that matters right now is watching the numbers inexorably climb up. Over 6 million confirmed cases worldwide. Brazil has leapt to second place in just the last week because Jare Bolsonaro thinks he’s a Brazilian Trump. As we can see, pandemic-wise it’s going as well in Brazil as here in the States.

The US has nearly two million confirmed cases, and over 105,000 deaths. If you look at the lower right corner at Daily Cases, unfortunately they’re trending up, and they’re trending up on a curve. These are cases world wide, mind you, but it’s a grim reminder yet again that the coronavirus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.