…play the lie [DOT 29/5/20]

there's blood on your guy...

…there really isn’t a good face to put on much of any of the last few days

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/05/27/cartoons-trump-golf-coronavirus-covid/

George Floyd Protests in Minneapolis: Live Updates
…but whoever the umbrella&hammer-toting, gloved-up multiply masked shithead is the police seem oddly less interested in who he is than who they say he isn’t

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/conflict-erupts-minneapolis-l-protests-over-george-floyd-death-n1216096

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/george-floyd-s-sister-says-firing-officers-not-enough-they-n1215371

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/george-floyd-brother-death-police

…meanwhile…over in the office of the red right hand

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-appoints-texas-prosecutor-to-review-obama-officials-unmasking-requests/2020/05/27/story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/justice-department-drops-insider-trading-probes-three-senators-n1215196

…so however you look at it looks plenty bleak to me

Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine

…while approximately 1 in 4 Americans are now statistically looking like they’re shit out of luck in the employment stakes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/28/unemployment-claims-coronavirus/

Record unemployment leaves more Americans vying for shrinking number of ‘safe’ jobs that don’t require face-to-face interaction

…not to mention that we are way the hell off track if we’re hoping to be saved by the herd

https://nyti.ms/3ejjryq

…which I guess makes it tempting to think of the whole spat-with-twitter thing as fetching up in the good news column

Angry over how social media platforms are treating him, Trump says ‘FAIRNESS’ is coming

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trumps-social-media-executive-order-would-be-big-mistake/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-doubly-wrong-about-twitter/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/28/trump-social-media-executive-order/

What he wants is to have the freedom to post anything he likes without the companies applying any judgment to his messages

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-executive-order-targeting-twitter-will-hurt-users-far-ncna1215921

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/victims-online-harassment-worry-about-resurgence-after-trump-s-executive-n1217151

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/legal-experts-ratio-trump-s-executive-order-aimed-social-media-n1216796

…but frankly two tweets featuring links to fact checks out of all the crap the man has spouted on twitter is some pretty fucking weak tea even without a walking mug of the stuff wading in

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-says-social-networks-should-not-be-fact-checking-n1216326

…the whole police-precinct-on-fire & dubiously-instigated escalation of rioting had me distracted enough that I missed this bit on my first pass

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/29/twitter-hides-donald-trump-tweet-glorifying-violence

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/twitter-trump-minneapolis-shoot-tweet-protestors-glorifying-violence-warning-george-floyd-a9538196.html

…so naturally there’s been some more obviously-instigated escalation of hostilities there…for anyone that hasn’t already & feels like they don’t want to fuck with twitter it goes a bit like this

see they served that tea while it was still hot…

…but then the milk got spilt

…the dead democrat thing, you ask…why, no…not exactly

Then, Trump called the demonstrators, many of whom are people of color, “THUGS” before parroting the words of former Miami police chief Walter Headley, who was known for his controversial “stop and frisk” policies.

The looting and shooting quote was first said by Headley during a December 1967 news conference addressing efforts by authorities to carry out what United Press International described at the time as a “crackdown on … slum hoodlums.” According to UPI, “Headley said Miami hasn’t been troubled with racial disturbances and looting because he let the word filter down, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’”

The moment has since been cited as a prime factor in the discontent that contributed to the race riots that broke out in Miami in the late 1960s, The Washington Post’s Terence McArdle reported.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/trump-minneapolis-twitter-protest/

…& for those that prefer twitter here’s a thread that covers much the same ground

…there really is more to it than that…so do follow the thread down

…so forgive me if I’m not feeling like we’re all on the right page just yet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/researchers-ponder-why-covid-appears-more-deadly-in-the-us-and-europe-than-in-asia/2020/05/26/story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-do-you-get-americans-wear-masks-vacation-gentle-persuasion-n1215436

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/how-private-jet-owners-got-subsidy-coronavirus-relief-funds-n1217061

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/28/white-house-coronavirus-economic-projections/

…not to mention this clusterfuck-in-motion

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/trump-china-bank-dollar-sanctions-trade-hong-kong-protest-crackdown/2020/05/28/story.html

