Tag: COVID19

Trump Administration #CoronaVirus #Pandemic Metrics, The Gray Plague & The #WuFlop

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Other than working overtime to re-assure the stock market, the Trump Administration is doing effectively nothing about COVID19. This is because of the metrics they are using.

Keep The Markets Happy
All Trump wants is the “German Industrialists” to be happy so they will continue to give him a pass on policy. So, in his mind, “it’s just the flu.” As such, given a lot of people die from the flu each year –as Twitter liberals keep telling me — as long as he has an effective messaging strategy and plutocrats make a lot of money then lulz. A million people could die unnecessarily and, well, that’s not really that much more than the flu, right? Trump has such a lack of the ability to comprehend any form of empathy or compassion that as long as the economy is humming and he and his shithead plutocrats are making money, the poors can fuck off.

Win Re-Election
This goes hand-in-hand with the above. He’s extremely paranoid about the evil liberals with their evil fact-base science “weaponizing” reality to “bring him down” that he, again, would rather withhold valuable information from the public in the hopes that, in effect, people will forget about it. It’s just the flu. All your old relatives died because of “the flu” so shut up and vote for me, you mouth breathing knuckle dragger. In other words, as long as the base believes it’s “just the flu” and remain locked in, then everyone else can fuck off and drop dead. Power for power’s sake. Greed for greed’s sake. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

Consolidate Power
And, really, if you wanted to kind of dystopian, you could say there are people like Stephen Miller who simply see the prospect of The Gray Plague as a means to an end — consolidation of power far quicker than they could ever imagine otherwise.

There are two ways to look at these metrics. One, Trump’s going to yet again evade any political consequence because the base is so afraid of the browning of America that Trump can send the whole country over the precipice and, well, lulz. And, I guess, there’s a decent chance that might work out. A lot of people — especially older people — may get sick and die, but if you can stay on message that “it’s just the flu” then lulz, no political harm no foul. It will be a more deadly edition to a string of Trump self-owns that have happened over the years. This is why Mike Pence is in control of the American response to WuFlu now. He’s a complete suck up who wants to stay on the ticket in 2020. He has every reason to prevaricate as need be to have people simply shrug this off and go back to raising their kids, paying their mortgage and, most of all, voting Trump 2020 in the fall.

And, yet, there’s another option. What if instead of simply “burning itself out,” COVID19 gets really, really, REALLY bad in the States to such an extent that the usual Trump ratfucking at last collapses? Now, Trump would see this initially as a win because he will have an excuse to get rid of Pence and maybe name Don Jr. his veep. But there are some additional problems his poor addled brain can’t comprehend because, despite Maggie Haberman’s cooing about this all the time, Trump isn’t a political genius, he’s just historically lucky.

In other words, Trump may finally meet his political match if, well, America is brought to its knees on a level not seen since the Civil War. A number of things might happen if Trump strictly follows the metrics I laid out above. The 20% of the infected who get REALLY REALLY REALLY sick may reach such a high percentage of the American population that, well, the economy locks up because no one is well enough to go to work. The health care system locks up and collapses. Even then, however, Trump would probably blame liberals, or MS-13 or whatever the fuck that idiot can come up with. And the base, thinking Trump is Jesus H. Christ himself who is the only person who can stop the general historic tend towards a minority-majority America, will abide by it.

But there are two things Trump can’t control — the WuFlop and The Gray Plague.

The WuFlop
This is the rather dramatic — and eerie — event when someone who seems healthy abruptly faceplants and, sometimes, begins to writhe uncontrollably on the ground like they have a xenomorph in them about to pop out. It wouldn’t take too many recorded instances of this happening around the United States in the next two weeks for, well, there to be some political consequences for House Trump. Each time I’ve seen the WuFlop videos on Twitter, I’ve gasped. Initially, of course, these videos wouldn’t be show on TV. But if enough WuFlops happened, there would come a point where they WOULD show up on TV. That would cause a panic and we would, at last, realize that Trump has not clothes and he’s lead us all into a very dark situation with no ready solution in the near term.

The Gray Plague
If thing get as bad as I fear, then a whole lot of elderly people are going to die. A whole lot. A huge amount. A shocking amount. And a lot of powerful people are elderly. Of course, Trump would at first see this as a win because if a dozen powerful elderly center-Left people died rather abruptly, then he gets to consolidate power faster. But, “death be not proud,” so a lot of elderly center-RIGHT figures could die, too. If things got bad enough, Trump, at last, might have finally met his match because it will rather abruptly dawn on everyone that it was directly because of his obsession with owning libs that an obscene number of Americans died for no damn reason.

