The Sheer Awe-inspiring American Clusterfuck

Ian wrote: “…America will be divided into groups of states which have shut off almost all travel between themselves.”

Yup. It’s a possible scenario.

“All assuming Trump doesn’t get in the way and make it impossible, in which case, reinfection!”

How can Trump get in the way, ultimately? With his supreme incompetence and bullshit, he’s pissed off every branch of the U.S. armed forces. That latest incident with the USS Roosevelt and Captain Crozier has — for those of us for prone to see history rhyming, if not repeating itself — echoes of the mutiny on the Imperial Russian Navy’s battleship Potemkin in

The weapon Trump/the Fed gov has against states is the money spigot. The states don’t have the big money. Sure a state like California, built vast surpluses from it’s taxed GDP, maybe like no other, but even in that case, it’s still not Fed gov type money. They will let the states go bankrupt.

Pfft. If Trump makes that play, that may just work to accelerate the centrifugal process —

https://www.depressionscrip.com/

https://joe4hou.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/local-money-in-the-us-during-the-great-depression.pdf

“…in1933, the massive declines in employment and output, along with the collapse of the banking and financial systems, created a widespread perception that the economy was experiencing shortages of money, provoking numerous issues of local currencies, or “scrip.” Given the large number and brief duration of many issues, there is no reliable estimate of their overall overall volume, though contemporary estimate placed it at nearly one billiondollars.’ It is clear, however, that some sort of scrip was issued by several hundred municipalities, business associations, companies, banking organizations,barter and self-help cooperatives, and production units of the unemployed.”

California is also food independent, though climate change may mean water issues in the Central Valley down the line.

Trump can get in the way by prioritizing the Old Confederacy, for relief and funds. By “opening back up’, those states are already signaling to supply chains and distributors that their goods will have a captive market, which will tend to exacerbate shortages in the coastal and Great Lakes states that remain vigilant (‘closed’). The pressure to ‘re-open’ will only increase as more and more staple goods and federal dollar flow South, into the mouths and coffers of the very people making everything worse.

“Oil is now -38$ a barrel…”

This, currently, is a one-off. But it has happened before with other kinds of fossil fuel on an irregular basis. It is a sign that that fossil fuel economy is dying, and the parties who worship it are coming to an end. The fossil fuel economy is, to a large extent, cost negative when one counts for heat dispersion. We are borrowing money from the future shifting the profits forward,

Your population refuses to vote for anyone who do the right thing, but keeps choosing (with the aid of the media, yes) people who are evil . . .

In case you did not notice, with this primary season, the U.S. stopped having fair elections altogether. There was some manipulation too clever by half ( “there’s an app for that!” in Iowa) but after that, there was no pretense. For purely ceremonial reasons, we might have “vote-by-mail” (except the Postal Service collapses in June) followed no doubt by count-by-mail. There were states where most polling stations shut down or were deserted and Biden never campaigned and recorded “turnout” officially rose.

Electoral democracy was built into the political culture . . . but it began to disappear after 1976 or so. The Archdruid, whom some of the other commenters despise, was remarkably good on the details of how this was happening: the disappearance of public meetings and Roberts Rules of Order was one of his observations; that Occupy was led by people who could not organize a political meeting, he noted, was a tell-tale sign of decadence. Local democracy was killed partially by early idpol: campaigns to end local control of schools as a matter of racial justice: busing! Followed eventually by the consumer choice of charters. You can trace the “lesser evil” tick-tock of Presidential neoliberalism, but at the local level the foundations were crumbling. Long before he was celebrated by MSNBC, Andrew Cuomo was destroying the NYC subway and there was scarcely any protest; the city cannot function without it and it crumbled in plain sight and no one seemed to care much or to fix responsibility on the malevolent governor.

I love this title. Perfect. It couldn’t be more fitting. America truly is an Idiocracy in every conceivable way.

One of the braindead, dimwitted is a compliment, “protesters” told the healthcare worker in medical scrubs to go to communist China. She was an obese blond Trump supporter who has an affinity for Russians and Vlad Putin. The irony is, she doesn’t realize Putin and Russians are communists too, meaning, using the communist label really no longer has the stigmatizing relevance it had during the cold war so she’s a braindead idiot to use the slur that’s not even a slur any longer especially when you factor in the contradiction of her support of Putin who was a communist versus her hatred of the Chinese who were communists. The Chinese communists are different — they have yellow skin. The Russians look like her, don’t you know.

