Coup or Grace?

Monday of Thanksgiving week.

In the US, one of the Trump lawyers has been fired, after pushing a conspiracy theory that the maker of the software provider for the vote counting was somehow in cahoots with Chavez of Venezuela, who died over a decade ago. This seems to have been too much even for Giuliani, who is trying to push ‘reputable’ conspiracy theories such as a massive plot to commit voter fraud, stuff ballot boxes, and ignore votes for Trump, or that individuals errors in counties should be adequate justification for throwing out all the votes in those counties.

They are melting down, and it is ugly to watch.

We also have seen almost nothing of Pence, Barr or Pompeo, or any of the other enablers of Trump. 

It makes me think that either they are hiding to avoid being smeared (too late) or there is something brewing. I have a hard time thinking what it is, though civil unrest on a massive scale remains possible. That would then require the intervention of Federal law enforcement (as in Portland earlier in the year) but with the goal of intimidating states to select Electors that will vote for Trump. I have no idea what it will take. There may even be a simple attempt to stop some states from ending Electors at all, and in doing so, put the election into the House of Representatives.

Too much quiet from the White House is scary at a time like this. I don’t actually think that Trump and his minions are simply watching TV and playing golf. That is not plausible. Hiding from what’s coming is possible, but unlikely.

So what the hell is going on?

A Thanksgiving-Day Coup?

…

If Trump calls on the Pentagon to send troops to a city, any city, will the generals refuse? If he (or his installed and presumably loyal new [acting] Secretary of Defence) issues a completely legal order, then a borderline order, and then an outright illegal order, at what stage will the generals say “no”?

Will there be an attack on Amerika, say a terrorist attack or other false flag attacks that gives Trump his opportunity to do what Giuliani tried to do after 9/11; delay completion of the election process?

Will he start a war on the way out? But how can he use that to seize power? It will need to be a war in which he can, quickly, smear key members of the Biden camp as traitors and lock them up. Who would let him get away with it?

Will he use the Supreme Court to support the rejection of some ballots in Pennsylvania, and use that as an excuse to exclude all ballots in Atlanta or in a state such as Wisconsin? 

I don’t know, but I cannot believe that he is simply sitting there doing nothing.

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Equally, is it possible that he has just “given up”? That he is simply sitting in the White House waiting for the final call that all options have been exhausted. Sitting in the bunker, so to speak. 

He lost the popular vote twice in a row. The first time the distribution of Electors as defined by the Constitution favoured him. This time that same distribution worked against him. He also lost the popular vote by a greater margin this time. He won more votes in total than he did in 2016, but far more people voted, and the votes were against him. 

So is he simply waiting, playing golf, and preparing to go into internal or external exile, picking the safest place to go to avoid extradition, if it comes to that? And preparing himself for a continuation of the Trump Survival Program from before 2016 – stall in the courts, sue anyone who says anything against him, and keep appealing, all the while looking for a deal that will keep him out of jail and keep most of his assets intact. 

Is he right now negotiating deferrals and changes to the loans that he owes? Is he looking at how to kick-start a media empire to crush Fox?

As a president, he has been a complete failure, with his only wins being the provision of tax cuts for the wealthy and destruction of the social and environmental protections that have taken so many years to implement. 

But will he go quietly?

The Washington Post reports: “Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman, said the president is “hard at work fulfilling the promises he made to the American people and building on his unprecedented accomplishments as he works to rebuild our economy, lower drug costs, end the endless foreign wars by bringing our troops home, and deliver on his ambitious goal to have a safe and effective covid-19 vaccine before the end of the year.””

Not only is all of that bullshit, but everyone seems to know that it is bullshit. Each and every one of the claims in that paragraph is false, and he has accomplished none of them, nor will he. Nor could he even if re-elected.

Yet still, his minions continue to lie for him, afraid of the end of their own careers and hopes if they cross him. They are linked to him, and their only hope is for a successor Trumpist to be identified, and for that successor to recognise their ability to be loyal no matter what.

Meanwhile, he is silent, and that still scares me.

The Interregnum

There is so much going on, while at the same time it seems ‘quiet’; the interregnum between the almost-dead but not quite king, and the usurper waiting for the body to be declared cold.

