Never let a crisis go to waste. Anything is possible. Feels a little like the week after 9/11. Maybe Moldbug is right and it all changes. Maybe it does not. This is the week the normie world caught up with the right wing internet autist world of January. This could get incredibly bad and it could blow over in a few weeks. We link to two takes on either side of the coin this week. Anything seems possible.

There is a strong chance nothing happens. This may spin out and by June we are all remembering the year without a spring. This is just a virus that can be stopped like any other. Humanity has made it through far worse. Had the Harvard professor not said 70% of the world could get this (caveat if no precautions are taken) it freaked many people out. It might have nudged some Western libs to adopt the defeatist posture like in the UK and Germany where they just say “let it wash over us and we will deal with it after”. Weaklings.

Maybe nothing will happen. What came of 9/11? The system played out trends in surveillance and warfare that were already apparent on that morning. SigInt received a huge boost as the intelligence agencies were unleashed instead of punished for the worst failure since Pearl Harbor. Our form of warfare with a heavy focus on bombing to engage in regime change and nation building accelerated, but was already in place with the first Gulf War and our Balkans intervention.

There was no Fortress America strategy of closing immigration doors and playing defense. This same missed opportunity happened after the American Financial Crisis. No real reforms happened, no structural change took place, and the system consolidated and centralized even more than the repeal of Glass-Steagall had sparked. What matters is who is at the helm and what the system thinks it can pull over on the population via the managerial class.

If kids have school called early and next fall show no signs of slippage, why do we have the long school year that we put kids through per experts’ recommendations? If college can be done online, even the prestigious schools, then why is it not all just via recorded lectures, online modules and a much much lower tuition fee? If medicine can deliver information or services quicker and insurance companies can find a way to cover things in emergencies, why would we go back to the old ways? If people work just as productive at home as they do in an office, why the hell do we force them to be in the office Monday through Friday?

Let workers go remote and repopulate small towns with much cheaper real estate. Force universities to reduce tuition. Shorten the K-12 school year. Tell Cigna and Aetna to lighten up. Break every cartel and take a sledgehammer to ossified structures. Maybe this all comes to nothing, but you are not a normie. You are not scared. You are a little excited. It is another week where it feels like everything can change. Anything is possible.

On to the links…

Liberals should embrace economic nationalism – An essay aims to nudge liberals towards embracing economic nationalism. It does make sense. This is what Michael Tracey is getting at as he creeps closer to socialism in one country (there must be a name for that). The problem is that the left is subservient to international capital and uses ethnic resentment to cobble its voter coalition. The left’s donor class is just as strongly against it as the right’s.

Libs won’t because they couldn’t write this in 2012 – This is an old American Conservative piece on what happened economically to destroy our working class. The left could not due to thoughtcrime mention some of these items and because their donors benefited from the policies they could not notice the other pieces to the puzzle.

Parallax Optics On Education – Education is not about teaching anymore. Corona has exposed that our education system is about daycare and meals for the underclass. Money quote, “The Education system currently revolves around bureaucratically occupying young peoples’ time, while minimally socialising them in accordance with ‘progressive’ values, rather than effectively imparting / instilling critical practical, cognitive skills and behaviours as per ‘traditional’ education.” Watch states start cancelling school for the rest of the year in the second half of this month because they will get through third quarter. We need to admit that schools are orphanages now.

A Calm View Of Corona – Briggs offers some graphs and numbers to show how corona is going to pass. It will pass. He uses annual influenza numbers as a guide too, because after all, there is no cure for the flu but it passes each year.

A More Alarmist View Of Corona – Flip side to the above post. This illness is far different and we need to be far more vigilant and proactive. Looking across the nation, a lot of corporations are taking steps to send workers home where possible. Colleges are shutting down and the k-12 crowd will follow. We’re privately doing it to overcome the public lack of will to shut anything down.

The Intolerant Universities – The left is catching on tot he problem of intolerant universities. This article along with Andrew Sullivan’s writing in ’19 hints that the left might be preparing a shivving of the woke crowd to neuter them, keep the neoliberal core intact and in power and hollow out the Bernie movement to get back to neoliberalism in mild beige Bernie packaging.

Relocate the supply chains – This month was a big awakening on the problem of outsourcing. Before this WuFlu crisis, most normies though just junk was made in China or things lower on the complexity scale. Wrong. The entire manufacturing sector, except critical natsec industries like ball bearings, were relocated to China all to save some money and avoid enviro laws. China became the global manufacturing hub and this is not a lie or exaggeration. This is what it means.

Profile of a man at the quirky intersection of tech and music – Nothing to do with corona. This is just a good profile with interesting tidbits that touch on the history of rock music.

Tech and amateurs were right again, the experts were wrong – Internet autists were right once again while the credentialed experts were wrong. Will this lead to the big tech firms allowing the non-credentialed to crowd to flourish online? Balaji on Twitter thinks it will end the disinfo purging push. I’m not sure. This might only make the system double down and purge harder that anyone showed the world that they were wrong, again.