Category: COVID19

‘The Big One’ #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Maybe. Maybe not.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I keep hearing chatter about how COVID19 isn’t “The Big One.” Well, all things being equal, it isn’t. And, yet, maybe it is. The Trump Administration is criminally mismanaging this situation to such an extent that, at least in the United States, it really might be The Big One.

Each nation has a different dynamic to it when it comes to fighting this pandemic. What is rather unsettling is we probably should have shut down all passenger flights some time ago if we were really serious about stopping COVID19 from being The Big One. In the popular imaginnation, because of things like The Stand, we assume that a lot of people would have to die for it to be The Big One.

What if it was just a lot of people got SICK. Like, a huge number. So much so that entire nations (ex: USA) became incapacitated. I think you could call THAT “The Big One.” Trump really is doing everything in his power to screw this up on a massive level. He’s doing a criminally bad job of not only mitigating this situation, but preparing the populace for the next step — triage.

There may come a point when we have to a national “family talk” about some pretty dark things. Like, what do we do when COVID19 rushes into the prison system? What do we do, if anything to save those people? What happens when the health system collapses and people with serious, non-COVID19 illnesses can’t get help? Who pays for all of this? What happens to people who are too sick not to go to work and they can’t go to work? Who feeds their children and keeps the lights on?

And that doesn’t even begin to address both The Gray Plague and the perception crisis that a lot of recorded instances of WuFlop would cause. Those two things in combination in the United States would likely be, in itself, The Big One in the American popular imagination. It would dwarf 9/11 in our culture for no other reason that if 11 million people died, many of them elderly, someone, somewhere might notice and hold Trump, at last, accountable. I DON’T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN. But if it tragically did, I’d at least like our naked emperor to be held accountable on a political level for once.

We’re just not prepared to answer those questions right now. A lot and I mean A LOT of preventable suffering is probably going to happen pretty soon. Sometime between now and The Ides of March is my guess. You can’t lulz something this serious without there being some consequences. The United States is setting itself up for an enormous — preventable — disaster on a pretty historic scale. So much so that it may be “The Big One” to Americans to an extent it is not elsewhere in the world.

Or maybe not.

Maybe Trump’s plan of messaging the base, hoping COVID19 will “burn itself out” and “magically vanish” in April as it grows warmer will work and he’ll use its return in October as an excuse to suspend the Constitution and put me in an ICE Re-Education Camp. Lulz!

‘Slicing The Boil’ #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Cast Away
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Sept 11, 2001 was a unique event in American history because within minutes of the first attack happening, the entire country was thinking about the same thing at the same time. This almost never happens given how large the United State’s population is.

Given that we’re not doing any mitigation, what would it look like when we slice the boil and have to start doing triage? What would that event look like?

The only thing I can think of is, The Gray Plague would occur rather abruptly in the guise of a lot of powerful or well known celebrities dying in very quick succession. Like, within hours of each other. If, say, 40 well known elderly people from across the spectrum of American public life simply dropped dead, that might be noticed by someone, somewhere. Even if we didn’t know why they died, it would be alarming if that many elderly people dropped dead.

Another thing that might spark the event that pushed us into a massive domestic crisis might be reports of the “WuFlop” happening in the United States. I’ve already gotten snookered by a fake news report of this happening in the United States, so I’m feeling a little touchy mentioning it. But, I have to. The WuFlop is so eerie, so disturbing, that if the American public saw it happen more than once across the country within, say, a 48 hour period, it might be enough to cause some serious panic. Of course, it is unlikely the broadcast news shows would even show such events. But it would likely be spread widely around social media and, as such be an extreme version of the Clinton Blue Dress situation where everyone knew something but it wasn’t reported on TV.

I can’t predict the future. I don’t have revealed truth, but I can read. And, I know what’s happened in other countries. Places like Italy and South Korea have had significant outbreaks of COVID19, EVEN WITH “social distancing” and testing. Places like Iran, however, have been less transparent and less proactive on those fronts and have suffered the consquences.

The great tragedy of COVID19 in the United States will be we were given two months to prevent and mitigate its spread and we blow it. We totally blew it. Trump is — and always has been — nothing more than a historically lucky Right Wing Twitter troll, so, lulz. And his only metrics are greed, power and cruelty, so, really he doesn’t have our best interests at heart and we’re going to have to fend for ourselves.

I would also suggest that Trump may snap. In fact, it could be Trump finally going completely fucking bonkers that is, in itself, the crisis that prompts our descent into chaos. If Trump whips his cock out and starts stroking it. Or starts to use the Presidential Alert System to send us all cock pics. Or if he pretty much just says the N-word all the time, then, well, that would be a crisis. And there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it. There’s just not the political will to address that the emperor has no clothes.

