Our Corona

The lesson I learned from 9/11: Don't turn over narrative control to the government and corporate media. Keep (or start) telling your own narrative. It is safer to plunge into your own personal fantasies than use their story-line as your setting.

Let them pry it from my cold unwashed hands

BAD - more people die this flu seasons  
GOOD - the worst case in Italy is because it has the oldest population in Europe, with about 1 in 4 Italians being 65+, this is not the norm

BAD - mass panic
GOOD - humans finally stop their 'GO GO GO! Capitalism' for a few months!

BAD - suffering is a chance for 'disaster capitalism' (massive fraud, mark-ups, untested products, and corruption)
GOOD - focus on funding HealthCare

BAD - moral panics make people aggressive and xenophobic
GOOD - some of this hate is going toward our Mafia Don leadership (BOris & Donald)

BAD - Trumpers continue to meet and shake hands to 'trigger the libs' because CORONA is 'fake news'
BAD - Liberals gleeful comment that about the 'darwin awards' and 'eating popcorn' while Trumpers die
GOOD - The second I go off the internet those two groups disappear...  

BAD - First case at LU
GOOD - I work for LU from my home.
BAD - My partner just went to a LU conference in the building where the first case was reported the following day

GOOD, GOOD, GOOD - Maybe Tom Hanks will die!

We are overdue for a plague - but this isn't it. This is a 'new serious flu' being tracked in real-time as it travels globally, which is something I've suggested for just the usual flu: a nightly newscast on spreading virus that would accompany the weather. The dangerous aspect is that this is a GLOBAL MORAL PANIC, the narrative of 'contagion' is powerful enough to challenge 'work at any cost' and so poses an opportunity. Humans are a dramatic, superstitious race so we'll get plenty of both.  All the drama-queens and suicide-kings see a tempting stage.

Many forces on the global are weighing their next move, mostly their decision is on how to profit but this panic does a potential act break to introduce a new storyline...

Gerstead - Our Patron Saint of Crisies:

This picture explains the news coverage adaquately.

When 'events' happen I check the chatter at this one UFO blog I discovered after following clues from James Woolsey's deep-state work in that shady area between the worlds of high-tech research world, finance and UFOlogy. In the late 1990s Woolsey was involved in some weird naval intelligence work on 'war-gaming' alien first-contact scenarios (Woolsey also did top-level 'biological attacks' role-playing games).

One of the weirder windows into this world is the relationship between Ron Pandolfi and Dave Smith on the 'openminds' UFO blog.  Pandolfi is an elite scientist employed by CIA/DIA/JASON, Smith is a rich masochist who believes he is jesus.... Since the 1990s Pandolfi has used Smith as some sort of  cut-out, wild card, and disinfo outlet. It is some sort of external Intelligence operation. You can watch them talk in code on that blog. Pandolfi politics are pro-Trump eco-imperialist, Smith is a christian centrist Democrat.

The current chatter on the blog by Pandolfi is that he is fleeing the coming plague, shutting down the blog and inviting Smith to join him.
FOOT/FEET= PANDOLFI
CHICKEN = SMITH
LOONS = all handful of crazy posters at that site





The right-wing JASONs want mortality but not economic damage, the Christians want economic chaos but not mass-death to increase the mass psychological impact!






....Everyone get your chairs ready!

Corona is a 'stress test' of health-care systems, because it can flood a hospital with elderly people needing respiratory care.  
Corona is a 'stress test' of state power, because quarantines are being enforced by state-power.
Corona is a 'stress test' of citizen sanity, because moral panics feed massive anxiety. [I'm jaded but I sympathize.]
Capitalism is a constant crisis for most people... and Americans are rightly worried their 'shit-hole' country cannot handle this 'stress test'

Now is your chance to demand the College re-instate you....

In this time of 'crisis' when need all the RTs Canada can muster! Healthcare not bureaucracy!

In this time of 'crisis' when need to massively re-invest in PUBLIC healthcare and PAID timeoff!

