Silicon Valley Redneck

Engineered bioweapon, hmmm.

In our last installment of Doctor The WHO and the Chronovirus, Dr. Tedros Boutros Boutros-Gallifrey finally conceded that the Virus had achieved pandemic status, a little.  The effect this admission will have upon the world remains to be seen.

Back in the tinfoil-hatted world of the Interwebs, there's (inevitably) ongoing speculation that the Kung Flu virus is a bioweapon engineered by a Chinese lab.

Various sensible people have pointed out that the known attributes of the virus (especially the incubation period) are not at all consistent with a good military weapon, unless its origin is extraterrestrial (Purple Death, Drakh Plague, that sort of thing).

On the other hand... what if it's a bioweapon, but the purpose is other than military?

• It shuts down commerce, and thereby greatly reduces carbon-dioxide emissions.
• It reduces the human population.
• It preferentially thins out the elderly population.
• A mechanism has been proposed whereby it could cause male sterility.

Could it be some sort of Green Plague, designed by an extreme misanthrope to do exactly these things and thereby usher in a fancied new Green Golden Age?

I can't help thinking of Jimmy Bond:

Handle these capsules with care. Dr. Noah's bacillus is highly contagious. This germ, when distributed in the atmosphere will make all women beautiful and destroy all men over 4'6." Please handle these capsules with care.

And some more-than-half-forgotten Charles Sheffield reference is floating around the back of my head, looking for something to connect to.

(Yeah, this is some real tinfoil-hattery here.  But, with home DNA-splicing kits and some hard-core crazy people out there, the category of worry is at least on the horizon.  See also: whichever Sheffield novel it is that's rattling around in the back of my head.)

So we know Epstein killed himself because...

According to Bill Barr, nobody else could have done it, because the one-and-only operational surveillance camera, showing the corridor outside his cell, showed a continuously empty corridor for several hours.

Did Bill Barr never watch Mission: Impossible back in the day?  And they had to deal with sort of thing as outsiders.

Just how secure is the video surveillance system in that joint, anyway?  (I'm guessing not very, given that it doesn't seem to summon Maintenance when cameras aren't working, and taking into account the attention to detail apparent in this whole business.)  How difficult would it be for an insider to substitute static imagery showing an empty corridor for the few minutes during which Keyser Söze slipped from the adjoining cell, entered Epstein's cell, killed Epstein, and returned to his own cell, secure in the knowledge that he'd be released without charges the next morning?

Break out the tinfoil!

For quite some time, I've held that if the Democrats were halfway smart, they'd throw the 2016 election so that the upcoming collapse would happen on the Republicans' watch.

Also, for a lesser time, I've suspected that The Donald, being a good buddy of the Clintons, was just in the Republican primary to make a mess of things and do as much damage as possible to the eventual nominee.

Now, Don Surber notes that Scott Adams perceives (without facts to back it up) that Hillary is not at all well.  (One of Surber's commenters notes that sudden weight gain could be a side-effect of Prednisone).

So, the new grand unified conspiracy theory?  Trump really is in it to win, and he'll take the general election after Hillary drops out for medical reasons... but he'll operate as a Clinton proxy.

Hey, having a Clinton proxy with an R after his name would be great, wouldn't it?  The Clinton machine would get all the goodies, and the Republicans would get all the blame.  Win!

Worldview-dependent interpretations

Staid establishment publication The Economist goes on at some length about the distressing emergence of a durable American aristocracy based on the heritability of braaaaaaains.  Because human evolution operates meaningfully over a span of a couple of generations, and is rapidly producing the New American Übermensch.

Uh, yeah.  The aristocrats are intelligent?  And well educated?*

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Meanwhile, it's left to the knuckle-draggers, e.g., here and especially here, to hint, in their subtle fashion, at the true heritable trait for success: insider social connections.

Yes, it's all very well that you can get an education at Harvard or Yale.  But!  You can also build up a social network while you're there.  And, given that a degree in a soft subject (no math required, please!) from one of those two institutions has become a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a presidential candidate?  That's the kind of social network that can make a big difference in your career, especially if you're basically a social animal and your parents taught you how to buy a suit**.

Then figure that if one or both of your parents attended a given university, you'll be given preference in admissions... especially if the ancestors have been making large donations to the alumni fund... and the opportunity to acquire the particular social connections needed to succeed in a crony-corporatist economy looks very heritable indeed.

The progeny of Davos are destined to rule the Universe not because they're particularly clever (they're not; any given one is easily outwitted) but because they form a closed group, don't regard anyone outside the group as being the same species as themselves, and give each other jobs in highly influential positions.

Throw in the ability to retire at 35 from the more lucrative positions (to go off and spend the rest of one's life doing something Socially Meaningful), and we end up with the New Silicon Valley decision-making class, which includes no one who was an actual adult during the Dot-Com Bubble 1.0.  Hence, no lessons learned, and we get the same investment and planning mistakes writ larger.

But they all have the social connections.  And that's what matters.  At least, to the important people***.

 

* And the "grown-up alternative" for President is "another Clinton or yet another Bush", forsooth!

** Go to one of the approved tailors, and throw money at him.

*** "Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of."

Remember the Maine!

FERGUSON ERUPTS

Yeah.  Was all primed for it, and this stuff sells newspapers (and/or eyeballs).

The mainstream press has been setting this up all along.  Even after evidence supporting the cop's story started dribbling out, serious, professional columnists for well-established publications were asserting as fact that the deceased* was murdered by a cop while attempting to surrender.

The spirit of William Randolph Hearst is alive, if somewhat attenuated.

When you ponder who might benefit from unrest and war, remember who distributes the divisive propaganda, and observe that they also profit from covering the tragedies they help to incite.

And they don't even need stealth warships.

* Invariably referred to in terms which implied a harmless child.

That latest Secret Service fiasco

Whatever it may be; at the time of this writing, it's the fence-jumper with the knife, but by the time you read this there may be another one.

Anyway: this brings to mind one of my less accurate predictions about Obama, which was this: he wouldn't finish his first term.  Either he'd get bored around the two-year mark and wander off in search of higher office, like Queen of the Space Unicorns, or the Chicago Mob would decide he'd be more valuable as a martyr than as a live distraction, and have him bumped off ahead of an election.

Well, he's still alive (unless he's been replaced by a Disney-made audioanimatronic contrivance, which would miss the point entirely), but we're coming up on a midterm election, and then there's 2016, so there are still two opportunities for martyrdom.

And an ineffectual Secret Service might just be part of the grand plan.  Makes it easier for some random loser to do the deed.  (Of course, said loser mustn't be taken alive.  Can't have him shouting about single-payer, or snackbars, or whatever, when the propaganda machine is trying to label him as a Tea Partier.)

Come to think of it, 2016 would be a better time; we'll be clearly at war then, and having some fanatic (of whatever stripe; we can count on his fanaticism being misidentified anyway) kill the wartime President would surely give Her Inevitableness a big boost.  Also, we'd only have 3-4 months of Plugs.

Or, maybe the decline of the Secret Service is just another symptom of general decay, and not part of any specific plot.  Gramsci, anyone?

Huh. Not as close as I'd thought.

So, Scottish independence lost, 45 to 55.

If this is anything like correct, there were huge incentives for the referendum to fail.  As in The Powers That Be could not, under any circumstances, allow it to succeed.

But I'd expected it to be rigged to fail by just a hair, to create political leverage for the Scottish political establishment.  Maybe more people than expected actually voted No?