In The Days Of The Comet

UPDATE: Almost forgot Comet 2I/Borisov

Well, here we are in the thick of a global shutdown over a virus that appears to be less virulent than the annual flu.  The world, to speak in gross generalities, seems to have gone completely off the reservation.  It looks to me, from my little perch under the stairs somewhere in the middle of one of the largest cities in Asia, that the whole thing is a case of fear porn gone viral, to indulge in a pun.

In a supreme, perhaps divine irony, it seems now that cigarette smokers may be among the least infected demographic groups.  As if we are living out Woody Allen's Sleeper, the French are distributing nicotine patches to reduce infection rates.  A big middle finger to all you shamers.

Some folks have inquired as to why I refer to this situation as "the days of the comet."  As with most things I write, there are multiple layers of meaning and intent, not the least of which is I happen to like comets.

At the most superficial layer, there are several comets making a run at the inner solar system just now.  2019 Y4 ATLAS is on a hyperbolic orbit, imlying it has come from outside our realm.  It has also crumbled to dust on approach to the Sun and may vanish altogether.  Then, there's 2017 T2 PanSTARRS, which was discovered when it flared up around the orbit of Saturn - an unusual behavior for a supposed dirty ice ball, but expected for a negatively charged body hitting the Sun's proton "wind".  Then, there's our old friend Enke, which hangs out around the inner solar system and appears every few years.  There's also a number of others still out beyond Jupiter that should arrive later in the year.

None of this is unusual.  There are roughly a dozen comets making runs at any given time.

At the next layer, we encounter one of my favorite authors, H. G. Wells.  Wells published a book in 1906 called, "In The Days of the Comet," in which the Earth is affected by a huge passing comet.  the interaction causes all the nitrogen in the atmosphere to convert to a breathable gas that in turn leads to a new Golden Age on the planet, called the Great Change.  I fancy we may be seeing something like that going on now, as 7 billion people slowly get angry enough to lamp-post the presumptive Masters.

It is curious to note at this point that Uranus entered Taurus last year, which has signaled massive changes on Earth when it happened in the 1770s, 1850s and 1930s.

Comets have long been considered omens of great events.  Whether the omens or good or bad is completely subjective, of course.  In 1066, Halley's Comet (700 years before Halley named it) made a particularly notable run through the inner solar system.  The British came to see it as a particularly bad omen, while the French saw it as a harbinger of great tidings.  This probably has a lot to do with William the Conqueror taking over the British Isles and beheading Harold II in London.

The Chinese, too, came to see the 1066 comet as a bad omen, since it kicked off a particularly rough period during the Song Dynasty.

On the next layer, I have a memory implanted by my great aunt Laetitia, or Tish as everyone called her.  In 1910, she was 12 years old when the Great Halley's Panic occured.  For those unaware, the Earth passed through Halley's Comet's tail in 1910.  A French (of course) astronomer noticed that spectragraphs of the tail revealed a fair amount of cyanogen gas, a deadly poison.  Well, as you can imagine, this set off a worldwide panic, with snake-oil salesmen peddling anti-comet pills and folks building bunkers against the end of times.  At the critical moment, my great aunt's mother dragged her daughter under the bed to hide, and told Tish to, "Pray, Laetitia, pray We're all going to die!"  To which my great aunt replied, "Why do we need to pray if we're all going to die?"

I take this as a sign that critical thinking runs in my genes.

Thus, I have come to think of these times as The Days of the Comet, because there are comets, this may be the beginning of a new Golden Age, and the panic is completely contrived by fear porn peddlers.

Here in Jakarta, we've been on lock-down for a month.  To their credit, the Indonesians find ignoring laws to be great fun and a national pastime.  In fact, they have done such a wonderful job of ignoring the government, that now the president has announced that mudik is cancelled.  Mudik means "exodus" and refers to the national holiday at the end of Ramadhan, where millions of people return to their native villages for feasting and reunion, not unlike the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

To enforce the anti-mudik rule, the Prez has threatened to lock down all entry and exit from the city, using the military to barricade the exits.  Essentially, we are under martial law.  Seems rather dacronian, since the entire country of 320 million people have had just 6,000 confirmed cases and 600 deaths "reported" as COVID-19.

In any event, I expect the riots to start sooner than later.  The second most enjoyed pastime in Indonesia is rioting, especially when it's paid for by various political interests.

My neighborhood is much quieter than usual.  Except for the ubiquitous door-to-door salesmen pushing bread, noodles, and meatball soup, the only real activity are the hordes of motorcycle delivery men rushing goods hither and yon from online purchases.

