The Last Centurion

Chapter One Days of Wine and Song

Call me Bandit.

Okay, hopefully that's, like, the last time I'm going to make a literary reference. But you never know. Beware . . . bewaaare . . .

There's a bunch of these stories out there now that people are getting back on the Net. I figured, what the hell? I've got one, too. Sure, we all do. But, you know, what the hell?

People started calling it the Hell Times after some pundit was spouting about it on TV. I mean, The Great Depression was taken and they didn't have the Plague or the Freeze thrown on top. I know, it wasn't a plague and all you nitnoids are going to point out that it was some fucking flu virus and plague is bacterial infection and . . . Yeah. I know. Thank you. We ALL fucking know, all right? Christ, there are times you wished it had been targeted at nitnoids. Everybody calls it the Plague, okay? Get over yourself.

Anyway, people call it the Hell Times. I dunno, maybe I've got a better personal fix on hell than they do or maybe I don't. Personally, having been in combat and blown up and shot and seen people I care about blown up and shot and even people I didn't particularly care about blown up and shot and having visited a volcano once and thought about what it would be like to spend the rest of fucking forever in one, I don't call it the Hell Times. Bad as it was, seems to be an exaggeration. Me? I call it the Time of Suckage.

This is my sucky story about the time of suckage.

So there I was in Iran again, this is no shit . . . It was my fourth trip to the sandbox in my short years as a soldier. And it was a maximally fucked up tour even before the Time of Suckage. Look, you spend any time as a soldier and you get good chains of command and bad chains of command. Good jobs and bad jobs. You deal. It didn't help that the Prez was a whiny bitch who really wanted us out of there but couldn't figure out how to get reelected and stab us in the back. Equipment was short, training was crap, the muj knew all they had to do was hold their ground and we were eventually going to leave.

And boy did we. Not that it helped them much, huh? Heh, heh.

Seriously, I met some Iranians (and Iraqis and Afghans) that were pretty decent people. And I'm sorry as hell for what happened to the good people, most of them, that inhabited those countries. But . . . Ah, hell. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Way ahead.

Maybe I should talk about myself for a bit to give a little context. I was one of the very few remaining farm boys in the Army at the time. Seriously. I mean, most of my troops were from rural areas but that's not, exactly, the same thing as being a farm boy. I grew up on a family farm. Well, I grew up on one of the family farms owned by the Bandit Family Farm Corporation, LLC.

Wait? Corporation? Family Farm? How do those two go together?

Like bacon and eggs, my friends, like bacon and eggs. Forget everything you've seen in a bad movie about family farms. If you're going to survive in this economy, you'd better know what the hell you're doing. And I'm not talking some hobby farm where the "farmer" is a construction contractor and has a couple of cows or a chicken house or twain that are some added income. (Or more often a tax write-off.) I'm talking about making all your income from farming.

And it's pretty good money if you do it right. Farmers are the richest single income group in the U.S. Were before the Time, during the Time and after. Sure, some of them lost their farms during the Time but damned few. (Except for the Big Grab but I'll get to that.) Smart farmers weren't saddled with killer debt when the Times hit. And, hell, people always got to eat. Sure, there were less mouths to feed but the government was always buying.

Anyway. Grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota near Blue Earth. It was one of nine the family owned in six counties in southern Minnesota. That one was right on two thousand acres, most of it tilled in time. Pretty much the standard rural upbringing. Went to school. (Yes, I was captain of the football team.) Played with my friends. Dated girls. (I'm straight for all you pining fags out there.) And did some chores. Yes, I've tossed haybales. But not all that many. Baling is time and labor intensive and thus unprofitable. Better to roll. Takes one guy with a tractor the same time to clear a field of rolls as it takes fifteen guys with bales. Do. The. Math.

Did I ever get up before dawn and milk cows using a bucket and a stool? No. The family owned two cow farms. Both were run by managers. At o dark thirty the cows would walk to the barn and into their stalls. Why? Because they had full udders. Full udders hurt. The cows learned quick that if they walked to the stall the hurt went away. Cows are very dumb (if not as dumb as sheep) but they can be trained.

A team of people (usually four) would then hook them up to the milking machines. They'd drink coffee while the cows were getting their udder dump, unhook them, and the cows and crew would then have their breakfast. After breakfast the cows got turned out and most of the crew went off to day jobs. The milk was stored in a steel vat until the truck came by to pick it up and take it to the processing plant. Manager, who was full time, handled that. In the evening, repeat.

Again. Do. The. Math. Forty cows (smaller farm). I milked one cow, once, by hand when my dad made me "familiarize" with it. It took me a good fifteen minutes. Figure an expert can do it in maybe five. Four guys, thirty minutes. Or one guy doing it all damned day. Sure, the equipment's a tad expensive (like a half a million dollars). It's amortized.

Then there's the whole . . . sepsis issue. Look, milking by hand you put milk into an open bucket in a stall that's occupied by a cow. Bessy is not, take it from this farm boy, a clean creature. Bessy's tail hangs down the same spot her poop (which is mostly liquid) comes out. Bessy walks in her poop. Flies surround Bessy like politicians at an all-you-can-steal lobbyist giveaway.

Milk is also a prime food for just about anything. Including bacteria.

We had no interest in being in the news as the evil farm corporation that killed x thousand customers from salmonella or some shit.

Doing it by hand spells "Going Out Of Business." We liked our farm(s). We wanted to keep being farmers. We did it the smart way.

That extended to everything. Look, combine harvesters are very expensive. The flip side is, the bigger they are the more expensive they get but the more economic they are. So bigger, in general, is better.

However, some of our fields were too small for the really big combines. And a combine only makes its money a couple of weeks out of the year. Harvesting is about it.

There are companies that do that shit. Since harvests, for really obvious reasons, don't happen everywhere all at once, they move around harvesting and planting. Most of the guys doing the actual work were from South Africa or Eastern Europe. (Mexicans never got in on that racket. Not sure why.)

We had a couple of small combines (price tag right at a quarter mil a pop) to do some of the smaller fields and cleanup. For the main harvesting, Dad would arrange, like a year in advance, to get the combine company to come in.

Farmers are planners. The Big Chill and the Big Grab really fucked with us but it was fucking with everybody so I'll get to that later. Adapt, react and overcome ain't just a Marine motto. Of course, the Time of Suckage proved that it just might be an exclusively American motto and at the time confined to a relatively small fraction. Insert sigh here.

So. Grew up on a farm. Maximum suckage once a year picking rocks. (Another essay.) Went to college (UM, Farmington) on a football scholarship. Got cut sophomore year.

Dad had a college fund for me but . . . Well, if I dipped into it for, you know, tuition and books it really cut into my discretionary income. The insurance for a twenty-year-old on a Mustang GT-175 is not cheap. And buying the ladies nice dinners tends to get you laid more than McDonalds dinners do. I did not want my discretionary income tapped.

ROTC was just sitting there. Most of my family had been Navy. (Don't laugh. I think most of the Navy is crewed by Midwesterners.) But there wasn't a Navy ROTC program. So I went Army.

Okay, yes, there was a war on. But, again, I did the math. Death rates in that war were pretty much on a par with death rates during previous peacetimes. Don't believe me? Check the figures yourself, I'm not going to hold your hand. But it's true. And death rates among combat forces were not significantly higher than in the Navy. Being at sea is an inherently dangerous process. Lots of people die from accidents. Most of the people dying in the Army were from accidents.

And . . . Oh, hell. Yes, okay. I did have a "desire to serve in combat." Call me stupid. My life, my choice. I wanted to go over and fight. Look, I was twelve when those bastards hit the Twin Towers. I watched those clips over and over just like the rest of you. I knew I didn't want to cruise around on a ship. I wanted to fight. Insert appropriate lines from "Alice's Restaurant" here.

So I went ROTC. Got my degree and my brown bars the same day. Went off to Infantry Officer Basic Course. Which sucked. At the time it was my definition of suckage.

Got sent to the 3rd ID in Savannah. Which wasn't a bad place to be for a junior officer with a decent stipend from my shares in the corporation. All I had to do was put up with the bullshit aspects of the Army for six years, go get my Masters in Agronomy and I'd be manager on one of the satellite farms until Dad retired. I was shooting for the mixed crop farms near Hanska. The walleye fishing on Lake Hanska was great and we owned a couple of cottages over there. And since the Hanska manager was in charge of ensuring the upkeep of the cottages . . .

And then we did our first deployment. And, oh, hell, I enjoyed it. Yes, I lost two troops to sniper fire, James Adamson and Litel Compson. They were good guys, both of them. Damned fine troops. I could talk about both of them all day.

But we were doing a tough job in a tough environment. Even with the support of the Iranian government, there were lots of people who really wanted the mullahs back in power. Not going to do an essay on that, this is about the Time of Suckage. We did our job and as a guy in charge of making sure that everything went right, well, for a first deployment I didn't do too bad. Farmers are planners; the CO and my platoon sergeant (Sergeant First Class Clovalle (pronounced "Clo-Vail") Freeman) didn't have to tell me about planning to prevent piss poor performance. And, hell, I always got along with people. I liked my troops and vice versa. Mostly. There's always a few assholes.

But for a first time deployment as a cherry LT I didn't do too bad. And my OER more or less said the same thing. (Actually, it sounded like I was fucking Napoleon but the decent ones always do. That got explained to me in detail.)

I was doing good work and doing it well. Frankly, that first deployment made me rethink the whole Hanska Plan.

Back we went to Savannah. I got promoted to 1LT and went off to Advanced Course. It sucked but not as bad as IOBC. Then I went to Ranger School and got a new appreciation for maximal suckage. (Edit by wife: The author of this is too humble to admit he got Distinguished Honor Graduate in Infantry Officer's Advanced Course and Honor Graduate in Ranger's School. He's an idiot but I love him.) Oh, sure, I like a challenge as much as the next over-testosteroned young idiot. But Ranger School wasn't a challenge in any way except staying awake. It was just suckage, day in and day out.

Oh, yeah, and I went to Jump School right after IOAC. Forgot about that until I remembered the maximally suck jumps in Ranger's School. Jump School, these days, just tries to suck.

When I got back we were getting ready for another deployment. I was too senior for a line platoon, it wasn't time to rotate the Mortar Platoon leader and I was too junior for XO. So I got stuck in battalion in the S-3 (Operations) shop.

There are jokes about Fobbits. Those are the guys who stay in the Forward Operations Base. Dude, all I'll say is that I'd much rather be out doing patrols than stuck in the fucking FOB. FOB duty is boring and stressful. There are more PTSD cases among Fobbits than line troops.

(Of course, most Fobbits are REMFs who wanted to avoid being shot at so they got a job that didn't involve shooting. There was one MI guy who had a nervous breakdown about once a week and had to go get "counseled" in a rear area. Smart guy, seemed to really want to do the job, just did not have the constitution for it. Can't even call him a coward, just . . . didn't have the constitution.)

Not being out where you could actually do something was the worst part. No, the worst part was constantly having to work with Fobbits. No, the worst part was the S-3 who was a dick and incompetent to boot. No, the worst part . . . Damn, there are so many worst parts. The tour was maximum suck. Hanska here I come.

Back at Savannah we're doing all the shit that soldiers do when they're not fighting. I'm still in the 3 shop (new S-3 thank God and Major Clark was a real mentor during this period, wish we'd had him in Afghanistan) and we're in charge of making sure everybody gets trained back up to standard. Look, sure, combat experience is important and there are things you learn in combat you can't learn anywhere else. But . . . There are things you forget in combat, too. Things that you could have used. But guys build up a small skill-set that works to carry them through. Getting them to learn a couple more skills on top of that skill-set is a good thing.

Okay, and we had to fill in all the fucking check boxes of some Pentagon weanie who'd sort of heard there was a war on but needed to justify his existence by creating check boxes for us to fill. Yes, that's a lot of it.

And we had a big part in making sure all the equipment that had gotten fucked up on deployment got unfucked. That was mostly my stuff and Jesus there was a lot of stuff to unfuck. And find. And then admit had disappeared and do reams of paperwork explaining why it had disappeared. I'd say "in triplicate" but most of it was electronic. We had to file in triplicate, though. Thank God I had a clerk for that. Rusty was a fine guy for a Fobbit.

I'd done extra staff time. Either because of that or because the battalion commander liked my winsome good looks I got the battalion Scout Platoon. Honestly, with the way that we worked it wasn't much different from having a line platoon. But the battalion had started to use the Scouts as sort of an integral special operations unit. When there was a high value operation to perform (like capturing a particularly bad boy) and the fucking SEALs or Rangers or Delta or SF were otherwise busy sharpening their knives or taking pictures of themselves doing push-ups we got to kick the door.

It was a very hoowah fucking time for me. We went back to the Sandbox, this time to Iraq which was still having trouble over by Syria, and we got to kick a lot of doors. The "real" spec-ops guys were busy in Iran and Afghanistan. They didn't care that various Sunni countries (Cough! Cough! Saudi Arabia! Cough! Cough! Syria!) were still funneling weapons, money and personnel into Iraq. The news cameras were all in Iran so naturally that's where SOCOM went.

They didn't, per se, end up on the news. But I took a little tour of the Delta Compound one time, (Okay, okay, I was being recruited, I'll admit it) and there were some very interesting news articles pinned up in cases with small comments underneath like "Detachment One, Alpha Squadron."

Now, don't get me wrong. The SOCOM guys are good folk who do a hard job. But, come on, it's like anything else. When they're looking for a guy to promote or give a special (i.e. interesting) job, they're going to remember the guys who did their job very quietly but also did it well enough that they ended up, unmentioned, in the news. Take the capture of Mullah Rafaki. Sure, supposedly it was 4th ID that got him. Nope. It was really a team of SEALs. And those guys are still unable to pay for their bar tab, not to mention the platoon leader is getting fast-tracked to lieutenant commander.

The point being, CNN and company were in Iran. Iran was the happenin' spot. We were in a backwater in Iraq which was, to most of the world, a done deal.

The downside? Nobody knew we were still fighting in Iraq and you had to explain it over and over and over again. The upside? Dude, I was the Scout Platoon Leader. Platoon leaders are supposed to sit back and direct. I did that. Sure. Absolutely. That's where I got these damned scars from a door charge I (very stupidly) got too close to. But we still did the house and pulled the bad-guys. Who? Me do a door? No, Colonel, of course I didn't do the door.

Very hoowah time. Rule One (no drinking, "fraternization" or pornography) was still in effect. Nobody paid a damned bit of attention to it. I was still an officer. I practically fucking lived with my grunts. We ran together, fought together, drank together and . . . Okay, there was a degree of fraternization on that one trip up to Kirbil. With girls. Hookers. Let me make it clear that we were not fraternizing with each other.

Good days, good days.

And back to Savannah. And I made captain on the "short list" and I got a company. Bravo called "The Bandits." Six is the military designation for "commander." Ergo, I became Bandit Six and have used it as a handle any time I can get away with it since.

Now, taking over a company when you've never been an XO is a bit of an adjustment. I got my first "does not quite walk on water but can negotiate the top of mud" evaluation during my first eval period as CO. Deserved it. I was not succeeding in my primary tasks. Some personal issues but I was not succeeding.

I begged forgiveness and, even more, begged help. I'm not good at asking for advice. I'd gotten used to asking NCOs what they thought and then using it or not. But going to the battalion commander (Lieutenant Colonel Nick Richards, good guy) and admitting I was getting a bit lost in the swamps as a CO was hard.

He didn't kick my ass for it, though. He just gave suggestions. And they were very good suggestions. I got better very fast. (Getting over the personal issues helped. Okay, yeah, they involved a girl and no she did not get pregnant but thank God we also did not get married is all I'll say.)

The company considered me a bit rocky when we deployed but we sort of mutually got over that in the Rockpile. My performance was coming up even before deployment and, hell, I like deployments. I'd finally gotten over my tendency to (badly) micromanage the company. Just in time, too, because I was not going to be a Fobbit on deployment if I could help it. I did help it.

God forgive me for what I put my driver through, though. You see, I'd have at any time two or three things going on at once out in the boonies. In different areas. Most of the unit would travel fairly heavy, at least a platoon. I wanted to see all of it and especially when the shit was hitting the fan. So myself, my driver and two RTOs (actually, Bobby and Buddy were my bodyguards) would go raring off across a fairly questionable to hostile Kandahar Province countryside, mostly by ourselves. Occasionally this involved stopping and paying a visit to one of the local "friendlies." I put the quotes on it because you never knew until you pulled up (and sometimes not even then) if they were friendlies today.

Occasionally it involved attempts by unfriendlies to stop us.

Lord love my boys. They never seemed to tire of bailing the CO out of a firefight. Probably because they were trying to catch up. And they never seemed to tire, either, of being in the middle of a firefight and "Bandit Six" suddenly roaring in to jump in the fight. Days of wine and song.

(Wife's Edit: Sigh. "Attention to Orders. Bandit Six is hereby awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for conduct above and beyond the call of duty in actions in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on March 15th, 2017.

"While travelling to meet with local friendly tribal leaders, Bandit Six was informed that a small group of Special Operations personnel had been ambushed and were pinned down by local Taliban related forces. Without any regard to personal safety, Bandit Six immediately ventured to the area of combat and closed with the Taliban forces. His personal vehicle damaged by concentrated rocket propelled grenade fire which injured both his radio telephone operator and himself, Bandit Six exited the vehicle and engaged the enemy with his personal weapon. With the support of continued machine-gun fire from his damaged vehicle, directed by hand and arm signals, Bandit Six advanced upon the enemy ambush location and using concentrated fire, the expenditure of all of his personal store of grenades and person-to-person combat skills, Bandit Six turned the flank of the enemy position. During the process of the advance Bandit Six was wounded three times but continued to move forward expeditiously against the numerically superior Taliban forces until they retreated from their positions. Upon analysis of the combat the relieved special operations unit commander credited Bandit Six with over twenty (20) personal kills including more than six (6) due to knife and bayonet.

"Entered service in the Armed Forces from Minnesota." End Wife Edit. I swear, he drives me nuts sometimes.)

Chapter Two I Was and Am an Idiot

And then we were back in Savannah. About halfway through our "Stateside deployment" Colonel Richards left and we had a new BC.

Okay, here's the skinny. I can get along with just about anybody. I'm a very laid-back guy in most ways. It is rare that I deal with somebody that I just cannot fucking stand and the feeling is mutual.

Mitigating circumstances. It didn't help that the new BC was a long-term Fobbit. He'd never led so much as a platoon in the Sandbox and we were scheduled to go back to AOR Iran. Not only Iran but Fars Province, which was the center of the Resistance. It was going to be a very fucking hot deploy.

Here he was, knowing everyone was looking at him, like, "who the fuck are you to be leading this battalion in combat?" And there was Bandit Six grinning and spoiling for a fight.

The problem being my time was up as CO. Up or out, baby, up or out. They only give you so many days of wine and song in the Army and mine were about over. Oh, I wasn't up for the ultimate butt-fuck, being promoted to major (the one shittiest rank in the Army) and having my mandatory lobotomy performed. But I was looking at doing more staff time. Look, I can do staff work. But it doesn't mean I like doing it.

But there's staff work and there's staff work. Now, adjutant fucking sucks as a job. But it's a good position for a guy like me. It looks good on your military resume if you will. Assistant S-3. Better position for my interests and looks almost as good as Adjutant. Brigade S-3 (Air). These are good positions career-wise.

Fucker stuck me in S-4. I nearly threw a shit-fit. I probably should have. It looked like I was a fuck-up. Nobody goes from company command to S-4 unless they've fucked up. He might as well have sent me over to Protocol Office at Corps. No matter what my fucking OERs looked like, it was going to hang over my head for the rest of my career.

So I deployed to the Fars op as an S-4 weanie. The actual S-4 was a major and a total luzer. I mean with a capital L. Even getting ready for deployment, even on deployment, doing his job wasn't hard. Trust me, I did it. He sure as hell couldn't and somebody had to make sure the battalion had beans and bullets. (Not to mention batteries, water, fuel . . . ) But it wasn't fucking hard.

That was sort of why I didn't throw a shit-fit. I threw myself on the grenade instead. The BC sweet talked me into the position. Manipulated me was more like it. "We're going over to Iran. The S-4, who I can't get rid of, is not going to do the job we need, the battalion needs. I need somebody there I can trust."

I hadn't realized what a back-stabbing prick the BC was at the time or I would have swallowed my care for the battalion, which was high, and told him to stick it. But I sucked it up and saluted and went to do the job.

Here's the thing. Remember what I said about that first OER. If your OERs don't make you seem like the reincarnation of Scipio Fucking Africanus it's a death knell to your career. Bad enough that I went from company commander to S-4. There are ways to write an OER for that position that make you seem like, at least, the Scipio Africanus of Supply Officers.

"During this period Bandit Six performed his duties in a manner which were fully acceptable . . . " is not one of them.

But what do you do? Go screaming about "fully acceptable"? The fact was, I'd done my duties in way that was "fucking outstanding." I was doing the job of my superior the whole fucking time. It wasn't a hard job, but it also was well above my paygrade and in a field that was radically different from mine.

I knew my fucking career was toast if I didn't get some sort of positive movement after the deployment. I reconsidered the Delta offer. They could smell bullshit in an OER and I knew I had to wait until I was Captain Promotable to go Over the Wall. Of course, Selection was maximum suckage and the training period took out almost everybody that made it through qual. But I figured I was the best fucking infantry captain in the Army. I could make it into Delta. Which would wipe out "commander to S-4" not to mention "fully acceptable."

Then I got an e-mail from my dad. When I'd been a Fobbit in the 3 shop I barely could keep up with home. I was working my ass off eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. As "assistant S-4" I'd considered starting a blog. God knew I had the time.

I don't know if you remember, I don't know if you realize it, but both bits of news hit the same week. Most people didn't notice the one my dad sent me for months. But it was reported the same week.

The article my dad sent me was from a British source. See, there was this solar physicist in Britain who had sort of gotten out of the solar physics field and entered the long-range forecasting field. Weather, that is. We all know, Lord God do we know, that all that baloney about "greenhouse gases" and "man-induced global warming" was so much horse shit. But back then it was all "global warming! CO₂ will kill us all!" Man, we wished we'd had that sort of CO₂, didn't we?

But the thing about this guy, don't recall his name, was that he did long-range weather forecasts based on solar activity. He'd studied the sun until he should have been blind and had figured out that just about everything related to the sort of weather farmers cared about came down to solar output. Forget CO₂, it was all the sun. We all know that now. Most of you probably know who I'm talking about. Damn, why can't I remember his name?

Anyway, Dad sent me this article. It was complicated. I had to dredge up some long-stored memories from my "Weather and Agriculture" classes but I finally figured it out. Basically, the guy was being very cautious in saying that Our Friend the Sun had turned off.

Oh, not completely. But his predictions were way more cautious than normal and just fucking dismal for the next growing season. He even put a caveat in the end. I recall it to this day.

"Based upon these indicators, NYP (Next Year Predictions) indicate significant chance of severe cooling regimes."

Severe cooling regimes. That would be 2019. Nobody has to be reminded about 2019.

And then there was Dad's note at the end. "Investing heavily in triticale."

For all you non-farmers and non-Star Trek buffs, triticale is rye. See, there's a couple of things about rye. The first thing is that it's not exactly a big need crop. Wheat? Lots of markets for wheat. Ditto corn. (Maize to you Europeans and Canoe-Heads.) Soy? Always good markets for soy. Beans of various sorts. Peas. We grew it all, even seasonals like broccoli. All good markets.

Rye is a niche market. Not a bunch of people lining up for rye. (Didn't used to be back then. Less so now, too. Thank God we're past eating nothing but rye bread from the lines, huh?)

But the main thing about rye is that it grows fast and is cold hardy. Winter wheat's cold hardy but . . . Oh, it's complicated. There's also only so much winter wheat market and it's touchier than rye in certain cold and wet conditions. Look, I'm a professional. Do not try this at home.

Bottomline? Dad trusted this guy enough to be prepared to take a big hit economically on the basis that that was going to be the only way to survive.

Farmers are planners.

I looked at it and shrugged. "How bad could it be?"

Well, we all know that, don't we? I thought I was a grown-up. What a fucking maroon. You're about to find out how much of a fucking maroon I was in those days. (Still am I'll admit. But at least now I know it.)

The next day was the Battalion Weekly Reorientation Exercise. It says a lot about our battalion commander that he couldn't call it a Battalion Command and Staff Meeting or even a Battalion Weekly Meeting.

I'd been an assistant S-3 and a company CO under previous battalion commanders. I knew the weekly staff meeting like the inside of my mouth. That was until this dickbreath came along. Weekly staff meetings, are, by and large, ritual dick-beating exercises. Everyone stands up and presents their action items for the previous week, completion function thereof and action items for the upcoming week, schedule thereof. They're actually necessary but God damn they're a pain.