My current listening:

exiled/warnerd wrote:By popular demand from Radio War Nerd subscribers, we're reposting open & unlocked this episode on the coronavirus emergency, with our popular RWN guest, Italian historian "Annibale", on what life is like under quarantine in his home in northern Italy...and what to expect as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. "Sobering" as they say, but necessary.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-34822138

At minimum there is gonna be a whole bunch of OCD after this.

The craziest thing this virus is bringing is the reality of rapid social change despite the TINA* philosophy of neo-liberalism.

"There is no alternative" (TINA) was a slogan often used by Witch-Queen Thatcher and it is the basic political-philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire.

The 2003 war made it clear that the government and news is fake, the 2008 bailout made it clear that money and banks are fake, 2020 is making clear that TINA is fake...

The 'psychology of moral panics' is my best guide because it postulates:

1) The danger is real but the reaction is exaggerated
2) The 'irrationals' use the exaggerated fear but have a serious political point
3) The 'status quo' just want to maintain the horribly-broken past model that caused to the crisis

So with Corona we find

* The 'irrationals' are using an exaggerated fear of 'contagion' to put a dent in TINA and give power back to the state
* The 'status quo' are all 'jaws mayors' clinging to TINA to prop up their ugly austerity regimes of corporate-rule.



Compare this to #metoo

* The 'irrationals' are using 'guilty without trial' to put a dent in the patriarchy
* The 'Weinsteins' are clinging to 'elites never pay' to prop up their criminal misogynist behaviours

I'm politically-aligned with the 'irrationals' but a germ-phobic panic is unsupportable, yet those opposing the panic are the usual 'rightist' gang of our corruptest, laziest elites who only want 'moral panics' amount socialism, 'free-speech' and non-white terrorism.

Watching the Ontario Govt. fight rumors of a province-wide shutdown is the closest to a GENERAL STRIKE I've seen in my lifetime.



Unfortunately this general strike slogan might be **KEEP OUR CAPITALISM GERM-FREE**

The general 'leftist' opinions seems to be:  respect the health warnings and demand that the resulting economic hardship help be alleviated.  
Also shaming hoarders.  

The 'right' is always ready to do some 'disaster capitalism': selling scam cures, hoarding & profiteering and their favorite type of socialism: billion-dollar bailouts to alleviate the economic hardship for capitalists

All the major indices (and bitcoin) were up in pre-market trading the morning after Trump announced he would direct the Department of Energy (DOE) to purchase 80 million barrels of oil with $2.6 billion in public funds
...
Federal Reserve cuts rates to zero and launches massive $700 billion quantitative easing program
...
Ottawa announces $10 billion business credit line, plans to roll out stimulus package as COVID-19 spreads.
“The measures we’re announcing today will provide up to $27 billion in direct support to Canadian workers and businesses, plus $55 billion to meet liquidity needs of Canadian businesses and households through tax deferrals to help stabilize the economy.” Trudeau said combined, the $82 billion in support represents more than three per cent of Canada’s GDP.
...
The Australian government's $17bn coronavirus stimulus

AND

*Joking about corona is not a sign of "how far we've slide into fascism". Endless wars, mindless militarism, and a social-darwinist economy are.

*Germfree Capitalism would be worse than the current Grubby Capitalism.

*Every North American last week: Do I feel like crap because of corona, psychosomatic corona or 'daylight savings time' fuckery?

*I saw a comment about 'viral time' referring to the the pace of transmission/infection/symptoms. It is like 'viral time' is fighting 'capitalist time' two; a battle between different world views. And this leads to the darkest deepest fear that underlies all panics since pre-history: the stirrings of the great leviathan of nature can overturn human civilization.

*No sane North American feels safer having 'austerity clowns' like Trump & Ford as our 'leadership'. Part of the panic is that Conservatives know they voted in corrupt administration because they just hoped to benefit from the corruption, they just weren't expecting it to matter.

*How about a 'biological terror' colour chart like we had post-2001. Green = Fine / Orange = Wash Yr Hands / Red = Screening at Airports. That way the govt.  could adjust their response, panicky people could look at the chart daily and the majority could make changes as needed.  Eventually it would fade into the background....

*Corona is basically the only chance to elect Joe Biden ... and is far more likely to led to universal healthcare than him....

