We are simply not dealing with people who have enough knowledge or love of truth to try to figure out reality. Fantasy worlds tailored to people’s competence dysmorphia are so much nicer and easier than reality.

Conspiracy theorists actually make things much more complicated than they are; it’s the nature of fabricating complicated schemes out of carefully selected facts, whereas history or science try to find the most parsimonious story that fits the available facts, not just the cool ones. One of the side-effects of those approaches is that, when you first start tracking a story, you may get to a point where you don’t have enough facts and have to exert some discipline to wait quietly for more to arrive. This is where the problems start: imagine we are in a race for the truth, and we’re sitting back and studying the information as it develops, while the opposition starts blurting stuff out, repairing the flaws in their analysis, later. As I write this, I am thinking that this applies to a large number of stories, which probably means I’ve gotten at some general principles. I’m thinking of the Kennedy assassination (which is news, again) and the COVID-19 pandemic. While the virologists were saying, “be cool, be cool, we’ll figure this out” we had the counter-spectacle of several federal agencies blurting out things they had no business blurting out. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, if the FBI or CIA had any evidence pointing toward a “lab leak” theory, it would have been massively secret. We have this weird paradigm in the security/intelligence world, where you can often tell who knows anything because the people who know things are keeping mum. Meanwhile, someone who’s on Fox television saying “It’s obviously a lab leak” by definition has no fact to put forward.

Of course, with COVID-19 there is also another motivation: to cover the US government’s collective incompetence. Just to review: we were dealing with a novel virus that was spreading and deadly – common sense would say to respond conservatively. If we don’t know (yet) whether the virus is transmitted from surfaces, let’s act like it is, to be on the safe side until we learn more. If wearing masks reduces the chance of being infected or spreading an infection, then that seems like a good idea, too. But, instead of pursuing a bunch of ideas and collecting information, the US collectively lost its shit(tm). Or, at least half of it did. I remember when someone mentioned on TWiV that “there’s a paper about ivermectin being helpful, but it’s not a very good paper and no doubt it will be looked at closely, soon.” Meanwhile, the president of the US started blathering about how it was all going to go away soon, and then “ivermectin” and then “I presided over making a vaccine” but “maybe it doesn’t work…” It was a crazy series of head-fakes that should have never happened. The administration actually had a pretty decent pandemic response plan somewhere on its’ “things to do in emergencies” contingent analysis shelf, but they couldn’t use it because the president was a demented old conman with a rotting brain, who was going to say any old thing that popped into his head. Then, the vast management cult that is the United States political system was going to have to rally around the stupidity and keep from being proved wrong. Because, apparently “I was wrong” are 3 words a US president cannot utter without being turned to ash in a bolt of lightning.

So we were treated to a remarkable spectacle of people running around, not doing the right thing, but trying to claim that it was the right thing, and the fault was anyone‘s but theirs.

Meanwhile, as Vincent Racagniello said many times, the progression and spread of COVID-19 was straight out of a public health study, and looked exactly like every other pandemic we have been able to learn anything about, ever. We don’t know enough about Justinian’s plague, but there was a Patient Zero, who became host to a pathogen that became resident in the human population, which spread through contact – that’s all it took. I recall a number of times the TWiV folks saying that the events in Wuhan were going to bear study because, of course, they will be a great case study in how a virus can jump to a human population, and how a virus becomes endemic rather than pandemic, etc. [One thing I always think about, around now, is that at some point when humans started herding birds, some of the pox viruses from birds jumped into our population and mutated and spread. That must have felt like a bad day from the gods.] There has since been lots of analysis, such as Worobey et al.,[twiv] looking at the viral strains from the Wuhan wet market, which note that the outbreak looks exactly like what we’d expect to see if some novel virus jumped into humans because someone brought a sick animal into a place where it would spread. One more time: none of this is shocking.

What is shocking would be if the Chinese government maliciously or accidentally spread the virus. Suddenly we are in conspiracy theory land: how did they do that? Why did they do that? How did they do it undetectably? Was this massively expensive operation a plan to knock off a bunch of old people in a home outside of Seattle, or was there a broader strategic point? Usually around now, it’s traditional to mention that “bioweapons are hard to control” – it’s not as though COVID-19 didn’t temporarily collapse parts of the Chinese economy, because the Chinese were, as an authoritarian state, more able to enforce lockdowns, until it became clear that the cat was out of the bag and riding on the back of the horse that left the barn. [twiv] Because of the Chinese political system’s deep hatred of being shown to be wrong, they didn’t properly advertise what was happening. This whole thing could have been handled much, much, better if the US and Chinese governments had been willing to say “we don’t know what’s going on, let’s cooperate.” Instead of “we are perfectly right in all ways, shut up, you are conspiring against us to make us look stupid.”

