The Plague

You Don't Need a Weatherman

Yes, it's Dylan again, and the Weather Underground-Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Gold, et al. Experts populate the talking shows of Big Media, infect (anti) social media, and are transmitted beyond any protective social distance. The responsible ones (MDs with lofty sounding titles and affiliation of various medical institutions) merely make claims about things they do not know. Not only do they not know, no one can know. For example, a prepublication article put out March 30, 2020 reports on a case study of transmission of COVID-19 within two family households. 2 The information reported in the article is from a single case study in China. It represents the state of medical and epidemiological knowledge as of March 30. Nonetheless, celebrity experts assert all kinds of phony information about transmission, rate of infection, virulence of the virus, and a host of other things they do not and cannot know. They masquerade as weathermen telling us which way the wind blows.

Governments and their organs, Big Media, trot out these charlatans to buttress actions and policies that can have no relevance for stemming the COVID-19 epidemic, any other flu epidemic, or for that matter any health emergency. Moreover, with a few national exceptions, the same narrative, same acts, and same policies are promulgated throughout the worldquarantines, business and school closings, restrictions on public gatherings, and all manner of anti-social initiatives, which are backed up by the armed force of the state. Inquiring minds might wonder whether they have stepped into an episode of the infamous Twilight Zone television program of the 1950s and 60s (1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964).

Wonder they should, because the driving forces and persons behind this Kafkaesque production remain opaque, shrouded from public scrutiny despite their coming from public policies, and executed by public apparatuses.

Rational, post-Enlightenment, scientific thought ponders observables and not angels on pin heads. Explanations for observables, called 'theories' by the more esoteric minded, limit discourse to those observables and leave out the opaque; maybe reserve it for later when more knowledge is gained. The semi-secret plans and goals of those who devised and implemented the current epidemic scheme remain hidden. Nonetheless, like electrons, they can be known by their effects.

The effects are those acts and policies of states. In the United States they are: killing small businesses and supporting big businesses and Wall Street, restricting education, restricting social interaction, rationing necessities like medical supplies and treatment, employing isolating communication like virtual and internet media, readying armed forces to quell and contain public protests, delaying elections, allowing retailers of food and other supplies to sell out to hoarding, pumping up fear, ineffective protective gear promoted as fashion statements, etc. Consequences of the effects in the previous paragraph ensure diminished effectiveness of popular demands and concerted actions, along with the strengthening of an absurdist rendition of public, social life. When social reality is represented as absurd, popular agency is neutralized. Why now and why so uniform throughout the world? Where do such acts and policies not prevail? Last but not least, who gains and who loses? We may not know what the global ruling class is up to, but we can be sure it does not benefit us.

Our percipient interlocutor asks why are people dying from flu? People have always died from flu, especially the Spanish flu after WWI. Current flus are different. Their proximate cause of death is pulmonary-i.e., they die from pneumonia or other respiratory failures, not the flu itself. Who dies? People who are sick, old, and poor-just as they always have. Why are these facts and comparisons not published? What is the purpose of the induced panic? Why has the panic led to police state measures throughout the world? These last few questions raise others.

After WWII, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death in the world. It is a disease of poverty. In the late 1940s and early 1950s several antibiotics were found to be effective treatments. They were not patented. At the same time polio was a major scourge. In 1953 the Salk vaccine, which prevents polio, was administered free of charge in most school districts in the United States.

