Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Class Warfare Page 5 of 34

The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred

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On October 13, 2021

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The UK is experiencing some of the worst shortages of oil. One contributing factor is that the old strategic reserve of oil was privatized, then when it was considered unprofitable to keep it running (repairs and maintainence were needed) most of it was gotten rid of.

A totalizing principle, or system, reduces every part of society to one value, or relationship.

In capitalism, the principle is profit.

In capitalism the assumption is that if something is making a profit, it’s also providing value. You should only do things that provide value and the more money something makes the more value it has. So, the strategic reserve wasn’t providing profits, and had to go, since it provided no value.

The next piece of logic is that someone who is making a profit obviously knows how to provide value. The more money someone has, the more control they have, and the more money they should have. The tendency of capitalism to lead to money concentrating in a few hands is good: those are the people who know how to create money and thus value.

Capitalism, like other totalizing systems, works best when it’s kept in check by something else: religious values, democratic values, enlightenment values, or whatever, backed up by forces powerful enough to resist totalization: governments or churches, for example.

When it doesn’t it tends to destroy the conditions for its own functioning: all the wealth goes to the top, for example, and you get a Great Depression due to a demand crash, as happened in the 30s.

Or capitalism makes massive profits based on damaging the environment, and you have an environmental collapse — ongoing and upcoming.

Capitalism tries to reduce all relationships to monetary ones. When you privatize trains, or healthcare, you’re following the profit motive. When you make everyone work, then have their childrens raised by strangers (daycare, and to an extent school) you’re totalizing it. When people say domestic and emotional work should be paid, they’ve bought into a totalizing system: since they’re creating value, money should pass hands.

Capitalism thus reduces everything to money: if it has value it should involve money, and if it pays little or nothing it obviously doesn’t have value. So if you’re low paid, and you want to be seen as valued, you want money.

Even when we try to fix the problems of capitalism we try to do so thru money: so we have carbon offsets (paid), and there is a movement for a carbon tax, and so on.

It doesn’t seem to occur to us that some things just shouldn’t be allowed: don’t dump more than X amount of carbon into the atmosphere, period, or you go to prison. Or make sure that insulin doesn’t cost $400, or you, yes, go to prison.

In properly functioning societies there are sacred objects: things which money is not allowed to control. Perhaps this is our relationship with God; perhaps it is “don’t cut down all the forests”, perhaps it is access to healthcare for all no matter how little money they have; or perhaps it is access to law, so we provide lawyers to those who can’t afford them (and not overworked lawyers who can’t represent well.)

Perhaps we have public financing of election and limits of private spending to influence elections, since we value democracy and don’t think that rich people should control the government.

When a totalizing systems destroys other values, and degrades sacred goods and values and items, it destroys the circumstances required for its own existence, but in so doing it also brings catastrophe upon the society is totalizing.

You can see this today, not just in the shortages (cause by over-optimizing supply chains to increase profit), or in the environment, or the lack of access to law for most of the population, or in huge prices for health care and a refusal to share vaccines throughout the world, but in almost everything that is causing our societies to degrade. Since nothing is sacred except money to us any more, nothing survives unless it makes maximum profits for the rich.

But the things we need most, like clean air and water, a liveable climate, affordable healthcare, healthy food, and loving family relationships not destroyed by the stress of overwork and poverty, are more valuable for short to mid term profits when sacrificed than when protected and strengthened.

The “solution” of trying to give everything a price and micro-managing incentives doesn’t work. The problem isn’t so much incentives, it is that some things have non-monetary value which cannot and should not have a price put on them. Some things are sacred: democracy, love and unspoiled nature, among many others.

Treated as sacred, these things allow markets to work. Treated as part of markets, their degradation eventually destroys the very environment capitalism needs to continue, and to be more beneficial than harmful.

A world where nothing is sacred, and where no value stands above profit, is a world that will be destroyed.

As it is being.

 

How The Structure Of The World Economy Made Shortages Inevitable

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On October 7, 2021

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For the second time I find myself referring readers to an essay by John Michael Greer, this time on shortages. This is the best piece I’ve read on the issue and I agree with almost everything he says. JMG’s overall worldview isn’t mine, but he’s unquestionably brilliant, and this has been nailed. Go, read.