*A serious problem I have in understanding the panic is that 'spend or die' ethos this culture is built on - the idea currently in crisis - has become so foreign to me it seems like a non-issue. I felt the same about the deaths of bankers in 9/11 and the stock-market implosion of 2008. Intellectually I know the 'little people' that always suffer the brunt in any crisis, but my own long divorce from society leaves me a poor judge of what is being effected.

*The problem with a culture that sees everything as 'left/right', where the mass media is a bunch of proven liars, units like the WHO and CDC have poor track records, and everyone is loudly half-educated, is that finding sane voices is such a chore. The last 'curve chart' on corona I looked at came from a guy with an "MBA in Storytelling ...  as seen on TEDtalks" - such a trash culture...

*How do I quarantine from 'quarantine madness'? Socialize? How about we all agree to quarantine until spring's 'thawing of the dog crap' phase is over....

*One clear point is that many capitalists are maneuvering to use this 'moral panic' as the scapegoat for the long predicted economic 'correction'. 2001 'fixed' the imploding dotcom bubble, threats of martial law and economic chaos during the 2008 transition of presidential power fixed' the imploding stock-market. 2020 is being used to 'fix' the imploding 'qualitative easing' bubble.

* nextstrain.org/ncov

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/202002/the-coronavirus-is-much-worse-you-think wrote:The coronavirus is quite simply, and almost exclusively, a moral panic. This is so in the most literal sense. Human bodies, minds, societies, systems of meaning, norms, and morality have co-evolved with pathogens. Determining who drove whom in this dark scenario is currently unclear.

Why the toilet paper obsession?

It is because this is a society of Anal Consumers - in a crisis they will do the only behaviour they know: consuming. They will consume anal products in their typical anal ways.



Also the psycho-political framing of 'Dirtry-Ass Deplorables' versus the 'Neoliberal Spotless Sphincters'

I support public healthcare and have a sense of justice, should I be cheering for Corona/Covid/Nemesis/Karma to devastate the US?

Your call.  If you choose to cheer for death and destruction you are acting like an American - so be careful. If you cheer for the status quo, you are cheering Trump and the US industrial killing machine.

What about the Panic?

Some humans choose to connect their nervous systems to insane devices like the "stock-market" or "the media". It is like tying a rope between your genitals and a monkey without seriously questioning the mental state and previous behavior of that monkey. Add into that all the media-fed anxiety and guilty consciences that wrack most Americans....

I'm Done?

Watching this become another 9/11 - (elderly) white people dead! rich people inconvenienced! - is too cringey for me. They are already planning for a long-running show with talk of "next flu season" and a "mutating virus".  When I heavily blogged on the US assassination of a Iranian general in January, it changed me in ways (both good and bad) I'm still dealing with. Outside of a toilet paper-burning ritual, I'm just going to ignore this one by staying off the internet for a bit.

[[s23e19]]

There is no virus! Bart faked the whole thing with a DVD! A direct-to-video DVD!

"CRUISE SHIP"="Ext. Cruise ship - deCK - day"/>

"Marge Simpson" ="Excuse me, Cruise Director Priddis. (POINTED) My son has something to tell you."

Rowan Priddisl="(TO BART) Speak passenger, son of passenger."

Bart Simpson: It was all a hoax, there's no virus.

"Crowd of Post-Apocalyptic Cruise passengers"="(SHOCKED ANGRY GASPS)"  (GROWING ANGRY MURMURS)

"Bart Simpson" original="(DEFENSIVE) All that happened is we got a little extra vacation, is that so bad!?

"Cruiser"=I think I ate people meat!

"Bart Simpson"="(GROSSED-OUT GUILTY NOISE)"

A Journal of my quarantine from the quarantine panic

DAY 1

Cut-off all non-essential internet and media access. Two o'clock during the day my heart races and I want to check out the news - but NO! the dangers are too high. Memes are easily transmitted by the filthy media outlets and the danger is too high. I'm still getting low-level exposure from human-to-human panic but that is easily converted into good feelings by applying a few sanitary laughs and a small dose of jaded reason.