Well, it worked. And everyone came off looking depressingly mortal. Especially the million or so people who died, worldwide, because the US and China couldn’t collectively get their crap together enough to stop people who were throwing off a novel virus from getting on airplanes to Italy, Seattle, etc. It’s shockingly like the scenarios in every Outbreak movie, ever. And the “lab leak” theory is shockingly similar to Stephen King’s mediocre potboiler The Stand.* A novel virus was actually a great opportunity for the authoritarian goons who run China and the US to show what good custodians they are of their flock. Alternatively, if their flock wasn’t a giant bunch of chuckle-fucks, humans might have been able to stamp down the outbreak without it becoming a pandemic.

Now’s the nauseating bit. The current US regime is deeply, passionately, stupidly, concerned with being right. I know this is probably obvious but one really good way to be right during a pandemic is not to ask whether people can push bleach up their butts to disenfect themselves from the inside. Or eat horse anti-parasitics. Or promote concern over the reliability of vaccines, but then run screaming for a monoclonal antibody shot as soon as you get sick. etc., etc. I think Trump was starting to realize this was serious business, considering that he lost a few of his buddies to that “mere flu.” But we cannot – literally cannot – underestimate the pettiness and stupidity of the current administration. Check this out: [wh]

How unnecessary is this? Trump already got away with mis-handling the pandemic so badly that more Americans died of COVID-19 than in World War 2. How important is it to these imbeciles that they be seen to be right?

This is a detailed exercise in pettiness:

“EVERYBODY ELSE WAS WRONG!!!”

And, as usual, everyone who came within Trump’s orbit is punished for it. I have to say I was not impressed with Dr Fauci’s response to the situation, but that was because he was expecting a collaborative environment where people shared a common objective. That was never what he was in – he was there to take blame. And, he did. I think he should have done a series of educational interviews with the shattered remains of the US press corps, but it was probably already too late. Unfortunately, like most sane people, he thought that he could try to reason with the MAGA psychos, and never had a chance. I don’t blame Fauci – it must have been incredibly painful to see a life of service to science getting thrown away – but I am sure plenty of people warned him of that. My guess is that Fauci’s flaw was hubris – he thought he could teach basic virology to a bunch of chuds who had no interest at all. He should have held a press conference the second he heard the word “ivermectin” but now he’s positioned where the vengeful trolls can flail away at the tattered pieces of his reputation for public service.

It’s just fucking weird. I’m vaguely reminded of the fate of Ernst Rohm, one of the founders of the SA, who became inconvenient when word of his homosexuality started to leak out. Eventually, Goring and Hitler had him arrested and imprisoned, where he refused to shoot himself politely, as suggested, so the commandant of Dachau shot him with the pistol he had been given to suicide himself with.

The Trumpers don’t seem to be learning anything from history. They could have just let Fauci crawl off, destroyed, and kept the cameras off him. But instead, it seems it was necessary to spit in his face a few extra times. What a disgusting bunch of cowards. Who was their last worthy foe? Jack Smith, perhaps. I’m surprised that he has been left alone.

It’s weird, puerile shit. This is the kind of thing that deeply insecure people do, pissing on their enemies’ faces once the legionnaires are holding them down. I am thinking of how Caesar showed clemency to his opponents once he knew they were utterly beaten – but Trump’s the kind of emotionally needy coward who’ll order a man bound and gagged, monologue at them, and then kick them very hard in the kneecap and run away. There is a story that Heinrich Himmler once arranged a mass shooting of Jews, so he could watch – and that he wound up puking his guts out into a muddy ditch. These people want to feel like they are tough and hardcore, but the tough and hardcore wouldn’t even use them as a toothbrush.

The sad thing is that what’s coming for humanity won’t care. Nationalism won’t matter. Borders won’t protect people. Weapons of mass destruction will only make it worse. Capitalism cannot cope. The great fucked will not respect anyone’s amour-propre. I plan to be dead by then.

* The Stand is the literary equivalent of getting a 2 hour hand-job, which ends in your sudden castration. It’s as though King wrote the book with an eye on his word-meter and as soon as it got close to the number specified in his contract he popped the cork on a whole magnum bottle of deus ex machina and sprayed it at his plot. Boo. Bad!

The thing that strikes me as so super crazy about this is that it’s pretty easy to come out of some situations looking like a good leader. I actually have some experience with this. I was running a company, back in 1999, and at one point we were doing a financing operation and were perilously close to running out of money and having to shut down operations. Instead of making that a Great Big Surprise to the employees, I actually discussed it, shared my fears, gave them the run rates and how much operational time we had left and so – when I was able to close the financing at the last minute (having made one round of paychecks out of my 401K) everyone understood what was going on and cheered madly. It felt good. Imagine if Trump and his goons had decided to make the “how is the vaccine development going?” the national sport for 6 months while it was tested. I am often reminded that the British often make big events out of their great failures (Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Omdurman, Jutland)* if Turnip had done that he’d be up there in the pantheon with Lincoln and Truman, instead of just a cheap gomer with a love of gold leaf and a criminal record.

(* Jutland was a failure. Wanna fight?)