Seen in a Mini Cooper:

Staten Islanders with masks drive out non-mask wearing person in grocery store. #Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/iPQwk7lD9y

— McAuley (@McauleyHolmes) May 25, 2020

For all their righteous indignation about keeping themselves “healthy” by attacking Mask-Less, they missed something important:

Mobs don’t follow Social Distancing guidelines.

An idea about reducing contagion it has become the badge of moral authority for the petty dictators among us to badger others that do not look like them. But they do not see their own failings because it is not about the health anymore.

Last week I wrote a post about California Governor Gavin Newsom holding Californians hostage over federal bailout money.

This week New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy decided to do the same thing:

New Jersey governor warns of major cuts to teachers, firefighters, police officers and health care workers without more federal funding

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Sunday warned that key employees — including health care workers, firefighters, police officers and teachers — could be laid off if the state does not receive additional funding from the federal government.

The dire prediction from Murphy reflects what many governors across the country fear as states grapple with budget shortfalls from the economic calamity brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The Democrat and other governors have called for additional federal assistance while the White House is reluctant to provide additional funds to states. On Friday, Murphy announced the state is estimated to have a revenue loss of $10 billion.

Are you telling me that there isn’t one unnecessary bit of bullshit or waste that New Jersey could cut to fund teachers and firefighters?

Of course there is, but trimming that fat would keep politicians from lining their pockets from the government coffers and upset the donors who give money in exchange for feeding at the trough of waste spending.

That is far more valuable to politicians than teachers, firefighters, or police.

So these politicians demand that our federal taxes pay for their necessities so their state budgets can still be spent on grift and graft.

The only thing that should be sent to New Jersey is a guillotine.

From Twitter:

Staten Islanders with masks drive out non-mask wearing person in grocery store. #Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/iPQwk7lD9y

— Mac (@GoodPoliticGuy) May 25, 2020

If you wonder how lynch mobs or pogroms form or how something like Kristallnacht was able to happen, this is it.

A bunch of people were driven by the powers that be (politicians and the media) to hysterical fear and ganged up on and verbally assaulted an innocent person for not wearing a mask.

The effectiveness of homemade cloth masks is still dubious.  Data seems to indicate that in close proximity, where the mask is able to catch large droplets of expectorated sputum a cloth mask is better than nothing.  Cloth masks are much less effective in stopping the aerosolized virus which is much finer than the mesh of the fibers.

If you are near someone who is coughing, a DIY mask might decrease the viral load you are exposed to.  Just walking around outside, a mask is little to no help.

Masks are most effective when sick people with a cough are wearing them.  Again, cloth masks are only good at catching large droplets.  If you are not expectorating droplets and your mask isn’t so fine that it it makes breathing difficult (if you’eve ever worn a properly fitting chemical respirator or have gone through MOPP training, you know what I’m talking about) that mask isn’t stopping you from exhaling virus.

But the science of masks doesn’t matter to these people.  They have been told that wearing a mask is a moral duty and someone not wearing a mask is a grandma killer.  The heretic was driven out.

The internet was quick to pile on the victim of the mob.

Finally. The anti-maskers have been bullies & spreaders of the virus. Those of us wearing masks should not put up with them. They are wrong

— JaguarPower (@power_jaguar) May 25, 2020

The people with the masks are 100% correct in this situation.

— Kevin Alan (The Geek) (@ffootballgeek) May 25, 2020

HEROES

— DorianGrey (@DorianGrey101) May 25, 2020

Good for them !!.??

— juanita gorman 3 (@3_gorman) May 26, 2020

This one is the most revealing:

I can't wait till we do this to ALL conservatives, except instead of grocery stores we are chasing them out of society https://t.co/2OyOme778q

— Mr Dyspeptic (@katzenbrau) May 25, 2020

See, it’s not about protecting people’s health. It’s that wearing a mask and wanting the lockdown to continue has become a political virtue for some and everyone who disagrees for any reason is the enemy to be utterly destroyed.

I promise you, this will get worse.