My partner's tales from her workplace are chilling: barely-hidden panic as workers want their chance to play a drama-queen of this cinematic stage.
"I feel slightly off, I'm going to the hospital"
"Why plague now!? I just crashed my car this week? Why me? Why me? Why is Gawd doing this to ME?"
"Don't worry I'll protect ... I have an extra bottle of hand-sanitizer back at my office"
"Let's not worry about anything else until the plague ends"
Management does the only thing they know how: hold meeting and make insane decisions: Cleaning staff are no longer doing regular trash pick-up so they can spend more time scrubbing and trying to sneakily pass nasty anti-union measure! They aren't wasting a moment.

A walk at Centennial brings strange thoughts. Spring seems completely uninformed about the pandemic apocalypse and has not paused but continues to allow animals to travel through borders, the first returning Canadian Geese are walking on the icy lake. Raven doing mating aerobatic and chasing Bald Eagles. Snow prints of weasels and hopes of returning otters.  Then the thoughts pour in: nature is to blame for all this chaos and normally I'm pro-'chaotic nature', have I forgotten my true allegiance? The 15-year old me would being building shrines to Corona to thank it for the extended March Break....  

I think back to the last headlines I read before I quarantined myself from them:

They no longer seem as apocalyptic as they did just a day ago...

DAY TWO

I wake-up and want to check the news. I feel a moment of fear: if people know I'm no longer exposing myself to the memetic contagion they might attack me in their clearly irrational mindset. Safer to join the panic, I turn on my browser - but instead I revert to my old habit of checking the weather: Cool and Cloudy! The words seem glorious to me. Cool and Cloudy.

Feeling physically better today, might there be a huge load of anxiety and psychosomatic illness being passed through the 'corona' meme? Fear of the genetic virus as the bait for the memetic virus? The media weakening immune systems to allow the virus to flourish? Hopefully well-funded teams of sociologists and psychologists are tackling this very question...

I can still feel a slight 'buzz' from the panic but that just allows me to skip my morning dose of caffeine. It is hard to imagine the electric current running through those still self-administrating massive viral-loads of the meme to themselves, and worse, the approved outlets for this panic are low-energy tasks like isolation and hand-washing. You can't run out and join the army for this one (yet).  

After spending some time watching the squirrels outside, the weird thoughts pour in again. Every time I make eye-contact with a squirrel it seems to telepathically communicate with me! I know it sounds weird but these aren't normal squirrels, they are used to my presence and give off that 'no longer strictly wild' vibe. What are they saying? The same thing, over and over: "Join Team Corona" Crazy rodentia.

Just got a robo-call from our internet provider telling us how much the are waving data-limits for the next month to fight covid-19. Considering the infinite amount of ill will I have for Xplornet it's nice to see them on their knees for a change.

Day Three

I wake up in the pre-dawn darkness, eat a cracker and check the weather - suddenly a covid-19 banner pops-up! The adrenaline dump rouses me and I quickly close the browser. Just too unsafe on the 'net these days, but I got what I wanted. Tonight begins the spring rain that will wash winter away.

After 3 days of media quarantine the plague panic seems like a fantasy more dangerous than the actual virus. But according to the word-of-mouth rumours I've heard: the guy in Sudbury died, Florida is bulldozing the dead, and 3 million dead are projected in Britain. I'm not the best judge of these events, it took me about 5 years to feel anypity for the banksters killed in the WTC collapses.  

My partner's workplace is in confusion: workers are been sent home to help 'social distancing' but then management treats it like a favor to them; workers want time-off but using the cloak of a contagion panic; and both management and workers are half in the grip of 'contagion' hysteria. Endless meeting with pointless flow-chart amounting to nothing. The loosening of TINA has unmoored many minds.

A 'quarantine from the quarantine panic' might seem like abdication but it feels like a bastion of sanity pouring a tiny trickle of reason into the shakey Ontario public health system.
You'll have to pry 'reason and mercy' out of my cold, dead, unwashed hands before I abandon them.

Here's the chart in my brain:


Paradox: panic and be rewarded with time away from the modern hell.  
One trick you learn early on in this society is that you can get a break if you are willing to admit weakness. I was a healthy kid but I learnt to  fake illness to get out the nightmare of school, it was ultimately easier than repeatedly running away from school, but I remember in high school being disgusted with it all. I wasn't physically sick and I wasn't going to pretend and I wasn't going to anymore "weakness narratives" were you life is told as series of weakness to escape the hell of modern institutions. And so the institutions broke me!

