Amerika

You come to Amerika for your daily high colonic of irascible realism and misanthropy, since at this site we begin our analysis of human failure with the “groups are self-deluding” axiom from Nietzsche. No one can promise safe space snowflake soy pajama happiness here.

In fact, you come forewarned, knowing that around here we cast around phrases like “every time you kill a communist, an angel gets its wings” because this is the internet bad boys (and girls) club where we would rather offend nearly everybody than give in to whatever deceptive partial truth is trending now.

Today, your deep internal cleansing comes in the form of a guest post about our COVID-19-ravaged times I wrote over at Death Metal Underground, the oldest and longest-running metal site on the net:

During these covidy times, one wonders what is real and what is not. One side says that this is just an unpleasant flu and not to worry, while the other side says that it is the apocalypse and we must go full Soviet now. As an anti-liberal naturalist and Darwinian nihilist, of course I see both sides as too liberal.

The Right wants to keep the economy from cratering, and they have a point. Better to lose a few million than impoverish everyone. Money means survival. The Left are just insane, since their hope is to drive Trump from office and adopt a socialist-style entitlements program like a UBI to gently transition us into Communism.

Neither side seems to grasp the Nietzschean/Platonic view, which is that if you identify the people with the disease and lock them up, the problem goes away at least for now. You have to be a boots ‘n braces fascist to demand quarantine at gunpoint however, so the moron Right and the insipid simpering Left both oppose it.

Luckily the coronavirus is thinning the herd in cities and those tend to be Left-leaning by their very nature as communalist conformist hive-minds and rationalization echo chambers:

Still, some experts believe that, throughout the outbreak, the greatest effects will remain localized in large urban centers. “The bottom line is, every epidemic is local, and the social networks and the physical infrastructure in any specific geographic area will determine the spread of the epidemic,” Jeffrey D. Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told me. “Particularly, respiratory viruses are dependent on close social networks and are going to spread much more efficiently in crowded, densely populated urban areas.”

On the case-tracking website maintained by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, each of the four states with the largest number of coronavirus cases is a Democratic-leaning place along the coast: New York, Washington, California, and New Jersey. Florida, a coastal, internationally oriented state that leans slightly toward the GOP, ranks fifth. Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, each with at least one big urban center that functions as a gateway for tourism and trade, come in next. And though the Johns Hopkins project isn’t publishing precise county and municipal data on the outbreak, the biggest clusters of disease have all erupted in a few large metropolitan areas.

The same thing that makes cities infectious with Leftism — that crowded, densely populated urban area thing that makes people more concerned with “getting along with each other” than actually achieving results in reality, very Soviet and End of Rome by its nature — makes them little Petri dishes for coronavirus to feast on the soon-to-be-dead.

In the meantime, most people are missing the vital message, which is that COVID-19 is a highly infectious virus from a family of which 40% are lethal:

The receptor-binding domain (RBD) in the spike protein is the most variable part of the coronavirus genome. Six RBD amino acids have been shown to be critical for binding to ACE2 receptors and for determining the host range of SARS-CoV-like viruses.

This “spike protein” (if there is not a grindcore band with this name by the end of the weekend, I will be disappoint) makes COVID-19 a fast-spreader because it is able to bond with human cells much more rapidly and easily than most influenza variations:

SARS-Cov-2 is round in shape and has a number of proteins called spikes on the surface. These spikes attach to the same human cell receptor (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) as the SARS-CoV. This information is important as it suggests that the virus uses the same mechanism of ensuring that the viral genes enter the host cell, replicate and infect other cells.

Another discovery is that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is unique and is 10-20 times more likely to attach to human cells.

In the meantime, you are unlikely to die of COVID-19 unless you have a pre-existing condition:

Nearly half the COVID-19 victims suffered from at least one of the following conditions: high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease.

More than 75% reported high blood pressure, while 35% had diabetes and 33% had heart disease, according to the study.

The average age of the victims was 79.5, and the number of deaths in the country surpassed 2,500 this week.

In particular, the high blood pressure seems to indicate a step into an early-ish grave:

According to Bloomberg, doctors have identified high blood pressure as a key dangerous factor that leads to distress and mortality in COVID-19 patients. Nearly 50% of the fatalities in one group of coronaviruses occurred in those suffering from hypertension.

Another study published in the Lancet hypothesized that those taking common hypertension drugs might be at risk of developing worse coronavirus infections. About 30% of the patients had hypertension and, among the 54 patients who died from COVID-19 complications, 48% of them had high blood pressure.