I want to note, as does JMG, than none of this is unexpected: the fact that the just-in-time inventory and ordering system was obviously subject to shocks is a warning given by many.

I want to emphasize, though, that it’s not only “just in time”, it’s the structure of production itself, which is both very dispersed and very centralized. A final assembly factory may draw parts from dozens of other factories, none of them near it, so when one of those factories goes down, the entire show can draw to a halt.

This dispersion was a deliberate choice. Some of it started as early as the fifties, as a deliberate way to tie economies together and attempt to avoid WWIII thru mutual dependence, but as with most of our economic pathologies, it really took off after 1980 and Reagan, with the vast offshoring and outshoring of industry and production: we were told the choice was to seek the lowest costs and highest profits.

None of this was necessary; the proper use of trade and industrial policy could, and I would say, should, have been to encourage every country to produce what it could in its own country, only importing what it couldn’t make or grow itself. Comparative advantage is, and always has been, garbage and no great state has ever allowed it to determine anything. Britain didn’t industrialize under”free” trade and neither did America or Japan or anyone else of significance.

But doing it this wasn’t mostly about profits and costs; it was about tying the world together in a way which disempowered every country outside the core. The so-called value chains were initially all controlled from the West or, perhaps Japan or South Korea. Everyone paid a vig to the controlling interests in the West: the rich did very very well, they just didn’t pay their fellow countrymen and women.

This was excellent, from their point of view, because money is power and it broke the power of their domestic opposition: absolutely gutting unions, the working and eventually the middle class, leaving them completely in charge.

Meanwhile, because of the dispersion of manufacturing and its inputs, other countries mostly couldn’t create any industry they really controlled (again, South Korea, Germany, Japan are exceptions), so there was not threat.

Until they got too greedy, and the Chinese saw their weakness, and they put so much in China while China had a policy of grabbing as much knowledge of how to produce as possible.

Which leaves us where we are today: vastly vulnerable supply and manufacturing chains, an onrushing cold War, and a struggle over who controls the “value chains.”

The Chinese are damn tired of paying the West its vig because the West is at the top of value chains where most of the work is done in China or other countries. Equally they are sick of paying for IP.

US elites, on the other hand, are terrified of losing their top-seat position; their ability take a big percentage of all profits because they own the IP and control the value chains.

There are no good actors here, be clear: the Chinese have done reprehensible things and so have the Americans. But understand that America was a known IP scofflaw in the 19th century, when it was industrializing (and the Brits were stupid enough to ship know-how and factories to the US for “profits”.)

This is a standard pattern, and as long as we make it so that a few countries can skim off everyone else the struggle will always be ferocious.

John Maynard Keynes wanted to end this: he wanted a world in which every country, as noted before, produced as much of what it needed as it reasonably and was allowed to use subsidies and tariffs and policies to do this.

We created a different world; a world in which everyone was dependent, most countries couldn’t even feed themselves, and everyone needed everyone else while a few countries, but especially the US, still remained in overall control of production (again, until US elites got too stupid and greedy and the Chinese took advantage (you can’t cheat an honest man.) Some of the reasons were good, if misguided (especially in the early post-war period), most of them were greedy, stupid and shortsighted, since Keynes could see it was a bad idea even in the 40s.

Now we’re paying, but most of those who set up the system then overbalanced it thru their greed are either dead or still alive and filthy rich, and getting richer.

Life is good if  you’re in the top .01% or so. Really, really good.

And really, you know, to them the problem with mid-century Americans not of the ruling class is they didn’t know their place. Now they’re being taught their place again. No more servant problems.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

What App Stores Have Cost All Of US

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On September 29, 2021

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There’s a very old Canadian joke. A farmer is angry at the weather, so he raises his fist to the sky, and yells, “Goddamn you, CP Rail!”

Back in the age of rail if you were a farmer the only way to get your product to market unless you lived very close to a city, was by rail. There were few railroad companies, probably only one near you, and whatever they charged, you had to pay.

Rail company freight prices were based on maximizing profit for them, and that price drove a lot of farmers out of businesses, and left many others working for poverty wages.

App stores are, effectively, the only way many software developers can get their products to market. Most of them charge 30%.