Paradox:  I'm a socialist deplorable
A friend who a managed convenience story in North Bay made an insightful comment many year ago when he said that there were two main classes of customers: the overweight working-class buying all the addictive stuff (sugar, corn oil, cigarettes, gambling) and the employees of a near by government Health Unit; slimmer, richer and less addicted. Broadly the dirty oral Deplorables and the prim anal Neo-liberals. The corona panic is serving as the 'Revenge of the Neoliberals' against the Deplorables and their Dear Leader, Trump. The Deplorables are dirty and grubby and in a contagion panic: dirt = death. Deplorables have 'dirty asses' in an era of 'spotless sphincters'. Before I went into quartine I was  a whole bunch failed Bernie Sanders 'leftist energy' to transform into shaming 'dirty ass Deplorables' for being plague-spreaders. The evolutionary psychological power of 'contagion' is larger than any political stance and so hopefully this panic leads to reinvestment in public healthcare but my also mean 'germ-phobia' as a new central plank in liberal politics.

Narrative: Viruses replacing Islam?
The 'Wars of Terrors' had worn out their narrative power and political use, they will still happen but outside of the neo-cons and evangelicals most people don't care. Mass-shooters brought those wars home and people did not like it.  So two decade later a new 'War on Plagues' is riped to be launched. The Liberal Party of Canada is full of neoliberal doctors that will have the same role as 'security experts' played in 'War of Terrors'. Now you will be checked for explosive residue AND a fever before you get on a plane.

Narrative: Corporate Strike and OPEC floods.
All the megacorps are giving two weeks paid holidays, shutting down and riding out the storm. Saudis are flooding the oil market to help Trump, and then riding out the storm.  The smaller guys will have trouble riding out the covid storm. Moral panics are opportunities.

8:20 pm - I'm in the murky darkness listening to the first goose of spring's raucous honking made melancholy by its loneliness. I close my eyes and the soundscapes bloops with drips and drops, the day has melted much snow and the night will bring rain. The drips dopplegang into the muffled fluttering of wings or soft footsteps, I want to open my eyes but stop myself. I want to check the news but I write on R2N instead.

Day Four

The rain was light overnight, I didn't mind because a window frame started dripping when it started. Now the day is snow and rain.

The temptation to at least peek at the chaos is difficult to avoid. Tomorrow I'll skirt my quarantine and do some browsing.

The fear in the town is semi-real: closed stores, half-full shelves, tight jaws. We brought a care package to some friends (including toilet paper secured with warning stickers) and I wasn't even sure if they would let us in based on the strangeness of how they spoke on the phone, things were stressful but OK.  Talk of this lasting into summer, of herd immunity and antidotes.  It is the over-reaction (aka toilet paper shortages)  has got them spooked.

I keep wanting to call it 'corvid' because I have plauge-crows on the brain. How about covid-911? or even covid-1999?  

Globally the 'mass mind' has been taken out of the mold and be soon be malleable for a new imprint.

One thought that kept occurring me during the 9/11 madness was "I finally understand the McCarthy show-trials era." I never really understood how the USA could embrace mass insanity until I had to endure the 9/11 coverage, after that watershed my view of history changed, I could better understand just how irrational most of out history is, and not as 'history' that exists in the mythic past but modern cultural behavior too. Rationality is always a goal, not the existing situation.

Knowing I have a trip back into the highly infectious 'media-land' tomorrow, I beginning to wonder if should have sheltered from it. Maybe it would have been better to just get the high viral load and start building the anti-bodies? My quarantine² plan is based on keeping my media exposure to almost nothing. This is how we think now...

DAY FIVE - A Trip into the 'Net

Says the guy who began working with the CIA in the 1990s.....



Quebec City police arrest a woman, who has the coronavirus, for breaking quarantine on Friday afternoon. 'This is the first time we have executed this type of warrant,' says police spokesperson.
At least their guns weren't out.