We get several boxes a day, primarily my wife ordering a dizzying array of Chinese herbal remedies and vitamins, and me restocking the bar.  There's an entire ritual to it, where the delivery man drops it on the doorstep, my wife suits up in homemade PPE, soaks the package in sanitizer, opens the outer package outside, then carefully removes the contents and rushes them inside for more dousing.

Of course, if I receive the delivery, I just take it from the guy, give a small tip for braving the elements, tear open the package and leave the trash outside, then pour a big fat Gin Tonic to ward off any viruses or parasites that may be lurking within.

And yes, I firmly believe that hydroxichloroquine is worth having around the house.  No, not because Trump touts it (I heard about it a week before Trump did), but because I am a firm believer that something which may work now is worth far more than a dozen possible vaccines next year sometime.  And yes, I have enough zinc tablets and azythromycin to cure an entire army.

However, I rest assured that my intake of vast quantities of Gin Tonic will do just fine as a palliative of first resort.  Hey, if it was good enough for the British occupying forces in India in the 1800s, it's good enough for me.

In any case, I am prepared for what I consider to be the two most likely outcomes; 1) the Supreme Hoax that is the COVID Scare of 2020 will be exposed soon and the lynchings will begin shortly thereafter; or 2) this is a devilish bioweapon that will sweep the globe for years to come, killing millions if not billions.  Whichever manifests itself, I am mentally prepared to deal with it

Whether Nancy Pelosi becomes the historical echo of Marie Antoinette, or we end up living out the movie Omega Man (with me as the gin-swilling Charlton Heston character), I am prepared to observe the proceedings with all the mirth and irony of Falstaff, and the sardonic snipes of George Carlin.

In the meantime, I shall remain supremely amused at humanity's eternal quest for self-annihilation.  for some reason, our species seems grotesquely fixated on doom, and I for one cheer its impending arrival.  Whether Nature has thrown an evolutionary curve ball at us, or the Slimy Bastards have unleashed their final act on us, the outcome should be highly entertaining.

And so, in the Days of the Comet, I remain the observer of all that is insane.  The chronicler of last resort, if you will.

The Game Is Afoot

MIRANDA      Oh, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
- The Tempest, Act 5 Scene 1, William Shakespeare

It is safe to say we are no longer in Kansas, Toto.  Sometime last October, the Central Communist Party of China robbed the world of its past and created a fork in the road to our future.  Whether that is for the better or worse is the question we must now address.

The China most of us have known our entire lives is finished.  Either by internal upheaval, or external shunning, or both, the Maoist regime is not long for this world.  This is certainly for the better.  China's fate is sealed and we need not waste too much time on it, but to say "good riddance."

Our primary issue now is the cause of this situation.  No, it's not a virus - that is just product of the Original Error.  No, the error we must address was committed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972, and perpetuated by the Bush Crime Family (BCF).

The Western corporate interests had cast their gaze upon Japan, and saw that it was good.  In the aftermath of World War 2, Japan was a smoking ruin barely out of its feudal age.  The geopolitical Chess Players saw an opportunity for cultural hegemony that would at once neutralize a powerful adversary, and offer a vast supply of cheap labor.

The Players set about building Japan in their own image.  At first, it was mini parasols for their Mai Tais on the beach, but slowly the manufacturing industry built up to cars and electronics.  In fact, the Players were so successful in rebuilding Japan that by the late 1960s, the country challenged the financial power of Western corporate elites.

Something had to be done.

The Players hatched a plan to move their operations to China.  A billion staving peasants led by a powerful and highly corrupt elite offered the perfect playground.  Here was an unending supply of cheap, mind-controlled labor and a leadership that could itself be led around by the nose with a little cash.  It also served as a buffer against the Soviet Union, and was a powerful influence in Asia.  One octopus, many tentacles.

Keep in mind that the Fascists and the Communists were mortal ideological enemies.  We should also note that China has evolved into a hybrid of Fascism and Communism.  The State owns all political and financial power, while fostering a racial superiority complex and fantasies of global domination.

After facing off against China in Korea and Vietnam, and seeing it cozy up more and more with Russia, the Players needed to control such a powerful force and sway it to their side - like a Master calling a dog to heel..

Kissinger, a crypto-fascist, was made National Security Adviser to Nixon in 1969.  In that position, he stage managed some of the most egregious violations of human rights of the 20th century across Southeast Asia and South America - no small feat in a century full of Hitlers and Stalins.  Having proved his usefulness and his complete lack of conscience to the Players, he was advanced to greater responsibility.