America is hellbent on maximizing deaths from this pandemic and ensuring that it’s here to stay. It’s quite plausible there will never be herd immunity from this which is an abominable strategy fyi and it becomes like the common cold or influenza except more deadly and definitely a death sentence ultimately for every senior over 70 (think Logan’s Run) but it doesn’t stop there — it can take anyone at any time and we’ll never know enough about it to know why that is. It inflicts all manner of disease on its targets. A young girl, five years old who’s parents are healthcare workers, contracted it and it gave her meningitis and she died.

It is clear now that America and its purposeful, not incompetent, non-response to the NOVEL virus is an egregious disease vector and thus a danger to the world. America is metaphorically, and actually practically literally, a nuclear attack that is airborne and incoming to the remainder of the inhabitants of this planet. World leaders should be calling for Donald Trump’s head and the heads of his administration and all those who influence him. As well, the governors of the states who are opening their economies back up and ending the quasi quarantine policies that were in place and I say quasi because it was always half-assed and only partially effective.

Donald Trump is now the leading cause of death in America, not cancer or heart disease, and because America and its status in the world heretofore and its interconnectivity is now a massive vector for COVID-19, Donald Trump is set to be the leading cause of death in the world.

How long does the world remain silent and not call for his head? How many deaths will it take to get to the center of Donald’s tootsie roll tootsie pop?

@ Mandos

Idpol has a rhetorical engine that drowns out thought. Busing as policy was short-lived. Currently, claims of racial segregation in public schools are often as brain-dead idiotic In their innumeracy as well as remarkably unconcerned about severe racial disparities in educational achievement.

In real life, ulterior motives are often more important than official intention.

I am pretty such the current charter school movement, whatever the precedents in trying to create segregated academies, is about making money and further destroying and discrediting public education.

Rome persisted long beyond its ostensible “fall.” Aspects of its glory days persist to this day. So I wouldn’t be too quick to count the USA out, despite the obvious and severe failings in dealing with innumerable crises, the Outbreak being only the latest and most crippling.

Yes, everything is being done wrong in this crisis if the goal is to protect, preserve and defend the people of the United States and their “way of life.” But what if that’s not the goal? As I see it, that hasn’t been the goal in the US or the UK; rather, the point is to exacerbate the problems, intensify the crisis, cull the ‘useless’, and enhance the wealth and power of a tiny and shrinking minority of bewildered and incompetent would be aristocrats. They’re winning despite their stupidity.

The People have yet to respond forcefully, but that will come.

In the meantime, this crisis, like the other shocks we’ve been through since the start of this century, serves to shift the governing paradigm onto a far more authoritarian, cruel, and destructive level from which the next crisis will be addressed. The process can go on indefinitely. Signs are it will.

This writing by Zhuang Tzu is always with me, and sustains me in this crisis:

“I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world. Letting be is from the fear that men, (when interfered with), will carry their nature beyond its normal condition; exercising forbearance is from the fear that men, (when not so dealt with), will alter the characteristics of their nature. When all men do not carry their nature beyond its normal condition, nor alter its characteristics, the good government of the world is secured.”

You see, by “governing the world”, inventing all this tech-know-logy and agriculture, we have carried ourselves beyond our normal nature, and now we are stuck with it in an endless chase to prop it up.

This crisis started 10,000 years ago when we became reliant on farms and those sociopaths took over.

So now I just watch and wait for the return to balance.

I find it funny that everything we’ve been talking about since 2008 is coming to pass, but its all due to a virus. Nobody is talking about why the system we live in couldn’t handle a shutdown, everybody is hoping that things will go back to the way they were but as this goes on that seems more and more improbable. Based on my understanding of the 2008 crisis, many businesses that opened from 2008 until today never should have, money should have been much more scarce but wasn’t and interest rates should have been much higher. I think all of that will now come to pass, but it will be the viruses fault. I’ve seen lately some people advocating we sue china for 20 trillion, probably in hopes to gin up a war. Nobody is talking about neoliberalism and sueing it for 20 trillion dollars. I guess we learned from the war on terror its hard to hold a philosophy accountable.

Hannibal roamed Italy for 15 years and still couldn’t break the Roman will. That best army in the world never entered Rome. Yet some centuries later, the Visigoths pretty much walked straight into Rome and sacked it, virtually unobstructed.

Something must have been very different with those later Romans.

Not quite sure what the big deal is — our deaths per capita are middle of the pack. As far as not shutting down, didn’t Sweden do just that? They seem to have come out pretty well, actually maybe better if they’ve got herd immunity now and others don’t.

