a class act

"as merchandising was at a full stop...all the poor whose labour depended on the merchants were at once dismissed and put out of business." daneil defoe. a journal of the plague year______________________

the "king" has backed down from his nixonian "divine right of presidents" stance...

and told governors to "re-open" their states as they see fit...which is probably as it should be even though some states ( like mine for instance ) are going to move towards "re-opening" more hastily than others...there are significant arguments on both sides...

people are struggling...and if they are receiving anything at all it likely resembles the pittance my state has forwarded to me...yes it is free money and it flies in the face of the puritan view of charity held by government as a gateway to the hell of "idle hands" ( slack times gives people to think about events and why the "whys" are what they are and to look at possible alternatives...best to keep the rabble busy working to scrape by rather then leave them time to think while they scrape by )..a return to "normal" ( which we will not be going back to by the by...they will tell you we are...but, as usual, they are lying to a purpose ) may mitigate some of the suffering...maybe...that will be the public argument for "re-opening"...i am not going to buy into that...

these numbers had shown signs of flattening out earlier in the week...the totals were still growing but they were holding steady in the mid twenty thousands a day...the past few days they have spiked again ( an important corespondent to this blog maintains it is because of expanded testing and that is a valid point worth considering...and another line of evidence showing that no one really knows )...going off and "re-opening" in a precipitous manner just might put a bigger point on that spike...my best bet is my governor is no better informed than i am off the johns hopkins' and state health department's web sites...he just might know the numbers before i do...so...and economic ( and political ) argument to "re-open" and a public health one for not...wondering which will win?

i am running with "re-open" before it is safe because wealth is taking a beating in "the market" and we can't have that..no sir...sod the proles, there is money at stake here and we are greedy bastards...class warfare has always been alive and well here...they just call it something else and hire academics and economists to rationalize their positions to a well indoctrinated ( what else would you call public education? ) polity who actually believe they have a say in how the government, and so the country, is run...to paraphrase vonnegut...government is whatever the rich, sane or insane, decide to do today...and "re-opening" to get the ponzi scheme that is "the market" up and running again is a class act.