Nixon, a rabid anti-Communist and fresh off a re-election campaign that swept the nation out from under the Democrats, was easy to convince.  In 1972, he spent seven days touring prospective sites for new plants and discussing China's role in avoiding labor rights and workplace safety regulations that had made US products so expensive to produce.  Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had no problem throwing his people under the bus, and even Mao Zedong gave his blessing to the rape of his nation, as long as he enjoyed plenty of perks for he and his cronies.

In the position of SecState, Kissinger was tasked with solidifying diplomatic relations with China, a country that had been virtually sealed off from the world since the Cultural Revolution in 1966.  He engineered the deals that would be consummated by the US Senate and would allow US corporations, then just emerging as global forces of their own, free rein to exploit Chinese workers with near-impunity and with almost no regulation.

And thus was born the Age of Globalism.

China's legendary corruption would allow the Players to use it as the global hub for manufacturing.  China, for its part, would farm out assembly work to Southeast Asia, while sucking up vast quantities of resources across the hemisphere.  The Players could deploy their financial tools all across the region and reap profits coming and going.

For their part, the US mega-corps would handle marketing and finance.  With innovations like Just-In-Time delivery, the products finished in China would essentially be inventoried in transit, eliminating the need for expensive warehousing, and creating an endless pipeline of gee-gaws and widgets to markets across the globe.

The US government sent out hordes of Economic Hitmen, who arranged dollar-denominated loans to emerging economies, which in turn would buy greater and greater quantities of gee-gaws and widgets, and service the debt with more dollars.  This effectively made the US dollar the global must-have currency and propelled US mega-corps into realms of profits unseen since the Dutch East Indies Company in the 1600s (exploiting the same region of the world too).

In the US, politicians became more and more corrupt themselves.  They found it expedient to sell America's research and development to China, since there were almost no labor or environmental restrictions.  The politicians grew fabulously wealthy and greedy.  Gangs like the BCF, the Clintons, the Obamas, the McCains, the Pelosis, and the Bidens fell all over themselves to sell secrets to China for a piece of the pie, while placing their spawn on boards of directors to ensure the correct amount of cash was being allocated.

They sent unsecured information to their private servers or GMail accounts, where it was easily passed off to Chinese interests.  Those interests in turn laundered profits, aid payments and grants through layers of Western banks and shell corporations, and then made sizable donations to various Foundations, where the money entered the waiting pockets of the Players.

We pause here to give credit where due.  It was the BCF who designed and implemented this intricate system, and was the reason Godfather GHW was first made CIA Director, then Vice President, then President, then head of a dynasty of presidents, governors and policy makers that would make a Kennedy green with envy.

The politicians received kick-backs from the vast piles of cash handed out in the form of aid and grants to "developing" nations.  Favored Central Party apparatchiks headed up corporations that secretly vacuumed up other companies, and themselves became fabulously wealthy.  The growing power, wealth and global influence excited the CCP elites and they pushed further and faster despite warnings from their Western Masters.

The corruption grew exponentially, and it started becoming obvious to anyone willing to look at it.  The Players used their media assets to create Conspiracy Theorists.  Anyone who saw through the thin veil covering these activities was labelled and marginalized to prevent the rubes from waking up.

At the same time, all of humanity was commoditized for the Players' amusement.  Our taxes were handed out as "aid" (USAID) and "grants" (science mega-projects like CERN and Global Warming).  Significant amounts of cash were kicked back to the Players.  Anyone useful who wanted to join the Players had to seal the deal with a heinous crime - say abusing children.  This ensured silence and allowed the Game to roll on unabated in spite of the increasingly visible corruption.

The ease with which the Players fleeced humanity, the effectiveness of their media tools and the strength of their internal bonds made them lower their guard.  They got sloppy and increasingly saw themselves as untouchable.  Their hubris made them weaker at the moment they perceived themselves to be at their peak of power.

The Players, though, needed an insurance policy against the masses.  They needed a means to hit the pause button if too many rubes started to smell the rot.  The most effective tool in the box was bioweapons, but global bans on such research made R&D problematic.  They were, however, easily transportable, almost undetectable, and if you had the cure, you were invulnerable.

So, they turned to China again.

The gross corruption and complete lack of regulation in China allowed the Players to operate bioweapon labs with impunity.  No oversight, a compliant and well-controlled population, and a national media that never asked questions presented the ideal environment to study, develop and weaponize viruses and bacteria.  Even the patents could be quietly filed and maintained without oversight, since the CCP would never bite the hand that feeds it.  China's well-established shipping and logistics as a manufacturing hub gave it nearly unlimited access to all regions of the globe.

then the unthinkable happened.

