Tag: We Are So Fucked

The Fortnight That Shook The World #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” as Thomas Paine said.

You could not write a more surreal, disturbing scenario as is about to begin. In large part, what we’re facing is a problem of perception. For the time being, we’re going to be in free fall until the psychological “re-calibration” that needs to take place is wrapped up. I am beginning to believe, however, that this is going to be a really bumpy two weeks on a global scale.

Things will stabilize after that, however. While there are a lot unknowns going forward, it’s possible that COVID19 really will begin to subside dramatically in April. Trump will crow that he was right all along and because of the personal fidelity of the MAGA base and his ratfucking of Joe Biden as part of the campaign, he will, again, cruise a popular vote loss and an Electoral College win. It may be just one vote, but he’s going to win.

But.

A lot can happen in two weeks. A whole lot. So, even if things stabilize sometime in April, the world may be so changed by that point that Trump may, at last, find a minor amount of “accountability” on his hands. He will still win the general election, of course, because, lulz, but the context will be a little bit different.

But.

If you really want to be a bit more adventitious in your scenario, you might two things might so shake up the whole world on a historic and political level in the next two weeks that when we finally catch our breath, we won’t recognize the world we now live in.

If the Gray Plague strikes, if even for a severe two weeks, that, in itself, is a wild card I can’t predict. If we count the dead in 10s of thousands, not hundreds, then, that’s kind of a bad PR situation for House Trump. Maybe. But MAGA is a death cult, so lulz.

But.

If the Gray Plague struck the right type of old person, then, that, too, might at least make House Trump a tiny bit more uncomfortable than it’s used to being. It’s not like their enables in and out of government are going to actually care that Trump’s historic, criminal mismanagement of all of this costs lives because, well, they’ve invested their entire life, entire identity into the Trump Train and, lulz.

But.

If things, even for about two weeks, grew extremely severe and not only did the Gray Plague strike, but there were multiple recorded instances of the WuFlop, then, and only then, might House Trump face an existential threat. It might be a little bit more difficult for Hugh Hewitt to defend Trump if 100,000 elderly people die in two weeks, but I’m sure he’ll try. Or he’ll just freak out and blame Asian people for and say they have to be put in the ICE camps for “national security” reasons. I’m not joking. That’s a very real possibility. The WuFlop, too, would likely highten the crisis to unprecedented levels. The bolts of our political and economic system might pop off. And even then, it would be, at most one election cycle. Give them four years and Don Jr. will, at last, wear the purple robes of the House Trump throne. So, we might have, about two years of a functioning government before the usual bullshit pops up again and the new Republican House impeaches the Democratic president out of spite.

But.

The last “but” is the darkest — Trump goes completely nuts at some point in the next two weeks. I have no idea what happens then. But I do believe Trump’s enablers would defend anything he did far, far, far longer than any of us might be willing to admit.

Lulz!

#COVID19 #Pandemic D-Day: March 9th

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It is now the conventional wisdom of Twitter that today’s the day. Today will be the “event” that pushes us into the rolling crisis of the COVID19 pandemic. It’s the day that will be up there with Dec. 7th and Sept. 11.

The reason is, we finally have a metric that the average person who is otherwise preoccupied with raising their kids and paying their mortgage can understand: the economy .

Or, more specifically — the stock market.

And that’s why Trump is so obsessed with the stock market, it’s a metric HE can understand.

And, really, what people on Twitter are probably thinking is if the stockmarket crashes in a big way today, that will be the event that causes Trump to switch gears and go from ignoring the crisis to exploiting it in order to consolidate power.

The thing I missed in all my thinking about this eventuality is that very thing — I didn’t think about Trump’s natural inclination to scare the shit out of people to political advantage. So, in the end, it may be Trump himself who causes the most damage.

He’s going to be the one who scares people about Asian people by calling COVID19 “Wuhan virus.” It will be he who whips his followers into a frenzy such that they start murdering liberals — and maybe even staging coups at the state level.

But also, some of that talk is the basic acceptance that Trump is probably going to flip out today or sometime soon. He’s going to go transactional with his insanity out of fear of losing the 2020 election.

