kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with coronapocalypse

I recently heard that my local library’s junior room is pushing a particular brand of children’s book. Books of this ilk, rushed to publication as early as Spring 2020, insist that wearing a mask is a way to express love and care for others.

Masks continue to dominate the feeble minds of the fearmongers who perpetuated the Panicdemic. Their use as a talisman to ward off the forces conspiring to devour the Professional Managerial Class’s comfortable way of life is ongoing, despite the Fauci emails and the glaring examples of Florida, South Dakota, and Sweden. Like their disgraced furor Fauci, Coronatarians never knew enough about their own subconscious processes (despite untold dollars spent to sit on the psychotherapist’s couch and profligate use of her expensive facial tissues) to realize why they forced several generations of now-permanently damaged young people to wear a scrap of dirty maxipad on the face for a year and a half. As Fauci admitted in one of his flip-flops, masks never had any efficacy in preventing disease.

Masks as Misanthropy

What the mask’s vestigial, increasingly irrelevant promoters refuse to admit is that the mask is about the opposite of loving and caring for others. Wearing a mask is an expression of misanthropy: the mask is a symbol to indicate the wearer hates others and that they couldn’t care less about their welfare. Those who are forced into wearing masks, for instance, the many people with social anxiety who face nervous breakdowns if they are confronted by friends and strangers, are potentially forced to lie. They may not hate others, but because of tremendous pressure, they are coerced into joining the Hate Club whether they like it or not. Misery loves company.

We often heard about how wearing a mask mysteriously saved Grandma during the panic, though if we told ourselves the truth, Covid measures made it much easier for poor Grandma to be hidden and thrown away as a useless eater. Tik Tok doctors and nurses danced through empty hospital wards while their superiors received fat bonuses for every new “Covid patient” admitted to secret hells of malign neglect. Now that the MRNA-hijacker disguised as vaccine has hit the market, Grandma is often presented with it as a non-option if she ever wants to hold her grandchildren again. Never mind that adverse reactions, including death, are two orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine roll out in American history. Never mind that Grandma gets to be a poked like a lab rat for a medical experiment for which no drug company will be held liable if it goes badly.

When I was a young girl, one of my primary regrets was the day I walked my young friend home. Because I was too young to go by myself (I think I was 8 or 9) my grandmother went with me. Grandma’s age made it harrowing and painful to walk the quarter mile or so. The walk there wasn’t half as bad as the walk back — my poor grandmother was crying. There was no excuse for what I did: not my age, not my friend’s desire to get home, nothing. I thought I was helping my grandmother by making her exercise. I thought it was the beginning of her regaining her mobility. I was an arrogant little nine year old. Instead, I subjected her to a Bataan Death March through the suburbs that I regretted long after she was in the ground. Like my 9 year old self, the Covidians think they are helping. They refuse to see the pain and hurt they are inflicting on the rest of the population, including those for whom claim to care.

Karmic Conundrum

I haven’t worn a mask for some time now because I don’t want the karma of it. Early on, I said that I would rather die than receive the so-called MRNA vaccine and I remain unchanged in that declaration. For me, I don’t reject the jab because I’m afraid of dying — that’s why I say I would rather die than have it. I would rather die than have the karma of the obedient mask-wearers and vax-getters.

It is my sincere belief that the people who continue to normalize the mask and the jab have terrible karma in store. Karma is nothing more and nothing less than cause and effect, and though it is as sure as gravity, I don’t claim to have any purchase on the ways it will manifest in the lives of those who have earned it.

Some of the karma for masking and vaxxing appears to be gathering on a dark horizon. For Bill Gates and other members of high-profile Epstein’s Pleasure Island group, they seem well on their way towards swinging from street lanterns without the benefit of their heads. Woke school board members who subsist ungratefully on the taxpayer dime while installing BLM and transgender propaganda don’t seem far behind if the new Recession gets too long in the tooth.

Some of the karma for masking and vaxxing is instant. In my state of Illinois, the state’s Tyrant in Chief has gotten himself backed into a corner. When groups like my Speakeasy Illinois quietly went around the mandates by solely patronizing patriotic, freedom-loving stores and establishments, the big woke retailers found themselves fighting for a shrinking customer pool in a bad economic recession. Presto change-o, suddenly the mask mandate expired and if you showed your vaccination card, you could suddenly shop at all the places almost like it was 2019. Little did the woke retailers realize that many of us would never walk into their stores again, as we did not wish to engage in any forms of Stockholm Syndrome style lovemaking with our abusers. There was also the problem of filtering each person at the woke retailer’s front door for their vaccine card, which is a violation of his or her Constitutional rights as well as inconvenient and difficult. The karma for the wokesters is increasingly empty stores — any retail CEO interested in this phenomenon should plug in the terms Carson Pirie Scott, Venture, or Zayre into a search engine — and the rise of alternative markets that don’t invade their customer’s medical privacy. Maskers now find themselves in the position of the modern day Nazi and his swastika. Sure, he can wear the symbol, but it automatically marginalizes him as an extremist. If you have hatred in your heart, it’s probably not a good idea to wear it on your sleeve.

Broken Hearts

Speaking of hearts, myocarditis is a known side effect of getting the MRNA inoculation. I think the vaccine attacks their hearts because of their heartlessness when push came to shove during the peak of the Corona panic. Sadly, the worst myocarditis is afflicting teenage boys, which speaks of blood sacrifice and marks over doors that had the opposite effect than the one intended. The horrible part of bad karma is that it acts like a grenade. It’s messy and non-specific. How many Professional Managerial Class snobs sneered and wished death on people for shopping mask free in stores alongside the masked and fearful? Though correlation is not causation, there could be a connection with the subsequent visitation of the Death Angel upon the sons of the sinners.

The death of the Christian Church is one of the scarier convulsions of the banquet of consequences. While Christian lions such as Artur Pawlowski are persecuted for doing what Jesus would do, fake Christians huddle fearfully and sparsely in their often virtual, always socially-distanced pews. As a religious person who believes in Jesus Christ but by no means exclusively worships him, I can think of no better way to anger a god than to supplant his worship with an egregore or worse, a demon. In 2020 and 2021, Christians clearly replaced the worship of Jesus with that of Coronachan. If one shall know them by their fruits, we have only to look at churches that are still forcing congregants to wear the Satanic symbol of the mask as well as the Mark of the Beast in the form of the vaccine. For two years straight on Christ’s birthday and resurrection days, Christians pretended their god mattered as they conveniently failed to take their religion back from a disease that kills fewer people than some seasonal flus.

Let Them Eat Bugs

Masks are a virtue signal that say "I've got mine, Jack!" meaning they signify the wearer as a person who believes it's OK for large corporations to benefit while the entire economy and the real people who need it crumbles. Masks are the symbol of the belief that communism in the form of eternal welfare checks can sustain a country. They are the sigil of those content to fiddle while Rome burns. Despite the baaing to the contrary of their wearers, masks are the ultimate way to say "I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY, you deserve to starve, peasant!" Ultimately, the joke is on the one who thinks the hatred behind the mask is without blowback. Anyone who believes in the mask is subject to the karma of the mask, and it hardly matters if they understand the symbolism behind it.

In brief, Sun Tzu talks about two things in this chapter: the importance of getting in and out quickly if there is going to be combat and knowing to mine the enemy for resources instead of one's own forces.

One and Done

Never, says Sun Tzu, should you involve your armies in a protracted, long series of campaigns. "One who excels in employing the military does not conscript the people twice or transport provisions a third time." Either make war quick and efficient or don't bother, which is to say Sun Tzu feels about war like I have always felt about shopping.

A great example of the abject failure of a long campaign is the measures that have been taken against the economic damage of COVID shutdowns, otherwise known as stimulus checks. The war would have been over had government and the mainstream media taken a different turn in 2020. COVID, a disease which at its most lethal kills far fewer people than cancer or diabetes any given year, could have been exposed as a nothingburger as early as April 2020. Instead, we Americans were peppered with a fusillade of "free" money, the cost of which is the current recession which may well become a new Great Depression. Not only was the relief badly aimed, it was a disguise for leftist government grift to fund ridiculous ventures such as modern art museums and gender reassignment surgeries in Muslim nations.

"No country ever benefitted from prolonged warfare" cautions Sun Tzu. Onlookers watching the collapse of the American empire take note of the shambles all around us: America has been at war to exploit new territories long before 1776, and look where that got us. The leaders of China don't seem to be willing to learn from American mistakes. Hell-bent on becoming the next Great World Power, they have gone to war with both their own citizenry and their land, raking both over the coals in the name of Progress. The greedy CCP takes paving paradise to put up a parking lot to a whole new level: the ghost city. Ghost cities are the eerie vision of China at war with itself, gaming and cannibalizing the strength of its own people in order to display the ever-less-convincing trompe d'loeil version of power.