…which is sure to land even better than this one

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/us-brings-largest-ever-n-korean-sanctions-case-targeting-state-owned-bank-and-senior-government-officials/2020/05/28/story.html

…so before we get too cheerful about these kinds of prospects

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-finds-himself-playing-campaign-defense-core-elements-his-base-n1215576

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/republicans-trump-senate-2020-trouble/index.html

…we should probably be remembering what those laurels rest on

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/27/honest-elections-project-conservative-voting-restrictions

…the accent might be a bit much…but he’s worth listening to
…somehow the “massive attack remix” seemed appropriate
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21 Comments

        • …it’s notoriously difficult even these days to verify the facts on the ground in these kinds of circumstances & the wisdom of crowds can sometimes stand on shaky ground

          …but there certainly appear to be some legitimate claims that (once again) bad faith actors have done their best to escalate & instigate things while attempting to implicate those with a genuine grievance in a deliberate attempt to seed their preferred narrative

          …I can’t say the precinct wouldn’t have burned without that kind of match being introduced to the powderkeg, for example…but I find myself dismayed at the ways this seems to be shifting how the conversation around this stuff is framed…the agendas being best served by too much of what I’m reading are not the ones I find I have the most sympathy for

          …there’s no doubt as far as I can see that (very much not for the first time) excessive use of force by the police cost a man his life…nor that it was not coincidental that the man who lost his life was black nor the officer white…nor does it seem open to dispute that the response to that from the authorities has fallen dismally short of anything that might deter those who feel that to be an injustice they simply can not abide

          …that any part of their point should be diluted or deflected on the basis that vandalism, looting & arson by some can be used to try to move a few goalposts is a thing I’m struggling to swallow in the face of the bad faith thing

          …I’m a little hazy on the preferred nomenclature but wouldn’t that dude with the hammer & the umbrella be what Alex Jones likes to call a “crisis actor” & the old fashioned would refer to as an agent provocateur?

  1. Speaking of the DoJ dropping their case about the three Senators accused of COVID-19-related insider trading:

    I think I have been shadow-banned from Jezebel. It was bad enough that I questioned the wisdom of Gretchen Whitmer’s husband calling a Traverse City marina to put their boat in the water for Memorial Day, and pointing out Who He Was. I didn’t bring this up but Traverse City is about 125 miles from Lansing, the state capital, and under Whitmer’s direction Michiganders are urged/obligated to stay local. “It was only guidance” was the lame explanation offered. So like Britain after senior adviser Dominic Cummings and his wife (she infected with COVID-19, he showing symptoms) traveling up to Durham from London Michigan is, presumably, now an open state with people free to joyride all over the place.

    Anyway, the Jezebel article about dropping the insider trading case focused on Loeffler. A commenter mentioned that Dianne Feinstein’s assets are in a blind trust so why bring the case anyway? I pointed out that with a personal net worth of $58 million she is the 8th-richest person in the Senate. But I didn’t stop there. I mentioned that her husband of 40 years started his own hedge fund (I think it was/is now a VC firm) in 1975 and he’s worth $1 billion. So, with California’s community property laws, shouldn’t she be considered a half-billionaire? I lol’d at the “blind trust” and dropped the term “asset shielding.”

    Oh well, Jezebel was fun while it lasted. I’ll still read it, even though most posts now get < 20 comments. I am a fan of a few of the SNS regulars and they follow me, so tomorrow night I'm going to reply to a couple of their comments, as I normally would, and see if they reply to me.

    But now, to start my weekend off right, for the first time in my fairly long life I'll be filing for unemployment. I'm a freelancer and my very last source of income just dried up yesterday so I have to go into that special pandemic-original allocation for this. I also live in New York, where I've heard getting an application through to unemployment is nigh on impossible, but what better things do I have to do?

    • …not to toot our own horn or anything but if you are able to speak to any of those kinja-friends we’d be glad to have them swing by for a chat?

      …the yelling into the void trick they like to pull on people but oddly not conspicuous trolls all over kinja is something I’ve gathered to have been pretty prevalent around Jezebel for a while, though…sorry if you’re the latest one on the raw end of that deal

      …& you have my sympathies on the last bit, for sure…being as I guess you could call me a stringer of sorts (with no chance of being a Stringer Bell) I think I maybe have a sense for how that looks?

