Tag: COVID19

America Is ‘Flirting With Disaster’ #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When the history of this pandemic is written, there’s likely to be more than one book written about what went wrong in the very moment we’re living in. It has a very “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” vibe to it. But this is far, far worse.

It’s as if center-Left states KNEW 9/11 was preventable and were doing something about it, while the center-Right states were lulzing. Because none of this is happening in a vacuum, well, it’s going to suck for all of us. I will admit, however, that this is a very surreal moment for me personally. I hate it when people deny reality, but there a lot A LOT of people around me right now who are doing just that.

All the datapoints are pointing towards a pretty dramatic event vis-a-vis COVID19 within the next two weeks (by The Ides of March) and, yet, a lot of people think its coverage is just a “liberal media hoax to make Trump look bad.”

Ugh.

Because we aren’t testing very many people, we still don’t have much of a metric that might help us mitigate the spread of COVID19. It’s because of this that we’re going to soon be past mitigation and into triage. We’re going to have to start thinking about what we can save in the near term. It’s unlikely that the economy is going to be saved when the boil is finally lanced and we realize we’re in a real-life horror movie.

I would like to note, however, that all of this could have been avoided. Yes, there’s a chance that if we did “too good” a job, our leaders would look like idiots, just like Ford and swine flu, but at least lives would have been proactively saved.

Another thing — we have to prepare ourselves for The Gray Plague. It’s very possible that a lot, and I mean A LOT, of well known old people are going to drop in the next year. It could be astonishing how many elderly people die between now and when this rolling crisis is finally wrapped up. And, remember a lot of POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE OLD.

So, lulz.

I feel like even if I’m “vindicated,” it’s going to be such a tragedy that I’m not going to feel all that happy about it.

Not Cool: North Carolina Is Lulzing Armageddon #COVID19

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I have mentioned, I was at a restaurant near my home when I noticed a Virginia State Trooper. On a lark, I engaged him and mentioned he was about to face a serious crisis. First, he was a dismissive dick. Second, he pretty much lulz the idea that any such thing was possible.

Now, I get it — you don’t exactly want Stewart Smally to be a State Trooper. But something about how he acted as if what I mentioned as insane really grated on my nerves. “We all have opinions,” he said.

The issue is — what’s bouncing around the world right now is not my “opinion.” It’s a cold hard fact. And the fact that next door North Carolina is echoing that State Trooper by lulzing its first reported case of COVID19 is rather disturbing to this Virginian. Apparently, the state government has bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the “coverage” of COVID19 is just a “liberal media hoax designed to bring him down.”

I got nothing against North Carolina, but come on guys, get it together. I live close enough to the NC border that it would not be difficult to imagine whatever growing COVID19 blackhole they have is probably going to consume my community, too.

This does, however, raise the question — how would we know that things have come to a head in North Carolina?

Well, I would suppose that at some point in the next, say, two weeks –about the Ides of March — the number of sick and dying would have grown to such a huge part of the population that both the economy and civil order would collapse. The Gray Plague would kick in and many, many lives that might otherwise be saved will be lost.

It will be chaos. This will not happen in a vacuum, however. By that point, the entire United States will be on its knees. We will be the most vulnerable we’ve been since the end of the Civil War. It would make a lot of sense if at that point a lot of bad actors around the world, seeing their chance, started to attack each other — and us.

But it’s just the flu, right?

Crisis Management & ‘Dow Joans:’ Queen of Denial #COVID19

Ugh
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a nobody. I don’t know anything. Ignore me. I’m a crank. A hayseed rube in the middle of nowhere who Maggie Haberman called out on Twitter for not knowing anything about (access) journalism.

I am all those things.

I am also, however, someone who believes reality is very important.When otherwise “normal” people who wouldn’t sit next to me in a Manhattan coffee shop act rather delusional I grow concerned. This brings us to COVID19.

The Masters of The Universe who make $20 million bonus in a year are living in a dreamland of their own making. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some sort of doubt about the situation, but there is none — a huge domestic crisis is careening towards the United States and “Dow Joans,” as POTUS recently called Wall Street, is living in a very weird denial. I am well aware that the fundamentals are fine, but so were the Titanic’s until it struck a fucking iceberg.

The crazy thing is it’s empirical that what’s going on in Italy, South Korea and Iran IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES WITHIN TWO WEEKS. What’s more, for a number of worst-case-scenario reasons, we’re not doing anything to mitigate the situation. By the time we do, in a terrified spasm, it’ll be way too late.

What happens — probably around The Ides of March — is going to be like a real life horror movie. So many people will be sick — and so many elderly people will be dying in quick succession — that it goes without saying that the economy is going, for the short term at least, lock up and collapse. Let me be clear — this is not finance advice. Why would anyone listen to me? Maggie Haberman thinks I’m a crank.