For All The Young People Out There: A Warning

To take it down to a more personal level, I would advise any person considering college right now to heed Sun Tzu's advice in this chapter, and that is to make college short and sweet. College, now more than ever, is a war to cheat you (and this includes your parents and your future self) out of as much money as possible for a tiny scrap of education you probably won't be able to use. Personally, I had to invent my job as a music teacher after the long fight to graduate with a Bachelor's of Music in 1995. Nobody else I know teaches in their field. My high school friend who got a Musical Theater degree ended up translating German textbooks. Another art degreed friend ended up in retail management. Yet another had a degree in Communications, whatever the hell that means, and had every job from car rentals to banking. Most of the people I started musical college with did not make it to year four. The college was gleeful to rob them of their money in exchange for no degree and a bunch of debt, of that I am sadly confident. Not that they could use the degree anyway. If you go to college, do it as quickly as possible. Or just don't go. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken a couple years at my local community college or in this day an age, a cheaper online college, and then finished the degree while already working as a private music teacher, for instance teaching out of my parent's home or driving to student's homes. What I would not do would be to obtain a Masters or a PhD. College is such a racket these days that I think most people should steer clear of it, lest they be trapped in the unending cycle of undischargeable debt by the time they are my age.

When Empires Overreach

"The State is impoverished when it transports provisions far off." The more I see of the decaying American Empire, the more I understand the genius of medieval Japan. Isolationism has its benefits. Staying local concentrates power.

Speaking of staying home, one of the primary reasons the salary class embraced the Coronapocalypse with such enthusiasm was because it put an end to the supercommutes of a majority of its members. A supercommuter is a person who commutes an hour or more to work each way. Supercommuting is a way of life for the working poor and lower middle classes, but over the years it crept into salary class life as well. Unlike the salary classes, the working poor and lower middle classes did not get to stay at home past the initial months of the Plandemic (if they got to stay at home at all) because their jobs involved "essential" activities such as driving a truck or working a cash register at the grocery store or more typically they could not afford a hiatus in pay.

To this day, unionized Chicago teachers have refused to step back into their classrooms, ostensibly because they're scared of COVID. Yeah, right. It has nothing to do with chaotic schools as babysitting operations/low security prisons for materialistic, shiftless, violent young adults with no better place to be and chips on their shoulders.

For the average salary class woman who actually loved her husband, the Coronapocalypse represented the first break the poor guy had gotten since his college days. The man who barely graced his family with his presence every other weekend suddenly was not a ghost anymore. All those business trips, golf games, business dinners, and supercommutes got cancelled. Suddenly the Big Cheese breadwinner was home, real, and involved with the children he sired. Isolation has its benefits.

Every person who has the luxury of working from home saves a ton of money: travel of any sort is expensive and time consuming. A long commute, Sun Tzu would say, impoverishes our State.

My issue with the above teachers and salary class telecommuters is their dishonesty. If only they would just admit it: they like having three extra hours a day and getting paid the same amount of money. Instead they give us a steaming dish of sanctimony with sides of fear porn and mask theater. Increasingly, we see peeks at a scheme that made salary class lives more pleasant and comfortable by design with little thought for the human expense.

Starve and Plunder Your Enemy 101: How Much Is Too Much?

"Thus the wise general will secure foodstuffs from his enemy." The salary classes have done this, except the enemy was the corporations they work for and/or draw stock benefits from in a parasite/host relationship. The salary class finally managed to turn the tables with COVID. Instead of the salariman or salariwoman being drained of vitality by his or her long commute and grueling office environment, the flow of the company's resources changed direction. The etheric power at home is now isolated in a bubble of apparent safety and not fed upon by a parasitic boss at the end of a long train or auto commute. The trouble here is that by reversing the flow of etheric resources, several albatrosses have been created. One is the empty office: what to do with the giant, empty commercial space where office workers used to congregate? What about the surrounding economies, such as the restaurants that served the office workers? What of the economies that had little or nothing to do with the office workers, such as Broadway entertainers or the little chess club that barely eked out an existence in the best of times? Starving the enemy and forcing his resources to flow to you stops making sense when you wake up and realize you've made a *glass factory of the land you intended to colonize. Just saying.

Sun Tzu suggests we assimilate our enemy and (eventually) treat them well -- it worked for Genghis Khan! Such a strategy avoids the blundering idiocy I mention in the above paragraph. Treat your client states well. Don't be like China, the US, or the salary class: overextended, thoughtless, doomed.

*"glass factory" is American slang for the aftermath of detonating a nuclear bomb

https://www.bitchute.com/video/WWsu98TTNnh9/

The people who have already gotten the vaccine are in for one hell of a ride.

The Professional Managerial Class is desperately trying to keep their Panicdemic and all of its accompanying shutdowns alive. Recently, the mainstream media announced a new 70% more deadly strain of Coronavirus was on the prowl, prompting a new round of closures and cancellations that will shove more tiers of the former middle class into destitution. And for what? Covid kills .03 percent or less for those under the age of 60, so increasing the amount of deaths to a whopping half a percent via a "70% more deadly" strain doesn't exactly make it formidable.

The New Useless Eaters

To protect a sliver of the elderly via dubious methods of solitary confinement in nursing homes and hospitals (a.k.a. forcing them to die alone because the State has clandestinely labelled them as Useless Eaters), the government has collapsed the world economy, driving millions into poverty and causing third world starvation. Back in the first world, suicide and domestic abuse statistics are skyrocketing, crime in the cities is ballooning, businesses like mine are folding, and unemployment is off the charts. The only people who are still doing well are the Professional Managerial Class and their one percent rulers, smugly virtue signaling from on high. They are, for now, still making plenty of money, happily sitting at home as their children muddle through online lessons at school, some more proficiently than others. Jeff Bezos is nearly a trillionaire. In Wuhan, the economy has never been better and they’re partying mask-free like it’s 1999. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving.

Psychotic Break

Despite a fortune seemingly cemented in place that heavily indicates a few more years of a communist Chinese feeding frenzy disguised as monarchy, the Professional Managerial Class is in the midst of a psychotic break. They are the spoiled children that got everything they wanted for Christmas and then found that none of those toys filled the gaping pit of emptiness inside. They were mentally ill to begin with (I’m not supposed to use that terminology according to the Social Justice movement, because I could hurt the feelings of schizophrenics) and that mental illness is worsening by the hour. The preferred leftist outcome of the 2020 American presidential election was supposed to heal all wounds — Facebook and Twitter still ring with calls for unity while spewing vitriol at anyone who disagrees with shutdowns and masks or is of the wrong skin color — but it is clear to see the wounds are still there, itching and seeping under a thin bandage. The PMC acts no saner than it did in 2016 when the Orange Man played salvage shop and began to drain the swamp. Now, with Orange Man apparently vanquished, the Left is doing what it does best: eating its own. The mainstream media does what it can to stick fingers in the dam of evidence against its drooling, senile, child molesting President Elect, but there’s only so much you can do on a slow news day. The facts on the ground are that the President Elect is easy to loathe, and since the mainstream media has pushed nothing but loathing for the last five years, old patterns die hard. Trump was the goose that laid the Cheeto-colored eggs and he’s no longer laying. Of course all eyes now turn from him to the pathetic travesty about to take the Iron Throne.

Enter Shame

The Professional Managerial Class and its defender aspirants marinated in pure hatred for the last five years and they now hilariously want to skip away to a unicorn fart world of love, light, and non-TERF BIPOC feminism where we can pretend it never happened. If we only accept the Great Reset, coerced inoculations for an impotent nothingburger flu, we can all be happy and the Progressive flying car utopia will arrive on schedule. The PMC have yet to realize you cannot eat, live, and breathe hatred and then turn tail when the consequences of being hateful are plopped on your doorstep. That’s why they’re so triggered when I say the word “shame.”

The PMC have a problem with shame, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. I know this because I was born and raised as a PMC. I know how they operate underneath the hood.

How Freaking Double Dog Dare You!

The Greta Thunberg phenomenon is meant to shame us all into accepting the young scold's warped vision of green utopia. Thunberg, in her ocean-sailing, vegan convenience food eating, autistic naïveté said "How Dare You!" without the faintest understanding of her own hypocrisy. The trouble with shame is that it cannot be effectively dealt by those who do not live as they preach. Nearly starving yourself to death at age ten because you are a spoiled brat is not the same thing as the ten year old who picks up trash in the forest preserve because he wants to inspire others to conserve its beauty and majesty. If the trash collector kid talks about conservation, I'm willing to listen. If a rich kid who accepted a "free" Tesla who played hooky from school and made her mother quit a once-in-several-lifetimes career of professional opera singing because of whatever piss was infecting her cornflakes that week, I am not inclined to lend such a person my ears.

The Burden and Karma of Responsibility

On one of JMG’s blogs, I had a Covid fearmonger trying to go around with me because I danced around the idea of the s word that rhymes with blame. Her fixation was on the idea of responsibility, how I had better not consider her responsible if I infected grandma with COVID by not self-isolating and wearing a mask until my own natural death. She (or he) displayed a transparent yearning for me to feel shame for being wrongity-wrong, which I would of course feel when my loved ones caught COVID and died horrible failed double lung transplant related deaths. I found this interesting because of the shadow being projected.