The Players lost control of the 2016 elections in the UK and US.  In the ensuing chaos, the established pecking order among the Players got tossed.  They panicked and each faction thought they had the most to lose and the best solution.  Competing crime families began jostling for greater power and control.  All the infighting led to hasty decisions and sloppy execution.  All efforts to subdue and destroy the competing factions were ineffective, and time was short.  The rubes were waking up.

The dominant Players decided it was time to hit the pause button.  A plague was distributed during the military games in southern China:

"The 2019 Military World Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games and commonly known as Wuhan 2019, was held from October 18–27, 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China."

During the Games, the various blocs would receive vials of the virus that could be easily stashed in all the gear they were shipping around with no customs interference.  The virus was to be released simultaneously throughout the world, thus obfuscating the source.

It appears to the keen observer that something went terribly wrong.  The virus was released too early and practically on the doorstep of the Wuhan Virology Lab.

Even worse, the world (us rubes) did not respond as expected.  A global population, increasingly distrustful of standard authority systems, and wary of the media mind-control, did not respond to the installed triggers.  No one panicked, and instead began questioning and researching.  The non-standard information outlets that had developed over the years became the trusted sources.

The early release in Wuhan and failed attempts to hide or dismiss it allowed the world to react quickly by shutting borders and setting up medical responses.

The infection pattern clearly implicated Wuhan as the epicenter and citizen journalists began digging before the cover-up could be effected.  The Players hastily triggered Iran, Italy and New York to deflect attention.  It was too late, though.  All the pieces weren't in place yet and the Plan was exposed.

And let's not forget that the US and other navies have been particularly hard hit, while the Chinese navy seems unscathed.  Seems the PLA ordered heavy doses of Vitamin C in the early going, knowing that the chemical is a strong anti-viral and is what brought the COVID-19 virus to the lab's attention in the first place.

Additionally, it appears that the use of hydroxychloroquine as a remedy, negating the need for expensive and protracted vaccine development, was not supposed to get out.  The cheap, tested and easily available drug was for the Players, not the rubes.  We were supposed to wait, pay and die while the Players lollygagged around "developing a vaccine."  Someone in the chain had let the cat out of the bag and the Players have been scrambling around trying to distract the rubes from this simple cure, but it's too late.  The honest doctors picked up on the cure and have been administering it with surprising success, given the way these things normally progress.  The cure went out in weeks, not years.

So here we are.  The Old World has passed away.  That was the intention all along - crash the global economy and cause the rubes to cling to authority out of sheer dread.  What has upset the apple cart is that there is at least one, possibly more, factions looking to use the chaos to take over the Family Business.

The power struggle within the ranks of the Players is a primary issue, but what complicates things is that the rubes aren't panicking - well, except for the toilet paper bandits.  We quietly retreated to our homes, pulled our kids out of the indoctrination centers, stopped listening to the Mockingbird Programming, and picked up some hydroxychloroquine on the way home.

The Weapon was triggered before the Plan had been fully implemented.  At that point, the Players were playing catch-up with the rubes, trying desperately to distract the rubes and get them back in the corral.  The Geezer Media has adopted a policy of contradicting everything.  They are recycling carefully staged video segments of death and destruction.  The Players are constantly hammering their "vaccine" cure.  They are constantly floating their "track and trace" programs.  Every conceiveable tool has been pressed into service to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

It's not working.

The world has two clear paths from here.  The end of globalism will lead either to a new cultural nationalism that rejects the Players and adheres to real community and self-reliance, or it will lead to a new feudalism of competing warlords and their herds of serfs.  The former seems very bright and promises what may be a new Golden Age, while the latter is dark and foreboding and dooms humanity to servitude for centuries.

Whither from here?

The Wasteland (w/ salute to t.s. eliot)

If you are one of those people who believes your government is a benign and righteous entity out to serve you and your best interests, stop here, because what follows is a thorough trashing of anything remotely resembling a government.

Most militaries are functions of governments.  They are the thugs that enforce the government's will on perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic.  At a local level, the military is usually called "police," at a state level its the "national guard" or "state police," and at a national level its called "army" or some variant thereof depending on medium over which it seeks dominance (the elements of earth, air, water, space, etc.).

Sometimes, the military serves the public interest, be it good, bad or indifferent.  Most of the time it is out of control and either covertly or overtly runs the civilian powers.  In the covert function, we commonly call it the Military Industrial Complex.  Overtly, we call it "junta" or "martial law," or similar epithet.

Most people think the military serves a valuable function.  They have been trained since birth to "support the troops" or "bend the knee," but in any case they bow to force of any kind.  This is because people think of "life" as a limited commodity, thus they will cower behind any entity that promises more of it.

