Cov-Idiot: Choice Coronavirus Denialism From Drunk Driver Bill Mitchell

Just thought I would highlight some of the absolute, bottom of the latrine level bullshit that sprays from the mouths of “people” who are coronavirus “truthers”. It is always good to name and shame those who would spread propaganda that leads to the loss of thousands of lives. I decide to use an example from my great state of Illinois.

Bill Mitchell is a Former IL State Rep., a Drunk Driving Enthusiast, and a MAGA True Believer. Bill really likes it when people die from disease and causes that are not COVID-19 because that means he doesn’t have to miss tee-time with his stock broker. Bill seems to be a “genius” when it comes to misunderstanding basic elements of public health statistics and how that new-fangled thing called “science” works:

AND

AND

Bil doesn’t seem to understand numbers very well. That could be why he “accidentally” overdrank the night of his DUI arrest; 3 shots, 12 shots… what’s the big diff? Also, Bill here seems to have a death wish for the US, pointing out with glee all the people who die every year from myriad different natural and unnatural causes, thinking this some how disproves COVID-19’s existence…at least until he starts on his weird obsession with people fucking in quarantine, then he is all about that COVID-19 Action:

Bill also really likes to have people stroke his enormous ego. Oh does he love that. He puts out polls so the brain dead mob who follow his tweets can better service his self-esteem issues:

Of course, everything Bill Mitchell has posted about COVID-19

A. Is absolutely wrong, easily debunked conspiracy theory garbage and ignorance of basic biology and math

B. Is absolutely due to his sneering disdain for all things not 100 Proof and served on the rocks

C. Is due to his Hate of anything and everyone that does not make him money or service his throbbing ego

I think Bill would appreciate your kind, thoughtful, and totally respectful comments about his statements on twitter. Drop him a tweet!

***

All kidding aside, if you want to get some non-insane information about COVID-19 and Coronavirus, Why not check out these fine resources:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

The journalistic/statistical coverage of the Pandemic has been especially good, or at least informative, from these sources:

https://www.newyorker.com/tag/coronavirus

The Monthly Review https://monthlyreview.org/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

As always, do your own research, check your sources for biases (every source has them, and it is good to find out what they are) and never, never take medical or scientific advice from a man who can’t manage to drive between the lines on an IL highway.

Here We Are Now: Some Thoughts On The Western Left

The US capitalist class has now abandoned any pretense towards liberal humanism and is fully embracing the logic, if not yet completely the aesthetic, of fascism. Decisions of state, of life and death, are made with the capricious moods of the Great Leader Trump in mind. Reality is relative for those who support Trump, and increasingly for those who support whatever bloated Third Way carcass the Democrats feebly vomit up every election cycle. I have talked before about how I believe the US is in the process of being torn apart by the contradictions inherent in its federalist system. I had predicated my thesis on an unforeseen but inevitable calamity. If the COVID-19 pandemic is not THE calamity, it is certainly A calamity which will open the doors to material possibilities and contradictions that will only further push the larger, neoliberal, federal tax base states, further away from the orbit of Washington, DC and the rural and central/southern states that provide the political capital that pays for nascent fascist indulgences among the white bourgeoisie and capitalist classes.

Tariq Ali, one of the last remaining voices of the great leftist youth revolts of the late 1960s, said something in an interview recently that quite impacted me

ALI: The big question of the 21st century for [leftist] intellectuals and others is the question mark on China. It has gone capitalist. It has, at the same time, lifted millions of people out of poverty. There is no denying that. But the question is, once you’ve caught up with Europe, then what? Where do we go from there? [The contemporary far left] have no real replies to this.