My previous COs had been big on maximal info, minimal dick-beating.

Not so the new guy. If the previous meetings had been, say, a Catholic High Mass of dick-beating, this guy was full up Aztec Sun Day ritual dick-beating with a cast of thousands and everyone has to give up their still beating heart. The best and the brightest were flayed and he wore their skin around for the next week. I thought when I was a CO I'd had a little micromanagement issue. I grew to understand a whole new term under this CO. One staff meeting the motherfucker took, I shit you not, four hours to "properly implement" issue of bottled fucking water. It was like he simply could not let it go. Look, you take the number of troops in a unit, add ten percent and send them that much fucking water. It's not rocket science.

At one point the Adjutant, the motherfucker who had my job and who had his office right outside the BC's so that he could slip in there from time to time and give the colonel a right nice sucking, suggested implementing issue based on individual body mass.

Body mass. He wanted his clerks to compile all the weights of the guys in the unit and issue water based on that. Potentially with each "aqueous packet" being detailed to individuals.

Dude, I'm a big lad. There was one of my troops when I had that platoon on the first deployment who was a fucking shrimp. Barely over minimum height and they had him on the weight control program to get his weight up. Drank about three times as much as me. I didn't get heat stroke, he didn't die of dihydrogenmonoxide poisoning.

Two bottles per head, four bottles per head, six bits a dollar. I don't give a rat's ass. Pass the fucking water out and let's be DONE.

Speaking of not being able to let it go.

The point is, what had been a two to three hour meeting now had to be scheduled for most of the fucking day. And I'm not talking about starting after 0900. I'm talking about from "cain see to cain't see."

It was late afternoon. We'd eaten MREs in the meeting for lunch. My tummy was rumbling. I wanted nothing more than to go back to my hooch, put in my iPod and wash this day out of my brain.

And it got up to the battalion surgeon's presentation.

The guy practically sprang to his feet. I'd noticed he looked as if he had to piss his pants all day long. Usually he sort of checked out like the rest of us. But he'd been practically bouncing in his chair, like, all fucking day. When the XO pointed to him he bounced up like a fucking land-mine. I actually tried to pay attention.

"We've got an important directive from the Chief of Staff," he said.

"The Med Branch chief of staff?" the CO asked.

"No, sir," the captain said. "It was sent through Med Branch from the Chief of Staff of the Army. The Chief of Staff's portion is two lines. I'd like to read it and then expand."

"Go," the colonel said pompously.

" 'Indicators indicate significant outbreak of Human-to-Human transmission of H5N1 virus in China Operational Zone. Begin immediate Type Two immunization procedures for all DOD and affiliated personnel in your AOC upon receipt of vaccines. End.' "

H-Five-N-Motherfucking-One. I snorted and went back to sleeping with my eyes open.

Th-th-th-that's right, people. I got two months advanced warning of what was about to occur. With both the Great Cold and the motherfucking Plague. Two. Months.

And I went back to sleeping with my eyes open.

Okay, here's a few of the things going on here. Item the first: The Battalion Surgeon.

Now, the guy had a set of brass ones. I knew that, intellectually. We'd been over there long enough, and soaked up enough casualties, that he'd been out there with his teams keeping them alive. The line commanders thought he walked on water. If I'd been a line commander I probably would have thought he walked on water.

But.

The guy was just a geek. Look, I never beat up the geeks in school, not even when I was a kid, and I tried to stop it when I got to where people listened to me. But that didn't mean we were pals. Some of them thought we were because I stopped it. They were like the adjutant, I swear. Bottomline: I don't talk geek; they don't talk me. I can pick up most of what they say. I'm not stupid. I just don't get off on what they get off on.

And the battalion surgeon was the geek's geek. Rumpled uniform, glasses, pens sticking out any which way, that geek scrunch. Social skills? The guy couldn't get laid in a Bangkok brothel if he was holding a billion dollars in small bills. Balls the size of the great pyramids, total fucking Grade-A-Number-One geek.

He flapped his hands when he talked. I don't mean used his hands to talk. When he got excited, which was often if he wasn't cutting on somebody, he held both hands out bent inwards at chest height and flapped them like he was trying to take off.

Geek.

I tuned him out. It was that or grab his extremely good surgeon's hands and rip them off at the wrists. It drove me fucking nuts.

I did, however, check back in when he said "Experimental polycoat serum . . . "

Wait, what was that? Back up . . . retrieving voice file . . .processing . . .

"Wait," I said, sitting up. "They're not using us for guinea pigs again?"

"Yes, it is experimental . . ." the surgeon said.

"Oh, no," I replied. "No fucking way. Anybody recall the studies on the anthrax cases? I don't want to have Alzheimers at forty. Besides, most flu vaccines don't even work!"

"It's an order, Captain," the CO said, angrily. "And you will carry it out."

"May I explain, sir?" the PA asked.

Now, the physician's assistant was a Warrant Officer Three. He was new to the battalion, but he had all the right merit badges. He'd been a medic before going to Mister and got his combat medic's badge. He spoke the language of the grunt. He was asking the CO but I knew he was asking me as well.

I let the CO nod. Hell, he thought it was his battalion, why not?

"Getting the Type Two polycoat immunization serum, if we do get it, is a very good thing, sir," Warrant Lomen said. "H5N1 is a slippery sucker if you don't mind my putting it that way. The standard serum attacks binding sites. H5N1 has been shown to have mutated binding proteins. What that means, sir, is that some variants of H5N1 may be resistant to the standard immunization. The Type Two is actually a broad-spectrum flu vaccine that detects flu protein coats across almost the full spectrum, possibly the entire spectrum, of flu viruses. Thus the mutated binding sites become unimportant. What that means is that we're more protected. Yes, it's experimental. I've seen the raw reports on it and they all look quite clean. I wish they'd fast-tracked it; as it is most civilians won't be getting it and that could mean significant public health issues."

("Significant public health issues" I'm putting that down for the classic, all time, there is nothing to top it, understatement of all time. I know I repeated all time. How many of you disagree?)

"Bandit Six, I take it that resolves your issues?" the CO said.

"Mitigates, sir," I replied. "But it's going to be hell to sell to the troops. I still don't like it."

That's right people, we got the good stuff. We got it two months before the Great Outbreak. And I was bitching about it. I was BITCHING about it.

Fuck.

Fuck that person. Me I mean. The person I was then. The lame-brain fucking maroon I was then. That know-it-all, I can lick the world person. Even now, thinking back, I just want to fucking cry.

The only important part of the meeting, which I mostly still tuned out, continued when Bravo spoke up.

"Is there any supplementary information besides the Chief of Staff's order?"

Bravo had been one of my JOs and, thus, was a good guy. Otherwise he'd never have gotten a company. I did not let cock-ups get ahead. It also meant he was not one of the BC's ass-buddies like Alpha. But it was a germane question.

"There's a WHO bulletin indicating a possible human-to-human outbreak in Western China," the WO said. "But that's all we've got and it's currently unconfirmed. CDC has not issued a warning."

Look, I'm not sure who all is going to read this. So I'm probably going to be covering stuff that most of my readers know. Little kids (sorry about the language) might not be as up on it. Hell, maybe nobody will read it, but I feel like I need to include stuff that about anybody knows. Like the story of Jungbao and how people viewed flus in those days.

Hardly anybody knew much about the World Health Organization in those days. I sure as hell didn't give a rat's ass about them. The WHO was just another nongovernmental organization that occasionally got in the way of soldiers doing their jobs. I didn't see, didn't care about, the WHO reporters in foreign lands. Or that their job was to be soldiers on the front lines of the battle against disease. Disease was licked. That was most people's attitude. Sure, some people had gotten scared into a frenzy over this "bird flu" thing. But they were just the usual sort of "I'm afraid of everything" idiots. That's what most of us thought. You got the flu, you felt sick for a couple of days and you got better. Flu didn't kill anyone.

Hard to believe, now, I know. But that's how we thought. That's how I thought.

Chapter Three Three Sentences All Alike in Fuckedup'edness

That was the other part of my mostly going back to sleep. You see, I was (and am to a lesser extent) a skeptic. Global warming, resource depletion, all the rest of the mantra the left constantly used to scare us. It went in one ear and out the other. If somebody told me the sky was falling, I wouldn't look up.

This time I got hit in the head by a chunk of sky. But I wasn't the only one.

Here's what was really happening as we can see with blisteringly clear twenty-twenty hindsight.

In a town called Jungbao, a lot of people suddenly got sick. Really, really incredibly sick. Dying sick. There's all sorts of estimates. Jungbao is about the only place that people are starting to open up the mass graves to get a count. And what exactly happened might never be known. Currently, the best estimates I've found go like this:

A lot of people got sick. The local medical boss, who was a WHO reporter, contacted Beijing with his estimate that H5N1 had become human to human transmissible and had, possibly, become more lethal. He wanted to report it to the WHO. He was told to hold the fuck on.

Back then there were about a billion and a quarter Chinese under a government that was still officially Communist (more like fascist but that's another essay) and pretty repressive. China, for a lot of reasons (another essay) tended to be where major illnesses first broke out. And the Chinese government found this embarassing.

I know. The kids who grew up in this post-Plague chilly world think that I've got to be shitting. I'm not. The Chinese government was not up on telling the WHO that bird flu was now human transmissible and that a lot of people were dying of it in Jungbao.

So what did they do? Well, as far as anyone can tell, they sent in the Army. It had orders to cordon off the area and prevent anyone from leaving. They also sent in, slowly, more doctors and "began official examination of the nature of the events in the Jungbao area." That last is from a document found in one of the offices that the historians are starting to pick over. There's just so damned much and so few experts who speak Chinese to do it at this point that the record's barely starting to firm up. But that looks like what happened.

Well, here's the thing. If you don't directly know what bird flu is like when you get it, you've got somebody who has told you the tale. If you don't know, you're a kid. (Sorry about the language. That's how soldiers are.) Probably it's been described to you by your mom or step-mom who freaks out totally when your fever goes up a single point.

But these guys had never seen it. They sent in the Army, cordoned off the area, started rounding people up for examination. And the soldiers weren't vaccinated.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, the Chinese, individually, are smart as whips. Before the flu and maybe more since, those that are still alive. But their fucking government at the time? Serious fucking idiots.

Call it denial. Most of the guys running the government were old. They didn't want to admit that bird flu was breaking out and things were going to change. They didn't want foreigners poking around in their country and examining the realities of Chinese peasant life. (Which sucked then and sucks more now.) They wanted things to stay the same.

So they sent in the soldiers, who weren't vaccinated. And they got sick. And the survivors or the sick but mobile, started fleeing the area. Including some of the soldiers (maybe all of them, we're not sure).

That was about the same time we got our warning order from the Chief of Staff.

Now, things generally don't work really fast in the military. I mean, if it's a combat op, it goes really fast. But things like world-wide distribution of immunizations? I figured it would take a year.

It wasn't all that long, but it was nearly three weeks before we got our shipment. By then, the WHO was on the scene in Western China and it was getting harder and harder for the Chinese government to cover up what was, and is, the biggest disease outbreak in the history of mankind. The news media still wasn't in the area but they were reporting second- and third-hand stories of mass deaths.

And we mostly blew it off. Why? Because "if it bleeds, it leads." The twenty-four-hour news cycle had gotten so competitive that even the most minor thing in those days, say a tornado in Kansas, which is about as "irregular" as blowing your nose, suddenly became the first sign of the End of Civilization! "Tornado in Kansas! THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!"

Call it the "Cry Wolf" syndrome. You all know the fable. Well, the news media had predicted so many ends of civilization they were about as well regarded in that area as a guy on a street corner holding a sign saying "The End Is Coming!" (Possibly a metaphor that won't work for the younger generation since, well, street people . . . Nuff said.)

Having said that, they also sort of soft-pedaled it. Basically, they were having a hard time believing the second- and third-hand reports. The only first-hand really good sources were the WHO guys who were having a hard enough time surviving much less talking to the news media. And the WHO brass were . . . well, brass. Top officials don't say things like "Look, people, this is the fucking end, okay? Flee to the hills! I'm out of here, you can stay here and die if you want!"

Honestly, the WHO might have had a chance if the Chinese had worked with them. Might. Maybe. Probably not but . . . Alternate histories.

Anyway, the news media was getting reports of "thousands dead." But they couldn't get camera crews into the area, or even guys with pencils and papers. People were streaming out of Western China but they had to avoid the roadblocks. Which meant they weren't exactly hunting up reporters; they were trying to stay away from the soldiers who were trying to stop them and get ahead of the Plague. (Good luck on that one, sucker. NOBODY got ahead of the Plague. We're only on one fucking planet.) A few of them went to reporters but when they said "everyone in my village is dead, thousands are dead . . . " Well, if you want to run a story like "thousands dead" you need one or two of a few things. You need someone you trust to eyeball it, like one of your own reporters. Or you need a government official to say it. If even the WHO had said it, people would have believed it. The WHO, though . . . Well, they were brass. They were getting sporadic reports from their hard-core and trustworthy guys that lots and lots and lots of people were dying.

From one of the few reports the WHO has made public:

"Entered village of Kai-Ching on 28th. Village abandoned. No live personnel save myself and driver. In one-hour period counted sixty-three bodies in early stages of decomposition. Found one large grave, unable to assess contents in any reasonable time. Primary site, Pou-Chin, not allowed access."

And there's another thing. So there's one village that's got sixty-three dead people in it. That's bad, don't get me wrong. But . . . It's not thousands dead. And even looking at a map, getting more and more reports, a hundred here, fifty there . . . It was hard for anyone to truly comprehend and say "This is the Big One." Actually, they were saying that, internally, but they didn't want to panic people.

The U.S. government has their own people for assessing this stuff. CDC and the USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Infectious Investigations Department) and Army Medical Resource and Materiel Command are tied into the WHO like arteries are tied to veins. Many of the WHO respondents were U.S. government personnel. And they were reporting back to the U.S. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the Chinese didn't like WHO. Most of the respondents were government workers from one country or another and all were considered spies.) The U.S. government was getting the same reports. But then you get to "what do we do about it?"

And thus we get to President Warrick.

Warrick, for all she was a micromanaging bitch, was like a lot of micromanagers. Making a firm decision and sticking with it was anathema. Thus the "I want to get out of Iran but can't figure out how." Now she had people telling her that bird flu was coming and the world was coming to an end. It was only the beginnings of her problems but we all know that.

Anyway, the DOD ordered immediate and required Type Two (fuck me, fuck me) immunizations. They had already stockpiled them. Logistics at the strategic level got suddenly very fucked up as they began using every plane in the inventory to move them to every detachment in the world. Priority parts? Forget it. Personnel? They wait. These were birds that had been blocked out months in advance and, thank God, suddenly every single block, EVERY SINGLE BLOCK became "serum distribution."

That is how to respond to a plague. The Chiefs of Staff ordered it, soft-pedaling it to their idiotic bosses and to the media (because that was the party line) because they saw the writing on the wall and weren't idiots like me.

President Warrick?

"Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials. These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot. My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young."

I'm rubbing my temples in remembered anger. It is as fresh now as it was ten years ago. Every time I see that pinched face on TV I want to vomit. If I was writing this by hand, I wouldn't be able to. My hands are shaking too bad in a need to kill that bitch.

Three sentences, all of them alike in totally absolute FUCKED UP'EDNESS!

I will take them one at a time.

"Under Executive Order 423 I am hereby ordering a distribution of vaccines to local health officials."

There were over three hundred million stockpiled doses of Type One and nearly a hundred million of Type Two. She specifically ordered Type Two to not be distributed because it had not completed human testing requirements.

Okay, you can give it to the soldiers but not to civilians. Civilians can and will sue. Soldiers cannot. Civilians comprised most of her voting block. And a bunch of her voters, as became obvious, were bug-shit nuts. She wasn't going to tell them to take the better stuff. Better to just go with the known quantity.

But that's not the real core of the fuckedupedness of this sentence. You see, what Executive Order 423 actually ordered was distribution to county health clinics. Only.

The lady was a big believer in socialized medicine. I know, I know, laugh. We all know, now, that that was a death sentence. We know a lot of things. Twenty-twenty hindsight. But she was a believer in it like the pope believes in God. It was Right and it was Just and it was The Only Way.

Under Executive Order 423 . . . hang on . . . I'm sorry, the memories, the hatred, the deaths . . . Fuck. I just have to keep stopping.

Where was I? Oh, first sentence.

Under Executive Order 423 the doses were sent to county health officials. Only.

Effectively, going back to the bottle of water thing, she did what I would have done if I was a complete and total fucking idiot. The federal government had a list of the address of every county health office in the country and a fair guess of how many people they potentially served. That is, if there were ninety thousand people in the county and one health office (common in those days) then they were good for ninety thousand of the total population of the U.S.

They then gave each office sort of a percentage and sent out THE WHOLE STOCKPILE OF VACCINE.

Well, not every bit. They kept a bit back, something like twenty million doses. Not that it helped in the long run. I think I read somewhere that they actually all went bad when Milwaukee had one of their long blackouts and the refrigerators shut down.

Let's make this perfectly clear. Then and even now most people could not tell you where their county health clinic is. Or if there's more than one. When people got sick, they went to their personal physician. Ditto immunizations and such. If they couldn't get an appointment they went to a Doc-In-The-Box. If it was bad, they went to the hospital. Not much has changed.

County Health offices did some reporting and mostly helped out the poor. The people working in them were, by and large, there because it was easy work, steady if low pay and there was a small amount of ego gratification. (And for some, petty power.) Thus the workers, the management, the whole structure tended to be one that was, shall we say, less than suited to crisis management. They went to the seminars and had classes and all the rest. But these were pencil pushers and stampers and people that gave a few shots a month. They were the health equivalent of Fobbits.

They weren't bad people. Don't get me wrong. They were, by and large, good people. Probably better morally than me.

They were the WRONG fucking people to expect to respond heroically to a plague.

These offices, which had limited cold storage space, were suddenly INUNDATED with boxes of serum that HAD to be refrigerated. And because the news media had been beating the drum of BIRD FLU they were, AT THE SAME TIME inundated with customers. At that point you got down to individual reactions. They were as diverse as the county health administrators. All I can do is give three examples. These are not "worst to best" in a grand sense, simply cases I've researched and categorized myself.

Worst: Orange County, California/L.A., CA. I choose this as the classic example of utter fucking stupidity but compounded by sheer volume.

Now, without any real warning they received, at their central warehouse, nearly sixteen million doses. They had cold storage for a bare million. The response of the county health manager (whose name I will not write. Ever.) was to have a meeting. While the doses that were not in cold storage sat in a trailer in hundred degree heat. They had been unloaded from reefers (refrigerated trailers) and placed in the only available storage, outside "CONEX" shipping containers. Unrefrigerated.

According to the minutes of the meeting, this was brought up, repeatedly, by the warehouse manager. The term "heated" and "raised voices" was used in the minutes.

The meeting went on for over six hours. No resolution was found. It didn't really matter. By the time adults stepped in, all the doses were useless.

They were useless. The protein chains they depended upon to do their work were destroyed by heat in less than the six hours it took to have the meeting. By the time a decision was made (days later) by the governor of California, it was so far too late it was insane.

There were, however, one million remaining doses. They were then rationed to those who "truly needed them." This included everyone in county government down to trash collectors. (Although those guys earned their doses later. Those that didn't desert.) And, of course, the head of county health.

There went fifteen million doses of serum.

Intermediate: St. Louis, MO.

Six million doses. Storage for three hundred thousand.

Upon receiving the shipment, the warehouse manager took one look at it and ordered the trucker to drop the reefer. When the trucker refused (it was a leased reefer) the manager explained that what was on there was vital medicines, they did not have storage and that if necessary he would have a cop shoot the trucker if he tried to drive away with the reefer.

(This was in a deposition, witness the truck driver, Morell Hermon, who asked for and received one of the shots while he was there. He stated that at the time he was angry at the decision because it caused him some personal grief and economic hardship, but wanted to thank the warehouse manager for being so farsighted. Alas, his boss was less so.)

Thus the six million doses were saved for the nonce.

The head of county health, however, chose to obey the letter of the Executive Order (big essay possible on constitutional issues there but we've had talking heads on that one for so many years I'm sick of it) and set up a distribution network for the County Health Branch offices. Would have been a decent one. If they hadn't gotten fucking swamped. Emergency services got their own distribution (more or less by walking in and saying "Give us vaccine. Now." at the warehouse), got the shots spread around to all emergency service personnel (and in some cases friends and family members according to more depositions) and eventually started raiding the warehouse to set up shot centers at firehouses, police stations, etc. They even hit a few schools before the Plague hit.

The county health centers?

There were only a few real riots. A riot being defined as ten or more people in a mass fight. Only one that really could call itself a riot when the Springfield Street county health office was burned to the ground. Total of six deaths. None of them healthworkers, by the way. They were evacuated by the police when the situation went critical.

Figure six people in an office. There were nine offices. The population was over five million. Worse, they played by the letter of the law in distribution. Only one or two of them were "qualified" to give immunizations.

The lines were . . . astronomical. Truly ludicrous. People camping out for days. They still were when the Plague hit (also when the riots started) and the conditions were ripe for spread. The very people most determined to get vaccinated . . . were some of the first to get infected.

Total distribution in the county? 138,000 doses. Some 60% by emergency services personnel who were not authorized to do so. Population? 5.2 million. Deaths? Who knows. Estimates are 2.8.

It's times like these that I'm glad granpappy taught me how to make a still and the real use in the world for potatoes.

You'll notice I didn't mention deaths in L.A. That's because, really, nobody knows. As of last census there is a population in Orange County, CA of five hundred thousand, mostly centered around the harbor area, Long Beach and Malibu. But H5N1, bad as it is, does NOT kill 90% of the population. Where are the rest of the former inhabitants? Well, there were significant death rates due to the Freeze (Californians were NOT prepared for the winters) and people just moved. Fled in the first wave of the Plague, moved out to try to find better climes (or better support structure) at the Freeze . . . One of the census questions that was part of a statistical sample was "Were you a resident of your current living area prior to the events starting in 2019?" Nationwide the average was 82% "Yes." In L.A. County the average is 63% "No." L.A. County, effectively, depopulated and has been slowly filling back up. Hell, the weather there is still better than Blue Earth, trust me. If I thought it was fucking cold in Minnesota growing up . . .

But I digress.

Best:

Everybody knows the answer: The Big Apple.

Damn if a Democrat mayor didn't hit it right on the fucking nosey. Admittedly, he had the example of Giuliani on 9/11. But he did what was right and damn the consequences.

Most people know the story but I'll tell it for those who are interested in my take or who have just terminally been out of the loop. (I've got a couple of friends who have just come out of hiding. There may be more.)

Upon receipt of the vaccines, the central distribution manager did the same thing as St. Louis. "Oh, no, you are NOT fucking taking the reefers away."

Peripheral note. The reefers were coming from the manufacturer, Winslow Pharmaceuticals, who was being paid to handle the distribution by the federal government. They'd also been paid to do the long-term stockpiling. Some people might have been following the investigations and trials surrounding the distribution. My take. The feds paid Winslow to pay truckers using temporary rented reefers to distribute the vaccine. Winslow followed their directives because that was what it was directed to do and was being paid to do. One of the Winslow logistics guys is on record (e-mail exchange with surgeon general's office) protesting the use of temporary reefers for the very reason of what happened in L.A. But that's what they were told and paid to do. Trying the CEO, etc, of Winslow was criminal in itself. The fact that no federal officials were tried makes it worse. The fuck-up was at the fed level, not Winslow.

County health looked at the Executive Order and started to do what was ordered: distribute only to county health offices. Mayor Cranslow stepped in and said "Not only no, but HELL no." His exact words from the minutes of the meeting were: "Just because you are told to commit suicide doesn't mean you have to stick the pistol in your mouth and pull the damned trigger."

Within two days, a distribution system was set up (under a former Army S-4 proving that all S-4s are not lame-brain dickbreaths). Each hospital, county health office, physicians' office (to include Doc-In-The-Boxes and even psychiatrists and plastic surgeons) and hospital was given an initial supply, amounting to forty percent of the on-hand at the warehouse and based on their best estimate of initial requests. Every emergency service person was vaccinated and called in on mandatory overtime. They even recruited fourth-year med students and set up street-level vaccination centers.

