Tag: We Are So Fucked

Act of God: The Kraken #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Just do it.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m going to give you the known conditions of what’s happening as we enter the weekend and YOU can tell ME what YOU think is going to happen. At the end I’ll give you some of what I’ve written about Trump going bonkers and you can use that, too, to decide what would happen if Trump suddenly woke up to the fact that he was absolutely not going to be able to weasel his way out of being blamed for the astonishing spread of COVID19 in the United States. Trump’s NOT a political genius as Maggie Haberman thinks, but only, in fact, a very lucky idiot.

Within about 48 hours of the first case being reported in northern Italy, the country was reporting hundreds of cases of COVID19.

The first instance of “community spread” COVID19 has happened in the United States about 48 hours ago. The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive testing strategy right now. It’s beginning to get better, but everything is being seen through the prism of short term politics. Everyone is trying to score points, not save lives. There are 335 million Americans who move around a lot and are very social.

As such, our only metric for the time being people getting sick. There’s a good chance we have a “shadow pandemic” taking place in the United States caused by a lack of testing. As such, COVID19 may pop out of the population like a kraken in rather abrupt fashion.

COVID19 is spreading and Trump doesn’t care.

Or, put another way, if you don’t have any metric for who has it because you’re not testing, and you’re not doing anything to stop the spread, then, well, lulz? You’re fucked. You could have a HUGE pandemic bouncing around the nation’s 335 million people at an alarming rate. Every day we don’t do some of the crazy things that places like China, South Korea and Japan have done to stop the spread, COVID19 uses to grow exponentially. More people spread it around their community. More people get sick. More people begin to die. But it’s likely they would be treated as if they just had the flu.

At some point, however, things would get so bad — like they have in Iran — that it would hard to ignore what was going on. Probably what would happen would be a LOT of elderly people would begin to die. They, too, would probably at first thought to have died from “the flu.” And we wouldn’t know any better until A LOT of elderly CELEBRITIES and POWERFUL PEOPLE began to die in quick succession to such an extent that the general population noticed it because each one of those events was news item.

Also at risk — if China is any indication — are nurses, doctors and other members of the health care system. Nurses as young as 29 have died there from COVID19. So, it is reasonable to assume that something similar would begin to happen in the United States. But because COVID19 was bouncing around unchecked, more and more such individuals would begin to die.

Now, if you take all those conditions and mull them for a bit, it definitely seems as though everyday something doesn’t happen to wake Trump up that maybe he needs to be a leader, the worst the situation is going to grow when something happens that finally does. In other words, as long as Trump tells MAGA this is all a Deep State conspiracy to bring him down, more and more lives are being put at risk.

I suspect the WuFlop — where people faceplant and begin to writhe on the ground like they’re possessed might give even MAGA people pause for thought. The conditions are there for this weekend to be rather dark on more than one level. And Trump’s willfully oblivious to what’s going on, focusing more on the stockmarket than the lives of the 335 million people he swore to protect.

Do The WuFlop.

The Gray Plague, too, might rattle the cage of a few of Trump’s supporters. Maybe. Either that, or we have some significant political violence in the United States. Places like Virginia I could see exploding into violence pretty easily if the vast majority of the United States was sick. Gun nuts, in particular, are itching to overthrow the Virginia state government because, lulz, they hate liberal democracy and want to fuck their guns.

Of course, this IS Trump we’re talking about, so once he realizes the magnitude of his fuck up, he’s probably going to snap. He’s going to panic in a rather frightening manner. He might shut the country down in various ways. He might order all planes out of the sky — including shooting them down. He might order the Internet shut down. He might start a war to distract people. Or, worst of all, he might just snap. The issue, of course, is there’s no political will to do anything about Trump until well after he inevitably wins re-election through any means necessary. The 25 Amendment is a dead letter, too. So, I honestly don’t know what would happen if he snapped in the middle of the biggest domestic crisis since the Civil War.

I’ve written at great length about what Trump losing his mind might look like. Here’s an example.