Before you get too excited, we have to think about Trump’s reaction to this. He’s probably going to snap. He’s probably going to, in a panic, shut down the Internet, order passenger planes be shot out of the sky, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. The question, of course, is what the reaction would be, in practical terms to all of this. I find it doubtful that the US Military would follow any of these crazy orders, but the MAGA base WOULD likely begin to hunt down and murder “libtards”– like ME! — like members of a Cultural Revolution group. I know that sounds rather panicky and hysterical — maybe I have Trump Derailment Disorder — but the we won’t know until that time comes, now will we? We’ve never had a POTUS go bonkers and so, I guess, anything is possible.

Twilight Of The Gods: World Order ‘Interregnum’ #CoronaVirus #COVID19

The End…and The Beginning
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The current world order gradually formed in the year’s following Japan’s surrender in August 1945. The linchpin of the whole thing is the power, the might and involvement of the United States all over the world. For instance, the 28,000 American troops in South Korea have served as a trip wire and kept the peace between the DPRK and South Korea since 1953.

So. It definitely seems as though because, well, Donald Trump is nothing more than a deranged version of Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, the United States may soon, on a national security level, be the weakest its been since the end of the Civil War. In other words, it’s tough to fight two and half regional wars when the whole nation is too sick, dying or otherwise incapacitated to do anything. For the last four years, Trump has actively been hoping for a 9/11-level terrorist attack so he can start putting people like me in ICE camps. but lulz.

Anyway, there’s a reasonable chance that the next year will be seen as something of an “interregnum” between world orders. The old post-WW2 order may crash and burn and after a lot of wars and general destruction, a new order will arise at some point starting whenever we manage to get a vaccine. But a lot of people will die. A lot of people will suffer. A lot of people will be displaced.

It’s not too difficult to imagine it all starting with a number of regional wars breaking out at the same time while the United States is on its collective knees from COVID19. It would probably be the DPRK attacking South Korea and then Russia attacking Ukraine. Or something like that. Then Iran might have a new revolution. And the the Indian subcontinent may be turned into a post-nuclear hellscape.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the very real risk that ISIS might arise again from hell to subjugate a big swath of the Middle East. Then, once the United States is feeling back to its old self again, we would have to sort out that mess. Though, truth be told, I fear that the United States, Russia and China may have some sort of revolution over the course of the next year. The United States is effectively in the middle of a Cold Civil War right now and a bunch of old powerful people dying wouldn’t exactly help that situation.

But we’ll see. The key thing we have to do is admit that the crisis exists in the first place.

All Things Being Equal, We Should Suspend The 2020 Presidential Campaign #Primaries #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though we may look back on 2020 as a worst case scenario when it comes to COVID19. Not only is Campaign 2020 now in full swing, but we’re supposed to have a Census this year. Lulz! But if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we need to suspend all presidential campaign activities until we learn how bad things are going to get.

Or, at least, we figure out some work arounds.

It’s growing more and more self-evident that it’s just not safe for there to be primaries or campaign rallies. All those people in the same place at the same time will only spread COVID19 even more. And, really, the whole issue may be moot if the contagion grows so large in the American population that everyone is too sick — or too scared of getting sick — to participate in the campaign to begin with.

Right now, COVID19 is still an abstract. Once everyone in the States knows at least one person in their extended social circle who has gotten sick or died from COVID19, it might be a lot easier to implement some of the more drastic preventive measures that have been seen in China and elsewhere. But I’m just speculating. It could go either way, I guess.

I do think, however, that leadership is going to spring up at some point. Someone, somewhere, is going to take a risk and tell the truth to the public so they can stabilize this growing clusterfuck. But I do think we need to rethink, at the very least, some pretty basic elements of modern American society, starting with the on-going presidential campaign. If we don’t a lot more people than necessary may get sick and or die.

It will be interesting to see exactly the sequence of events going forward. I think what will happen is people will start to get sick on TV and that will be the thing that prompts some rather radical rethinking of what’s going on the States right now. We don’t have any leadership in Washington for the time being and Trump would probably keep having his dumb Nuremberg rallies until the last MAGA dipshit keeled over and did the WuFlop. Ignorant morons.

But that’s what they want, I guess. They want a tyrant. See you at the polls.

