It has taken me a little while, but I’ve figured out why so many MAGA people are interested in COVID19. It’s not that they’re oblivious to the fact that Trump is completely fucking up the handling of this pandemic. They just don’t care. That’s a lulz.
What they’re more interested in is the idea that a pandemic will be the end of the global liberal order that has kept the peace for about 75 years. They’re looking forward to, what? I don’t know. A lot of elderly people dying unnecessarily? I thought angry old Baby Boomers were the core of MAGA. But, lulz. I guess the younger, more ignorant MAGA shitheads think that when the global order collapses and the poors are desperately searching for food while Peter Thiel snorts coke off a twink’s asshole that, what, their jobs will come back? That women will go back to being living gestation pods?
Some of it is that, by nature, many MAGA shithead fuckers are preppers who have been looking forward to the end of the world for some time — why else would they vote for the anti-Christ, I mean Donald Trump. They have been preparing for a post-apocalyptic hellscape for decades, so if Trump makes it closer to being a reality, all the better. All the more reason to support him, right, you fucking shithead KAG and MAGA fucks?
House Trump is going to lie and cheat as necessary in its craven need to consolidate power going forward. The Fourth Right is here. I just have to be sure not to die in an ICE Camp.
I have said more than once that when New Yorkers feel that same feeling they had on 9/11 that America’s knees will buckle and the country will fall to its collective knees. I’m not a New Yorker, but I am an American and empathetic.
What made 9/11 so bad on a national level was that the otherwise fearless New Yorkers were gobsmacked. Stunned. The one city in the world that can kick the ass of any other city in the world was cowering in fear. It bounced back in a few hours, but when America saw NYC wasn’t functioning, we became equally dazed.
So, here we are. It’s now probably inevitable that NYC is going to become a hot zone. All we don’t know is when and how severe. As we start to test more and more people, the numbers are going to rise rather dramatically. There is likely to be a rather dramatic “re-calibration” of New Yorkers’ world view, just like there was on 9/11. But they’ll bounce back soon enough and start to thrive in The New Normal.
The thing New Yorkers probably need to realize is the WuFlop is going to pop up in the city soon enough. When it happens, a lot of New Yorkers are likely going, indeed, feel that same gut punch feeling they felt on 9/11. The WuFlop is extremely disturbing. Eerie. Frighting. But don’t let how spooky it is get to you. You’re a New Yorker and hayseed rubes like me in the hinterland look up to you for how tough you are otherwise in the face of adversity.
Now, let me address something — I don’t see the above as Fear Porn. I’m not trying to scare you by pulling bullshit out of my butt. I’m simply using what is known and then extrapolating into the future using the facts. New York City — especially mid-town — has a shit ton of world tourists every day, every week, every month. So, COVID19 is going to pop up in NYC in a pretty brutal fashion soon enough.
But I believe in NYC. Maybe one day I’ll get to live there, just like I did in Seoul. Let’s rock.
At the heart of MAGA is the idea that because they’re skart of women with sexual agency and the browning of America, Trump — as an avatar of their misogyny and racism — can pretty much rule as a tyrant because, lulz! Now, that ideology is being put to a test with the first real crisis Trump has experience that is not a self-own.
And it could not happen at a worst time. Not only has Trump already been impeached and acquitted, but we’re not well into the 2020 presidential campaign and so all things being equal, Trump could murder me live on Sean Hannity’s show ritual sacrifice style and, well, “let the people decide.” Add to this that generally exactly what I predicted would happen, is happening, the same political dynamic associated with global climate change is happening with COVID19 only with far more dire and immediate consequences is happening, well, we got a problem.
It’s very possible that after some thrashing about for the right strategy, House Trump will find just the right mixture of hate, racism, ignorance and “owning the libs” necessary to do exactly what he was going to do anyway — lose the popular vote and when the Electoral College. By one vote, if need be. In fact, as I keep ranting, Trump is fully prepared to dox, or threaten or bribe individual electors simply to get into office so he can fight another impeachment battle.