No doubt the shitlib media are screaming about this nonstop, but when weren’t they? It’s just “get Drumph”, part six million.

BOO, the World’s Greatest Nation comprises 4% of the worlds population. It now has 1/3 of the reported coronavirus cases, with that share ever increasing.

Ever been to North Dakota? I was born there. Some states have plenty of isolation no matter what the Governor says.

Have to say, Trump’s attack ad absolutely DEVASTATES, this one is an attack on Nancy Pelosi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7DKYML2MRs

I am an American and I agree with everything you have said. We are in an electronic trance, and in thrall to ghouls. What else is there to say?

And fuck feminism. Fuck the #MeToo hyposcrisy.

And I notice that the headline story in The Atlantic by George Packer (author of The Unwinding) is: entitled “America is Failed State.”

“The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.”

“Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

The sad thing is that those of us who know it can do little about it but watch. Will other countries take us in (especially if we’re not rich or don’t have rare skills?)

Hey Blizzard, I remember about a month ago you were here spouting the “it’s not even as bad as the flu!” nonsense that was making the rounds in right-wing circles at the time. Good to see you’re back with their latest talking points, without any thought at all given to how they contradict what you were saying before!

‘Something must have been very different with those later Romans.’

I believe the Roman ethos was an impressive and terrible thing in their prime. Every Roman man, woman, and child was given to understand that a Roman chose death before surrender and slavery, and any person who failed to make that choice was no Roman and by nature a slave.

As for the idpol, I’ve always taken that to be the de facto institutionalization of robber baron Jay Gould’s comment that he could pay one half of the working class to kill the other half.

Blizzardofozz

It does kill young children, the first death of a child in the states was in Illinois.
The few studies we have out of China show about 6% of the kids that catch it become critically ill and require hospitalization.

Yo oooze, you still on that crisis actors kick, insisting those dead kids aren’t dead?

You know your butt-buddy Alex is getting sued right into to prison for that.

Way things are right now I’m betting it gets lynched before it gets there.

Yes, it.

I think we might be looking at the beginning of the ultimate breakup of the US, but yes, it will be an extreme clusterfuck.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/14/us-governors-states-rights-defy-trump-by-forming-regional-alliances/

Conspiracies and hoaxes do exist, of course. But one always has to ask the question: Who benefits? Blizzard, who benefits from a Covid conspiracy/hoax?

BOO,
Masks, training, testing and most importantly, enforcing. Gotta be a little statist to get back some economy. Just letting things run freedom-wild? Maybe we should try that out first on one of the more conservative states.

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

–TS Eliot

But, but MAGA, right? MAGA now. MAGA forever. MAGA for whimper.

It may not even be a matter of the health of the immune system, or not in all cases. It could be your biome. They’re researching this as we speak. Certain biome configurations may be more susceptible to it than others and your biome is a product of nature and nurture. Your biome may not be unhealthy, but it may be a conducive environment for the virus to propagate.

Like I said, this is a virus like no other. They really mean it when they say NOVEL. It’s multifaceted.

It’s too bad when Rome was collapsing it didn’t have a Rome to point to as precedent like we do as though that’s how all “empires” collapse. I would think collapsing would somewhat, or closely even, parallel the increasing pace of everything else to include computing power and information expansion.

Confirmed COVID cases in the U.S., by day:

February 20: 15
March 20: 18,747
April 20: 776,093

But according to Blizzard, there’s no such thing as exponential growth.

Willy:

Did anybody weigh the cost-benefits of conquering the Sassanids to replenish the slaves and loot?

Julian the Apostate gave it a try. He failed, badly enough to get both himself as well as his army killed.

But another entire millenium of warfare, finally decided only when the Ottoman Empire reduced a militarily insignificant remnant in 1453, argues that the strategic equilibrium between Rome and Persia was far too stable to make serious attempts at conquest by either side a very good idea. All that was, was a black hole that swallowed humans and wealth and produced nothing but deserts and boneyards.

Of course the Huns not so much.

But the odd thing about the rise of the Hunnish Empire is that right up until the early 5th century, Rome wasn’t clashing with the Huns directly. It was being inundated by groups that the Huns refugeed out.

