I love me some Koreans and I’m growing very concerned that South Korea, the place I called home for a total of five years, is going to implode because of WuFlu. I thought it might be Japan that we were going to have to worry about, but it makes a lot more sense that it would be the ROK.
Korean culture, even more so than Japanese culture, is communal, which, is of course, how WuFlu is spread (being near someone.) Add to this that South Korea is a small, developed nation that’s not only “free” but has an excellent transportation system and well, the CONDITIONS are there for us to be fucked, fucked, fucked on a global scale. In other words, South Korea is not only a big enough economy that if it went the way of Wuhan that the entire global economy would lock up, but given its “complicated” relationship to its brothers in the north, well, look out.
The conditions could be there for not only a significant knee capping of the global economy if the ROK implodes, but also a major regional war in Northeast Asia. It would all happen very, very fast, too. The entire nation of South Korea couldn’t faceplant for too long without Little Rocket Man — who might be facing a similar situation — weighing the change in conditions and going for broke.
Or not. Who knows. North Korea is a blackbox, so anything could happen.
But the key thing is, the conditions are there for 2020 to be the most historic year since the fall of the Russian Empire. The years 1917-1923 were astonishing in their significance and things grow even more concerning when you look at this:
1815-1914 1914-2020
We’re overdue for history to wake up, play in traffic then go back to sleep for 100 years.
After a few days of personal freak out, I’ve grown rather blase about what’s going on in Asia right now. This happening in large part because, well, while it’s all very tragic, the average American simply doesn’t care and won’t care until it becomes something other than an abstract in our collective clueless national conciousness.
There’s a 14% death rate for WuFlu for people 80 years of age.
And, really, it might stay that way. I have come to stay that 1 million Chinese could die in Wuhan and as long as Vox tell us it’s the *flu* we should really be worried about, then, well, lulz. So, as of right now, we might see a little bit of a slowdown in the global economy because of WuFlu, but not enough to stop the Russians from throwing the 2020 election to Trump AGAIN. Trump’s never leaving office, anyway, unless the doofus Crown Prince Don Jr. is assured as his successor at some point. I still think Trump’s going to demand a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment” then turn around and pass American Enabling Acts, but that’s just me.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the absolute worst happens and my fears of a “Gray Plague” become a reality. The chief thing we have to understand is how old most of the most powerful people in the United States government are. And, what’s worst, our political system is about as taunt as you can get — if there was a Gray Plague and a lot of old people dropped dead suddenly, if the sequence of events wasn’t right, the Right would start to blow shit up because they would be ABSOLUTELY SURE the Deep State was out to get people on their side.
Of course, if, say, three major figures on the center-Left dropped, the MAGA fuckheads would gloat, mumble it was all “God’s will” as they worked to squeeze every once of political advantage out of it. If any MAGA person abruptly became president in the middle of a pandemic, they would use the opportunity not to help their fellow man, but burn the nation to the ground and establish a Fourth Reich. The fuckers. But if, say, a center-Left person was put in the same position, a civil war would start immediately because MAGA would assume “muh guns” and kill anyone who was different than what they feel America looks like. I’m not joking, I’m not exaggerating. This would happen.
It makes you wonder how many people would have to die for us to finally look past scoring short term political points to the point that we actually begin to put the needs of the nation first. A million? Five million? 10 Million? 20 Million? How enormous, really, would the human tragedy of the Gray Plague have to be for Sean Hannity to finally shut the fuck up about Hillary Clinton’s email server?
Of real concern is what would happen if the 30 year movement towards a majority-minority America happened not in decades but in months? What if, say, 30-50 million Americans (mostly elderly) died between the first report of a hotzone outside of Wuhan and when the vaccine was widely available? What makes that question difficult to process is it would be more like a war than anything else that we’ve ever experienced as a nation.
If an entire generation of the American political class got wiped out over the course of little under a year, there would be massive implications going forward. Probably what would happen is the country wouldn’t make it. The Second American Civil War that we may face in 20 years, might happen in a matter of months. But, I don’t know. Who knows. Anything could happen.
I can’t predict the future and don’t have reveled truth. Just stay aware of what’s going on.