For about four years now, I have been telling anyone who will listen that I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. The last few days have pretty much proven my case. It’s rare that I look out in the blue winter sky and wonder if I’m going to see a DPRK ICBM in the sky, heading to nearby-ish DC.

I have even begun to pace out how I would know it had happened. The EMP burst would zap all electronics in the general area of the nuclear blast and so, well, nothing would work. I have thought about how many sites the DPRK would target and the likelihood they would actually be able to blow them up. I love Koreans, but they have no “medium” switch on a cultural level. So if president crazypants managed to get them to the point where they wanted to take us down with them, then, then they would probably shoot as many as five ICBMs towards us. They have a pretty nice H-bomb arsenal at this point and the means to deliver them across the entire United States.

But they haven’t really had a chance to test the whole system, so there’s a good chance what would really happen is we would all collectively shit our pants at how fucking close we came to 10+ million dead (at least) in the United States alone. We aren’t really prepared on a psychological or emotional level to deal with THAT many dead in the context of civilization continue to exist. But that would be a real possibility — as long as the Chinese and Russians sat on their hands, any nuclear war between the DPRK and US would be on the low end of a “limited exchange.” Given how fucking bonkers Trump is, of course, he would probably nuke the North Koreans out of existence using not just tactical nukes but h-bombs. You could probably turn most of North Korea into an unlivable radioactive hellscape with as few as 5 h-bombs. Think about that. That’s pretty deep.

The point is, however, that we’re definitely lurching towards what I’ve suggested all along — things are going to get so extreme and so surreal pretty soon that we’re going to learn a lot not just ourselves as a people but something pretty basic about our nation as a whole. If there’s nothing Trump can do that will lesson his support for any reason, what happens if he get’s so bad on a mental level that we all start to think maybe we’re entering The Dead Zone. Maybe the reason there’s no intelligent life in the universe is inevitably an ET Donald Trump pops up and blows the planet to bits? Is it possible that Trump’s not just an existential threat to the Republic, he’s an existential threat to the species?

I suspect that we’re just fucked. MAGA just needs Trump cognizant enough to make it into his second term. That’s it. By that point his new Veep — The Kooch, Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson or Don Jr? — will be in place to pick up the slack. So I fully expect one of the scenarios we face is Trump uses any war in the Middle East to win re-election and the he promptly turns into a psychological puddle and we get the American Hitler we’ve all been expecting in Trump.

I just can’t see ANYTHING that will force Trump out of office for any reason other than a peaceful death sometime in the next 10 years. He’s just one tweet away from demanding a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” He will get it, they will go rouge and pass Enabling Acts on a Constitutional level and I die in an ICE camp sometime in the next two to three years. Lulz!

Another, far darker scenario is Trump doesn’t make that far. He manages to crater on a psychological level not when MAGA needs him to (any point after Jan 20, 2021) but, say, sometime in the January-October time frame. If things get as mindblowingly surreal as fear, Republicans will have three lines of defense, 1) Let the people decide 2) If only we back off and give him some space, he’ll make America Great Again 3) The Pence Pivot.

The last one is one of the more clever moves they might use. If things get so absolutely extreme that the Republican Lizard People finally face the unthinkable of having to admit that, well, maybe Trump really WAS a worse choice than Hillary Clinton, they will simply say that Trump needs his rest and Pence is making sure Trump’s vision of America (ugh) becomes a reality. We’re safe because of Pence, in other words.

But let’s say that doesn’t work. Then what. What if what I’ve mulled before happens. I mean, what if Trump really finally flips his lid — and in the middle of a major regional war in the Middle East, no less! Then what. Poor old Hugh Hewitt’s brain may break. If you’re such a cockholster for The Dear Leader and finally reality comes crashing into the situation in a way that even you can’t spin or deny, then, well, things are going to get fucking lit. A lot of smart, educated grown-ass men have debased themselves absolutely for the sake of Trump and every day Trump gets worse and more dangerous for not just America but the FUCKING WORLD.