In fact, Flavius Aetius made quite a good thing of the Huns. Rome had gold that Attila needed to keep his underchiefs sweet. The Huns had very skilled light cavalry that Rome could use to address it’s permanent shortage of native military manpower after Adrianople. This arrangement continued to benefit both parties, right up to the point where the expanding frontiers of the Hunnish Empire met those of a contracting Roman state directly. That, of course, was when the arrangement broke down. Along with Flavius Aetius’ military career and his life. But even then, the Huns proved unable to overpower the reduced Roman military. They suffered a reverse at Catalaunian Fields and then looted for a bit. But when Attila died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, the Hunnish Empire disintegrated far faster and more completely than the Western Roman Empire did. By 469, there was nothing whatsoever left of it but refugees, seeking asylum in the Eastern Roman Empire!

But pissing off the Visigoths wasn’t a very politically competent move, not a good indicator of Roman elite proficiency.

From Heather’s account, Valens considered them to be, potentially, a good thing. They showed up hats in hand. And resettling peaceable immigrants from across the Rhine-Danube frontier was a trick the Romans had practiced successfully for at least a century. Look up Aurelian.

But he didn’t have enough reserves in hand, per Roman SOP, to keep the toothpaste in the tube should arrangements go sour. Which they did. There’s some reason to suspect that the local Roman in charge, Lupicinus, got either greedy or stupid or both. Then, when things went sideways, Valens got wrongfooted.

But I wouldn’t say that Diocletian and Constantine were the only glimmers of competence between Marcus Aurelius and Honorius. The problem with being a Roman emperor between 235 AD and 285 AD is that if the plague didn’t kill you (AD 251), your own troops probably would. So people who saw the problems on their plate clearly and tried to deal with them usually weren’t around long enough to make a difference, by themselves. Gallienus, for example, was stabbed to death by one of his officers while beseiging a usurper he’d already defeated in the field. And Aurelian, who was arguably the most brilliant field commander the Empire had since Trajan, was – you guessed it – murdered by a cabal made up of his own officers.

The Army was a major part of the problem with the post-Antonine Empire. And the roots of that went all the way back to the early Empire, under Augustus. They expected “donatives”. And the sums kept going up. By the time Septimus Severus was running things, he had to rule, as he put it, “mano ad ferram” (hand on his sword). Because if he turned his back on the army for too long, a number of somebodies amongst the senior officers would get greedy, and then he’d have a military insurrection to squash. That particular emperor, BTW, seems to have been one of the more competent ones. The emperors who managed to shut down a series of interdynastic wars tended to be.

@ Mandos

We see the world differently. What I see as incoherent foppery or hypocrisy, you take to be sincere and earnest. Here is a New York Times editorial worrying over race and public education in the city.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/opinion/nyc-schools.html
It is not by any stretch of imagination the worst of its kind, but it displays a remarkable inability to reason and it is focused on remedying disparity rather than deficiency, which is typical of how idpol on the left has evolved. Basic terms fundamental to the topic are undefined and conceptual distinctions sideswiped in a dance around the problems of education.

I am skeptical of the accuracy and usefulness of educational achievement testing, at least as far as measuring school performance is concerned, but decades of testing has consistently shown very large gaps between average black student performance in grade school and high school and the performance, on average, of white or Asian-American students. That testing reveals a real and persistent problem. I do not think the problem comes down to too few blacks are selected for highly selective enrichment programs. But, that is the idpol view: they do not concern themselves with poverty or its relief, they concern themselves with racial proportionality among the rich. And, they can be quite flippant about local community, these globalizers.

@450.org

The Romans would have had at least some knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse (1177 BC), which is also a much better model for today’s decline than Rome. It involved thoroughly intertwined transnational economies collapsing domino-style as the entire network was disrupted by repeated shocks.

@BlizzardOfOzzz

It’s a hoax…by whom? And for what purpose? Because from where I’m standing it looks entirely like a bunch of dysfunctional and arrogant states have basically completely bungled their response to what was a significant but eminently manageable threat through sheer ineptness. I’m really struggling to see what evil grand plan would involve intentionally destroying your economy while throwing vast amounts of fertilizer on desperation and revolution.

“for the express purpose of manipulating different groups against each other” was supposed to be followed by “so we don’t go full Frank Castle on the scumbags at the top”.

And several things were changed by autocorrect. Hope meaning still clear. Apologies if not.

COVID-19 ‘Liberate’ Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial

Here is the beginning of the piece:

The response among many American public officials and the public at large to the COVID-19 pandemic has, in many ways, paralleled the response to the climate crisis.

First came a denial that it was a problem at all, then a denial of its depth and gravity. Later came an acceptance of the problem but the stance that responding is too economically costly. And as with the climate crisis, this is no accident. The well-funded machinery that sowed doubt about climate is now sowing seeds of doubt over the economic and public health response to COVID-19.