A lot of consumers think this doesn’t matter, “who cares how they split the price?”

But that 30% is a cost, a high cost, for a service which costs companies like Apple and Steam almost nothing. (Apple also insists on a cut of all in-App purchases.)

Thirty percent is actually about a 42% price increase (30/70). It is HUGE. It is absolutely a cost; apps are not viable at all price points: you can’t just charge whatever, because most of them aren’t “must haves.” Running app stores costs almost nothing compared to the profits (not for the monopoly or near-monopoly providers, like Google, Apple and Steam).

Anyone who is the least familiar with business knows that increasing your production costs so much absolutely means that many products will never see the light of  day; they aren’t profitable. Entire companies will not come into existence because when the initial costing is done, the 30% makes their offerings unprofitable. Other companies will go out of business because their product(s) don’t make a profit or enough of a profit with that 30% in place, where they would at 15% or 10% or 5%.

Even businesses which do exist, and prosper, would prosper more if the charge was less, AND Apple and Steam and Google would all still be fine, and able to provide just as good services. (All these businesses are infamous for their profits, and their app stores are nearly pure profit.)

So what app stores at 30% has cost us is a lot of businesses: many which never existed and we can’t miss, others that went out of business. Thirty-percent app stores have also cost existing businesses a lot of profits they could have reinvested in new employees, or given to shareholders (or, admittedly, wasted on their executives.) They have also cost us a lot of apps, both from companies that never existed and from existing companies, because the 30% made them unprofitable right at conception.

App store fees are taxes; all major app stores that I can think of off-hand are near monopolies or part of oligopolies. We don’t know what Apple’s profits from the app store are, but one expert guessed around 80% (Apple said “no” but never gave the necessary data to refute.)

No one makes that sort of profit except in brief periods or when they have a huge, and unfair, market advantage. There is no way in any reasonable market theory to justify such profits over a period of more than a couple years. These are pure market position/monopoly/oligopoly profits.

So, yes, my friends, unless you are attached to the spigot (not necessarily the App spigot, but the general oligopoly spigot), the App store has cost you something: a world with a lot more jobs, companies and apps. You don’t even know what you lost, because what App store companies have done is mostly akin to strangling newborns: you never got to see what they killed, just by existing and taking extortionate profits.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Wages Of Embarassing Elites Are Death

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On September 23, 2021

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Everyone remember the Panama papers? A leak of bank records showing that the ultra-rich are hiding massive wealth, tax-free and often breaking the law to do so?

A rather weak set of laws designed to allow tax avoidance by rich people, at that.

Found out the other day that the reporter who broke the Panama Papers story was killed by a car bomb.

Coincidence, no doubt.

You may recall the Ferguson protests, started after another black man was killed by a cop. They were a big deal.

Since then six of the Ferguson protest leaders have died: two inside burnt cars, three by suicide, one an overdose.

Coincidence, no doubt.

Then there was a high ranked pimp, who flew important men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Prince Andrew in his private jet and provided under-age women for sex. The first time he was indicted he was let off because the prosecutor was told to back off, as he belonged to intelligence. The second time, influence not having worked, he “committed suicide” in prison.

I used to work in life insurance. There’s an adage, backed up by lots of studies, that people who are worth more dead than alive tend to die a lot more than the actuarial tables would suggest for someone of their age and health.

Coincidence, no doubt.

The simplest fact of modern life is elites kill and impoverish other people in order to make money and secure their power. You are seeing it in the pandemic, where Billionaire wealth has spiked 60% and vaccine companies refuse to share their “intellectual property” while planning to sell Covid booster shots in perpetuity. Actually wiping out Covid would close pharma money, but if it stays around, it’s golden.

Meanwhile, all the small and medium businesses closing has lead to a vast buying opportunity for those with lots of money, and private equity is moving big into buying up distressed homes.

It’s just business, baby. Your death, or homelessness, well, it’s someone else’s profit opportunity.

We have the richest wealthy the world has ever seen; even more than the gilded Age. Richer than kings and emperors. They are rich exactly because they hold political power: in the period from 32 to the 70s they lost relative wealth and income, because that’s what government policy was set up to to do.