The single most surreal event of my life will be if Dennis Prager+Hugh Hewitt+Matt Schlapp get on TV and have a complete, total mental and emotional breakdown when, like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, they realize they hitched their “lives and scared honors” to the wrong guy. This is unlikely to happen, but thinking about it happening is kind of chilling. That level of bonkers behavior on the part of a “public intellectual” would be rather disturbing.

Only if, say, a few million people died and everyone blamed Trump for it could I see that happening. In real terms, those guys have gotten what they wanted from Trump — a tax cut and young, hack MAGA judges. They have no shame and our media ecosystem is so broken that the moment Trump is no longer politically viable, they’ll change their tune in mid-conversation and act as if nothing happened. Fuck those liars.

Anyway, I generally don’t think any that extreme is going to happen. Far more likely is Trump will always be just on the cusp of losing his mind and yet never quite get so bad that Nancy Pelosi strikes by sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so they can be used essentially as the 25th Amendment. He will drift into his second term and The Kooch (or whomever) will be the person who puts me in a camp and is indirectly responsible for my death in American Killing Fields. (In upstate New York maybe?)

Here’s a little fragment I wrote about how difficult it would be to get Trump physically out of the White House if, for some reason, we did manage to decide to get rid of him against his will.

9/10th
a story fragment of a possible near future
by Shelton Bumgarner

April, 2019

The eyes of the world were on the White House.

Just moments before, President Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, had been convicted by 67 members of the Senate for a whole list of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump had for weeks now been ranting on Gab about his case in the Senate, bouncing back and forth between threats to start a war with Iran or the DPRK and not-so-subtle hints that he might take his own life should he be convicted by the Senate.

And, now, at last, the moment of truth had arrived.

Trump legally, at least, was no longer president, but he had been oddly silent since the verdict had been announced with great fanfare from the well of the Senate. Trump’s conviction had come after months of investigations on the part of the now Democratic Congress. The length and breath of Trump’s malfeasance discovered by these hearings had rocked the nation to its very core. On more than one occasion, MAGA talking heads on cable news had been interrupted by astonishing breaking news that left them, for once, unable or unwilling to defend the president.

The hearings had ground on for months to such an extent that Trump’s approval had slowly drifted to the 20s and stayed there consistently. Trump’s support was now made up of the very rich and the very poor. Oddly, despite Trump’s near constant demands on Twitter for violence on the part of his supporters, little, if any was reported. Trump had grown so frustrated that he had all but abandoned Twitter at one point for the more receptive Gab social media platform. Though on more than one occasion Rudy Giuliani had made it very clear it was within the rights of the president to declare martial law if he deemed it in the best interests of the nation. More than one delegation of Senate Republicans had gone to the White House to explain to Trump that he was going to be convicted, no avail. Trump made it clear to them, in not so many words that his simply living in the White House made him president, a sentiment best expressed by the legal saw that, “Possession is 9/10ths of the law.”

Finally, a post to Gab came out: “My so-called ‘conviction’ is the work of the Deep State and as such illegitimate. I remain president.”

This set off a chain of events, the likes of which Americans had never seen. Suddenly, everyone on Twitter became a Constitutional scholar as everyone studied the exact wording of the Constitution as to what happens if the president is removed from office by the Senate. The wording is quite clear: he or she is no longer president and that’s it.

Nowhere in the Constitution did it explain what to do if the president simply decided to ignore the Senate. What’s more, nowhere in the Constitution did it state what to do with the nuclear launch codes should a president be removed from office and he refuse to accept the decision of the Senate.

The next few hours were chilling as they were surreal for millions of people not just in the United States but around the globe. The issue of Trump’s physical access to America’s nuclear launch codes was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Though it was finally announced that while the nuclear football remained in Trump’s possession, Sec. of Defense Mattis had ordered the American armed forces to stand down for the duration of the crisis.

Trump, on Twitter, was as defiant and unhinged as usual.He threatened to kill himself. He threatened to start a nuclear war. He vowed to declare martial law.

The usual suspects on cable news did their best to spin all of this for Trump. As an anxious nation waited for the now former president to leave the White House, a cavalcade of former Republican Senators and Trump White House staffers attempted to make the former president’s case. Their final argument was that for the good of the country, Trump should be allowed to remain president, despite his lawful conviction by the Senate.