DeSmog previously reported that many conservative groups and individuals who for years downplayed the gravity of the climate crisis did the same as the coronavirus outbreak worsened around the world and eventually made its way into the United States.

Now, weeks into that public health crisis — and with more than three-quarters of a million cases and over 41,000 deaths in the U.S. — groups nationwide are clamoring for an early end to stay-at-home orders and a reopening of state economies. Many of those same groups, a DeSmog investigation shows, are also part of what sociologist Robert Brulle has called the climate change countermovement and what U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has coined the “web of denial.”

Like the eruption of Tea Party protests in 2009, many of the protests have the outward appearance of spontaneity, yet are tied through common funding streams and networks.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/04/20/covid-19-liberate-conservative-groups-climate-denial

Ultimate Deaths by Country:

World 262095

USA 79882
Italy 30033
Spain 26301
France 25699
UK. 22905
Belgium 6224
Iran 7494
Germany 4682
China 5414
Netherlands 3541
Brazil 6179
Turkey 3004
Canada 2415
Sweden 1837
Switzerland 1157
Mexico 1747
Portugal 1033
Ireland 1418
India 899
Indonesia 953
Ecuador 827
Romania 661
Austria 1002
Peru 2877
Russia 712
Philippines 808
Poland 455
Algeria 501
Denmark 774
Japan 381
Egypt 461
Dominican Republic 346
S. Korea 292
Hungary 565
Pakistan 454
Czechia 353
Colombia 646
Israel 533
Norway 440
Ukraine 258
Argentina 432
Chile 278
Morocco 363
Panama 234
Finland 419
Serbia 206
Greece 269
Bangladesh 603
Saudi Arabia 194
Malaysia 104
Iraq 221
Luxembourg 130
Slovenia 168
Australia 173
Moldova 175
South Africa 359
Belarus 102
North Macedonia 93
Bosnia and Herzegovina 80
Thailand 100
Croatia 359
UAE 67
Honduras 83
Bulgaria 110
Estonia 82
Cameroon 58
San Marino 88
Lithuania 77
Cuba 72
Tunisia 48
Burkina Faso 56
Andorra 63
Bolivia 81
Afghanistan 37
Albania 53
Nigeria 39
DRC 62
Armenia 34
Channel Islands 48
Lebanon 49
Azerbaijan 45
Niger 93
Kazakhstan 34
New Zealand 60
Slovakia 24
Kenya 23
Mali 17
Martinique 43
Ivory Coast 15
Diamond Princess 18
Sudan 45
Cyprus 22
Uruguay 15

We should not that China, among others, is hiding deaths.

@Mandos What do you think the problem comes down to, then?

I think there is a problem with privileged, pseudo-liberals occupying the political space of the left and using that space, that role to represent not the interests of the poor and working classes, or of the cause of justice and the general welfare, but to argue instead the case for privilege.

“Race” as explanator and all-purpose original sin has assumed a special point of leverage in the politics of left neoliberalism. To argue the cause of racial equity is a signal of “leftish” virtue, even if your concept of racial equity is only a proportional share in the privilege of the few or neglect of the rest, as “individual choices” may decree.

You, Mandos, claim to be incredulous that I would question the intentions of those campaigning against racial segregation decades after de jure segregation ended in a genuinely heroic political campaign. I gave you as an example text a NYT editorial that opened with the claim, “New York’s public schools are among the most racially segregated in the country.” but no explanation of the factual basis for that dubious claim. This isn’t atypical for the NYT, which has sponsored the 1619 project of historical revisionism in support of this strange but potent ideology.

Lest this side-discussion slide off into the irrelevance of off-topic personal ill-feeling as Mandos exchanges are prone to do, let me bring it back to how the degeneracy of American politics produced the present awe-inspiring American clusterfuck. The U.S. was ripe for a revolution of sorts in 2006-8. The coincident failures of several ill-advised policy directions resulted in scandal and catastrophe: failed wars, Katrina, global financial crisis and a radical change in fortunes for the political Parties. The country was ready for change, for reform. Instead, . . . and now here we are. And, no one sane can even pretend elections matter; that safety valve is shutoff and we are given the choice of demented and dementia, with every assurance that no one will bother counting the actual vote. And Zachary Smith is getting hysterical about something tribally pleasing he heard on MSNBC. Interesting times for some value of interesting.