During this time there were repeated emergency broadcasts. A replication of one:

"There is a high probability that the New York area will soon experience cases of the Asian Bird Flu. Two times out of three, this disease will kill you. In no more than (started at three days) a distribution system will be in place so that everyone in the New York area can be vaccinated. If you do not get vaccinated, you have a two in three chance of dying. Even the stupidest gambler doesn't go for those odds. Do not try to get it now. Your city government is working as fast as it can to get the doses ready. When we're ready, it will be available at all county health offices as well as hospitals, fire stations and even your personal physician. Don't rush, there is still time. But get the shot. This has been Mayor Bill Cranslow. You pay me to make sure you stay alive. Let's both work on that."

In two days the system was in place. Then New Yorkers were told to get the shot and not panic.

Get the shot. Do not panic. There are no cases in the U.S. yet. But get the shot. And do not panic.

Get the shot. Do not panic.

Over and over again. Along with "let's work together on that."

And it worked. Everywhere there was a rush the first day. But the shots were everywhere and cops, firemen, meter maids, garbage collectors, were standing by to distribute more as stocks dwindled. The biggest bottleneck was the supply of syringes and peripherals. Syringe disposal boxes ran out the first day and never really caught up. New Yorkers reacted, adapted and overcame. They made them out of red-painted bleach bottles. New Yorkers took time off from work to go to their fire station. They went to their physician's offices. They went to hospitals.

Health care workers were overworked and often frustrated, but they dealt. And the broadcasts continued.

Schools. The H5N1 could be administered either with a syringe or with the less common air-gun. Pupils in schools were lined up and given their injections, airgun, mass production style by order of the mayor. There were some protests and threats of lawsuits. I'm not sure what happened with most of those. I suspect a lot of the protesting parents didn't get the shots themselves. For reasons that will become clear, later, there were and are a tremendous number of orphans in our great country. If you haven't taken one in, look up your local government foster care system and sign up. It's a lot easier these days than before the Plague and there are a hell of a lot more needy children. We've got four. What have you done for the world today?

Within two weeks the crush was over. Every New Yorker that was going to get immunized did get immunized. And they had spares. Not enough to help places like fucking L.A., but they had spares.

Mayor Cranslow, by the way, was reelected last year in a true landslide. His campaign slogan? "Let's work together." The bastard makes me question being a Republican sometimes. If, when, he runs for President he's got my vote. I'll work together with him by fucking God.

But let's get back to the Executive Order.

"These vaccines will be available to anyone who feels it necessary to get a bird flu shot."

Okay, here we go into some tedious but necessary shit. Spread prevention games theory.

The basic premise of infectious disease spread prevention is sort of like a game of Othello.

I need to explain Othello, don't I?

Sigh.

In Othello each player gets a bunch of rocks, colored black on one side and white on the other, and plays them on a board filled with indentations or squares. If there is a black rock on a square and a white rock on either side of the square, the black rock becomes white and vice versa and so on. Basically, you try to surround your opponent.

Spread prevention works the same way. Say that a person has the flu and they only see two other people a day, say in an office. (I know, impossible, but work with me here.) The infected person is the black rock. They can only infect the other two people around them. If both of them are immunized (and the immunization is good) and they wash their hands and . . . Look, work with me. If they can't get the flu, they can't pass it on. So whether the person who's infected lives or dies, it stops with him.

That's the critically important thing to mass immunization. You have to create enough white rocks that the black rocks can't flip them. They can't get past them to uninfected portions of the populace. The problem being, hardly anybody ever deals with only two people all the time. Think about your day. You deal with hundreds of people every day. Or at least dozens. And they deal with dozens and they deal with dozens.

That, as any school kid these days knows, is how disease spreads. To stop it, you have to cut off its ability to infect. If you find a "patient zero" fast enough, or a location zero at least, you can try to encircle it, what's called "ring immunization." Which was, sort of, what the Chinese tried. They just did it very badly.

Now, don't get me wrong, there were a lot of people (obviously from the above) who wanted to get immunized. Maybe, if the distribution hadn't been so cocked up, enough to stop the spread.

But probably not. Look, it's a complicated computer model but to stop a major spread you have to have 93% of a population (statistical) immunized. 93%. You can't get 93% of any population to decide on the color of the sky. The only way to truly stop a disease, butt cold, is mass, forced immunization. You've got to hit everybody you can get your stinking hands on if it means breaking down doors.

Let's take a look at our "optimum" example, NYC. NYC, good as it was, did not, not NOT act as a white rock. Why?

Illegal aliens, homeless, the criminal class, idiotic nature-loving vegans (sorry, highly redundant there), big-shot lawyers and stockbrokers who "didn't have the time for this crap . . . " None of them got immunized. And because flu doesn't actually have to infect someone to get passed (it can get passed through handshakes even if the person with it on their hands doesn't get it) you'd be surprised how fast a big-time lawyer can get it from a street-person. Street person to drug dealer, drug dealer to drug dealer's boss, boss to his lawyer. Doesn't have to be on their hands, can be on cash. Put in a waiter in the middle if it makes you feel better.

Robust diseases are slippery fuckers. They will get your ass if there's not that 93% of "white rocks" around you.

Fortunately, with the exception of illegal aliens the people in NYC who didn't get immunized are, sorry and being as callous as fuck, not worth the immunization. If you were too stupid to get it, stockbrokers and lawyers, you're better off out of this world. Criminals that were afraid they'd be arrested if they went to county health? Lessee, five days for violation of a restraining order or death. Hmmm . . . Homeless? There was even a program to go around offering it to them in their "habitual areas." Mostly by firefighters and cops which might have put some of them off. Hardly any got the shot. Why? Most homeless had mental health problems. (For you youngsters that grew up in the Post-Plague world they're what are called, again, bums.) There used to be a shit-pot full of them. I mean, like, dozens on any street in any major city. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most were too whacked to understand or believe about the flu. It was all a government plot. More alien mind control rays. Whatever.

Most of them died. World ends at six. Poorest hardest hit. Go figure.

And, sorry, given all the rest that died that tried, intelligently and aggressively, to live, don't got much for the homeless and the rest of those idiots. There's a reason I live in Blue Earth again. All the planning in the world doesn't help if you're not allowed to have the medicine that will save your life. The homeless in NYC, and the rest that decided "I don't trust it," "I don't have the time" . . . Got nothing fucking for them. Got nothing.

So there we have the stupidity of sentence two. If you're not going to mass immunize, you're not going to stop a disease. It worked with smallpox and polio. It might have worked with a bunch of other diseases, but we got weak. There's a program in the works right now to get started on slamming the door on everything possible, that is everything that transmits only through humans and domesticated animals. Don't know if it will ever work but it's worth a shot.

So, Warrick you pinch-faced lying incompetent bitch, let's take a look at sentence three.

"My advisors recommend them primarily for the elderly and the young."

What advisors? Her advisors for a situation like this were the National Science Advisor, the Director of the National Institute for Health (NIH), the Surgeon General, the Director of the Center for Disease Control and the Commander of USAMRIID.

All five have testified under oath at this point about the decision process, such as it was, leading to 423. Two, the National Science Director and the Surgeon General, took the Fifth. Fuckers. The other three, including the only two epidemiologists consulted, have, however, spoken at length.

The first meeting was called by the National Science Advisor and included, along with various hangers on, the Director of the CDC, the NSD, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Surgeon General. At that meeting, the President announced that the vaccine was to be distributed immediately and that it should be available through county health services. And that it should be given to the young and old first.

Note: This was before any input from the advisors. This according to both the DCDC and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

The DCDC has stated that he demurred after it was clear that neither the NSD or the SG were going to. Why?

First, there was a plan already set up for vaccine distribution. Called, incredibly, the Emergency Vaccine Distribution Plan (incredibly because it actually made sense), it had been in place for years and regularly updated. It was a complicated distro but, effectively, it spread the vaccine through both military and emergency civilian channels to all healthcare providers. There were identification methods. Following initial distribution there was a forced immunization program as a sub-codicil noboby wanted to really use. It was cumbersome. Everyone knew it was cumbersone and that it would take at least a week to get the vaccine down to civilians. But it was designed to work. Might not have, but it was the Plan.

In the first three minutes of the meeting, the Prez had thrown the Plan right out the window. So much of sentence one and two. This is really about sentence three.

Bird Flu was strange. Most flus, the major deaths occurred in the old and the young. And, don't get me wrong, the bird flu killed off both groups.

But like the earlier Spanish Flu, bird flu was not a secondary killer, it was a primary. Secondary and primary . . . Sigh.

Most flus don't kill you. They just get you very sick and, notably, flood your lungs with fluids. Secondary viral and bacterial infections then get in those fluids and kill some people through pneumonia. Notably . . . the old and the young. Thus, the deaths are from secondary infections. Secondary killers.

There are very rare flus, though, which are primary killers. Death qua death, the Grim Reaper, Pushin' Up Daisies, occurs because specific portions of the brain (we don't need all of our brains, just ask Al Gore) die. There are various ways that those portions can die; anything that cuts off oxygen to them for long enough will do it. (Such as, say, having your head cut off.) But something has to kill them.

Besides all the usual stuff that bird flu did, it spread systemically. First there was the danger of pneumonia. But even if you survived that, it tended to hang on. Blood vessels are designed to keep fluids in. Infected vessels let the fluids out, they accumulate in lungs, in body cavities, kidneys fail, brain swells, pressure kills neurons, breathing stops, etc. If your immune system couldn't kill it, it got into the brain. Fluid builds up, pressure on brain causes dementia, then strokelike symptoms . . . And then, well, you quickly went mad and then died. Thus the pattern of get sick, seem to recover, relapse, die.

Worse, like the Spanish Flu and for reasons that are still being studied, it hit the "prime" population harder. That is, the young and old tended to get the pneumonia but if they shook that off (which if there was health care was normally possible with antibiotics) they survived.

People in "prime ages" went through all that, (if they didn't die of pneumonia) felt better for a couple of days, relapsed and then died.

Mortality amongst prime population, 15–55, was twenty percent higher than among peripheral population, the young and the old.

So, let's see, in that one meeting the Prez ignored the Plan and chose the wrong group to focus on immunizing.

Don't get me wrong. I care for all living beings except slow drivers in the left-hand lane, terrorists and pedophiles. And I'd have loved to be able to save all those youngsters and old folks. Well . . . Sort of. The youngsters, certainly.

Face facts. I loved my dad and he wasn't even in the "old" category. But old people, retired people that wander around playing shuffleboard . . .

We were looking at surviving. Not prospering. Not becoming better. Surviving. The advisors knew how lethal H5N1 was. Destroy a certain percentage of any society and it crumbles. The models based on wars and previous famines and pestilence was twenty percent. At that point, the society devolves to survival level. (At least that was the model. We found out how robust some societies were and how weak others. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

But of that twenty percent, old people don't matter. They're done. Even if they have the desire to rebuild, they don't have the strength or stamina. They're smart, they're wise, sure. (The good ones.) But they can't rebuild a society. They're the past. If you have to sacrifice any group in a survival situation, The. Old. Go. First. Cold survival logic is like that. Not nice, but survival logic isn't.

Sigh. "Women and children first" would have been the right call. Why? Because they matter. Children are the future of any society. Immunize the kids first? Hell, yeah. Forget that they're less susceptible. They're going to take care of the survivors in the survivor's old age. If they make it.

Children are important.

But . . .

Kids can't rebuild a society. I don't care what you've seen or read in a science fiction story, they just can't. They don't have the experience; they don't, yet, have the strength that is going to be needed. Most of them would, eventually, become of reproductive age. If they survived.

Look, mortality from H5N1 dropped with age to about seven then picked up again. Say that it was even more lethal than it was and killed off everyone in the middle.

You'd have a planet filled with oldsters and children.

Think they're going to get factories going again? That they can run farms?

Think again.

You'd better have that functional middle or the kids are going to starve and the oldsters are going to starve and die off and nobody's going to remember or care what the fuck the Mona Lisa was or why she was smiling like that. Kids growing up scavenging in the ruins. Read "A Boy and His Dog." But don't believe the end; there's nothing a teenage boy won't do for pussy.

Women? I'm just a sexist, right?

Not if you're looking at survival. Look, it's logic most people don't like but here it is:

Once upon a time the whole human population of the world got wiped out except about forty-four reproductive aged females. (Based on DNA data. Look it up.) How many males doesn't matter. As long as there was one, we're good. He'd be busy but we're good. Nobody knows or cares how many males were in that group that eventually grew to six billion and change. All that mattered were forty-four females.

Sad but true, women have babies. Males have more utility than just sperm, don't get me wrong. But when you're talking about something as tight as bird flu, women matter much more. "Reproductive age" women.

Everything that Warrick was, though, prevented her from even thinking about that. Warrick was the ball-buster's ball-buster. I am woman hear me roar. You'd think she'd have made sure the immunizations went to women first for that very reason, but she couldn't even survive that logic.

The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that even if the distro had worked it was going to be going to one group that wasn't going to be of use in the immediate aftermath and a group that wasn't of any true functionality at all.

So the Director of the CDC demurred. He was about the only male in the room, so he was ignored. So he pointed out that there were others that were missing from the meeting. Notably, the Commander of USAMRIID and NIH, both of whom were missing.

Another meeting was called. Both USAMRIID and NIH were in the more or less DC area so it assembled that evening. The second meeting, according to testimony from the DCDC, CUSAMRIID and the DNIH (three males in a meeting chaired by and filled with female ball-busters) was "acrimonious." Neither the National Science Advisor (a former patent lawyer) nor the Surgeon General (an MD specializing in "women's historical medicine" whatever the fuck that means) would disagree with the three actual, you know, specialists in fighting plagues. On the other hand, they also did not support them. And the President, from her vast store of experience trying to take the medical industry apart like a chicken, Knew that children and old farts were the Most Vulnerable and Had To Be Protected.

Well, yeah, gee. Nice sentiment. The only problem being that we weren't dealing with the common fucking COLD lady!

She also didn't listen to reason on the subject of the other two sentences. Go figure. Men had testicles and therefore were Wrong.

Just before WWI started the kaiser sent a message to the king of England, who was some sort of cousin, saying something like "War is now inevitable." He was still bargaining, but from the POV of "we're going to kick your ass unless you surrender now." But that's not really the point.

The point is, as of the end of that second meeting, a biological disaster in the U.S. was inevitable.

Most people in the U.S. don't realize how important getting the right President is. Sure, the Prez gets blamed for a lot of things that he or she can't control. The Prez does not control the stock market or the Federal Reserve. But the reality is that the Founding Fathers, having no real previous experience of democracy or a republic and having lived under a monarchy their whole fucking lives, created a temporary king to run the country. They were, at heart, monarchists. They just didn't like the current one and didn't want to make it hereditary. (Don't get me started on Bush, Warrick, Bush, Warrick. But from history it's a very bad sign.)

So every four years we elect a king. Since people like consistency, we tend to elect the same king as many times as we can get away with. (See previous paragraph.) And the king, especially in any sort of emergency, has a lot of power. They don't always, or even most of the time, have enough to fix things right away. But they've got a lot of power.

Including the power to totally screw things up.

Everybody in the room that had the power to change the President's idea of a fucking plan also worked for the bitch. Legally, they were required to follow her orders. They could argue, they could recommend but that was like talking to the Great Wall of China. She knew what was Right and what was Good and the people arguing against her had Dicks and they were Wrong.

For the kids reading this, this is a very important point. When you choose your king, forget most of the reasons you think you should vote for the king. Mostly, the king can't do much about the economy but ruin it. They can't make you richer or smarter (although they can manage the reverse). If you want one suggestion, think about all the contingencies under which that king (or queen in this case) may hold your lives in his or her hands. And choose wisely. About half the U.S. population chose unwisely. (48.2%. It was one of those elections.)

Quite a few of them died. Every person who voted for Warrick deserved it.

Chapter Four They Always Forget the Emergency

Patient Zero, USA, was in Chicago. What the fuck?

Definitions. Patient Zero. The first detected case of a disease. Generally, that required lots of investigation as the disease was tracked back.

In this case, Ching Mao Pong was easy to find. Just follow the screaming.

But Chicago? What the fuck?

Most of the epidemiologists who were scattering out to try to stop things had headed for the West Coast. Why? Most immigration and movement from China came from that direction. And it wasn't just China anymore. H5N1 was breaking out all over Southeast Asia. Some of it being spread by bird movement but more from people movement. The Chinese had little tendrils all over Asia and people were following those tendrils trying to escape the Plague.

Outside of China the first reports, by a few minutes, were from Thailand. Then, within a day, every single country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam (which right up until it turned into a wasteland didn't admit any cases) reported cases.

All of them tried containment. But it was impossible to contain. None of them had the sort of health system that the U.S. did, they were physically connected to China, they had birds migrating from China that carried the Plague, none of which we had, and we couldn't contain it. (Maybe we could have. If, possibly. If wishes were fishes . . . )

There was the Plan. Called the Epidemiological Emergency Response Plan (with the unfortunate acronym EERP, which sounds like someone who has just had a very bad practical joke played on them); it had several parts. It probably wouldn't have worked because what every Emergency Plan leaves out is the fucking emergency.

Example: Hurricane Katrina. Okay, okay, most of the shit about it was urban legend. There were not tens of thousands of dead. There were no riots or rapes in the Superdome and people were neither starving nor "out of water." They were being rationed, which the fuckers that were complaining thought was starving, but that's not the same thing. But let's look at the evacuation Plan.

Okay, Nagin was a total fuck-up and never even tried to initiate it. He'd never looked at it, despite a fucking hurricane being headed for his city which, by the way, was below sea level. So calling him a fuck-up is insulting fuck-ups. But there was a Plan.

The Plan was to use school and city buses to evacuate all those who were "transportation challenged." Whether Nagin used it or not was sort of a moot point, though. People had forgotten little details. Such as, there was no emergency call list for the drivers.

In any group that does emergency response, from the military to cops and even including child services, there is a call list. Generally it's a call tree. Person at the top gets a call. He or she calls three people, then starts getting ready to head in. Those people call two or three people lower than them and start getting ready. Assuming more or less equal transportation distances, the bosses get to work first, which helps in most cases.

There was no such phone tree for bus drivers. So there was no real way for anyone to get ahold of them in an emergency.

Oops.

Drivers had never been told that they were supposed to drive people out in an emergency. So they weren't exactly sitting by the phone if there had been a phone tree. They had jobs and cars. They were packing to leave or already gone.

And that was the last point. The order to get out was sent out before any thought was given at all to the "transportation challenged" plan and even the evacuation order was more of a bow to reality; the roads out of New Orleans were packed (by among other things the bus drivers) when it was given.

People who develop emergency plans always seem to leave out the emergency.

But the EERP wasn't a bad Plan as such things went.

The first part was the Emergency Vaccination Distribution Plan. Spread the vaccine to health providers. At the same time, spread it to emergency services personnel and the military including National Guard. As time permits, go to nationwide forced immunization if it got that bad.

Simultaneous with that, call up all the National Guard and Reserves. Mobilize all active units to full combat status. If necessary, start a "staged redeployment" of the rest of the military world-wide.

Second step, shut down the country. It's called "zone quarantine." Close all the borders, not only between the U.S. and other countries but internally. Preferably, close it down to county level where possible. International travel shuts down first. Planes coming from other places are turned back. U.S. citizens and residents can enter the country but go into quarantine, not home. This would probably start before the first vaccine shipped. It was planned (there's that word again) to be total "primary" quarantine in three days. I think that's optimistic, but we'll give it that just for shits and giggles.

When, not if, you have outbreaks you start "ring immunization." That is, when you find someone who has the flu you ensure immunization status of everyone they've come into contact with or anyone they could have come into contact with. You do not ask for permission; unless they can prove they're immunized, you stick them with a damned needle whether they like it or not. You go through the whole neighborhood the person lives in, you go to the stores they've visited, you stick everyone at their workplace. You stick people that just sort of knew them in school or that they sort of remember from seeing across a bar.

There are leakers. Always. You find them and do the same thing, hopefully quicker. You broadcast that such and such a person had the flu and beg people to go to a doctor and get checked. And anyone who has been in contact with those people

You hit that motherfucker with a full fucking court press.

You don't open up the borders, any of them, until you've killed the son of a bitch.

Fuck the economy. Fuck anything. Shut the fuck down until your population is safe. They can't buy trinkets or gas or groceries if they're mostly dead.

Nothing. Else. Matters.

There were some plans for this we knew were going to work. 9/11 had proven we could ground aircraft at will. We'd called up the National Guard enough times to know exactly its predictable response rate. Deploying troops internally had been done enough that most units could do it in their sleep.

Distribution? Ring immunization? Zone quarantine? Nobody had tried it, ever, in a Western country. We'd never had to, not really.

As it turned out, we never did, not really. Oh, the words were spouted, but . . .

"Forced immunization is not an option."

That's not really what the bitch said. Look, Presidents get paid to, among other things, handle emergencies. And there are supposed to be emergency drills. Yes, it's a busy job and not every contingency can be covered. But mass epidemic was a scheduled drill. (Congressional Testimony On H5N1 Spiral Event.) One that the President was supposed to attend.

Seemed she was meeting with, irony of ironies, some Chinese businessmen the day the drill was scheduled. And despite being a lawyer, apparently never took the time to even RTFM (read the fucking manual).

So when the meeting finally came around where the Secretary of Homeland Security was explaining the full EERP, it went, apparently, something like this:

"Mass requisite innoculation program . . ."

"You mean forcing people to take the drugs?"

"Yes, Mrs. President."

"That is not an option."

Now, you can't go to school these days without a measles shot. And four or five more, some of which have some good clinical studies showing they are a. not very useful and b. very very fucking nasty. But unless you can prove, with a doctor's test, that you are allergic or something, you can't go to school without the shot.

But . . . well . . . politics.

Look, there are "freedom uber alles" wack-jobs on both sides of the political spectrum. There are the guys who feel very very strongly that the Constitution entitles them to owning an M-1 Abrams with full load. (Okay, okay, that would be me. Love and hate those fuckers depending on if I'm cranking one or killing one, done both . . . ) And Don't Tread On Me and Pry My Gun From My Cold Dead Fingers. Also "If I don't want to take a fucking shot, I'm not going to take a fucking shot. And anybody who tries to give me that devil poison, or fluoride, is going to get blasted by my Mark-Four-One Blaster with Puring Optical Sights that I whack off on every single day! End the slavery that is government! With no government, things would be perfect!"

Blah, blah. Libertarians with a capital L and hand me that rifle, buddy. Ask one some time if their utopia has building inspectors. Or, you know, how much it looks like, say, Somalia. Or Detroit after the Plague.

Okay, that's the nuts. Let's take a look at the fruits.

"End the cycle of violence. Eating animals is murder." "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." "Don't poison your body with pesticides and hormones. My body, my choice . . . "

Guess which side contributed about 15% of Warrick's core supporters. Not to mention:

"The Southwestern U.S. was once Mexico's and shall be again!"

And I did mention Chinese businessmen?

Warrick had a whole team of people, working in the very crowded and space short for really important shit White House, that did nothing but monitor blogs. Oh, not the "Pry it from my cold dead hands" blogs; the other guys. In that, she was politically nearly as smart as her husband and a bit more techno-savvy. Her team of nerds were mostly members of the blogs and occasionally passed on juicy news, thus increasing the importance of their most crucial supporting blogs. But more importantly they kept the pulse of the fruits.

And the fruits were not going to be forced to accept innoculations. Some of them were screaming for them, others were explaining how a diet of honey and organic herbs would prevent any flu. AIDS in Africa, after all, was a plot by the free-market world to kill off the black-man, blah, blah . . .

"Forced immunization is not an option."

Ring immunization?

"Forced immunization is not an option."

So there goes ring immunization being any effect at all.

Then there was sealing the borders.

Look, I've worked at sealing borders. It ain't easy. You basically have to station people, in groups so they don't get overrun, at close and regular intervals. And you can't be nice to those who are attempting to cross. Not if you really want a sealed border. Part of the military plan for sealing the border with our southern neighbor included shoot-to-kill orders for runners. If they did not stop, they got shot. Ditto people attempting to cross internally. If the car or truck or whatever wasn't willing to stop, light them up.

"Force is not an option. Closing internal borders is not an option."

Okay, can we at least cut off international travel?

Actually . . . no. Persons who were from "affected" countries were to be quarantined, nicely and for no more than three days. "Affected" countries were countries which had declared themselves to be "widely and endemically infected" by H5N1.

Look, China, which is now about a quarter of its pre-Plague population and five countries and change in a fourteen-way internecine war, never declared themselves "widely and endemically infected."

We didn't cut off international travel. Everyone else cut off international travel from us.

Of course, by then it was too late. There were still planes flying to and from Hong Kong after it had basically ceased to function. They stopped because they couldn't be sure of getting refueled. And they were flying straight from Hong Kong, which was in direct contact with the Mainland, to LAX and San Francisco and Seattle. People would be held for a couple of days in isolation, board another plane and fly on. Some of them to Europe which cut off travel from us before we came close to shutting down from anyone.