In the Reagan-Thatcher era (basically the 1980s) concern for the public good gave way to privatization. The air traffic controllers' strike (1981) in the United States, and the coal strike in Britain (1984-5) marked the transition. Other public goods soon followed. Public schools, once the mainstay of the republic, were derided as failures, and privatization was promoted. Even the US military was privatized. Armies gave way to mercenaries such as Blackwater, then Xe, and currently Academi (as of 2011)-not coincidentally started by Erik Prince, brother of the US Secretary of Education, whose fortunes were founded on a ponzi scheme; navies to privateers, and intelligence contracted out to the like of Booze Allen Hamilton, former employer of Edward Snowden. Liberation movements of the 1960s and early 1970s were perverted into identity politics, in which statuses replaced class as primary political affiliations. Some call this shift neoliberalism, which is probably as good as any other name. By the 1990s neoliberalism became the new world order. When the financial crisis of 2007-8 hit the global system, Wall Street and the City of London-along with other world centers of capital-were infused with public wealth by the states in which those centers resided. The banks were saved. The people paid for it. In April 2020 the US Treasury was effectively handed over to another Black, this time Black Rock, the largest money management company in the world, and favored by political luminaries like the Bush family and Henry Kissinger. The people who run such operations are those 389 people who control the wealth of the world, according to Peter Phillips in his book, Giants: The Global Power Elite (2018). They are not the owners. They work for them, but they are not ordinary employees, not exactly burger flippers. They have their own wealth, just not in the league of the owners. More importantly, however, they are the managers. They make the decisions.

What did they decide relevant to the plague? They decided that sick people are a vast and expansive network whose needs could be exploited for profit. As a result, they stripped the assets of care provision. And as another result, there aren't enough. There are not enough ventilators (that work). There are not enough doctors and nurses. There are enough treatment effective medicines, but they come from the wrong countries (China and Cuba) or are too common to be profitable like quinine derivative anti-malarial drugs. Triage is employed. Twenty to thirty thousand US residents will die, because there aren't enough. The same happened last year, and probably will again next year, no matter which flu is around. Everyone else is under house arrest. It's just what the doctor ordered.

Inconsequential information from epidemiology and virology supports inferences that COVID 19 (CoV2, TV, or any name you choose) is typical of coronaviruses which are endemic and potentiate annual influenzas, common colds, and other diseases of winter and spring, is not more lethal, is not more virulent, and might even prove milder than most new flu epidemics that sweep the world every seven years or so. And yet, Big Media (BM), as stenographers of state apparatuses (national governments) under the control of the global ruling class's executive apparatus (US intel-military apparatus--USIM), have promoted TV as a Really Big Scare (RBS). Under the aegis of BM and US apparatuses (including WHO and its employers, Big Pharma, et al), much of the First and Second World (Third World doesn't count) is under house arrest. Also World 1 and 2 face a toilet paper shortage-horrors! Conclusion: It worked! Global populations can be totally controlled by promoting a RBS. They will not revolt or even question. They will obey. Great news! No worries! Rob them blind and they will thank us for it. There are, of course, some collateral benefits too.

Governments shovel scads of money into the pockets of the ruling class and their top demes) out of even the pretense of democratic rule. Delay elections or make the voting process too scary for anyone to take the risk (e.g., Wisconsin April 7, 2020).

Mirrors and Tsuris 2020 begins to look more and more like 1348. By the mid-fourteenth century the world system of feudalism was decaying rapidly. Much tsuris ensued. It was a period of global cooling, hence famines and disease. Wars became more widespread, mobile, and long lasting-e.g., the Hundred Years War. About the time various pundits-witting or unwitting mouthpieces for the ruling class-were assuring everyone that liberal democracy had triumphed everywhere, the whole project looked like a colony of moths had lunched on a favorite woolen coat. Therefore, let us look at a distant mirror.

Picking a time to be alive, the fourteenth century would probably not top the list for most people. In her book by that name (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, 1978), Barbara Tuchman argued that her contemporary twentieth century was a distant mirror, in effect; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were rampant. Tuchman compared the aftermath of the Plague (Black Death-more on this irony later) to the aftermath of WWI. Before quoting, I note her psychologism, especially national psychologism, misses a crucial point-namely, that material conditions determine psychology, and not the other way around. Nonetheless, Tuchman makes a thought provoking point. "Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God's purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. . . . To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man (123)." If that be so, then perhaps the plague of 2020 is the end of modern man.

Consider the modern condition. Before postmodernism's perversions, modernists took a quizzical, if not downright querulous approach to the relations among nature, people, and those among people (aka social relations). Here Albert Camus has the resident physician of Oran, Rieux speaking with Rambert, a journalist trapped in the city by the quarantine.