It’s possible that whatever happens won’t be a 9/11 type event. It might be more a rolling clusterfuck. It might be more like what happened in the book Nine Days That Shook The World. It could be a week in which things get worse and worse in the United States to the point that some people will begin to wonder if its the Rapture, or the end of the world or whatever the fuck else people think when they lose hope in the real.

I do think, however, that something akin to martial law is going to happen in the United States out of sheer desperation. All passenger flight will end rather abruptly. In fact, cities may be put on lockdown and all movement WITHIN IN THE UNITED STATES may be — briefly — highly regulated. As I have mentioned before, if you’re still worried about the Stock Market, well, you’re living delusion.

Wall Street will come roaring back in about a year, but in the short term it’s going to be moot.

Buckle up.

The Gray Plague: #AIPAC & #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have been talking about the political and historical implications of The Gray Plague for some time now. And, lo and behold, my fears may be careening towards reality. This is nightmare stuff. Apparently, a lot of Democrats were at AIPAC this year and a few people there apparently may have had COVID19 at the time.

This is exactly the type of stuff I’ve been talking about.

Because we’re doing a piss-poor job of mitigation, we may lurch towards having to do triage. The reason why I say this is we already have the example of Iran where the country is quickly imploding because of COVID19 contagion. Now, just imagine that the preventable sickness and death of a shit ton of people occurs throughout the American population in the next two weeks because we lulzed this while it was still possible to control.

We’re now rushing towards a rather scary moment when not only the poor and the powerless are sick from COVID19, but, like, powerful old people and stuff. If much of the government was too sick to function, then God knows what mischief could happen both domestically and internationally. It goes without saying that House Trump would see any mass death toll among Democrats as an opportunity to consolidate power. And andy similar number of deaths among old MAGA people as…and excuse to consolidate power.

So, before Twitter liberals pop the champagne on Universal Health Care, they might want to reflect that it’s just as likely that Gilead will be founded and, well, it will suck. Or put another way, there’s just as much a chance MAGA wins any political violence caused by the instability of COVID19 and kills us all as there is some sort of fucking liberal utopia being founded.

If the worst happens, it will be a massive tragedy.

We will only give it value after the fact.

America Is ‘Flirting With Disaster’ #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When the history of this pandemic is written, there’s likely to be more than one book written about what went wrong in the very moment we’re living in. It has a very “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” vibe to it. But this is far, far worse.

It’s as if center-Left states KNEW 9/11 was preventable and were doing something about it, while the center-Right states were lulzing. Because none of this is happening in a vacuum, well, it’s going to suck for all of us. I will admit, however, that this is a very surreal moment for me personally. I hate it when people deny reality, but there a lot A LOT of people around me right now who are doing just that.

All the datapoints are pointing towards a pretty dramatic event vis-a-vis COVID19 within the next two weeks (by The Ides of March) and, yet, a lot of people think its coverage is just a “liberal media hoax to make Trump look bad.”

Ugh.

Because we aren’t testing very many people, we still don’t have much of a metric that might help us mitigate the spread of COVID19. It’s because of this that we’re going to soon be past mitigation and into triage. We’re going to have to start thinking about what we can save in the near term. It’s unlikely that the economy is going to be saved when the boil is finally lanced and we realize we’re in a real-life horror movie.

I would like to note, however, that all of this could have been avoided. Yes, there’s a chance that if we did “too good” a job, our leaders would look like idiots, just like Ford and swine flu, but at least lives would have been proactively saved.

Another thing — we have to prepare ourselves for The Gray Plague. It’s very possible that a lot, and I mean A LOT, of well known old people are going to drop in the next year. It could be astonishing how many elderly people die between now and when this rolling crisis is finally wrapped up. And, remember a lot of POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE OLD.

So, lulz.

I feel like even if I’m “vindicated,” it’s going to be such a tragedy that I’m not going to feel all that happy about it.

Not Cool: North Carolina Is Lulzing Armageddon #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I have mentioned, I was at a restaurant near my home when I noticed a Virginia State Trooper. On a lark, I engaged him and mentioned he was about to face a serious crisis. First, he was a dismissive dick. Second, he pretty much lulz the idea that any such thing was possible.

Now, I get it — you don’t exactly want Stewart Smally to be a State Trooper. But something about how he acted as if what I mentioned as insane really grated on my nerves. “We all have opinions,” he said.

The issue is — what’s bouncing around the world right now is not my “opinion.” It’s a cold hard fact. And the fact that next door North Carolina is echoing that State Trooper by lulzing its first reported case of COVID19 is rather disturbing to this Virginian. Apparently, the state government has bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the “coverage” of COVID19 is just a “liberal media hoax designed to bring him down.”

