Notes from the Wuhan Apocalypse, as viewed from the Death Star orbiting above Sodom-on-The-Hudson.
What Don't We Know?
* I think the medical profession has a grasp on how to combat this virus, in terms of treatment. What they don't have is an apprehension of what makes it so virulent. It's the numbers of sick people, not the disease that is telling.
* Government, at all levels, keeps throwing numbers at us which are largely guesses (projections based on computer modeling), or highly suspect because they've been compiled by bureaucrats who make too many assumptions without enough facts, and they can often be confusing because they have not been placed in their proper context.
Example: I have heard various rates of infection for New York City and State, ranging from 80,000 "testing positive" to 315,000, with 60,000 of them within New York City, alone.
Three things:
We don't know how many were false-positives. Nor how many are testing positive for PAST exposures that test positive because virus fragments remain.
We don't know how many were "tested positive but are not sick"; we don't know WHO is getting sick in terms of demographics (age groups, ethnicity, previous health problems, and notably. immigration status). We need better demographic data. I fear it will not be forthcoming for a variety of reasons, mostly political, some related to covering up crimes.
We're not being told how many are being successfully treated and released, or treated and sent home to quarantine.
The impression given is that somewhere between 60,000 and 315,000 people (in New York State, alone, depending upon whose numbers you buy) are in hospitals, some of whom may not even be sick, some who may have already recovered, all enduring a Hell of lack of basic equipment and medicines and dying in ungodly numbers, stacked like cordwood in the hospital parking lots.
This is a deliberate misrepresentation, I believe, for if we knew how they were counting cases, if we knew whether the cases were majority illegal immigrants, then we might have to question immigration policies and the wisdom of "sanctuary cities" and then the advocates for Open Borders -- like Andrew Cuomo and Comrade De Blasio -- would have to face the music. When they already have to do so for cutting funding to City Hospitals and shutting 16 of them down.
And as if they didn't already have enough to answer for, what happened to the billions in post-9/11 anti-terror aid that was supposed to ensure we were prepared for this sort of thing? Where did that money go, or what stupid, vote-buying idea was it diverted to?
The math doesn't add up. Neither does the reality on the ground versus the doom and gloom on the nightly news: I live here. I know no one who has this thing -- not friends, family, neighbors, co-workers -- so just who is getting this illness and where are they? Because I'm not stepping over bodies on my way out the front door. There has been no panic, whatsoever, from John Q. Public...only the politicians.
I also want to know how much of what is being done by these idiots is simple activity for the sake of being seen as doing something. The Katrina Effect: you don't want to be the guy in charge when it happens and you don't want to be the guy in charge who appears to be doing nothing while the cameras are rolling. You also forget the details, like "if what you're doing actually makes sense or achieves anything".
For example, "testing everyone" is probably a waste of time, effort and materials. You need to test people who show symptoms, not people who are perfectly healthy.
Recalling his activities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Andrew Cuomo is second to none at looking busy but accomplishing nothing, As soon as the cameras leave, so will he.
Cuomo was seemingly the adult in the room when this started, but it becomes clear with each passing day that he's a lying piece of shit who hasn't a clue. It's an Academy Award-winning performance. It's looking more and more like he's running a con game, attempting to get the federal government to make up for all the cuts he's made previously to public health.
It's the public hospitals that are in trouble, after all. Where all the Medicaid cases and illegals show up.
But I'll bet the (remaining) public hospitals all hit their mandated Diversity Goals and Muslim and Transgendered Outreach requirements before all of this started.
What have We Learned?
* Nature is gonna Nature: The World spins, regardless of what human beings do or don't do, and it has it's own ways which are mysterious, complex, and often beyond our capabilities to comprehend. If this outbreak, pandemic, bout of global sniffles, whatever, has proven anything it is that if Man believes he has mastered -- or understands -- Nature, he's sadly deceived.
Take this lesson to heart, global warming dingbats.
