Whats good natives

It’s ya boi Huck. As you have probably noticed, it’s been a while since I last posted on this blog. I was summoned by the High Council to visit my home planet in response to an emergency that arose. That is about all I can say at the moment. I will not disclose any more information regarding the visit, as it is top secret. Anyway, all seems to be somewhat well now, so I have returned to your home planet to continue my mission in observing all of you and the world you, and I guess myself, live in. In a previous post I spoke about the coronavirus and how the actions, or the failure of a single government to act upon certain events can have a tremendous impact upon the entire world. Since then, the problems surrounding the coronavirus have only multiplied. Italy, one of many countries to be affected by the epidemic, reported a 45% single-day rise in infections. In today’s blog post I wanna speak more about the new issues that have risen since, and most importantly, the solutions and research that have been proposed to solve the epidemic. Since my last post, the amount of cases of COVID-19 have only risen globally and just earlier this week the CDC, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that the coronavirus is expected to spread throughout the country, and that “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness”. I’m straight up quoting the words of the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. What makes the disease even trickier to pin down is the fact that, according to some reports even though there are the normal traits that characterize the disease such as pneumonia, fever, runny nose, even diarrhea, there has been amounting evidence that the disease may be asymptomatic. For non-science people who don’t want to deal with opening a new tab to google the definition, that just basically means that it can also exist in people without producing or showing any symptoms. To address these asymptomatic symptoms Dr. Yuen from the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital says that the new aim is to control the epidemic by isolating patients, “…Tracing and quarantining contacts as early as possible, educating the public on both food and personal hygiene, and ensuring health care workers comply with infection control”. Meanwhile, there’s research going on behind the scenes to tackle the issue. This week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that a vaccine does not seem to be a likely solution to COVID-19. Normally vaccine development takes decades, but a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 would likely take 12 to 18 months. This is obviously comparatively fast, but is still not rapid enough, considering that the coronavirus seems to affect more people even by the hour. Right now it seems that the more viable option for combatting the epidemic are drugs as they can get produced soon. I sure hope that’s the case.

Huck.

Dear natives,

Three weeks have gone by and I still can’t seem to shake the tragedy that occurred in Calabasas, when Kobe Bryant and his 13 year old daughter Gigi Bryant passed away in a helicopter crash. I always knew he was a basketball legend even though I never really followed sports, but strangely ever since his death I haven’t been able to take it out of my mind. I was glad when I stumbled across a post written by someone else who was clearly also shaken up by Kobe’s death and who admired the amazing person that the world lost a couple weeks ago just as much as I do. The second I saw Spirofighter’s post about Kobe I knew I had to respond. Not only was I amazed to have found another being not from here, but I enjoyed reading the alien’s touching perspective of the impact of Kobe Bryant on the world. As Spirofighter said, Kobe was the definition of a warrior. I think a reason why so many of us have been affected by his passing is because of how shocking it is to see someone as great and seemingly invincible as he was, the victim of a tragedy. 

One of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou is: “At the end of the day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel”. I think I agree with the great poet to a certain extent, but not all the way. People will definitely always remember Kobe’s accomplishments that made him into the legend that he was, but the main reason I personally feel so affected by this tragedy was because of the noble, talented yet insanely hard-working, family man that he was. I think the same can be said for lots of other people who find themselves in the same position as myself, not completely in tune with basketball yet still deeply affected by the tragedy. Back where I come from, we too have parents that reproduce to create us, but in my specific case, I grew up without parents and never really saw the full extent of parental love. The fact that he only started using helicopters as a way to spend more time with his family after missing his daughter’s school plays makes the story even more heartbreaking. And the fact that his daughter, who was rumored to have inherited her father’s talent and dedication to the sport never got to show her gifts to the world, makes me beyond devastated. Scrolling through any social media form it is evident the deep connection he shared with his daughter and the amount of love that flowed from him to his children and wife, and just about anyone who was lucky enough to have crossed paths with him. Rest in peace Mamba and Mambacita.

