This is a surreal moment, not a funny one. Plague humour takes on a
Bosch-like
quality. Bosch depicted sin as a catalyst for social breakdown in his
Garden of Earthly Delights. His famous triptych symbolically portrayed a world letting go. That's the feeling now. Jokes get thrown in with intense news reports and crazy conspiracy theories. There is no clear narrative.
Paranoia and Priorities
Crazy predictions, apparently from 2017 - or if you prefer - crazy disinfo. Click to enlarge. Image Source: 4chan.
The Internet Underground, as I have previously blogged, regards Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) as a Gen Y hero; rightly or not, they believe his death reflects deep corruption at MIT and Harvard. Image Source: 4chan.
As authorities respond to the spread of the coronavirus, public trust dissolves into paranoia. It is hard to trust officials when so many disturbing things were happening prior to this pandemic. Even with the best containment measures, governments and hospitals will not be able to contain the medical tsunami. Failures may be so catastrophic that they will look orchestrated or premeditated, even if they are not.
Combine that disaster with economic failure and restrictions on citizens' movements, communications, and activities, all on a stage set to sweep aside civil rights. An economic Gordian knot could be conveniently cut by means of the pandemic response. At the same time, the public will be immobilized and partly decimated. This is not a nice coincidence.
Even red-pilled and black-pilled anons are surprised. They nursed alienation from the 'normies,' whom they regard as wage slaves, for two decades. Anons' distrust of the establishment is so complete that they regard everything labeled 'good' as 'bad,' and vice versa. Yoichi Shimatsu's quotation above in relation to the late Aaron Swartz is emblematic of these priorities:
"Striking at the nerve center of the military-corporate-pharmaco-porno complex is an ethical duty not a crime, one of the few available means to defend constitutional law."
Anons cannot decide now whether soldiers are being shuttled around countrysides
to help them in an eleventh-hour coup against Deep State actors - or if the military are ready to imprison dissenters in quarantine camps.
To some extent, this nervousness extends to the mainstream public, made worse by mixed messages from governments and media and the fact that this nCov crisis reminds everyone of 9/11. Compare a
semi-official statement about tanks moving now into London, UK with a
citizen's observation. Like 9/11, this pandemic will shape the global landscape for another twenty years. Like 9/11, the devastation will not just be measured in terms of loss of life. Unless there are serious, far-reaching changes to shift things away from the current technocratic drive to control the very thoughts inside our heads, this pandemic will be remembered in terms of a powerful loss of faith in existing politics and society. That trend will probably overturn most systems of authority today, whose leaders assume that they will consolidate power through this crisis, not be flushed away by it.
"Harness Biology as Technology"
The public have good reason to doubt the integrity of the global establishment. Things were hardly ideal before the pandemic began. Below is a screenshot of a 12 November 2015 report in
Nature about bat virus research at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is one of the reasons anons - and the Chinese government - claim that the coronavirus had a (partially) American source. There are also
reports about
an explosion at a
Russian biolab, known as
VECTOR, from
September 2019. There is a
Harvard connection, and a
Canadian connection, to this crisis.
Image Source: Nature via 4chan. Click to enlarge.
The main thing to take away from this speculation is that it is not all paranoia and disinformation. Gain-of-function research was certainly taking place in top level biolabs over the past few years. Chinese scientific publications from Wuhan were full of it. The money was there for it and the Chinese were not restraining their scientists with red tape or regulations. There was an
ethical debate about reckless behaviour in this field within the
scientific community.
This is before we get to highly questionable genetic experimentation with tools like
CRISPR. And it is also before we get to strange innovations in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biotech, and
nanotech,
all of which overlap in the worst ways with
genetic experiments. It is easy to dismiss lunatic conspiracy theorists who have been rambling for years about vaccines,
chemtrails, and
retweeting Julian Assange's warnings against
smart dust. But they have a point:
DARPA has stated that its goal is to "harness biology as technology."
Public fear is justified, because the scientific and tech communities have not restrained themselves. They have not moved forward in careful ways. They have been held back only by the availability of funding and legal jurisdictions. No one appears to have lost sleep over whether certain experiments should even have been attempted. Lines are and were being crossed all over the place. Researchers have been arrogant and deceitful in their practices and this time, the Petri dish blew up in their faces.