And that we do not. We who are Marxist-Leninists look to China as a great remaining redoubt for our ideological perspective, and in many ways the People’s Republic is still that, and is progressing towards its goals of socialism. But we also run the risk, as leftists, of projecting all of our hopes and dreams and expectations, both ideological and practical, onto an ancient, thriving, vibrant and wholly independent culture and people who have their own interests and dreams. How is it fair to make of China what the USSR was to so much of the left? How just is it to demand of them what we seem incapable of demanding from ourselves: sacrifice, ethical and moral consistency, proletarian solidarity? How is it fair to play out, for the umpteenth time, the now pro forma clash between the idealized and vilified ghosts of Trotsky and Stalin? How is this anything less than the chauvinism that we rightfully denounce when performed by the capitalists? We must support China, principally, in its fight to remain whole, self-governing, and strong in the face of capitalist empire. To demand more, to demand a super hero leftist state that matches perfect internationalism with perfect socialism in one country, is to colonize the Chinese people with our own fears and inadequacies. We risk aestheticizing a material reality lived by billions of people since 1949 when we project our needs onto the living reality of the People’s Republic.

The concern must not be for our own deliverance by China, but to support them in their war against Balkinization, and to know when to shut our mouths when the contradictions arise in China between a newly formed capitalist power and a newly emerged proletariat and bourgeois classes. We on the left, particularly in the West, need to stop looking for others to do the dirty, painful, frustratingly contradictory work of bringing about class conscious for us.  We need to be doing more on our own in order to create a proletarian base conscious enough of its place in the world system to begin to dismantle the empire from within. We must accept that there is not always a straight road to a beautiful destination. Sometimes the just, the correct, the dialectically informed thing to do is to tear down the world you know and think you deserve so that the greater part of humanity can be free. The dialectic progresses in spite of our “needs” or “desires”, and the Western left would be better served by looking around itself and saying to itself “here we are now”.

On The Bourgeois Temper Tantrum In Hong Kong

It is telling that the Hong Kong comprador-bourgeois protests, which are supposedly based on “justice” for Hong Kong, began as a way to deny justice to the people of the rest of China, by denying the people’s government the right to arrest & try a man who killed a pregnant woman.

It is true that one can know everything about the situation if you are not there, but that is why a materialist analysis of material history and conditions can be helpful: Hong Kong was a part of China without any uprisings or separatism since it was taken over by Qin Shi Huang in the 200s BC, and the first separatism started after the British stole Hong Kong in the first opium war, and then selectively developed it in order to create what is called a comprador class. Compradors are usually the bourgeois/richer elements of a society that are selected by colonizers to enforce the rules of the colonial regime, and reap the benefits of being treated as “junior” members of the ruling race.

This happened in India under the UK, in Puerto Rico and Cuba and the Philippines under the US, and in Vietnam and Algeria under France. The colonialists have then created a vested class interest for the compradors to keep things the way they are, because they benefit and become the middle classes. When the territory, in this case Hong Kong, is returned, you have a built in protest movement/subversive movement against the government that was wronged by the colonialists, and a permanent capitalist class to do business with in the more globalized stage of capital that emerges from the ashes of colonialism. 

In the minds of many of these protesters, they truly think they deserve to be treated differently than the mainland Chinese, because they and especially their parents and grandparents, held positions of authority, and lots of capital and property, under the colonialist regime that enriched them and privileged them over the proletarian “natives”, as they are increasingly seen. This is why you have colonial era flags being waved, colonial anthems being sung, and mainland Chinese people and working class Hong Kongers, who are often from mainland China, being harassed and beaten by protesters. 

This is why, in Hong Kong, you are not seeing factories staging walkouts, or street cleaners holding signs, or women and their kids out in the streets, or masses of migrant workers protesting. You are only seeing mostly men, aged 18-30, well dressed, with iPhones and well made signs, singing western anthems and talking with western diplomats and media, always western media, and always using symbols and slogans and concepts westerners will recognize and value. 

THIS IS NOT A PROLETARIAN UPRISING. Do not buy into the colonialist propaganda.

The Great Wall of Trump

There has been a lot of blabber lately, from the far right in general and Donald Trump worshipers in particular, about building an enormous wall between Mexico and the United States so as to “stem the invasion of the ‘illegals'”. The Great Wall of China is often named dropped as an example, or rather, THE example of how a wall can be used successfully to maintain the supposed integrity and security of a large nation. You see, there is just one little problem w/ using the example of the Great Wall this way: It didn’t work, or at least not the way people have been led to believe.