Frankly, the only reason it didn't break out faster was people ignoring their orders. Sure, the guys sitting in the room with the Prez arguing till they were blue in the face had to send down suicidal orders. Didn't mean that the guys and gals in the field obeyed them.

Quarantine in L.A. was heavy until things started to break down in California. Ditto Seattle. Not so much in San Fransisco which is probably one of the reasons they got hit pretty quick. And hard. Lord forgive those fags, they got hit hard.

Then there were the big order breakers. People still have a hard time codifying the response. It depends on who's writing about it. "Pseudo-secessionists" is one term. "Knee-jerk reactionaries" was a term used at the time along with "racists" (never quite understood that one unless they were talking about Mexican immigrants), "fascists," etc. Big litany of "you're bad people."

Hawaii was the big winner in the "racist/fascist/reactionary" category. Okay, Hawaiians are racists. If you're not native Hawaiian there are laws saying you can't have certain jobs. There are Natives and there are "haoles." But, strangely enough, nobody was calling them that. In fact, despite their actions at the time, nobody was quite sure how to respond.

Lemme explain. The news media was filled with liberals. They might not like what the Hawaiians did but, hey, they're our little brown brothers! (Hawaiians, like Samoans and for similar reasons, tend to be motherfucking big little brown brothers. But it's pretty hard to get a liberal off their mental grooves.) Conservatives by and large thought they were about the only smart people in the nation and wished they were in Hawaii.

Basically, Hawaii cut itself off. No planes were permitted to land to do more than refuel or get fixed if they needed it. Then "hie-away with you! No fucking lei for your ass! Aloha!" Ditto boats from outside Hawaiian waters. They'd give them some food and fuel if they had it but then get the fuck out of here.

They shut down internal travel as well and required documentation of immunization. And the immunizations that got sent to them a. arrived slower than on the mainland and they could see the Prez's order was fucked up and b. were packed for air-travel so they kept for long enough for everyone to get the fucking clue.

Hawaii came through the whole damned thing with nothing but a major depression. Racist fuckers. Smart racist fuckers, I'll give you.

Then there were the ones that did get called racists and fascists and all the rest; the L states.

I put it that way because it wasn't exactly the states of the Confederacy. Tennessee was a border state in the War Against Slavery. And there were some that weren't near the Old South like Wyoming.

Why the L states?

Way back in the 2000 election a map came out of the vote patterns. Back then we'd call it the "red and blue" states. Red states went for Bush, blue states went for Al "I Invented The Internet" Gore.

I always hated the "red/blue" divide. I'm military. Red forces are the bad guys. I'm not a bad guy and I'm a red stater.

But if you look at the map, it's a big fucking L for the red states. Southeast, then up through the midwest with a bit on either side in the southwest and northeast.

Fly-over country. The Dust Bowl. Hell, the Bible Belt.

Not all of them were "reactionary." Missouri followed the President's orders to the letter. See St. Louis.

Others, however, had a different opinion. I call it "disorganized civil disobedience." They waited for the Prez to announce the Plan, heard the New Plan and went "Oh, hell no!"

A lot of them got some or most of the immunization plan right. When reports from Mississippi started coming in of shipments of vaccine and nowhere to store them the word went down, from the governor, not the state director of Health, that they should store them anywhere. Get cops to help if necessary.

Short example. County Health in Jefferson County, Mississippi, got a bunch of styrofoam boxes from FedEx marked "Vital Medical Material: Refrigerate." They didn't require a truckload, fortunately for them.

The director of County Health, a nice old lady I caught on the news one time talking about her response, called the only store in town, Piggly Wiggly, and told them she had a big problem. Piggly Wiggly dumped out enough room in their storage room for all the boxes.

Atlanta? Screwed the pooch. Ditto Mobile, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah . . . The list is long.

Small towns? Small counties? Small cities even? Better than 50% by current estimate "presented optimal or near optimal distribution response." They reacted, adapted and overcame.

Okay, call it "red/blue" if you wish. Red got it about 50% right. Blue? About 7%.

The response expanded from that. "Forced immunization is not an option." Yeah, right, tell it to the people of Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. There were areas where forced immunization wasn't an option, mostly the big cities, due to lack of vaccine. But the order went out and damn the President or the media wailers. School kids were immunized production line style in every state. Smart or not, those governors went for "children first" at the very least. Overtime paramedics, EMTs, cops, nurses, whoever had a clue about sticking a needle, visited work-places. It didn't last long; things went to hell too fast. But the order went out and the process started.

The President actually ordered the National Guard in those states to be used to stop the forced immunizations. Even when they were as a part of ring immunization responses. (CDC was just outside Atlanta and the guys and gals left there tried. Lord they tried . . . )

The term here wasn't really mutiny. Okay, it was mutiny. But by then things were going to hell in a handbasket and everyone knew it. Obeying the increasingly shrill bitch at 1600 was the last thing on anyone's mind.

That would be about early April. But that was more than a month after Patient Zero when the Prez finally ordered "staged redeployment" and I got left holding the shit end of the stick. And then there was the whole "Emergency Powers Act" fiasco.

Patient Zero was in Chicago.

Why Chicago you ask. Well, since plenty of people have answered and I obsess on questions like that these days I'll repeat.

Ching Mao Pong had been a peasant as a child. He grew up in central China and became one of the large class of "undocumented workers" who moved into the coastal areas as common laborers. Apparently at some point he convinced a Chinese smuggler, what is called a "snake-head," to get him to the U.S.

How Ching Mao Pong became infected is unsure. All that is known is that he was loaded by the snake-head, along with fifteen others, into a cargo container bound for the States. Its destination was Chicago where an accomplice snake-head would open it and let the immigrants out into the freedom of virtual slavery in the U.S. until they paid off the extortionate price of the transportation. There was sufficient food and water packed into the container to sustain all sixteen. (Twelve males and four females, by the way.) Don't ask about sanitary facilities.

How could a container of immigrant Chinese possibly make it to Chicago you ask?

Uh, ship to Seattle then Great Northern Railway to Chicago. Not that hard.

Oh, customs?

Containers were categorized several ways. At the low end were containers from sources that were both "unrecognized" and known drug smuggling areas/companies. If, say, a container entered the U.S. that was a. from Colombia, b. from a company that did not have special documentation with Customs and Immigration Service and c. did not have a pre-cleared seal on it, it was five percent likely to be checked.

That is, of containers coming from known drug source countries without any indication that they didn't contain drugs, only five out of a hundred actually got opened and inspected.

Oh, there were all sorts of special systems to examine them. Dogs might walk by, X-rays if they weren't something that might get damaged, neutrino systems were even in consideration.

But only five in a hundred from the worst possible source got opened and examined thoroughly.

Why?

Money. Time. Interference in commerce. Call it an iron triangle. Nobody wanted to spend the money on the (huge) number of inspectors that would be necessary to actually check, say, every dodgy container coming into the U.S., much less every container without slowing things down to a crawl. There were containers that never were supposed to get opened in the U.S. There were times when it was smarter and cheaper, if you were shipping something from, say China to France, to ship it via rail across the U.S. It got loaded on a ship in China, dumped off in L.A., put on a train, carried to Jacksonville and loaded on another ship for Nice.

There were a fuckload of containers coming from China in those days. Most of them were to addresses in the U.S. Hell, you couldn't go into a store and not buy something from China. Even the plastic your food was wrapped in came mostly from . . . China.

And China was not considered a threat source. Yes, people got smuggled but not, you know, drugs or bombs. Sometimes it was discovered after a "packet" was found that a highly trained bomb-sniffing dog had walked right past one of these snake-head containers and never even quivered. They were good dogs. They were looking for drugs or bombs. People did not count. Don't bark at People. Good dog.

A snake-head named Chan Twai opened the container when it was dropped off at a rented warehouse. He later said that upon opening it he thought everyone in the container was dead. He knew what was happening in China. He ran, hoping he hadn't caught the Plague.

Ching Mao Pong, though, was alive. Apparently nearly insane but alive. He stumbled out of the container into a country about which he knew virtually nothing with no one he could speak to and nowhere to go.

He did what he'd done in China. He looked for food and work. According to his accounts he ate garbage and drank from bathrooms for two days. He saw people bumming for money from people and the police did not stop them. He bummed money and food and even cigarettes and he was not told to stop once by the police, which he found to be very nearly paradise. Truly America was the land of opportunity.

On the third day he found men that looked somewhat like him standing on a street corner. He was picked to go work on laying sod for a new building in the final stages of completion. He couldn't speak the language of any of the men he worked with but "working with your hands was working with your hands."

He knew he had been exposed to the Plague. He had gotten sick. He had nearly died. Most of the others in the compartment had died, two from when one of them went mad. But he survived, he recovered. He thought he was fine. He was feeling somewhat unwell when he finally found work but he had had little good food recently.

He collapsed while working on the job. The contractor who had hired him cursed, loaded Ching in his pickup truck, dropped him off at the emergency room and made himself scarce.

Ching was semicoherent when dropped off. He was directed to sit in a chair. There were more police and they apparently wanted him to stay. He sat. He collapsed again. The emergency room personnel, who were not masked and had not received their immunizations, put him on a gurney and moved him up the triage list.

The responding doctor saw a slightly emaciated Asian male in his mid thirties who was suffering from high temperature and disorientation. Initial exam determined he was suffering from, among other things, dehydration. He was given an IV. He went into spasms shortly afterwards and dropped into unconsciousness.

A Chinese-speaking nurse was called in when he regained consciousness. By then the possibility of bird flu was considered and Nurse Quan was in Cat Four dress. Ching was questioned closely. He was initially uncooperative until the nurse, who was an immigrant, called in a security guard and, unknown to the doctor or any of the others including the guard, warned that he would be sent to "reeducation" if he did not tell her everything she asked. He spilled his guts.

He went back into febrile disorientation a few hours later, slipped into a coma that night and died before dawn.

CDC, by that time, had over sixteen active quarantines on the West Coast. Specialists got on the still flying planes for Chicago and arrived just as Ching breathed his last. They attempted to get the Illinois and Chicago authorities to override the President's directive against forced immunization. Two problems. Chicago was one of the cities that had screwed up its receipt of vaccine and they weren't even willing to do forced immunizations with what they had.

But the news media got the news that a confirmed case had been detected in Chicago and Katy Bar the Door.

Chapter Five When the Turbine Blows Up

Now we get to the subject of "trust." Trust, as a society, is something that most people understand poorly. Trust is vital for a society to function. It's not hard to explain, though. Trust means that if you loan your lawn mower to a neighbor, you've got a pretty good chance of getting it back. There's an implied contract. I let you use the lawn mower. You return it in pretty much the same condition you got it.

You don't loan it to your cousin who then uses it to cut his clients' yards. If you borrow it, you don't break it and give it back and then insist you didn't break it. You don't sell it. You give it back in pretty much the same condition you got it.

There are several different types of societal trust but they really boil down into two major groups. Familial and general. Familial is the society where if you loan your lawn mower to your cousin, he'll give it back. But if you loan it to your neighbor, who is not your cousin, you don't know if he'll give it back or not. So you don't loan it to your neighbor. You don't do anything for anyone if you can possibly help it. You don't trust the cop unless he's a cousin. You don't trust the banker unless he's a cousin.

If you've ever been overseas (or, hell, in certain areas in the U.S.) and had someone say "I have a cousin who . . . " then you're in a familial trust society.

Then there are general trust societies. The U.S. is, by and large, (and we'll get to Chicago, L.A. and Detroit in a second) a general trust society. In most segments of American society you could loan your lawn mower to your neighbor with a fair expectation of getting it back. If you didn't, you could take him to small claims court and the judge wasn't going to care about you or your neighbor, mostly, just about the merits of the case.

Trust is vital in a society. If societal trust is too low, people trust no one. Except, maybe, their cousins.

This brings us to "multiculturalism."

A study was done by a very liberal sociologist back in the mid-oughts. The study set out to prove that multicultural societies had higher levels of societal trust than monoculture societies. It seems a no-brainer that the reverse was the case, but at the time multiculturalism, along with a bunch of other urban myths, was the way of the world.

However, it was a no-brainer. The study proved the exact opposite. That is, the more diverse an area was in cultures, the less societal trust there was.

Look, humans don't trust "the other." The name every single primitive tribe gives for "other" translates as "enemy." Apache was the Hopi name for the Apache tribes and that's the exact translation: Enemy.

But it's more complex than that. Say you're from a general trust culture. A neighbor moves in next door who is from a familial trust culture. You offer the use of your lawn mower. It never comes back. You point that out and eventually learn that it's been used to cut about a hundred lawns. If you get it back, it's trashed.

The neighbor considers you a moron for loaning it to him in the first place. And he doesn't care if you think he's a dick. He doesn't trust you anyway. You're not family.

Actual real-world example I picked up on a forum. Group in one of the most pre-Plague diverse neighborhoods in the U.S. wanted to build a play-area for their kids in the local park. They'd established a "multicultural neighborhood committee" of "the entire rainbow." I got this from the liberal "general trust" side of the story. I'd have loved to have gotten it from the rest of the cultures. If they could stop laughing.

Anyway, this group of "let's all sing kumbaya" liberals got their little brown brothers together and proposed they all build a playground for their kids. There was a kinda run-down park in the neighborhood. Let's build swings so our children can all play together. Kumbaya.

There were, indeed, little brown brothers and yellow and black. But . . .

Well, it's kinda difficult to tell the difference between a Sikh and a Moslem unless you know one's turban looks cool and the other's looks like shit. (For general info, I can not only tell the difference between a Moslem and a Sikh, I can 90% of the time tell the difference between two tribes of Moslems. Yes, I may be a culturist SOB, but I'm a very highly trained one. I can tell the difference between a Moslem and a Sikh and talk about the history of conflict between the two groups.) And Sikhs and Moslems can barely bring themselves to spit on each other much less work side by side singing "Kumbaya." The liberals had, apparently, never noticed that the fucked-up-turban guys never went into the cool-turban guy's corner store.

The Hindus were willing to contribute some suggestions and a little money, but the other Hindus would have to do the work. What other Hindus? Oh, those people. And they would have to hand the money to the kumbaya guys both because handing it to the other Hindus would be defiling and because, of course, it would just disappear.

(At some point I need to talk about India. It is not the India today that it was in 2019.)

When they actually got to work, finally, there were some little black brothers helping. Then a different group of little black brothers turned out and sat on the sidelines shouting suggestions until the first group left. Then the "help" left as well. Christian animists might soil their hands for a community project but not if they're getting shit from Islamics. Sure, they're just two different tribes that lived right next to each other in Africa. Speaking of kumbaya. But they've also been slaughtering each other since before Stanley ever found Livingston smoking his bong.

Trust. If you lived in a mostly white-bread suburb before the Time of Suckage you just can't get it. But when trust breaks down enough in a society, nobody trusts anyone. Blacks don't trust black cops. Whites don't trust white cops. Nobody trusts their mayor, nobody trusts their boss. Nobody trusts nobody.

What the study found was that the more multicultural a society, the lower the societal trust. (The professor, by the way, refused to accept his own results. He sat on them for five years and even then spouted bullshit about "education" as the answer even though that was covered in the study.) The only way to get generalized trust is to blend the societies and erase the differences. Back in the 1800s an Italian wouldn't be bothered to spit on an Irishman unless he'd just stuck a knife in his back. These days the only way you can tell the difference in the U.S. is one has better food and the other better beer.

So why does this matter to Ching Mao? Doesn't, really, he was dead and never really cared. But it mattered, a lot, to the response in Chicago.

You see, by that time Chicago was a very multicultural area. Gone were the days of it being pure white-bread and kielbasa. Only recent immigrants, who didn't recognize the local white guys as being anything like Polish despite their names, spoke the Old Language. Where there had once been mostly assimilated German and Polish and Russian Jew and a smattering of Black communities there were now Serbian and Pakistani and "Persian" and Assyrian not to be confused with Syrian and Iraqi and Fusian who were not Manchu who were not Korean or anything like who were definitely not Cambodian, damn it . . .

Each trusted the family group around them. To an extent they trusted others who were "them." The few white-bread multicultural true-believers trusted all their little rainbow brothers, of course, until you got a few drinks in them and they started telling about their experiences. "And I never did get my lawn mower back!"

And nobody trusted the Police, the Fire Department or anything else smacking of the government. Most of the immigrants came from countries where that was just sense and police had a hard time dealing with those communities that closed around anyone, good or bad, when questions were asked. And never ask a fireman about responding to an "ethnic" neighborhood. You won't like the story if you like to sing kumbaya.

The kumbaya types didn't trust them because they were so mean to their little brown brothers. Fascists. General societal trust had been totally degraded.

You couldn't get people to agree on how to build a playground. Getting them to work together to fight a killer flu bug was so far beyond the pale it wasn't funny.

The specialists tried. Lord God they tried. The CDC worked around the globe. They knew what they were up against. They just didn't expect it to be this hard in the U.S. They had people that spoke just about every language on Earth but there were families that spoke Martian. They never did track down the snake-head that opened the container until he turned up at the hospital choking up his lungs. None of the Asians were willing to admit there even were such people. They found a few street-people who had been exposed. The other laborers, who had been working side by side with him? Nada. "Day laborers that were gathered on the corner? Which corner? We know nothing of this." They were never even able to track down the contractor until he was sick. And he didn't know any names or addresses.

It's hard to say whether "the rest of the first" could be called Patients Zero or not. The arguments are technical. I've monitored a few of the boards where specialists discuss it and tried to keep up. I'll just call them "the rest of the first."

It started mostly in the immigrant communities. The people traveling legally were stopped at the border and submitted to quarantine. Illegals, however, weren't interested in being stopped.

The Plague hit Mexico actually after it hit in the U.S. At least that was reported. The Mexican Territories were right on the edge of being a failed state back then. No way of knowing if it hit before or after. Didn't really matter. Immigration from Mexico, which had been high, exploded. It couldn't really even be called immigration anymore. Not with the Tijuana Riots and the border attacks in Texas and Arizona. It was an invasion of people desperate to get somewhere they might survive.

And lots of them were infected by the time they crossed the border. On the other side of the border were people willing to transport them to other areas of the U.S. Death crept through the land coughing quietly in the back of thousands of vans and pickup trucks headed for factories that no longer needed their services, farms that were looking at disaster . . .

Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Cincinnatti?, Atlanta, Houston, Savannah, Indianapolis?, NYC, Boston, Miami . . .

There was no pattern. There was no way to maintain containment.

It was like biological warfare except it wasn't. It was a Plague.

More came from China even until the West Coast ports just said "Enough!" and stopped accepting any shipments from Asia. Not that there were many by that point.

Big problem with saying "Enough!"

China was the United States' number one trading partner. And it wasn't just fold-out hampers you could get for a buck at the Dollar Store. (Remember those?) China supplied most of the raw steel, and a hell of a lot of formed, that U.S. industries used. (Not just because U.S. steel was more expensive but because Chinese was better. Big technical explanation but "trust" me, it was.) They produced parts to go in everything from cars to computers.

There's a really crappy book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged. It's a snoozer but I was really bored one time on an exercise and struggled all the way through that fucker. The basic premise, though, was simple. A guy who built a widget that was very important to, well, everything it turned out, decided to quit. The guys who took over building the widget didn't build it as well and society fell apart.

Societies are dynamic complex systems. It is not easy to break a society or an economy. You can't do it by missing any one widget. If the guys making the widget, now, don't make it well enough someone will come along who does. And probably better than the original widget maker. That's the whole point of a free-market. Command economy? Maybe. But then the KGB will come break down the widget maker's door and explain that he'd better get back to making widgets or he's never going to see his daughter again.

And one widget never does it. Ever.

One hundred thousand widgets? All those widgets that are in containers that might or might not contain infectants?

That will break an economy.

Look, our farm used only John Deere. Made in the USA, baby, best damned tractors in the world.

The wiring harness was assembled by slave labor in the good old People's Republic of China.

So were a bunch of other parts. The steel was Chinese. (Because it beat U.S. steel hands down.) They made the injectors for the engine in the U.S. It was Chinese material. They made the stanchions for the suspension in the U.S. The steel was Chinese. The computer chip that ran the engine? Taiwan, which fell about as fast.

If there had been time, if there had been warning, if the whole fucking world hadn't come apart, companies would have reacted, adapted and overcome. Many of them did in spite of everything. Things never really got to the point of complete Armageddon in the U.S. in most areas. (L.A. is an extreme example but Chicago was nearly as bad. Especially after the winter of 2019–2020. Actually might have been worse. Most of L.A. left rather than died. They're still finding bodies in Chicago.)

Forget a machine with sand in the gears. The economy of the U.S. had often been called the Turbine of the World. It sure came apart like one.

Ever seen a big turbine come apart? Think about the same quantity of plastic explosives.

Companies in those days ran on very thin margins and very small inventories. Various reasons. It was economically more efficient. After the changes in the '70s and '80s in the way that companies ran, the marketplace had become cutthroat competitive. There were a bunch of tax laws that pressured for it. Returns were higher. Everything depended on productivity, which was and is higher per man hour in the U.S. than anywhere in the world.

However.

That meant that when a company suddenly had a breakdown, the answer was to rush order whatever they needed. Don't want that parts inventory bogging them down. "Just in time ordering."

Only the parts were made in China. And while a middleman would normally have them, they were sitting in Port of Seattle under quarantine.

And what with the Plague spreading fast in Seattle there weren't any people to clear the container or guys to move it onto a train or even a train engineer to drive the train.

Not to mention that there weren't any more shipments. China was out of the widget business. Cheap hampers were suddenly a thing of the past.

So was the Dollar Store. Walmarts started closing. Whole companies went from "the fourth quarter will be a fully acceptable return period" to "here's your pink slip. I've already got mine" in mere days.

Various states became "reactionary." Technically, it was against the Constitution to close the borders of a state and people said that there was no way to do it.

First of all, by this time most people were trying to interact as little as possible. Even in areas where trust was high, Blue Earth for example, did you trust your neighbor enough to not give your kids the Plague? People, wherever possible, huddled in. Another reason for the economy coming apart so fast was people just stopped going to work. And the American Turbine ran on productivity. Companies kept as few people as possible and worked them hard. One calling in "long term sick-leave" might have worked. Half the work-force calling in was a different kettle of fish.

Businesses started slamming their doors. And it was happening so fast people couldn't begin to understand the effect. The President was dealing with reports that were a day old and during the height of the Plague that was like reading up on Darius the Great.

You know the greatest heroes in all of this? It wasn't the firemen and police and National Guard. It wasn't the guys from the CDC. They were all trying, hard, to stop the Plague and failing miserably. But they were innoculated and so were most of their families, officially or not.

No, it was the teller at the grocery stores. It was the nurses and doctors that opened their doors every morning, not sure how or if they were going to get paid all things considered, and dealt with patients for eighteen or twenty hours before going home to crash and come back and do it all over again. Most of the latter were vaccinated. Many of the truckers and stockers and tellers at the grocery stores weren't. They put on masks and hoped for the best.

Because people had to eat.

And then money started to run short at the same time as inflation hit big-time.

Explanation.

People were only buying what they considered essentials. Basically food and gas so they could drive to the store when they absolutely had to or to the hospital or doctor's office when they knew they had to.

But the distribution system for food and gas was getting shot. People were dying, yes, but even more weren't being heroes. It was a tough call.

Say you're guy working at a local fuel distribution plant. Your wife is, say, a teacher. She's on permanent leave and might or might not be getting paid. You've got two kids. They're both okay. You've got food in the cupboard, enough to carry you for a while. A few weeks at least. Surely by then there will be immunizations, right? There's some money in the bank. Not a lot; you live paycheck to paycheck.

Now, it's morning, there are reports of people dying all over the nation from this flu shit. Your kids are good. You don't want your kids to die. And, hell, you don't want to die.

So do you go to work that morning? And have to interact with a bunch of people?

The choice of most of the people who did get up and go out to try to keep things running was just that. They went out and didn't come back until the majority of the Plague cleared or they died. This was mostly males. Not all, by any stretch. But when it came down to who was going to survive and who die in a family, mommy stayed home and daddy went to work.

And about thirty percent of them died.

Mommy and the kids weren't doing so hot, either. H5N1 had a four day "latency" period. That is, it could sit around for four days waiting to infect someone under normal conditions. It also had a three day period before "first frank symptoms." You didn't sniffle for three days after you had actually picked it up. That combination of damned near a week meant that lots of people picked it up before they ever decided "enough's enough" and went home to hide. And even if family had been hiding before they went home, now everybody had it.