Rambert: "'But damn it doctor, can't you see it's a matter of common human feeling? Or don't you realize what this sort of separation means to people who are fond of each other?' Rieux was silent for a moment, the he said he understood it perfectly. . . . Only the law was the law, plague had broken out, and he could only do what had to be done. . . .

'No' Rambert said bitterly, 'you can't understand. You're using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.'

The doctor glanced up at the statue of the Republic, then said he did not know if he was using the language of reason, but he knew he was using the language of the facts as everybody could see them-which wasn't necessarily the same thing. [The Plague, Trans., Stuart Gilbert, Modern Library College Edition, (1948) 79-80] Of course "the facts as everybody could see them" are massaged, if not manufactured out of whole cloth when it comes to The Virus, where the stricken are counted according to tests that do not work and heart attacks, cancers, and occupational diseases are counted as deaths due to the virus, in some cases without any tests at all. The only reason that prevails is the 'raison d'état, which serves in its tortuous and complicated ways, the global ruling class.

The current plague has helped lay bare many realities of modern society, not least is the irrational behavior of officials, media, and the masses. Modern man has been succeeded by irrational man. Granted, its emergence was promoted by postmodernism, but that scurrilous intellectual and artistic trend could not account for the run on toilet paper, people wearing bandit masks (in case they plan to hold up a stagecoach), closing of public parks, arresting people playing basketball, closing self serve delicatessen counters while displaying fresh produce as usual, etc. Even the 9/11 terror had a certain rationality, despite the fact that it was based on fairy tales about the incident.

After just two decades, the twenty-first century makes the previous one look halcyon. Instead of two centralized mass slaughters, the twenty-first century has myriad genocidal conflagrations spread across the world. Plagues are not rare either. Polio persists despite the possibilities of its eradication at the beginning of the century. In the impoverished and extracted parts of the globe-e.g., central Africa, South Asia, and so on-tropical, preventable diseases kill tens of millions every year, and life spans remain those of the Neolithic. Were it not for their convenience for global capital, the standard of living in the Third World would equal that of the Second World. Moreover, Second World counties labor under constant threat of invasions and sanctions from the lords of the world in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, etc.

In the fourteenth century the feudal mode of production based on bound labor, serfdom, gave way to the kernel of modern capital-wage labor. In the twenty-first century human labor has been supplanted with cybernetically controlled robotic labor. It is the result of a long term trend, which signals the end of the global system of capital. Before the fourteenth century, the feudal order was dominated by status-i.e., birth or blood and one's position in a status defined structure anchored by control of land. Modern relations supplanted status relations with class relations, the essence of which was that of the employer-employee relationship. Marx called the bourgeois mode of production. Marx and Engels captured it succinctly in their Manifesto of 1848.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Ch. 1). The mode of production, which determined modern man, was continually ephemeral. Modernity proper, the consciousness based on the new system of social relations, characteristically sought the foundations of the ephemeral-from Einstein, to Freud, to Marx, to Picasso-modern consciousness tried to grasp the essentials. Postmodernism made fun of the attempt. The ridiculous movement found its origins in France and its exponents in the pseudointellectuals and phony artistes of America (the United States of), where they turned politics into psycho-sexual-color-identity denials of material reality-the essence of postmodernism.

Change the relations of production, and all social relations change. In the fourteenth century, the serf-lord relation gave way to the employer-employee relation-class relations. What is today's relation? Is it between owner and robot? But that is not a social relation, as the worker is not human, and cannot therefore produce value, and the owner of capital cannot, consequently, reap a profit. The current social relations are based on a fiction: owner-robot. Increasingly capital is fictive capital, a capital without value. Billionaires can boast of great wealth, but theirs are sand castles, ready to crumble and melt away at the next tide of the affairs of men. Fiction, of course, is not irrational. It is non-rational. It is art, not mechanics. But fiction has already been "deconstructed" by the postmodernists so that fiction no longer has artistic value. Irrational man has no safe shore, no succor from the storm, and so it and they, buy toilet paper Black Death Surprisingly, Big Media in the United States have found that Black Americans are dying at a higher rate than White Americans from TV. Who would have thought? Maybe they did not get the memo. Big Media seems oblivious. Why, after all, would there be a racial discrepancy? Is the virus racially prejudiced? What a wonder. Must be kind of like why cops disproportionately kill Black people, and why Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, and why Black people pay more for everything from housing, to transportation, to food, clothing, and medical care. It is a real puzzler.