Things began to move rapidly at this point.

Vice President Pence was sworn in but Chief Justice Roberts in a dark, somber event in the Old Executive Building. Meanwhile, it was learned Trump had quietly replaced his Secret Service detail with a private security force that made it clear it was prepared to defend Trump until the bloody end.

At this point, two things happened. A final bipartisan delegation of Congressional leaders came to the White House grounds under the flag of truce. During the course of an hour-long meeting, Trump screamed at them that they had never supported him and the world would be better off if it just ended instead of allowed the forces of the Deep State to ruin America. He made it absolutely clear that he would never leave the Oval Office willingly.

With that, they left.

Next, a surreal, bizarre event, the FBI slowly began to surround the White House. There was much debate online and on TV about how long the nation should wait for Trump to leave the White House. CNN went so far as to do a deep dive into the exact amount of food the White House grounds might have available at any one moment.

Finally, shots rang out from the White House as the battle was joined. It took several hours but in the end, the FBI was finally able to secure the facility. Nearly a dozen personnel on both sides died during the course of the Battle of The White House.

In what would become ionic footage, Trump was quietly escorted from the White House grounds. He spent the remainder of his days ranting on Twitter and Gab that he was the rightful president.

The End.

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.

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!

Power To The People: ‘Character is What One Exhibits In a Crisis’ #COVID19

We will make it, but in spite of Trump.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When I was living in Seoul, I tried to save my favorite bar one memorable night. I didn’t think about it. I saw it as on fire a raced to the scene. And now one Donald J. Trump has a fire of his own — one quickly consuming the whole world — and we’re learning what is natural inclination is when he and he alone has to make a decision.

And, guess what!

As expected, his national inclination is to lie, dishimble, prevaricate and, most of all be as cruel and greedy as possible. And, so, while COVID19 may not turnout to be nearly as bad as we fear, we pretty much know who the president is right now – a creedy, immoral, liar. We already knew that, of course, but it’s a bit jarring to seeing confirmed so blatantly.

But that’s where we are. The Trump Administration is pretty much putting all its chips on the idea that lulz, but you’re still making money, right? So, if the economy global economy locks up because of a pandemic they can….blame liberals? Declare Martial Law, suspend the Constitution and not have an election so Trump can finally name himself God King for Life? I wish these were just my personal rantings not very connected to reality, but have you looked at MAGA recently? They sure do look like they believe Trump is within his rights to do just that.

That we could very well go the Handmaid’s Tale route and not Age Of Liberal Progressive Aquarius is why this pandemic could be a high risk – high reward proposition. The risk is revolution, counter revolution and civil war. Throw in the possibility of a limited nuclear exchange with the DPRK, well, lulz? And the fate of the United States — and the world, sad to say — rests of a barely functioning man-child who is president because a bunch of aging white people hate the browning of America and Russia tipped the scales for good measure.

In a sense, that Trump is POTUS is, in itself, a worst case scenario. He simply incapable of showing any leadership or rising to the occasion. He is a historically bad POTUS now faced with a historically enormous crisis. If we make it, it’ll be because of luck and the hard work of every day people willing to show the type of leadership that Trump, sadly, won’t or cant.

Nine Months That Shook The World #Pandemic #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We still don’t know how bad the spread of COVID19 is going to get. It could fizzle out and I can — finally — turn my full attention back to developing my novel. Here’s a back-of-the-envelope assessment of what might happen between now and when things “get back to normal” in about a year, or nine months at the earliest.

Putin’s Russia
Russians are extremely difficult to figure out. Why they finally revolted in 1917 is probably because of an extreme set of circumstances. I’m not expert, but it seems at least within the realm of possibility that if Russia made a major land grab against Ukraine in the coming days, using COVID19 as a cover, that that could lead to some major instability int Russia going forward. Add to that a pandemic and, well, lulz?