Let me talk a bit about the rest of the world before I get into just what that did to the U.S.

Chapter Six Daddy Is Under the Roses

H5N1 was spreading, fast, through the world. A few countries tried, hard, to close their borders. Some of them thought they'd done a good job. Cuba slammed the door fast but the sucker got in anyway. Then their "universal health care system" kicked in. Raoul wasn't as stupid as the Chinese; the soldiers he sent out were immunized. But the "universal health care system" in Cuba wasn't anywhere near what it was cracked up to be. If you weren't someone important, say a liberal celebrity licking a dictator's boot, you had to wait and wait for any kind of treatment. And trust levels were, to say the least, low. So when Cuba's patient zeros turned up it was the same problem as Chicago. People ran from the soldiers who weren't all that happy dealing with a plague. And when people went to the hospital because they were afraid they were dying they generally died. And infected everyone around them, some of whom could escape one way or another.

Then the soldiers started deserting and the doctors started deserting, taking as many medications as they could carry with them, and Cuba took right at 60% casualties, primarily among the mid-range of adults. Classic H5N1.

Britain's an island. It's hard to get to Britain if you don't have a plane or a boat. Britain cut off aerial communication with the U.S. when Ching Mao was reported. Didn't matter. A Thai doctor who was a British citizen landed at Heathrow the day prior to Ching's discovery. He had just returned from visiting family in Thailand via India. He landed in India prior to it cutting off contact with Thailand and India still wasn't on the quarantine list.

Two days later, Britain cut off all communication. But by that time it was too late. The doctor and nine other infecteds had spread out across the country. He was in frank symptoms for less than twenty-four hours when Dr. Van realized what he had and reported to his local health clinic. Where, despite being an MD, he had to wait. He'd worn a mask, not wanting to infect anyone else, and was gloved. He told the triage nurse he suspected he had H5N1. That was on the records of admission.

The records also listed his time of speaking to the first person about his condition. It was nine hours later when he was finally examined by the on-call MD who admitted him as a possible H5N1 patient. He was subjected to a battery of anti-viral drugs and put in quarantine while being questioned. He was fully conscious, in the first stage of bird flu. He gave a very comprehensive list of his contacts and had even taken the time in the waiting room to make notes.

During his stay in the waiting room, despite his best efforts, he was later determined to have infected eighteen persons. Total infectants was never quite determined but was believed to be on the order of two hundred.

Two things were important here. The first is that, as with any illness or injury, speed of the response mattered with the Plague. Dr. Van died. Because he is one of the classic cases, there have been many articles written about Dr. Van. He had waited twenty-four hours after showing first symptoms, normal cold and flu symptoms, to go to the medical clinic. When asked why, he admitted he knew he would deal with much hassle and red-tape and hoped it was just a normal flu.

Even an MD didn't want to deal with British Health.

He waited nine hours for treatment. In the U.S., unless you were going to an emergency room with the flu, you weren't going to wait that long. Most people of any economic substance, and many who were on medicare or medicaid, had personal doctors. There were "emergency medical clinics" (Doc-In-The-Box) scattered at random.

From the first reports of H5N1 anyone with a sniffle flooded to their nearest MD. While in some cases there was little to be done, they were all instructed on basic necessities and in most cases pumped with anti-virals. The most effective in original tests, Zanamivir from Glaxo, had, again by the Chinese, been made useless. They'd used it in chicken populations in the years before the Plague and H5N1 had developed a resistance. A newer one, Maxavir, also from Glaxo, had just been distributed. Stocks ran out fast, but people who were treated in the first few hours of frank symptoms, instead of nearly 36 hours after the first sniffle, recovered at a rate of 80%. There was even an over-the-counter medication that increased survival rate if taken immediately on first symptom. Many people started using it as a prophylactic until it ran out and probably caused H5N1 to develop its resistance. But they survived.

Most of this wasn't available in a "socialized medicine" country unless you went to the local clinic and waited all fucking day to see a doctor.

Study done in 2004 by the CDC. The way that good science works is that the scientist looks at something and says "What if?" He then develops a statement from that (a hypothesis) then tries to disprove his hypothesis. "The sky is yellow." He first defines yellow. He then tests to see if the sky is yellow. If it turns out that the sky is actually blue, his hypothesis gets disproved. But he still publishes the paper and comes up with another hypothesis. Say that the world is really round. If he cannot disprove his hypothesis, it then and only then becomes a theory. This is Science 101. Man-induced global warming was an hypothesis that had been repeatedly disproven. Anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming proponents weren't scientists, they were religious zealots.

Anyway, the CDC liked "universal healthcare." It was a government health program and government health programs were good. They were a government health program so any government health program had to be good.

Hypothesis: "Universal health care will increase the lifespan and general health of a population over free-market health care."

Conclusion: "Fuck, we were not only wrong we were really wrong!"

How could that possibly be? Seriously. Universal healthcare is, well, universal healthcare! Everybody gets the same quality of treatment, young and old, rich and poor! Nobody is turned away! It's perfect communism! With doctors!

Yeah, everybody gets the same quality of treatment: Bad.

Look, if you're between the ages of 7 and 50, in reasonably good overall condition, don't have fucked up genetics and don't really lose the lottery, you generally don't really need a doctor. People between the ages of 7 and 50 rarely realize how bad socialist medicine is. Because they don't have to depend on doctors.

Try getting a hip replacement in a country with socialized medicine. Or a gall bladder operation. Hell, try getting drugs that improve a heart condition without surgery. And even though you can't, you also can't get surgery. Not in any sort of real time. Go rushing into a socialized medicine hospital with a clogged artery. You're going to get a stent if you're lucky. And get put on a waiting list for a bypass. For various political reasons, drugs that in free-market economies are the first line of defense just aren't available.

In the U.S. the standard time to wait for a gall bladder operation was two weeks. In the UK it was nine months. In the U.S., if you needed a bypass you'd be out of the surgery less than fourteen hours after emergency admission. In the UK it was emergency admission, minimal support therapy, months wait. Some 35% of persons waiting for a bypass operation died before they got one.

They found an interesting statistical anomaly as well. Death rates amongst the elderly climbed sharply as the end of the fiscal year approached.

Doctors in socialized medicine programs worked for the same pay whether they fixed people or not. But they had quotas for operations. As the end of the fiscal year approached, most of them had filled their quotas and went on actual or virtual vacation.

And people died.

Average population age in most of the socialized medicine countries were only starting to climb to the levels where death rates due to poor medical care were going to be noticeable. But the truncation of ages was clear. As were quality of life indicators.

Persons in free-market medical environments lived longer, healthier, less pain-filled lives. Despite the evil doctors and HMOs and pharmaceutical companies? No, because of the evil doctors and HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. All three groups had a vested interest in keeping patients alive as long as possible. The longer they lived, the more money the "evil" guys made.

The U.S. had been repeatedly castigated for the cost of healthcare and especially pharmaceuticals. Also for over-prescription of the newest and most costly.

But.

In Europe there was no pressure to use pharmaceuticals. With costs capped by the government, there was no incentive for the pharmaceutical companies. Modern pharmaceuticals are enormously expensive to field. The first problem is the cost of development. Many of them are derived from natural substances, but it takes relentless searching to find a new natural substance. Cancer drugs were derived from rare South African pansies, new antibiotics were derived from fungus found on a stone in a Japanese temple. Then they had to be tested to find out if any benefits could be derived.

Here's the numbers:

Animal (screening) in rats—about 1–2 years, cost about $500k/year, in monkeys—about 2–5 years, cost $2 million a year. Phase I in humans is strictly toxicology: 2 years, $10–20 million a year. If it doesn't kill anybody, then move to Phase II testing for effectiveness: up to 10 years, cost $100+ million/year. If statistics suggest a beneficial effect, then on to Phase III to determine effective dosage, side effects, other benefits and "off-label" uses: 5–10 years at another. $100+ million a year. A (large) Pharma company will start with 10,000 compounds in screening, take about 200 into animal testing, then possibly get ten into Phase I to maybe get one into Phase II. In the last 10–20 years, about 95% of Alzheimer's disease drugs that got to Phase II on the basis of rodent testing were sent back because they had no effect in humans—hence the necessity for the added expense of monkey testing . . .

It was a hideously expensive process. Again, Do. The. Math. Easily a billion dollars invested in one drug. The reason that a new pharmaceutical was so expensive was not just the cost of developing that pharmaceutical but the brutal necessity of so many thousands and millions of failures that that one new shining hope bore upon its back. Billions of dollars lost when "miracle" drugs failed at one step or another. And all that money only being recouped by those limited shining hopes that made it through the process.

But the results were worth every penny. New drugs that cut the need for bypasses; one of the most lucrative surgeries of the 1980s had been almost eliminated in the U.S. by the time of the Plague. Stroke reducing medicines, anti-cancer medicines, cancer prophyllactics and, of course, Viagra, every old man's fantasy made real.

In Europe, in contrast, it was considered cheaper to just operate. Much more unpleasant for the patient but the doctors filled their quotas and the government wasn't forced to pay for the development of pharmaceuticals. Which was why most of the modern wonder drugs were coming out of America or from European businesses that were making most of their nut selling them in America.

Doctors in socialized medicine countries, and their bosses and the heads of departments, had no vested interest in keeping old people or the chronically sick alive. The doctors might have a personal desire to help people, otherwise they wouldn't have become doctors. But they had no actual benefit and if you've ever dealt with a bunch of crotchety old people you can see some of the actual detraction.

For doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies in the U.S., those crotchety old people spelled money, money, money! So they researched and they worked and they studied ways to extend the time they could continue to suck the money out of them.

In the case of governments of socialized medicine countries, the primary users of the services, see: "crotchety old people," were their worst nightmares. The patients worked their whole lives, contributed to the economies of the countries and now expected to be paid back. Heavily. Socialized medicine wasn't the only benefit they expected. They retired early with pensions that nearly equalled their salaries when working. And they paid little or no taxes. And as any health insurance actuary will tell you, they consumed 90+% of the health budget. Mostly in their last six months of life. And what was the point of that?

It would be unfair to say that the politicians just wanted to see them all go away and that cutting off access to vital health services thus killed two birds with one stone. Save money and quietly kill off the primary users.

Or would it? Health care spending as adjusted for inflation had dropped steadily in socialized medicine countries in Europe even as the need had increased. All access to medicine was rationed. And in the Netherlands people who were "beyond help" were denied access to healthcare on a regular basis and even "medically terminated," put to death, against the wishes of their care-givers. Not only old people but children with chronic health care problems. "Terminal" cancer? Which sometimes was treatable or even erasable in the U.S.? In the Netherlands, they just turned up the morphine drip until you quietly passed into the Long Dark.

A corollary effect was on the members of the health profession. A doctor in Britain who worked ninety hours a week got paid exactly the same as a doctor who worked forty hours per week. (Often they worked less.) And it was rare that there were any changes for quality. World-renowned surgeons in Germany and France made only a fraction more than less competent doctors.

In the U.S., on the other hand, they could write their ticket.

The brain drain was not severe at the time of the Plague but it was telling. More and more top-flight doctors had left to find greener pastures. For that matter, doctors in less developed countries had flooded into the U.S., where they might not make a fortune but they got paid in more than chickens and hummus. They filled the corner "Minor Emergency Centers" as well as being the front line general practicioners, a field most American born doctors disdained as the most plebian of medical fields.

This was what the good doctors at the CDC learned when they set out to prove that American healthcare, with its dependence on the free-market, doctor/patient choice, HMOs and pharmaceutical companies was far inferior to the enlightened healthcare of "socialized medicine" countries.

They discovered the irrefutable truth that when you put the same sort of people that run the Post Office in charge of your healthcare you get Postal Workers for health care providers. And more people die in less necessary ways.

So let's go back and look at the effect of H5N1 on populations.

In its initial discovery, mortality among affected populations, primarily Chinese poultry workers, was right at 60%. Two out of three who were infected died despite best efforts on the part of local (socialized medicine) doctors. This continued as a pattern during the long period that H5N1 was confined to avian to human transmission.

Across the board in unimmunized populations with access to "universal healthcare" the same pattern emerged. Two in three unimmunized patients who were admitted to healthcare environments (less than 10% of the affected at the height of the Plague) died.

In the U.S. the rate was one in three.

Thirty percent vs. sixty percent. Still a horrific number, total death-toll from direct effects of the Plague are estimated to be around a hundred million. But if the rate had been the same as Europe's, the death toll would have been twice that.

Why?

It had been a puzzler even before the Plague. One reason that there was a somewhat slower response among the public to H5N1 was that there had been an earlier scare involving something called SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It had also started in China, there had been a cover-up that affected a large and never clearly documented number of cases with estimates ranging from five hundred to fifty thousand and mortality rates similar to H5N1. It had broken out into Thailand and Singapore and even spread into Canada. Everywhere the rate was the same, serious pulmonary distress that led to death in five of ten cases. Including in Canada, which was prepared for it and responded very fast to the discovered cases.

Cases that reached the U.S. were given a different name: MARS; Mild Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Same exact bug. Fifty documented cases in the U.S. No. One. Died.

Why?

Think of Dr. Van. A physician who cooled his heels for nine hours in a waiting room after telling the triage nurse that he probably had a deathly illness.

By the same token, cases in the U.S. called their private general practitioner and told him that they were very sick. They were seen within no more than two hours and admitted within less than an hour afterwards to the hospital.

Cases in Canada which were detected through investigation got similar speedy care. More of them survived than those who were first cases. Speed of care was preeminent. Yes, too often it simply didn't work. And as cases burgeoned the healthcare system in every country became overloaded. But in the U.S., people didn't just have to go to the local health clinic. As hospitals became overloaded, doctors often shifted to the old fashioned home-visit. Where they could not, there were thousands of minor healthcare providers, mostly LPNs and Medical Assistants, from that increasingly lucrative industry who were pressed into service. The number of providers in the healthcare industry in the U.S. had been exploding as the population aged while it had been more or less stagnant in Europe. Because there was money in them there old people there were just more healthcare workers per patient.

Many of them worked through the height of the Plague for little or no money. The economy was tanking, fast. They worked in the hopes that they'd get paid and eventually most of them did.

This was one reason that the mortality rate from direct effect of the Plague was lower in the U.S. than in other modern countries. (Countries which never had their act together simply sank lower. I'll discuss my personal experiences of that later.)

A secondary reason is debatable. It had been debated as far back as the SARS scare and still remains questionable. But there is now some corroborating evidence based on analysis of mortality rates in various populations based on their lifestyle. It is, however, detested by most health care persons and every remaining "organic lifestyle" lover on the planet.

Hormones.

We're back to industrial farming. Yep, we injected our livestock with all sorts of shit. Growth hormones for the beef and goat stock. (Yes, we raised goats for meat. There was a pretty good market before the Plague.) Milk generating hormones in the milk cows. We used "genetically modified" seeds that were hyper-resistant to dozens of pathogens. We sprayed herbicides and pesticides and laid down fields with ammonium nitrate (the stuff terrorists use in big bombs) to increase yields. We used every trick in the book and most of the bigger farm corporations we competed against used the same tricks, just not as well as we did or we'd have gone out of business.

And you all ate it every day. For that matter, at the food factories, and there is no other term for the way that food was processed, it was then injected with more "stuff." In some cases it was vitamins. Preservatives. Colorations.

The U.S. was the most heavily chemicaled food on earth. Sure it had some effect. Was it a contributor to obesity? Don't know and there's no clinical evidence. Ditto "early maturation": those cute little girls that got their boobies way too soon. But it was in your bodies. If you weren't a health nut. And be glad you weren't.

One study that is roundly castigated still but pretty hard to argue showed that people who were "uncaring" in their food choices had a five percent lower mortality rate than people who were "careful" in their food choices. The language of "uncaring" vs. "caring" was explained in the codicil that "caring" meant they ate, to the greatest extent possible, organic and natural foods. Uncaring meant they stuffed whatever in their maw and didn't give a shit how it was raised or what was in it as long as it was tasty.

The problem with the study, with which I agree, is that there is no mechanism explained for the effect. Got that. But that was what the pope's Inquisition said about Galileo. Sure, he thought that the Earth revolved around the sun but he didn't have a mechanism. Gosh, he might even have evidence, but he couldn't show why that was the case whereas the "scientists" of his day had thousands of years of built-up stories about how the sun revolved around the Earth. And my answer is the same as his: "It still moves!"

In the U.S. SARS, a huge health threat everywhere else it touched, became MARS, a very bad cold.

Part of that was, unquestionably, free-market medicine vs. socialized. Absolutely. But another fraction, also as unquestionably, was that Americans had so much shit in their bodies it was amazing we decayed at all. All those chemicals had some negative effects, sure. But they also have some positive. That's the part that healthcare nuts and organic fruits don't want anyone to realize or talk about.

Fuck 'em. It still moves.

Here is another that relates purely to H5N1. It's just a hypothesis because nobody has been able to do a good clinical study on it. (Several people have tried.) And it's kind of weird.

Social distance.

First I've got to talk about, yeah, virology and binding. (Lord I was trying to avoid this.) Prepare for major MEGO.

The common "seasonal" flus are referred to as H3N2 and H1N1. Both have a binding protein that binds to specific proteins in the upper respiratory system. (Can you say sinus pain? And fever and all the rest once your good old immune system kicks in.) Then, maybe, it moves to the lungs and you get coughing and if it gets bad a secondary bacterial infection (pneumonia or bronchitis depending on how bad it is).

H5N1 in its classic "bird flu" form bound to receptors in avian intestines. (It's an intestinal flu for them.) Which was why at first only poultry workers got it. They got it from breathing in chicken poop. Because there are similar receptor proteins in human lungs. Not the same. Similar.

(By the way, on an interesting aside. Influenza, in general, may be the oldest pathogen around. The genetics indicate that it goes all the way back to intestinal flu in dinosaurs. So the next time you're sneezing and coughing, just remember: Species come and go but the flu is here to stay. Take it like a man. End aside.)

(Oh, serious technical note. The bird binding sites are referred to as alpha 2,3. Human lung receptors are alpha 2,6.)

What caused the pandemic was a switch in one little gene code. That permitted the flu to bind to the proteins in the lungs.

Which was a good thing. A "normal" flu that bound to the upper respiratory system with the same lethality as H5N1 would have been truly a world killer. What kept a lot of people alive was they just never caught the flu. Because it had to get all the way into the lungs. That required a much higher viral load.

Which gets to social distance.

Everyone knows what social distance is. "I need my space." In the U.S. it's about two and a half to three feet. Anyone who is "non-intimate" (which doesn't mean just family/lovers, get to that) coming inside that space causes a social reaction. People back up or a fight breaks out. I need my space.

Every society has a social distance. But "classic" Americans (white, black, you name it, but fully assimilated) have the largest social space on the planet. Arab social space is about sixteen inches. When they're just moving around. If it's crowded it can drop to ten or even in contact with no social issues. Asians (Orientals for the non-PC) are even closer. Standard is around ten. Africans even work closer than Americans. We're very stand-offish people. Germans get closer to each other than Americans and we probably got the social meme from the Germans.

Heavy viral load requires you to breathe somebody else's breath. In general, people don't do that much in the U.S. In Asian societies it's just everyday living.

The "in general" gets to "intimate contact." Intimate contact is getting down to less than arm's distance. People go "ain't happening" but it happens with several categories of jobs. Medical profession and early elementary teachers (K–4 more or less) being the top two. Kids, for that matter, get much closer to each other than adults do.

Guess which professions had the highest infection rates?

Probably one of the reasons that Americans just didn't infect as much as other societies is that we're grouchy, touchy SOBs. For that matter, it may be why some of the more "socially prominent" zones (San Francisco) got hit so hard. People were "accepting" of entrance to their personal space and it killed them.

The last factor is back to trust. Thought that was a big sideline, didn't you?

Let's go back to our standard family of four living in a house with a white picket fence. Mom's a teacher, dad works for a local gas distribution center and the kids are, well, kids. For this narrative we will make them twelve and nine, boy and girl respectively.

This is about to get . . . Well, those of you who were that family, you know where this is going. This isn't going to be your narrative, but most of you lived one like it.

The Plague is definitely spreading. Mommy and Daddy decide that they're going to sit it out with what they have in the house. They'd had a bad ice storm a while back and they have some preparedness. Daddy makes one more run to the store and the gas lines. He finally finds what they desperately need and comes home.

Doesn't matter. Daddy didn't bring the Plague into the house, Mommy did. She got it from one of her Hispanic kids who barely had the sniffles. She doesn't know it.

The nine year old shows the first frank symptoms. They all put on dust masks Daddy usually uses for painting and go to the doctor. The office is overrun. They do wait, probably two hours, to see a nurse. The nurse administers (at the doctor's orders as he shouts them down the corridor) an antiviral to all four. It's probably pissing in the wind but it's the best that you can do with a virus. The doctor doesn't have any immunizations; they went bad waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them. They are also given an antibiotic shot and a bottle of antibiotics for each of them. This is for the pneumonic stage so that there's a chance secondaries won't kill them. They're told the hospital is overloaded. Don't bother.

They go home. They hold hands. They watch TV. They get sick and then they get sicker. Mommy and Daddy take care of the children as well as they can until they are at the point of collapse then lie in bed to wait it out. There's a box of bottled water in every room and that's about all they can do.

They go through the pneumonic stage. Mommy and Daddy come out of it at about the same time. They check the children and make sure they're taking their antibiotics. The kids are both alive, thank God.

They relapse, almost at the same time. Mommy doesn't remember much of that period except shouting at her husband to stop screaming.

Mommy wakes up covered in sweat but clear-headed. Her husband is dead by her side. She finds her children in the kitchen eating cereal; the only thing they know how to make. There is no power and the water runs for a moment then stops. She hugs her children and tells them that Daddy has gone up to heaven. The children are shell-shocked. They know Daddy is dead. And he said bad things to them before he died. So did Mommy. They're terrified but she comforts them as well as she can and gets them something better to eat. That, at the moment, is the most she can do.

Mommy tells the children to go out in the front yard and not to come in the back yard or the house until she tells them. Weak, dehydrated and just recovered from a killer illness, she nonetheless drags her late husband's heavy body into the backyard. There she digs a shallow hole and puts him in it, wrapped in the sheet from the bed. It's spring. She looks around the yard and, despite her aching bones and fatigue, picks up the plastic tray filled with pansies that were supposed to eventually ornament a planter on the front porch and arrays them across the tilled earth that is all she has left of her lover, her friend, her mate.

Across the United States there are these small monuments to the horror and glory of the Plague and the response of just everyday people. Flower beds across our God-kissed nation rear up from the bones of the dead, their death bringing new life and beauty into the world they have left.

My father is buried under roses.

Yes, there were the charnel pits. There were the death trucks with their slowly tolling bell. Manned mostly by garbage men in cities they carried away thousands and do so still in places. But when people really grasped how messed up things had become and when they had the land many of their family members ended up in a flower bed.

Personally, I'd have preferred that, wouldn't you?

But then came the next step. What do you do when the world has so clearly come apart? Radio reports indicate that nothing is working, anywhere. The Federal government is telling people to do the best they can until help arrives.

I'll describe later what happened in low trust countries. But this narrative is about the happy suburban family, an environment where societal trust, believe me, is probably the highest it has been in recorded history. People growing up in suburbs just don't know how unusual they are. That "it looks the same all over" is boring as hell but it's a function of high trust.

The U.S. is a strange country. Growing up in it I never realized that, but spending those tours overseas really brought it home. We're just fucking weird.

Alex de Touqueville spoke of this weirdness in his book Democracy in America way back in the 1800s. "Americans, contrary to every other society I have studied, form voluntary random social alliances."

Look, let's drill that down a bit and look at that most American of activities: The Barn Raising.

I know that virtually none of you have ever participated in a barn raising. But everyone knows what I mean. A family in an established commuity that has gotten to the point they can build a barn or need a new one or maybe a new pioneer family that needs a barn puts out the word. There's going to be a barn raising on x day, usually Saturday or Sunday.

People from miles around walk over to the family's farm and work all day raising the barn. Mostly the guys do the heavy work while women work on food. That evening everybody gets together for a party. They sleep out or in the new barn, then walk home the next day to their usual routine.

ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA.

Only ever happened in America. It is a purely American invention and is from inconceivable to repugnant to other cultures.

A group of very near strangers in that they are not family or some extended tribe gather together in a "voluntary random social alliance" to aid another family for no direct benefit to themselves. The family that is getting the barn would normally supply some major food and if culturally acceptable and available some form of alcohol. But the people gathering to aid them have access to the same or better. There is a bit of a party afterwards but a social gathering does not pay for a hard day's work. (And raising a barn is a hard day's work.)

The benefit rests solely in the trust that when another family needs aid, the aided family will do their best to provide such aid.