      • I’ve brought up Deadsplinter more than once. I don’t know if anyone has migrated over but you’re getting a lot more views than comments so maybe? A couple of them start food threads and I’m friendly with them and have suggested The Takeout, to keep it in the kinja family, but as far as I know they have ignored me. Some cross over to The Root for political stuff (in the absence of Splinter) but you have to tread very lightly over there.

        Sometimes on SNS someone will be bold enough to make a very general criticism so if I see one of those, and I’m not actually shadow-banned, I’ll bring it up again!

        • It certainly seems like there’s a lot of Kinja people around who haven’t signed up to comment yet.

          To which I’d ask them kindly to not be shy, and welcome back to the light side of the Force.

    • I do not mean to use this forum as a day diary but:

      So I tried to file for unemployment online and it was exactly as hellish as promised. There’s an unfounded rumor going around that they’ve streamlined the process and you no longer need to apply as if you were getting a W-2 but if that’s true I didn’t see it. Just getting an ID was worse than when I applied for my first passport as a teenager. I spent over an hour filling in all sorts of fields about the most recent (long-standing, freelance) gig like what was my first date of employment? I made stuff up. Over an hour later I got to the very end, and got a message saying that my session had timed out and that my info hadn’t been saved.

      I think I read that last month 250,000 New York freelancers/gig economy workers filed for unemployment. How did they do it? Googling is of little help. The New York State Department of Labor website, like NY State government itself, is a labyrinth of corridors leading nowhere. The home page should be simple. Are you filing for unemployment? If you are and you received a W-2, click here. If you are and you don’t receive a W-2 click here. But oh no, there’s something like 7 screens to go through before you even get to the buried link to theunemployment filing form.

      But again, I don”t have a lot else to do so I’ll keep trying.

      • good luck
        cant offer any help as im on the wrong continent
        (tho…our gubments websites are just as arse backwards…last time i used one they made me log in with my digital id to fill out a form on their site…. then they told me to print the filled in form out and send it to them by snail mail…wtf? the whole point of digi id is to be a secure personal login to their system… a submit form button should have been fine)

      • …as far as I know it’s more it less an open secret that those who have to try to use them under “normal” circumstances find the extent to which access to such services is opaque to be a degree that calls into question whether it wouldn’t be better described as a process for maximizing the chances of a claim being denied…it seldom seems as though that impression can be put down to it being anything other than by design, either

        …so sadly I can’t say I’m all that surprised…but do feel free to keep telling us how it goes if you feel like it?

        …for that matter if you feel like making a post out of it we’d be happy to see that, too?

        • I can understand why the system was set up this way but I don’t think it’s been updated since the “Mad Men” era. One of the questions was something like, “Did you receive employment through union recruitment or a hiring hall?” A hiring hall. Now there’s a term I hadn’t heard since my last viewing of “On the Waterfront.” I guess they still exist, New York is a union town, but still. I guess that means the union local might be on the hook for UI benefits, not the state.

          Another one asked where I worked. “From home.” That was seemingly not acceptable so I had to enter, for the third time, my home address. That might have been for tri-state reverse-commuters, so I’m a New Yorker but I reverse commute to CT or NJ and maybe they should be paying me UI?

          The whole thing is ridiculous. I’m going to try again but the other, new aspect of this is you are encouraged to apply on different days Mon–Wed depending on your last name. If you missed your day supposedly Th–Sat is a free-for-all, but I bet there is a software glitch or two or 400 whereby my last name is falling out of the day I should apply, which is Monday.

          The other neat feature is at the end of all of this if the application is accepted for submission there’s a phone follow-up! Yes! After widespread condemnation of people trying to call and failing (people getting busy signals, in the Year of Our Lord 2020; people getting “mailbox full” and hangups; calls not getting through; calls getting through and then after an hour or three or six on hold people getting hung up on) they (theoretically) switched to a system where they schedule a call back. This apparently rarely happens.

          I really need to know how those 250,000 freelancers managed to swing from trapeze to trapeze to make the landing. I’m a member of the Freelancers Union so I’m heading over there in a few minutes.