I am very alarmed at the prospect of Trump / MAGA switching gears today and blaming Asians (and liberals) for all of this. That people like Hugh Hewitt are already laying the groundwork for that is pretty astonishing. MAGA really is a death cult. They really are prepared to get us all killed in the service of the Dear Leader.

It’s rather shocking, once you realize how obvious it is. Yikes!

‘危機’ — #Pandemic Era America #COVID19

Let’s rock.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While MAGA “thought leaders” like Hugh Hewitt are begging us to remember that COVID19 came from Wuhan, China, that’s not the reason why I put the Chinese in the title.

As I understand it, ‘危機’ are the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” In other words, while the next, say, two weeks are going to suck, there is also some opportunity for those willing to take a risk and show some courage and leadership.

The first thing to do, of course, is to admit that there is, in fact a crisis. Once you do that, you can readjust your thinking accordingly. We’re probably going to have something of a “re-calibration” of society and the economy over the next two weeks.

But the fundamentals of the global economy are strong enough that once the re-calibration wraps up, things will bounce back. Though, I will note, American psychology is pretty unusual. It is so extremely alien to us for there to be a mass, rolling crisis like this, which is comparable to, say, an invasion, that some pretty long-standing habits and traditions may simply melt away.

Add to this how polarized America is and how House Trump is prepare to lie, cheat and steal to maintain power and that “danger” character may get something of a work out. In other words, this could be the thing that doesn’t give us Universal Health Care, but Gilead.

It could really be that bad.

The point is — this is going to be a massive tragedy. So massive that we will only give it value long after the fact out of desperation. Hopefully, maybe, we might come together after it begins. But more likely than not, there will be political violence on the part of MAGA fucktards who think it’s all some sort of weird Deep State conspiracy.

Or people like Hugh Hewitt will endup stirring up forces they might — just might live to regret. If fucking MAGA decides to start murdering Asian people out of a fear of “Wuhan flu,” then, well, we will know whose hands that blood will be on. They will whine that they aren’t responsible for other people’s actions, but history will record the truth.

But once we make it through this crisis, we may have something of a return to the 50s as everyone decides they want to settle down and have kids after getting the shit scared out of them for 18 months.

‘Acceptance’ #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I feel I’m about two weeks ahead of everyone else psychologically when it comes to this pandemic. As such, I’m feeling rather calm. I’ve reached acceptance.

How Twitter Liberals view me.

The key thing is I accept that absolutely no one is going to give me any credit for, in a sense, calling some major elements of this crisis. I’m just a no body. I am an aspiring novelist and the I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to develop so far. I am rather worried that its context will be dramatically different, however. Though given how overtly political and anti-MAGA it is (in a very diffused, non-preachy manner), I guess if we manage to make it through alive, there might be an audience for a rumination on the Trump Era hiding under the guise of a thriller.

I’m going to assume that’s the case gong forward, anyway.

We do have some significant milestones ahead of us. Trump hasn’t gone bonkers yet. We haven’t had The Event that will “re-calibrate” our perception of the world for years, maybe decades, to come. That Event will either be the first conspicuous culling of the elderly associated with The Gray Plague and / or recorded instance of the WuFlop somewhere in the United States. Given how fucking racist MAGA is, I probably need to stop calling it “the Wuflop.” It has an actual scientific term, but I don’t know how to spell it — yet.

Anyway. The issue at this point is how bad, exactly, is it all going to get? I could get a lot worst than we imagine right now given the cold hard fact that there are about 15,000 rest homes in the United States with a total of 1.4 million residents. Each one of those rest homes not only could potentially be felled by COVID19, but also serve as something of a “signal amplification” site for the virus because it’s not like prison where not that many people go in and out. People go in and out of rest homes all the time — often from outside the community — and, as such, well, yikes!

It may get very dark within the next two weeks until our minds acclimate to what’s going on around us. We haven’t even gotten to the part where global bad actors decide to strike while the going’s good.

And still Trump won’t be held politically accountable.

#MAGA Is A Death Cult #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

‘Accountability’ #COVID19

MAGA, 2020
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

The Gray Plague Is Now A Very Real Possibility #Covid19 #CoronaVirus

How, indeed.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

‘Triage’ #Covid19 #CoronaVirus

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 wish I was joking.

‘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.

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.