In the fourteenth century it was called the Black Death, because bubonic plague, the first and most common kind, produced dark buboes filled with blood and pus. Actually the buboes were lymph nodes overwhelmed by plague bacteria. They weren't really black, but dark purple. The term did not refer to victims' natural skin color, which had a far different significance then than it does now. Of course Black Americans (US variety) die quicker, are sicker, and generally have shorter lives than White Americans, because, you know, White supremacy. White supremacy is a congenital disorder of the US body politic, exhibiting symptoms of endemic, systematic, structural racism. Black people are its main, most numerous victims, but other non-Whites are stricken as well. Under the US system of status segmentation, Black Americans are not dissimilar to the Dalit (Untouchables) of India. The Black segment gets the worst of everything. The US cultural and historical tradition of White supremacy comes from the later seventeenth century when two developments shaped US social structure: King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion. Interested readers should research these, as full backgrounds are too cumbersome to include. Nonetheless, the upshot of both, which occurred around 1676, is the genocide of Native Americans and transgenerational slavery of Black Americans. A telling point is that until laws and court decisions in the seventeenth century British colonies of North America, people originally from Africa and paupers from England had the same legal status. They were bound laborers. By roughly 1700 Black Americans had the privilege of trans-generational slavery (racial slavery defined by law), whereas English paupers were slaves for one generation only. Indians, of course, were best eliminated with extreme prejudice, which later was called 'genocide'. Not that the Black people didn't also enjoy the benefit of genocide, because their original cultures were deliberately destroyed, but their lives were relatively preserved, because as slaves they became valuable property. Black Americans have a dual consciousness, As WEB Dubois explained, because they are members of both a status (Black) and class-working or middle but never upper. With the dual status they get to die faster and in greater numbers, with one informative exception. In the middle nineteenth century the railroad builders used Irish and Chinese workers, because Black slaves were too valuable to die building the rails.

In the United States today Black ghettos and Indian reservations have a much higher morbidity and mortality rate than White parts of the country. Doubtless much of this has to do with environmental racism. Non-Whites live in toxic, unhealthy environments. Ghettos and reservations have higher social toxicity with more suicides, homicides, higher rates of drug addiction, and so on. Of course poor Whites do too, and those populations exhibit the same population health conditions. The physical environments are more toxic including air, land, and water pollution from heavy metals from lead to uranium to organic toxins from industrial dumping. People who are born and grow up in such environments are more likely to develop chronic non-infectious diseases like cardiovascular disease and emphysema, and they are more susceptible to infectious disease like TV. Generally ghetto dwellers have much poorer health, not because of some inherited characteristic, but because of their social and physical environments. They get sick more and more easily, and they die earlier. Infant mortality is higher and so is maternal mortality, both of which are excellent indices of poverty and general health. In other words, the Black Death is rampant among them.

Instructive too, is that the foregoing US cultural history is replicated within different cultural histories in other countries. The relevant point in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that similar social structures prevail according to particular cultural histories. For example, in Mitteleuropa fascist societies segment statuses according to relatively recent national origins, much like they did in their interwar fascist regimes in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and so on, but with different categories. Currently, these segmentations target recent immigrants from the territories of the Middle East and Africa as part of the Global War on strategic and resource rich geographies. How different it is from the European colonialism of the first wave (15 th to 17 th centuries) and second wave (18 th and 19 th centuries), or maybe not so different. In any case, in the United States and throughout the world non-White people, corresponding with lower class, die first, more prolifically, and generally count for less all across the world. Whiteness is the unmarked, dominant status identity. That is the Black Death in the twenty-first century. The United States is the main enforcer of that reality along with all the other manufactured realities of global capital.