Mike Pence, Fall Guy #CoronaVirus #COVID19

Mike Pence Is In Control.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems rather self-evident that Vice President Mike Pence has been set up to fail. In Trump’s deranged mind, he know’s he needs to ditch Pence to placate the MAGA base, and, as such, in the end, if the Trump Administrator bungles its response to COVID19 – which it will — he can lay all the blame on Pence. That is, when Trump’s blaming liberals and or the Deep State.

Given that there apparently is already evidence of communal transmission in the United States — and we’re effectively not testing for COVID19’s spread — that the only way we’ll know what’s going on is when a lot, and I mean A LOT, of people get sick all at once all over the United States. For a few days, it may get kind of scary.

And the person who will suffer the political blame won’t be Trump, but Pence. And so President Crazypants can simply drop Pence from the ticket and cruise into a second term of bigotry, tyranny and hate. And if you think that’s my “Trump Derangement Disorder” coming out — fuck you, you piece of shit. How simply pointing out that Trump is a hate-filled ignorant tyrant is any type of “disorder” leaves me at a loss. When you think my rage against a tyrant is nothing more than an over-reaction to a policy disagreement, then, well, whoa buddy.

Anyway, it definitely seems as though we’re going to know soon enough one way or another. My gut tells me that COVID19 is spreading like wildfire in the United States and it’s going to get really bad, really soon. The whole thing may be seen as rather dramatic in hindsight. Or not. Maybe I’m overacting without even realizing it. Maybe that’s my own form of confirmation bias.

I do wish that the Trump Administration had the best interests of the nation, not the stock market, at heart. But Trump has plutocrats to placate if he’s going to win re-election and, as such, fuck you America.

Mulling The Possible Arrival Of The ‘#WuFlop’ To America #CoronaVirus #COVID19

Our Future?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the more alarming things to come out of CoronaVirus is the “WuFlop.” This is when someone just out of the blue faceplants, sometimes writhing on the ground aftewards. It’s crazy whack. To date, that hasn’t happened in the United States.

And I’m saying if it did happen in, say Times Square, and it was recorded it would likely be seen on TV immediately and would freak people out so badly that the entire country would come to a grinding halt. In fact, I would say that, along with a lot of elderly people dying in South Florida and the entire nation of, say, Iceland abruptly getting sick, would be a major indication that what’s happening to Italy, Iran and South Korea was about to happen to the United States in a big way.

It would be, albeit for a few days, something out of a horror movie. We would abruptly realize that a huge, deep swath of the population was sick with COVID19 and that the nation was going to be as weak as it was on 9/11 not for hours, but for days, weeks and months. The entire world order would then collapse –as would the global economy — and, well, heroes would be made, cowards would be shamed and all would be remembered. I think it goes without saying that Mike Pence — someone the MAGA base doesn’t really like all that much — is being set up for a fall so some ethno-state advocate like The Kooch can take his place.

Anyway. I have no idea what is going to happen. but we’re pretty much one WuFlop away from mass panic in the United States. I might not get a lot of play on the cable nets at first, but if started to happen too much, it would quickly bounce from The Drudge Report to more mainstream outlets. That’s the way such scandalous things have happened in the past. A lot of WuFlops happening out in public would not be easy to hide. WuFlops are just too dramatic, too surreal.

If they started to happen a lot, they would be noticed.

The Gray Plague & TMZ’s Moment Of Journalistic Glory

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone read one of my posts about possibility of The Gray Plague and was quite sure I had “Trump Derangement Disorder” the likes of which they had never seen. First, fuck that guy. Second, if you ain’t got haters you ain’t poppin. And, second, I think we definitely need to keep and eye on South Florida. If we started to get reports of an unusual number of deaths there then, well, we know my fears of a Gray Plague are being realized.

I only think this is even possible because we don’t have any metric for how many cases are in the United States right now. While South Korea has tested 20,000 people, the United States has tested about 500. So, the only metric we will have to measure if it’s here or not is any unusual levels of sickness in the general populace. While I have been talking about how I think Iceland will suffer for the sins of our healthcare system because of how many Americans visit there in a year — I also think there’s one thing we would notice: a lot of old powerful and well known people dying in a rather abrupt fashion.

If you had between 1.3% and 15% of the elderly population of South Florida — or the rest of the country for that matter — being to die at a rather rapid rate, someone, somewhere would notice. The one organization that would likely benefit briefly by a surreal number of elderly celebrities dying would be, of course, TMZ. They would be something of our trip wire because they would the the one organization that would break the news of 40 elderly celebrities dying in 24 hours. One thing I just don’t know is how many elderly people, in real terms, would die if the absolute worst happened. Are we talking 1 million? 10 Million? What? I can’t imagine it could possibly be 10 million, but who knows. I know I don’t.