The thing is, the PMC and all of the fearmongers who still encourage lockdowns and masks are directly responsible for the consequences of the lockdowns. The reason I have not played nicely with lockdowns and masks from the beginning is because I do not want the karma of those who have blindly followed orders all this time. My ill-wisher is already responsible for the death of 11 year old Adan Llanos, who shot himself during a virtual school session. She is responsible for the terror of my elderly neighbor, a kind old man who died surrounded by strangers in a hospital bed a few weeks ago instead of his wife and grown children. She is responsible for the droves of addicts who fell back into addiction, given nothing but idle time and no support groups. She is responsible for the small towns that lost their only profitable company because of lack of demand and all of the families thrown into poverty as a result. She is responsible for a billion missed rites of passage: weddings, proms, funerals, mitzvahs, quinceaneras, graduations, first kisses. She is responsible for her own cowardly escapism into the Petit Trianon of Netflix and takeout food while others literally starved. I believe she will pay for it someday, though it won’t be up to deplorable like me to punish her. Justice for her is up to the gods and I am not privy to viewing their schedules in advance.

Meanwhile, she is a septic tank of PMC mindlessness, a condition I wouldn’t wish on anyone because I used to live there and it sucks. She can only pretend to feel sorry for the disenfranchised because THAT IS HOW SHE IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL. If she were just to admit she doesn’t care because it doesn’t affect her personally (not my circus, not my monkeys) it would make her into a monster. This is why she and her ilk are so quick to accuse anyone suffering from the lockdowns as a grandma-killer: projecting the monstrous shadow. If she were to admit she disliked the idea of my elderly neighbor dying alone and abandoned but also admitted she wasn’t willing to lift a finger to help if it meant sacrificing her own privileges, it would make her guilty. Her guilt might cause her to feel shame.

I know how the PMC mind races at night. I know how full it is of media tidbits, popular jargon, and peccadilloes. In the current climate of fear porn, soon to be declassé Trump Derangement Syndrome, and cognitive dissonance, it’s a thousand times worse than when I called myself a PMC. The PMC are getting plenty of rest these days but they still can’t sleep. When your imagination has been polluted and you are in complete and denial about the ways in which it is polluted, that pollution still must discharge in various ways. Trump was the outlet/target for the steady stream of PMC foulness in the US. Now the sewer has backed up, hence psychotic break, descent into depression, alcoholism, drugs, TikTok, online gaming and Netflix binges.

You Watching Me Watching Me

The PMC woman was, like me, trained to be vain and to simultaneously deny that vanity as a sin. She is always picturing herself from an outsider’s view. We women are cultivated to view ourselves remotely from birth so that we can better compete with other women. The urge to compete is the urge to consume. Grasping why Madison Avenue would want us this way should be obvious.

Postmodern Original Sin

Rich women are saddled with this self-viewing compulsion in the extreme. Being born rich means you will constantly percolate set ideas in your pretty head: that you don’t actually have the right to exist, that you are ugly, that you’re a parasite, a hustler, and a grifter because of the privileges you enjoy. The Korean film about class warfare, Parasite, comes to mind: we are never explicitly told if the real parasites are the rich or the poor.

The more privileges you enjoy, the more shame and guilt you must feel. In order to consume more product to ostensibly better yourself, you are made to feel guilty and worthless, especially while young. Women have different reactions to being conditioned this way; most don’t think about it for one second and would blink at you stupidly if you pointed it out. For some, there is extreme dieting and dysmorphia, starving oneself to become perfect, beautiful, and therefore worthy of your status. For others, angrily inventing a list of oppressions to become a professional victim assuages the feeling of guilt. Some become party girls, attempting to have fun while becoming human tragedies of addiction and codependence. Rarely do they strike at the root, which is of course the way they were conditioned to (not) think.

There are workarounds, of course, but the fearmongering PMC is not willing to look at them at this point. One would be taking a hard look at the toxicity of an exceedingly comfortable life. Another would be admitting that the economic prognosis of living standards for one’s grandchildren is going to be bleak, especially if said grandchildren are under the age of ten. To truly deal with their shame hangups, the PMC would first have to admit that shame is playing a role and second stop projecting the shadow upon others in the form of blame and finger pointing. Mostly I see the PMC clinging onto the privilege raft down the DeNile River until it finally throws them off. They will only be dragged from Versailles kicking and screaming.

This morning, I found myself sharing the sob story of my business with the pharmacist who compounds my cat's anti-constipation medicine. Since mid-2020, little Kiki (LOL she's actually huge, around 20 pounds) has needed artificial assistance in the form of an oral medication called Cisapride in order to poop. I suspect that Cisapride is secretly manufactured by artisan elf-monks in the high Sierras out of solid gold that tarnishes when touched by air, because it costs $60 for a 30mg bottle.

I just happened to get the head pharmacist on the phone, and he was exceptionally kind when I told him that I was a small business owner down on her luck because of the Covidapocalypse and $40 was the difference between me and two week's worth of groceries. Though he gave me a discount on Kiki's medication, I don't want a discount.

I want to be able to afford my cat's medication.

Last year at this time, I was doing great. I had money coming in from my usual side work -- recording vocals, PDF sheet music. Plus my music lesson studio had a line out the door. I'm extremely good at what I do. There isn't a singer who walks into my door who isn't a better singer in 6 months time. I also teach piano and guitar, and I know I'm exceptionally good at teaching those as well: as adults, my grown-up ex-students don't stop playing their instruments long after lessons with me are over.

Enough about me and my business. I'm one of the lucky small business owners. I still have a business to come back to. If I owned a dance studio, a gift shop, or a restaurant, forget it. Tracy Walker is (was?) a hairstylist in Alberta, Canada who did everything right. She's on the verge of losing her house, which will displace her, her husband, and her diabetic brother who depends on her for care.

Tracy managed to create a situation that I've always wanted but couldn't make happen: she runs her business out of the bottom floor of her house, which has been converted into a storefront. It seems the idiots running things in her neck of the woods are of the same breed as the ones in Illinois, because she is unable to do business under a second lockdown. Here's the thing: even though Tracy has made the decision to stay open against the lockdown order, much like I have done, there's not much one can do if only half the clients are willing to walk through the door. Fear is powerful, and Tracy, like me and so many other small business owners, can't do much if people are too scared to be in the same room as each other. There's also the not-small factor of economic collapse, which is cascading through the middle class right now and crushing people's abilities to afford luxuries such as meals out, karate lessons, cosmetic dentistry, hair cut & color, and exorbitantly-priced pet medications.

I don't want government handouts. There are people who should benefit from government handouts: all of those old, infirm, and chronically diseased people should be able to access the money they need. Me? I am of sound mind and able body and I want to work. If I were to come into a great fortune tomorrow, I wouldn't close my Studio. I would still go to work five days a week, though it would probably be via chauffeur as I hate driving.

There is a silver lining to the cloud: Notice there were no lines outside Best Buy this year and nobody got killed in a Walmart stampede on Black Friday. This will be the least commercialized Christmas we've had for a long time, and not because Big Retail wanted it that way, but because Big Government cut off its nose to spite its face in the form of self-induced financial collapse. There is a lot of garbage that won't end up in ocean and future landfills because there won't be as many toys bought this year. The desperation is palpable in Target and Dollar Tree -- I remember seeing Christmas decorations up in September because they all knew this would be a terrible year no matter how early they rolled out the BUYBUYBUY propaganda. I hope we never have a successfully commercialized Christmas again. I hope this year wipes out the frantic, Madison Avenue-driven urge to buy other people's love via material detritus in many individual souls.

I don't want money. I want bravery. I want people to stop following mask orders. I went into Aldi yesterday and I didn't wear my mask. When a shelf stocker said "Ma'am, put on your mask", I sweetly replied, "Oh my goodness, I must have forgotten. Thank you so much for reminding me." I put the mask on and as soon as I was around the corner, I took it off again. I am going to stop wearing masks when I enter large chain stores, though for smaller places and local chains, I will comply with mask orders so they don't get in trouble. How sad that it's up to a 4'11" inch woman to stand up to tyrants. I guess it goes to show how few manly men there are in the suburbs -- I married one of the only ones who can wield a hammer, a paintbrush, and a saw competently. I suppose I enjoyed myself a bit, gaslighting that poor Aldi employee in such a sarcastic manner. I don't usually like confrontation and will do anything to avoid it, but this is war, make no mistake.

We may be at peak Coronapocalypse, because Buzzfeed finally featured an article about people who were diligent savers who were wiped out by the panicdemic. In other words, a good seven months after every lower middle class person realized that shutting down every restaurant, bar, concert hall, and sports arena would decimate an already fragile economy, the geniuses at Buzzfeed managed to put together the puzzle pieces. Yes, collapse ripples from the bottom up. Yes, the financially responsible types who save every spare penny are feeling the pain right now. Yes, the Professional Managerial Class is next in line.

They Only Wanted Rest

I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.

Insomnia Takes Its Toll

What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.

I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.

Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.

Enter the Panicdemic

The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.

The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.

The Declaration of War

The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.

The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.

I am a braver person than I used to be. At age 16, I stood idly by when my best friend at the time was being denigrated within our own vicious clique of backstabbing frenemies. Frightened of “everyone” not liking me, I failed to defend her. We weren’t friends after that. I did all sorts of other awful things as a tween and teen that were a result of moral turpitude and general spinelessness. Like the Rush song proclaims, by choosing not to decide I still had made a choice. My young existence was a constant battle of sinking to the lowest level of my Midwestern Nice, Just Do As You’re Told, Don’t Rock The Boat programming while battling the cognitive dissonance that whispered true tales of my sniveling cowardice into the opposite ear.