China (or more accurately, the areas of China populated and controlled by the Han ethnic and cultural group) was invaded successfully by the Mongols, the Hsi Hsia (Tanguts), the Tibetans, and the Manchu. The wall, or rather serious of walls (made variously of stone, wood, and earth at different places along its length) and border forts linked by trade and communication networks and manned by pickets and conscripted militias along with the Imperial military, was basically a giant propaganda tool and a way to martial large amounts of labor resources and maintain control of frontier regions, protect against bandits, and control import/export trade. So, long story short, walls don’t work as ways of keeping large amounts of people out of large nations and they are almost never effective at “controlling” the flow of migrants. People are like water; they will always find a way through even the most tough and powerful looking barrier.

Also (talking to you here Mr. Trump and your supporters) China never made the other nations that were meant to be kept out by the wall pay for the wall. China tried the whole bravado/middle finger technique against the Mongols, and, well, the Mongols invaded China, killed 20 Million people, burned many of its largest cities to the ground, and ruled it as conquerors for 150 years. So there’s that. Unless we are willing to post tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of armed to the teeth soldiers on and around the 2000 mile border permanently (like the Israelis in Palestine, the Soviets in East Germany and North & South Korea on the DMZ) said wall is not going to solve the “problem” of unregulated immigration into the United States from Mexico and Central America. And even THEN, as the China examples shows, it wouldn’t work. Only a “giant loser” would think otherwise. 

We Are the Evil Empire

This Essay is Dedicated to the victims of Imperial Violence everywhere, and throughout time

I realized the other day that the Invading US Military, controlled by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and nominally George Bush II among others, appoint a AMERICAN MILITARY/COLONIAL DICTATOR to rule Iraq, a nation of over 20 million independent, living, breathing, worthwhile people. His name was L. Paul Bremer and he was aided by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and they were no different than General Iwane Matsui in Nanjiang in 1937, or Lucius Flavius SIlva at Masada, or Nathan Bedford Forest at Fort Pillow or Field Marshal Walter Model in Warsaw in 1944…they were functionaries, brutal ones, of the imperial/fascistic order of their national/ethnic system of power. We are no different than any other violent, expanding, brutal, greedy, ambitious empires in history. The scale of the violence inflicted upon Iraq, for no reason other than petty revenge by the ruling Bush family, profit and for Dick Cheney, the then dictator of the US, and out of shear myopic xenophobic rage against anything that challenged or even irritated US imperial authority and economic control, is on par with the violence inflicted by the Mongols on Baghdad in 1258, or the IDF in Palestine since 1948, or the Germans on Spain in 1936.

The only objective differences between our empire and any other in history is time, distance, technology, and professed ideology. We are convinced of our moral superiority to, our difference from, the “others”, these “truly evil” empires. We killed at least a million people in war in Iraq, surely if we count the death toll from starvation and illness caused by our invasion and occupation and the sanctions, that total is closer to 2 million. We would count these deaths as part of the war victims if we were analyzing the Soviets, or ISIS, or Imperial Japan in their imperial debacles. The founding imperial myth of “American Exceptionalism” notwithstanding, a US Sniper killing a child in Baghdad because he “may have been a potential terrorist” is not different morally from a Soviet Private running a Berlin shopkeeper through with a bayonet, or British Regulars gunning down women and children at Amritsar. Iraqi lives are no less valuable than American lives, or Jewish lives, or Tibetan lives. Iraqis are no more or less prone to “evil” or “savagery” then any other arbitrary grouping of peoples in the world. How is a US soldier killing an Iraqi civilian in Anbar Provence any different than a Chinese Communist beating a Nationalist Sympathizer to death in Xian? THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. We are no more or less evil than any other empire in history. Our belief in the righteousness of our moral/political/philosophical/economic/religious systems are not unique, every empire has its self-sustaining myths and belief in its own self evident superiority. I mention Iraq because it is the most egregious recent example of our imperial brutality, but I could also mention the fire bombing of Tokyo in 1945, the nuclear obliteration and slow radiation poisoning of 500,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ideological motivated and justified genocide committed against the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, the wholesale slaughter of Indians over 200 years of Manifest Destiny warfare. China occupies Tibet, and Russia occupies Chechnya, but we occupy the Najavo Nation, the Cherokee Nation, the Iroquois Confederacy. There is no moral difference. Only the cast of characters, the slogans, and the justifications are different. We are what we condemn. We are the evil empire. We are the most dangerous and violent empire now existing on Earth.