If you work on the assumption that the Russians are going to hack directly into our election computers, anyway, then, lulz. Even if we prove this happened, by the time we get around to fixing the problem it could mid-way into his second term. He could very well name Don Jr. his veep and, then, well, House Trump will have been founded once Trump is finally convicted in the Senate in, like, August 2023. Or he could use an actual American Nazi like Rep. Steve King as his veep to make the prospect of impeaching-and-convicting as nasty as fucking possible.
Or, put it another way — there is unlikely to be any accountability for Trump turning what could have been The Little One into THE BIG ONE. MAGA is a death cult. They would rather we all die that women have the right to choose or AOC have the political power she’s potentially going to grow into.
It is growing more and more apparent that something I’ve been ranting about for some time — The Gray Plague — is a very real possibility going forward. In fact, given how much of the levers of power are controlled by, well, old people, the way the general populace might wake up to the severity of the crisis we’re facing is the first wave of The Gray Plague.
I’m not advocating — it’s not like I’m rooting for this to happen, despite what Don Jr. might say — but we have to take this seriously. Should a number of older powerful people begin to drop dead, then, well, it’s not something we can just lulz. There will, in fact, be real-world consquences that change the lives of millions.
I will note, in passing that on a superficial level I’ve noticed a minor uptick in 80-year-old people dying. Jack Welch. James Lipton. A few others. It’s at least possible that a combination of family privacy and misdiagnosis is causing us to not to realize that The Gray Plague is ALREADY HERE. The death rate for people in their 80s is a brutal 15%.
Or, if you want to really think strictly from the metric of saving as many lives as possible, if the families of some of these 80s year old people would come out and say their loved one had died of COVID19, then, maybe, a lot more people would take this seriously and lives might be saved because of this. But that may be rather delusional this early in the process. It may take someone really powerful for that to happen, which, in itself, is rather tragic.
Anyway, maybe this is I’m just being hysterical as everyone keeps telling me. Trump tells me’s going to magically vanish in April and Little Big Man Mick Mulvaney said I should just “turn the TV off” if I’m worried. Right? Lulz.
Don’t sleep on the nation reaction to the State of Washington’s reaction to COVID19. As I have repeatedly said in rather grandiose, poetic manner, when it comes to COVID19, “Heroes will be made. Cowards will be shamed. All will be remembered.” There’s a reason why Trump was so weirdly personal recently against Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, calling him, of all things, “a snake.”
Trump knows Inslee is something he will never be: a leader.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee
I have also said repeatedly that much like 9/11, when Rudy became a national figure because, well, George W. Bush was busy hiding out in a bunker, so, too would there be a number of political heroes be made in the wake of Trump being nothing more than a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner.
Another thing — we are one “WuFlop” away from an unprecedented public perception crisis. The average American simply won’t be able to comprehend it when they finally see happening on a American shores. It’s very eerie everytime I see it. And the person doesn’t have to actually “flop.” Just seeing someone abruptly faceplant for no reason is also rather unsettling.
America, for all our might, is not immune to basic math and physiology. And, so, when we do get the WuFlop, or The Gray Plague really gets bad, it will be men — and women — like Jay Inslee who will keep the country going while we figure out what to do with our doofus criminal who tweets all day and generally being a Russian operative.
If history is any guide, in about two weeks, there’s a good chance that the United States will have multiple hotzones growing exponentially and the death toll will skyrocket. I fear, because of the criminal incompetence of the Trump Administration, that an event that might have been “The Little One,” is going to turn into “THE BIG ONE.” In other words, it’s going to be a real life horror movie.
Within months, we may be talking about not thousands, or hundreds of thousands but MILLIONS of people sick, dying or dead. Of course, given how slow this crisis is moving right now and how, how large a geographic area we’re talking about and the size of the population involved it’s going to take a while for this to happen. Until it doesn’t.
