Ever since my holiday in Japan, where my backside experienced pampering in all sorts of ways, I have grown increasingly aware of the inferiority of the Common Toilet and its frigid, fragile, flimsy construction. Cold plastic, against my bum cheeks, in winter? Please.
This awareness was compounded by the events of the last 18 months, during which I have learned a difficult and enlightening lesson – that one cannot simply take for granted the perennial availability of toilet paper.
The coarse, fibrous nature of public restroom toilet papers have, indeed, rubbed me in the wrong way more times than I would care to admit; it seemed rather jarring that, in a time when everyone was concerned about personal hygiene, we were still traversing our buttholes with nary but a film-thin plant-based barrier between the tips of our fingers and the gaping maws of Cthulhu.
Even while taking care of business at home, I could not help but notice that – being a twice-a-day number-two-taker myself – I was burning through toilet paper at a rate that would put the lumber conglomerates carving though the Amazon to shame. This was ridiculous, I thought – there would be no need for this barbarism, for this finger-Cthulhu adjacency, if I could just employ a device that, not only provided heated comfort for my poo-fort, but also eliminated the need for Lovecraftian horror every time I partook in takeaway curry.
In these harsh times, a bidet is no less than a font of deliverance. Not since humanity first learned to walk on two legs have their limbs been liberated to such an extent. With a bidet, when you browse Reddit on the toilet, you no longer need to worry about cross-contaminating the shit online with the shit offline. Your hands are freed, and your mind with them.
With the press of a button, you imbibe refreshment through your posterior orifice with calibrated efficiency. No more daring the abyss. No more relying on the consistency of a plant-corpse for your hygiene. You are the master of your own fate now. Let the cleanliness flow through you; purified you shall be of the taint of the world and the taint on your body.
With an additional button press, a tropical breeze shall dehumidify the Chasm of Endless Night with the power of science and ingenuity. There is no need to wipe – unless, of course, you still harbour lingering doubts about that which you have already let go.
What is the Common Toilet, compared to the bidet? It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is a shackle around the feet of human progress.
Set yourself free, and by the glory of the bidet you shall embrace all that is good in the world with hands sanctified and pristine, as I do now.
Another failure to support hotel quarantine workers, another lockdown, this time in Western Australia.
There is no excuse this time, no “we didn’t see this coming”. South Australia already tore up that ticket.
Once again, frontline staff were left to fend for themselves. At least this time, the public discourse is less of a “whether we should allow them to work second jobs”, and more “maybe we should pay them more so they don’t have to”.
After what happened in literally every other state, there is no way the government was still ignorant of the necessity of supporting their quarantine workers. A dozen advisory panels and committees and internal assessments would have made the risks very clear.
But nope. Once again, it was shitty wages, long hours, and treating what are essentially frontline healthcare workers like lower-class minions, unworthy of a higher pay, because they don’t mine gold or sell stock.
This display of wilful ignorance implies that the government understood the risk of community transmission, looked what happened last time, and said, “nah, there’s nothing we could do better”.
They have chosen to use lockdown as political theatre.
In America they have “tough on crime.” In Australia it’s “tough on the virus”.
Even now, the political parties are shuffling their cabinets, competing to see who has the toughest stance on the virus, who has done a better job at containing the pandemic – all in anticipation of the upcoming election, which is certain to be this year, while both parties can still ride the plague to their advantage.
“I got us the vaccine!” “I locked down my state to prevent the spread!” “No I locked down faster!” “No I locked down harder!”
Fucking bullshit. If you cared, you would’ve fixed on the hotel quarantine system – the first line of defense – and taken care of the workers that were the vulnerability last time.
With our way of life largely adapted to social-distancing, lockdowns have become less of a shock to the economy. Critical workers get exemptions, big industries still operate, and the market still trades high.
Now that the states pretty much understand what to expect, lockdowns have become political leverage. The measure of last resort is now seen as an easy way to appear “tough on the virus”. Never mind that the most effective containment method, once again, would have been to fix the hotel quarantine system.
