Nobody cares about Dixville Notch.

We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. ~Malcolm X.

The Chinese keep trying to make it sound like the Coronavirus outbreak is under control, but the general consensus is that the numbers they keep feeding the rest of the world are fake.

Last night, I saw video of Chinese government officials ordering people to weld apartment building doors shut.

Does that seem like "under control" to you? It sure doesn't to me.

I saw something last week that said if this situation isn't resolved by February 14th, the world economy is going to start feeling the effects as all those just-in-time supply chains start to run out of stuff, which will have massive second-order effects on the world economy, starting with the USA...and our economy is basically already a mirage, at least for the non-super-rich. People in some areas of China are going back to work, which many people theorize will simply spread the virus faster.

I saw a video of an old man committing suicide, and another of a person apparently committing suicide, and yet another of some dude ramming his car through a police barricade. Does that seem like "Situation normal" especially in a country like China? People are being beaten for not having face masks, even when they simply do not have the money to buy any.

Even if you have money, there may simply not be any surgical masks to buy. I also read a few days ago, that Chinese people in other countries are buying masks to send to relatives in China.

Meanwhile, governments in the rest of the world seem not to be doing very much at all, and the PRC internal response seems to be a Potemkin village, except as regards where brutality is concerned.

Pro-tip, Chi-Coms, diseases don't get intimidated. What happens when the Police are incapacitated by infections, or the People's Liberation Army? It doesn't take more than a few to incapacitate an entire unit. Who will care about the power of the Party or the State at that point?

If this situation continues to escalate, don't be surprised if the Chinese bomb their own cities and massacre their own civilians.

Might be a better idea to give a fuck about your own people, rather than just your own power base and personal image.

Why do I bring this up? Because this is what the decline and fall of civilization looks like. This virus got its start in the coastal cities, allegedly in a major commercial-grade fish market, and spread to and took off in Houbei province in the interior, especially in the city of Wuhan...which is a major transportation hub. What happened there translated into effects on most of the rest of China. A lot of the photos and videos that I saw last night were from Heilong Jiang province, right on the Amur river and thus, the Russian border. Think about that for a second. This thing threatens the whole world, and there's functionally no way to contain it. It's a virus, strands of DNA attached to a means to spread itself. Russia is next, then Europe and Africa, then us, although to be fair, many countries including the USA already have at least a few cases...and some deaths and recoveries as well.

Why, indeed, do I bring this up?

Because while China is in chaos and our President spent yesterday evening talking all kinds of stupid shit at a rally in New Hampshire and hoping to disrupt the Democratic primary by doing so, the media was nattering endlessly about five primary votes in some tiny town called Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, including how the sole Republican voter (and somebody else) voted for Mike Bloomberg, thus handing Magic Mike a plurality of the votes and winning him the (nonexistent) Republican primary in the town.

Doesn't this seem a bit...counterproductive...when the world is on fire and the Republicans are openly, proudly broadcasting to all and sundry that they don't give a fuck about any democratic anything that does not exclusively favor them? I mean, these people have turned on every single one of their own who won't go along with the fascist shit-show even if it's just one time...and the media and Twitter spent half the night chattering about five votes cast in the first town where today's primary election started.

Maybe it's just me, but some people's priorities seem massively out of whack with reality right now. America, as usual, is parochial and self-obsessed.

I get that.

But right now, Trump is ramping the existential fear-mongering up to 11. Never mind that the Democrats don't have the slightest means (not least in a democracy they wish to preserve) to "take everything, take your wealth, take your guns." That would be theft, illegal and wrong, not to mention unconstitutional...and anybody with a brain in their head and the least understanding of US history and society not to mention the Democratic Party's actual platform knows this.

Of course if you have a brain in your head at a Trump rally, you're most likely there as an observer, not a participant.

Does anybody really think, at this point, that these fucking people will accept it when they lose? They've already been programmed for endless war against anybody who's not some kind of hard-right fascist dickbag by 30+ years of "Conservative" talk radio as pioneered by Rush Limbaugh.