The reason why I believe we need to “recalibrate” our high end of this disaster is we had two months to do something about this issue and we didn’t do anything. So, just wait until 20 nursing homes are reported to be hotzones. Or the prison system gets involved. Or the ICE Camps. Or, the homeless in California.
I don’t mean to scare you. This is not fear porn. Fear porn, in my opinion, is when you use end-times confirmation bias to draw conclusions that aren’t based in fact — you just want people to freak out. But what I’m suggesting is based on what’s going on in Italy and Iran RIGHT NOW.
Or, to put it yet another way, we’re going to need a lot more people like Jay Inslee and a lot less people like Donald Trump to make it through this crisis which, through sheer criminal mismanagement on Trump’s part may be seen in hindsight as the biggest domestic crisis in American history since the end of the Civil War.
The last few days, I think much of America — at least the fact based part of it — has been feeling a sense of dread. A sense that something bad is about to happen. We’ve been feeling the Undertoad.
The Powers That Be have a vested interest in keeping the sheeple at peace. Not that that is all that bad — I mean, I don’t really want panic to set in. And, yet, I feel as though because we have a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner as POTUS we, as a nation, haven’t really been focused on what a huge fucking disaster we’re about to be pushed into.
I only say this because of what’s going on in other countries. Within about a week of their first cases being reported, places like Italy and Iran saw a huge surge in cases — and deaths. It doesn’t take too much to do a back-of-the envelope comparison and say this weekend might be the tipping point when we realize the criminal incompetence of the Trump Administration has finally caught up with us.
The Pacific Northwest right now.
The key thing we have to keep in mind is we’re going to have to write off the Pacific Northwest in the next few days. The contagion blackhole now consuming it is going to turn supermassive. The whole region — if Italy is any guide — is going to lock up on a societal level and its economy collapse. And that will be only the beginning. The same thing is going to happen in all the major American cities in days. By the end of next week, I suspect the entire American economy will have locked up and collapsed.
It will, of course, bounce back, but it will take a few days — or weeks — for people to adjust to the new normal of social distancing and a daily rising death toll for a preventable and unnecessary disaster. Of course, House Trump will likely play dirty with people lives and think of every way they can stoke fear and racism in an effort to deflect any form accountability. And, really, it could very well work except for, well, Trump. A fish rots from its head and, uh, it’s at least possible Trump could either explode or implode mentally. I’m not “rooting for the virus” and I’m not “rooting” for POTUS to go bonkers. But we have to take that possibility seriously.
The actual experts keep talking about how COVID19 isn’t “The Big One.” Well, this is something of a worst case scenario and Trump being criminally incompetent might make what otherwise might be “The Little One” into THE BIG ONE.
It seems logical to assume that by about March 15, the States could be looking at something of a real life horror movie. The worst domestic crisis since the Civil War. Not even Lincoln got away with suspending the writ of habeas corpus without some consequences — it’s seen as a major legal issue for his legacy. Trump, being a moron, would likely do this in a rather ham-handed, dumb way that would piss everyone off should he have to lock the country down as the contagion consumed huge swaths of the country.
Anyway, the point is — this weekend may be rather lit. I do keep getting the exact chronoligy of our future history wrong, so take everything I write with a grain of salt. If it’s not this weekend, however, it definitely will be at some point between now and March 15.
If it isn’t, then, well, Trump really has gone all-in on the Nero thing and is going to Tweet as thousands — if not millions — die for no damn reason other than he wants to keep the stock market doing well.
Yeah, I used Usenet, what about it?Shelton Bumgarner
by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner
I’m too busy developing a novel to do the basic journalism necessary to give you some sense if this is even possible, but given his age — and the fact that he had an email address in the 80s! — it’s at least POSSIBLE Bernie Sanders was on Usenet in the 80s.
Someone should look into that. If we could dig up some of his old Usenet posts — if they exist — that would be quite illuminative as to his state of mind in the 80s.