Arrange special accommodation for your quarantine worker; make it opt-in; incentivize participation with a high salary. If there really is a socially irresponsible idiot under your employ, who, after his shift, enjoys going to the pizza shop to blow his nose, then under special accommodation he wouldn’t have had the chance. And he would’ve been happy to stay put, since he’s getting paid enough to get by on the one job.
Instead, they saw the risks and said, “nah, would rather risk community transmission than paying these guys more. What are the chances of the virus getting out anyway?”
Really, there are no excuses anymore, only the reality that the decision-makers don’t gives a shit.
Two weeks before the city of Wuhan was given a 12-hour notice to shut down, the headline news result in the Chinese search engine Baidu had read: Official Statement From The WHO: No Human-to-Human Transmission.
In those 12 hours, five million people fled from of that city, a sizable number of whom from the railway transit hub that was less than a kilometre away from the wet market at the epicentre of the outbreak.
Tedros Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, throughout most of January, publicly maintained that there was no transmission risk, despite having received no such confirmation from WHO’s own field team in China.
Now, almost one year later, the WHO is still sending out guidelines on recommended containment strategies, while at the same actively avoiding consulting Taiwan, the place that has objectively done the best at containing the outbreak.
The hard work of thousands of professionals, in the world’s foremost public health organization, was undermined from the very beginning by its leader, who at every turn impeded the effective operation of his own staff.
Normally, we would give a guy like him a break. Once you take a bribe, there is no going back. For a couple million bucks, you run the risk of being blackmailed for the rest of your life, of having your dealings publicly exposed the moment you say something out of line. It’s a tough life. Spare a prayer for the corrupt; they are but indentured servants with eight-digit savings in Deutsche Bank.
At some point, however, they need to be confronted with the impact of their actions. Having them visit one ICU is not enough. Telling them, a million people have died because of their wilful negligence, is not enough. Having tumbled in bureaucratic mud pits for their whole lives, these leaders have skins so thick, almost nothing will impress them.
It will take daily conditioning to make them feel even a shred of guilt.
Take the head of the WHO into every hospital that is packing coronavirus patients into the ICU and running low on PPE. Make him wear one flimsy used mask as he visits twenty hospitals a day, seven days a week, at every epicentre around the world. Make him lay flowers at the graves of every one who has died of the coronavirus. Make him explain to their families, that in January, it was he that told the world that nothing was going on in China, that everything was under control. Every family. Every day. For the rest of his life.
Maybe then, dear Tedros will regret taking Chinese money.
To Make An Example
One might say, wait, that’s too extreme. No one deserves that kind of life-long humiliation for a lack of moral character.
What will be the consequence, then, for killing millions of people around the world?
It’s not a criminal offense. No one’s going to jail over it, except for the doctors and citizen journalists who had tried to investigate what was going on in Wuhan back when it all started.
Some kind of reparation is probably due. Emptying Tedros’s bank account could probably pay for a hundred ICU beds, which is a good start but is not enough. Asking China for reparations is the financially sensible path, but, well, good luck with that, when even getting an apology for a doctored image posted by a low-ranking official is met with derision.
Before reparations can be found, there needs to emerge a winner from this pandemic. If Germany had won in WWI, it would be them asking the world for war reparations, not the other way around. In 2020, the winner of the pandemic will not be the country with the least deaths, but the one to come out of it with the best economy.
China is positioning itself as just that. By every matrix its economy has already recovered.
It doesn’t matter that its GDP figures are bullshit. As long as they are the official figures accepted by the international community, they can act like the winner. The global economy has integrated to such a point, and the stock market has detached from reality to such a degree, that unemployment could hit record highs at the same time as the DOW. Pretending to be rich has become indistinguishable from actual rich. Just ask the Donald.
The only way to break the ego of the pretend-winner is to show them that their success is an illusion.
Realistically, this will never happen. Hundreds of thousands of multinational corporations depend on the maintenance of this illusion of prosperity to uphold their profits. To break it is to shoot themselves in the foot, and lose millions of Chinese customers.