So they bought up intellectuals like Milton Friedman and politicians like Reagan, Thatcher, Blair, Clinton and Obama, along with tens of thousands of lesser lights. They changed how government was run. It lowered taxes massively, sold off its crown jewels, and got rid of regulations meant to keep wages up while education and housing were cheap.

It’s not that long ago. I remember the last parts of the post-war era, and many people still living remember the 50s and 60s, even as adults.

But that world is long, long dead, and we live in a new one. One where it doesn’t matter if climate change or a pandemic will killing millions or billions. One where lower wages are good, and the Federal Reserve intervenes constantly to lower them, while always making sure the rich never lose everything in a financial collapse.

And in this world, the rich kill and impoverish you for money. Usually they do it in ways they can pretend aren’t about them: policy changes, or increases to insulin prices, but if you really get on their nerves or might even be a real threat, as with our pedophile pimp (and almost certain blackmailer) Jeffrey Epstein, well, people who are worth more dead than alive, they tend to get dead.

Are you worth more dead than alive to some rich person, or some politician in the pay of said rich people?

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Age Of Assassination

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On September 20, 2021

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It’s forgotten now, but the invention of effective pistols created a period with a lot more assassinations.  Effective portable bombs made assassins even more effective. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination started World War I, is the most famous victim, but hardly the only one.

We’re in the start of a golden Age of assassination. It has gone largely unremarked because the victims have been nobodies, and mostly in the developing nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and so on, though hardly limited to those war zones.

A large group of assassins have been drones (special forces hit squads are the other group.) Drones are not, as I have noted before, a technology of the rich and strong: a good mechanic can make a drone easily enough in their garage. Hezbollah has its own fleet of drones. Iran has invested in them. Turkey, while certainly a powerful nation is not a technological leader overall, but has become a leader in drones and especially autonomous drones.

Drones will get smaller, more deadly and harder to stop. More and more will become autonomous, so that they can’t be jammed.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes has a story about how Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist:

Israel’s Mossad used an AI assisted 1 ton machine gun robot. Its parts were detached, smuggled into Iran and assembled inside Iran. The robot used facial recognition to recognize the target.

All of this tech is going to come back to bite our elites in the ass. As Dan points out, there’s no reason these types of technologies can’t be used to kill Western elites, and they will be. The reaction to then try and then clamp down on the technology will do huge harm to tech development, because the items needed to create a drone or stationary robot are simple, not complicated, and will become simpler and less complicated over time.

Ages of assassination aren’t pretty, and they increase political instability substantially. That isn’t always a bad thing, it depends if what’s on offer is better that the status quo, but it’s always a mess.

Technologies are never neutral and that is nowhere more true than technologies of violence. Firearms put a decisive end to the age of the knight, and allowed for the creation of mass democracy. Knights, when they became predominant did the opposite: they entrenched an age of aristocracy, because Knights were expensive as hell, and training to be a knight almost had to start in childhood.

How a technology starts is also not necessarily how it winds up being used predominantly. Consider the machine gun. For the first decades of its existence the machine gun was an offensive weapon: it was used by the Brits and then other colonial militaries to absolutely butcher native forces that dared to oppose them. It helped expand the British Empire and other colonial regimes.

Then came World War I, and it turned out that machine guns were actually a weapon of defense when both sides had them.

Drones have started as weapon by which elites terrorize the weak, and autonomous robots, especially, seem like a dream come true for the powerful. The great problem of power is always the Praetorian one: you need enforcers, and the more you insist on being far richer and out of touch with the commons, the more you need them, but the less you can trust them: whatever the pretense, they become mercenaries, and people who fight for money or for the right to loot and hurt people are never reliable.

Robots seem like the perfect solution, allowing elites to have a much smaller enforcement class; just the people who create and repair them. The real dream is that eventually loyal AIs will design and repair themselves, and non-elite humans will be completely unneeded. The elites will rule alone, with loyal robotic servants and no Praetorian problem or fears that in a revolution, the troops won’t shoot.