* The Chinese are Disgusting. They're also duplicitous, deceiving, conniving and all-around bad people. And, yes, that's mostly their government. This plague -- like most of the plagues that have devastated Mankind throughout history(see: The Black Death, Various Influenzas) -- originated in China.
Not only do they eat vermin, house pets and probably their own shit (way to go, Scientific Socialism augmented by Capitalism!), but they apparently have a very tenuous grasp of the reality of their own filthy personal habits, prime among them living in crowded cities up to their armpits in their own feces, animal blood, and assorted forms of environmental pollution, spitting, sneezing, shitting, pissing, coughing wherever they goddamned please.
I guess when you live in a culture where human life is cheap (a million died? No problem, we have a billion more!) and wedded to medieval ideas regarding just about everything, cleaving to a system of medicine predicated on eating powdered hooves, animal genitals and sticking needles in your skin, permeated with a semi-religious belief in "evil spirits" and "animated" rocks and trees, the idea of basic, modern hygienic practices must seem like "magic".
How many people in China, for example, even have access to a flush toilet? Do they even have the equivalents of Kleenex or Robitussin? If you go to the hospital there, are you likely to be given life-saving drugs and surgery, or have a 100-year-old douchebag stick pins in your face and offer you some stir-fried tiger anus or rhino testicle jerky as a cure?
And we let a lot of them into the country. And a lot of them don't go back, and so they bring their plagues and primitive medical/religious beliefs with them, and the next thing you know, the entire United States has the flu and Andrew Cuomo pollutes your television screen with a brand of verbal diarrhea all his own. Constantly.
There is a danger -- and it should be manifest now -- that allowing great masses of the Great Unwashed into the country and then not DEMANDING they assimilate in every conceivable way, especially by washing their fucking hands! -- has consequences. Not kicking these rat-eating orcs out of the country has consequences, as well. Not locking up the "activists" and politicians who call for the elimination of borders and the destruction of Western Culture need to be beaten bloody and hung from lamp posts.
Or, better yet, ship THEM to China and let them live among the "equally valid" culture of squalor that produces little but super bugs and mass executions, and let them experience what they advocate at first hand. Let's see how alternately relative and equal they believe cultures are, then.
* The Anti-Vaxxers have disappeared. Every last one of them. Probably all running out to get that flu or pneumonia shot they all vowed not to "submit" to for fear of being made into "Big Pharma's" zombies or creating "Autism Hotspots", and rethinking all their crackpot "scientific" notions of "Herd Immunity" , cowering in their mental bomb shelters of dumbfuck and shame, wetting their goddamned pants that they might get the Killer Flu, only emerging to scream the loudest and most shrill about why "no one is doing anything!" and praying they don't get the sniffles and shuffle off this mortal coil.
Good riddance! When this is all over we're probably going to discover a large proportion of the ill (and dead) are going to be assholes who didn't believe in vaccinations, who harbored the most nonsensical conspiracy theories about collusion between the drug manufacturers and The New World Order, who believed quack medical theories and the benefits of "Hollistic" (more like Ass-holistic) medicine.
There's a reason why your kids were born with Autism; it's because you're a defective human being and passed those rotten genes on to a new generation, not because someone gave them an injection of chemical/viral fucktard. On purpose. Grow up, accept the responsibility that comes with having created a genetic potato salad and get on with your life. And do it quietly, because we're sick of hearing from you.
* Air Travel - who knew that allowing hundreds of thousands of people to board self-contained metal tubes with re-circulated air could spread diseases far and wide?
Why, anyone with a fucking brain did.
Closing the airports and suspending flights should have been the FIRST thing that was done on Day One, especially from the inhuman shitholes we call "China" and "The Middle East" (since coronaviruses are native to Asia and the sandy cesspits of the "Fertile Crescent").
* Cruise Ships. As the Overlord has said on numerous occasions, you will NEVER get me to take a cruise.
A cruise ship is simply a gigantic, floating toilet bowl. It has the other unpleasant qualities of being a place where complete strangers are packed like sardines into close confinement, usually sleeping on mattresses that have been awash in other stranger's bodily fluids, while a walk around the deck means stepping over drunks, puddles of urine and vomit, right before you go to the Buffet where 2,000 people preceded you and touched, sneezed or breathed upon everything on the menu before you got there.