I would note, however, that if I had any money — which I don’t — I would probably (glup) be looking at Bitcoin. I also would ever-so-slowly cash out and look for something that might actually do me some good in a short — if severe — crisis. If I was ultra-rich, I would hide out in one of those doomsday bunkers I keep hearing about. (Of course, as a poor, I have I vested interest in this because, lulz, it’s easier to seize rich people’s property if they’re doing rails on tails off of some whore’s asshole in a doomsday bunker and not paying any attention to the revolution taking place in the real world.

Do I really think it will get that bad, though?

Sorta.

I do think the United States’ economy is going to crash very, very soon, for no other reason than we’re going to be sucker punched by COVID19 in a rather dramatic fashion. It will be like a real-life horror movie without the zombies. But it will be real life and so, as such, we’ll make it through it. Though it will be mentioned in the same breath as the Civil War and WW2.

If it makes the Masters of the Universe feel better, once we finally get everything sorted out in about a year, we’re likely to have a post-Civil War level boom. A huge amount of money will be made because of the “creative destruction’ associated with what just happened. It will be a tragedy. Some pretty wild things may happen — not all of them beneficial to plutocrats — but it’s possible Millennials will stop killing industries and start making them.

But I guess, for me, the issue is we have to prepare for the boil to be sliced. We have to prepare for all hell to break loose in a rather Pearl Harbor kind of a way.

#ETTD, India Edition? #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

This is all know about this subject.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Besides holding several Nuremberg Rallies across the country for his MAGA supporters, Trump may have managed to put the people of India in danger as well — just as a pandemic was exploding around the globe.

I have no idea if there’s any connection between the massive events Trump participated in in India recently and what’s going on. It just is unsettling to think about.

3WW: Food, Lights & Military, *Not* The Economy Should Be Our Short Term Metrics #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

World War Wuflu
Shelton Bumgarner

Editor’s Note: Of course I goofed — it wouldn’t be 3WW, it would be 3W. But this is propaganda we’re talking about, so lulz.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The fundamentals of the economy are fine. But in the immediate near term, we have more pressing, existential metrics to use than the daily close of the Dow Jones. We need to worry about three things: 1) Food 2) Lights 3) Military readiness.

If we can’t keep those three things going, then everything is going to be a disaster. We have to have those three things to do the next thing: make sure we save as many people as possible. If we’re worried about the economy as we rush towards such a unprecedented long term crisis, we’re only going to ensure that a lot of people get sick and or die.

But we focus on those three metrics above going forward, we can save a lot of lives without the distraction of making sure plutocrats are able to make an extra billion here or there. We have to put human life first, no matter what.

Is Trump going to implode or explode?

Of course, that’s not at all what is going to happen. In fact, the first thing we’re going to have to worry about is if Trump implodes or explodes on a mental level. Is he going to turn into a puddle in the Oval Office, or is he going to go transactional with his insanity? He is going to get really passive aggressive on Twitter, saying we hate him, etc, etc. Ugh. He’s a big baby. A deranged, moronic baby. And in the near term, when we should be trying to save as many people as possible, we’re going to have to figure out how to babysit Trump so he doesn’t get us all killed one way or another.

I’m really concerned about one particular group — the elderly. If we don’t get our act together there’s going to be a great culling of elderly people we may look back upon as The Gray Plague. Yes, the Spanish Flu killed a lot of otherwise healthy people, but COVID19 may kill a lot more elderly people simply because our population is significantly larger and they’re a lot more vulnerable on an existential level.

Anyway, we see this as a war with battles that we may win or lose. I think we should call it 3WW — World War WuFlu. It’s catchy and evokes WW3 to give people some sense of how tough a fight this is going to be.

Keep the faith.

Has #WuFlop Come To America? #CoronaVirus #COVID19 (UPDATED: MAY BE FAKE)

Shelton Bumgarner

Editor’s Note: While we know WuFlop is real and has happened in other nations, I’m hearing chatter that the specific instance shown below may be fake. If it is fake, I regret the error.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have seen footage of someone who has passed out in NYC. That’s all I know. But given one of the hallmarks of #COVID19 is “the Wuflop” it is something to think about — is the WuFlop in America?

Now, what is likely to happen is the media “gatekeepers” will simply ignore any such footage for as long as possibly — and rightly so. Social media is a safety valve for such things. But if the WuFlop REALLY IS IN THE UNITED STATES, then, well, hang on.