Trust.

Americans form "voluntary random social alliances." Other societies do not. Low trust societies in the U.S. do not. The kumbayas trying to build swings for the neighborhood children assumed the willingness of their "rainbow" neighbors to form a "voluntary random social alliance" for mutual benefit and discovered how rare American are.

In other countries an extended family might gather together to raise the barn or some other major endeavor. But this is not a voluntary random alliance. They turn up because the matriarch or patriarch has ordered it. And family is anything but random societally. (However random it may seem from the inside.)

This leads to the next stage of the narrative of our family. The mother performs an inventory of what they have. She considers heading to the hills. Many did. But most, those that survived and lived in high trust areas, then did something unthinkable in most areas of the world: They set out to help their neighbors.

Note: In many areas of the world, most neighbors would be extended family. In those areas, similar things happened. But they stopped at the level of extended family. From there on out, it became the government's problem. The king is supposed to fix big disasters. Individuals help their family as much as they can and then it's up to the king. The king will tell us what to do.

The mother of this narrative, and it's documented in at least twenty studies that it happened in all "high trust" zones in the United States, then went next door. There she found one of her neighor's children dead, another alive and very nearly psychotic. The child clings to her and she comforts her. Then she suggests that the child go play with her children. Children will recover their feet quickly when given anything orderly and common. The child is marginally functional by the time she goes back to the house. Long-term effects may be high, but right now functional is all that matters.

She returns to the house. In this case the wife is dead and the husband in the last throes of the cerebral portion of the progression. She removes her friend's body from the bed and gives the husband as much support as she can.

Note: One function of the H5N1 is that children rarely suffered from the cerebral infection stage or did so moderately. This was across the board and the clinical rationale is still poorly understood. The hypothesis (unproven) is that kids' bodies, due to growth hormones and such, tended to hold the blood in despite systemic flu. Thus they didn't suffer as much from cerebral and other organic breakdown. No solid clinical data but that's the hypothesis.

Thus, unfortunately, children often broke out of their illness to find dead parents. Kids, keep that in mind when your parents are freaking out if you get a mild fever. The reason you only have one or two grandparents is that your parents found their parents dead of the Plague.

The support helps. One of the secondary mortality effects of H5N1 was often death from dehydration. She manages to get him to swallow some water, to take some analgesics to drop the fever. Perhaps she finds some remaining ice and, over his incoherent protests packs some of the precious substance around him.

She performs an inventory of her neighbor's material. While she is doing so a neighbor from down the street, well ahead of her on the curve, turns up to find out how people are doing.

The neighbor's final fever breaks. She informs him his wife and one child didn't make it and neither did her husband.

Yes, there is a new voluntary association starting to happen. Okay, it's becoming familial fast.

They bury the wife and child. They may rebury the husband deeper. Their children are playing with neighborhood children, recounting their tales of horror this time in whispers and even occasional giggles. Kids jump back fast.

People walk out on the road and look around. They start counting heads. Houses that still haven't suffered from the bug shout for them to stay away. Those who have stay back, not wanting to infect another family. But if one of those families gets sick, neighbors gather to help.

Neighbors gather to help. They bring over bottled water and administer medicines from their own dwindling stores. Larger groups gather and begin to inventory group material and food. A bit of shifting occurs. The female moves into the male's house and now has three children. There is a slight surplus of some food stock because of that. It is offered to others in the community.

Why? There is no benefit. Why minister to the neighbor? There is no fixed benefit. Loot the house? Fixed benefit. Provide your own precious bottled water to a man who may die anyway? Why?

Trust. Trust that when you need help, they will provide that help. That even if there's no policeman watching to make them return the lawn mower they will anyway.

This was not purely a function of the Plague. In every major disaster studied, response of random individuals in first moments was a key factor in initial recovery. "There's never a cop when you need one." By the same token, in a disaster during the first portion of recovery there is never a recovery worker when you need one.

All societies show an initial positive reaction amongst generalized individuals. Yes, there is also looting and scavenging (two different things discussed later.) But the "severe outbreak of violence" generally follows the disaster at long intervals.

However, in "high trust" societies, the "voluntary random response" continues and grows. In "low trust" societies it falters after a short period, usually less than 24 hours. See studies of the Northridge and Kobe quakes "individual persons response" vs. those in Turkey all from near the same time-period. For that matter, find if you can the study of "evacuation response" in New York post-9/11. A purely random and voluntary "Dunkirk" movement of boat and ferry owners evacuated twice the number of people out of New York as the "official" evacuation.

If you're going to be in a disaster, the best place to be is in a high-trust society. And if the disaster is Asian bird flu the best place is a high-trust, standoffish society.

Let's hear it for the red, white and blue and a chorus of badly sung "Star Spangled Banner." Just don't stand too close to me while you're mangling it.

Chapter Seven Case Studies or the Grasshopper and the Ant

Was it invariably this clean? No, of course not. In any society there are those who consider trust to be aberrant and stupid. There were those who hoarded and looted even in high trust zones. But, by and large, yes, it was that clean. People gathered together in "voluntary random associations" for mutual support. And it saved our nation.

Case Study: Blackjack, Georgia.

Blackjack was, at the time of the height of the Plague, a town of two thousand in a very small rural county in south Georgia total population of thirty thousand. Counties in Georgia are tiny. I hunted around to find out why and learned it has to do with their charter, which was written right after the Revolutionary War. Basically, the county seat has to be "one half day's ride" from any point in the county. That was so voters (who at the time of the charter had to be middle class to wealthy white males) could ride into town, vote and ride home in one day.

Does any of that matter? Not really for this story. But it made doing studies county by county in Georgia a lot easier, which is why so many case studies of the Plague were done there. Also that the University of Georgia survived with so limited effect.

(Clarke County Health Department was one of those who got it right with the immunizations. It didn't hurt that the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab at UGA was immediately consulted and gave very professional advice, that was followed, to university, city and county administrators. No fewer than 90% of the students and faculty of UGA survived the H5N1 Plague and an astounding 70% of the residents of not only Clarke but the surrounding five counties. Athens has pretty much become the linchpin of Georgia at this point.)

Blackjack. The county health administrator was not the brightest light in the array nor were any of the other county politicians. Immunizations were not properly stored. They were administered purely by the two (count them, two for thirty thousand people) county health centers. All emergency services personnel, all county workers and administrators were vaccinated before the first local case of H5N1. (A Hispanic as was far too frequently the case.) Studies of the remaining doses indicated that they were probably less than 20% effective anyway. When the Plague hit in earnest, pretty much everyone went down.

When the wave was past, there were the initial voluntary associations. But once you've made sure your neighbors are okay, what do you do? Sit there and wait for the gub'mint to come help? Not hardly, brother.

There were many people in the county who needed assistance beyond just surviving the Plague. The elderly who had survived (a surprising number) needed assistance. Power was out and it was chilly that spring. There was food aplenty for the time being, but it was irregularly spaced. Bodies needed to be buried.

Did the county step up and get things going? After a while. But the next step was another "voluntary random association": Churches.

The preeminent church of Blackjack, as was the case of most areas in the deep south, was the First Baptist Church. The pastor was away on a missionary trip in, of all places, Thailand. Where he and his wife both died. The assistant pastor's narrative is unknown. He apparently took to the hills at the first suggetion of Plague and his whereabouts were unknown to the researchers.

This left the eldest daughter of the pastor in charge by a form of default. There were deacons of the church and such but they were doing other things to assist the community. The emergency services of the entire county ended up on the shoulders of a petite nineteen-year-old girl.

People who had special needs were brought to the church. A community kitchen was set up. Pews were moved and cots put in their place. People brought in food and supplies as they had them. Emergency crews trying to get power restored had first priority on food and beds. Then children. Then the elderly. Then "associated workers," that is everyday citizens who were helping out. Last were general refugees. If you were able-bodied and unwilling to help, you by God got the last of the food if there was any.

The priority was established by the preacher's daughter and nobody argued with her. And every time that things seemed to be on the brink of disaster, out of food, out of wood for fireplaces, out of blankets, in the words of the young lady in charge, "The Lord would provide."

Note: The limited effect of SARS and H5N1 leads people like this remarkable young lady to suggest the real reason isn't free-market medicine or hormones or "voluntary random associations" but that the Lord God looks over America. Given that "bigoted" and "stupid" and "backward" areas like Blackjack had lower mortality rates than more "enlightened" areas, even if similarly rural, it is occasionally hard to argue the logic.

They did not wait for the King to tell them what to do. They did not even wait for the local Lord, their elected county and city representatives, to tell them what to do. They just gathered in "voluntary random associations" and did whatever seemed to be the right thing at the time.

And it saved our nation.

Now we get to "who do you trust?" Well, you trust "us" whatever that "us" might be. Yes, if we're continuing this narrative, the white-bread residents of Smokey Hollow subdivision are not going to trust outsiders. They especially don't trust outsiders that don't look like them. Are they wrong?

Blackjack, again, was an interesting case. The local churches did not just take in those from their church. They ministered to anyone in need, which included Hispanic migrant farm workers as well as people who had become stranded on roads trying to escape the Plague. Did they trust those people? The answers given to the researchers were very Southern. Which means as opaque as a Japanese koan. "They were, by and large, nice people." "Did you trust them?" "They were, by and large, nice people."

The answer seemed to be "no." At least in the definition of "societal trust." But they also didn't turn them away. In places there were small towns and counties that closed their borders but Blackjack was, fortunately, far from major metropolitan areas and thus never reached the point of "overrun" with refugees.

The young lady in charge, however, only had problems from members of two minority groups: Hispanic males and African-American females. Neither group would accept her authority unless she brought in a male. Generally, that was one of the emergency workers who was catching a brief rest and a bite of whatever food was available. They were tired, they were frustrated already and they were very clear: You get what you're given, you give what help you can give or you get the hell out and go starve in the wilderness.

The news was still working and occasionally this sort of thing, or the "bigoted" counties that turned away refugees were pointed out on the news as signs of how "backward" such areas were.

Backwards and bigoted or just smart, wise even?

Let us take a look at our kumbaya brethren, what we can piece together of their narrative.

Comparing a city to a small, rural county would be ingenuous. I'll get to cities later. In the meantime, let's look at another case study.

Lamoille County, Vermont.

The county seat, Hyde Park, was a small town. The largest populated area in the county, Morrisville, had a population of 2000 just like Blackjack. The surrounding county had some farming but was primarily a "bedroom community" of mixed semi-retireds, "crafty" artisans and various others who for one reason or another could escape to the wilderness. Some of the homes were rentals but at the first touch of Plague the owners fled their suburban or urban residences and headed for the hills.

The county went 87% for Warrick. To call it bedrock rural "blue" is an understatement. The county government had issued nonbinding resolutions against the War in Iraq, the War in Iran, global-warming and every other cause celebre of the left. It had issued proclamations lamenting the fact that Lamoille was so intensively white-bread. Where are all our little brown brethren? Don't they know the Berkshires is the place to be?

Lamoille followed Frau Warrick's orders to the letter. Since they received a small shipment of vaccine, they were able to store about a third of their doses and kept the rest in styrofoam shipping containers. They violated the orders only to the extent of sending enough doses to the emergency services for them to spread their innoculations.

Instead of calling for people to come to the county health centers, though, they went out. They went first to nursing homes and innoculated all the old people. They got virtually every oldster that was in a nursing home or other care facility and that didn't object. Then they went to schools. That was harder. They had to get permission from the parents, first. Many of the parents were camped out at the, closed, county health centers so that was tough. They gave the schools a few days to get permission slips. God forbid they innoculate some poor dear when the parents objected.

The Plague hit Lamoille County in earnest about two weeks after they received the vaccine. Some of the vaccine had gone bad without refrigeration but not most. It was chilly in Vermont and it was stored in a back room. It, mostly, kept. But the only people vaccinated in the county, for all practical purposes, were the elderly, county workers, emergency service workers, some of the latter two's families and one school.

(Patient Zero at Copley Health Systems was a stockbroker from Massachusetts. His method of infection was never precisely determined. And many subsequent patients had never had interaction with him. But by then the Plague was really getting around.)

It took them two weeks to get to that point. At which point the schools shut down because parents were keeping their kids home, anyway.

It snowed that March in Vermont. It was a very cold and wet spring. People died. They were sometimes buried in backyards. People walked out and talked to their neighbors. There was some "voluntary random association" of local groups.

And at that point, it stopped. A few people, many of them long-term locals, gathered in larger groups centered around churches. The vast majority of the county, however, sat in their houses and waited for the King (Queen, actually) to tell them what to do.

Why?

Well, one reason was purely political. The vast majority of the "transport" population of Lamoille were liberals. Liberals Believe in the government the way that the young lady in Blackjack Believes in the Lord. It's almost a disservice to refer to such people as liberals. They were, in fact, aristocratists. They were very Old Country in that they felt that beyond their little fence it was the King's duty to fix things.

On average after one week they were out of Maslov's basic necessities, food, water. They then mostly drove to the nearest town to find help. They found dozens and hundreds of their mental brethren doing the same thing. The few "voluntary random associations" that had formed around churches or other societal groups tried to help at first. But there was no significant reciprocation. The transports felt that it was the duty of others to help them in need but not their duty to reciprocate. They wanted to be fed and watered and given shelter because it was a Right. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs. I have no abilities but I have lots of needs.

The voluntary associations, of necessity, started turning them away. Even if they had, societally, trusted the transports (and there had always been a degree of friction) they quickly learned that it was misguided.

En masse the transports complained to what was left of the county administration, accusing the voluntary associations of hoarding, bigotry, being badness. The county began rounding up supplies and distributing them, as was the right thing to do in any communist county. There was resistance from the ants that had prepared when the grasshopper, in a situation of survive or die and too many had already died, came to take his gathered seeds. In some cases, literally.

Farms were ordered to bring in all their food stuffs. Of course farms have vast stores of food. They're farms!

Uh . . . no. I mean, farmers tend to build up some personal stores in cans and such. Sure. But they don't store bulk grain, for example, on site. When they harvest it, it gets shipped to silos and distributed further. If they do have a couple of silos filled with what looks like grain, that's what's called seed. It's what you make more food from. Unless, of course, you eat it.

Farmers were preparing for planting season at that point. Some of them had seed in their silos. It was confiscated. Those that weren't already using "organic farming" methods or had genmod seeds were roundly castigated. A couple of the local farmers resisted, forcibly, having their seed taken from them. They lost in the end. More deaths.

And all the time the grasshoppers were wanting to know what the gub'mint was going to do to help them. They were protesting and shouting and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Were all of them being idiots? No, no more than "random association" worked perfectly in high trust zones. But, statistically, "blue" counties had lower levels of local volunteerism on every level, from helping their neighbor to assisting in large-scale voluntary associations.

Why? These were, by and large, the people who spoke the most fulsomely of communal living, of everyone binding together in some sort of vast communistic surge to make the world a perfect utopia. And all organic, mind you. This general class of people, looked at in macrocosm, had the most experts in it on communal association of any class of people in the U.S. They should have been the biggest "voluntary associators" in the country.

Looked at in macrocosm. The hard-core believers in communal association, though, made up a small fraction of the overall "blue" group. Less than five percent. And most of them were already in "voluntary random associations." It's called a commune. And a commune where everyone voluntarily and randomly believes in communal living sometimes works. Sometimes. Generally, though, it don't.

Let's look at the most famous commune in history, even if most people don't know it was one: The Plymouth Colony.

That's right, the Pilgrims were communists. Oh, they didn't have the words and they sure didn't have Marx's great "From everyone according to their abilities to everyone according to their needs" line. But the original charter of the Plymouth Colony, the Mayflower Compact, was clear: Share and share alike.

This lasted through one year in The New World. A year with a death rate that made the Plague, at least in the U.S., look like a minor cold. They simply didn't grow enough food to make it to the next harvest. Various reasons. They were lousy farmers. They didn't understand the soil and weather conditions. But the most important thing they learned, forget putting fish heads under the corn if you got that in elementary school, was that if you treated the people who were doing the majority of the work exactly the same as those who would not or could not contribute as much to the community, the workers eventually decided to work less hard. And farming at that level is, trust me, very hard work.

Let's look back at Blackjack and that remarkable young lady. She looked at the situation very clearly and made a list of who really needed food and shelter. First, the guys who were officially trying to rectify things. They were out working hard every day to try to fix the disaster that was still ongoing. If things were ever going to get better it was going to depend, to a great degree, on them. Some of them were female. They got fed the same as males; take all you can eat, eat all you take. Then kids and the elderly. Okay, that fell into two categories but, face it, kids and old people don't eat much. And it was, after all, a church. Think "Christian charity."

Then the "random associators" got fed. These were the men and women that were doing things in the community to help out. They weren't going to save the world but they were saving lives and supporting the church's efforts. Farms get a mention here. At one point, according to the stories from that case study, they ate okra soup for three days. Why? Because there was a farm that just happened to have a bunch of okra. They offered it to the church for the refugees. One of the deacons from the church, a "voluntary random associator" went out and picked it up and brought it back. Those were the people who were next in line for food and beds.

Last, and certainly least, were the refugees who could help but did not. They were fed last, if there was food. Why? Because they simply didn't matter. If they all died, it wasn't going to offend God or Man because live or die they weren't fixing the situation. They were waiting for the King to make it Right. They were grasshoppers. They were the people that Da Vinci spoke of when he said "Most men are good for naught more than turning good food into shit."

Another true study. In any disaster situation, after the disaster is over and things are back to some degree of normal, ten percent of the refugees in temporary shelter have to be forcibly removed. No matter how bad it is, if they don't have to do anything they're content to sit on their ass. By the same token, there's another ten percent that, no matter how bad it is, has to help. Disaster professionals leave a certain number of blank spots in their response group because they know that there are going to be people who simply cannot sit on their ass and not help out. Giving them pre-specified jobs keeps them from being a nuisance. They're also very temporary slots because the same people will leave the refugee environment as fast as possible. Probably to head back to their communities and see how they can help out.

Grasshoppers. Ants.

Back to Lamoille County. The vast majority of the "transport" population, the crafty artisans and semi-retireds and such weren't true communalists. They were grasshoppers.

Look, I'll give you an example of the difference in another disaster: Hurricane Katrina.

Forget the suboptimal response of New Orleans, a city of grasshoppers led by a grasshopper, vs. Mississippi. Forget all the rest. This is a personal story from when I was a kid.

Like everybody else I watched the news when the disaster hit New Orleans. And I grew up on Fox or nothing. But even that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of what was happening, because of how it was being covered.

I recall this one incident clearly. It's never a thing they replay over the years when stuff comes up about Katrina but I recall it clearly as day.

Shepard Smith was interviewing people down by where the water stopped. When the TV crew first got there there was this guy standing up to his hips in that rotten fucking water. Skinny little black guy, looked like he might have had a drug habit or maybe he was a street person. I dunno, but he was skinny as fuck. He was, when they arrived, helping an old lady out of the water. Walking back to the land with her. When she got to land he turned around to go back out.

Shepard Smith stopped him and asked him what he was doing. The guy said he'd been there all morning, it was a bit after noon and looked hot as shit, helping people through the water. He hadn't had anything to eat or drink. (It's been noted that the news people never seemed to offer except to one lady with a baby that looked as if it was dying.) There was some back and forth then the guy went back out to help another lady.

This bitch, though, was about a hundred pounds overweight. She was bitching up a storm, too. She had on some sort of ID hanging on a lanyard, didn't see what it was. She was sure bitching, though. By God, where was the government! She'd been in her apartment for two days waiting for help and no help done come! Where the hell was the help! Nobody was helping us! We's got nothing and nobody doan care!

Did the cameras tune her out and go back to the good Samaritan up to his hips in water that was probably eating away his fucking legs?

No, they followed her. They caught every bitch and complaint. She just kept walking and they just kept following until the segment ended.

Let's be clear, here. This is a digression about the media. They had a fucking hero right in their fucking sights and they chose to follow a fucking complainer. Here is a guy killing himself to help others and they follow the overweight bitch that wants to know "why's nobody heppin us?"

But it's also about grasshoppers and ants. I don't care if the guy in the water was a heroin addict who lived by stealing purses. He was a fucking ant. When the shit hit the fan he helped others and didn't wait for the King to tell him what to do. He jumped into the fucking breach.

The fat bitch? Grasshopper. I don't give a shit if that ID was for some job somewhere and the guy in the water was a street person. She was a grasshopper, he was an ant. "I waited for somebody to help me. Why didn't somebody help me? You should help me. The government should help me."

Me. Me. Me. Me. Fucking Me.

(Ran into Shepard in Iran one time and was forced by higher to give him an interview. He tried like hell to be charming. I admit I was less so. I suppose some day I've got to explain why, but it's one of those things from your childhood you just remember, you know? You're trying to figure out how to be an adult and you look at that and go; "Well, I'm not going to be like that bastard Shepard Smith, giving the limelight to a bitching grasshopper while a hero toils away behind his back." Addendum: Turns out it was his producer's fault, not his. Okay, so I'm not perfect, I should have realized he was just the ventriloquist's dummy. In that case, his producer is an idiot. Sorry, Shepard.)

Me. It's all about me. Okay, they were called the Me generation. Yes, the vast majority of Lamoille County were baby boomers. "If it feels good do it" was the mantra. "It's all about me."

Well, you know in peace and plenty (brought to you in great degree by us ants) "It's all about me" works. It doesn't work for anyone with honor and dignity, but the "It's all about me"people don't care about that. They just care about themselves.

And even in a sufficiently awful disaster situation "It's all about me" works. If you can get out of the disaster area and stealing a car will get you out, you can go far using that technique.

But beyond a certain point, you need help. You can try to shoot your way to what you want, but eventually you're going to be outnumbered and outgunned. (That happened a few times in the U.S. Not many, but it happened. Very common in other countries, but I'll get to that.)

The wolf only ever gets to the door because it hasn't hit some blocking force before it gets there. Normally, that's people like me. "People rest safe in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence in their name." I'm one of those "rough men" and proud of it. But when things come apart, hard, like an exploding turbine, well it helps to have a group gathered for mutual support. Lone wolves found themselves increasingly challenged in many areas (mostly red areas) by "voluntary random associations."

So what happened in Lamoille?

Foodstuffs down to seed were confiscated for "community benefit" kitchens. There were soup lines. (Well, they were all over for the next few years. Remember?) There was rationing. Remember the ten percent that have to do something? They were the first to leave, looking for somewhere less screwed up. Many of them were the natives of the area who were having their supplies stripped for the grasshoppers. They packed up and ran. Many of them to New Hampshire. Many of those counties weren't taking refugees, but a true Yankee accent could generally talk its way through. Especially if it was carrying supplies or had a sob story from somewhere like Lamoille.

Eventually things were getting bad and worse. There were starting to be some food shipments at that point. Things were starting to derandomize in the U.S. by May or so. Not anywhere near pre-Plague and there were still people getting sick, but it was starting to derandomize.

But it still wasn't great. And then there were the evil farmers who many were sure were still hoarding food. So many of the grasshoppers were moved out, or moved out voluntarily, to the farms.

This is called the Cambodia Syndrome. Also The Zimbabwe Method. In a situation where food is short, send people out to farms. There they can produce food for themselves and for the cities. More about that later as well. It's the explanation for 2020 and 2021.

In Cambodia it led to a 20% drop in the population. The farms were and are called The Killing Fields. In Zimbabwe it led to the "grain basket of Africa" entering a long-term famine.

Look, farming is hard. It's not only hard physical work, it's hard mental work. Farm boy, remember? Degree in Agronomy. I know whereof I speak. Sending a bunch of tofu-eaters out to rebuild the local farm economy, or even the semiretired stock market traders, or lawyers or power traders or whatever, was like asking a two-year-old to program your stock trading computer.

Especially the way they did it. And the weather didn't help much a-tall.

Most of the seed had been seized and eaten. But there was some left, at least for vegetables and beans. Little packets that had basic instructions on how and when to plant the crops. There was a county agent, a, you guessed it, expert on natural farming methods.

So people were sent out to farms and given the packets and told to read and follow the directions. How hard could it be. Put the seed in the ground and wait for the food to come rolling in.

Most of the packets had planting zone instructions. There were generally five, ranging north to south. Vermont (and Minnesota) were Zone One, meaning the last zone to be planted.

The seeds would give a time frame for planting in the zone you were in. Most of the seeds passed out that April and May were in the zone for planting. Corn, peas, even in Vermont they would normally be ready to go into the ground. Corn "knee high by the Fourth of July."

