The lock-down, at least around here, really got going on Monday and has accelerated through the week. The weekend saw the hoarding, as public officials started acting hysterically in front of the cameras. On Monday, businesses started to wind down, sending people home if they were not needed or could work from home. The parking lot at my office was very light on Monday, but there were still people in the building. By Thursday the parking lot was just about empty of all cars.
There’s some traffic on the roads, but it like a Sunday morning, rather than a weekday or even a weekend afternoon. People are staying home, for the most part. Not happy with their work, the government is talking about a nationwide quarantine. They are talking about grounding all passenger air traffic for up to 30 days, halting stock trading on Wall Street, and imposing a shelter-in-place rule. Presumably, if one more person gets sick after that, they will begin bombing American cities.
Yesterday I realized that I had not had a face-face conversation with another human in a couple of days. I’ve spoken to people by phone and had e-mail exchanges, but I’ve not talked to anyone in person for a while. For whatever reason, I was reminded of the old Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth. There was an old Twilight Zone episode of a similar nature. Of course, there was the crappy Will Smith version on this theme, in which you end up rooting for the monsters to get him.
In my fortress of solitude, I started thinking about another science fiction classic, The Mote in God’s Eye. In the book, humans finally meet an alien species for the first time and discover something called the Crazy Eddie. This is a mythical character the aliens use to explain the inevitability of repeated cycles of collapse of the alien civilization and the pointlessness of trying to prevent them. Anyone who thinks they can solve the inherent defect in their society is called Crazy Eddie.
That’s the thing that does not get addressed in the tales of apocalypse like I Am Legend or the many movies that spring from it. The plague movies usually have a story line where the good guys can stop the plague or maybe come up with a miracle cure for it afterward. In the post-plague stories, after society has collapsed, the characters never think much about how they got to that place. It’s just bad luck. The collapse itself has no meaning other than as a devise to drive the plot of the story.
Maybe what we are seeing here is the inevitable end of all human society. From the perspective of time, the end point looks like a fizzling out of a dying people, but to those in it, it looks like mass insanity. Maybe this is what it looked like for those living in the late Roman Empire or even the late days of the Republic. Then, as now, the people speaking out against the gathering madness were dismissed as madmen, as everyone set about pulling the roof down on civilization.
On the other hand, one has to consider the possibility that it is not the world going mad, but you are the one going mad. It’s possible. There are a lot of people looking around and wondering why we are doing this, but maybe all of us are suffering from madness and the rest of the world is acting sober minded. It’s possible, but that would mean they have a secret way to feed people in a nationwide 30-day lock-down. Maybe turning America into a hermit kingdom is the path to the Promised Land.
For the curious, if they can get past however they are responding to the what’s happening right now, this is an amazing time. We will see things that no one could have imagined seeing just a few weeks ago. No one can know what follows a 30-day quarantine of a continent sized country. No one really knows what will follow just this one week halt to the global economy. No one knows what happens if the plague fears are wildly overblown, which seems inevitable at this point.
Regardless of what follows, we are living in a time without precedent. A century ago, we had a real plague, but the world did not stop. The stock market collapse in the 1920’s did bring a closure, but it was not for a month. The bank run that happened in 1933 resulted in a week-long bank holiday, but the rest of society kept going. The past provides some samples but nothing close to what is being contemplated. Heck, we are already into uncharted territory with the one-week lock-down.