A military runs on strategy.  If you've ever programmed in the archaic FORTRAN language, then you have a deep understanding of how military thinking works.  Everything in the world is an IF>THEN statement or a DOLOOP.  You either respond and advance/retreat, or you get bogged down in a morass.

To game out these situations, militaries create War Colleges.  This is a collection of a nation's best strategists, who pull out a piece of paper, make two columns (OFFENSE and DEFENSE) and proceed to think of every possible scenario and how to respond to it with any given set of resources.

I assure you, the current global situation has been gamed to the Nth degree for decades, down to air pressure and wind direction.  The creation of AI and supercomputers has made it all the more complex, adding dimensions of timing, stellar alignments and (based on your Amazon buying habits) the projected behavior of billions of people at any moment.

What it boils down to, is that we are being gamed by someone.  Our collective response is already known.  The headlines are written to extract the exact reaction from a precise demographic.  Every news outlet knows who is watching and what they want to hear, and the information put out is tuned to their sensitivities.

No matter how smart you think you are, you are susceptible to this Beast.  Even though I know how it works and why, I fight a continuous battle to break out of the programming and think clearly.  When you know precisely how an atomic clock works, it doesn't stop you from being amazed by the unerring vibration of Strontium-50.


In our modern world, everything has been gamed.  Information has been weaponized.  The human condition has been modeled down to being able to predict your behavior by your purchases.  If you have any social or economic habits of any kind, someone can predict how you will behave in any given situation with a fair degree of accuracy.  There are a finite number of personality types, and you are one of them.

We have reached a point in our collective development that most of our deepest thought processes are now algorithms.  I can determine your profile, enter it into a computer, adjust the conditions, and be fairly certain you will do anything I predict with a table of uncertainty built in.

With a big enough computer (think super or quantum), I can load in demographics for any given population, feed in a set of external conditions, and get a table of likely outcomes with their associated percentages of certainty.  And they are pretty damned accurate, with the outcomes plotted on a candlestick graph showing the likely range of reactions.

Add to that the ability to control what the individual knows in any given population, and now I can predict what you know and how you will react.  With sophisticated media, I can even control how any given group will react by sensitizing that group over time with certain views and beliefs.  In other words, by controlling how groups interpret religious beliefs, I can control how they will react to specific inputs based on their programmed worldviews.

Given that most of the world has some type of religious belief system and has been educated in a certain curriculum, I now have the ability to tailor information to get any group of people to behave a certain way.

There is nothing magical here, in the strictest sense.  These techniques have been studied for the better part of two centuries, with religious tool sets stretching back into antiquity.  These tools have been developed and refined for millennia.

With all that said, do you really think a novel virus has to be released into a global population?  How many people reading this can verify information coming out of China or Italy or Spain or New York?  How many of us just accept the infection and death tolls without calling a colleague in another country or hot spot to confirm?  How many of us choose an "authority" and just follow that without question?  Do you reject Trump but like Fauci?  Do you accept the Pope but reject the Dalai Lama?  Do you listen to the CDC but dismiss the WHO?  Does the FED have more weight than the IMF?  The UN over your personal governmental agencies?

Whichever set of "authorities" you choose will determine your outlook on the current situation.  That is predictable.  Whatever viewpoint you adopt based on those "authorities" will color your responses and activities based on the information packet you ingest.  That much is predictable.  At some level, someone can predict at a global, regional, national, and local level just how any group of people will react to any given set of headlines.

And now back to the military.

In this brave new world, there is no need to bomb, strafe, invade, or even fire a single bullet.  The most advanced war colleges have already gamed this situation.  They know what it would take to start it, what every possible response will be, and have some means to counter it.

You are not reading headlines or listening to reports.  You are being attacked by one group, and covered by another.  It makes no difference who/what you believe.  Whoever wins this war will decide what was right and what was "enemy".

At a certain level, we are all pieces on a game board being advanced and withdrawn in a game we did not sign up to play, but that we support with our undying allegiance to governments and militaries.

All of your possible responses have been modeled and anticipated.  You have been sensitized to follow certain "authorities" since birth.  There really is no way out, because even if you call bullshit on all of it, you are part of a demographic that will carry you along with it willing or not.

There is/isn't a new virus.  It is/isn't infecting/killing people.  Your "authorities" are/aren''t responding appropriately.  Civilization will/won't survive.

It doesn't matter what you or I believe/don't believe.  We are surrounded by billions of preprogrammed automatons and our habits and resources have been duly noted and modeled.

The war began before you or I were even aware of it.  The game is already well under way.  How you and I respond is inconsequential.

With that set of conditions, where do we go from here?