But an age of drone and autonomous robots, some of them as small as insects, but still deadly and operating in swarms, is not an age that seems likely to actually favor elites as much as they think, because, as noted earlier, it isn’t actually a hard tech: it’s hard to pioneer, yes, just as were early gunpowder weapons (which were used by Kings to destroy the power of the feudal nobility, since only they could afford enough cannon, and cannon trumped Medieval castles) but once it is pioneered, it will spread and it will be used against elites.

The only way to avoid that is to crack down, hard, on all the precursors, but since the precursors are so simple and basic to a technological society, doing so will make you backwards, and as with Japan completely controlling firearms, this only works if everyone does it everywhere in the world, otherwise one day the “White Ships” show up and you realize you’re helpless before them.

Simple, cheap, effective autonomous or semi-autonomous killing machines are an epochal military technology which is going to change everything if we can maintain societies capable of fielding them. Even in a semi-collapse, we may be able to do so, because they are, actually, simple.

The results are in the air, to be sure. No one in 1500, even, could predict all the results of firearms and the printing press.

But elite who think this will all to their way may find out, as they bleed out their last, just how wrong they were.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Humanity’s Completely Broken Feedback Systems

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On August 10, 2021

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If you want to understand how we got where we are, it’s simple: our strongest feedback systems to our decision making people are telling them “everything’s great, stay on course!”

For over 40 years now the rich have gotten richer. Politicians have gotten richer. Corporate officers, CEOs and executives have gotten richer.

Money is reward, and the reward centers for our elites are going off like a slot machine that constantly pays millions. BLING! BLING! BLING!

Whenever someone says “you should do less of this thing that makes you more money and power”, which is essentially everything that needs to be changed from Covid (making them richer) to climate change (still more oil to pump, baby) to ending pharma patents (Bill Gates says NO) to fixing inequality or feeding hungry people or housing the homeless, well, their fortunes (or bribes) come from making these things worse.

Capitalism is supposed to provide a feedback system. It isn’t the best feedback system, but if forced or allowed to work (and only government can enforce it, which is why rich people can’t be allowed, as they always purchase the government) it makes individuals and corporations who can’t even make a real profit go bankrupt.

But in 2008, Bernanke, whose entire intellectual opus was “how do we make sure another FDR doesn’t happen by making sure the rich never lose their money and power again” started the process of shoveling money down the gullets of the rich. (Greenspan had been piping it in too, but maintained some pretense he wasn’t and tried not to actually print money obviously.)

Every major central bank in the world followed course and all the economic feedback systems broke. No matter what rich idiots did, they would never as a class be allowed to go bankrupt, or even not keep getting richer. Vast money funneled to the rich and inflation showed up exactly where one would expect it, in things the rich were bidding up (yachts, art, luxury apartments) and in whatever they were buying up to get a new revenue stream (housing, most recently, so rent will soon /really/ go thru the roof.)

Now, as I pointed out at the time, the problem with all of this is that the real world exists, and so does a real economy in which items must be manufactured, food grown and products delivered. All of that has to be done in a world with weather, climate, animals, plants and an atmosphere.

Since all the feedback systems put in place by humans had broken (no one in power cared or cares about UN climate reports), we then had to wait for the world to start smacking us around.

That has started, with wildfires and northern hurricanes and so on (and Covid, to some extent), and the logistics system has proven itself to be fragile and easily disrupted exactly as many of us pointed out, while power and water systems and so on show their fragility as well.

But it’s not enough yet, this is all stuff the rich can ignore: have more than one home, have them off the grid, travel by private jet, etc, etc…

So the feedback will continue until it becomes so severe either the Proles do a Versailles on unresponsive elites or the elites feel more endangered than their bank accounts can make up for. (A hundred million+ dollars can buy a LOT of immunity. You may be dead before they feel it.)

This story isn’t new to regular readers, though, but I want to splice it with another thread.

Incentives.

I hate incentives. Loathe them. Every place I ever worked, the incentives did more harm than good. But it’s the mantra, the mindless ideology of our age that incentives work and you should align incentives.

Since we re-engineered our entire society to appear to do that, our societies have gone to shit for everyone but the one to three percent or so, but since feedback to anybody but them doesn’t matter, we continue.

I recently read John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization.” Or, rather, re-read it, but last time I looked at it was in the nineties.