Full disclosure — I, personally, was obsessed with Usenet in the early 90s while in college. So, if you look me up, you’ll find I was something of a crank even then. Just a younger, more passionate version of my current grump old middle aged guy crankdom. Lulz!
I live near the Virginia border with North Carolina. I’m beginning to grow worried that the Tar Heels are increasing the risk that I, and the people I love, here in Virginia are going to get ill because of their negligence. I also have family in NC, so, lulz?
The problem with the American response to COVID19 is it’s so slipshod that because of how decentralized the system is that we’re all kind of going to go down together when the history of this is written. What House Trump wants is for COVID19 to “burn itself out” by April in such a way that they can hide what really happen through a lack of testing.
One of the big issues for me in the politicalization of this cluster fuck is how MAGA is going to lie, cheat and steal its way to victory, no matter what. Some 11 million people could die unnecessary, preventable deaths and unless Trump finally goes fucking insane in a rather dramatic fashion, I just don’t see him being held accountable in a real-time political fashion. Maybe in the history books 40 years from now, but now when it might matter in the 2020 election. Trump will do whatever necessary to stay in power if this pandemic gets as bad as many people fear.
Anything.
So, all I can say is take this seriously and buckle up. Tell someone older in your life you love them. You may not have a chance to do so soon.
I feel like I have The Martha Mitchell Syndrome. Shelton Bumgarner
by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner
I may just be a “delusional jerk with a good heart,” but I can read. It seems as though we have to stop assuming some vague, scary number as to the coming test results and think about what we might learn in concreat terms. It appears as though COVID19 has been in the United States since at least mid-January. Apparently, when an outbreak gets bad enough that you notice it, it begins to double in the 6 day – 12 day time frame.
Something about the outbreaks in Iran and Italy are different than, say, the outbreak in South Korea. The Italy outbreak seems to be spreading like wildfire. The Iranian outbreak seems to be more potent, maybe. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’m simply telling what appears to be true. If what I’m noticing isn’t true, it’s not, like, wilful disinformation on my part, for Christ’s sake. This is, after all, a blog that on a good day, might get 500 unique hits in a day. That’s a rounding for the places you should be reading for information on what’s going on.
Anyway, the point is, the States appears to all the slight variations of COVID19 that are floating around the globe. So, I would suggest that maybe things might get A LOT worse than we expect right now. Given how mobile the American population is, the fact that nursing homes are serving as “national superspreaders” AND criminally incompetence the Trump Administration is about doing anything to stop the spread of the virus, I suggest we may have as many as 100,000 verified cases in two weeks.
Remember, Northern Italy and Iran are pretty much imploading as we speak and they’re actively working to halt the virus’ spread. We, meanwhile, are doing jack shit. In fact, the only real metric we are going to have in the near term is, well, people getting sick.
One thing to remember — there haven’t been any reports of cases within the penal system — or ICE camps, for that matter. Once we do, things may get far worse in the public’s eyes. Also, WuFlop hasn’t been recorded in the United States yet. And that, in itself, will freak everyone out. Add to this The Gray Plague, and you have something of a historic disaster on your hands. At some point, you may have to simply do triage. What can you keep functioning so you can save lives?
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.
I suspect that the event that would kick off the actual long-term crisis of this pandemic would be a number of famous — and powerful — elderly people dropping dead in quick succession. That would definitely focus the population’s mind. And, also, remember, another big issue at the start of all of this –will Trump implode or explode mentally as it grows ever-more apparent that he’s going to going to be able to weasel his way out of his. If his absolute need to win at any costs slams against the absolute realization that he may have to, at last, face some sort of accountability, well, THAT will be interesting.
Honestly, I’ll just be glad if the human race makes it out alive at that point. Maybe that’s why we’ve yet to find any aliens — they all inevitably elect alien unhinged Right Wing Twitter Trolls who blow their planets up.
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!
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