Saying that we’ve given up on Covid-Zero, then that case numbers will rise a lot, so much so that home self-isolation will supplant MIQ, and that the track-and-trace system won’t cope, are all “tells” that we’re being softened up to accept endemic Covid-19 as a victory after which life returns to normal, with no daily news of case numbers or even deaths, as is the case every flu season.

Two interesting, if longish articles.

The first is from The Spectator and it starts off by looking at how we’re feeding the world via monoculture, taking the specific example of pigs and comparing their slaughter nowadays to how it was done when Thomas Hardy described it in Jude the Obscure. Anybody who has ever slaughtered and cut up an animal (in my case sheep but never a pig) knows what’s involved: it’s a wonder I never turned vegetarian or vegan.

To accomplish all of this on the industrial scale necessary to feed the gaping maws of our teeming masses requires a great deal of pigs, of course, estimated at some 700 million heads worldwide, but also a commensurate number of abattoir workers. It is a thankless occupation — grisly, physically demanding, and necessitating a certain amount of cognitive dissociation from the macabre task at hand.
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With the imposition of pandemic-related immigration restrictions, alongside various Brexit disruptions, we are told that the shortage of butchers and abattoir workers in the United Kingdom is such that there now exists a slaughtering backlog of at least 120,000 pigs, a number increasing by 12,000 more every day that passes. These pigs naturally continue to gorge themselves, in some cases expanding to 55 pounds or more over prime, meaning that their pens are now bursting at the joints.

It also means that the pigs don’t fit into the supply chain machinery, which means that Britain (and other nations) are looking at emergency pig culling, which was done in the USA in 2020. Last year I wrote an article (The Perils of the Modern Supply Chain) on the problems posed by the pandemic because of the modern emphasis of Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing, specifically in the case of the world of food production, but this article goes further than mine did by looking at the waste and the philosophy:

Now we have a new abiding symbol of modern industrial just-in-time agriculture: row upon row of euthanized pigs dumped into hastily-dug, wood-chip-lined shallow graves, beasts rotting in the sun, destined never even to “turn into pork,” at best serving as a very expensive compost additive. Surely this is the reductio ad absurdum of an entire way of life — our own — and yet more support for Leopold Kohr’s incontrovertible dictum that “whenever something is wrong, something is too big.”

However, this is merely another step in a process of mechanisation started over a century ago. I was pleased to learn of a book that draws attention to how much of this development came out of the famous stockyards and slaughterhouses of Ye Olde Hometown, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992) by one William Cronon:

“An industry,” Cronon continued, “that had formerly done its work in thousands of small butcher shops around the country must be rationalized to bring it under the control of a few expert managers using the most modern and scientific techniques. The world must become Chicago’s hinterland.” This was an epochal rupture with the past,

I appreciated the article’s exploration of the political and even spiritual implications of all this too, particularly where it likens how we’ve moved from treating animals this way to how we treat ourselves in our “urban pens”. I was especially struck by this passage:

It was in two recent Substack pieces, “We Are All Cattle Now” and “Bovine Coronavirus and Us,” that a German researcher writing under the nom de plume Eugyppius made the astute observation that “coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results,” adding that:

Our own SARS-2 vaccines, despite their fancy mRNA and virus vector technology, are entirely of a piece with veterinary standards. They have a poor side effect profile, they provide only temporary and partial protection against infection, and they are deployed on a vast scale with no regard for the evolutionary pressure they place on the virus or their broader consequences for infection dynamics. These are normal standards in the context of industrial livestock, where most animals are not raised to live very long in any event, and the risk of occasional accidents — inadvertently favouring or even causing lethal superstrains, or inflicting widespread vaccine injuries — can be weighed against the economic loss associated with mortality from infections.

Speaking as a farmer I can’t tell you how appalled I am at the regular feeding of antibiotics in the US cattle industry. It’s likely only because the animals don’t “live very long” that we haven’t had a lethal disease jumping from cattle to humans – yet. Of course we have had bird flu out of the Asian meat markets.

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The second article is a blog piece that keys off a book published in 1890 by a James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, and the writer uses that book to take a sometimes serious, sometimes funny look at modern magical beliefs, A Study in Comparative Religion, which looks at two such beliefs, provides some history and modern context.

Frazer’s First Law of Magic: Similarity

Backward countries even have an example called a Cargo Cult where, for example, cell phones and aeroplanes are made out of wood and expected to function because they are similar to the real thing.
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When we see people wearing masks alone in their cars or far from everyone in the outdoors, or we see Covid Karens and their like with breathing holes cut in their already useless masks it’s clear that, to themselves, masks are a totem object. The mask is not expected by the masses to have any scientific use but rather gains its power by resembling something else that does

Frazer’s Second Law of Magic: Law of Contact

Think here of lucky charms such as a rabbits foot or Peter Blake’s lucky Red Socks (1995.) Think of medieval pilgrim trails visiting various holy places to be near a holy relic claimed to be the shin bone or the skull or other cast-off body parts of some Christian saint or other
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When it comes to COVID-19 Hysteria, ,what difference is an Ashley Bloomfield Tshirt, towel, or tote bag from other ritual totem objects?
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Contact Tracing is the obsession of the population for which daily statistics are collected and the masses transfixed by. Given that Law 2 is literally called Law of Contact and Contagious Magic it could not be more transparent to anyone following along. The afflicted all want to know who has been contaminated, when, and where while our modern witchdoctors dutifully accommodate using all the power of modern broadcast technology.
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The old Law 2 magic that stated cell phones could ignite petrol pumps was replaced by the new Law 2 myth that one had to “Scan In” to defeat the Contagion that preys upon the non-hyper-vigilant anxious-paranoid. Those who are not hyper-vigilant anxious-paranoid are regarded as suspicious and known by their chilled normalcy and failure to perform conspicuous rites such as Scanning In and Mask Wearing,

I also appreciated the comparison with the modern era of Frazer’s ideas of positive and negative magic (Sorcery and Taboo)

An old time Maori chief and tohunga priest casting a taboo would use the word “tapu” or “rahui” but for the Prime Minister and Director-General of Health it is called Lockdown. They taboo cities, districts, even the entire country on-again-off-again by changing prescriptions referred to as Levels.

The Prime Minister has singled out particular people and particular businesses during the daily spell-casting which serves as a warning to others who would be ruined socially and financially if they do not comply with the spell.

I also like the section on The Sovereign Magicians, featuring guess who…

Rulers and their priests (media and academic) are the major beneficiaries of a little amount of superstition, according to Frazer. When, as in the most primitive people, superstition is widespread nobody has a monopoly on magic. As the irrationality is driven out of everyday life the remaining users of Magic are considered especially powerful to those who believe they exist at all.

Not to mention the Chief Priestess herself. The article ends on a hopeful note:

If the mass taboo magic were to wear out the Orwellian Double Think superstructure it depends on beyond Ardernian running software patches (such as “It’s a tricky virus” or “Delta is a Game Changer”) then the psychosis would become exhausted and end.

At this point a good magician would get out ahead of the inevitable Taboo Market Crash by declaring victory over COVID-19 and making herself scarce before the tar and feathers come out.

Saying that we’ve given up on Covid-Zero, then that case numbers will rise a lot, so much so that home self-isolation will supplant MIQ, and that the track-and-trace system won’t cope, are all “tells” that we’re being softened up to accept endemic Covid-19 as a victory after which life returns to normal, with no daily news of case numbers or even deaths, as is the case every flu season.