More to the point, this is the apotheosis of making literally everything some kind of hair on fire existential crisis. I have an ex, who at this point cannot seem to tell fantasy from reality. She claims to be part of some kind of Christian prepper group. No, she does not know how to survive, even for a little while, if things go to hell. She's never butchered an animal or grown her own food, never fired a gun (and I offered to teach her 20 years ago) never hunted and probably can't use a compass, read a map or (with her health) walk long distances...much less defend herself physically.

And I checked out her group's website. The group is basically an anti-Dominionist, anti-Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal survivalist group. My ex doesn't seem to have even paid the least bit of attention to that, instead thinking she'll get money and power by being some kind of "facilitator" or some dumb thing. I think she figures she'll bullshit and manipulate and "pray" her way out of trouble. When things go to hell, nobody's going to have time for that...and she and a lot of people like her are in for a rude surprise as to what the one thing of value that they actually have even is. I ain't saying that's right. I'm saying I listened to what my bros said when they came back from Afghanistan.

And very little of it has anything to do with what right-wingers think the collapse of civilization will entail.

And that's why this kind of crap is dangerous. If things go as sideways here even only as bad as they have in China, a hell of a lot of these people will kill themselves, by doing stupid shit, by negligence with weapons, by religious dumb-fuckery and by in general thinking that they know a lot more than they do. Not a damn one of these fucking people has ever lived in any society that wasn't America-as-it-is. Not a damn one of these fucking people has ever lived in anything but a democracy with all the conveniences and freedoms the vast majority of us still enjoy.

If anybody thinks that's going to continue indefinitely in a situation where roughly a third of the American body politic wants to pull civilization down around its ears because endless hatred or personal resentments or racism, and every last one of them thinks they'll be the Lord of the Manor, the Swell with a field full of slaves to do his labor, the Warlord, or just some kind of tough guy who women throw themselves at, or possibly all of the above....you have another thing coming.

There's a lot of Republicans, hell, a lot of gun-loving white dudes in general, that basically aspire to be murderers.

Mostly because they wouldn't survive in any other sort of circumstance using that weapon, especially when people are shooting back. And of course, there will be people on the other side returning fire, accurately. There always are.

I bet a bunch of these people have thought about welding doors shut and trapping a bunch of people. But how many of them actually know how to use a welding torch without setting themselves on fire, let alone do so under combat conditions with people shooting at them?

How many Americans can bear down and focus and ignore bullets zipping by your heads?

Lots of people think they're going to be John Wayne. They forget that even John Wayne wasn't really John Wayne. In a more modern sense, a lot of people seem to think they're going to be John McClane, from the Die Hard movies. How many of those people are even as fit as Bruce Willis?

Real life ain't no action movie. And you ain't gonna be king.

And it just, numerically, physically, etc. doesn't fucking work that way. It's usually just one guy, whoever can browbeat and bully and manipulate, and maybe shoot a few people, and he's almost certainly not you.

Only one guy gets to be Radovan Karadzic. You're not that guy.

Oh sure, civilization will prevail in some places, maybe even most places, but would you want to live in one of the places where it doesn't? Whole vast areas of the United States were totally unaffected by the Civil War. Sucks if you lived in Maryland or Virginia or Tennessee, though...let alone Georgia. There were whole countries in the Balkans that weren't severely affected, or affected until later, by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Situation was kinda hell on the residents of Mostar and Sarajevo right out the gate, though. Can't you even manage to care about other people?

If you don't want to live with air raids, bombings, social disruptions, power outages for days at a time, terrorist attacks or troops in the field, why do you think anybody else would?

We need to stop this shit, show up in enough numbers to vote the Republicans out that they have to reconsider the course they're on, or at least enough to localize the damage...and then still be prepared for more conflict.

This has to end, I'm sick of the hate, I'm sick of these people pissing all over everything I was ever taught that America was supposed to be about, and my question to you is...why aren't you?

 If you want to win, you have to care more about human rights than the motherfuckers care about taking them away from you. You can't live with or reason with people who don't think you have a right to exist.

Remember that.