UTOPIA (the plandemic)

horsemouth has been watching TV series UTOPIA (well the few episodes of it available online). 

the basic plot is a PLANDEMIC - a plandemic is a deliberately engineered pandemic either for the purpose of lowering the population or for some other nefarious james bond villain type purpose.

against the dreaded 'russian flu' the billionaires will fund vaccinations for all of humanity. those vaccinations will combine with a protein already present in most of the highly processed food of the world to sterilise most of humanity. 

this is an elegant solution to the problem of overpopulation (so far so ehrlich) and the running out of oil and coal and gas that have fuelled humanity's population explosion (aka. the energy crisis). 

if this were to be allowed to happen humanity would of course 'slaughter each other like rats in a bag' over the remaining resources (goes the theory). 

the avoidance of such a large evil this is a large good - quantities of lesser evil become available to enable the greater good. 

back to the real world 

the covid pandemic was not a plandemic confidently asserts conspiracy theorist horsemouth. 

instead of a genius secret plan tens of thousands of people died or died early because the government could not get its act together, lunched opportunities to intervene and so was left with little choice but to lockdown. having done this once they (of course) repeated the lesson (just to make sure there couldn't be a counter-example or that they'd got it wrong the first time).

boris looked good during the pandemic. he came out to the podium and called for lockdown. he did and said what was necessary even though it was against his personal beliefs, he locked down. he embodied the decisions within himself.  and then he caught covid himself and was confined to a hospital, going back to work visibly weaker. he suffered with (and seemingly for) his people.

and then boris lunched it. (because he'd been winging it all along) but ultimately boris's 'lockdown scepticism' matched that of the people and so did not adversely affect his reputation. 

in the battle between preventing deaths and the economy there was only ever going to be one winner - the only question was what the conversion rate was between these currencies was (and with eat out to help out we had our answer). 

but of course practically everything the government touched turned to shit - PPE (it was PKD's PPE, one moment it was fine and brand new, the next moment it had fallen apart), track and trace etc. but this  was all matt handcock's fault (and everyone agrees on this so it must be true). and once everyone agreed on this strangely the spy camera in his office was turned on. 

this seems to horsemouth to be the story of the government response to the pandemic. he thinks the covid inquiry will confirm this. 

not that it matters - the people who are dead already are dead already, the already dying in increased numbers will continue to die, the economic harms that were done can only multiply. beyond that even if there was to be a list of lessons to be learned and changes to be made  he doubts that the british ruling class could implement them. 

this is the lesson of the lakanal house fire. 

so what was horsemouth doing in the pandemic?

most people were still going to work (hell nurses, doctors and bus drivers were dying in their droves) but guardian readers like horsemouth got to stay home and read camus' the plague. 

so has horsemouth done his homework? well yes he read the plague. 

here we have translator alice kaplan and laura marris interviewed about their book states of plague: reading albert camus in a pandemic. horsemouth had forgotten about this but he rediscovered it reading back through his blogs. . 

there's an insufferable element of parody possible with this podcast - best fast forward 15 or so minutes in (and even then it is still annoying) but persevere. alice and laura go to the cholera graveyards of oran, they dig into the local history, camus' own TB etc. they make a new translation to track the movements in the language, bureaucratic language for bureaucratic moments.

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horsemouth has other stuff he could talk about (mavis gallant in paris, japanese women of fluxus) but he has already used up this blogpost on the plandemic. 

here in the wilds of herefordshire it is a rainy grey day (possibly clearing up briefly this afternoon).  yesterday he put a fence post back in and placed some rocks in the mud as steps up onto the banking (not that he wants to encourage his mum to go up there - too slippy, too dangerous). he went for a walk on the common.