Hi Earthlings,

If you read my last post you are probably aware that I travelled to California recently to visit the beautiful city of Santa Cruz. I ended up extending my stay by an extra two days, and let me tell you, it is quite a time to be there right now. In case you aren’t already aware, there is a graduate student strike happening at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one that has made many headlines. However, I am writing today not to give my opinion on the strike, but to talk about a separate issue that has only gotten worse in California with in the past years. The mention of the graduate strike, however, isn’t completely irrelevant. Both the strike and the issue I plan on talking about highlight the impossibility of being able to afford rent in California due to the high cost of living. I used to live in the Bay Area for quite some time and decided to leave California some 16 years ago due to financial strain. You may be wondering how a God like myself who possesses light speed, the only being on Earth who knows the complete truth of your existence, can experience financial problems, but where I come from, I am an underpaid human-obsessed journalist receiving limited funding for carrying out my travels and observations of your world. In a way, I too identify with the graduate students who are just trying to make ends meet to pursue whatever their passion is. For this reason, I deeply empathize with their circumstances. My recent travels didn’t just stop at Santa Cruz, I ended up extending my stay in the Golden State and explored the entire Bay Area. I visited my old neighborhood, my secret spot where I used to write my weekly reports, the church where I got married. In some ways, it hadn’t changed too much. It still looked similar, enough for me to recognize the places I had regularly visited. In more ways, though, it was completely different. The generations of families I had witnessed grow up were all gone, the ambience had changed. San Francisco isn’t what it used to be. Everything is now overpriced, targeting tourists and residents alike. Back when I first moved there taking a cable car only cost me 25 cents, now they’re 7 dollars. With an average one bedroom apartment costing a whopping $3,700 a month, the only people that can afford to live there anymore are Silicon Valley techies who have taken over the city. Even though San Francisco has probably the worst case of price inflation, sadly it’s extended to the rest of California. This time that I visited happened to overlap with a recent news story that I found from KSBW8, that stated that between the years 2007 and 2016, 5 million residents moved out of California, while 6 million OG Californians moved out. According to the US Census Bureau, the majority of those that moved in make over 200,000 dollars a year. People are being left no other option than to abandon their roots, part ways with their families, and consider futures in other places. It’s a pity that only the wealthy California natives for the most part have the option of staying close to home.

Huck.

Hello Earth Natives,

After my recent travels, I decided to take a day off from my duties and do what humans typically do on what they call a “Lazy day”. After sleeping an excessive amount (which for the record, us Jainkoa only do for the purpose of meditation but is in no way a necessity), binge watching a series on Netflix (that i am too embarrassed to tell you the name of), and indulging in toffee candy, I stumbled across a blog created by a cloud. It was quite interesting, as, in all of my years here overseeing the activities and daily lives of humans, I had never stumbled upon the perspective of a cloud! I had never even stopped to wonder whether my people had created clouds to even have perspectives! While reading the Cloud’s blog it occurred to me that being up in the sky all day definitely is a vantage point in the daily observations of humans. Sure, it’s pretty neat getting to travel everywhere thanks to having light speed but imagine how sick it would be to watch it all from above.

I never thought that I would find a cloud to be similar to myself, but I can’t help but see the comparison as we both oversee the daily lives of humans and watch them regularly. Watching you humans on a daily basis, observing your actions are what the cloud and I share. And it is the reason we care so much about you. The cloud, who calls itself DrizzyK had an interesting opinion or two about the legalization of mushrooms in Santa Cruz. Being on the other side of the world for travel purposes recently, I had no idea they were even legalizing mushrooms in Santa Cruz. Upon hearing of this and returning to the beloved city, I spoke to a couple residents who were opposed to it, and it wasn’t until now that I found someone who shared such similar views to mine. Upon stumbling across the title of his post, I had mentally prepared myself for another blog attacking the legalization of mushrooms, and was satisfied to see that that was not the case. I loved the example DrizzyK provided of Portugal and how decriminalizing drugs and investing money in other efforts to help the community ended up reducing the use of drugs by a huge amount. In fact, I remember what Portugal used to be like pretty clearly before they decriminalized drugs, and I, Huck, can definitely certify that Portugal was a very different place than what it is now. A lot of it, as DrizzyK said, has to do with the fact that feeling like you are a criminal creates a disconnect between oneself and society. And I completely agreed with the cloud’s assertion that the positive side effects of mushrooms have been overlooked not because there’s hard data supporting it, but because of the fear of the unknown.

Huck.