The attraction of a cruise -- stopping every few days at a new and exotic location (whose main export will likely be a new form of diarrhea or chlamydia, but you just can't get these adorable straw hats in America) -- holds no excitement or interest for this boy. A cruise that is deliberately taking old people to the most-squalid corners of the Orient (most likely so that they can reminisce on their former WW2, Korean and Vietnamese battlegrounds before they kick the bucket) is an even stupider idea.
If the prospect of spending a week or ten days on a floating petri dish, awash in semen, urine, puke, fecal matter, spit, snot and foul-smelling ancient people turns you on, then I have to question your sanity.
If this does not sound a death knell for the Cruise Industry, I don't know what will.
* The Left is reckless, feckless and irresponsible. And finished.
If the sight of Nancy Pelosi stalling a relief package to suffering Americans for the sake of getting the Kennedy Center and Planned Parenthood some cash didn't make you gag, you have a serious mental disorder.
The American left was already on Life Support, as demonstrated by it's two "front-runners" and it's leadership (Pelosi, Biden, Sanders, Schumer, Waters, Warren) who are all candidates for life support, themselves, let alone higher office. It is liberally (no pun intended) seeded with questionable personalities and (very) mean intelligence, not to mention tried-and-failed ideas that were being bandied about as workable "this time" (with more funding, taxes and regulation). It is obviously splintered into a million factions by the poison of identity politics. It's extreme left is split between Nazis (the Sandernistas) and the Red Guard (ANTIFA), and it's crumbling middle has only managed to retain some semblance of control by cheating in its own electoral process.
Stick a fork in them. No mater how long this virus shit continues, and no matter how big a beating the market takes, Trump can still -- easily -- overcome these morons.
* The Press is irresponsible. From now on, I shall refer to the American Press as The Mouth of Sauron (if you don't get the reference, read The Lord of the Rings).
The press, collectively, is congenitally incapable of telling you the truth about anything. If their coverage is not shamelessly slanted by political bias, the overwhelming sense that the person talking on television was probably Special Ed is difficult to dismiss.
I could write an entire rant on this subject, but here's the main points: The Mouth of Sauron is simply repeating what the politicians and dubious "experts" are telling them -- often unverified, uninvestigated -- and it turns out this information is consistently misleading or contradictory, and the M.O.S. doesn't seem to notice, or care.
There is a shitload of information coming your way every day -- television, newspapers, social media, online media, radio -- and it's a jumbled mass of numbers, half-understood science, a lot of fearmongering, grandstanding, and sometimes, some facts. The M.O.S. is not doing it's primary job, which is to sort through this messy pile of data and present something that is compact, easy-to-understand, relatively-truthful, and in context, to you, the consumer.
Except that our M.O.S. doesn't do context. Context takes time and understanding, and they have little of the former -- because rush to be first -- and serious lack the ability to muster the latter in any great reserves (because J-school is actually easier than becoming an 'education major"). and besides, OrangeManBad.
* Government-run healthcare fails. Always.
If you needed more proof than China, Italy, Iran, the troubles the public, government-run hospitals are having here, and now the underbelly of Europe (Spain is the new hotspot), you deserve to be laying on a gurney in a hallway, drowning in your own mucous, while an unaccountable bureaucrat decides whether you are worth the expense and effort "to save".
But don't worry: there's plenty of room in the mass graves and the crematoria.
A strange phenomenon here in States regarding socialized medicine:
The Left: The government response to Coronavirus is horrible!
The Left: The government should run the healthcare system!
I guess which opinion you hold at any given moment is dependent upon how close you are to your own mortality and what the dictates or needs of the democratic (small 'd' intentional) party are at the time.
You should all shut the fuck up.
But don't feel so bad: the same crisis has produced a mirror of Cognitive Dissoance on the Right, as well:
The Right: Welfare is wrong!