I got nothing against North Carolina, but come on guys, get it together. I live close enough to the NC border that it would not be difficult to imagine whatever growing COVID19 blackhole they have is probably going to consume my community, too.

This does, however, raise the question — how would we know that things have come to a head in North Carolina?

Well, I would suppose that at some point in the next, say, two weeks –about the Ides of March — the number of sick and dying would have grown to such a huge part of the population that both the economy and civil order would collapse. The Gray Plague would kick in and many, many lives that might otherwise be saved will be lost.

It will be chaos. This will not happen in a vacuum, however. By that point, the entire United States will be on its knees. We will be the most vulnerable we’ve been since the end of the Civil War. It would make a lot of sense if at that point a lot of bad actors around the world, seeing their chance, started to attack each other — and us.

But it’s just the flu, right?

Crisis Management & ‘Dow Joans:’ Queen of Denial #COVID19

Ugh
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a nobody. I don’t know anything. Ignore me. I’m a crank. A hayseed rube in the middle of nowhere who Maggie Haberman called out on Twitter for not knowing anything about (access) journalism.

I am all those things.

I am also, however, someone who believes reality is very important.When otherwise “normal” people who wouldn’t sit next to me in a Manhattan coffee shop act rather delusional I grow concerned. This brings us to COVID19.

The Masters of The Universe who make $20 million bonus in a year are living in a dreamland of their own making. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some sort of doubt about the situation, but there is none — a huge domestic crisis is careening towards the United States and “Dow Joans,” as POTUS recently called Wall Street, is living in a very weird denial. I am well aware that the fundamentals are fine, but so were the Titanic’s until it struck a fucking iceberg.

The crazy thing is it’s empirical that what’s going on in Italy, South Korea and Iran IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES WITHIN TWO WEEKS. What’s more, for a number of worst-case-scenario reasons, we’re not doing anything to mitigate the situation. By the time we do, in a terrified spasm, it’ll be way too late.

What happens — probably around The Ides of March — is going to be like a real life horror movie. So many people will be sick — and so many elderly people will be dying in quick succession — that it goes without saying that the economy is going, for the short term at least, lock up and collapse. Let me be clear — this is not finance advice. Why would anyone listen to me? Maggie Haberman thinks I’m a crank.

I would note, however, that if I had any money — which I don’t — I would probably (glup) be looking at Bitcoin. I also would ever-so-slowly cash out and look for something that might actually do me some good in a short — if severe — crisis. If I was ultra-rich, I would hide out in one of those doomsday bunkers I keep hearing about. (Of course, as a poor, I have I vested interest in this because, lulz, it’s easier to seize rich people’s property if they’re doing rails on tails off of some whore’s asshole in a doomsday bunker and not paying any attention to the revolution taking place in the real world.

Do I really think it will get that bad, though?

Sorta.

I do think the United States’ economy is going to crash very, very soon, for no other reason than we’re going to be sucker punched by COVID19 in a rather dramatic fashion. It will be like a real-life horror movie without the zombies. But it will be real life and so, as such, we’ll make it through it. Though it will be mentioned in the same breath as the Civil War and WW2.

If it makes the Masters of the Universe feel better, once we finally get everything sorted out in about a year, we’re likely to have a post-Civil War level boom. A huge amount of money will be made because of the “creative destruction’ associated with what just happened. It will be a tragedy. Some pretty wild things may happen — not all of them beneficial to plutocrats — but it’s possible Millennials will stop killing industries and start making them.

But I guess, for me, the issue is we have to prepare for the boil to be sliced. We have to prepare for all hell to break loose in a rather Pearl Harbor kind of a way.

#ETTD, India Edition? #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

This is all know about this subject.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Besides holding several Nuremberg Rallies across the country for his MAGA supporters, Trump may have managed to put the people of India in danger as well — just as a pandemic was exploding around the globe.

I have no idea if there’s any connection between the massive events Trump participated in in India recently and what’s going on. It just is unsettling to think about.

3WW: Food, Lights & Military, *Not* The Economy Should Be Our Short Term Metrics #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

World War Wuflu
Shelton Bumgarner

Editor’s Note: Of course I goofed — it wouldn’t be 3WW, it would be 3W. But this is propaganda we’re talking about, so lulz.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The fundamentals of the economy are fine. But in the immediate near term, we have more pressing, existential metrics to use than the daily close of the Dow Jones. We need to worry about three things: 1) Food 2) Lights 3) Military readiness.