During my recent travels I have heard all sorts of news regarding the widespread Coronavirus. I will not explain to you today what it is or how significant it is because I assume that if you are on my site reading my blog you are already aware that it is of far more significance than the Chinese government is trying to let on. Not to mention that there are already several other great blogs and articles out there doing it for me. What I will talk about however is how the failure of one government can greatly affect the rest of the world. Despite China’s president Xi Jinping being hailed “a great leader” in the past we are starting to realize the dangerous implications of his authoritarian ways, for China and for the rest of the world. The saddest part is the extreme lengths he is going to to silence people who attempt to warn other people about the health dangers they may face. Take for example, a doctor who told a WeChat group about the virus and was then punished by the Communist Party. It is still unclear what the doctor’s punishment entailed. Upon research, I cannot find exactly what happened to the doctor, all that is known is that he had to sign an “I am wrong” statement and is “under critical condition” according to Twitter user Yaxue Cao. Upon trying to follow the links that Cao cites, one reaches a blank page that says that “The content has been deleted by the author”. Sadly, this is just one of several cases of the Chinese government attempting to silence the people and punish those who try to spread the alarming news. They reportedly are closely monitoring “journalism, social media, nongovernmental organizations, the legal profession, and others that might provide accountability”, according to The New York Times. Even sadder is that by the time the Chinese government decided to act on it and listen to the doctors by locking down Wuhan (the city where the Coronavirus is said to have originated from), 5 million people had already evacuated. Because of the Chinese government’s refusal to acknowledge the virus at its onset, hospitals were unable to stock up on supplies. There are now shortages of testing kits, masks, protective gear, etc.

There is one other topic I wish to talk about regarding the Corona Virus, and that is the way that people that identify as Asians are being treated ever since the onset of the virus. Many Asians living abroad have spoken out about incidents of discrimination, the most common incident being people moving away from them on buses. There has also been a reported incident of a Singaporean woman being confronted in a mall in New Zealand. A French newspaper had “Yellow Alert” spelled in huge letters earlier this week. It’s disgusting and disheartening to hear that after all these years, what was known as the “Yellow Peril Era” is making a comeback to the west, at a time that I thought we were in progress of moving forward. That era was filled with lynchings of Asian immigrants, racial violence, and discrimination. I remember that time quite clearly and it’s beyond devastating to think that it may repeat itself again.

Hi Earthlings,

Every now and then when I scroll through a news website, somehow among an endless compilation of disheartening news, I find a story that low key restores my faith in humans. It reminds me of why I stick to my mission, even though it has not been easy for me by any means and is the reason I live my excruciatingly long life (around 1 billion human years) as a lonely nomad in exile. Apparently nobody wants to be friends with a Dijanko, or someone who has faith in humankind and works towards proving their worth. So be it, this is the price I’m willing to pay to pursue my passion.

When I do find one of those rare stories that manages to put a smile on my face, an insane feeling of warmth and joy courses throughout my body. It is the same warm feeling you get when you see those videos of dogs rescuing their owners on instagram, the same warm feeling I get when I think of my beautiful homeland. Take for example, the article I found today about beloved artist, Michael Davenport, who draws and paints with his mouth after an accident that left him armless in his childhood. Earlier this week he was robbed of all of his cash, markers, canvases, among many other expensive tools. Exasperated, on Tuesday he recounted the experience saying, “I started breaking down and crying. All my tools are gone, what am I going to do”.  Surely, the events that found Davenport in that predicament don’t reflect too kindly on the actions of humans, but the widespread response he received as a result is enough to bring joy to readers like myself. With a little help, Davenport was able to open a GoFundMe account and in only 24 hours received $24,000. That meant he was cashing in nearly $1,000 an hour. The donations far exceeded the initial goal, and Crime Stoppers is offering up to $1,000 in reward for information regarding any suspects so that they may be arrested. I tend to have an ever changing stance on whether humans are inherently good or bad, and most of the time, I prefer to stick to the pessimistic stance. Hey, it’s tough being let down by you guys, especially considering that I put so much on the line. But stories like these make me realize that the initial study by the Jainkoa to determine whether humans are inherently good or bad is wrong, because there is no such thing as good and bad. There’s a little bit of both.

