Posts Tagged ‘trump derangement syndrome’

Apparently Calvin Munerlyn life only matters if Trump could be blamed for it ending

Posted: May 6, 2020 by datechguy in media, News/opinion
Tags: , , , ,

Last week I mentioned DaTechGuys’ Laws of media outrage which dictate how the media/left will act in any circumstance. This week we saw a story that applied both sides of DaTechguy’s 3rd law of media outrage which states:

The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.

The story? The murder of Calvin Munerlyn.

Calvin Munerlyn, a guard at a dollar store in Flint Michigan was shot to death when confronting a customer concerning wearing wearing a facemask. This would seemingly be a local story but it was suddenly elevated by those on the left as Stacy McCain reports:

“This is another Trump inspired murder,” one Twitter user declared. “This is what the rabid hosts on Fox and Trump have done,” said another. “A direct result of Trump’s cry to ‘liberate’ Michigan,” said yet another as the torrent of Trump-hating messages spewed forth.

And the critique was not confined to those without a blue check as Fred Guttenberg declared:

.@realdonaldtrump remember your crazy tweet to liberate Michigan? You and your incitement of your unstable base are responsible for this murder.

So you had a killing that was ready to be promoted to a national story as a Biden supporting blue check was on it, but you might note that rather than the tweet itself I have a quote of the original tweet which is now gone?

Why is that tweet gone? This photo from the abc12 story about the shooting is the big clue:

Larry Teague Jr., Ramonyea Bishop 

From the abc 12 story:

Three people are charged with the murder of a Family Dollar security guard in Flint, who was enforcing the store’s policy requiring face masks.

Two men remain at large while a woman has been arrested and is awaiting arraignment in the Genesee County Jail.

The male suspects are 44-year-old Larry Edward Teague and 23-year-old Ramonyea Bishop. Teague’s wife and Bishop’s mother, 45-year-old Sharmel Teague, has been arrested.

All three suspects are facing a charge of first-degree premeditated murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole if they are convicted.

If ONLY Mr. Munerlyn was killed by the right kind of people, say Trump supporting activists protesting the Governor of Michigan, then the left would make his name would be a household word in America and sympathy would be pouring in from all corners of the country.

But alas he was not so as predicted by DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of media outrage, the story remains a local one and those who once purported to care decided that Mr. Munerlyn murder was not worth their time, outrage or sympathy.

Unexpectedly of course.

Will COVID-19 change your care level in local elections?

Posted: May 2, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,
From https://penobscotbaypress.com/news/2018/oct/31/voting-information-for-election-day-november-6/

Everyone wants to talk about President Trump. Even when the President isn’t focusing the media attention on himself (which is pretty rare), people want to discuss what he’s doing or not doing. If you wander onto social media, the overwhelming number of political posts are about President Trump, followed by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

Given all that focus, you would think that the President has an outsized influence in our daily lives. But unless you work in the federal government, that’s not really true. In fact, your local judges and politicians have a far greater impact on your daily life, and yet most people can’t name but a handful of them.

Let’s look at your average day. After you get up, you drive into work. The roads are managed at the state level, with some states spending significantly more in administrative costs than others. Your gas tax varies widely from state to state. Whether your hair stylist or braider needs a license is mainly state controlled. Whether you can buy alcohol on Sunday, or at night, or from a private store, is controlled by your state.

The COVID-19 responses in your state are mostly controlled by the governor. While Michigan and New York have capitalized on media coverage, the reality is that most governors seem to have done OK. I’m not a fan of our governor, but his response to COVID-19 and the restrictions he put in place made sense. I can still shop and get take-out from restaurants, without getting pulled over by the police and having my trunk checked for essential items.

The rules in place get funded and reinforced by the state legislature, and yet I struggle to find people who know anything, even the name, of their state representative. These people have a huge influence on your daily life, and people actually get to choose them every few years, and yet most have no idea who they are.

