a distant mirror and a current issue

So…. Coronavirus ey?

In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s forever wonderful book, there’s much description on how society changes.

For whatever reason, Coronavirus is disproportionately killing elderly people and while it sickens pretty much everyone, kids are getting much lighter versions of it. If a lot of elderly people die, there will be a wealth transfer that’s the greatest in a generation – right into the middle of what will probably be an 18 month long global recession, and assuming that we don’t have a global or large regional war to deal with at the same time which would be accurate historically except for large swathes of Indigenous territories excepting Central America which got wealthy enough (always a Bad Fucking Sign) to support standing armies.

Backing away from that rathole, this is a time to bring notaries to bedsides in hospitals all over the planet. Elderly people are about to experience a mass mortality event, just when we have need of all the good husbandry tacked into their clever brains as amassed across a lifetime. More avariciously speaking, as soon as the dust and mold and unknown fibres clear from one disaster, many mini disasters, like tornadoes in the wake of a hurricane, will be spawned as lawsuits arise over inheritances. Guess which class of human being will be disproportionately affected by COVID-19? JUDGES. So at a time when there will be a lot of disputes, there will be fewer adjudicators. You know what happens when there are a lot of unadjudicated property disputes dumped into a traumatized population? You’re not stupid, you can guess, but I see private drinking as a hobby becoming super popular in the next ten years. Breweries and distilleries for the win.