How, exactly, such footage would pop up on TV is anyone’s guess. It would likely have to either happen really conspicuously, or enough instances would be recorded that the pressure from social media would be so great that the gatekeepers would feel forced to show it.

But the key would be PROOF. You would have to follow up on the footage to find out why the person passed out so suddenly. While the footage I saw could be described as “fear porn” because the context is unknown, I do think it’s important for people to see it with some pretty strong caveats.

Only time will tell.

‘Over & Over’ — Beware The Gray Plague: Celebrity & Political Edition #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Get ready.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh Boy. I can’t predict the future, but it would make a lot sense if within the next, say 48 to 72 hours there was a rather dramatic number of elderly celebrities and politicians who were felled by COVID19. May I point you to this chart, AGAIN:

Our future?

I have no idea who would be affected or exactly when. That’s between the fallen and their maker. But it would make a lot of sense given the above chart that whatever is going on out there in America’s population would pop out in a rather dramatic fashion when there was a dramatic uptick in the number of people we would notice: celebrities and politicians.

TMZ will report death after death of well-known celebrities in the 60s. I don’t want to think about the politicians in Washington and elsewhere who may be felled by COVID19 in the coming days. It makes me angry and sad taht maybe that might have been prevented — whoever they may be. We all bleed the same colored blood. We need to think of ourselves as patriots, citizens and human now, not Red or Blue.

I’m not “rooting” for this to happen, as the Doofus Crown Prince Don Jr. might have you believe. I am, however, being honest — the numbers are rather grim for old people. And a lot of elderly people in the 60 – 80 range control both the spotlight and the levers of power in the current world order. If they were wiped out rather abruptly by The Gray Plague, that would cause not only a lot of cause a huge amount of chaos, it would also shove us into a New World Order. Many, many years of institutional memory would vanish.

It would be a tragedy because, in hindisight, we will look back and realize that maybe some of those lives could have been saved if we had, say, had some actual leadership and not a fascist, deranged moron as president. I don’t think simply wanting some fucking accountability makes me either someone rooting for “millions of dead” to stop the “winning” of House Trump nor does mean I suffer from “Trump Derailment Disorder.” If you think the latter, you can, as always, eat shit you fucking fascist.

Anyway. I have no idea what is going to happen. But this going to be a process, not an event. And with testing, we’re looking at the past, not the present or future. So I still think by about March 15, America may be on her knees.

What happens then is anyone’s guess.

Keep the faith.

If #COVID19 Causes Trump To Snap Mentally, How Bad Will It Get, & How?

Ugh
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, if Trump snaps because his absolute need to win smashing against his absolute realization that he’s going to be blamed for a royal clusterfuck of a response to the biggest domestic American crisis since the Civil War, how bad will things get?

Well, first, things may sort themselves out. No one can predict the future. Maybe it really is “just the flu,” or at least the bullshit coming from House Trump will work with the base. It will work with the base and the “German Industrialists” will continue to buy stocks no matter what and Trump will get his Thousand Year Trump. The Fourth Reich will consolidate its power and I endup with a Trump-brand bullet in the back of my head sometime in Trump’s second term at my local ICE camp.

But, for shits and giggles, let’s just play pretend. I know it’s hard to believe, but let’s assume that, work with me here, Trump finally faces some political accountability for being a fucking criminally incompetent traitor racist bigot misogynist who is only powered by greed, hate and a bloodlust for power and not the interests of the Constitution. What happens then?

One of two things: either Trump implodes or he explodes on a mental level.

Implosion
If Trump implodes, we just won’t see him that much. He’ll go full Howard Hughes on us. He might be able to summon enough energy to come out and talk about what’s going on, but in general will see Pence a whole lot more. Like, a whole lot more. And, it’s possible that weirdly the government starts to function better as if someone else is running it. There might even be some personal changes that mysteriously happen out of the blue. And Pence isn’t fired for the second term is widely assume he will be. Trump’s second term is just as bad as we all assume it will be, but by about 2022 it definitely will seem as if Trump has effectively given control over to Pence. A huge political fight breaks out between Pence and Doofus Don Jr as Don Jr has a political reason to expose what is really happening — the United States doesn’t have a functioning president.

Explosion
This is less likely to happen, but if it did, it would happen because the short term events on the ground had gotten far worse than we expected. Trump will snap in a rather dramatic fashion. He will go transnational in his bonkers state. A lot of things that have been rolling around in his head since he became office will happen. He’ll pardon everyone he wants to pardon — including himself. He’ll whip his cock out and stroke it to completion. He’ll use the Presidential Alert System to shoot out dickpics and tweets all day long. He’ll probably get extremely passive-aggressive on Twitter an talk about how we all hate him and want him to kill himself. (We don’t.) It will get really, really bad.