The Right: Nancy Pelosi held up my welfare!
You guys should shut the fuck up, too.
* The Failure of Expertise. For years we have been told that our lives should be guided by the principle that if "an expert' says it, it must be true.
If ever there was a more-egregious example of the failure of expertise than this "crisis", then I'm hard-pressed to think of it.
We have dueling "experts" who often change their opinions on a daily basis. Some of this may be due to new data coming in, but an awful lot of it seems to me to be little more than hedging bets and covering behinds. The bureaucratic failure -- the FDA, CDC, HHS, and the other alphabet soups, plus their counterparts at the state, county and municipal levels -- all appear to one extent or another to be more-concerned that their reputations, and that of their agencies, remains pristine despite obvious failures.
I have warned you many times before about the dangers of managerialism: you're now seeing one particularly pernicious aspect of it playing out before your eyes, as governors scream for equipment they already have but apparently don't know about, petty legal lords wrangle over the fine print of onerous regulations that stand in the way of innovation and saving lives, and how overlapping bureaucracies are more than willing to point the finger at each other as a means of avoiding responsibility.
The best thing to have happened during this "crisis" is the president declaring a State of Emergency and then telling the federal agencies to get the fuck out of the way of the private sector.
The Swamp, the same Swamp that has tried repeatedly to overthrow this President, has shown it's willingness to risk other people's lives in an effort to continue to make him look bad. If we're lucky, this process of Swamp Draining will be speeded up, prodded by the obvious rotten response we've gotten from government at all levels.
* Economically - We have (finally!) discovered that putting all of our economic eggs in one basket was a really bad idea (I will cover this in greater detail in Part 2).
* Automation is not a panacea. It just took a hit. Which sucks, since it's how I make my living, but we've just discovered that just because we CAN automate everything, it's probably a good idea NOT to. The thought that humans can perform in ways that machines cannot was always known but the thinking on it was "just give us enough time, memory and processing power and we can fix that".
We definitely have to rethink that attitude. I'm not so certain we should.
I shudder to think what this would look like if all the decisions were left up to Artificial Intelligence at it's present stage of evolution.
What have We Gained?
* Boutique activism came to a screeching halt. Even the "Chinese flu is racist" bit was met with resistance. No more PC, no trans shit, no more pronoun policing. In the face of something really important to complain about, the long list of petty, vicious, ridiculous leftist virtue-signalling tropes disappeared overnight.
The Diversity train just de-railed. It was The Diversity that brought us this pandemic. The pretentious sanctuary city shit just hit the proverbial fan in many of the worst-affected cities. While there is no backlash against The Diversity currently forming, there is one gaining steam against the people who push this nonsense agenda and a questioning of their true motives.
Let's keep it up.
* Schooling: now that everyone is distance learning, Parents have a better idea of how their children are being mis-educated, and what, exactly, they're being exposed to in school. Many are discovering that they don't like it.
They're also discovering they often can't help their children, because when they were taught math it made sense and wasn't systematized in favor of the retarded. They don't quite understand the politically-correct jargon being bandied about in assignments. They certainly do not like the exceedingly high levels of political content they're finding in their children's schoolwork, much of it woefully misinformed, vicious, and detached from reality.
* A measure of self-reliance is returning to communities. Having seen "the government" at all levels fail, flounder, creak and stall, people are taking things into their own hands when it comes to helping neighbors, preventing the spread of the virus, and keeping each other fed and supplied.
Communities are becoming Communities, again and the old identity politics of division are being swept away by the simple gestures of concern for fellow human beings and an innate sense of what is right.
Communities are growing closer together. Unlike a 9/11, or a Columbine, this is everywhere at once, and the event is so much more of a shared sacrifice and danger.
This is all to the good.
* We're discovering just how much "non-essential" exists in our government and business life.
* Liquor stores are now considered "essential" services. Let me know when escort services and massage parlors make the list, too. I can think of no better tonics to soothe shredded nerves.
UPDATE: Corrected spelling and grammar.
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