The moral of the story isn’t that humans are “good” beings because they donated money. Money has nothing to do with it. What makes humans “good” in this situation is that they were informed of an event they realized was unjust and inhumane, and were so taken aback by Davenport’s experience that it inspired them to attempt to correct some of the wrong that was done to him by other people.

Hi Humans,

Allow me to let you in on a little secret that us Jainkoa like to keep to ourselves. We perform all sorts of studies on you, mostly off the radar. However, it’s not really us performing the studies at all, we get you guys to do it instead. See, humans will go to odd lengths to acquire knowledge and power– a trait that you inherited from us. All we need to do is implant an idea in one of your heads and almost immediately it’s “as though a block has been lifted from your brain”, and you get an idea that “you never thought of before”. We hear that a lot. Before placing you into this experiment we purposely placed that block in your head to prevent any of you from making any discoveries that could alter the results. We created humans in our spitting image and you have thus been gifted with the mental capacity to create a civilization from the ground up and understand what I am telling you now. Without the block, you would’ve realized the truth long ago and the experiment would’ve had to cease.

Back to what I said earlier though– we study humans by convincing your kind to do it for us. The incentive is power and knowledge so we don’t have to do more than implant the idea. We carry it out in many ways. First, we investigate the people that have the power and the money to carry out the sort of experiment we need you to. Then, it’s only a matter of faking a casual run-in, or drawing your attention to a specific forum that we created anonymously to implant the idea. It’s an old as time tactic we use to trick you into doing our work for us, we call it “the human hack”. One of our current indirect studies on your kind started nearly a century ago, with the objective of determining the scope of your intelligence and adaptability. We chose one human from the early 1900s and made him time travel to this century. Does that maybe ring a bell for one of you? Hi Howard.

As I explained in my very first blog post, I chose only 25 people in the world to disclose my personal reports of human affairs to. Howard was an obvious choice. For one, he probably wanted some sort of explanation for the current state of his life. Second, it’s not really like he can expose the Jainkoa– What would he say to the press? That he’s a criminal from the 1920s who time travelled to the 2020s because of an experiment that aliens (who created all humans) orchestrated to determine the scope of human intelligence? Like anyone would believe that. I have kept close tabs on Howard ever since his arrival in this century and have recently discovered his blog. Obviously, I was delighted to have found it as he is essentially chronicling his day-to-day experiences, facilitating our observation of him and his time travel experience. I look forward to hearing more from him.

Huck.

Dear Earthlings,

I have a confession to make. I am what your kind would call “old”. I knew some of your grandparents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents. Just to clarify though, I am hardly old. In my native land “old” and “young” don’t exist, as we are outside the sphere of time.

100 years ago today, January 17th, I witnessed the passing of the 18th amendment and honestly, as much as I’d like to give some elaborate story about how me and the boys dashed to the closest liquor store and waited in a crazy line to stock up on all the booze we could get our hands on Prohibition Eve, it was just like any other day. Every year that this day passes by there will be a new article reading “97th Anniversary of the 18th Amendment” or 98th, or 99th, and every year it finds its way into my trash. I don’t even need to read it, by now I know to expect some crazy story about violent street protests and how it all started because some crazy Christians got together and decided alcohol represented the devil, and let me offer you one word to sum it all up: bullshit. Just a waste of trees. Back then, it was hardly front page news so I cannot for the life of me understand why it is now. To put some things into context for you, there was way too much going on at the time for the 18th amendment of all things to even matter. There was talk about ratifying the Peace of Versailles and a war scare with Russia. Fact check me, I dare you. The New York Times backs me up on this one. The entire US had basically been sober for over half a year becuase of the Wartime Prohibition Act, not to mention that 32 of the 48 states (history lesson: Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico still weren’t considered states back then) already had prohibition laws. Making it into an amendment hardly changed anyone’s lifestyles.

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m blogging about an event that I claim is overrated and shouldn’t be spoken about as much. I mean, it’s a little contradictory right?

To clarify, my problem isn’t that people talk about the 18th Amendment more than they should. My problem is that this is only one of millions of historic events that is so hugely distorted to the point that everyone’s knowledge of the subject is only 5 percent truth. My problem is that we have a way of rewriting history and using it to vilify certain groups of people that did nothing wrong. Prohibition did not happen because alcohol represented satan, it happened to prevent the rich from making profit from addiction.

Huck.