Bravery, like Joan of Arc, dies hard. Once the path of bravery is forged, there is no turning back. Perhaps knowing this deep down is what scared me away from brave acts as a young person. Bravery also has its rewards. For me, it has meant having my own wholly independent business, marrying the person I wanted instead of the ones who had money and connections, and various odd rescues and rehabilitations I could not have managed if I had a smaller set of cojones. My bravery has only become extremely difficult to live down in the post-COVID era where cowards have run amok. The universal sign of the coward, the mask, is mandatory in my state of Illinois via the executive order of the current governor, the tax-evading billionaire scion of a hotel empire named J.B. Pritzker. This order was ruled unconstitutional by a court in Clay County, Illinois, but that was but one civil court. On Tuesday, October 20, he crippled the Illinois economy by closing restaurants just as they and the rest of the small business economy were showing faint signs of life. The cowards are currently still winning in my corner of the world.

Cowardice is The Blob

The problem with cowardice is its amorphousness. Cowardice does not stay in its lane and neither do the consequences of cowardice. Mandatory shut down orders were not supposed to take a wrecking ball to small businesses (or were they?), but this is exactly what they did. If large corporations were looking for the perfect way to crush their local, small business competitors in a wholesale orgy of state, city, and county government-backed destruction, they could not have found a better way of doing it than COVID lockdowns. Walmart and Amazon are doing fine. Small businesses like mine are not. I am a music teacher. I have run a successful, one person teaching studio for the last 24 years of my life. I haven’t had this few students since I began fresh out of college. If things stay the same way they are right now through 2021, I will have to close my business. For this reason, I have began to push back against COVID mentality. I slip off the mask when I am in stores. I don’t require the mask inside my business. My protests against mask-wearing have resulted in the alienation of decades-long friends. One former fan of my books took it upon himself to wish disease and death upon me and my family.

Cowardice is amorphous. Every person who wears a mask in public, including me, is a living symbol of submission to an insidious groupthink that is barreling us towards the edge of a new Great Depression. I have begun to push back because it is finally time for normal people to draw the line in the sand. If more people do not act like me, I will lose my livelihood like millions of other Americans. I will join the bread line. I don’t want it to come to that, so I push.

I mentioned that I believe the consequences of cowardice are amorphous. I am also pushing back because I don’t want the karma of those who perpetuated COVID panic. This karma is no small thing. To understand how bad is the looming karma of COVID panic pushers, we first have to look at the ways they have benefited under the current reign of fear.

Curse of the American Salaryman

There’s a certain type of house one encounters frequently out here in the suburbs. The style is boxy and superficially old-fashioned. Typically there are four to five bedrooms on the top story, a two to four car garage, and an association-controlled, postage stamp lot. A facade of fake brick on the front and grey-beige siding on the other sides is common. Inside the house, you’ll find an average American family. There are one to four children (any more is considered a bit weird, but it has been known to happen) and both parents work. Only in the very largest versions of the house can one parent, usually the wife, afford to stay home. The nucleus of these neighborhoods is the local school, which is nearly the sole reason for the insanely high property taxes and home prices all around it. The same cookie cutter houses way out in the country would cost half as much or less, but then there wouldn’t be a population willing to move into them because the school wouldn’t exist out in the sticks. In order to afford one of these suburban boxes of ticky-tacky, you need a combined household income of 100K at the entry level. Not only is this required to get a mortgage, you also need a bunch of extra stuff like insurance, cars, and a family wireless plan.

There is an odd acknowledgement that suburban life is a living hell. In the film Vivarium, a young married couple visit a new construction housing complex with thoughts of a potential purchase. They find themselves stranded in a bland, sunny subdivision called Yonder where all of the IKEA-ish houses are one of two or three models, one of which sports a plaque: Number 9. Quickly learning they are imprisoned in the subdivision, they journey down its eerily empty streets that stretch into infinity. They set fire to Number 9 and do everything possible to escape, all of which is in vain. A package arrives with a baby in it, which the couple reluctantly adopts. Months drag by and the child grows freakishly fast. The young couple, deprived of other people outside of their alien, energy-draining child, quickly grow apart. The husband becomes obsessed with digging a hole in the astroturfed backyard as the wife’s life becomes hopeless, child-centered, automatic drudgery. I won’t give away any spoilers save that the film does not end well.

Vivarium is literally a film about the loathsomeness of the suburbs. The salaryman is the young husband, who digs a hole everyday — obviously symbolic of salary class work — and kills himself before his time to do it. Meanwhile, the young wife is saddled with a completely disloyal, non-human child who throws violent tantrums when his routine isn’t followed to the letter, which to my mind was a subtle way of mentioning the unmentionable: the tyranny of raising a severely autistic child. Isolation and sameness turn what looks pretty enough from the outside into a living hell.

Though it’s not all terrible, salary class life is mostly awful. Like Vivarium, going outside is pointless. There is no connection with nature, only endless suburban sprawl and a job mining astroturf. There is no connecting with other people — salary class work is largely a dog eat dog endeavor. It is empty, hollow serfdom in the service of moronic, capitalist Montezumas who brag to other CEOs about their latest private jet vacation. The salaryman rarely sees his loved ones. His work is a constant game of musical chairs. When another chair bites the dust, he is forced to take on all of the duties of his former co-worker with no additional pay or benefits. His commute? Brutal. Or at least it was before COVID came along.

Escape Via Throwing The Lower Classes Under The Bus

COVID gave the salary class the escape valve they were looking for. For the salaryman, it brought the first opportunity his lot has had in nearly a hundred years to get a regular good night’s sleep. In the case of people my age, Generation X, it has provided relief in the form of suspended college loan payments. Many salary class kids have never spent quality family time with their parents, having previously been preoccupied with a 60 hour week schedule of school, sports, clubs, and lessons. Salary class wives have been granted time with their husbands and children, and for many, a much-deserved moment of appreciation for all they handle while their husband is out busting heavies at the office. The army of working salary class women, like their male counterparts, find it much easier to telecommute and order takeout than to try to do it all. Being a working mom stinks. You’re saddled with the responsibilities of Atlas — you not only win the bread, you have the thankless job of having to make it into healthy sandwiches. To add insult to injury, you’re the one who cleans up the dishes afterward!

For these reasons and more, the salary class is still clinging to endless lockdowns and mandatory masks with everything it has got. Never mind that small business entrepreneurs quickly going the way of the dodo — we need endless funny money so the salaried suburban Costco shoppers can afford their La Croix Pamplemousse Sparkling Water (the snooty LaCroix brand was founded by a Wisconsinite, by the way) and their bulk frozen cauliflower rice. Everyone must wear a mask, including solo bike riders, because there must be the appearance of compliance with fear porn culture at all costs. If you have the remotest aspirations to the salary class — like the former fan of my books who is dirt poor — you had better toe the line.

The salary class and its aspirants do not like to be told “no”, and when someone like me says the N-O word, the reaction is hysteria and death threats. No one is more used to this than Donald Trump. Donald Trump swooped in like Krampus to squash their dreams of Progress in the form of fully automated luxury welfare communism in 2016. They have thrown the most epic of tantrums ever since.

The salary class, as vacuous and detached as the in-dwellers of Versaille in the latter half of the 18th century, has failed to understand the fragility of its bubble. They have already popped much of the frothy economy that dropped a yoga studio on every corner and towns with 13 car dealerships within the same five mile radius. Just as Louis XVI didn’t connect the dots between his own attitudes towards the peasantry with the ill will that separated his head from his body at the guillotine, the salary class cannot comprehend that what’s good for them is not benefiting the lower working classes. The salary classite believes that since she can stay home watching Netflix, so can every else. Let 'em eat cake! The idea that she herself could end up disenfranchised or homeless due to her own disastrous cluelessness doesn’t occur to her, because up until now, there was no limit to the amount she could screw up and have someone (family, friends, government) come in and fix it for her. Now that the salary class and its COVID lockdowns have messed up the economy royally, she does not understand that she is next. She has thrown entrepreneurs like me under the bus and does not see how close the wheels are skidding towards her own well-heeled feet.

What's Next For Fearmongers

I walked away from the social justice left because I think they've got a tsunami of bad karma about to crash upon their shores. I ran a vegan meetup group for ten years. I ended it somewhere around July 2020. Vegans are some of the most toxic Trump Derangement sufferers. Like it or not, my preference to avoid the consumption of all animal products gives the social justice left the idea that I am on their side. I am not. I am a patriot and I'm willing to die for the cause of free speech; they feel differently. They think it is perfectly fine to wish harm (lately in the form of COVID) on Trump and his supporters. I do not wish harm on Nancy Pelosi or the Democrats despite their blatant hypocrisy and obstructionism. I don't wish harm on Hunter Biden, who is blatantly guilty of treason. I don't wish harm on Ghislaine Maxwell, proven child groomer and trafficker. I don't do that anymore because it helps no one, including me. What I do instead is try to act in a way they currently don't seem to be capable of acting: where they freak out, I am calm. When they start flinging bad intentions around, I wish for them to be blessed, as they truly need it.