Now that we’re in the Fourth Reich after the acquittal of Trump, what happens to pop culture? I thought at first maybe a sizable chunk of the audience might want some sort of emotional catharsis. But I now think it may be a bit more complex than that.
What’s more likely to happen is we’ll enter a sort of second 70s in that a lot of people are just going to want to dance while other people want to see serious, gritty movies and TV show that address what just happened. I think. I don’t know.
Given what the novel I’m writing is about, I definitely have a vested interest in people wanting Trumplandia catharsis. But we’ll see. I’m writing a novel instead of screenplay because I live in the middle of nowhere, it affords me more nuanced creative universe building ability and just don’t want to write a screenplay right now.
By Shelt Garner @sheltgarner So, there you are, watching TV when you see one of several interchangeable sliver haired middle-aged angry dough boys ranting about how if only we let Trump be Trump then he could fulfill his role as the anti-Christ, Jews would be driven into the sea and the Rapture would occur like the Bible says America would be made great again. Here’s a list of the major actors in the racist, misogynistic, bigoted bullshit bad faith argument bullshit echo sphere that will dominate the lives of millions in the Fourth Reich for years to come. Oddly enough, they all kinda look the same, as if birthed from some sort of dystopian They Live podchamber.
Hugh Hewitt Hewitt is notable for the lengths he will go to debase himself for Trump in a reasonably cogent fashion. He is the apologist’s apologist when it comes to Trump. It has started to seem as though he’s angling for some sort of apparatchik position in the Fourth Reich. Does he want to be gruppenführer of the new Washington Military District of Columbia or something? What is his deal? He is also notable for having sufficient respect among Twitter liberals that he pops up on the Sunday chat shows and the Washington Post babbling in the most obsequious manner possible that if only we’d leave Trump alone, he would, at last, make America great Again.
Dennis Prager Prager does PragerU, which is a middlebrow bad faith and very formal online conduit of MAGA bullshit that a lot of otherwise reasonable people eat up because it gives them some sort of intellectual framework for being a Good American in the Fourth Reich. He conveys with great gravitas racist, misogynistic, ignorant and historically oblivious bullshit that conflates anything necessary to get your middle-aged mom to think somehow Trump is not so bad after all.
Glenn Beck Beck is simply fucking insane. After having shown a modicum of principle at the onset of the Fourth Reich, Beck has switched gears and is just another fucking Trump cockholster in an pretty elaborate bullshit echo chamber of bad faith arguments. He’s completely unhinged and sees conspiracies under every rock. In a way, Beck’s change of heart about Trump is all you need to know about modern Trumpian conservatism.
Mark Levin I don’t know what to tell you about this guy. He’s not as deranged as Beck, but he’s somewhere between Hewitt and Schlapp in intelligence and the ability to make a cogent badfaith argument. He’s very fascist friendly and you start to think he would be cool with American Killing Fields in update New York if Trump suggested it.
Matt Schlapp Oh, Matt Schlapp. I see him as one of the most dangerous of these pasty white MAGA thought leaders because he’s the smartest and best educated of the bunch. He honestly believes that the racist and misogynistic bullshit he spews isn’t either one of those things. In an earlier time, he’d be the German somewhere in the east of the country who had an “overnight conversion” to Communism at some point in late 1945 when it became apparent the Soviets weren’t going anywhere and he still had mouths to feed.
Newt Gingrich If the Fourth Reich was a video game, he would be the last guy you had to defeat to win the game. His MAGA rhetoric can’t be beat and he probably is far closer to The Dear Leader in private than any of us could possibly imagine. In fact, you could say that MAGA is nothing more than the deranged ideological child of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. But Buchanan isn’t a pasty silver-haired dough boy, so he’s not on this list.
Not that it will matter in time, but we still don’t know what Trump knew about what Robert Hyde told Lev Parnas in March about his efforts to monitor the movements — and God only knows what else — of American Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch.
It doesn’t really matter the way I thought it might because she was out of the country by the time Trump told the president of Ukraine that she “was going to go through some things.” But I mean, what the fuck? She was already out of the country and he says THAT? What did he mean by that?
Barring a significant bombshell in the next few days, this is shaping up to be just another shady thing Trump has done that no one really cares about. Things are going to get very dark once he’s aquitted.
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