Mojave Wolf wrote: “Randomly choosing our president by blind draw would be an improvement.”

Indeed. This was how global society elects the World President In Philip K. Dick’s first novel, SOLAR LOTTERY aka WORLD OF CHANCE (1955) — though they call him the QuizMaster.

The rest of the novel’s social arrangement is kind of prescien, toot — the next step beyond having a reality show president. I think the U.S. should go for it.

“Society is entertained by a televised selection process in which an assassin is also (allegedly) chosen at random. By countering and putting down threats to his life, using telepathic bodyguards, the leader gains the respect of the people. If he loses his life, a new Quizmaster, as well as another assassin, are again randomly selected. Quizmasters have held office for timespans ranging from a few minutes to several years. The average life expectancy is therefore on the order of a couple of weeks.”

Needless to say, in the denouement we learn it’s all rigged – a con by the novel’s TPTB, who then get conned themselves.

People are so amazed by the Saudis driving the price of oil down. How stupid, they say. It’s so blatantly against their own interests.

Well, maybe it isn’t. If the Fed’s shoveling money their way somehow … and they have all sorts of ways to do it now with the Fed’s and the U.S. government’s ties into the financial markets … so that they’re getting fully compensated (read: subsidized) for the oil decline by the U.S’s money-printing factory that manufactures bucks with mere key strokes, then who would the biggest losers be? Russia, Venezuela, and Iran would be some of the largest, if not the three largest. All U.S. enemies. The winners? The U.S., Israel, and the Saudis.

It certainly wouldn’t be out of our rulers’ character to kick these countries while they’re down, when they’re struggling with social system stresses from the virus. They’re already doing that by finding ways to withhold international aid from Iran and Venezuela, an act of passive aggression.

Destabilize Iran and Venezuela. Weaken Russia. Use the Fed as a geopolitical weapon while the U.S. dollar still got the leverage of being the king fiat currency and the international financial world’s still so tied to it that they can’t disentangle themselves quick enough to stop its power.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste …

Z

A thank you to Stirling for both the numbers and the qualifier about their reliability.

Gods yes to what Bruce said about a very warped form of ID pol being the sadly successful weapon of choice (not the only one, but the most consistently effective one, IMO) the ruling class uses to … Or, actually, which the ruling class has suborned the left into using on its behalf to keep potential troublemakers divided into factions that spend most of their time sniping at each other instead of focusing on the real problems and trying to find ways to bring down the oligarchs.

Not that any such bringing down is likely to happen at this point, barring the Covid-19 turning into The Red Death or somesuch.

Great post, Ian. I especially enjoy your description of the electorate. The population itself here in America is as evil and corrupt and stupid as the elite that preys on them.

Z wrote: “We’ll probably never know … The fracking fundamentals have been pointed off a cliff for over 5 years now, but still somehow those companies stay solvent when there doesn’t seem to be any hope that they’re ever going to be profitable.”

Sure we’ll know. This goes back to Dick Cheney, who was absolutely explicit and on record about how under Bush II it would henceforth be U.S. policy to be energy-independent again via fracking and other then-unconventional means of extracting oil and natural gas from underground sites inside North America.

Look around the Internet. Cheney made speeches about it.

krake, you’re wrong. Wrong as wrong can be. The rabble will always be the rabble so long as they set aside any & all opportunity to think critically and for themselves independent of the influencers with a constant persistent vigilance in consistently challenging their nurtured biases in order to maintain some semblance of objectivity. So, I will continue to berate and denigrate the scum engaging in their absurd and largely disingenuously-motivated protests in the name of liberty.

The guys carrying the guns? The time is not right yet. It’s close, but the zeitgeist is still manifesting. Those guys, that profile, well, let’s just say I have fomented their punishment in my imagination many times over and it’s just a matter of when the immoral law that protects their insanity no longer applies and can no longer protect them. It is at that point that they quite literally get nailed to crosses with their bowels hanging out for the birds of prey to feast upon. That’s a righteous, and I’d say perfect, punishment for false warriors. They must die with extreme prejudice for all the world to see.

The scum we see protesting and all those who share their sentiment could never, and I mean never, get behind and support a truly moral and righteous cause and movement. They are not made of that stuff. Instead, they’re made of sh*t and the world is a better place without them. As well, the world is a better place without Jim Kunstler and the audience he hosts at his putrid blog. It will be none too soon when the virus makes its way to slaying every single last one of his noxious commentariat, Kunstler included. In fact, every male who has voted for and supported Donald Trump and has enabled his ascension, so this includes Biden and Obama and many male Democrats, should be purged from this existence and hopefully the virus, in Mao-like fashion, does that so that the world can move on and evolve sans their destructive influence in helping to maintain the status quo.