The party of the king knows full well that its time is up, for now. They also do not expect the king to survive exile. So the ‘game’ being played now is to continue to demonstrate ‘loyalty’ to the king so that he does not have a reason to disown any individual. That is happening, to those that he thought were either disloyal or inadequately obsequies.

The sons (and daughter) of the king can be disposed of later, and that is lurking in the minds of those that are positioning themselves to take the mantle. None know how long it will take, but the king is finished. Armies are gathering that will sweep him away, and their own RINOs are deserting the flag in droves. Exile awaits. But where? And how soon? How to manage the process of going into exile without appearing to be routed.

But the king retains a huge following in the peasantry. They will be loyal. As long as you tell them that they are better than the other peasants, they will follow. As long as you protect anyone who kills those that are (God’s own preachers reinforce this) lesser people, then all is good. Those non-white, those educated, those working, those simply not like them but wanting to build better lives; they are the threat. And the under-educated whites will rally to the cause of anyone who will ‘protect’ them. If everyone’s life become marginally better, or even a little worse, as long as it is the others that suffer more, all is good. And if the others progress in any way, then it was not through work, not through education, and not through any effort, they succeeded only because the ‘system’ supported them, smoothed their path, gave to them.

And the peasantry is easy to lead. Just keep reminding them that God loves them alone, and therefore all sins are forgiven. All. That includes the (not-sin) of arming themselves to the teeth to protect the constitution, a document 95% of them have never read, do not understand, and couldn’t really care less about – except that part that says that a black man counts as only 2/3 of a white man.

The other side is gathering, and are simply waiting for the coronation. That will come, but for now, it is important to appear as the king-in-waiting, and not to like another wanna-be princeling. And it is working. The unasked, and unanswered question is what retribution will be visited upon those who stayed loyal to the old king (not that the new king is a young man, so exactly the same games are being played on that side).

Some, like me, hope there will be public beheadings, and that the king’s children will be stripped of everything, loaded into an oxcart, and paraded to the guillotine. They deserve it. That won’t happen of course, because only the mob can actually convict the children. Regicide is one thing, murder of the entire family is Ottoman.

But the incoming king’s party is looking at how much they can extract from the current king’s adherents, and how they can break his party fully.

Of the remaining loyalists, the toadies such as Cruz and Jordan, and the newcomers like Getz, are all continuing their spouting of loyalties, rallying the fodder for one last battle. Lindsey Graham is playing the dog who knows just how hard he will be kicked if he doesn’t play the game, bark in the right direction, and lick his master’s boot. All see it. All are revolted by it. All, that is, except for his own limited power base. He is someone upon whom history will not look favourably, if he is more than a footnote as the demonstration of the pandering sycophant that he is.

Meanwhile, plague ravishes the land, and the king and the king’s men ignore it, blame the opposition. No compassion, no national grieving, no acknowledgement at all. They will pay for that also. A year from now, when there is a national memorial service, I want them excluded. Let them stand in the rain, just as they happily are allowing the virus to rain on their followers. They are evil people.

And that is the core of Amerika today. A land possessed by evil, in the middle of an interregnum in which the evil king is looking for a safe exile from which to plot a return. Meanwhile, his toadies and sycophants manoeuvre to avoid any appearance of being ready to do a deal with the king-in-waiting, and hoping for one more flicker of approbation from the king. They also know that the king, while plotting a return, will die in exile. How to handle that?

Loyalty, of course. Because only one of his minions will be able to claim the mantle of the True-Trumpist. So watch them fight each other, tearing the Trumpist party apart, slandering each other. All but one, of course. Graham will not join the fight. He is not a leader. He has the power of a Hugh Despenser, able while being rogered by the king, to still whisper to the king who should go to the gallows. But he will never be king. He is waiting to see who the king hands the file containing all that he has been blackmailed with. And he will then transfer his loyalty, and his troops, to that person.

The problem is the kingdom. It is still divided between the overthrown king and the new king. And civil war remains highly possible. It would be short-lived. The Army, the real one, is transferring its loyalty to the new king already, or at least preparing to do so smoothly. And the Army will crush anyone silly enough to declare a real rebellion. Peasants do not perform very well against mounted knights. And while too many of the old king’s mob might know how to pull a longbow, not one of them has the discipline to stand up an army that can even begin to match the real one.

