Meanwhile, in Modena

We use words like "piling on" as a metaphor, but then I heard about the giant Saharan dust cloud taking the trouble to stay intact, at an hilariously large size, all the way westward across the whole-ass Atlantic Ocean just to jab us in the eye when we're at our most vulnerable. Seriously, it will leave little tiny piles of grit in its wake as it barrels through, residue of the parts that we don't inhale. A literal breathing hazard upon us when we're in the middle of breathing hazards, some caused by disease and some by deliberate acts of state violence. I'm not sure if this kind of malicious targeting is new or it's just that now we have a word for it since the internet both invented and recognized "trolling" as a verb.

It really does feel like we're being trolled by the planet we're native to, which is dangerous if you consider that as far as we know so far, it's the only one in the whole universe that will have us. Yes, scientists like to talk about "super earths" in "habitable zones" around other "stars," but all those ideas are pure probability speculation. Until we get a probe down on a surface to send us back something we can YouTube, it's all pretend. And even then, about a third of us still won't believe it anyway, no matter how incontrovertible.

This is all another way of saying: yes, death is bad and diseases are bad and transoceanic asphyxiation vortexes are bad, but... maybe they're the right thing?

I'm not saying we made them happen by any direct action, no. That would be stupid. That would be like saying giraffes have long necks so they can reach food higher up in trees. That's the end result of the process, but it's important to decentralize intent and understand processes as processes. The outcomes are a sort of mathematical expression, an unavoidable expression at the end of a series of events that could not have finished in any other fashion. Giraffes don't decide to have long necks. No amount of neck-stretching is ever going to achieve the desired result, no matter what years of direct-mail-marketing "male-oriented herbal supplements" would have you believe. They get longer because a long neck is an advantage, resulting in access to better food, making for stronger specimens more likely to have their traits passed down through the act of giraffe-boning, however that works. Honestly, I can't fathom the logistics of it really. Does one... mount the other one? How does that structure support itself? The only picture in my head is a couple of poorly stacked ladders kind of, I don't know, shuddering.

What I'm saying is there's nothing we could have done directly as a human to get Saharan dust clouds and murder hornets. I kind of want to make fun of "murder hornets" for turning out not to be that big of a deal, but let's not be hasty. There's always a chance one speaks too early and ends up Gaetzing himself.

Well, I guess I didn't consider climate change... like, maybe we're more likely to get a freak-style sand cloud from Tatooine because all the world's weather is fucked past recognition because of all the families of three driving Chevy Suburbans for no goddamned reason and shit like that. And maybe that's what's driven the murder hornet migration too, they're just really stingy climate refugees?

In retrospect the giraffe example wasn't great because evolution is a biological process and we're dealing with social processes. Consequences are results of actions. Actions come from institutions, institutions come from systems, systems come from structures, structures are derived from predilections and predilections are born out of character. It's a straight line. There are noises and distractions about ideals, but you can skip right over that when you're tracing a straight line from a measurable consequence and the character of a people. I mean, look at this shit:

As a measure of character, I think the only logical conclusion (as disease numbers in Europe and Asia and Oceana plummet and flatten and fade out) is: we don't actually have any.

The virus is beatable. We know because it's been beaten in I think every other society that has made an honest effort at it. We're at the point now where the only coherent conclusion is that we have opted not to.

The president is who the president is as a result of the type of people we are right now. He didn't impose himself on us and drag us down, we conjured him out of nothing. The only real hope is that enough of us see a little more clearly once all the dust settles.