Now, what the political consequences of this would be, I don’t know. It could be that we might just summon up the political courage — at last — to have something of a snap impeachment-and-conviction. But events on the ground would have be so existentially bad that the usual Trump enablers would have abandoned him in a big, big way.

And, as such, that will never happen.

Lulz!

The Right’s ‘Reverse Hysteria’ #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Oh boy.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though the Right isn’t prepare to take the possibility of a pandemic seriously. Much like they think global climate change is a “hoax,” so, too, do they think the “coverage” of the COVID19 by the press is a “hoax” as well. Now, of course, Trump’s enablers are twisting themselves in knots, trying to explain to us that the idiot-in-chief meant “weaponize,” when he said “hoax.” Whatever. he’s still too stupid to be president and should be removed from office immediately for that, if nothing else.

But what’s interesting to me is, what has happened for the Right to take this situation seriously? How many people have to die? Probably if it got bad enough they would either simply lie, or deny or hide any information that really hurt Trump or might cause him to, at last have some sort of concrete political accountability. If that was the case, the only real metric that might give them pause for thought would be if, they, themselves got sick to the extent that they couldn’t show up to work.

That’s it — if they, themselves, were near death because of this “hoax,” then maybe they might at last take it seriously. Then the moment they got well, they would turn around and start screaming at people like me for whatever new reason they might pull out of their butt. They would either simply ignore what just happened, or say if only people like me had supported Trump, things wouldn’t have gotten so bad. Even if there was demonstrable evidence that Trump’s corrupt, incompetence administration is bungling the response to this “hoax,” they would still ignore it. Or, put another way MAGA Republicans are a death cult. They would rather the entire world be a nuclear hellscape than admit that maybe the browning of America and increased sexual agency for women isn’t something to be afraid of. Lulz!

It is interesting some of the wilder rhetorical flourishes of the Right. Mike Huckabee’s “Trump could suck out all the Corona Virus in the world and go to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out and be blamed for polluting the ocean,” comes to mind. That sound very bi-partisan to me, how about to you?

Or, put another way, if America does unite because of COVID19, things will have to get far worse than any of us could possibly imagine at this point. And, for the time being, I have no reason to think that will happen. Trump will again escape accountability, Don Jr. becomes the Crown Prince of the Fourth Reich and I die in an ICE camp. Lulz!

Anyway. We’ll see, I guess. The media’s concern over this issue is a hysterical “hoax,” meant to hurt Trump politically. (Ugh.)

Threat Assessment For March 2: Our Dumb Century #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Before BuzzFeed calls me a “dangerous charlatan,” or some such, let me state I have no idea what I’m talking about and if you listen to me you have only yourself to blame. I just like to write and I’m interested COVID19. I was trained a journalist and, as such, it’s an opportunity to flex that part of my mind.

There’s a lot to be hopeful about when it comes to COVID19. I know that Don Jr. thinks that I have some twisted bloodlust and want “the death of millions” so his father’s “winning” will stop, but lulz, fuck that guy. All I want is some form of accountability. That’s it. If you have power, I think you should have to account for any screw ups you might do. What’s going on may be the biggest domestic crisis in American history since the Civil War simple, basic accountability is not a radical concept.

Anyway, in the medium-to-long term, there’s a lot of good news. We may have a vaccine far sooner than we might otherwise hope for. It’s possible that as part of the general ebb and flow of the virus it will subside — but not vanish — from the States. If it follows the Spanish flew, there will be seasonal waves. That will not only get Trump plenty of time to consolidate power and blame everything on Democrats (Flughazi!) but should Corona Virus come back in the fall in, say, October, he can suspend the Constitution and stop the 2020 Election. Lulz!

But there is some bad news. We still aren’t testing very many people — and the Trump Administrator has made a point of censoring how many tests are available — and when we do get around to testing a lot of people it’s a snapshot of the past. We’re seeing what happened two weeks ago with the virus, not what may happen in the future. And this doesn’t even being to address the possibility of The Gray Plague or the WuFlop happening in the United States.

The Gray Plague would be a significant culling of the nation’s elderly punctuation. That might have significance political and social significance going forward. The WuFlop, too, might be a rather big deal if it begins to happen in the United States to any degree. The WuFlop is when otherwise healthy people passout and faceplant. Sometimes, they twitch or “flop.” It’s very unnerving and we’re very unprepared for the general public to see it.

So, in the long term, we’re fine. It’s the short term — say the next 24 to 72 hours — we have to worry about. But it’s possible Trump will AGAIN weasel his way out of any accountability, even if it means a lot of necessary deaths. All that matters is power, greed and being cruel for cruel’s sake.