They Seem to Be Blinking

Published at 15:47 on 5 June 2020

The Pentagon is backing off a bit. More then likely, Esper realizes how vulnerable his side is. More than likely, there has been private pushback from active officers that makes the public pushback from retired officers (of which there has been no shortage) look tame by comparison.

The question is, what happens after Esper is fired. Make no mistake, he will be fired. He has gone against the orange god-king’s wishes.

My guess at this point is that the clock is going to start running out. For a variety of reasons, these protests have been many things, but a good (or even an incomplete and halfhearted) implementation of social distincing they have not been. I may expound more on this aspect later, but the important fact right now is that the virus doesn’t care about what’s personally important to you.

It doesn’t care, because it can’t care. It’s a virus. It can infect people via protest rallies as easily as it can infect them via church services. As such, a big spike in cases is coming, and sooner rather than later. There is about a two-week incubation period for COVID-19, and we are now at day eleven of the protests.

The virus will therefore soon do what Grandpa Ranty has been unable to do by angrily tweeting and making shows of force, i.e. quell the energy in the streets. The window for revolution (which really does exist) will close and pass.

Such is life. Politics, to invert von Clausewitz, is war by other means, and in war one is never totally in control; so much of it depends on what one’s enemy does, and what happens in the overall environment.

One thing it does mean is that the unexpected economic uptick last month is likely to prove itself a blip and not the start of a trend. Not only is there going to be a resurgence in the pandemic, there are also many fatally wounded but not yet defunct businesses which will inevitably fail in the coming months.

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