Maybe I am the crazy one, but crazy or not, messing with big complicated things always has unanticipated results. This is an iron law of systems. Even if the response is appropriate to the danger, taking a sledge hammer to the very complex system that is American society will have consequences that no one can anticipate. Another rule of complex systems is you need to understand the iron law of systems before you are allowed to even tinker with the system. That rule has been violated.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 02:00: Cochran & Sailer
- 12:00: Permanent Crisis
- 19:00: The Boomer Question
- 25:00: The RV Community
- 30:00: The Truth Still Counts
- 46:00: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
- 49:00: Economics
- 56:00: Leaving A Record
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It’s believed I contracted some flavor of covid 19 at the cusp of February. I’m Z’s age, male and a frequent flyer who lives in Chicago proper along the lakefront. We were descending from LAX to ORD and the Chinese national, I saw his passport, who otherwise sat like a rock, motionless with a kid on his lap suddenly jerked his head in my direction, yanked his facemask and coughed what seemed like a gallon of hot mucous on my head and shoulders. One shot, nearly one kill. I couldn’t clean myself properly until I reached home. Three days later… Read more »
I watched the old “Last Man on Earth” the other night, and even though Heston scoffed at it when watching to prep for “Omega Man” and Richard Matheson had his name removed from the credits, it still maintains its weird elegiac power. Not really scary, but poignant. But I think “Dawn of the Dead” is much more apt for right now, what with the mad consumerism accompanying the End of Times: American cities will be left smoking ruins, the global elite will have retreated to their underground bunkers at Raven Rock Mountain Complex, and worse of all, Amazon will suspend… Read more »
I would be very interested to hear your take on this one. You’ll have to download the PDF from the link below. A very interesting view of how the Chinese are going to take advantage of this current situation.
https://www.horizonadvisory.org/news/coronavirus-series-report-launch-viral-moment-chinas-post-covid-planning
The dilemma in A Mote in God’s Eye for the alien race was their mass reproduction inevitably brought about social and economic collapse of their planet, hence why they wanted the stellar transport technology to travel to new planets. Of course, the Humans wanted to stop them, as their rapid spread would soon lead to war and conflict with other peoples.
The dilemma of humanity will be how to keep prosperous countries to have the will to maintain their civilization and reproduce after comfort is achieved.
Maybe it is just me but I always thought the Moties were like the Chinese.
Intelligent in a way that is useful to them and their reverse engineering skills.
Agreed. That was always my sense too.
Since the Z Man didn’t mention it, I will: The Omega Man, 1971, starrring Charlton Heston. Campy and a bit pozzy, but Charlton effing Heston! I loved it as a kid…
Here is a link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2FU9uJh5YY
I wrote a long time ago that the key to a good bio weapon is that it kills enough of your enemy to cripple him, but no so many that it boomerangs on you and wipes out all your people too. This was back during the anthrax / dirty bomb era in the early 2000’s. China is almost certainly under-reporting cases and deaths. More Chinese die before lunch on a Tuesday than in their reported CV19 death toll. China also knows that the West has a different attitude towards this stuff. So, they game it out, and either release it… Read more »
You have to wonder if some neo-con nuts have another plan in place just like 9-11. Remember The Project for a New American Century?
The Soviets had a very advanced biological warfare program. No doubt the Chinese picked the brains of former Russian bioweapons people to start their program.
I think it is possible the Chinese did this on purpose, but I suspect it was a blunder. Still, even if they did and publicly admitted to it, our rulers will do nothing, because that would racist.
Check the link I posted above. Explains the details of what the Chinese have planned.
We’re being led by a suicide cult, why would they even care if it was intentional?
Alright, now I want to go reread some Niven / Pournelle. Of course my f&*#^ library is closed for the duration.
Lucifer’s Hammer, Ringworld, protector etc.
Footfall, The Integral Trees, Inferno, Escape from Hell…
So Chloroquine might be the magic bullet? A simple drug invented in the 30s and as common as aspirin in the tropics? I sure hope it turns out to be the case, and crashing our economy and forfeiting liberties was a ridiculous overreaction.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-new-hope.html
If Trump is going to play Wartime President now, then let Senator Richard Burr be tried and hung as war profiteer.
One death may or may not be a tragedy, but it can be attention-getter.