  2. “…but there certainly appear to be some legitimate claims that (once again) bad faith actors have done their best to escalate & instigate things while attempting to implicate those with a genuine grievance in a deliberate attempt to seed their preferred narrative”

    SO MUCH ^^^^THIS!!!!^^^^

    I needed to call a co-worker to vent this morning, ‘cuz I can’t call my parents–they’d worry too much😉

    But, frankly, I am TERRIFIED of White folks (Nazi/Neo-Nazi/ White Priders, III%’ers/ *WHATEVER* you wanna call them!) coming in to fuck with people here.

    I’m as terrified of THEM, as I’m NOT scared/afraid AT ALL of “Black Rioters!”

    Because the folks protesting are peaceful.

    And the folks looting & even rioting**
    are NOT violent.

    Hell, most of them are even pretty friendly–or at least nod at you, or simply ignore you, if you’re a white woman in her 40’s out with her doggo.😉

    But the shitty teen to 20-something White kids?

    HATE them right now, and I pretty much want to hunt down their parents, so I can shake *them* until their teeth rattle, as I ask them “WHY DID YOU DO *SUCH* A SHITTY JOB OF RAISING A DECENT HUMAN BEING?!?!?????”

    Because Agent Provocateur-dude, WHITE. The initial rock-throwers, breaking the first windows at the 3rd on *Wednesday* night–WHITE.

    The little shitheads breaking *back* into Target Uptown, to have another go at looting, at 1am LAST night? Yep–you guessed it–WHITE AGAIN!!!
    🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

    All these White ASSHOLES, sorry DS dudes, but YEAH, mostly *Guys,* being motherfucking BAGS-O-DICKS.

    And I HATE them.

    And I hate that they’re frankly, terrifying right now.

    And I REALLY hate, that I’m scared enough, that… I feel like *scared white lady* right now.

    Because I KNOW, that me, crying, can be literally deadly.

    And I KNOW, like literally, personally,INTIMATELY K.N.O.W. what it’s like, to be the person who talks to a Black mother, who’s lost her only son, and who is SO scared, that it was police brutality.

    And i KNOW the power i have, as a short white womsn,to put her fears to rest, that it WAS an accident, and NOT brutality, and that the cops really DID do everything they could, to try to save him.

    Lorenzo Doby died, 14 years ago, Tuesday.
    I was one of the last people he talked to, as he lost his breath, and then lost his life, to an asthma attack those two officers & I didn’t know he was having, while, yes, unfortunately, he was also high–because, after he lunged at the female officer like he lunged at me, she ended up spraying him with pepper spray.

    I hate. HATE that George Floyd’s family is living the horror(and now, SO much worse!),that Lorenzo’s mom & sister were forced to endure–except that THEIR brother was literally murdered ON PURPOSE,rather than dying because oslf a terrible, tragic, accident.

    And I am SO GODDAMN ANGRY right now, that there are MORE shitty, White Men,who want to inflict that kind of PAIN, on more Black families.

    (**aside from the firebugs–tbqh, THEY *do* worry me–but, BECAUSE *FIRE*, not because of their skin color!😉),

  3. Lorenzo Doby was a GOOD man.

    He was MY age.

    He had hopes and dreams, just like ME, or any one of you.

    And he also had a daughter, she was 4-ish back then… and dear god, I just realized that poor young woman might have had her whole senior year fucked by the ongoing COVID awfulness!😳😳😲💔💔💔💔

    She lost her daddy that day.

    Lorenzo’s momma lost her only son (I started sobbing, later that day, on my way to work, when I realized that *I* knew her son was dead, before SHE even did💔

    Lorenzo’s sister, she lost her brother. Her only sibling.

    ***MAJOR correction!!! 16 years ago Tuesday, my brain is shot, and math is hard lately, I apologize!***

    Lorenzo died on the morning of May 26th, 2004.

    I tried to help, I really did.

    But I couldn’t.
    And it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t anyone’s “fault,” all, simply a series of tragic accidents.

    But LORENZO, ‘Zo to his friends & family, HE MATTERED, goddammit.

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