At the same time, specialists in the arts and humanities have failed. They normally act as critics to indicate a larger moral context when science, technology and engineering get out of control. Gone are the greats like
Jacob Bronowski, who could stand in a human ash pool at Auschwitz and
state: "we have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power." Bronowski
warned repeatedly that knowledge must move forward with integrity, and that anyone who did not pair integrity with knowledge would lose the light of true understanding and any power and authority that might accompany that understanding. Only Bronowski could have pleaded for the integrity of science in terms of the
Auguries of Innocence by William Blake:
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"
I discussed Bronowski's assessment of physics in the 20th century as an "immortal work" in my 8 April 2011 post,
Worlds within Worlds.
The Jacob Bronowskis are gone. The most vocal practitioners in the arts and humanities have become compromised by politicized navel-gazing. Unlike researchers in the sciences, they barely get funded anyway. And when they do, it is for the worst reasons, to bolster Franken-science with Orwellian
goodthink. I get the impression that the only permitted 'soft' fields around cutting edge 'hard' scientific research are
espionage, finance, politics, and marketing. The classic commentator from the humanities, who once played a crucial role in scientifically- and technologically-advanced societies, has devolved into a controlled environmental activist pawn like Greta Thunberg. At least the pandemic has mercifully forced her off the world stage.
As an individual, I have tried on this blog to meet the moral obligation to society of a person based in the humanities and the arts, by holding up a philosophical mirror to the Millennial march progress. In the past two decades, there are a lot of bloggers and vloggers in the alt-media who have also done this, as well as some trolls and hacktivists.
In order to grasp the myriad of scientific and technological experiments, tests, trials and research groups which were underway at a single point in time, I selected one month as an example. In February 2016, I tried to track down as many science and tech reports as I could in the mainstream English-speaking press or in institutional press releases. I summarized my findings in one post:
Science and Tech: Headlines and History in February 2016.
I barely scratched the surface of what was currently being pursued in labs and test facilities in the United States, let alone worldwide. The footage I remember above all was of a Cape Cod warehouse, in which
DARPA was repeatedly flying small, very expensive quadcopter drones into cement walls. I had hoped to make this type of post a monthly digest, but there was simply too much information for me to catalogue. It was overwhelming. I reflected on this big picture in the post,
The New Millennium's Gothic Moment.
Surreal Reality: The Garden of Earthly Delights
Notice that mainstream reporting on nCov and COVID29 consistently draws attention away from any moral failing on the part of the scientific community. Were researchers playing with fire in Promethean bioweapons projects? Rather than broach these concerns, the MSM fail in their duty, and paper over the cracks. They fixate on pandemic numbers and manage public behaviour. No one is allowed to get to the bottom of preexisting problems which may have lain at the root of what has occurred.
The only reason this comes as a surprise to the public is that we were not paying attention, and we trusted our governments and universities to monitor top level biolabs. That wasn't happening.
As a result of the lies and cover-ups, no one knows what is really going on. We can't get a real grip on this thing. No one is being held accountable. We could even be in the early stages of World War III, and be blind to it. A Canadian anon expressed the Underground's sentiment:
"we can only speculate as to whether coronavirus is a nothing burger or not. if you trust the media, or politicians, or the corrupted scientific establishment you are naive. but you cant totally discredit them either. we can just speculate and guess as to whats going on because everyone everywhere is a lying piece of shit.
should you be worried or not i dunno, flip a coin, 50/50
maybe this is the best possible response, maybe its the worst possible response. feel free to speculate but dont pretend like you know fuck all, you are just a dumb fucking peasant like everyone else and you dont have access to accurate information. who the fuck does?"
This uncertainty creates a surreal atmosphere. No one knows what exactly is happening in this pandemic, how it started, and where it is going. This has led to disillusionment about some leaders, and to jokes and criticism at their expense, which they may or may not deserve. More seriously, it has led to accusations between Chinese and US governments about the origins of the nCov virus.
An American veteran's response to
Lijian Zhao on
4chan: "dude when I was in the army there wasnt even enough money to fart outside let alone poison a bunch of bats in wuhan." Where the uncertainty about reality goes, actual reality follows.
This prepper earned his beer. Image Source: 4chan.
See all my posts on Epidemics here and here.
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