I think the social justice left and everyone who empowered it via their fear mongering is about to get served. For some, Trump Derangement will be the reason they open their wrists into warm bathwater, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses. It's a classic double-bind: if he wins, the Great Satan has conquered. If he loses, their anti-populist cheating apparatus will have succeeded, leaving them with no boogeyman to resist. The reserves of spite they depend upon for sustenance will have to bubble up from elsewhere. Either way, I believe the consequences rolling out over the next couple of years will be severe for them. I believe TDS sufferers everywhere will find their support networks disintegrated, and their streams of taken-for-granted comfort and wealth interrupted, perhaps permanently. This is only natural law at work: they who spent the last five years asking the Universe to visit misfortune, disease, and death to visit Trump and his supporters will find misfortune, disease, and death barging into their domiciles. They made a grave mistake to wish misfortune on regular people simply for the crime of disagreeing with them.

So many of these people haven't the faintest clue how to be poor. They are not ready for the death of a breadwinner or for a sudden cutoff from family and inheritance money. Making a living has been mouse find cheese to them. They have lived beyond their means all this time, and the last thing they are is Stoic about what they cannot control.

I will be saying nothing to them. I have cut them off; I do not donate to them the privilege of my company. They are welcome to read this blog if they want to know what I think. Nevertheless, if I did say something to my former social justice pals, it would be this: "After spending five years lobbing your own turds at the opposition, don't expect for your yard to be clean and your hands to smell like roses."

Of course I could be wrong. The privileged clingers-on to masks and convenient anti-white race baiting could slide once again, slaloming around the hard limits and sucking off the grift from the same rackets as usual: Big Education, Big Pharma, Big Tech. Only time will tell what new egregores lurk in the shadows, waiting to ride the next wave of mass consciousness. The one thing I do pretty much know is that we should all hang on to our seats, because the next couple of weeks are going to be a rough ride.

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Hi Everyone, thank you in advance for your comments. Please refrain from commenting with profanity: four letter words that start with f, s, or c will result in an unpublished comment. Damn and rhymes with witch are OK.

The Professional Managerial Class (heretofore referred to as the PMC) has committed suicide, it just doesn't know it yet. This turn of events baffles me as much as anyone else: Why did they do it? Are they ever going to realize what they've done? The Coronapocalypse was the instrument of self-strangulation, and since it wasn't adequate to the task, the victim employed arson, rioting, looting, and murder in order to complete the job.

If we compare the PMC's condition to acute anorexia, it is a case of preferring the condition of death to that of being fat. In the PMC's case, the excess weight that must be ruthlessly cut is populism, and in the US, evil flab is represented by Donald Trump.

Not Ready To Die

The PMC is still living in a fairy tale they don't understand is over. For instance, there's a woman I know who is a perfectly pleasant snob. She lives in a gargantuan house on an estate size lot. Her husband is the money of the family. Almost all of her energy goes into scrubbing every surface of her mammoth home (her kids are grown up) and tidying for imaginary guests as she is largely antisocial. She is not formally diagnosed with the disorder as far as I know or care, but I suspect she has OCD in the form of compulsive cleaning. Her husband's career is tied to the success of the travel industry. In other words, they are in the unenviable position of an endangered species.

There's a PMC couple living in on the West Coast with two children. The husband is in asset management and his wife is a nurse. Family money is in play as one of the grandparents heavily subsidizes all of children and grandchildren. The kids have turned out to be disasters in most respects. The nurse is only person in her extended family who doesn't have a raging addiction to alcohol or worse, and she struggles against the tide of disaster that is the family she married into. Her husband cannot cook, cannot fix the sink, has never built so much as a wooden box, and doesn't know how to operate a lawnmower despite the fact his house sits on a lawn. To top it off, he is recently unemployed and there is no job for him to which to return. Unemployment subsidies will run out shortly and she is pregnant with her third child.

Another PMC I know depends on stock market dividends to survive. At least he can cook and fix a leaky faucet.

The PMC's mistake is the notion they can subsist on the post-COVID government gravy train forever. Because they live in an artificial, fragile bubble, they don't understand the value of practical skills or prepping. Until COVID hit, preppers were looked down upon as deplorable conspiracy theorists. When the S did hit TF, the inept former non-preppers hoarded toilet paper.

The PMC has no idea how to live simply, modestly, or sustainably. They don't grow tomatoes. They don't save seeds. They don't fix their own sinks. They're in trouble, but it is hard to pity them, because:

1. They are squarely to blame for the current predicament
2. They don't exist in a vacuum

Be Very, Very Afraid

By deliberately crashing the economy via the COVID overreaction and then extending the destruction via mask wearing, social distancing, and the endorsement of riots, the PMC has waged a terror campaign in order to maintain its rapidly-diminishing chokehold upon Western civilization. The PMC thought it would usher in the era of fully automated luxury communism via its mighty plandemic and wound up conjuring its own end in the form of a fetal Dark Age.

Destruction being what it is, the consequences of PMC clownery fall upon everyone. Make no mistake: the person who still pushes mandatory mask-wearing and the illegality of hugs and handshakes is directly responsible for the millions of businesses that have gone down the tubes and for the untold numbers of addicts who have relapsed, children who have been trafficked, and depressed people who have killed themselves out of despair. They have yet to deal with the full load of bad karma they've brought down upon themselves. There is just too much of it to arrive at once short of a large asteroid hitting the Earth.

There are five main industries the PMC has destroyed. They are travel, insurance, entertainment, education, and medicine. In an odd act of non-NIMBYism, the PMC brought the consequences of its actions into its own association-maintained backyard. That's why it has mystified me. I'm not shocked the PMC became literal terrorists and burned down buildings and killed people (Antifa and BLM). I just didn't think they would end themselves like this.

Travel

Travel is one industry that I believe will return within a decade, though I suspect it won't be in such a grandiose form. Airlines were already prone to bankruptcy before the Nothingburger Flu got blown out of proportion. What happens now after hotels in big cities can be commandeered at any time by maniac mayors as addict asylums? What happens to luxury stores when nobody wants to shop there because their contents are considered "reparations" by crazed BLM lunatics, to be reconnoitered by lethal force if necessary? Much of the travel industry existed based on the pretense that businesspeople needed to put their butts in chairs for endless in-person meetings. That is clearly over. The salt in the wound is travel being harder and knowing you can be kicked out of the country (or worse, be quarantined inside it) the next time a severe flu season is used as an excuse for political power overreach.

Insurance

The insurance industry only works if there is an economy to support it. When everyone and their uncle has an insurance claim because of an omni-disaster, the insurance company cannot pay claims. For instance, in Minneapolis where Democratic leadership enabled rioters to burn, loot, and murder with impunity, business owners are quickly running into brick walls when they try to get the money they paid in for that "just in case" scenario. There are only so many GoFundMes one can employ to save a repeatedly looted and burnt business. Like the salon owner who allegedly set up Nancy Pelosi by catching her without a mask at a government-forbidden hair appointment, at some point you have to cut your losses as a business owner and try to make a living far, far away. If every city in California wants so badly to become the next Detroit, the rest of the country cannot waste its time trying to stop it.

Entertainment

The moment of peak cringe for the entertainment industry is hard to pinpoint. I think the goofballs under the leadership of Gal Godot who banded together to sing Imagine, a song about opening borders and giving away everything you own, represent the moment where Hollywood died. I expect to see a gutting of the film and TV industries in years to come. Legacy TV and film producers, including the Disney sacred cow, can expect relentless scrutiny for pedophile activities. Heads could very well end up on pikes because of Pedogate. Professional sports killed itself via wokeness and has become a meme. Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, and Jimmy Kimmel, once adored, are now hated. Netflix has impaled itself on the Cuties stripper pole. Nobody in their right mind trusts CNN or MSNBC. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are suspected of the nastiest forms of pedophilia, thanks to Chrissy Teigen's creepy tweets revolving around getting her "pedo on" and admitting to feeling like a criminal when she watches Toddlers and Tiaras. Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen for suspicious reasons that could have to do with being accused of being a pedophile by multiple sources.

Education

This is an area where the PMC has taken a hot, steaming dump in their own living room. What does a PMC university administrator do if pensions dry up (say the university ceases to exist and its assets are sold) and they are reduced to depending on Social Security? What do tens of thousands of them do if half of all colleges and universities go out of business in the next ten years?

What has gone unsaid for many, many years is the hard fact that most Americans don't go to college in search of an education. They go so they can gain the prestige of supposedly possessing an education as indicated by a diploma. They go in order to get laid. They go in order to find someone to marry, hence the saying "She went to college for her MRS degree". They go to college in order to experience friendship, and for some that means partying and experimenting with substances. But they absolutely, positively DO NOT GO so they can be locked in a small room in solitary confinement while connected to the outside world solely via a Zoom conference and a crappy mandatory food plan from the cafeteria.