Big Chill, remember? Actual planting time, what you plant and when you plant it, depends on two things: soil temperature and projected growing season. (Wow, real farming information.) Seeds need the soil to be a certain temperature before they'll sprout. Plant them too soon and they're mostly going to go bad. By the same token, the plants need a certain amount of time to mature. Plant them too late and they'll get caught by an early frost or a cold front and be unharvestable. Or the harvest will be lousy.

My dad used to start pacing around March. He'd watch the weather reports like a hawk. He'd surf the Internet. He'd listen to the radio. He'd take soil temperatures. He was gathering all the information he could about how things were warming up, what they might be like that summer. He'd look, I don't joke, at things like the flight of birds. When they were migrating. How fast they were moving. It all went into that organic and extremely experienced computer in his head. And then he'd make a decision on just when we were going to plant and what.

The Big Chill was already setting in. Soil temperatures, which is what the little instructions were based on, were not following normal progression. The tofu-eaters and retirees and the rest of the grasshoppers who now thought themselves ants put the seeds in the ground and waited for the crops to roll in.

And, by and large, they didn't sprout. Some did, they happened to have gotten the soil temperature right. Those were, by and large, caught later by the fact that it was "a year without summer." Frosts continued into June and started again in August. Corn does not do well under those conditions. It can handle frost when it's near harvest. It does not handle it well when it has tassels.

Speaking of which: Then there was the insistence on "organic." I know, I know, how many hobby horses can one person have? But bear with me.

Up in Minnesota we've got our fair share of Amish. Nobody is bothered by them. They're not "us" but we're not "them" so it works out. Nobody wants to try to sing kumbaya with the Amish and the Amish won't even consider singing kumbaya with us. "Clannish" doesn't begin to cover it.

But they farmed organically. I mean, it was like their religion, right? They had been doing it for a long time and they were not stupid. They paid attention to what worked within the constraints of their culture. They used every trick in the book that wasn't a violation of their faith. They were, hands down, the best truly organic farmers in the United States.

Their harvests averaged half of my dad's evil farm corporation. The only reason they were able to stay in business at all was that they had so few needs and everyone worked for, essentially, no pay. They ate what they harvested and anything left over went to buy the very few things they couldn't make themselves.

They were excellent organic farmers. They were not excellent farmers. Excellence in farming is how much use you get out of a patch of soil. My dad was an excellent farmer.

The best organic farming in the world is hugely inefficient compared to industrial farming. All the kumbaya types that wanted everyone to go to organic farming simply could not do math. Say that everyone was suddenly forced, by some sort of edict, (like, say, The Emergency Powers Act and a fucking Presidential Order) to do organic farming. We won't even talk about horse-drawn plows, just no genmod seeds, no herbicides, no pesticides, no "nonorganic" (a contradiction in terms, by the way) fertilizers.

Look, the U.S. was and is beginning to be again the world's bread basket. We produced, and are getting back to producing, 15% of world agricultural production. With about a quarter the workers per ton. But if we had to go to "all organic farming" we'd have had to break three times the amount of land that was farmed. Why three? Because in areas that weren't rapidly urbanizing, good farmland was all in use. That means working the marginal stuff where production falls off, fast.

Three times as much plowing. Three times as much transportation. About five times (for some complicated reasons) the hands. There was already a notable shortage of skilled farm workers; I have no clue where we'd get the extra guys.

And you have to use some fertilizer. I can project places we could get it, they're called sewers. Do you transport it raw? I don't think even the tofu-eaters like the idea of honey-wagons all over the road and they would be all over the road. The transportation network for professionally produced fertilizer was very efficient. Trying to replace it with some massive network of shit carriers was going to be ugly. And then there's the energy involved in transportation.

Again, plenty of studies. Environmental damage from a total switch to organic farming would have been ten times that of the current conditions of mass industrial farming. Don't care what the tofu-eaters believed; that was the reality.

For every simple answer people don't use there are big complicated reasons they don't. But some people can't comprehend big complicated reasons so they cling to the simple answers.

Back to the tofu-eaters in Lamoille. The crops didn't sprout. Those that did did poorly. It was a sucky year to farm, that was part of it. The big part was that the tofu-eaters had no clue what they were doing. And they weren't willing to work nearly hard enough. If you're going to organically farm, you'd better be ready to work ten times as hard as an industrial farmer. And I mean "swinging a hoe" hard. And "picking the corn" hard. (The latter is not harvesting.) Why? Weeds. Pests.

Laying down a bed, industrially, works like this in the simplest possible way. (Understand, this is the farming version of C-A-T spells "Cat." Don't think this little paragraph can make you a farmer.) Start with winter fallow field. Spray with herbicide. Let sink in. Wait two weeks for Roundup to degrade. Spray with ammonium nitrate to "seal" the soil. Some stuff you have to combine these but that's getting into sentences and complex words like complex. Wait a short period of time for ammonia to do its magic. Check soil temperature (if you're good you've guessed the day perfectly) and start plowing and planting simultaneously with a John Deere combination planter. At specified intervals spray with insecticide and herbicide chemically targeted to miss your crops. Depending on what you're growing, you might have to do pollination. (Usually except for the low-grains like rye, wheat and barley.) Pollination is the one thing that is hugely manpower intense. (Oh and picking rocks. I can't believe I left out picking rocks!) Generally it happens in summer and you hire a whole bunch of the local kids to come out and hand pollinate. And they'd better be willing to work for peanuts or it's going to break you.

Harvest when it's ready and get ready to either do a second crop or let the field lie fallow for winter. Repeat.

(By the way, all farmers have some level of debt. Ever signed a mortgage and get the question "Do you want to pay monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually" and look at the banker like they're nuts? Monthly, of course! Are you nuts? Unless you're a farmer. In which case, it's generally yearly. You don't make diddly until harvest. That's when all debts get paid, payments on tractors, payments on improvements to the house, payments on your car. And you'd better have budgeted for next year, including the pollinators, or you're going to go bust. Farmers are planners.)

So, let's say you're growing corn and you don't do all that. You just put it in the ground (at the right time) and let it grow its own way. Okay, maybe you spread the field with "manure" (shit) before you plow. (The tofu-eaters mostly didn't.) But you're not going to use evil herbicides or pesticides.

Well, weeds grow much faster than crops. In fact, it seems weeds will grow like, well, weeds. They get up everywhere. Even in fields that have been sprayed over and over again, they spring up. They are transported by wind, by birds. Fucking thistles are the bane of any farmer's existence. They get carried on bird legs and birds will get into the fields. If you don't spray in a year or so you're covered in thistles.

But wait! I can hear the organic types screaming about burning and cutting and all that. Yeah. Tell it to the Amish. Go look at an Amish field right next to an "evil" field. Let's take wheat since it's easy to spot. Look at the "evil" field. You'll see, scattered through it, some brown looking stuff that isn't wheat. If you don't know what that is, it's called "Indian Tobacco." It's related, distantly, to tobacco but has no value as a crop. Period. It's a weed.

Look at the "evil" field. Maybe five percent of the total, usually less, is taken over by Indian Tobacco. Look at the Amish field. Closer to thirty percent.

And they burn. And they cut during fallow at intervals to catch weeds. Some of them, and there was a big debate about it, even used biological controls. (Pests that target specific weeds.)

And it's still there. Hell, it's hard enough to get rid of with herbicides. And its root structure strangles out everything around it. Let fucking Indian Tobacco get loose in a wheat field for long enough and you might as well move to Florida and retire.

And don't even get me started on mustard weed! I really fucking hate mustard weed!

But we were talking about corn. So let's talk about burcucumber. Sounds cute, right? It's a combination of two words, the first of which is "bur." Don't know if anyone reading this has ever dealt with burs. They're the things that stick onto your legs when you're walking through grass in summer. Burcucumber doesn't have really nasty burs, but it's a climber. It climbs like any viny plant. Let it get into a corn crop and it will climb right up and kill the plants.

And all weeds, no matter how minor, take away nutrients from your crops. They are a pain in the ass.

So, you can do industrial things to get rid of them. From a paper on weed management and burcucumber:

You know, herbicides. Get out there in your spray truck. Call in a crop duster. Corn's a monocot. Burcucumber is a dichot. (grass vs. broad-leaf plant) Some herbicides (2-4-d: Brush-Be-Gone) only killed dichots. If you didn't get it with the first application of Roundup you can get it with Brush-Be-Gone. In the case of soy, which had been "genetically modified" to be resistant to glypho (Roundup) you can go ahead and spray 'em anyway. I do so love modern bio-tech.

Or, you can manage it by tilling fallow fields (not a great use of anyone's time), burning at appropriate times and, most especially, weeding. (All but the last, by the way, causing more damage to the environment.)

Weeding. You know, get out there with a hoe and hack away at the weeds. Better make sure you get all the roots and especially get them before they seed. Or next year is going to be worse. And worse. And worse. Gonna spend a lot of time on your knees. Backbreaking work. Stoop-work, the worst kind. It will kill you fast. Ask any Mexican farm laborer.

But those guys were mostly doing it at harvest. You'd better be doing it all summer. Hell, spring, summer and fall; there are weeds that spring up all three seasons and you need to get them young.

If you've got an area that's large enough to support four people and some to sell, you're going to be weeding all the time. Or you're not going to get enough to support the foursome.

And you still will have more weeds than those evil bastards using chemicals. Ask the Amish.

Then there's pests. We're sticking with corn again. Corn borer. Ever picked up fresh corn at a roadside stand and when you're shucking it there's this big fucking caterpillar which has eaten, like, half the kernels? You go "Yuck!" and toss it out. But a bunch of the rest has the same shit?

Corn borer. And your friendly roadside farmer is an organic nut. Welcome to the reality of organic farming on the sharp end. If it doesn't have a worm somewhere, it's industrial. If it has a worm, it's organic. If you're eating something organic, there has been a worm involved. Guaran-fucking-teed.

And if the worms are eating it, people can't.

Prior to the advent of modern pesticides and other pest prevention methods, pests and infections (corn gets sick, too) caused a loss of 25% of all crops before they could be consumed. That's a lot of fucking food.

Digression again. Ever heard of a guy called Thomas Robert Malthus? As in "Malthusian Equations"? There was a book called The Population Bomb that was based on Malthusian Equations. Basically, according to Malthus, people reproduce a lot faster than food production can be increased. (Geometric vs. arithmetic.) Thus every so often you're going to get a massive famine since the amount of mouths outstrip the production.

Malthus did his study and wrote his treastise just as the industrial revolution was getting into gear. And for his knowledge of the day, organic farming by human and animal labor, he was absolutely right. There was a regular cycle of population growth stopped by famine throughout the world prior to the industrial revolution. See the upcoming thing about Marie Antoinette. Not to mention Les Miserables.

What changed it was industrial farming methods. Period. Dot. Everybody on earth would occasionally be going through a widespread killer famine if we all went back to organic farming worldwide. Simple as that. I hate "all organic" nearly as much as I hate mustard weed. More, probably. Mustard weed just evolved. Organic farming nuts have brains. They just can't use them.

But the good organic farmers (oxymoron, I know) are going to use tricks to keep it to a minimum. They'd pick the corn. Very labor intensive, again, but get a bunch of people out there looking for the corn borer eggs on the surface. Getting the eggs off. Looking for caterpillars or grasshoppers (they're fucking locusts, okay?) and picking them off by hand. Have a big fry at the end of the day since you might as well get some protein from your fields.

The tofu=eaters were not good organic farmers. They were not good farmers. They were not good horticulturalists. They thought they could be grasshoppers (fucking locusts) and just prop their feet up and wait for the food to fall into their mouths.

"Summer time, and the living is easy . . . "

No. It's not. Traditionally, spring and summer were when people starved. Back in medieval times the lords would store the grain and if you had been a good worker, when your personal stores ran out you could go to the lord and get grain to feed yourself and your family. If not, starve. Sometimes stores didn't make it all the way through the next harvest. They had huge problems with pests. (See above.) But that was the general idea.

There wasn't any food. Crops weren't coming up. There was nothing to eat.

There was nothing to eat.

This is referred to as famine. It hadn't happened to the U.S. in a century or more. And even then it was, to an extent, localized. 2020 was the first widespread famine the U.S. ever had. In 2019 it was still localized until the example of Lamoille became fucking national policy!

But I digress . . . Again.

There was still a certain amount of fuel. Most people had run their fuel out but there was still some. And there was always the leather-personnel-carrier. (Shoes.)

People started wandering. The tofu-eaters started looking for food, any food. The grasshoppers were turning into locusts and starting to fly.

There was food. Grain stores from the previous year were at near record highs. Even the winter wheat harvest hadn't been awful, despite the weather. And there were, alas, fewer mouths to feed. By June there was some movement on emergency distribution.

And then there was the Big Grab.

But we'll get back to that.

Okay, last bit on "organic" farming.

It's bad for the environment. It's sucky efficiency. Trying to go to it as the only way that farming was done caused the famines of 2019 and 2020. And then there's the whole pest thing.

Sure, there are more worms but, hell, it's healthier for you! Right? Well, there's the part about hormones and their effect on H5N1 but that's sort of specious. Let's talk about real health and safety issues.

What do they use for fertilizer? Shit. Okay, dress it up in any pretty language you want, "manure," "fully natural plant food," whatever. It's shit. It's what came out of your anus and you flushed down the toilet. It might come from cows or horses or whatever. It's all shit.

Don't get me wrong. It's a pretty good fertilizer. Especially horse shit. Very balanced. Also less smelly than the cow shit. (Which means, by the way, less nitrogen.)

But it's shit. It's made up of e coli bacteria. And the good organic farmers not only use it to prep their fields, they spray it (using a tractor and a manure sprayer) at times during the growing season. Because while it's pretty good fertilizer, it's not as good as the industrial type.

Yes, that's right folks. That organically grown food you just ate at some point was sprayed with shit. In many cases, it's "debiologicaled" shit. That is, it's been heated to the point that the germs should be dead. Doesn't always work out that way. And that kind is more expensive. Anything that's not cooked—lettuce, celery, green onions—generally got "debiologicaled." And sometimes it wasn't quite debioed as people would prefer.

Look, bottomline: Of the ten major e coli outbreaks of base food materials in the five years before the Plague, one was associated with industrial farming. One. The other nine were products that were "all natural."

Way more people died of "all natural" food that was contaminated with some "all natural" toxin than people who stuck to that icky "evil" food.

Back to trying to avoid famine.

Chapter Eight Let Them Eat Cake

Food distribution centers had been set up in some areas. But they, by and large, had not gotten to small towns like Morrisville, VT, or Blackjack, GA. Never really did. Those areas were supposed to be producing the food, not drawing on it.

Initial movement during the Plague had been out of the cities. As the summer (what there was of it) kicked in, the movement was back. There wasn't any food in the countryside. Oh, there was, just not what most people recognized as such (yet). And the locusts wanted the government to feed them. Which it did. I wasn't on that detail but I've heard the stories.

Food distribution was very much on the classic methods used in Africa during famines. People got in long lines and were given some basic food materials. Semolina (cream of wheat for those of you who don't know the name, couscous for the hoity toity) was a base distribution as was cornmeal and beans. Why those? You could put it in a pot and boil it up and eat it. That simple.

"How can I boil it? I don't have a pot!" "I've got a pot, where's a stove?"

The answer is "find a pot, cut down a tree, boil the fucking water."

Believe it or not, there were still "environmental activists" being interviewed on the news who were complaining about the ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE that was being done from this sort of distribution. Trees were being cut down. (There used to be these things called "greenbelts" around subdivisions. I kid you not.) Fires were adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There were even lawsuits seeking injunctions against fires used for cooking food.

Due to the way that the population had ebbed and flowed, most of the food distribution centers that were getting heavy traffic tended to be in the outer edges of cities. Central areas had some commerce as well, but people were clustering out of cities and, well, there were "issues" in the cities. Which wasn't good for the economy. Cities were and are the mitochondria of the economic animal.

But that's where most of the people who were coming to the food distribution centers were. And they included the "random associations" from suburbs. Side note again.

According to orders, the only people who got food were those that came to distribution centers. The Bitch again. I'll get into her hate affair with her crisis management specialists, including the head of FEMA, later. But that was the Rule.

Very few local officers paid attention to it. The majority of the distribution was going through the Army and what remained of the National Guard and reserves. The NG had had widespread desertions when they were called up. Go take care of others or stay with your family? About 20% chose the latter. There were also screw-ups with their vaccination program. They ended up at about half strength.

Oh, why weren't there more widespread desertions in the Army? There is no better place to be in an emergency (generally, we still haven't gotten to me, right?) than the Army. The Army always gets fed. Rations may be short, but it gets fed. And it generally takes care of dependents.

Dependents near bases went to the units when things got bad. They got some medical care, unit family support groups gathered in "less than random" associations and, well, supported each other. The troops were away. Rear area detachment personnel weren't going to turn away their wives when said wives turned up with kids in tow, hacking and coughing. (And in some conditions girlfriends or even "close personal friends" of the same sex. You can turn a blind eye to all sorts of shit in an emergency.) But even the dependents, those that lived on or near base, mostly got innoculated. And while power might be out in the local town, it stayed up on bases. There was food, water, shelter, medical care and clothing. As things started to get humming again there were even jobs.

There's a reason for this. See the difference between the National Guard and the Regulars. The Regulars stayed on the job in droves, less than five percent desertions, no matter how nasty those jobs were. (Body clearance in Miami was high on the list according to a buddy in the 82nd. He's challenged by a couple of officers in my unit who were involved in breaking up the food riots in DC. Clearing already dead people in hundred degree heat or killing American citizens? Tough call. I didn't get to find out, fortunately. Sort of. But, truth to tell, I actually enjoyed Detroit. Sometimes you can do good works in very bad ways.)

The point being that most of the work at the grunt level was not being done by FEMA, which never had many bodies, or even by the National Guard, which should have had many more bodies, but by Regular Army units. They'd been flown back starting in April when it was clear things were going to hell in a handbasket. At first the generals stuck with the pre-disaster plan until they got ordered to follow the Bitch Plan under Emergency Powers.

Okay, okay, damn. Sooo much to cover.

There was a Plan. Like all emergency plans the Post Catastrophic Disaster Emergency Rebuilding Plan left out, well, the Emergency. But it was a plan. It was a plan nobody wanted to implement but it was a Plan. It amounted to nationwide triage.

Triage is a word that comes from the old French word "trier" meaning "to pick or sort." Triage on a battlefield (where the word originated in the Napoleonic Wars) came down to three choices: Those that don't need help right now, those that can survive if they get help right now and those that are probably going to die whether they get help or not. Three choices. You send the bulk of your resources, doctors in this case, to the cases who had to have help right now, but that were probably going to live if they got that help. The lightly wounded could wait until later. And for those for whom there was no help, you sent no help. You put them together hopefully somewhere far enough away from the rest that their groans and screams wouldn't bother anyone and you Let Them Die.

It was an ugly, ugly, ugly plan. Basically, the Powers That Be, notably the military and FEMA, would determine zones that were recoverable fast. Energy would be concentrated on those zones first. As they got back on their feet, they would be used to springboard movement into zones that were just so totally fucked up they hadn't been recoverable. Lightly wounded (not many of them, NYC comes to mind) would be more or less on their own.

So now we turn once again to the Bitch. Tum-tum-ta-dum-tum, Hail to the Chief and all that.

She's been going quietly insane in my opinion. The news media did not agree. The Democrat Congress did not agree.

Everyone else in the world fucking agreed.

In March, in the midst of the worst of the Plague, the Congress had passed the Biological Crisis Emergency Act, effectively surrendering power to the President "for the duration of the biological and economic emergency."

Biological and economic.

What is the definition of an economic emergency? Okay, the world's economic turbine coming apart like an explosion is one definition. But what constitutes the end of the emergency? According to the news media, blips in the stock market pre-Plague were "emergencies." A quarter point rise in the unemployment index was "an emergency."

Okay, okay, fifty percent unemployment, as far as anyone could determine, (and, remember, thirty percent population drop) was an emergency. But at what point did it stop becoming an emergency?

Fortunately, they put a sunset date of one year from its signing for it to end but there was a proviso for an automatic renewal with a simple majority. And there was no stated limits. It suspended just about every right a person could have. Notably, habeas corpus and property rights.

Okay, there were "issues." There were a lot of dead people and stuff that was lying around that could be used. Factories that had been owned by families, the local members of which were dead and the distant ones unreachable. Or, hell, the corporation had just shut its doors and was in receivership. Farms that were lying fallow due to the Plague. Fine, whatever. There's a term called "eminent domain" for those. Basically, if there wasn't an immediately recognized heir or owner the government could and should take it over. Then sell it to someone who can run it.

The Emergency Powers Act cut through that. It also meant that there were no legal roadblocks to forced immunization. (Not that the Bitch ever got around to that.) And there were areas where social order had broken down completely. They were supposed to be placed in the category of "let them die" but . . . There's the Bitch deciding what is Right and What Should Be Done. Despite experts who were advising her that SHE HAD CHOSEN for their EXPERTISE.

Bush had been lambasted for his response to Katrina and New Orleans. Incorrectly IMO; the people who really cocked up were the local authorities. Look at Mississippi if you can find the information. There were entire counties that were wiped out. The storm surge that hit the Mississippi coast was higher than the tsunami that had hit Indonesia. There were bodies on top of a Walmart. They just picked up and did what they could. They called for Federal assistance right away, they followed their pre-disaster plans.

But the bottomline was Bush got hammered. And one of the things he got hammered on, justifiably, was his choice of head of FEMA.

I won't get into the hundreds of thousands of words I've read on that particular issue. Bottomline was that Michael Brown was not the guy to lead the agency. For so many different reasons it's scary.

But FEMA's actual response was as near textbook as you could get. Mostly because Brown realized he was totally out of his depth and let his people handle it.

The problem being, nobody really understood disaster response in the media. And they fucking hated Bush. Even Fox didn't really like him.

Look, in a local major disaster like that, FEMA wasn't even supposed to be up and running for seventy-two hours. Three days. That was after they were requested by local authorities.

But on day two, hell with the skies barely clearing, people were asking "Where is FEMA?"

FEMA doesn't actually have all that many full-time employees. Disasters, by their very definition, don't occur all the fucking time. So most of its response specialists are contractors who do other things, or are retired and hang out, waiting for the next response.

They had to be called in. People had to go in and find areas to set up. It takes time.

Even then, they don't do most of the work. They coordinate the work. More contractors, and military, and local government do the actual work. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Asking "where is FEMA" in a disaster is like asking "Why aren't the managers here?" The managers are important, don't get me wrong. But they don't get the bodies cleared.

So Bush was roundly criticized for responding in damned near textbook manner. Despite Michael Brown.

Warrick, though, knew it was a major political point. So even during her campaign, she found a person that she said was to be her head of FEMA in the event of her inevitable election.

Brody Barnes was a former Army colonel. He'd started as a tanker but then got into specialized areas of what's called "civil affairs," that is dealing with problems of a local populace.

He'd been an unnoticed but major reason that the rebuilding in Iraq, which went way better than the media ever could realize, went as well as it did. His main degree was industrial management so he wasn't an engineer but a guy who understood how to get very disparate parts of a complicated system to start working together.

He retired at twenty years and got a job almost immediately as assistant director of the California Emergency Management Agency. The director was a politically appointed position. A year after Brody joined, the director "voluntarily" resigned and Brody was appointed by the Republican governor. Like similar positions in the federal government, it required the consent of the very liberal California Senate. He passed the vote with acclaim. He was definitely a rising star.

By the time the election of 2016 rolled around he'd dealt with multiple major brushfire outbreaks, three minor earthquakes, mudslide seasons aplenty and one fairly major earthquake. He also looked good on TV. Square-jawed, soft-spoken, dry sense of humor, good soundbites.

He accepted the nod as a potential FEMA head and spoke widely in favor of Warrick. He liked her domestic policies. When asked about her military policies he politely declined to comment. Not his area. Ask someone else.

He was appointed head of FEMA one month after Warrick went into office. He was head of FEMA when the Plague hit.

He was one of the people with testicles trying to get Warrick to stick to some sort of plan. Wasn't happening.

You see, he had been a convenient tool to aid a close election. But he wasn't one of Warrick's inner advisors. Not that Warrick listened to them much. She knew what was Right and so on and so forth.

Warrick had Her Plan. And everybody else was going to follow the Warrick Plan.

The first part of the Warrick Plan was the distribution Plan. Pancake.

The second part of the Warrick Plan had to do with the economy. Okay, Wall Street fucking tanked. It made Black Friday look like a minor blip. The Dow was riding high at nearly 16,000 points before the first word of H5N1. By the time trading was "semipermanently suspended" it was below 5,000.

Well, if corporations couldn't handle a minor matter like a plague that had wiped out their workforce and their customers and their distribution systems and the economic underpinnings that they depended on for sustenance, they would just be nationalized.