Xi’s China
If China imploded because of COVID19 then that would be a gut punch to the global economy and the global order. I have no idea that is going to happen in China going forward, but it is something to mull. If we really do descend into a pandemic then China could be one of the big three to collapse as part of the general chaos associated with the pandemic. I have no idea. But keep an eye on that situation

Trump’s America
I’m of the general opinion that the United States isn’t going to make it through a pandic. Either we split into two different countries or a Handmaid’s Tale type situation occurs. It’s up to us which one happens, I guess. A lot depends on the exact sequence of events. If a lot of elderly MAGA people get really sick and or die in quick succession, then MAGA is going to start murdering people — like me! — in cold blood. But if it’s a series of powerful center-Left political figures who drop then MAGA will cry crocodile tears and be not-so-privately giddy at the prospect of their final consolidation of power. Of course, given that, as the Bible says, “Death be not proud,” at some point both sides are going to suffer so much that maybe we’ll finally see each other as patriots, citizens and humans, not Blue or Red.

But that’s going to be far more down the path than any of us imagine. And, even then, if we do manage to survive as a nation, the moment things go back to normal, we’re likely to be back at each other’s throats. I think any pandemic in the Untied States is going to get a lot worst than we could ever imagine for a number of reasons, making it something of a “perfect storm.” But here are some ideas as to how you would know it was about to strike.

If the reason the States hasn’t had any noticeable uptick in WuFlu cases is they’re not getting picked up because of a combination of societal and general government screw up, how would we know that Corona Virus was actually here?

Well, what’s so chilling about the conditions of that scenario is how bad things would have to get before we realized what was going on. A few things would likely tip us off.

My current theory.

One, popular vacation spots for Americans in the general North America area would faceplant one by one.

Two, notable elderly people would begin to die an alarming rate, which would make news.

Three, people whose job it was to be somewhere — say, TV anchors — wouldn’t show up to work

Lastly, so many people would be really, really sick that it would be difficult for us not to notice that something was up. The frightening thing about this it would make us realize that our entire medical infrastructure had failed us on a massive scale. By the time we realized what was going on, a huge, deep swath of the population would have been infected multiple times by multiple people.

It would be the biggest crisis in American history that history would mention in the same breath with the Civil War and World War II. I only suggest this is even possible because COVID19 is whipping around the globe at an alarming rate and, yet, to date, there have not been any major flair ups in the States.

The World Economic Order
It seems to me that even with 1K in declines in the Dow, the global economy has a good, solid nine or 10 months of pain ahead of it. The pain could be so sharp, so painful that Trump will simply bribe human Electors to stay in office because, well, lulz, fuck you. Trump’s going to finally go transational in his insanity and take the whole country with him before this is over with. And, really, there’s nothing we can do. The entire global order is a dead man walking at this point. What replaces it is any one’s guess. It lasted about 75 years, which isn’t too bad.

Campaign 2020
All things being equal, we need to cancel the 20202 campaign in the USA. Or, put another way, it’s probably going to effectively be canceled at some point if things get bad enough. Once the shock wears off when we finally wake up to 12 hot and warm zones across the country, we’re all going to have to come to grips with the new normal where being in a social situation of any sort is problematic for a few months which will roughly coincide with remainder of the 2020 campaign. There may, if things crest at just the wrong moment, be talk of “postponing” the 2020 Election until sometime in early 2021.

Regional Wars
I can think of four places in the world where cold wars could turn hot. Korea, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and Ukraine-Russia. If all four erupted at the same time, then, well, you got what would be marketed, at least, as World War Three. This would especially be the case if any — or all — of these regional wars went nuclear in some way.

Really, we’re careening towards a few month of global instability not seen in about 75 years. It’s going to be a war, of sorts. A war against COVID19. I used to call it 3W, but I guess WWC would be more accurate — World War COVID19.

Flughazi: ‘American Kraken’ #WuFlu #CoronaVirus

I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Shelton Bumgarner

Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, let’s pace this out. If the reason the States hasn’t had any noticeable uptick in WuFlu cases is they’re not getting picked up because of a combination of societal and general government screw up, how would we know that Corona Virus was actually here?

