On Monday night I was at work and my friend said something to me during break time:

Wow apparently there is looting in Fairfield.

I found that pretty surprising considering Fairfield is a military town that borders Vacaville, making Vacaville a military-adjacent town. I figured these areas would be the last ones to be hit with any of this craziness, and to be fair that may turn out to be the case in the long run. Or perhaps I'm way off base here and that's precisely why we'll be the testing ground for the new and improved police state.

---

Regardless

When my shift ended, I got a message from my girlfriend claiming there was also looting in Vacaville at the outlets (which is directly on my way home from work) and that I should take an alternate path home from work.

Nah!

So of course I drove straight to the outlets to see what was up.
Life is boring.
The world only ends once.

YOLO

Disappointed

All I saw were two empty cop cars with their lightbars blazing silently, blocking the entrances and exits to the area. That was enough "excitement" for one night. I just drove on by and headed home like I always would.

I'm now being told today that these looters were from outside the city. My girlfriend claims they were "a teenage gang of anarchists" from Martinez and most of them have been arrested.

So many problems with that statement...

First of all, I'm not 100% sold on the whole "teenage gang of anarchists". That straight up sounds like a bad movie. Barring that skepticism how is it possible that "most of them have been arrested"? It's not easy to catch people doing crimes, especially when lots of people are all doing crimes at once. Either they are lying or they are employing some kind of (possibly illegal) police state surveillance tech. No one even questions these statements. So alarming.

JK!

Upon further review it looks like they were traveling in a pack of cars and all they had to do was record license plates off of cameras... lol... take off your license plates, morons!

😅😂🤣

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamiAfXCrZY

OH OH OH!

I almost forgot the best part! lol... the looters in Fairfield crashed a crane into the Bestbuy. Damn it feels good to be a gangster. To be fair this footage looks like a roving band of teenage anarchists... lol. What dimension did I fall into?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1L8l3LrzLA

So yeah...

Vacaville literally translates to "Cow Town". Nothing happens here. I'm surprised I even live here, if I'm being honest. The only reason I do is because my girlfriend lives here and we met online. Needless to say, it's weird to see shit going down in such a Podunk area. I guess this is the "new normal" they were talking about.

Looting is stupid...

You can't loot any of the supplies that you actually need. That's what these rioters don't seem to understand. Seriously, what are you going to steal? A TV? Phones? Mach 3 razor blades? Everything people actually need (food/water/shelter) is either dirt cheap at the moment or impossible/impractical to steal due to bulk limitations (hard steal a house). The blind rage combined with undirected and pointless lashing out we see during these moments of unrest is extremely alarming.

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Even more alarming!

We lost power yesterday for a few seconds. It's always nice to be reminded how heinously dependent we all are on the grid. I talked to my friend in Fairfield and his power wasn't restored for like 7 hours. Want to know why?

Yep!

Goddamn helicopter hit a power line.
Isn't that fun?
Jesus Christ...

Perhaps even more alarming

The National Guard has been called in to Vacaville to "protect and serve" the outlets. My girlfriend has been making jokes like, "You may take my life, but you can never have my Air Jordans."

Predictive programming.

This is where I lose "normal people". I say things like this are practically planned and that they are only going to escalate from here. Let no crisis go to waste.

What is the point of the National Guard coming in here and garrisoning the outlets? Vacaville as so many cops. The mayor is tight with the police union (which should not even exist). We don't need help from the National Guard, so why are they here?

Isn't it obvious?

They are here to get people accustomed to military intervention. You know, originally I was thinking the police were becoming militarized enough to deal with the coming shitstorm, but I guess not. By preemptively calling in the military to deal with these nonsense situations, we train the population to accept further escalation.

Meanwhile, I try to tell people these things and they look at me like I'm a fucking lunatic.

Fun stuff.

Perhaps if I can't convince anyone, @caitlinjohnstone can (she can't).
She wrote a piece recently that really sums all this madness up pretty well:

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/we-are-watching-the-story-of-america-crash-headlong-into-the-reality-of-america-9668d67ffd25

Once upon a time a nation rose to prominence after emerging unscathed from two world wars which damaged the infrastructure of its competitors. The world’s major power players quickly coalesced around this new superpower and began maneuvering other nations into a tight empire-like alliance with it. After a long and gruelling cold war, this empire succeeded in toppling the world’s only other superpower and began working to absorb all other nations into alliance with it. If nations resisted, they were subverted, sabotaged and attacked until they either collapsed or allowed themselves to be absorbed into the imperial blob.

The operators of this globe-spanning empire have always been acutely aware that the weakest point in their machine is the possibility that the hundreds of millions of people who live in this nation may one day decide that the imperial status quo is not serving them, and that they do not want to be ruled anymore. They know that the last line of defense against this happening is their ability to use extreme violence upon the population until they stop revolting, so they have no intention of ever giving up this ability. An entire planetary empire depends on it.

First Amendment violations are sweeping from coast to coast as police chiefs, mayors and governors try to see how far they down can squeeze freedom of assembly laws, and mysterious armed men in fatigues who refuse to say who they’re with are patrolling the nation’s capital. Prison riot specialists are being recruited as expert consultants because, in the eyes of the empire, the prisoners are rioting.

Still jealous that she'll always be a better writer than I.

But can she code?
Take that, Johnstone!

JK

Same team.