2025: Looking Backward

Unlike Edward Bellamy's novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), there is no utopia. In retrospect, it was all so easy. The world system was collapsing. Global capital could no longer generate profits. It was all coming to a grinding halt. All that was needed was a personalized existential scare. Of course, it was only another flu; nothing really out of the ordinary. Every year, influenzas kill a few million people in world, like culling the herd, getting rid of the old, sick, and, of course, redundant. All that was necessary was that the pharmaindustrial complex pass the word through its agent, the World Health Organization (WHO), that this year's flu , denominated the catchy name, COVID-19, sort of like a new model smart phone, was different from all other flus in the past. It was more contagious, more virulent, and more lethal. People had to stop what they were doing, no work, no school, no assemblies to petition the government. Orders from presidents, governors, and prime ministers enforced separation. Their publicity organs of Big Media continually trumpeted scares, laced with heart rending personal interest profiles of otherwise healthy young adults dying of it. They did not mention that such cases were rare as consciences among aldermen. That great modern invention (anti) social media offered echo chambers so that the more people tried to find out what was happening, the more scared they became, and therefore the more obedient Luckily, the rodeo clown was succeeded by the Alzheimer-afflicted in the White House. Clowns, after all, are so unpredictable. Now the orders from Wall Street can be articulated by a leader who cannot remember his own name. The leader of the free world (translation: the countries that follow orders) no longer has to do anything but read from the teleprompter in his ever briefer public appearances. No one noticed any difference. The more attentive had been so diligent. They worried and agitated against nuclear war, sought solutions to climate change, and other global threats. Once again Bob Dylan: "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line know what any of it is worth." "No reason to get excited", the thief, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late". All along the watchtower, princes kept the view While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

(All Along the Watch Tower, 1967) So much for manning the watch tower. A microscopic virus causing a not very unusual influenza was all that was needed. The ruling class was saved. That is the only thing that really matters. The world system, now that the system of global capital had been shattered, could be remade. A new state-to steal a phrase from Antonio Salazar of Portugal-could be built. On the other hand, Salazar's version of fascism was of the liberal variety, akin to readers of the New York Times. The twenty-first century new state will be made of sterner stuff.

The New State will not be a return to normal. Of course, there never was a 'normal'. For the last 50 years there has been a boiling of frogs . . . and we are the frogs. Americans (of the United States variety) became so frightened that "Blacks, Communists, and Hippies," would take over after 1968 that they sided with the Chicago cops who brutalized their children in Chicago in August. The Chicago pigs were vindicated, and the rulers knew just what to do. Just scare them, and everything will be OK. We stay in control. We don't have to fear the people, because we can make them more afraid of themselves. Maybe not a new strategy-it had always worked in the past. (Remember Adolph and the infection of the German people-the Jews?). Nonetheless, Chicago 1968 served as a useful reminder. Now in 2025, 1968 was a lifetime ago for those in middle age. Just as kids then, looked on as "the whole world was watching." The kids revolted then, following Camus advice: "Je me révolte, donc nous sommes." The water has been heating since then. It became too late.

The Donald built The Wall. He said it was to keep Them out. It kept us in. They closed the borders after the pseudo election of 2020. People need papers. At first they called them vaccination certificates. They were what that poseur, Michel Foucault, called biopolitics papers. They were not so very different from the yellow stars and passports with the "JUDEN" stamp on them. The Vopos stopped anyone on the street and demanded their papers. They even looked like the Vopos (Volkspolizei) from the DDR during the Cold War. They were supposed to be scary to those in the West. They were supposed to represent the bugbear, Communist dictatorship. Of course Victor Grossman told a different story in his memoir, A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (2019). He was 50 in 1968, living in the East. For him, the Vopos were just cops; the Stasi helped protect the people from the CIA and MI6. Star Wars and Hunger Games modeled their gendarmerie on them. There was a wall back then too, but in the West, people were told it was to keep people in. The propaganda was that people had to "escape" to the West. It wasn't. It was to regulate the spies from the West. That is just the thing with walls. They work both ways, and what the authorities tell us is usually the opposite of the way they really work.