The Bio-Police will be fun. Just give the public an anonymous hotline and society will end in flames.

*A friend was telling me about Italian cases of corona passed through rhinoplasty, I first thought the guy was having rhinoplasty so his nose would be more effective at spreading the disease...

* I saw a video where some person started singing 'imagine' so I stopped immediately - but just those few seconds made me very nervous because I expect the end of the world to be a pile of  schmaltzy nonsense. Apparently it was celebrities! This is the exact BS I've always expected to have to watch as the world ends.    If Trump steps out of his WWF-president role, starts weeping, tehn makes a very human speech about the need for all humans to support each other in this time of crisis as Pence hugs him - we are all dead... I already read (and re-read) McCarthy's 'The Road' until all its' conservative schmaltz was too much too bear.  

* The US Evil Empire isn't skipping a beat, attempts to destroy Iran, Venezuala, Cuba and China are still going with medical sanctions as the spear-point.  

* So we just waiting around until some day/month/year we get the virus? Or is Bill Gate's saving us with the Mark of the Beast?  

* Toronto Police removing the dirty homeless off street into crowded shelters. Now the shelters are quarantined.

* So humans will never shake hands again in our lifetime? Really? What about the 'genital handshake' that produces new humans? Are we heading to some 'boy in the bubble' culture?

* They'll need a big 'we found the antidote/ order restored' narrative at some point - or not. The 9/11 narrative worked because people kept awaiting the next attack.

* Reading some of the 'I survived stories and the severity the illness seems like a genetic crap-shoot: some are heavily-hit and some don't even have symptoms.

* "Where's Biden? Where's Biden?" I figured if the Democrats ran Biden they we basically throwing the election to Trump, apparently some Democrats were not informed about this.

Oh Christ, now we're at Dilbert Fascism -- Did Trump appoint this guy Official Workcamp Commandant or something?!  


*Stan Goff: "Covid-19" is not Covid-19, it is Covid-19/debt bubble/climate change/insane clown fascism. For many around the world, this doom arrived three, four, five generations ago.  

*

*Every so often a get the feeling I'm missing out on a real-life 'Masque of the Red Death' party somewhere...


*What iconic photos are defining this moment? I'm sure there are plenty of '28 days later' / '12 monkey' shots - but are they are iconic photos?

*  the twitterverse is shaming "eco-fascists" for enjoying the downfall of human culture by posting fake pictures of animals enjoying the empty streets......a pox on both their houses  [www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/]

*Kenny Rogers but not Tom Hanks is a cruel blow.

*So the US and USA are doing full 180s from "do nothing/herd immunity" to all-out social control. Valuable time was lost, so we get the extreme versions which does more social damage.  Overreaction to H1N1 (2009 swine flu) after scare of H5N1 (2005 avian flu) seems to be part of the story too.

* World: Thanks to China for lending tools, people and hard-learnt advice.
  USA: The 'Chinese Virus' was a biological atomic bomb deployed against us by the criminal Communist Party.    


*Quinn Slobodian: I hope people are planning now how to react if the presidential election is suspended.

*Spain just nationalized all its private hospitals and health care providers. States are really flexing their muscles!

* So capitalism now needs to disincentivise work to survive?   Interesting times....

* https://covid19syllabus.substack.com/   <---------------- I'm too tired to read this but it looks good

* Where's James Woolsey and his COG plans (continuity of government)? Far above my pay grade, but you want to keep on eye of Woolsey in times like these....



---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The trip was exhausting. Fear without outlet is a tough environment, the 'righteousness of the clean' is going to be a discouraging new norm and doom, doom, doom...



Overnight the cold snap has frozen the snow crust allowing me to transverse it. I followed a giant pair of rabbit tracks as in wove through the forest, overhead two pairs of ravens had an acrobatic territorial dispute.  A grey jay swoops into see what I'm up to. I see nuthatches, woodpeckers, and a horde of squeaking blujays (some doing the weird 'reptile trill'!)

At 34 minutes you get liberalism's vague last stand against corona.... [See my thread: 2020 - Too Late for Liberals @ roadtonowhere.forumotion.org/t650-2020-too-late-for-the-liberals]

The apocalyptic vibe is getting a little much     
How about we panic when the local supply of racoon-burgers is running scarce but until then we act with the calm dignity the situation call for?