Or, put another way, we are likely about to enter about a year of unprecedented instability on a global scale. Living through history of such a a scope will suck big time. When it’s all over, some basic assumptions about life that we have now may no longer be accurate, for better or worse. I would prefer a few hundred thousand old people not die in the next year directly from COVID19. It would be a tragedy just like the Civil War or the first two world wars. I hope everything works out and I can, at last, give my full attention to the novel I’m developing.

‘Burn, Hollywood, Burn’ #COVID19

It’s going to suck.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Hollywood, we got a problem. It’s at least within the realm of possibility that not only will all entertainment production shut down soon because of a pandemic, but people will stop going to the movies for a solid year. If you work on the assumption that for about a year — until a vaccine is finally approved and mass produced — some fundimental assumptions about everyday life will be suspended then Hollywood as we know it is a Dead Man Walking.

By the time things go “back to normal,” we may not even have a traditional Hollywood anymore. “Immersive media” in the guise of VR and AR may pop out of the rubble and take over the entertainment world. But another thing to remember — when will the crisis reach such levels that there aren’t live studio audiences for late night talk shows? Or everyone on TV starts to wear a mask? The issue is if you see the coming pandemic in the United States as a process, not an event, a “new normal” will happen at some point where we move past the “event” stage into the “process” stage where everyday life begins to come back, albeit in a dramatically different form. It will be surreal, at first, but it will have to be done.

The whole thing is going to suck. But at some point The Powers That Be are going to encourage “normal” TV to come back for no other reason than to make the life of pandemic — where everyone has to stay inside — at least a bit more bearable. Remember, whatever the pandemic is called will be, will said in the same breath as the Civil War and World War 2. So, eventually, inevitably, we’ll figure out some way to go back to “normal” while we wait for it to end.

But one thing that will be interesting to look at will be the rise of Immersive Media. How fast will that happen? Telepresence will be a huge growth industry in the middle of a pandemic. It will be interesting to see how that will work out specifically.

I am curious what will happen to music. Will someone write a pop song that alludes to the effects of a pandemic? How would they pull it off? I’m tempted to write some doggerel. But I see writing song lyrics a huge waste of time when I have a novel to develop and write. But someone should start thinking about that.

In the end, even with a pandemic all around us, life will go on. People will have sex. Babies will be born. People will die.

Life will go on.

We Got This #COVID19

Let’s rock.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While it seems pretty obvious that we have a pandemic on our hands, it seems rather slow moving at this point. I guess it’s possible that it will burn itself out or otherwise not being the staggering clusterfuck catastrophe that people like me are beginning to think it may ultimately be.

Let’s look at what is known about what’s happened. China has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop the spread of COVID19 in their nation. To date, they’ve been quite successful. There’s the ironic chance that they will be REINFECTED from the outside despite all their hard work. That’s the problem with a pandemic — at least in my “Brian Fellows” view. It kind of feeds on itself. That, in a sense, is what a pandemic is.

So, right now, South Korea, Italy and Iran are the three major “warm zones” with a lot of people getting sick. Only Iran seems to be something close to a “hotzone” with the number of people actually dying growing exponentially. Iran is the one nation right now that seems like it might actually have some sort of historic political event take place because of this pandemic. You can only have so many major political figures dead, dying or really sick before historically bent up political pressures explode to the surface.

Italy, meanwhile, seems on the verge of collectively faceplanting. It’s possible that the entire nation of Italy will have to be written off by the end of the week. Things are bad in South Korea, yes, but not AS BAD as they are in northern Italy right now. And the rest of Europe is well on its way to being ravaged by COVID19 soon enough.

And, yet, America to date hasn’t seen any hot or warm zones. We have some cases, sure, but it’s not like New York City and LA are imploding like northern Italy. America is a lot bigger than a lot of other nations and, as such, the bigger they are, the bigger they fall and all that. My current belief is Iran’s present is our future — people are going to start being physically ill on TV. Or, put another way, there may be a pretty huge gap between what people are actually experiencing first hand and what the American media is reporting.

That hasn’t happened, but it’s possible. It’s as if there was a stealth zombie apocalypse. We already have a big gap between what we know to be true on social media and what MSM reports, so if things got as bad as I fear they will in the States, then that difference will grow rather extreme in a rather surreal manner. It’s going to get dark, like a real life horror movie.