The question still remains, however, what will the incoming king’s party do, and how will they undo the damage done to the kingdom.

International relations have been destroyed. No one trusts Amerika any longer. An alliance with them is good for four, maybe six, maybe 50 years. Or maybe only four. Can they be trusted to play their part in the world? That remains to be seen. What has become very clear is that almost half of Amerika truly does not care about anything or anyone outside of Amerika. And their God, speaking through their preachers, tells them that they do not need to care about others.

Amerika will re-join the Paris Climate Accord, but will not have a real seat at the head table. They will be invited to the table, and leaders will look approvingly on the words of the new king or his emissaries. But this time they will wait to see action and money, not words. Amerika’s word is no longer worth the noise its utterance makes.

The real question is how much pain is the new party willing to impose in order to stamp out the Trumpists? Too little I fear. And this will allow the Trumpists to work in the shadows to rebuild, and in two years, they will roar back, emasculating the new king, and plunging Amerika back into a period of a failed government unable to make any real progress.

To actually fix Amerika will require the parking of mercy at the door for a while. QAnon must be hunted down, exposed. There are already murmurs that QAnon is a Russian operation. If so, then that should also be exposed and people brought to court.

The “Proud Boys” and other neo-fascist groups need to be disbanded, and their guns taken from them. Their acts of intimidation should be tried in court for what they are, acts of intimidation. Push them back underground where they belong. Let former membership (and certainly current membership) be a mark that makes them unemployable.

Black Lives Matter. And the police must have their “Qualified Immunity” removed. This can only be done by the central government, and that will require strong action. Unpalatable action. Police must not be allowed to kill black people with impunity. I’ve seen calls for the turning off of a body-cam being a sackable offence. I support that. But that is only the beginning. Don’t “defund” the police, but force them to allocate their funding differently. If the police have taken over as the social workers of last resort, then make them fulfil that role. They are funded certainly.

There is so much to fix, and I fear that Amerika, or the Amerika of the new king’s party, does not have the stomach for what it must do. Mercy can be a weakness, and in Amerika today, I fear that weakness will be turned against the rest.

But we are in the interregnum. There is much yet to do. Positions are begin taken. The old king’s loyalists are playing survival games. They all know that their game now is to survive exile and either take the mantle from the dying hands of Trump (fuck his family, they will be crucified and used as martyrs for the newly anointed) or to identify who will seize the mantle and demonstrate alliance to that new Trumpist.

It is going to be much less messy than it could be, or that it should be.

 

Traitors to Two Countries

Living in Greece, and being connected to a number of Greek/Americans, I am becoming more and more frustrated that there are Greek/Americans who actually support Donald Trump. That there are many Greeks who support DT should not be a surprise; Greeks love strong heroes, and too many Greeks did support the Junta (though they would never admit it today).

Greek/Americans who vote for Trump are traitors to two countries. To Greece they are traitors selling their souls to a man who has made no secret that he supports Turkey, does not care that the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is now a mosque, and has admitted that he takes calls from Erdogan weekly. They are traitors to their other country, the US, by supporting a traitor in the White House, who has engaged in High Crimes and Misdemeanours, who attempts on a weekly basis to implement policies that are anti-Constitutional, and who is actively setting Amerikan against American with no regard for the impact this is having on the country or its citizens. A President who has said that he should be allowed a third term, in direct violation of the Constitution.

By their support for Trump, they accept and support turning the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. They support Turkish jets violating Greek airspace multiple times per week.

They support the very people who suppressed and excluded their own Greek ancestors in their early years in Amerika. They soil the memory of Greeks who worked so hard to become Amerikans, supporters of the Constitution and the greatness that Amerika already was.

They are traitors to their families, saying that they support a man who would happily grab their daughters by the pussy, kiss them whether they like it or not. These supporters of Trump are in effect offering up their own daughters to be raped by the man they adore. Shame.

A country and a people for whom family is so important are being betrayed by people who would sell their families, sell their country, sell or give away their daughters. And for what? A RED hat.