Medicine

In the US, healthcare represents 17.7 percent of the real economy. Let that sink in for a minute. Heathcare is a racket. It is founded in blind superstitions, one of which is the belief that science in its current form is infallible and incorruptible. It is only within the last decade that a significant group of Americans have routinely dared to question their doctor's advice. Documentaries like Forks Over Knives and What The Health were the first foray into questioning the medical profession's conflicts of interest via its payouts from Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Agriculture. There is still a long road to travel. On average, US medical schools offer only 19.6 hours of nutrition education over a four year university stint, according to a 2010 report in Academic Medicine. The cost of seeing a doctor for pinkeye or a routine UTI remains outrageous despite Trump gutting the Obamacare mandate. Personally, I have not had health insurance for several years and have only been able to afford it for a two year stint when my husband had employment with a company known for its great insurance benefits. In the US, one can only afford to see a doctor regularly if they are rich, which kind of defeats the purpose of health insurance, doesn't it? People like me learn to do whatever they can not to catch a cold -- we literally cannot afford to be sick. But I'm not certain I would see a doctor even if I had cancer, because I don't trust the lot of them as far as I can throw them.

So when hospitals locked down over a flu that supposedly overran them with patients, we were all left to ask why so many nurses, doctors, and other people in medical scrubs had time to choreograph and film viral Tik Tok dance videos, including one where they apparently danced while hoisting the corpse of some unfortunate soul? Why should we trust mouse-find-cheese executives in scrubs whose perks come from sleazy Big Pharma reps in expensive suits? I know nurses who were laid off because there aren't enough people in the hospital to justify them being there. Fake hospital footage from Italy was used in March to frighten Americans into believing New York was experiencing the Black Death 2.0. Yet we all know someone who put a cool million into battling cancer and died the most horrible of deaths anyway. The idea these medical "professionals" would like all of us to wear face coverings forever and for always strikes me as suspicious. Aren't they supposed to know more about the human immune system? Or are their motives purely political?

This article raises more questions than it provides answers, and for that I apologize. I am lucky to have reached a point where I am not worried about the future, not because of my advantages imaginary or otherwise, but because I legitimately cannot see a point in worrying about the things over which I have no control. I think we are in line for a hard economic and social reset that has already begun to happen, but how this will affect me or anyone else remains a mystery.

Your opinions and speculations are welcome. I thank you in advance for refraining from profanity.

Illustrator Harry Clarke's image for Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death

My sister is a nurse in Texas. She had covid. These bull***t denier post don't help a single person. They do hurt many and possibly kill some. My sister is on the front line and paying the the price. I hope all you loud mouth cowards contract covid. Karma is a beautiful thing. If you do contract it and while you are coughing up your lungs while s***ing your petty brains out...please reread all your posts. A***oles.

This post is an absolute study in ignorance and making s*** up. Bravo!! 👏🏼👏🏼

All bull***t excuses. Every. Single. One.
Yes, they are sad things, but not one of them is a reason for not masking up.
If you don't want to wear a mask, stay out of stores. And if you can't wear one for the 20 minutes you need to be in a store, then seek mental help, and in the meantime, order curbside or delivery.

This is absurd, just STFU. Yes, I do shame people who don't wear masks, because f*** you selfish a***oles. This looks like something a Trump worshipper would post, in addition to a few other posts of yours in the last couple of months. Bye Felicia!!

The above comments were sent in an attempt to force me to take down a meme I posted on social media. The meme explained to the devout mask wearer that certain people cannot wear masks because of breathing issues, sensory issues, or certain types of PTSD. These responses reveal a commonplace yet disproportionate rage. All of the above commenters are leftist former friends of mine who seek to control my thoughts and behavior via shaming.

The COVID mask does not serve its most obvious function, which is preventing suspended droplets of COVID-loaded bodily fluids from finding a contagious human target. COVID is endemic. I'm not going to explain what this means, because I am sure if you are reading this paragraph, you are already aware of how an endemic disease is the viral equivalent of wallpaper.

For those who wish to harass me like the examples above, I will warn you now that your entreaties won't be published here, so you will do best to take it elsewhere. Comments are fully moderated by me, filtered for profanity, and this site gathers the IP addresses of all who comment, whether I choose to publish them or not.

What I want to talk about is the non-physical aspects of masks and what they represent in the group subconscious. I want to peel back the layers of bluster and tough guy posturing to reveal the working guts. I want to talk about the real reasons behind the unhinged, hateful comments I received for posting an innocuous meme.

Hegemony

"We Are All In This Together" bellow the ad sloganeers. Yet who benefitted politically from the shutdowns? Which classes and types of people reaped the most benefits from a stop to all but "essential" labor? The answer: the middle and the upper classes and their aspirants. Anyone who questioned the shutdowns, like the April 16 protestors at the Michigan capitol building who wanted to go back to work, was shamed and ridiculed. Unmasked rioters like the ones who drove a UHaul to loot luxury stores in Chicago last weekend, however, have been cheered on by Black Lives Matter. We were clearly never all in this together, nevertheless, the pro-mask people figured out they could enforce the appearance of successful groupthink even though the reality was far different. That's why all those who wear masks wish to force mask-wearing on everyone else. A mask wearer's unconscious statement proclaims that he or she is benefitting from the policies designed to give us all an artificial boundary of safety -- the mask, distancing, and shutdowns -- that have all been repeatedly revealed as ineffective shams in stopping a mostly non-lethal, endemic disease. We Will All Appear To Be In This Together Whether You Agree Or Not.

Fear and paranoia have quickly turned 2020 into a lost year for funerals, weddings, graduations, concerts, and games. Whether it was the opportunity to hold your dying child's or grandpa's hand as they left this incarnation or to harmonize in a church singalong to raise money for the less fortunate, those who were paranoid about a disease with a less than 3% fatality rate cancelled it. The coddled, fearful, obedient believers helicopter-parented us all without our consent.

The mask is a muzzle to those who would speak evil or like me, attempt to go deeper into their astral plane meaning rather than examining them from the materialist, scientific standpoint where they have already failed. The mask is an astral plane symbol with a material plane set of rules to accompany it. The mask identifies its wearer as a unit of the hive mind, like a badge, armband, or special tattoo. Those who do not comply will be shamed, cancelled, forced to die outside castle walls. I am reminded of threats from Christians, "You had better repent your sins to God or you will burn in eternal Hell." Narcissistic, abusive God loves you though!

Isolation

The mask and distancing that goes with it erects an astral plane barrier to prevent potential dissenters from communicating with other people. The mask isn't meant to prevent the spread of a virus so much as it is meant to prevent the spread of ideas. Masks are often compared to condoms: only icky, low class, date-rapist skeezeballs refuse to wear them. As usual, wearing one signifies belonging to the middle and upper classes or at least aspiring to belong. In the case of sex, as someone who grew up terrified of accidentally becoming pregnant, I know that abstinence is the only way of doing this between menarche and menopause. For mask-wearers, the ideal of abstinence has its direct parallel in mandatory stay at home orders. If abstinence in the form of complete social isolation for everyone was the goal, they have done a remarkable job of achieving it in the last few months of cancelled gatherings.

The staunchest cheerleaders of mask-wearing and social distancing are natural introverts who fear other people, especially the working poor. For them, social distancing was a welcome respite from being obliged to interact with low class strangers on a daily basis. The mask keeps the dreaded Other far, far away from the fearful and their misanthropy. The mask's double bonus is its function as a talismanic Binky. The feeling of safety that the illusion of a masked face provides is more potent than its value as a face covering. The mask is the molded plastic velociraptor that guards the terrified toddler from the Boogeyman he is certain lives in the bedroom closet. The mask is the mark of lamb's blood on the doorframe to drive away the angel of death. The mask is the hottest trend in superstition.

Speaking of death, you'll notice that one my detractors in the opening comments heartily wished it upon me and everyone who thinks like I do, which is a practice I do not reciprocate because nowadays I have an appreciation of the kind of karmic retribution it brings. The paranoia around COVID arises from the imbalanced fear of death that remains unexamined in our culture. COVID primarily slays the elderly no matter what the mainstream corporate media tries to invent. Instead of taking a cruel to be kind route and helping any elder drowning in their own fluids to an easy death of opium sleep bliss, our society chooses to isolate them in ICU wards while frantically inflating their lungs so they can succumb to the Reaper while exclusively surrounded by "essential" workers, which is to say they will die alone. Meanwhile, nurses and doctors hold corpses aloft while dancing in choreographed Tik Tok routines through mostly empty hospital wards. One might almost dare to think they have plenty of time on their hands.

The end goal of mask enforcers is a permanent government funded welfare state of mandatory shelter in place. In this Marxist welfare utopia, nobody has to work because Progress will deliver the technology in order to feed, shelter, and clothe everyone. The salary class had it the easiest during the shelter in place orders in March and April, and their naive assumption is that such a state of affairs can go on forever just as long as it is applied with a one size fits all brushstroke. This is evidenced in the "order curbside or delivery" comment. This is Marie Antoinette asking why the peasants don't just eat cake. It presumes the restaurant is kept open because of endless government cash, that the home will not be lost to foreclosure or eviction, and that the person living inside has the money to order expensive take out and grocery delivery. Marie Antoinette does not understand that real people live outside Versailles and they must work in order to eat. For the antisocial corporate drone marooned at home with her computers and smart devices, it seems like nobody should be permitted to gather in public ever again because she personally does fine in social isolation. In her mind, nobody needs to go to church or see a movie in a theater because they can have online worship services and Amazon Prime Video. The top-riding Marie Antoinettes of the Coronapocalypse want to create the world of Wall-E with slightly less junk, though it will be the same amount of junk soon with all of the take out containers and Amazon trinket packaging piling up.