Corona (Crown):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/coronavirus-crisis-change-world-financial-global-capitalism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other wrote:It is now inevitable that we will experience deep global recession, a breakdown of labour markets and the evaporation of consumer spending. The terror that drove government action in the autumn of 2008 was that money would stop coming out of the cash machines, unless the banking system was propped up. It turns out that if people stop coming out of their homes, then the circulation of money grinds to a halt as well. Small businesses are shedding employees at a frightening speed, while Amazon has advertised for an additional 100,000 workers in the US. (One of the few, and far from welcome, continuities from the world we’re leaving behind is the relentless growth of the platform giants.)

Rather than view this as a crisis of capitalism, it might better be understood as the sort of world-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings.

*a 9/11-style increase in 'bio-security' (and all the grifters this brings....)
*a 2008-style "correction/bailout" to their latest 'bubble' (and all the grifters this brings...)
* a serious stress test of health-care resources as the global population bulge of old baby-boomers get hit
* planetary push to atomize people to their dwellings/families and indoctrinating them in germ-phobia.

The last item worries me most because it might be exasperated by the planetary 'shit-show' of Trump's vulgarity - including calling African countries 'shit-holes' - fueling this heavy (bio)puritanical counter-reaction. Dirty Deplorables versus the Spotless Sphincters.  Germophobia replacing (merging with?) Islamophobia. Cores of real threats accumulate humongous cultural baggage that can far exceed the danger.

If the politics of "the left" adopts germ-phobia as a central psychological plank it will eventually turn its' politics against all the 'dirty' people they claim to help: dirty foreigners, dirty poor, dirty sick. Contagion psychology is much deeper wired than ethical positions. A version of this occurred around the crime issue during the 1980-90s, when liberal/left had to address very violent, very high crime rates (aka population bulge of young baby-boomers) and so they adopted the punitive attitudes toward criminals normally found on 'the hard right'. By the end of 1990s the NDP was more punitive than the Conservatives on many law-and-order issues but it don't get votes while encouraged a mass shift to dangerous emotions (blame, rage and victimhood) in Canadian criminal justice politics. There will be new political alignments, and as a wildcard, Transhumanist stuff like  'download-the-mind' and 'germ-free generation' might soon seem like reasonable goals.

It's OK you can admit it. Moral panics fill the souls of the empty - it gives a dramatic backdrop for all the broken husks capitalism produces so they can emote.

Kids in the US and the UK were three times as likely to want to be YouTubers or vloggers as astronauts, while kids in China were more likely to want to be astronauts.

I'm OK with the tag #boomerremover but we must make a virus that kills all age groups equally.


Might as well send the bio-police to round me up. I ain;t never going to be clean or obedient enough
Too many traitors like me inside Fortress North America for the "good people" to sleep soundly...  

Day Six

An early morning scavenging run scored enough off the 'net to see me through the next week. No need to head back until next weekend.

Hobb's Private Conspiracy

I have to nurture at least one 'wild' theory: key element in both Sept-9/11 and Covid-1/9 began with black ops in Italy.

WIKIPEDIA.... wrote:The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI (Italian military intelligence), which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the Anglo-Americans asserted that Iraq violated UN sanctions by attempting to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was then invaded and 100,000s died during the Anglo-American occupation.

The Niger embassy had reported a burglary on January 2, 2001, telling Rome police that letterhead stationery and consular stamps had been stolen from their flat.

The Italian military intelligence (SISMI) is also willing to allow the mass killing of Italians if it serves their ultra-right agendas...

Wikipedia & Friends wrote:The Bologna massacre (Italian: strage di Bologna) was a terrorist bombing of the Bologna Centrale railway station in Bologna, Italy, on the morning of 2 August 1980 which killed 85 people and wounded over 200.  Shortly after the bombing, the Italian press agency received a call from an individual claiming responsibility. The call later proved fake, originating instead from the Florence office of SISMI (the Italian Military Secret Service). The director of SISMI's Florence branch, was later charged with obstruction of justice.