How’s that for a REAL #MeToo movement? Without these noxious males, the women behind them will die on the severed vine and within a generation be no more.

The Romans could see in real time the dissolution of the thousands of years long Egyptian Empire. In fact, they directed the final dissolution.

Mark Pontin,

Look around the Internet.

I’ll have to try that.

Thanks for the tip.

Z

BOO, so I just did a ten minute news search for what’s happening in the largest cities inside of our heroic “Freedom Five” states.

Des Moines. Iowa livestock producers face tumbling prices after hundreds of meatpacking workers have tested positive for COVID-19. The governor launched a coronavirus testing program.

Omaha/Lincoln. Similar to Iowa, the governor is increasing testing and there are meatpacking plant concerns. Omaha’s mayor closed the parks. No shelter in place mandates yet, “but things can change”.

In Little Rock the governor is encouraging social distancing, but has mandated nothing yet. The mayor is limiting social gatherings, closing community centers and indoor exhibits and implemented a curfew.

The Sioux Falls mayor was pushing for stay at home mandates, but now feels their hospitals can handle a projected case surge.

Fargos mayor has already issued a stay at home directive.

Freedom hating Communists!

Maybe It’d just be easier on everybody to find other ways to limit disease transmission so people can get back to work?

BAH! I say the same “scientists” who brought us global warming are doing it again with this coronavirus hoax. They use nerve and sense gases to induce hallucinations. The people think they’re seeing warming and viruses and call these bozos, who conveniently show up to “get rid of the problem” with a fake electronic light show.

The Saudis and Russians crashed oil prices to destroy the US fracking industry. They’ll destroy the Cananadian tar sands industry on the way, but that’s just icing on the cake. They got prices to the $20 a barrel range and the world wide economic collapese did the rest. Their intention was to increase market share in the long term. We’ll have to wait and see how this turns out for them. This may be just what the world needed to transition off hydro-carbon based energy.

DMC wrote: ‘The Saudis and Russians crashed oil prices to destroy the US fracking industry.’

Seems like it.

Early days to be reaching conclusions. Still, U.S. foreign policy since the early Cold War has been to control the access to oil of the rest of the world’s nations — that’s part, forex, of the U.S. deep state’s decades-long, seemingly irrational obsession with Tehran, which under the shah was under Washington’s control — so this arguably may be a blow to that policy.

For what it’s worth, I cannot get upset but rather cheer any blows to the tracking and tar sands industries, which ideally would not exist in the first place.

Our rulers have been trying to systematically cull the human herd for years now through austerity, SS and medicare cuts and such. Now they got a killing machine loose and they’re trying to steer it to manage a controlled culling of the working class and particularly older folks who no longer contribute any energy towards turning the wheels on the economy and only take from it in those regards.

Too fast a culling could cause problems, particularly by killing off medical workers, who I’d imagine they value higher than most of the working class. Another concern would be social problems that erupt into protests, strikes, or looting that could trickle up to them.

So they toss us $1200 and wait.

It may seem cynical to some to think that way, but ask yourself this: if they intended to do just that, would they act any differently than they have?

What have they done? Come to the immediate rescue of capital, which is the source of their power over us, with trillions of dollars. And what have they done for the working class? Merely measures that slow the rate of our class’s economic destruction by increasing unemployment benefits and tossing us $1200. They have only foamed the runway to the economic cliff most of us are headed for.

As far as I know, they haven’t even made it so that we’re fully medically covered if we catch it. They seem quite content, actually encouraging, that we take our chances at home that we’ll survive it rather than go to the hospital to get treatment and hence risk being hit by a potential bankruptcy causing medical bill. It decreases hospital capacity, places less exposure on medical workers, and allows our rulers to keep those try-to-shake-if-off-at-home deaths off the official coronavirus death count. What’s not to like from their sociopathic standpoint?

Z

Just woofing at this stage, but potential to climb the escalation ladder —

‘U.S. attorney general won’t rule out legal action over state coronavirus measures’
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-barr/u-s-attorney-general-wont-rule-out-legal-action-over-state-coronavirus-measures-idUSKCN2232ZO

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General William Barr waded further into a debate over governors’ stay-at-home orders meant to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, saying he would not rule out legal action against states if he thought their actions infringed civil liberties.