Be very, very careful, people….your rulers in current government, pennsylvania and federal, who won the most recent popularity contest…err..election……are getting incredibly more powerful and arrogant using this “crisis” to grab more power for themselves…we’re GIVING AWAY the farm…our governor has GRANTED himself the absolute non-legal power to SHUT DOWN BUSINESSES….if this were the 1950’s there would be revolution in the streets…..it is truely a sad state of affairs…..if 30% of us died from this virus while going to work and school,etc. , I would think as a society we’d come out of it stronger……we will never recover from this government… Read more »
I love The Mote in Gods Eye! Matter of fact my parents had a copy of Larry Nivens Ringworld on their bookshelf and it was what got me interested in science fiction.
Before he died, I struck up a correspondence with Jerry Pournelle. He was a reader!
I was pretty young when I spotted Ringworld on my parents bookshelf but the really cool book art caught my eye. I’ve loved Nivens and Pournells writing ever since.
Pournelle was a definitely a guy on our end of the spectrum.
Nice audio clip from The Prisoner to start the podcast. I got caught up with that maybe ten years ago with crappy youtube quality episodes. Better ones available now. McGoohan went on to play the king in Braveheart.
Governor Tom Wolfe of PA shut down ‘non-life-sustaining’ business last night, which apparently also means Coal Mines must shut down… Coal plants stockpile anywhere between 30 to 90 days of burn. But shutting down the mines means reduced restocking at the plants. But it’s “non-life-sustaining”. Steel mills are still open though.. I guess nobody thought of the coke facilities for the blast furnaces?
These people are insane. I am so pissed of right now. I am supposed to start a new job on March 30. Still planning to start via telecommute, but I am freaking worried now.
They act like they’re terrified of death, but then make decisions like they’ll live forever, yes insane! I heard from my boss this morning that any business that is a “critical supplier” (and a supplier to the critical supplier) will need to stay open. This includes energy (oil, gas, but I would presume coal too), medical, defense, food – the list goes on but we both puzzled what the point was. The further down the supply chain you go, the more likely places will have to stay open since those companies are at the base of the supply pyramid. Maybe… Read more »
I get around to visiting about a hundred and fifty different businesses in a week, every week. I can tell you that none of the manufacturing is shutting down and almost no one is panicking at all. The few that are panicking, however, are in a complete mental meltdown. Most useless office jobs are closed however. But they are not productive jobs. The employees who would hold baking contests at their “job” are all at home. Amazon has no more of their own delivery drivers they have all been laid off. Despite what news stories you read they are gone.… Read more »
I think this is interesting.
Read the comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRao6lVmsoQ
At 54 you miss being a baby boomer by one year lol. You are baby boomX.
(From my perspective) I think you have done very well to keep your head at this time, and this is very rare: you give some examples of several people who I thought were sound, but have spectacularly failed this challenge. Indeed it seems to you me that you started-off down the wrong track with this business, but (and this is unusual) backed-away from where you were going, recovered; and have start making valuable analyses over the past days. One thing I think you need to consider is that crashing the world economy may be deliberate – indeed I believe it… Read more »
In addition to the other pieces of literature mentioned, now would be a good time to read H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” the story of a once-great alien civilization that declines and collapses under its own weakness.
Lovecraft was an admirer of Oswald Spengler and the story, written in the 30’s, is an obvious metaphor for where HPL thought we were headed. It’s tough to say he wasn’t correct.
The Elder Things were so great even Cthulhu wouldn’t mess with them, but then they gave equal rights to a Stone-age race….
Now would actually be a good time to read all of Lovecraft.
http://www.lovecraft-stories.com/story/at-the-mountains-of-madness
When things come roaring back….. The service sector which employs a significant percentage of the workforce will simply jump back into the thick of things? Fat chance. Most of these people are forced to live paycheck to paycheck. They are the canaries in the coal mine. It will have a ripple effect throughout the economy. Unemployment and YangBucks may paper over things for a short period but how about the long term? Manufacturing may come running back home but there will be a serious time lag between the contraction in the service economy and the rebuilding of the manufacturing base… Read more »