Take iron ore as an example. China doesn’t need any more low-quality steel, but has to keep buying it from Australia to maintain a critical rate of industrial expansion, so that its economy can be propped up by infrastructure spending. Australia, too, will never stop selling it to China. Ever since the GFC, the expansion of the mining sector has been dependent on China buying Australian ore, as most other major markets, like Japan, have been well saturated. To stop selling to China is to forfeit the sector’s only realistic new revenue stream – it’s never going to happen.
Just as Trump will insists into the grave that he has won the 2020 election, so will China insist unto eternity that its economy has never been stronger. Multinational corporations, knowing how much money they can make from that market, will never question this statement.
There is a way out of this loop.
Just as it is morally right to ask TedrosGhebreyesus to pay for his wilful negligence, but wrong to ask WHO – the organisation – to foot his bill, so it is morally right to target the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP – but not China itself – when it comes to economic action.
It has become difficult to separate China from the CCP. The confusion was intentionally cultivated, so that when the CCP inevitably fails – like the unleashing of this pandemic – they could take China itself as hostage and declare, ‘how dare you blame our hard-working people for this natural disaster?’
In economic terms, this means separating Chinese State-Owned Enterprises, or SOEs, from private Chinese corporations. The former is an extension of the CCP in the free market, the latter, at least in part, plays by market rules.
China has a law that dictates that every foreign company that wishes to operate within its borders must form a subsidiary that is partly owned by an SOE. This law essentially forces multinational corporations into working for the CCP – or be barred from the market.
Except, there is now one exception.
Tesla. Elon Musk.
Their new Chinese giga-factory is 100% owned and operated by Tesla, a foreign company.
The reason being, that Teslas are in such high demand in China, and so technologically superior compared to domestically-produced electric vehicles, that Elon had all the leverage in the world when it came to negotiations with the CCP.
Now, if Elon was a better person, he could have demanded all sorts of labour rights for his Chinese workers, but the whole point of having a factory there was to cut labour costs. One step at a time, folks.
To be fair, not everyone can be as great as Elon, and iron ore is no cutting-edge product – but one exception paves the way for another.
It will take inordinate effort to turn basic commodities like iron ore or brown coal into indispensable bargaining chips. Perhaps a new, more efficient refinery process could be created based on the specific chemical composition of Australian ore, and propagated to Chinese steel mills. Regardless of how unrealistic such ideas are, they should still be explored – otherwise there will never be a leverage, never a break from this cycle of profit dependence.
Counterespionage
Trump has recently announced that it will no longer be possible for communist party members to obtain long term visas to the US.
While that sounds good on paper, the US does not have access to the party member register, and therefore has no idea who is or isn’t a member. They can’t even reliably distinguish who is a member of the Chinese military. As far as visa frauds go, this is going to be a trivial hurdle to get past.
Here is a better idea.
Remember those 12 Hong Kong activists who were arrested on a speedboat and jailed in China? Sooner or later they will resurface reading letters of confession, pleading guilty to their crimes, and be let back into the real legal system, and receive jail terms from a real judge in Hong Kong.
Taking a letter from that playbook, every Chinese person who wishes to enter the US – or any other applicable location – as a part of their visa application process, should make a video featuring themselves declaring that they are in no way affiliated with the communist party, and post it on social media. The video should be publicly accessible, both from within China and outside it.
If you didn’t have any understanding of a CCP member’s psyche, you’d think that this is entirely pointless, since they can just lie, but in reality, it’s one thing to systematically lie on a template form, and quite another to declare it to the world. Most party members will be physically incapable of vocalizing this declaration in public, even when they know they’re lying. The fear for unspecified reprisals for public repudiations of the party is so huge in their minds, that even a deceptive one will cripple them.
Visa hoops are easy to implement, since most times it’s just a matter of changing some guidelines in the Department of Immigration, rather than laws. Unreasonable visa rules are bread-and-butter for developed nations. If you can separate children from their parents at the border, if you can lock up asylum seekers on an island indefinitely, you can make CCP members shoot a video.
Julian's Blog 