Schools are even worse. School board elections are so mundane, and yet most people figured out that despite the administrative costs paid by your property taxes, most schools couldn’t build a distance education plan to save their lives. I’m having to teach my kids math and science because the math and science teachers aren’t allowed to lecture more than an hour a week because of the school administration. After having that stupid rule explained to me, I’ve taken a larger interest in school board elections.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a chance for many people to reevaluate portions of their life. Could you spend long periods of time at home? Could you stay connected with others when you couldn’t travel? But perhaps most importantly, it exposed most of us to how well or not well our local elected officials run our government. That experience should drive your vote this year.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

On Conspiracy Theories

Posted: April 18, 2020 by ng36b in catholic
Tags: , , , ,

People never cease to amaze me. I am used to reading Chinese, North Korean and Russian propaganda. It’s comical to read, but sad when you think that 20% of the world’s population has to read this garbage due to censorship.

So imagine my frustration when a friend sent me this:

And I’m pouring myself a glass of plentiful water being like

How are you supposed to respond to these things? It’s not the first time, and over the years, I’ve tried various strategies. The three I’ve settled on I like to call Truth, Ridicule and Instigation.

Truth

You can always fight lies with truth. A while back I was trying to sort through the hype about the HPV Vaccine. My doctor at work said it was fine, but I had heard stories about it acting as a contraceptive. So I dove in, reading an awful lot of technical papers. Turns out, the one study that said the vaccine was a contraceptive was poorly done, and every Catholic source I found said the vaccine is fine, although also recommending it not be mandated.

Ridicule

Watch Baghdad Bob in action at about the 7 minute mark!

The invasion of Iraq exposed many Americans to the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, or more commonly known as Baghdad Bob. During the invasion, we were inundated with interviews where Baghdad Bob would deny claims that any American forces had entered Iraq or Baghdad, with such memorable quotes as “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks.” and “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!” Americans, in typical American fashion, were not impressed, and soon al-Sahaaf was featured on countless memes, YouTube videos and even had a website devoted to him.

From http://www.holtorf.com

Instigation

Instead of fighting the allegation, you force it one level deeper. When someone asked me whether 5G caused COVID-19, I told them “Only the Huawei 5G. That’s why we have to build 5G from Verizon.” Or when someone claims that climate change is a government conspiracy, I tell them “It’s worse than that. Ever since the U.S. captured the Nazi weather machine in Svalbard, our scientists have been making all sorts of dangerous changes!”

A good instigation has a kernel of truth that is easy to find on the Internet. In the 5G case, its the push by the U.S. to build their own 5G infrastructure. In the climate case, its the (true) fact that the Nazi’s had a weather outpost on Svalbard that was one of the last places to surrender during the war. Heck, the Nazis even had a weather station in Canada! Maybe the Inuits were working with the Nazis to overthrow the Canadian government…nah, couldn’t be true, could it?

You can easily do your own instigation, and you should! The best format is:

  • Hyperbole – Actor – Kernel of Truth – Outright Lie –

My favorites are:

Hypberole:
It’s worse than you know…
I have insider information…
A study that was covered up said…
I found this site on the Dark Web that said…

Actors:
The radical left
The vast right-wing conspiracy
The underground Communist movement
Russian spies
Vatican II
The Nazis
The Illuminati

Truth and Lies are easy, a bit of Googling and you’ll learn some interesting history. Occasionally, places like the Onion help you out, like when they reveal that government vaccine trackers malfunctioned.

Instigation seems cruel, but the more I used it, it made me realize two things. First, when you learn about history, you realize that governments are made of people that are flawed. Conspiracy theorists will connect a few dots of information to come up with some wild accusation, while the reality is a lot more mundane. I tell people that the golden rule for government conspiracy is “Never attribute to government conspiracy what is better left to incompetence, greed or lust for power.“

Applying that to the current status of Michigan’s COVID-19 shutdown is perfect. The current Governor is a jerk. She’s using the crisis to push her own agenda, beat down on people she doesn’t like, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she profits from it in some way. But is she part of a bigger conspiracy? Doubtful. You’d be giving her too much credit by saying that.

The other thing I realized is that we’re all sucked into conspiracy. Plenty of people reading this will think they are somehow too smart to be fooled by conspiracy. To that I say, you’re not. Lots of people believed Bernie Sanders and/or Donald Trump was being funded by the Russians. People doubted whether Barack Obama was a U.S. citizen, despite the FBI having investigated the matter. People still believe there are UFOs at Area 51.