Virtue

It is interesting to watch people pretend to hate a situation they brought about out of political necessity. The panic over the current administration lasting four more years is thick. Though I have never revealed my 2016 vote, one commenter above paints me as a Trump supporter with gleeful spite. The people who accuse me of being a Trump lover (I don't honestly give Trump much thought) doth protest too much. I think they secretly love Trump. Their hatred of them belies Freudian sexual turbulence. They sincerely believe they hate him but I think they're more hot and bothered by Trump than simply bothered.

The Left has a pathological need to feel victimized and oppressed. Trump does the job nicely, doesn't he? The revival of The Handmaid's Tale uncovered leftist longing for a Big Daddy Christian takeover that would make liberal women feel as oppressed as authentic victims of religious male oppression, such as Muslim women in Somalia. Leftist women had the gall to uniform themselves in red Handmaid's Tale outfits to protest Trump's locker room banter about grabbing women by their crotches. Meanwhile, the tragedies wrote themselves as trafficking gangs targeted white girls in Britain and Islamists hung gay men on public city walls while Joe Biden had yet to be implicated by Tara Reade. Since they are not personally oppressed, the tormented black, white, and multiracial souls who wear masks must invent their tormentors, whether it's a disease or a president.

Progress, the true religion of the affluent, brought a longed for Apocalypse. Like Progress itself, the Apocalypse in the form of COVID did not live up to expectations and had to undergo much fluffing and stuffing to appear like it was arriving on schedule. Materialist Science's Coronapocalypse, although disappointing, was good enough for mask-wearers who needed to believe in the Narrative. Those like me who don't go along with the Narrative are shunned as Deplorables. Only a Deplorable would reject the Marxist welfare state utopia. Only a Deplorable wouldn't be concerned about what the neighbors think.

Charging Away On Revolving Credit

The reason masks are pushed as the New Normal is a rational fear of accumulated blowback. Just as a twenty-something chases more degrees via grad school in order to delay the first of many inevitable invoices for student loan debt from arriving, the mask-wearer seeks to delay the tipping point when the masses discard the New Normal. Such a reckoning must be avoided at all costs, lest those who were disenfranchised start thinking about whom they should hold accountable for lost time, lost income, and forever lost connections with loved ones.

Though they have their virtues, Millennials are a soft, easily led, placid group with deep reservoirs of entitled rage. Without realizing it, they have pushed the cost of their hysterical rage primarily upon Generation Z, which is at this time too young to marinate in the hatred of their parents' generation. Boomers are already hated by Millennials, but this will pale in comparison to the hatred Generation Z will feel towards Millennials when Generation Z comes into its own. The mask, like pastel rainbow wall art and Netflix binges, is at risk of becoming a Millennial moniker: a symbol for the scaredy-cats who ruined lives because they couldn't admit that their political side was losing for solid reasons. I'm not sure how this will look to the youth who bore the brunt of Coronapocalypse in twenty or thirty years, but I cannot imagine it will be flattering.

Current Mood: recumbent

In my final essay of this series, I will be discussing why curses do not work and why blessings, though not as easy to formulate, are the best strategy for overcoming demons. Next week I am planning to write about the symbolism of masks and why they have precious little to do with the actual preservation of human health.

The class of people who bought into and perpetuated the COVID-19 phenomenon were and are largely salaried professionals who grew up in environments of extreme privilege yet see themselves as the middle class because they don't have as much as the successful Hollywood director or tech startup guru. We will call them the PMC or the Professional Managerial Class. PMCs grew up under the umbrella of wealth.

Shielded by luxury, the PMC finds no comfort in excesses of basics that people of lower classes cannot take for granted. Food strewn about their personal landscape is only an opportunity to be tempted and to become fat. Shelter or the lack of shelter isn't a concern either: there's almost always a house and/or its proceeds donated by a doting, deceased family member to fall back on and if all else fails, stocks and bonds can be sold off to provide a safety net. As far as jobs are concerned, their class works hard, but the work isn't a quarter as challenging as the benefit free, do-it-all-and-get-yelled-at-anyway convenience store job or the debasement of the retail sales floor. They are drowning in perks they did nothing to earn, and they believe they hit a home run when they were born on third base.

Poor Little Rich Kids

Despite the freedom material wealth affords, PMCs are miserable. Their lives suck. They battle severe depression that is always teetering on the knife edge of a three month-long descent into a black hole that ends with a bottle of Azipam chased with a quart of Grey Goose. They are perpetually anxious, tormented by a nearly unbroken fight or flight response gone haywire. They are angry. Some retreat into social justice activism, which helps to allay the suicidal despair I mentioned above and also provides an outlet for the energy generated by constant anxiety. Others go the sleazy Ahrimanic evil route, like Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly needed orgasms with three young teenage girls per day in order to function.

Others still turn to curses. Michael Hughes is the most obvious example with his trash compactor hexes of Trump that combine mismatched planets, inauspicious moons, whatever ancient god or goddess that seemed cool that day, and high school poetry magazine submissions disguised as spells. His female counterparts stage their Satan-lite altars for Instagram, inflaming paranoid Christians while hoping to make enough money as witchy influencers despite not believing in the forces they invoke. Hughes and his pals engage in the formalized version of what regular media socialites do without the quasi-magical pomp and circumstance: they throw around bad intentions in public while sustaining the background belief that god does not exist and that karma does not apply to them. My theory is they have now done this enough times to attract and become infested by demons, a.k.a. large incorporeal beings who hate humanity and become invisible parasites upon those stupid or unfortunate enough to extend the invitation to feed.

Dissecting the Curse

The word "curse" has a murky etymology. In the University of Michigan Press's Middle English Compendium, the etymology of the word curse is attributed to the Latin "cursus" or "course" as in the Christian liturgy, implying a formula of readings performed four times a year.

My definition of a curse is an imposed cycle upon someone or something (places and objects can also be cursed) intended to punish the subject of the curse whenever they try to repeat the behavior the curser intends to prevent them from doing. If you've ever seen the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, Alex, a gleeful murderer and rapist, ends up being ineffectively punished via cruel attempts at aversion where he is trained to associate the his own violent behaviors with the physical pain delivered by his torturers. After a few close calls and a suicide attempt, a newly released "rehabilitated" Alex goes back to his old ways with renewed vigor.

In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is put through a curse. His torturers who try to reprogram his mind via cycles of punishment only serve to create a better and more shady criminal. Prison sentences are curses laid upon transgressors by the State. Though they are meant to trap the prisoner in a place where he is ostensibly prevented from committing crimes, we can all agree the worst types of crimes, such as pedophilia, have high recidivism rates. Prison doesn't help anyone except those who get off on punishing others.

When we look at the anatomy of a curse, is the point of it to prevent the offender from reoffending, or is it to provide a dopamine rush of self-righteousness in the curse-thrower who believes they are doing good?

But Kimberly, you ask, if cursing is like heroin for the self-righteous and prison doesn't work, how should we handle murderers? Well, personally, I'm all for Hammurabi's Code type punishments for murder. Hang a murderer and in five minutes or less, we can let God sort it out. Some crimes are worse than others and it is my belief that the western approach is hard where it should be soft and soft where it should be hard. The bottom line is that most of us are not about to go to prison for our crimes, so we need to identify other examples of what cursing entails and other patterns where intention is aimed as an imposed cycle of hurt.

Most cunning serpent, you shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat.

The Most High God commands you, + He with whom, in your great insolence, you still claim to be equal.

"God who wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." [1 Tim. 2:4)

-Excerpt from the Catholic Exorcism Prayer

Mad As Hell

Before I go all love and light on you, I would like to share how angry I am at my leftist friends and acquaintances. Well, clearly I wouldn't write five articles on accusing leftists of being possessed and obsessed by demons if I didn't have a modicum of anger to stew. Leftists caused and elongated the shutdown that nearly took my livelihood. They succeeded in ruining and damaging millions of small businesses via exacerbated panic and then rioting, they killed people of every color under the banners of BLM and Antifa, and they had the gall to lie about it, calling the rioters "peaceful protestors" and mask wearing "scientific". Though I do blame their behavior on the demons who I believe are infesting them, they still bear the burden of ultimate responsibility for the way they have carried on in the last four years.

I'm done with them. I would much rather be alone than have friends of such low, down-with-the-demons character. My strategy for dealing with leftists, though I don't necessarily recommend it to anyone, is this:

-If the person is someone I do not know, for instance, a random social justice type on Facebook who I wouldn't recognize by name, I look for signs of Trump derangement, pro-BLM signaling, or mask wearing. If they have any of the above, I immediately block them.

-If the person is an acquaintance and I see the above signs, I consider blocking them and I refuse any form of conversation about the above topics with threats that I will cut them out of my life. If I felt they could have a rational conversation, I wouldn't come down like a hammer. You cannot argue with the possessed -- it's an exorcism basic!

