Y’know that stupid game you play with fortune cookies in which you read the fortune out loud and add the phrase “in bed” at the end…? Well, that’s apparently the favorite little fun game with the brain-rotted US media with regard to China, especially at the Olympics this past week — find any news of any positive achievement of or any news that reflects well on China, and the US Boss Media will be right on top of it with their shallow bitching and moaning about “human rights”, trot out their victims of the week, fling some over-hyped apocryphal stories around and wail “but at what cost”?

The front page of the Washington Post — where Democracy died long ago and is now beginning to smell really pungent in darkness — put on quite a show this past Saturday, pissing and moaning about the job the Chinese did of keeping covid under control during the Olympics, claiming that it “kept the joy out of the Games” and at “great mental and financial costs”. It was a headline so galling that I had to just kind of stand there in the front hall, slack-jawed, sputtering and giggling as I read and re-read it.

I was almost in awe of it, somehow — a gaggle of hacks from a corporate mouthpiece in the seat of the US Empire, which had twice as many covid-19 deaths last week than China had all of last year, is having a tantrum about China taking the steps any responsible government should do during a public health emergency, filling its pants about how it took the joy out of the Olympics. Myself, I think any “joy” issues our friends here had came more from the shock of being shown up by a Chinese-American who chose to ski for China, and by a government which treats healthcare as a public good rather than a commodity.

Yeah, shame those horrid, awful Chinese commies took appropriate action to mitigate the spread of an infectious pathogen and took a little bit of the “joy” out of it for you — not nearly as awesome as here in the good old USA, where we’re joyful and free and lost nearly a million people to covid19 last year.

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Schoolkids and teachers in the UK, Chicago, Oakland and NYC are being clobbered, child infections are jumping, hospitals are being swamped, but the State and the media keep telling us that it’s “mild” — over and over and over again, beating the word to death like a slow, painful mantra, kind of like “Weapons of Mass Destruction”… or, perhaps the end of a cigarette commercial in the 1950s or ’60s — “…and, they are mild!”

Al Jazeera’s just precious as hell, here. They really do think the Chinese are some kind of weirdos for actually trying to eradicate covid — they had what… two deaths last year? — while, back in The West™, we’ve thrown in the towel; State spokespeople have laughed in our faces on live TV, and thrown the working class to the wolves with a big, hot, sloppy slice of “learning to live with it”.

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As seen from the POV of Old Father Time.

Happy New Year? Huh, what’s happy about it?
No, really; I know it’s only January 1st, but what the hell’s happy about it?

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For the workers who died at a candle factory in Kentucky, and an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, for every worker forced to risk their life without proper protective gear or healthcare, in the middle of a pandemic and a tornado, to keep the profits coming in and the supply chain stocked so we can buy our daughters a Fighter Pilot Barbie for Christmas… Season’s Greetings from Capitalism.

“The bosses won’t keep us safe; they only care about profit. Workers are the only ones who know what is safe and what is not. We should decide whether to continue working or not. For that purpose, we need to fight for Health and Safety Commissions to be set up in all workplaces that will function independent of the bosses, that are democratically elected, and that can organize to impose protocols and shut down production when necessary.

Not one more dead worker at the hands of the bosses! Our lives are worth more than their profits!”

Left Voice, 12.14.2021

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