“We’re looking carefully at a number of these rules that are being put into place. And if we think one goes too far, we initially try to jawbone the governors into rolling them back or adjusting them,” Barr said … on Tuesday….

“And if they’re not and people bring lawsuits, we file statements of interest and side with the plaintiffs … As lawsuits develop, as specific cases emerge in the states, we’ll take a look at them.”

His comments come after the Justice Department recently sided with a Mississippi church that sued the city of Greenville over state shut-down orders on the grounds it was imposing on religious freedoms….

@450.org

Why do you think archeology was the only way Romans could have known about events that were much closer in time for them than they are for us? For Mesopotamia people were still using cuneiform well into the Roman period, so the contents of tablets wouldn’t have been inaccessible to them, and the Egyptians would certainly have had knowledge of their own history, which they could also still read. And that’s not even counting oral history and just general awareness of major past events.

This is, of course, beyond Democrats and Republicans. Fauci has held his positions through Democratic and Republican control. Fauci should have seen jail time. Maybe he should still be in jail. But there he is, a leader of a national pandemic response.

There’s a recent retrospective study of veterans, some of whom got hydroxychloroquine, some HCQ + azithromycin, and some that got neither of these. The death rate amongst hydroxychloroquine treated vets was a whopping 28%. I remarked in the previous post that

“OTOH, they claim “We did, however adjust for a large number of Covid19-relevant confounders including comorbidities, medications, clinical and laboratory abnormalities”, so I wouldn’t dismiss this study, right off the bat, as totally misleading garbage. I.e., no socially redeeming value, at all. It may well be that giving hydroxychloroquine very late in the disease process (i.e., just the opposite end of the stick that Raoult and Zelenko did), in a ‘reasonable dosage’*, is worse than not using HQ, at all.”

However, Didier Raoult has now commented upon the veteran study, and noted that “lymphopenia is twice as common in the HCQ groups (25% in the HCQ, 31% in the HCQ+AZ group versus 14% in the no HCQ group, p =.02) and there is an absolute correlation between lymphopenia (<0.5G/L) and fatality rate, which is well known (Tan, 2020) "

See also: BUSTED: Media Uses VA 'Study' to Launch Easily Debunked Attack On Hydroxycholoroquine by Patrick Howley. Goes into Gilead connection, etc.

If we do a thought experiment and fantasize that we can wave a magic wand, and all elected officials would morph into Ralph Naders, it should be obvious that, initially, with the likes of Fauci, in power, instead of in jail, our pandemic response would still be dysfunctional. We would have to drain the swamps of the various bureaucracies, the media, etc.

Ché Pasa: “Probably not the apocalyptic collapse … but a much leaner (shall we say) US than we knew previously.”

Yes, that would be my guess

Hugh:
I’m thinking you’re talking about JHK, and I’m thinking you’re engaging in semantics. Should things go seriously sideways I’d much rather be in the position he has set himself up in than 99% of the population of this country.
I could be wrong, and if I am, pardon me.
That said, JHK practices what he preaches. I read him widely pursuing my Bioregional Planning & Community Design M.S.. He’s the reason that degree even exists — an urban planning visionary. I’d recommend “The Long Emergency” and its latter companion “Living in the Long Emergency.”

https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-sheer-awe-inspiring-american-clusterfuck/#comment-113276

Look up Peter Heather. He’s a specialist on the Successor States, and his history of the Collapse is worth reading.

This looks promising, especially since the guy is clearly a professional. The reviews say it’s heavy duty reading, but I can handle that if the author is good. Odd thing, those reviews were much higher for the 2005 1st edition, so that’s the one I’m buying instead of the 2010.

450.org
You find God all the sudden?
How many threads do you think I’ll have to go back to find you calling for the eradication of the entire human race?
People who live in glass houses might hesitate to throw stones.

Come on, Hugh. You really going to double down?
From Oxford:
“needing no outside help in satisfying one’s basic needs, especially with regard to the production of food.”
From Cambridge:
“able to provide everything you need, especially food, for yourself without the help of other people”

There is this thing call “English usage,” of which, my use of self-sufficient is entirely within bounds. You, on the other hand, are clearly engaging in semantics.

It’s not that I don’t get your point. In fact, I agree with your point — “one alone is none.”
But, seriously. You’re going to pick that nit?

You must be as bored as I am, because I probably wouldn’t even be replying right now were I not.

I don’t have much time or use for the libertarian mythology of the individual über alles.