Saul wrote a bunch of non-fiction books and they’re all bad except “The Unconscious Civilization”, which is brilliant. (They’re bad because Saul is of the old humanist tradition that insists on putting in as many references to the greats of the past as possible.)

But Unconscious Civilization is the publication of a series of five lectures by Saul and the limited time forced him to get to the fucking point. So, read it. (It’s scarily right about almost everything.)

One point Saul makes over and over again is the “value of disinterest”. Social decisions cannot be made properly by people who have an interest in them. Cannot be. We have run a 40 year (arguably 200 to 500 year) experiment on this, and it has failed and failed and failed. Elites need moderate negative feedback and to be insulated from the effects of their decisions which benefit groups.

Our society, as Saul points out, is all organized into interest groups, which half the audience is probably thinking is insane, because they think of interests group as things like environmentalist and people who want food aid, and not as corporations. (Though NGOs are definitely corporatist by Saul’s definition.)

People who have a strong interest can’t make good decisions for anyone but themselves about anything they have a strong positive interest in. It’s that simple.

If we want out of this mess, we have to break strong positive incentives. No stock options, for example. No surgeons flying around in private jets.

When someone’s interest is so strong it makes sense for them to burn the world down (and be clear, it did, because most wouldn’t still be here, and many figure their wealth will protect them), interest has failed. Incentives have failed.

Elites must be subject to the effects of their decisions, yes, but primarily on the downside.

It’s hard to see a way out of this now, because there isn’t one.

Instead the way out will be forced. When fear rises to the necessary level, those who betray society as a whole for their own interest will be dealt with. If they’re lucky it will be thru democratic norms, if they aren’t lucky, it will be the justice of the mob. In either case it will be too late to stop the worst of climate change and ecological collapse.

For you, a reader, the point is to internalize what went wrong and why, so you understand the conditions in which it will change and do not waste time on actions which won’t help. Moral ‘suasion will not work. The elites will respond to power and fear and nothing else.

If you can’t apply enough of that, or any movement asking for your help indicates their strategy doesn’t involve power and fear, then you need to prepare in other ways. In fact, as an ordinary person, you just need to prepare, because while you can do  your bit you do not have enough power to be determinative.

Politics is unlikely to save you and what you do will not determine if it does. So you must, with others, save yourselves.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

And The Mass Evictions are ON

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On August 2, 2021

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So, the evictions moratorium expired Saturday at midnight.

Over a quarter of renters are behind in some states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank.

Southern states are some of the worst affected, though some 16 percent of US households owed rent — about double the amount before the pandemic.

This wasn’t necessary, but the choice was made to not pay people to stay in place, and the money given for relief has mostly not been administered, presumably because the bureaucratic hoops are ridiculous.

only $3 billion in aid has reached households out of the $25 billion allotted to states and localities in early February.

Rental properties and single homes are being snapped up en-masse by private equity and other big investors. Eviction is in their interest, as it makes it easier to raise rent.

This is a watershed moment for real-estate in America: this is where it moves to being owned more by smaller landlords and individual owners (for homes) to just another corporate owned means of, well, rent extraction.

Remember that after 2008 banks deliberately held houses off the market to drive up prices, and you’ll understand what is going to happen to rent, which has already seen ridiculous rises. With large amounts of rental property now in a very few hands, it will be easy for a few people to decide to hold just enough properties off the market to drive up rents. It’s better for big institutional owners to have higher rent prices and some empty if that works out to more rent, and given shortages already exist, I’m betting that will be the case.

The era of cheap housing has been over for a while, but it’s going to be thrown in a coffin and staked thru the heart if big investors have their way.

We’ll talk more later this week, probably, about how wonderful and useful the homeless are and why they are treated so badly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Quarantine Matters

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On July 21, 2021

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So, compared to a lot of other countries, Australia has done a pretty good job on Covid.

But they just had a Covid breakout in two major cities: Sydney and Melbourne. Those breakouts required them to then go back to shutdowns: closing and restricting businesses and movement.

Both outbreaks come from failures in the quarantine system: from hotel quarantine not working because hotels are not set up properly for quarantine due to not separately ventilating.

On July 7th I wrote that quarantine should be mandatory, with criminal penalties for violation, and…

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there.

How has this been proved across the board in Australia?

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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