Of course, because we’re leaderless and everyone is a doofus, what’s likely to happen is once we realize that 20% of the American population — especially the elderly — are REALLY SICK — then we’re going to freak out and panic will set in. Things are going to get really dark, really quick. But I do believe that leaders will begin to bubble to the surface.

It’s just human nature. We got this. It’s going to be scary at times, but we got this. We won WW2. We can win WWC.

Twitter Liberals Are So Oblivious: Putin, Pandemic & Trumplandia #COVID19

The Dear Leader
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing that so many Twitter Liberals are completely oblivious about is Trump shares the view of another autocrat, Russia’s Putin, when it comes to his relationship to power: as long as he’s still in power when the sun sets, it’s a win. If your only metric is still being in power, then you can, as a Twitter Liberal, nash your teeth all you want to — Trump’s never leaving office for any reason.

And, yet, there’s something of an “act of God” bouncing around the world at an alarming rate right now — the COVID19 pandemic. Even then, I am reluctant to assume that Trump will, in traditional terms, face any type of political consequences. He’s escaped conviction by the Senate, and he will do whatever necessary to stay in power as long as he likes — even call a Constitutional Convention, if need be — so lulz. Even if the COVID19 pandemic caused a sharp, brief global recession and many died in the States directly because of his bungled response, it would still be 2021 – 2022 before we got around to attempting to get rid of him again. So, for the time being, Trump’s a tyrant with absolute power in the United States. Lulz?

It does, however, make you wonder how bad things would have to get before people like Hugh Hewitt might change their tune on Trump. They might have a momentary pause — in private — about their support if we entered horror-movie territory. But more likely, they would become rather giddy at the prospect of Trump consolidating his power even more as notable center-Left figures got sick and maybe even died. Or, put another way, even the gates of hell opening and Satan telling us that Trump REALLY WAS the anti-Christ wouldn’t be enough to make people like Matt Schlapp stop sucking Trump’s political cock. I guess, maybe, if 20 million old people died because of Trump’s poor leadership they might think about it for no other reason than their base of angry old men would be dramatically reduced in size.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, slow your roll Twitter liberals. Trump’s not going anywhere for any reason unless his enablers feel they have, at last, gotten every fucking thing they could possibly get from him. Then Mike Pence — or Don Jr, or The Kooch or Steve King or Kris Kobach — will swoop in and finish the job of turning America into the Fourth Reich.

Lulz!

Where The Fuck Is Peter Thiel? Or, Is #Iran’s Present America’s Future? #COVID19

Believe
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The issue of the moment is, how would we even know the pandemic had struck us in a big way if we’ve only tested 500 people out of a population of 335 million? The answer is, enough of that 20% of the infected who can’t do anything would grow to be a large enough percentage of the population that the bolts would begin to pop off of American society.

A lot — A LOT — of people wouldn’t show up to work. All at the same time. What’s happening Iran right now is exactly what I fear would happen to the United States. Public officials are now seen on TV obviously ill. The United States is big enough that a COVID19 infection in the general population could grow so deep and wide that it would have something of a horror movie feel to it when we all realized at the same time THAT EVERYONE WAS INFECTED. If this was a movie, then next scene would be of Peter Thiel drinking a cocktail on a boat off the coast of New Zealand as the rest of the world collapsed.

And, yet, the issue is that wouldn’t be the end of some movie. That would be the beginning of a real-life crisis. It’s not like history ended when the Mongols reached Baghdad or we dropped the bomb on Japan. Life kept going. There was a new normal, but it kept going. And I believe that leaders would pop up in the days and weeks after this horrific realization occured.

But it’s not like it would be smooth sailing. There’s a decent chance that might be a few limited nuclear exchanges along the way — one between the US and the DPRK. And, remember, living through history sucks. There’s no narrative. If the lights went out because New York City was vaporized by a DPRK H-Bomb, then we wouldn’t know for along time what had happened — maybe through HAM radio we would know something in bits and pieces, but the EMP would fry all of our electronics and for the time being it really would seem like the end of the fucking world.

I do think, however, that we might be in for some surreal TV footage in the near future if everyone gets sick and yet we don’t do anything about it because we don’t know that anyone is sick to begin with. It’s similar to watching someone turn into a zombie on live TV in a movie or something. Only, it wouldn’t be them turning into a zombie, it would be them obviously being really, really sick. I really hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s a least possible given how poorly we’re prepared.

And, yet, life really would keep going. That’s why panic is not a viable option. When chaos strikes, you have to keep your head about you and do triage. Good luck.