Most people believed. They believed that last election was real. They believed that if they got TV, they would die. After WWII, life was hard. Things were rationed, and not just toilet paper. People in the West thought it was because of the CD (Communist Dictatorship), but they gave money to help starving Western Europe-Britain, France, Italy. They forgot that it was the east that was devastated by the Wehrmacht. They forgot it was the Red Army that saved them from the camps. That was the way the ground was prepared. Even in 1968 when the kids revolted, they believed in the CD so instead they formed the New Left, because the old left, the commies, were just a bunch of benighted oldsters taking orders from Moscow, dupes and useful idiots.

Then there were the lost decades. Dylan got religion, and lost touch with what he had known, written about, and played. Young people felt left behind, their parents, the kids of 1968 seemed more interested in other things. Let them be raised by television, which was a big mistake in many ways. They didn't just cut their hair. They cut themselves off from the real revolt. Instead they revolted against their parents, went for Reagan and Rambo. Thought they knew something, as young people always do. What they did not do was question and wonder why. If they went to college, they got tempted by the Foucaults and the Lacans, the Lyotards, the Baudrillards, the Deleuzes, and the like. They learned that so-called grand narratives, which were the explanations of underlying realities, were not to be trusted. They learned that such grand narratives were false because they had been enunciated by men and women, instead of genderneutral beings. But they did not learn that postmodernism was just a warmed over nihilism that served the Nazis so well.

Almost all business is conducted online. Theaters have disappeared, except for boutique houses catering to the 1 percent. The same goes for restaurants where the plebs (99 percent) order electronically and serve themselves. There are no wait staff. Children still go to primary and secondary school, but only for three hours a day. The rest is online. Colleges are mostly online except for a few laboratories and studios, but the top tier institutions continue as they always have. All those jobs in what used o be called the service industries have been shifted to guards and enforcement. There are a lot more cops. Everyone must have certificates of need to use public transportation so the few private vehicles are largely chauffeur driven. All kinds of socializing is virtual, and the birth rate has fallen dramatically.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore 3

Of course 2025 is speculative, but the trends are clear. Using the plague as an excuse, the state has tightened controls and divided the public with ubiquitous surveillance and policing. Civic life is becoming virtual. The anti-social media regulate society much better than the Gestapo ever could. It was all brought to a head because people were made to fear death if they got a bad cold or flu. State instruments like WHO and CDC fed propaganda to Big Media who, as usual, broadcast without checking or questioning. Publics throughout the world, but especially in the centers of capital, complied, consented, and became complicit in their own imprisonment. They turned inward and against each other.

The media report doctored (literally) data, manipulated statistics, promote fear, highlight rare personal interest stories without background (why did the otherwise healthy 30 year old die when he caught COVID? Maybe it was an undiagnosed pulmonary aneurism that burst). Testing and test kits and methods are not consistent, the population is not scientifically, randomly sampled, and therefore nobody knows who has been exposed, who has contracted the disease, how many have gotten sick, how many who are sick have sought reportable medical care, and so on. Nobody knows how many COVID attributed deaths are genuine measures of mortality of the disease, or how many are due to pressure from CDC and like agencies to predispose reportage as COVID, because that is how the death certificates are structured. Nobody knows and nobody in Big Media asks. Those who do ask are relegated to such alternative media sites as Off Guardian and Greanville Post. "There is something happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mister Jones?" Yes, it's Bob Dylan again from Ballad of a Thin Man (1965).

The Irrational mind of the twenty-first century First World reverts to magical thinking and authoritarian obedience. Might be worse than getting sick, in fact it most undoubtedly is. Nonetheless, the plague has consumed us. We fear and tremble as if it were the end of the world.

So, I don't get around much anymore. But then, there is no place to go.