-If the person is my friend, I resolve to keep them at a careful distance until the election. If they confront me about any of the above topics, I flat out refuse to discuss it (um hello, they can read my blog) and put them on a top priority discursive meditation list to consider what to do about them after a few months have passed. I am considering cut and clear spells if it comes to that.

Gratitude: Easier Said Than Done

Curses are easy. Blessings are hard. Think of how readily an embarrassing or painful memory surfaces, or guilt. Now try to come up with a random, overwhelmingly positive memory. Not so quick, is it? As humans, we are hard-wired to recall pain, suffering, and misery. Happiness and bliss aren't remembered so much as chased.

If you want to be blessed, try gratitude. Gratitude is the first blessing. To give heartfelt thanks is to humble yourself before the gods, even if you don't technically believe in gods. The sheer ingratitude of our era explains a great deal of our cultural misery. A PMC friend once gratitude-shamed me when I thanked the owner of a now defunct hole in the wall restaurant for offering great vegan options. My friend snarkily commented, "You know you have to pay for the meal, right?" To him, every act of kindness is a transaction. Every gesture of grace boils down to a dollar sign, a tit for tat. This is the sort of person who becomes obsessed with getting something for nothing. Gratitude is a quaint bit of woo that comes from nothing and disappears into the gaping void.

As you can imagine, the inhabitant of such a gray and materialist world is a woeful being. They curse because they are angry and depressed (with a deep terror of being left completely alone) but it couldn't possibly be their own fault, so the answer is to foist the blame on someone else. The first "someone" they blame is their parents. The second is their society. They begin hexing and cursing their enemies, calling for various justices but actually just wanting to lash out and trap Trump or Bolsinaro or Johnson in a cycle of repeating physical and mental anguish. Of course by throwing that trash out there, they end up with blowback. Trash also stinks, and it attracts demons. Cursing does not work, and trying to bring someone down only results in your own downfall. If your enemy truly bothers you that much, ignore them and go around them if they stand in the way. If you truly hate the hatred, however, you will genuinely and honestly bless them.

It's pretty tough to bless a person or group you are mad at, so instead of that, I suggest starting with number one. I'm not suggesting you always bless yourself, though it would be kind of hilarious for all members of the public to shout "Bless me!" the next time they sneezed, however, I am suggesting the supplanting of the urge to curse with the immediate blessing of someone you love.

For instance, I stopped using curse words because I don't want to be like the people who seem to be the most predisposed towards foul language at the moment. For every urge to use a curse word, instead of putting a dollar in a jar, I try to say a kind or loving thing to the cherished people around me.

If you have no person or pet to bless, you can bless your place. Even if that place is a tent on the (rhymes with city) streets of the Castro district, you can bless it. You can get formal with frankincense and sage or you can informally steal a moment to focus your mind, asking the gods, Jesus, or whomever you acknowledge is smarter and better than you to bless your space. I am currently in the process of writing a book called Sacred Homemaking about the spirit of place and the ways we can go about amplifying the power of blessings via every trick in my arsenal and then some.

We all have something to be grateful for. When I was at my lowest point of depression in high school, I missed many opportunities to be grateful for my wonderful parents, my decent health, and the beautiful food that seemed to overflow from every cupboard. I am not saying that we should create snares of positivity for ourself that act like horse blinders -- being grateful should be accompanied by an assessment of that which does not elicit gratitude (does it spark joy? Yeah I had to go there). As a teen, I had a boyfriend I settled for, and I was lazy. My emotional storms and inability to look at my real blessings clouded my vision. I should have broken up with the boyfriend and dealt with my laziness and weakness instead of feeling guilty for wanting to be grateful for my devoted boyfriend and the wallowing in the luxury of being a lout.

To defeat the demons infesting the Left, we should become what demons cannot stand. If demons have turned leftists into babbling automatons of hate and authoritarianism, we can defeat them by becoming more thoughtful and analytical, employing discursive meditation every day. We can resolve to take a "you do you and I'll just go around if necessary" attitude no matter how disgusted we are by their behavior. Instead of cursing and throwing around ill will, we can bless. Give someone an authentic compliment. Share what you have. Pay it forward. Light a candle in the memory of someone you loved and take the time to remember why you loved them and how they brought you joy. Light a candle to a great philosopher or a hero. Kiss your dog or cat if they'll let you. Memorize a beautiful poem or a prayer. Recite it aloud. Take cursing out of your language. Learn an instrument so you can fill your home with music. Decorate a corner or a whole room with Aphrodite in mind. Pick up trash in the forest preserve. It's a small, blessed act of informal consecration that will encourage others to do the same. Look to ways to work the soil, even if it's only in the form of houseplants. Every little bit counts said the witch as she peed into the ocean. Be blessed!

Dear Coronavirus: First they ignored you, then they laughed at you, then they fought you, then you won.

Coronavirus’s power was not in its ability to shut down schools (hilariously, when the kids in my local schools got the news school would be closed for three weeks starting March 16, the cheers were deafening) and it wasn’t in its ability to ruin small businesses. Its true power was much more occult: it brought our culture face to face with the one thing it is far too afraid to talk about: the fear of death.

Simply put, the people on this planet in the current era are afraid of aging and dying. For this reason, it is perfectly normal for a modern human to put herself or others through the worst forms of degradation, torture, and pain in order to extend time spent alive a few more precious days, months, or years. Even those armed with living wills and embossed DNR jewelry easily find themselves on the business end of a feeding tube or an iron lung because that’s the mandate of modern times. Forcing someone to live has become so fashionable that it’s fine to keep hydrocephalic babies alive despite the torture of living with deformity and disease. The pro-life movement does not stop at the fetus. In our culture, keeping someone alive through pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy is a way of screaming “I LOVE YOU!” to all and sundry. Because there are a few Stage 4 cancer victims who cling to eking out a few more years at all costs, the culture has presumed every Stage 4 cancer victim feels the same way. Because an Indian woman from the untouchable caste eats her own vomit in an attempt to survive, or because the Donner Party ate its own dead, it’s assumed that the killer instinct to survive becomes universally active when a threshold is reached. I am aware that I will trigger lots of sensitive souls by saying the above out loud, however, if you are triggered by what is no more than an honest opinion from a silly individual like me, perhaps it would behoove you to ask yourself "Why?" before coming down like a load of bricks.

One of the reasons I admire the Samurai of medieval Japan was the notion of Bushido: honor until death. A Samurai was disciplined, dutiful, and willing to kill himself for the honor of his lord. If necessary, a Samurai would commit ritual suicide, and he would vastly prefer a noble, self-imposed death to an ignoble, sniveling, fearful one.

What Corona brought out, except in a few rare and shining cases, were the snivelers and the cowards. It takes a special kind of stupid to visit a bunch of stores in order to hoard toilet paper, and despite my better self’s admonitions, I found myself hoping police would find a TP hoarder accidentally mummified in the stuff, having starved to death cocooned for warmth in his doom bunker because he forgot a can opener. Other dingbats are still acting out a contemporary version of the Masque of the Red Death, licking toilet seats and aluminum anti-perspirants for Instagram clicks. If this made you think of the phrase Darwin Awards, you’re not alone, but since I’ve mentioned Darwin, I’d like to point out the staggering irony of a leonine, solar-named virus stalking and killing the weakest, oldest, and sickest of the human herd. Nature is cruel and her limits are harsh. Why is this a reason to freak out?

When this thing began, I thought, “Oh no, all of the sad sacks who lust after the Apocalypse are going to try to DIY one out of this.” That’s exactly what they did. Coronavirus, no matter what anyone wants to make out of it, is not a heinous child-killer/disfigurer like polio, measles, or mumps. I live by a graveyard that is full of little gravestones of babies and kids who died of past epidemics, and not once did the Victorians shut down the entire world economy because of it. Young people do catch the virus, especially when they party on beaches and lick toilet seats, but when we’re honest, COVID targets Boomers. Boomers who have a sense of proportion would have insisted on triage, not the closure of every tiny mom & pop restaurant. The old and comfortable classes weren’t in the front lines of COVID; no. Millennial grocery store workers and Gen X small business owners are the ones paying for Boomers to luxuriate in their terror, in blood when necessary. Nurses and elder care assistants haven’t had a single day off lately, and nobody seems particularly concerned about their welfare.

One trend I’ve found unappealing to watch is the tendency for members of the upper middle class and their aspirants to use Coronavirus to virtue and fragility signal for themselves and their families. By constantly chattering about their own fragile condition, or that of a relative who will surely die if they catch Corona, they can do double-duty political correctness policing and virtue signaling if anyone has the audacity to question government lockdown. If the Left wants a docile, welfare-dependent state and is using the Coronapocalypse to get it, they messed up bad by accidentally shutting off the flow of illegal labor and by almost utterly ruining the tax base they wanted to extort. As popcorn-worthy as it was to watch the Left shoot itself in both feet via a suspiciously bio-tinkered looking virus from a fishy Chinese lab, I’m anxious to try get the business I built from scratch 23 years ago back on its feet. Wish me luck, because like every other working class person in the US, I’ll need it.