Well, what’s so chilling about the conditions of that scenario is how bad things would have to get before we realized what was going on. A few things would likely tip us off.

One, popular vacation spots for Americans in the general North America area would faceplant one by one.

Two, notable elderly people would begin to die an alarming rate, which would make news.

Yikes!

Three, people whose job it was to be somewhere — say, TV anchors — wouldn’t show up to work

Lastly, so many people would be really, really sick that it would be difficult for us not to notice that something was up. The frightening thing about this it would make us realize that our entire medical infrastructure had failed us on a massive scale. By the time we realized what was going on, a huge, deep swath of the population would have been infected multiple times by multiple people.

It would be the biggest crisis in American history that history would mention in the same breath with the Civil War and World War II. I only suggest this is even possible because WuFlu is whipping around the globe at an alarming rate and, yet, to date, there have not been any major flair ups in the States.

I’m simply struggling to understand what’s going on. What I layout out above is one of several possible options. It’s the absolute worst case scenario, which is my thing.

After was all said and done, of course, then we’d struggle to figure out how it happened. Maybe the person who should be blamed — Donald J. Trump — would be blamed. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe I’ll be in an ICE Camp re-education camp after the pandemic, maybe I won’t.

We’ll see on both, now won’t we?

‘Act Of God:’ Trump May Finally Be Politically Felled by ‘Flughazi’

Will never change.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If Trumplandia had a motto, it would be, “Cruelty is the point.” I have come to believe that the Religious Right supports Trump not because they think he’s Jesus Christ, but because they think he’s the anti-Christ and, as such, will bring back Jesus. That particular theory may be put to the test if we pretty much have the end of the world and….Jesus STILL DOESN’T COME BACK.

But the issue is — how bad, really, would a pandemic have to get before Sean Hannity would crawl out of Trump’s butt? Far worse than you could possibly imagine. I figure at least 10 million people would have to die before Fox News might re-think its support for the Dear Leader. Or, put another away, America could be brought to its knees economically directly because of Trump’s dumb policy decisions regarding pandemic and it would be a lulz by Fox News. In a sense, America’s political system is now run by a death cult.

When “the end” comes (at least in the short term) they are likely to make good on all those threats against people like me. Trump will go completely fucking insane, do everything he was planning on doing in his second term, only counted in days instead of months and years. I guess what I’m saying is — the bad guys are a lot more organized than the good guys going into what may be a short-term armageddon. By the time the ship of state is righted, Trump will be even more powerful than he was before. I just don’t see Democrats having the wherewithal to impeach Trump AGAIN over his criminal mishandling of a pandemic. Prove me wrong, Speaker Pelosi.

But you have to admit, it would be ironic if someone so loved by the Religious Right was ultimately brought down by an “act of God.” One could make the case that Trump maybe wasn’t QUITE as loved by the big guy upstairs as MAGA would have us believe. And, remember, it would be difficult to impeach-and-convict Trump for negligence in the middle of a pandemic. He would otherwise be removed through the 25th Amendment, but lulz. Any Congressional trial of Trump over a massive pandemic screw up would be happen long after the event itself was over –say 2022-2023. Trump would be even more powerful and the massive clusterfuck he was directly responsible for would have faded, the economy would have bounced back and Mt. Rushmore would have a new face on it.

In fact, I would say you really would have to have a “Gray Plague” for MAGA to lose its potency. If 10-20 elderly people died then that’s a few less angry white men who will march to the polls no matter what for Trump. I generally believe we’re more likely to go dystopia or division than any type of renewal. This is an example of how the narrative of history isn’t written until after the fact — by the winners.

4 Minute Warning — Corona Virus Threat Assessment For Feb. 23rd

Lulz!
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

No one listens to me. No one cares. But I can’t help myself. I need to at least put down my own thoughts about WuFlu before I go back to working on my novel. So, here goes.

America
We have three major regional powers — South Korea, Iran and Italy slowly and collectively faceplanting. And, yet, fucking Fortress America is being “protected” by the magical mystery Big Dick Energy of our Doofus Dear Leader — or whatever dumb theory the Christian Right has come up with when they’re not drinking fucking bleach. The American Twitter intelligentsia, which SHOULD be using their collective voices to educate the population about WuFlu is too busy stroking their taints about their Campaign 2020 hot takes to worry themselves with that.