If you are a Greek/American and you vote for Trump, you are neither. You are no longer Greek. You are no longer American. And you will be dead to your children and grandchildren. What did παππούς do in the “Time of Trump” will be asked, and everyone will pretend they do not remember that you helped make that time. What did γιαγιά do in the “Time of Trump”? Well, she prepared her daughters and granddaughters to be raped on the altar of Trump.

So on Election Day, go to the polls. Take your ballot. Go into the booth.

When you are in there, remember how the Junta let your παππούς and your γιαγιά vote; by giving them a red card and a green card. Green to support the Junta, and Red to reject them. Put your vote in the ballot box, and drop the other one onto the floor. And heaven help you if you drop the wrong card onto the floor.

Remember that this time, you don’t have to drop the card, you can simply soil your ballot. You don’t have to brave, but you can uphold your honor and dignity. You can just – not – vote.

But if you do vote for Trump, then have the decency to step out and say that you did (if he wins or loses) and say that you are proud to have betrayed both of your countries.

Not everyone should be an Internal Auditor

Sometimes Internal Auditors shouldn’t be Internal Auditors. Sometimes the role can be, no matter how much effort is expended to avoid this, confrontational or with the potential for conflict with the auditee (and others). This is particularly the case when there are strong personalities on the ‘other side’ of the audit process. I ran into exactly such a situation, as I’m sure have most of us. Remember, however, that just because someone is not appropriate for Internal Audit that does not mean that they may not have a lot to contribute to the business.

A number of years ago, I was engaged by a bank to perform a number of IT Audits. The bank had a full Internal Audit function but only three IT Auditors. The audit programme, however, included too many audits to be completed by the team that was available (for various reasons, only one of which was to too much work for the available resources).

After cutting my teeth on a couple of simple reviews, the Audit Director asked me to take a look at the implementation and use of the Project Management Methodology in a couple of the major projects that were in-flight at the time. These were significant projects, being run by and for different parts of the bank. Each had external project managers, and each seemed to be running to time, budget and promised deliverables. There were no particular reasons to worry about the projects.

Enter Bob (not his real name), a somewhat meek Internal Auditor, who chanced into IT Audit from a role as a bank branch auditor. I had worked with Bob before at another institution, and knew some of his strengths and weaknesses.  The Internal Audit Director said to me “I’d like Bob to work with you on this audit”. Really? Well, okay. “It will be good for him. He’ll learn something, and hopefully will become a better auditor.” He saw the horror in my face.

“I really need you to do this, but let me know how it goes”.

So the audit began. Each project provided all the requested information, and both were open allowing interviews with key project personnel and the projection managers. The project sponsors were comfortable the progress, and the user communities were looking forward to the new systems and processes, even though these were months away.

The projects were running smoothly, and the audit did not find any unreasonable budget to actual variations, or undue and unexpected slippages in estimated deliver dates, resource requirements, etc. Risks were documented (inadequately, but there was some consideration of risks). Of course, the primary purpose was to confirm the implementation and use of the corporate-mandated project management methodology.

While everything is going smoothly, a finding that process is not being followed can be a difficult finding to make and defend, especially when the processes will add effort and probably increase the resources and costs required to accomplish the project or set of tasks.

Add to that the personality trait of many good project managers – a straightforward manner and an air of confidence that can be used to ‘encourage’ focus on goals. They are confident, and they exude confidence, and that is one of the ways that they provide comfort to stakeholders, encourage teams, and deflect or reduce potential conflict or disagreement. This sometimes can manifest itself as arrogance and bullying.

And we faced two of these individuals. They had the backing of their respective General Managers, they were confident, they were delivering, and they really didn’t need Internal Audit second-guessing how they were going about achieving their missions.

I sent Bob to carry out some interviews, collect documentation, read it and summarise his thoughts. We talked through what he was seeing. We combined our work and work papers, and we arrived at our conclusions. We wrote up the draft report, and prepared for the exit-interviews with the two Project Managers. 

As the fieldwork progressed, Bob became more and more agitated, and at times seemed distracted. Finally, with the fieldwork completed and the draft report ready, we scheduled the exit interviews. Twice.

Then a third time, with each of the other two being cancelled and rescheduled.

Finally, the day arrived. I arrived in Internal Audit, and seeing Bob, said “Fantastic, today is the day. They’ve not cancelled or postponed. We’re ready.”