The Italian government, led by Christian Democratic Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, first assumed that the incident was due to an accidental explosion of an old boiler in the station's basement. Evidence, however, soon pointed to terrorism.[5] L'Unità, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) newspaper, attributed responsibility for the attack to neo-fascists on 3 August. Later, in a special session of the Senate, Cossiga also supported the theory that neo-fascists were behind the attack: "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state through its representatives, right-wing terrorism prefers acts such as massacres because acts of extreme violence promote panic and impulsive reactions."

As a result of protracted legal procedures and false leads, a number of theories were proposed during the years after the attack. Involvement by Italian Secret Service officials was documented .[18]

Handwashing and the PARENTAL Left

- T. Christopher Bond, Bristol Myers Squibb wrote:Real epidemiologists don't shake hands.

I've mentioned this already but the shift of Leftist energy into 'contagion-shaming' is very problematic. The psychology of 'germ-phobia' is deeply-wired into our brains and it is a very dangerous circuit. It serves a real evolutionary purpose of avoiding disease but filtered through modern culture it becomes Germans forcing the 'dirty ones' into lethal showers to rid the 'body politic' of its infestation.

In my lifetime I've seen other ethnicities categorized 'dirty', the poor are always 'dirty', and each gender considers the other one to be 'dirty'!  You don't want to spam the 'contagion' button because all that energy will latch on to something....

So as "leftists" adopt no hand-shaking as a new cultural norm I'm reminded of the movie Pride (2014) depiction of the the real-life political alliance between 'dirty' coal-miners and 'dirty' gays during the 1980s UK miner's strike. This is a great movie and it's turning point is a hand-shake, when the coal miner teaches the gay activists about the power of solidarity expressed in a handshake. Handshakes and hugs bridges many divides.

Pride – Handshakes Have Never Been So Powerful wrote:Ben Schnetzer plays the social activist Mark Ashton with great style. The young activist who wants to fight for the rights of all, miners, gay, women, and so on, sees the rights of one and all as linked. While Schnetzer is a strong presence on screen on his own, it is when he shares the screen with Paddy Considine that Schnetzer truly performs to his greatest. They both show they truly believe in working together in order to fight the good fight.

And when they shake hands, it is something so powerful that nothing can diminish its true significance.

Many parts in this movie had me crying (and I am not a sentimental person). At the end during the 1985 June LGBT Pride Parade in London, it was so beautiful to see the Minors coming to support their Lesbians and Gay friends, and I cried when the letters appeared saying how some were inspired to go to college, others continued to work for social justice, and finally the banner appears of the Welsh symbol that was so talked about in the movie: Two hands joined together in Friendship.

That movie is the closest cinematic representation of my life between 1998 and 2003 as an activist. In the film I'm 'Bromley', the earnest middle-class dork, trying to manage his fear of gruff unions folk, sassy queers, and faceless riot police. When I encountered the 'Sudbury Left' it was a similar mixture of mining unions and of 'alternative' people organized by queer Sociologist Gary Kinsman.  I know exactly how the divides between these groups dissolved when we marched arm-in-arm against Mike Harris/Marge Thatcher.

It's a great, funny, human film too, so I can fully recommend it.  Once you've seen the movie go on Youtube and find the documentaries about the real alliance this movie fictionalizes.




00:34:13,801 --> 00:34:16,344
There's a lodge banner down in the welfare, over 100 years old.

00:34:17,972 --> 00:34:20,223
We bring it out for special occasions, you know?

00:34:20,433 --> 00:34:21,767
I'll show it to you one day.

00:34:21,976 --> 00:34:24,061
It's a symbol, like this, right?

00:34:24,604 --> 00:34:25,937
Two hands.

00:34:26,147 --> 00:34:28,356
That's what the labor movement means. Should mean.

00:34:29,025 --> 00:34:30,984
You support me, l support you, whoever you are, wherever you come from,

00:34:33,362 --> 00:34:36,239
shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand.



I see leftist cheering the end of corporate alpha's "killer grips" and I cannot disagree, but there is also deep leftist of handshakes overcome amazing social divides that should be remembered too.

Button History:

They will make us pay for this taste of life beyond capitalism...