And then, Trump’s leave the country for a major meet-and-greet with the leader of India. This has got to be the stupidest idea of Trump’s presidency and he’s had a lot of them. For POTUS to be on the other side of the world just as a pandemic may be about to strike the country is…less than optimal. There’s a greater-than-zero chance that we could wake up to the horror of multiple warm and hot zones across the United States and…lulz…POTUS is struggling with having to eat vegetables and making crass jokes about Indian food across from the leader of a billion people.

Then you have to think about what would happen if the entire air system shut down in a frantic spasm as global leaders tried to shut down what was already here: a pandemic. It would be like 9/11, only last for days, weeks and months and be all over the world. It would be 3W – World War WuFlu. How would POTUS be able to lead if he wasn’t even physically in the country? Who would lead the country? Pence? What if — God forbid — the opening of 3W was not only a wave of hot and warm zones across the nation, but six or seven major elderly political figures croaking in quick succession? THEN what are we going to do? I don’t know. I just know the first few hours and days of a 3W would be unlike anything we’ve seen since the Civil War. It would be worst than WW2 because it would be domestic, as well. It would be mass chaos all over the globe until we started to get our wits about us.

Throw in the possibility of THREE major regional wars going nuclear, and lulz, things get even weirder. I mean, if the entire global system goes belly up while Trump is in India and there’s a war between India and Pakistan….yikes! We’d need Snake Plissken to fix that particular problem. But that really is the absolute worst case scenario. Trump could never get trapped in India during a nuclear war with Pakistan caused by WuFlu. Right? That could never happen.

I still think there’s a TMZ Ticking Bomb — if there was a massive outbreak of WuFlu in the States, the first thing that would happen would be a lot of elderly celebrities would die in quick succession. That and maybe South Florida’s death rate would abruptly sky rocket.

Iceland
I continue to wonder about Iceland, and other popular tourist destinations around the States. It just seems that Iceland would be the one nation best prepared to realize what was going on as it was happening. Way, way too many Americans visit Iceland in a year for it not to get a gut punch if there was a “shadow” WuFlu pandemic happening here. My fear is that WuFlu is all over the United States right now, but because most people simply don’t go to the doctor because they don’t want to medical bills, that it’s not until the number of REALLY sick people grows so enormous that we notice it. That’s why I think Iceland might give us a heads up — all those slightly sick Americans exposing the natives of Iceland would inevitably bring that lovely nation to its knees whenever the outbreak finally happened there. But I have no idea if I’m anywhere near the truth on that one. I’m Brian Fellows and all that. But I would, if had any power in Iceland — which I don’t — declare a national energy and get EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY tested for WuFlu.

Japan
While right now Italy, South Korea and Iran are getting a lot of attention, I think it’s Japan we should keep an eye on. There actual number of cases apparently is growing exponentially and they have about 125 million with a lot of the being old. We’re careening towards a situation where all of Northeast Asia is going to have to be written off economically. If that doesn’t do something to the global economy then maybe we really are living in the Matrix. If Japan is brought to its knees not so much because of deaths but because, well, 60% of the population is too sick to do anything that might cause the Masters of The Universe in NYC to pause for a moment while doing “rails on tails.”

China
I have no idea what is going no here. Someone, somewhere, is lying. And President Xi wants everyone to go back to work ASAP to make widgets for the capitalist running dogs in the West. There’s a chance that China is going to implode and take its economy with it. Again, all those “but I’m making money” Trump supporters might say, “Well, I’ve made all the money I’ve going to make NOW you can impeach him successfully.”

Iran
Iran is interesting because it has more deaths associated with its outbreak than anywhere else. It has eight deaths to date. That’s a lot, but it’s still not the exponential growth in deaths that maybe we might otherwise fear. I still don’t understand how it’s outbreak fits in what the other ones around the globe. But it didn’t cut off air traffic at the beginning of the Wuhan outbreak, so, I dunno.

