137 open some damn doors and windows

August 01, 2020

Yesterday started with another trip to Safeway. The coughing cashier I had last week was still working, so I was probably just being paranoid last week. Still no temperature checks. Mark my words, there will be by, say, XMas time. Maybe Xmas 2021, unfortunately, but my gut is we'll be getting scanned before this is over.

One of the entrances has been blocked off since they eliminated the line outside. Instead of the doors constantly opening and closing, they've been closed now for months. In a disease where stale air and many people equals spreading, this doesn't seem like the best idea.

This isn't news if you've been reading along here. I'm not an expert, or anything close. Which is maybe why I have just followed along with the news of what this virus is doing, rather than rely on my education about "what viruses do."

And this virus is spreading indoors, by vocalizing or merely breathing long enough.

The gloves and the scrubbing and the bleach and the hand sanitizer and the wipes? Not entirely useless, but maybe not such a great use of our time.

So maybe instead of talk about "deep cleaning" we need to hear about "our new outdoor facility."

Blah blah blah. Really, this is barely controversial. There's got to be so much pork hidden in these bills.

And not even a half billion dollars? Dear leader, despite spending a lifetime turning daddy's two billion dollars into three, now only gets out of bed for trillions.

But what's not in that bill?

So, White House gets a renovation, your house gets taken away from you.

Let me do some quick math. $21 billion is, um, less than 1/100th, or under 1%, of the stimulus that already passed.

1% of the money to protect 21% of the people seems like a pretty good spend.

Half of American renters are feeling insecure right now, and may be houseless soon? Well, hey, would you look at how many ways voting-by-mail can go wrong? For instance, what if you had an address in July, but not in November?

While we're on the subject. How much was this remodel?

And how the hell can he run ads with images of right now, and say "this is what America will look like under Joe Biden."

Hello, America, this is what we look like RIGHT NOW.

And this is who he's trying to make you afraid of.

A few years ago, during the W43 days and O44 years, it felt conspiratorial to say things like "we're living in a fascist country" and "we'll know it for sure when there are tanks in the streets."

Saying these things felt like I was participating in alternative culture, and speaking of conspiracies. Certainly our government wasn't really spying on us? Surely they didn't really send in agents provocateurs to start trouble at protests. Surely we weren't really a police state? This was just wishful, paranoid thinking.

And then the Boston Marathon bombing happened, and we had tanks in the streets, and residents ordered to stay inside.

Surely this is not martial law, we thought, this is about terrorism, not fascism?

And that is how conspiracy theories make it from the fringes into the mainstream.

(Or as I like to say, in a country where the baseline mindset is a belief in dog, reality is out the window.)

(But hey, at least that window is OPEN.)