How, exactly, she expected that to help was never quite clear. They were to be nationalized. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, would take over their facilities and get them back in running order.

Banks closed. The one smart thing she did was stop all foreclosures from banks. The stupid thing she did was continue to permit tax seizures. The idea of tax seizures is that the government grabs the goods of a person or company who refuses to pay taxes. Then they sell them.

There were effectively no buyers. Oh, there were some. That money in the stock market had gone somewhere. Mostly it had gone into the first people to bail out. They were sitting on money in various places. Some of it evaporated. When banks closed, if you had more than the federally protected maximum in it, it disappeared. Not exactly but it was tied up in loans that, for the time being, couldn't be recovered and might never be. But the truly rich were covered on many fronts and held onto portions of their assets. And they then used them to buy up properties at firehouse prices. Some of them were in eminent domain because there were no heirs. But the government was seizing a lot of stuff that was because people suddenly found themselves unable to pay taxes on it.

Farms, factories, equipment, there wasn't a huge market but there was a market. The problem being that just as basic necessities, food and clothing, were getting astronomically expensive, things like a dump truck were going for pennies on the dollar.

The next thing she did was declare a fixed price on commodities. Oh. My. God.

Look, in a free market economy stuff sells for what people are willing to pay. If the commodity, pork bellies for example, is in big supply and low demand, it sells for less. If the commodity is in big demand and low supply, it sells for more. Supply and demand.

Go back to the seizures. A loaf of sliced, wrapped, packaged bread in the few remaining open grocery stores, if you could find one, was going for ten dollars. Knew somebody who had paid $500 for a pound of coffee. You could buy an F-350 pickup truck in nearly mint condition for not much more. The supply of useless vehicles was high. The supply of food was low.

Supply and demand.

The Bitch decided that she was going to put a stop to that and ordered all basic commodities to be repriced at pre-Plague levels.

Which just meant that people who had any money left stripped the shelves and because it was costing more to produce a loaf of bread than ten dollars, the few remaining businesses that were making bread went out of business. So there was no more bread.

Ever hear the whole thing about Marie Antoinette and "If there is no bread then let them eat cake." She wasn't a cold-hearted bitch as is normally thought. She was a liberal airhead.

Think I'm wrong?

There was a famine going on at the time, a Malthus special combined with, hey! look! a global cooling event. The French agricultural economy had reached its carrying capacity just as there was a turn-down in the thermostat. One bad harvest and people were starving. The king ordered that the price of bread in Paris and other cities be fixed at a certain level so that people could afford to eat. The only problem being the farmers, who had limited supplies from the bad harvest, weren't willing to sell it to the bakers at the cost necessary for bread to be that cost. So the supply of wheat ran out for bread.

The king had also decreed that if there was no bread flour, then cake, which was from much more expensive (less supply) flour, was to be substituted.

So she was making, within the "command economy" mindset, a perfectly plausible statement. If the bakers aren't making bread, then the poor get to eat cake.

The only problem being, there wasn't enough flour for cake, either. And either way the bakers were going to go out of business.

There were stores of grains still in silos. It could be argued that locking in their price to what they were worth pre-Plague was reasonable. Except that the people who owned them now had much higher expenses across the board. And if they went out of business, somebody was going to have to run the silos. Okay, the government. Are we going to get to full communism? If Warrick had her way we would have.

But even if you fixed the cost of those, that didn't get it to mouths. You had to transport it. The fuel delivery system was shot. (Take our dead husband in the suburb and multiply by fifteen million.) What fuel was available was expensive. Law of supply and demand.

Okay, then fix the price of fuel!

Truckers had gotten hit hard by the Plague. By definition, they traveled and were exposed all over the place. So there were fewer truckers. And most of them were independents. There were fewer loads, but there were way fewer truckers. They could pick and choose their cargoes and if they had one that was willing to pay more, say a load of critical components that a company was willing to pay through the nose for, rather than, say, a government priced shipment of food, they went for the filthy lucre.

Seize the trucks!

Thus was the Big Grab started. And it went on and fucking on. Sure, she had the Right under the Emergency Powers Act. It was, however, very fucking stupid. It did more lasting damage to the economy than the Plague. We're still trying to unfuck it.

There's a personal side to that but I'll get to that. I promise.

But while the Big Grab was still getting rolling, and understand it was never quite a full governmental program, just an ad hoc response as things came to the Bitch's attention, the Bitch implemented the next stage of her Plan.

There was to be no triage. Not as such. Areas that were recoverable weren't to be designated. Areas that were write-offs weren't to be designated. She and her advisors would determine which areas were to be concentrated on, first.

Well, go figure. Looks like the blue states won out big-time. And especially blue counties.

Only one problem. If Brody Barnes had been asked, his contention was "they're mostly gone for the time being."

Go back to the trust thing. Think about multiculturalism. Look at Morristown vs. Blackjack. And blue counties tended to be heavily urbanized.

The cities were just a fucking wreck. At least for a time in almost all urban areas "essential services" broke down. Essential services are Maslov's hierarchy. Food and water are the big two. Security isn't really mentioned but before food started to run out looting became a major issue.

Ah. Looting vs. scavenging. In a disaster situation, there is a difference between looting and scavenging. Scavenging is a person coming out of a Winn-Dixie or Meijers with a shopping cart filled with canned goods and bottled water. Looting is a person coming out of Walmart with five TVs.

You help scavengers, you shoot looters. (Okay, okay, shoot me. It was too good to pass up! But I'm getting ahead of myself again.)

Inner city neighborhoods that had been the target of "specialized policing" were the absolute worst. These were the grasshoppers gathered in force. Trust barely existed within family groups. There was little or no social cohesion.

After the first wave of the Plague they were free-fire zones. I'd have rather walked down a street in Qom butt-assed naked than drive through South Detroit in a Stryker.

But not only were those areas where the bulk of her voters came from, they were where the news media was. If it bleeds it leads and it was bleeding hard in South Chicago, Detroit, Watts, East L.A., Washington, DC . . .

The worst spots were to be the target of the most concentrated effort.

There's a military term for this. It's called "slamming the wall." The basic concept is that if you take your enemy's strongest position, it will break him. It's also called "suicide." Porkchop Hill, the Somme, Coldwater Harbor. Historical examples of "slamming the wall." Also historical examples of highest casualty assaults. And none of them did a damned bit of good in the end.

Neither did pouring vital supplies into the free-fire zones.

And then there were the Rules of Engagement. They went way beyond "do not fire unless fired upon." Warrick was, after all, a lawyer. Written out, they went to five pages of flow diagrams. They were worse than the ones issued towards the latter part of the Iraq Campaign. Essentially they came down to "do not fire." Period. If you shot anyone, for any reason, you were probably going to jail.

Soldiers were prosecuted, during that period, for firing upon people who were actively firing at them. Guys went to Leavenworth who had bullets in their body-armor. Dozens of food shipments were lost to gangs that forced the soldiers to turn them over. It was that or have a fire-fight. And they were not permitted to fire. When it was more or less one on one, and it often was, not firing first meant heavy casualties. The leaders, and I don't blame them, were willing to give up the shipments rather than take the casualties.

Units were required to "maintain a minimum presence of force." That is, they weren't supposed to ride into the neighborhoods like an invading army. No matter how violent they were. Habeas corpus had been suspended but you couldn't tell it if you were a soldier. Unless, of course, you were up for punishment. Then you hadeus no corpus.

And some very heavy weapons had gotten into the hands of these gangs. One Stryker was hit and destroyed by a Javelin while escorting a food convoy. Most of the units doing the escorting didn't have Javelins issued. (A Javelin is an anti-tank missile. More about those, later, too.)

So while the red counties, the rural counties and smaller cities that made up "fly-over country" were organizing and recovering and hoping for some help, however little, the "blue" counties, many of which had gone completely bat-shit, were having food and medical supplies and emergency supplies shoveled into them like coal into a furnace and for about as much result.

Okay, they were not all losses. Notice I didn't mention Harlem, Queens or the Bronx. That's because they didn't ever get that bad. Not even close. Part of that was because the mayor refused to let it get that bad. Mortality had been incredibly low. Less than 20% and that, frankly, tended to be among grasshoppers. Police presence was high and the local National Guard unit had been turned into something closer to the New York militia. When they were ordered to displace to handle problems in New Jersey—Newark was one of the war zones—the orders were ignored.

Food shipments got to where they were supposed to go. Bodies were collected. Order never really broke down in New York. It's possible for at least a local government to maintain near normal conditions even in densely populated areas, even in a disaster as bad as the Plague. But it took strong and effective leadership. People have got to trust. Let's all work together said "I'm trusting you to trust me to not screw you." Enough people got the idea that it worked. The few "random associators" among New Yorkers supported the mayor. And the "King" types were willing to follow a strong man in a time of trouble. Call it a cult of personality.

Like I said, if Cranslow runs for President, I'll work with him. He's even a fiscal conservative. What the hell.

Chapter Nine Random Associations

The majority of the functional distribution, therefore, happened outside cities. Much of it was illicit. That is, food convoys were ordered to Philadelphia and "broke down" before they got there. And set up distribution stations. And fed people that needed it and weren't going to try to steal it. And, often, turned bulk materials over to "local random associations" for distribution.

Okay, the gangs were, often, local random associations, more or less. Some of them, especially Hispanic and Asian, were at core familial based. (And by Asian I don't mean just Chinese. Note the Caliphate.)

But they were not going to be, in turn, acting as useful distributors. The food was used for internal power. There was a touch of that in places with the churches and other associations (VFW did enormous if unheralded good during the Time). They had the food and they made the choices who ate and who did not. Generally, this was not race based as was often reported. It was, to an extent, based on trust issues. But mostly it was based on the same reasoning that young lady in Blackjack used. Feed local emergency services personnel first. Feed kids and elderly next. Feed random associators next. Feed the grasshoppers last.

There was a degree of blending and bonding during the Time which was unprecedented in American history. Generally, for actual biological reasons, people do differentiate on the basis of color. (Yes, babies do not. Children, by and large, do not. The trait kicks in at puberty. It can be culturally adjusted, but it's a defined human trait. A white child raised among Chinese is going to trust Chinese over whites. True study. Another urban myth trashed.) And there were then and are now bigots on that score.

But due to societal factors, random associators had a fair slice of military personnel in their midst. And military personnel deal with all kinds of colors when they're in. It's hard to be in the military for any time and not become to an extent color blind. They may look at cultural factors, but they tend to look past color per se. The two are not equal.

(Had a bit of an issue on that part just before the last Iran deployment. We were having a hard time getting a widget out of one particular supply unit. I paid them a visit to try to sweet-talk. Ended up talking with the unit commander. Didn't get far. And then the fuck-head had the audacity to say "I guess you're just not part of the African-American mafia." So I laughed and admitted I wasn't. And then I turned the whole thing over to the IG. Along with my report of the meeting. About three weeks later the unit commander was on his way out of the Army.

By the same token, Colonel Richards, just about the best fucking battalion commander I ever had, was black. Culture is not the same as race.)

So when a white kid walked up to one of the white distributors and asked for extra food to take back to his family, he was judged on his social appearance. Did he have his pants hanging down to his knees and his ball-cap on sideways? Was he wearing an earring? Did he look "ghetto"?

He'd better be known to the people doing the distribution or they'd tell him if someone had a chance they'd take some over but right now it was line up or nothing.

A black guy walking up to a line of distributors from a very white church might get the same perusal. If, however, he was neatly dressed and well spoken, and especially if he offered to help, he was likely to be trusted. He might be given food for more than just himself if there was extra.

Yes, there were those that used that to their advantage. But by and large judging on the basis of culture for trust works.

It was not only white churches that got largess from military units who were, increasingly and against orders, turning away from downtown areas. Any random association that seemed functional and valid might get a drop of food and medicines. A fucking mosque in St. Louis was eventually considered the best place to drop shipments. They handled them evenhandedly and very efficiently. Charity is one of the few things that Islamics get right.

Larger associations formed, very very much "back channel."

Example:

A white church in suburban Boston was running low on food. Suddenly, a convoy destined for the center of Boston "broke down" nearby and had to unload most of its supplies. Convenient?

A black church in Arkansas had received a similar largesse, in part because the first sergeant of the National Guard company doing the delivery had family in the church and they were not interested in going into the portion of Little Rock they were destined for.

The two churches, widely separated, were "sister missions" to each other. That is, there was some reciprocation of ministers and support. That mostly came down to the more wealthy church having, over the years, given financial support to the less wealthy. And, yes, that is white and black. And even after the Plague they had kept in contact through several means.

In this case bread upon the waters, as Jesus said, worked out. The XO of the National Guard company had been a member of 10th ID. He called one of his old bosses and mentioned that he'd heard there was a church group doing good works but struggling near Boston. 10th ID was working the Boston area. Voila "breakdown."

Bread upon the waters. Random associations.

Where there was not direct interference, it was random associations that started to rebuild the country. The economy was just screwed. But that didn't mean people didn't work and businesses didn't function to some extent. It was strange. There was a labor shortage and at the same time high unemployment. It was like the cost of goods. There were many hands that wanted to work and companies that were opening or managed to hang on and stay open that needed to fill the slots left open by deaths. It took time, though, to get those two together.

Communications never went down completely. There were times when it was impossible to get a phone call through to certain areas. And the Internet was a spotty thing. Not so much because of the trunks but because of local providers, functionality thereof.

But commo was spotty and screwed up. And there would be various scares of a new plague breaking out. It did in places. Miami had a cholera outbreak, more deaths. L.A. . . . Well, despite the best efforts of Warrick, or possibly because of them, L.A. was fucked. Cholera, resistant tuberculosis, typhus, they all broke out. And then there's the water situation. But that's a sideline I'll see about covering later.

And whenever there was a scare, the phone lines went down. All the connections weren't in place and as soon as anyone who still had access to a working phone heard a rumor, or a news report, which was often the same rumor, that a new plague had broken out they called friends or relatives in the area. And commo went down.

So let's look at an example.

Let's go back to the suburban family. The father was a guy working at a local fueling center. Now, this is a pump farm where the trucks that fuel gas stations go to fill up. Sometimes they're owned by one oil company but fill up all the trucks in the area, regardless of whose gas it's supposed to be. Not usually, but it happens.

Anyway, working one those places is a semi-skilled job. At the very least, a knowledge of the basic safety and emergency response is useful.

By and large, such places stayed up. Fuel was central and critical. They might not be going to a dozen gas stations anymore, but they were providing fuel to somebody. The military bought from such stations, fueling their fuel trucks at them.

But they'd taken hits in personnel. One in three, more or less at random. And as things started to reform, they were getting more and more trucks wanting fuel. Sometimes they ran out; it had to come from somewhere and the distribution system was in chaos. But the bottomline was, they needed bodies.

Say that the first family was in suburban Cincinnatti and the fueling station was, too. The husband was dead and buried under pansies. They get to the point they need a new fuel guy. Everyone's working overtime, for sometimes no pay but the company is making sure they get food, and they're getting worn out. They need another body. A warm one. Not the guy under pansies.

So they put out the word. They need a trained fuel technician.

All sorts of people walk over to the place. It's a job, man. Jobs are scarce. And the fuel company is making sure its people and their families get fed. But these are just bodies. They need someone with experience handling big quantities of fuel. They're too overworked to train someone, much as they need the body.

In the suburbs of Beltsville, itself a suburb, there's a former webdesigner who, during a single stint in the Army, worked a fuel distribution point in Iraq. She is a trained fuel transfer technician and has experience. But the place that needs her experience is in Cincinnatti. She's more than willing to go there to get a job and assured food. Maybe a bit of money left over for more than bare survival. It's a job, man.

Say that she still gets some Internet access, somehow. (Libraries still had some functionality.) Say that she finds the want ad on MonsterJobs.com. (Which came back up in June of 2019 and stayed up to this day.) How does she get to Cincinnatti? Note the "she." Hitchhiking is a choice of last resort. Major league trust issues.

In this case, not quite a random association. She puts her experience on the website along with a phone number at her local association (the VFW in her case, yes, it's taken from a real person's experience) where she can be reached.

The manager of the fuel point sees the hit and nearly jumps for joy. If it's legit. They'd had lots of people who could talk a good line about being experienced. One who was very good at talking had nearly blown the place up.

They get in contact. He quizzes her. She sounds good. But so did the nightmare. But how to get her to him?

Hey, fuel moves.

Mostly it moves by rail to distribution points like that. But they also handle more minor materials such as volume grease and oil. The military term is "POL": Petrol, (gasoline for Americans) Oil, Lubricants. Oil and lubricants, to a great degree, still moved by trucks.

There was a fuel point, from another company, near Beltsville. It had all the people it needed, but it also had trucks going north. The truckers, in this case, were known quantities.

Calls were made. E-mails were exchanged. (The oil companies had ensured their own connections to backbones long before the Plague. They were going to be hooked tight into the Internet if anything happened. They also had satellite connectivity if even that went down. Oil companies tend to be planners, too.)

She met a trucker at the "other company" fuel point who carried her to the outskirts of Philly where there was a distro point still open. From there, with the knowledge of the distro point manager, she caught another ride to another point. And so on. She had someone who knew who she was, where she was going and when she was supposed to arrive at each point.

She wasn't, really, a hitchhiker. She was a commodity being moved for the good of the companies. And while the companies were cutthroat, normally the exact opposite of "random voluntary associations" they also understood scratching back. When a favor was needed, it would be called. They trusted the other company, especially in these conditions, to be good for it.

She reached Cincinnatti and went to work.

By the way, there was a certain ignoring of paperwork in those days. Green cards were not necessary. Social security numbers were not necessary. Pay, by the same token, was spotty. Really long-thinking companies like oil companies tried to keep their people fed and mostly succeeded.

But it was still maximally fucked up.

The point to all this is that you can have massive unemployment and still have a labor shortage. Even if things are sort of bumping along, sort of, maybe, the "disruption" means that bodies, parts and everything else that is needed to keep any business going is scattered in the wrong places.

What saved the U.S. was a lot of people at fairly low levels working very hard to keep things going using any means necessary to do so. Like moving a skilled worker around via trucks that had strict regulations against picking up hitchhikers.

What nearly killed us were people in positions of power who wanted things to work the same way as pre-Plague.

There were articles and news reports on various "irregularities." Okay, that was a minor one and mostly overlooked even though she didn't file taxes for the whole of 2019. (Thank God for the Amnesty Bill is all I'll say.) Hell, she didn't officially work for Exxon for most of 2019 . . . Oops, did I say that out loud?

J

(Wife edit. Thanks a lot. If you think you're getting any for the rest of the year, think again!)

(Hell, most of 2020 you worked for the feds! Back off.)

(And it was a nightmare.)

But the worst "irregularities" were "price fixing."

Sigh. The government could do price fixing but not companies. Especially not oil companies.

Sigh.

Look, things were total suckage. People were still dying. There were very few truly functional banks. Nobody could figure out if we were dealing with run-away inflation or runaway deflation.

So a bunch of managers getting together and saying "We need to call a truce" just made sense. Don't compete. Associate for the common good. Wait until things cool down to go back to stabbing each other in the back as hard as we can.

They had a far better idea of what valid prices were than Warrick. They knew their costs, they knew their inventories (and when the on-hand inventory was out, it was going to be a while getting more oil on a national level. There was no chance of getting out of the Middle East, I can tell you that. Not sure of deploying troops to cover the pumping and transfer. Which we got around to eventually.) They consulted, they planned, they projected, they shook hands and they set their prices.

And they got hammered.

Oh. My. God. The news media led the charge. The evil oil companies were screwing the American People. Profits were soaring as prices were fixed by an unnamed cabal.

So Warrick nationalized the oil companies and arrested the "conspirators."

And that worked real well.

At that point she was nationalizing so many industries, many of which were effectively defunct, that she didn't have government employees to run them. Sure, she could just say "all of you are government employees" but who bells the cat?

Okay, take the oil companies.

Running an oil company is, at almost every single level, a very complex business. Receptionists are about the only people who don't require hours and weeks of training before you can let them do anything on their own. One wrong turn of the wrench in a refinery can mean a big boom. Figuring out how to get just the right inventory to Peoria, Kansas, means having figured out which ten thousand gallons of fuel from which tanker at what point in its voyage is going to go there months in advance. Not exactly, but functionally.

What does "you are nationalized" mean?

Well, in the case of Exxon (oops, sorry) it meant choosing a crony to become the CEO with all the perks, pay and privileges. Said crony being, effectively, a tofu-eater. Notably, the person put in charge of Exxon had, upon a time, been a senior member of Greenpeace. And an "environmental lawyer."

Metaphors on that one are tough. I guess putting Osama Bin Laden in charge of the Defense Department works.

The crony brought in more cronies who brought in more cronies. Their job was to make the oil company less evil not make sure it ran efficiently. Profits were no longer their objective; "serving the world" was their objective.

Some of the "service" that was required of the company during the brief reign of what were and are called "the fucktards" were odd to say the least. Okay, so they had to be even more environmentally conscious than they already were. I'm not an oil guy, that would be someone I know and she's not a guy, (Thanks) but there's this thing called "the law of diminishing returns."

Look, refineries were already about as clean as they were going to get. Spills were a major response issue. Emissions were pretty low, all things considered.

Getting the emissions lower required engineering that was horrendously expensive and, at the time, unavailable. The refineries were having a hard enough time just continuing to function. Installing more and better emission systems simply was not an option. Who was going to make them? They don't grow on trees! They grow in China on trees!

But they had to get lower. And gas has to get cheaper. Oh, and you need to start contributing to various funds. Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund. And pay these huge numbers of grasshoppers exorbitant salaries so that they can get back to their grasshopper lifestyle even though they're not actually contributing anything but bitching to the company.

And contribute to the presidential election campaign, by the way. I mean, I'm the CEO. I can cut a check if I want to.

First of all, there weren't profits for the first two years of the Time. There was also no infrastructure renewal, damned little maintenance and there was barely money to pay the workers. The oil companies had been providing fuel to major farm corporations in return for food that was then distributed down to, well, the level of a lady working in a refueling plant.

That was illicit collusion and had to stop.

Because most of the tofu-eaters didn't understand the oil business, or any of the many other businesses they were put in charge of, they were often flat ignored. They did so love meetings, especially meetings with obsequious and chastened oil company executives bowing and scraping and giving long PowerPoint presentations. They were taken to refineries and shown all the new "environmental improvement systems," many of which were cobbled together from spare pipe and flashy lights, and generally led around by the nose in the hope that grown-ups might get back in charge.

And in cases where they weren't ignored, or things fell apart anyway, the government then had to pick up the slack and actually try to run things. That worked about as well as any communist-run organization. And there were cases where workers rioted or quit despite the employment conditions or went on strike and had to be told "get back to work, slaves!"

Another lovely job of the Army. In that case, the rules of engagement were somewhat reduced.

The Army had long experience of mob control, though, if not in the U.S. And commanders tended to negotiate rather than open fire. The workers, many of which had a certain respect for the military, tended to talk things out as well.

(This, by the way, was slightly different than the case of the Long Beach Oil Terminal. In that case, the strikers were led by a very hard-core union group that stated that it had "seized the means of production for the people" and was less than willing to negotiate. Actually, they didn't want to negotiate, they simply had demands that had to be met or "the oil terminal would be destroyed." When President Warrick dithered the commander of SOCOM ordered Delta to deal with the situation. Delta dealt. The remaining strikers, with ten dead ringleaders being carried out by their heels, went back to work. The SOCOM commander was court-martialed as was the group commander who carried out the mission. Delta got gutted. But oil flowed. Ex-General Pennington is being bruited for the next secretary of Defense. Got my vote.)

Look, civilian control of the military is a very important thing. If the military doesn't obey their civilian commanders, sooner or later you get Generalissimo Jones trying to run things and making things worse. We knew that. That bedrock belief went all the way back to George Washington who, when some of his officers wanted to mutiny, ordered them to swear an oath to always obey the orders of the government, no matter how bad they seemed. It was the foundation of The Society of Cincinnatus. I'm not a member since I'm not descended from any of them. The S-4 in Iran was, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the concept.

But we were being told to do things that were clearly unconstitutional, and the Constitution is what we swear an oath to not the President, while simultaneously being told to do things that were suicidal.

Did we ever slip control, totally? No. But at first at lower levels then at higher and higher we started to ignore The Bitch. When told to do something clearly illogical, we tended to tune it out and do something more logical. Or at least survivable. We got people fed when we had the food. We distributed to groups we trusted. We were color blind on that but not culture blind and sure as hell not tactically blind.

On an actual functional level, we implemented the original Plan, even if we didn't realize it at the time.

We reacted, adapted and overcame.

Which, finally, leads to "let's talk about me."