Italy
This outbreak is the one that hits closest to home (other than South Korea because I lived there for five years). The scenes I see there seem like something I might see in the States in, say, two weeks. Panic buying. People generally freaking out, that kind of thing. It is interesting that, just like as depicted in the book WWZ, different nations react to WuFlu in different ways according to their collective personality.

Anyway. That’s where things stand. The DPRK is acting weird — as usual — but I may devote an entire blog post to that situation.

Jon Stewart & The First Hundred Days of 3W #WuFlu #CoronaVirus

Save us, bruh.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was born on a momentous day — Feb 26th. It was the day Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba. It was the start of The Hundred Days. It is within reason to believe that in real terms the worst of whatever pandemic strikes the USA will be about three months — a hundred days. Our fate, one way or another will be decided by the end of that period.

Either we finally start killing each other, or we renew our Union’s vows and, much like after the American Civil War, we enter a new era of peace and prosperity. For that to happen, of course, we’d need leadership. And, honestly, there’s only one person I can think of who has the oratory and leadership skills to help us get through what is shaping up to be a huge clusterfuck. Crisis management is about using what you have, not wishing about what you want. The first person who comes to mind when I think of leadership is Greta Thunberg, but she’s Swedish. The second person I think of is Jon Stewart.

He’s not a politician — yet — but he’s who we need right now. He’s funny, articulate and passionate. If we could somehow get him organizing things once we finally strike the pandemic iceberg, then maybe we could turn things around in 100 days and not, like, fucking implode into civil war. Or, put another way, we need some leadership immediately, off the bat the moment there’s panic buying. Passive-agressive tweeting isn’t going to cut it.

We need an actual leader. Someone who has a vision as to how we’re going to stay together as a nation and save as many lives as possible. No one listens to me, so I don’t know what we’re going to do. Besides, I have a novel to develop.

Keep the faith.

Twitter Liberals — GET WOKE, Campaign 2020 Is Over & #WuFlu #CoronaVirus Ended It

America, 2020
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Imagine if instead of Dec. 1941, WW2 had started in, say, February 1940. That’s where we stand with WuFlu. I just don’t see the 2020 campaign lasting past the first big outbreak of WuFlu in the States. Retail politics is, by definition, social and if you aren’t supposed to be in the same room with someone because they might make you sick, well, how the fuck can you campaign?

Only one or two journalists on Twitter are beginning to take WuFlu seriously as a political and national security issue in the States. That may — or may not — change in time for when the Pearl Harbor or 9/11 sized strike by WuFlu happens in the States within the next 28 days. We are so fucked for so many reasons, one of them being that the stewarts of the public interest — public intellectuals on Twitter — are so busy giving us hot takes about Campaign 2020 that they’re totally overlooking the huge iceberg that is headed straight towards us.

We. Are. So Fucked.

I mean, Italy is about to faceplant. South Korea is about to faceplant. And Iran is having a disturbingly high number of deaths. And fucking Japan may implode in stealth mode. Meanwhile Slate and Vox are bitching about Bernie Sanders in his underwear with Soviet apparatchiks 40 years ago. What we need is all the brand name nattering nabobs of negativism on Twitter to tell us not only what WE should do but what THEY are doing on a practical level to save themselves. That would be a way to alert people of how serious what about to happen really is.

A pandemic in the States would be equal to WW2. And Americans are so inward looking that we just don’t care. I got shithead MAGA people sniping at me about Bernie being the presumptive Democratic nominee when we should pause and think about how, in the end, we’re all Americans who bleed the same colored blood.

I don’t know what to tell you. It’s going to be mass chaos whenever the Kraken of pandemic finally arises from the US population. We’re totally unprepared. Totally flatfooted. We have no leadership and whatever leadership we do get will do find will be from the ground up, the “sheep,” if you will. Or, it will come from some unexpected places. I think Jon Stewart would be a great person to be the “Rudy” of our coming pandemic crisis. He has the skill set necessary.

But buckle up. We’re so fucked in the near term.