From the New York Post:

Alaska resident with rifle aids unarmed police after firearms incident

A 19-year-old Alaska man is facing attempted murder charges after breaking into a public safety building and firing on an unarmed village police officer, authorities said.

Troopers arrested Bryan Nicolai after a member of the Kwethluk community with a rifle arrived on scene and talked Nicolai into surrendering, the station reported.

Nicolai is accused of aiming a rifle at Lee and pulling the trigger, but the weapon didn’t fire. Troopers said Nicolai put on a ballistic vest, a helmet and staged multiple rifles after breaking into the building.

The village police are unarmed because of a lack of training due to a lack of funds.

The village has a population of 721 in the unorganized borough of Bethel, which has a population of 18,000 and a population density of 0.42 people/sq-mi.

So we’re not exactly talking about a big city with a prevalence for violent crime.

Note that when the lone village police officer came under fire it was a good guy with a gun who came to the rescue and ended it, and without a shot being fired.

Usually I am not one for internet public shaming.  I find cancel culture to be horribly corrosive to society, drawing from some of the worst moments in history.

This time I’m going to cover it and in a way not entirely in the same way that the rest of social media has.

Amy Cooper let her dog off its leash in Central Park.  This is neither here nor there for me because I’ve let my dog off her leash a few times in places where I shouldn’t have when nobody else was around.

Some black guy decided to be a Karen and call her out for it.  If her dog was not bothering him, why the fuck was it his business to say anything?  Then he starts to record her with her dog.

Fuck this guy.

I’m suddenly reminded of this meme comic:

If that is where this story ended it wouldn’t have been a story other than the irony of a black man being a Karen to a white woman, which is the opposite of how it happens 99.9% of the time.

However, the dog walker decided to out Karen the man Karening her and in doing so fucked up royally.

She called the cops and lied to them saying that a black man was threatening her.

https://twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920

Yup, that’s pretty fucking racist, and she was caught on camera doing it.  She KNEW she was on camera and did it anyway.

The internet tracked her down to her job at an investment management company and ratted her out and got her placed on administrative leave.

Granted that woman was a piece of shit, but forgive me if I don’t think that black guy comes away from this smelling like roses.  He started that when he decided to record a woman for letting her dog off its leash.

It’s been a long, hard lockdown and if there is one lesson to be learned from what we’ve been seeing lately, it’s this:

IF SOMEONE ISN’T DIRECTLY HARMING YOU, LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE!

If you really feel the need to call someone out for breaking some minor rule that really isn’t hurting anyone, write it down on a slip of paper and cram it up your ass.  If it’s really important your proctologist has a duty to report it when he disimpacts your anal cavity and reads it.

These two Karens got into a pissing match and one lost, badly.

Also, one more lesson:  If someone points a cellphone at you, that is the precise moment where you need to be on your best church behavior.  Make the other person look like an asshole by being a shining beacon of the best of humanity.

The death toll from the Coronavirus in New York City and the surrounding areas is going to require years of study and investigation to understand how things were able to get so bad so quickly.

However, one of the many mishandlings of the Coronavirus was to treat the rest of America like it was New York City and impose on us restrictions that did more harm than good.

Case in point:

Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say

Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.

The head of the trauma in the department believes mental health is suffering so much, it is time to end the shelter-in-place order.

“Personally I think it’s time,” said Dr. Mike deBoisblanc. “I think, originally, this (the shelter-in-place order) was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients.We have the current resources to do that and our other community health is suffering.”

The numbers are unprecedented, he said.

“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” he said. “I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”

The American people struck a gentlemen’s agreement that we’d shut down for two weeks to flatten the curve.  That deal was altered and the lockdown has gone on for months, and the threat of it becoming semi-permanent is real.

Outside of a few very specific hot-zones, the cost of human lives from that is worse than the virus.

If this was truly about saving lives than data like this would justify lifting the lockdown immediately.

However it won’t because clearly the lockdown isn’t about preventing hospitals from being swamped by COVID patients anymore.

These deaths don’t matter to politicians because they can’t use used to consolidate power.