Looking cynically at that, doctors paper patients with any plausible reasons for their deaths in order to avoid lawsuits. When an older patient is at risk, doctors tend to list obesity, hypertension, and other common scapegoat disorders in order to cover up the eventual diagnosis of “bodily crap-out” when the natural life span reaches its end.

No one wants to say to put grandpa and grandma out with the trash, but what this tells us is that COVID-19 is hard on the body, especially respiratory and circulatory systems. Those who are impeded in these areas, whether diagnosed or not, may find themselves kicking off early.

This means that losing a few million people in a country stuffed with people with multiple health conditions is pretty much inevitable. When COVID-19 hits the obese, wheezing, diabetic, herpetic, hypertensive, AIDS-ridden, gouty, opioid addicted American population, that scythe is going to drop many heads of wheat.

Luckily, the grinning reaper seems to be killing off soy fruit pajama boys and neurotic box wine females in toilet Leftist HQ, NYC:

The coronavirus killed city residents at a rate of more than one per hour on Friday.

Between just 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., 14 people in New York City died from the virus, pushing the Big Apple’s total death toll to 43.

And the city’s Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, warned New Yorkers that double-digit daily deaths may well become the new normal, at least for a time.

If this trend continues, Leftists will die in the communalist living schemes they have chosen, and conservatives will thrive in the suburbs where the sound of bodies hitting the floor will be a muted “pop” every now and again. Call it the Revenge of the South.

However, if history teaches us anything, it is that life goes on (for some). The graves will fill up, there will be much weeping, and then Friday night will roll around, everyone will drink too much Corona Light and wake up with someone unsuitable the next morning, and ordinary existence will keep chortling along.

We are just monkeys, after all, at least in the case of the 99%. A rare few manage to live as thoughtful and intelligent beings who may actually have souls and participate in the divine, but it is important never to lose sight of necessary misanthropy, xenophobia, eugenics, and elitism.

Once life gets huffing and puffing again, we will have herd immunity and can continue our neurotic and conformist behavior uninterrupted:

There are basically three ways to stop the Covid-19 disease for good. One involves extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly, as well as aggressive testing, to interrupt its transmission entirely. That may be impossible now that the virus is in over 100 countries. The second is a vaccine that could protect everyone, but it still needs to be developed.

A third is potentially effective but horrible to consider: just wait until enough people get it.

If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and (if they survive) become immune that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the germ finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host. This phenomenon is known as herd immunity.

Some of us argue for doing almost nothing about the coronavirus because after a plague passes, the survivors tend to be immune to that plague. Over time, those genes predominate and the population at least coexists with the pathogen, never getting close to being wiped out.

Sure, we are going to lose a few million here and there. Massgraves will overflow for awhile. This is what happens whenever you grow too many humans and cram them in close proximity, then have incompetent Communists like the PRC who spend more energy saving face than addressing the crisis.

We have also tied our hands with our commitment to human rights and civil rights as noted above: “extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly.” Basically, you find anyone who has had contact with anyone who has had the virus, and you lock them up at gunpoint. A few will resist and you will have to smash holes in their meatsack to convince others not to emulate them.

In other words, by the time you get to this point, having ignored bad Communist government, overpopulation, open wet markets, the impossibility of human rights and civil rights, and the disorganization of liberal democratic bureaucracies, then you have few options but to ride it out:

It’s a cliché to say we haven’t ever had a moment like this (a plague, a crash), but it’s true. As for New York, twice in 20 years we’ve been ground zero, epicenter of a national tragedy. Will we get through it? Of course. But it will change things, and change us, as 9/11 did.

The governmental instinct is right: stabilize things while everyone’s absorbing. Whatever is done will probably be an unholy mess. Do it anyway and see where we are. In the long term the best plan—the only plan—is one that attempts to keep people in their jobs. Meaning look to European models on how to help businesses hold on to their people.

In other words, we are going to take some losses but we must preserve normal life, including the economy. No one wants to talk about money but, unless you own your own tax-free homestead, money is what feeds you at Costco, Walmart, and UberEats. Without it, people die, so keep the system alive even as the dead drop among us:

This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.

Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.

Even cash-rich businesses operate on a thin margin and can bleed through reserves in a month. First they will lay off employees and then out of necessity they will shut down. Another month like this week and the layoffs will be measured in millions of people.

The deadweight loss in production will be profound and take years to rebuild. In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.

Keep those numbers in mind: up to half of our fellow citizens will be unemployed, and when the welfare checks are late, we get race riots and a pandemic outbreak.

In the meantime, a hybrid protocol of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin seems to be limiting the impact of infection.

Tags: ACE2, coronavirus, covid-19, spike protein