by John Ringo
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 o
r 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 sprea
d 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.