On a small scale though, we all fall victim to this. How many people think drinking 8 glasses of water a day is recommended? Or that flossing your teeth is a good thing? Despite living in the information age, we’re terrible at actually challenging our beliefs. We could read about vaccines and flossing, sift through campaign finance records, and learn about unique history…or we could share social media posts that appeal to our emotions instead of reason.

Humans are unique for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest is our ability to reason and logically question the world around us. Social media makes it too easy to be lazy, put people in stereotyped boxes, and accept old-wives tales as truth. We could all do better.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

One point missing from Stacy McCain’s ‘Grisly Calculus’ on the Corona/Wuhan Virus

Posted: March 24, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, media, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , ,

On Saturday Robert Stacy McCain put up an excellent post concerning the math of the Corona/Wuhan virus:

Notice I’m counting deaths, rather than the reported number of infections. The reason for this is that death is a fixed target, whereas identifying people who are infected is variable. It has been reported that about 80% of people infected with Wuhan coronavirus have only mild symptoms — a few days of sniffling and sneezing, no different than the common cold — and some have no symptoms at all. There has been a shortage of tests for the virus, and many U.S. patients have only been tested in the past few days, so we can expect a significant upswing in the number of known cases over the next week or so, but that does not necessarily mean the actual number of cases is increasing. Therefore, I’m focusing strictly on the number of deaths from the virus.

This is an important point because reducing the number of deaths is the actual goal of all the draconian measures taken to this point.

Stacy Also points out something I’ve mentioned on the Podcast more than once that blue urban areas are the ones most affected.

The key will be to keep track of (a) the total number of U.S. deaths, and (b) the percentage of deaths in the top 10 states in comparison to the rest of the country. As I say, the number of people reported as infected may increase rapidly without telling us very much. You could test positive for Wuhan coronavirus and never get very sick at all. It’s the serious cases requiring hospitalization that will put a strain on our health-care system, and the number of deaths will be a good barometer of how that’s going.

If you don’t have any symptoms, you don’t need to be tested. The media are panicking about the lack of testing because guess what? The media are based in urban centers where the risk of getting this disease is much higher than it is for Americans living out in the boondocks

That’s part of the key as well, if you are in an urban center and/or a place full of people who travel internationally you are much more likely to get the virus than if you are getting a scallop dinner for takeout at Mike’s Clam Shack in Wells Maine as I did with DaWife on Friday. Thus NY, Chicago LA & DC have cause more cause for concern than folks in Fitchburg MA or Wells ME.

But there is one other component of the math that Stacy is Missing concerning the hue and cry over testing. It a point I was making concerning the President’s handling of the case during my tale of Brer Donkey, Brer Rino, Brer Trump and the Coronabriarpatch

Meanwhile Brer Trump took Brer Owl and his team’s advice and coordinated with industry. He realized that while you couldn’t destroy the #coronabriarpatch he started taking the steps needed to keep the #coronabriarpatch under control and did such a good job that even Brer Newsom and Brer Cuomo who worked for Brer Donkey had some nice things to say about him.

Nevertheless Brer Media, Brer Deepstate Brer Rino and Brer Donkey kept insisting that millions of people where going to die and the economy of Brer Eagle’s land was going to tank in the #coronabriarpatch because Brer Trump was doing a bad job. They insisted be thrown in the CornoaBriarPatch and prove there was a safe way out. They were convinced that he wouldn’t be able to get out before election day to stop Brer Old Slow Joe.

Remember for the media and the left the Corona Virus isn’t a dangerous disease that needs to be stopped, to them Donald Trump is the disease and the Corona Virus and panic over it are the tools to use in order to destroy him.

That’s why they are so fixated on the number of infections vs the number of deaths and why they are so anxious to push the idea that not having a test for everyone is proof of failure. This isn’t about informing the public in a crisis situation, it’s about throwing that same “Orange Man Bad” pitch that they’ve been hurling for three years and tying to generate a metric to help that pitch alone.

As I noted on twitter a few days ago:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Anyone who thinks the media has changed its stripes over this crisis is a fool.

Older Entries
Newer Entries