Dukkha/Weightier Than Mount Tai

dukkha!

aye aye

there is a thorne

in my foot

it bleeds

and I have to pluck it out

and it bleeds more

but

slowly

it clots

 

Sun Yat Sen

and then the Generalissimo

these are the leaders we get before

the Red Emperor

a bourgeois nationalist revolutionary

and a beer hall putsch wannabe

20 years of bland protestant incompetence

and then

the programed life

of leaps

and

revolutions

 

a beggar

was throwing coins into the brush

the Buddha came over and retrieved the coins and

brought them back to the beggar

and the beggar wept and thanked him for his generosity

and then he returned to throwing coins into the brush

Paramartha/The Manchu Begin to Lose their Grip on the Mandate of Heaven

The Buddha is in the sky

and he is blue like the sky

but I can see him smile

 

the Qianlong Emperor

of the illustrious and powerful

middle kingdom

has taken our family

Buddhas

curse him

let the mandate

be alien to him

 

The Lamas sing

in the mountains

so high

up that their lungs

rattle

from lack

of air

find refuge under the tree

away from the sun

away from the stinging wind

and from pain

Buddha will smile

and laugh

at your revelation

 

the foreign devils

have returned

and they have more

flower oil

to beguile my peasants

so that they leave the fields

fallow

they mean to starve the

Great Qin

by sowing madness

in my peasants

So we will send the

Mongols

after them

 

you sought

paramartha

but there were only

more questions

and confusions

Mara is dancing in the flower

gardan

 

Lin Zexu served the

Daoguang Emperor

wisely

but

not

well

“the barbarians have no

shame, and poison

a better nation and people

into defeat

the barbarians’ is a purloined victory

The Khan is in Tibet/Samyaksambuddha

‘brug banner

zing skya scales

grinning and bald

under the hooves of small horses

The Khan of all

between the two oceans

 

Mara bleeds into my eyes and

screams into my chest

a breath smelling of

lilacs

and it is so hard to resist

 

The banner of the horse tails

Qoridai

reigns triumphant

the tumens

roam the roads

beat into the dirt

I look to the west and see only their empire

I look to the East and the North and the South

and I see only their empire

 

samyaksambuddha

nettles and thirst

blasting heat

like Mara belching fire

the air shimmers

and the beggars

sitting lotus

listening

samyaksambuddha

please

I strive

nekkhamma

 

Tibet

is a appendage

of the

Yuan

who possess

the Mandate

of heaven

Taiding

and now his illustrious successor

Marajit/War in the North

these feelings

afflict me constantly

like a persistent chest cold

and there is Mara

and Mara has power over my dreams

I am not hungry enough

I do not embrace agony

 

Ān Shǐ Zhīluàn

and the lord of

the middle kingdom

loses the mandate

of heaven to

Trisong Detsen

of that backwater

Tubo

 

he is without place and without

rage

but he is vengeful

and spiteful

and craves the wine

of life

a god of indigo and honey

Mara

has suzreignity

over my nightmares

thunder

in a blight red sky

 

the beleaguered Tang

rage against

the Xuanzong Emperor

for his

credulousness

regarding those he

trusted

in the North

why must the Middle Kingdom

suffer for one Emperor’s folly?