I looked closely at Bob. “Are you alright? You look tired.”

“I haven’t slept all week, I’ve been so worried about this meeting” was his response. Worried? Why? All our ducks were in a row, all the documentation was completed, the draft report was written, the findings reviewed, and the key points ready. All that was needed now was a conversation with the PMs, and to give them an opportunity to take the draft back with them and write up their comments, responses and action plans.

Focusing on the coming meeting, I put his comment away in the back of my mind, something for later.

We had our exit meeting. We outlined the audit, the fieldwork performed and the data and information reviewed. We presented our findings. The PMs read the Executive Summary, looked at each other, and after a few questions said “You’re right, we use our own methodologies. They are not the corporate-approved methodology. We will talk to our teams about how we will implement and use the standard methodology. We will need to train our people, and we might need some training also.”

Done. 

Yes. It was that ‘easy’. The data was there, the documentation was there, and we did not attack their methodologies or pick holes in what they were doing. We were not auditing the effectiveness of their personal leadership, and we were not questioning the performance of the projects (although we did look at status reporting, steering committee reporting, budgets to actuals, etc). We had a specific scope and we audited to that scope, cognisant that other issues may come up.

What I didn’t expect was that the primary finding of serious concern was that one of the auditors was not able to perform the audit. Having worked with Bob in the past, it all came together then. He simply was not capable of assertive support of any position. His default in any potential conflict was not to address the issue, but to seek someone who could deal with it on his behalf.

When all was done and the report was issued, I stopped by the Audit Directors office. I told him what had happened, and said I was deeply worried about Bob, his mental state and his fitness to be and Internal Auditor. Furthermore, there was the very real potential that Bob would bring Internal Audit into ‘disrepute’ within the bank by not being adequately assertive or able, when pushed, to deal with highly assertive individuals. In the worst case, such an auditor might miss a critical control and technical issue, or fail to push for acceptance and resolution of a critical weakness, potentially endangering the bank itself. The IA Director knew we had worked together in the past, in fact, all three of us has been at another bank at the same time in the past. He “inherited” Bob when we took over IA in this bank. He knew what he had, but there was little he could do directly.

We talked, and eventually, I said “You have to get him out of Internal Audit. He will have a nervous breakdown, or worse. This is not the right job for him.” The IA Director agreed and asked for my suggestion. My view was that Bob had a solid knowledge of retail banking, adequate IT knowledge, and understood both the bank and the banking sector. Firing him would only compound Bob’s issues and would be wasting an otherwise perfectly decent person and skill-set. “Find him another job in the bank. For you and for him”.

Checking in with the IA Director a couple of years later, I asked what was the final outcome with Bob. The news was all good. Bob was encouraged to apply for, and was appointed to, a role in the Retail Product Development team, and was to all reports thriving. Conflict was not an issue, because he was supporting product developers who were, by nature, positive and had the support of the executives. His knowledge of the bank and banking products served him well.

Most of all, a ‘wrong fit’ was rectified, and IA was seen as a potential source of good quality people for the business, and not tarnished as the home of people who were not able to provide the challenge actually needed in healthy organisations.

What are the attributes of a good Internal Auditor? There is a long list. Near the top of any list must be confidence in the correctness of the principles that the auditor is espousing; of effective control, process effectiveness, risk identification and assessment, and confirmation by the auditee of the findings and potential impact. Meekness is not a desirable attribute.

  

Be warned: Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won

Be warned, the only thing worse for the United States in the short term than a Trump victory will be a resounding Trump defeat. After Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was quoted as saying “Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won.”

So Trump has declared that negotiations for a second Covid-19 stimulus package are over until he “wins the election”.  This should not be confused for anything other than what it is; the beginning of the Scorched Earth policy that will be implemented to the fullest if/when Trump loses the election.

Defeat is looming, and he knows it. He feels the rejection of the people, who are supposed to love him and all he has done for them. He knows that he will face accusations in multiple courts if he loses, and that the Republican Party will turn on him when he no longer has adequate leverage over individual senators and congressmen. He fears jail, he fears impoverishment. But mostly he fears exposure. That is why he was happy to pay $130,000 to a porn star to keep a fleeting affair secret. That is why he has stopped every attempt at the exposure of his tax records. He fears exposure and the destruction of the myth of the all-wonderful and all-powerful Trump.