If we can’t keep those three things going, then everything is going to be a disaster. We have to have those three things to do the next thing: make sure we save as many people as possible. If we’re worried about the economy as we rush towards such a unprecedented long term crisis, we’re only going to ensure that a lot of people get sick and or die.

But we focus on those three metrics above going forward, we can save a lot of lives without the distraction of making sure plutocrats are able to make an extra billion here or there. We have to put human life first, no matter what.

Is Trump going to implode or explode?

Of course, that’s not at all what is going to happen. In fact, the first thing we’re going to have to worry about is if Trump implodes or explodes on a mental level. Is he going to turn into a puddle in the Oval Office, or is he going to go transactional with his insanity? He is going to get really passive aggressive on Twitter, saying we hate him, etc, etc. Ugh. He’s a big baby. A deranged, moronic baby. And in the near term, when we should be trying to save as many people as possible, we’re going to have to figure out how to babysit Trump so he doesn’t get us all killed one way or another.

I’m really concerned about one particular group — the elderly. If we don’t get our act together there’s going to be a great culling of elderly people we may look back upon as The Gray Plague. Yes, the Spanish Flu killed a lot of otherwise healthy people, but COVID19 may kill a lot more elderly people simply because our population is significantly larger and they’re a lot more vulnerable on an existential level.

Anyway, we see this as a war with battles that we may win or lose. I think we should call it 3WW — World War WuFlu. It’s catchy and evokes WW3 to give people some sense of how tough a fight this is going to be.

Keep the faith.

Has #WuFlop Come To America? #CoronaVirus #COVID19 (UPDATED: MAY BE FAKE)

Shelton Bumgarner

Editor’s Note: While we know WuFlop is real and has happened in other nations, I’m hearing chatter that the specific instance shown below may be fake. If it is fake, I regret the error.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have seen footage of someone who has passed out in NYC. That’s all I know. But given one of the hallmarks of #COVID19 is “the Wuflop” it is something to think about — is the WuFlop in America?

Now, what is likely to happen is the media “gatekeepers” will simply ignore any such footage for as long as possibly — and rightly so. Social media is a safety valve for such things. But if the WuFlop REALLY IS IN THE UNITED STATES, then, well, hang on.

How, exactly, such footage would pop up on TV is anyone’s guess. It would likely have to either happen really conspicuously, or enough instances would be recorded that the pressure from social media would be so great that the gatekeepers would feel forced to show it.

But the key would be PROOF. You would have to follow up on the footage to find out why the person passed out so suddenly. While the footage I saw could be described as “fear porn” because the context is unknown, I do think it’s important for people to see it with some pretty strong caveats.

Only time will tell.

‘Over & Over’ — Beware The Gray Plague: Celebrity & Political Edition #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Get ready.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh Boy. I can’t predict the future, but it would make a lot sense if within the next, say 48 to 72 hours there was a rather dramatic number of elderly celebrities and politicians who were felled by COVID19. May I point you to this chart, AGAIN:

Our future?

I have no idea who would be affected or exactly when. That’s between the fallen and their maker. But it would make a lot of sense given the above chart that whatever is going on out there in America’s population would pop out in a rather dramatic fashion when there was a dramatic uptick in the number of people we would notice: celebrities and politicians.

TMZ will report death after death of well-known celebrities in the 60s. I don’t want to think about the politicians in Washington and elsewhere who may be felled by COVID19 in the coming days. It makes me angry and sad taht maybe that might have been prevented — whoever they may be. We all bleed the same colored blood. We need to think of ourselves as patriots, citizens and human now, not Red or Blue.

I’m not “rooting” for this to happen, as the Doofus Crown Prince Don Jr. might have you believe. I am, however, being honest — the numbers are rather grim for old people. And a lot of elderly people in the 60 – 80 range control both the spotlight and the levers of power in the current world order. If they were wiped out rather abruptly by The Gray Plague, that would cause not only a lot of cause a huge amount of chaos, it would also shove us into a New World Order. Many, many years of institutional memory would vanish.

It would be a tragedy because, in hindisight, we will look back and realize that maybe some of those lives could have been saved if we had, say, had some actual leadership and not a fascist, deranged moron as president. I don’t think simply wanting some fucking accountability makes me either someone rooting for “millions of dead” to stop the “winning” of House Trump nor does mean I suffer from “Trump Derailment Disorder.” If you think the latter, you can, as always, eat shit you fucking fascist.

Anyway. I have no idea what is going to happen. But this going to be a process, not an event. And with testing, we’re looking at the past, not the present or future. So I still think by about March 15, America may be on her knees.

What happens then is anyone’s guess.

Keep the faith.