And most of all he fears rejection.

And losing the vote will be the ultimate rejection. And they will pay for that rejection. Since he proved that he was quite capable of imposing horrible retribution on his closest family (his brother), no one should be in any doubt that he will impose even greater retribution on the entire country that rejects him.  On the morning of April 22, 1945, Hitler is supposed to have said "Everyone has lied to me, everyone has deceived me… the SS has left me in the lurch. The German people have not fought heroically. It deserves to perish… it is not I who have lost the war, but the German people."

I expect that exactly the same delusional thinking is going through Trump’s head right now, and that he will take as much of the United States with him when he goes. 

Halting the negotiations on a stimulus package may seem like just another negotiating tactic; it is not. This is his announcement that there are two choices; Trump, or destruction of Amerika. And he will carry through on that threat.

First, he will attempt to invalidate the election process (ongoing), then he will attempt to invalidate the election results (see the Atlantic and others), and finally, he will take down the country and leave a smouldering ruin for his successor.

So what does Scorched Earth look like between November and January?

The following is speculation of course, but I would not be surprised to see some or all of the following, but not in this or in any particular order.

1. Complete withdrawal from all negotiations with Democrats on any topics.
2. Refusal to allow any administration officials to participate in any transition meetings or planning.
3. All bills will be vetoed, regardless of content, either by a direct and explicit veto or by letting them sit on his desk long enough to the automatic veto to occur.
4. He will fire the head of the CDC and the FDA, for failing to bring a vaccine to market early enough to save him.
5. Ordering the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from any foreign bases and a “Home by Christmas” order.
6. Firing any and all generals who refuse, or who are seen as dragging their feet. Quite possibly firing hundreds of generals and senior officers as it becomes clear that the orders will not be fully implemented.
7. Notice to withdraw from NATO.
8. Executive Orders banning all Asians, Muslims and others from entering the United States (even though these will fail in the courts, the objective will be punishment, not implementation).
9. Cutting off all federal funds for all “Blue” cities immediately.
10. Closing all federal offices in “Blue” cities, except for “police” who will be tasked with…
11. …imposing close to martial law on “Blue” cities, including federalising the National Guard and putting them on the streets.
12. Fire much of the cabinet, with the objective of further slowing and collapsing the economy, and in retribution for a lack of adequate outward adulation.
13. Imposing immediate 100% tariffs on all imports, regardless of source (why? To destroy the stock market and economy, leaving a ruin for the new administration).
14. Firing hundreds if not thousands of federal civil servants who are identified as disloyal, either by having been accused of not being adequately compliant, or who are actively attempting to enact a peaceful transfer.
15. A war somewhere? A unilateral strike on China in the South China Sea? The only thing we can be certain of is that there will be no war with any country in which Trump has business interests, because
16. The flow of Presidential Pardons will be fast and furious, focusing first on his family, then on those who directly support his businesses. He will assert an ability to pardon for state crimes, though these pardons will fail in lower courts in 2021.
17. The only pardon he will hold back until the 20th of January will be Melania’s pardon, to make sure that she does not abandon him (which will happen in early February).

The list goes on. If it is possible, it will be on his list. He will not care about the economy, after all, the country rejected him, and especially New York and the markets will have rejected him, and that will make it personal. 

He has been compared with Hitler too often, and in most ways the comparison is completely wrong. He never served, and never held his Volk, his People, or his Nation to be anything greater than himself. He has never had a higher cause, and while Hitler may well be the very image of evil, Hitler did have a cause, however much the cause and the man were conjoined.

Trump is Trump, alone and only. And those that have sold their soul to Trump will find the bill coming due. Will they revert and put “Country first”, or will they believe that by staying loyal they will be able to seize the reins of the Trumpist “movement” and somehow command the loyalty of the Trumpist cult? Some certainly will take that route, and they will, perhaps, survive the culling that he will make even of those closest to him. 

Will those still around him be willing to stand up to him in those last days? I very much doubt it.

There will be senators who will have lost their seats and will be looking for some redemption in the history books. They might, but only might stand up to him. That of course will make things even worse, as they will only have proven themselves to be treasonous and disloyal. 

However this ends, it does not look good from here. There will be years of rebuilding ahead. The economy will be a shambles, and the incoming government will spend its first two years getting that back on course, all the while fighting against the Trumpist "Dead-enders".

The myth of the "Stab in the Back" will persist for years, and will be stoked by those who want to claim his mantle. 

Responding to "how do we get back to normal?"

Some days ago a message was sent to a group I'm in. "John" said to me after that he forwarded the message when another member of the group had insisted that he send the message. The message's first three lines were worth considering

Please just take politics out of it and read this with an open mind using common sense. Anyone out there who can tell me what our end game is with the covid 19? What is the magic formula that is going to allow us to sound the all-clear?

The person insisting that the message be forwarded is a Trumpist, and the entire tone of the message was confrontational. The message then had a long list of questions and statements that felt like it was leaning to a political position, i.e. stop trying to lock down, open up the economy, there is little else we can do about this. The message ends with the following two statements:

I'm struggling to see where or how this ends.
We either get busy living or we get busy dying.

So without repeating the entire turgid message, I'll provide only my response (with very modest edits to clean up grammatical errors, etc):

------------------

Okay John, no politics (I promise).

I consider the entire gist of this comment to be summed up in the first three sentences, and really the question is “how do we get back to ‘normal’, whatever that was or will be?”

The problem with this virus is that it is not yet fully established in the human population, and the more we know about it, the more potentially disturbing it is. Therefore, we are “waiting” for three things to happen, and we are taking, collectively and individually, various steps to reduce the impact until one or all of those things have been achieved/happen.

The three things that we are waiting for are:

1. An effective vaccine. Yes, I will be one of the people who will happily take the vaccine. I’ve been taking them my entire life, and for much of my youth, they were not optional. Cholera shots twice a year in some countries (antibodies do only last so long), Gamagobulin in some countries. Tetanus. And of course the standard ones. There was a time when approaching check-in for an international flight you had to provide a ticket, a passport, and a vaccination record. Those days will come back. We do not need to do that now because, until Covid-1, we were living in a magical time after most major illnesses had been ‘conquered’ and a new one had not yet arrived.

2. We have developed effective therapeutic responses that render the virus as dangerous as the common cold. We are not there yet, though treatment protocols are improving – thus we are seeing fewer critical cases. 

3. The third thing we are waiting for is for the virus to mutate into a host-bothering virus and not a host-killing virus. This is natural and will happen with Covid-19 also. But we do not know how long this will take (probably only a year or two, as the more virulent strain kills too many hosts, and vaccination pushes it to the outer fringes).

So those of us not actively involved in vaccine development are basically playing a waiting game. And in that time, some of us are trying to limit the risk of either infecting others or becoming infected. 

We now know that up to 25%+ of people who contract the virus will have longer-term negative impacts, and those will be a huge drain on the sufferers, their families, and society as a whole. So a combination of the initial unknowns of mortality coupled with the now-known longer-term impacts suggests that until 1 and/or 2 and/or 3 above are achieved, it is prudent to do all we can to limit the spread of the virus. That is impossible without completely closing a country, as New Zealand did, and bought themselves 100+ new case-free days (all as part of holding out until 1, 2, and/or 3 above is achieved).

Here in Greece the decision has been made to accept a certain number of cases (I have no idea what the number would be) in exchange for salvaging some of the tourist season. That has worked, a little. Yet even opening the country has not rescued the tourist season, but has, hopefully, reduced a little the damage. There will be spikes, as we are seeing Halkidiki with additional restrictions at this moment.

The recent flights from Zante carrying Covid-19 infected people back to the UK have tarnished Greece's well-earned image as a safe place to holiday. Meanwhile, Greek infection rates are higher now than during the 'first wave' in March and April 2020.

How long will it take to reach 1, 2, and/or 3? I don’t know, but there is a huge amount of progress being made on number 1, and there will probably be stage-4 successful vaccines ready by the end of the year. Greece has ordered 3 million doses, with the first to arrive in December (provided stage-4 trials are successful).

So with a vaccine, and with better treatment options, I think next year will be a “good year” (relatively speaking of course). I hope number 3 happens through the coming year also.