Of all of the words that recent technological developments have added to our lexicon, ‘doomscrolling’ is my personal favorite. This is the act of scrolling through your news feeds looking for dire news of the world, or the end of said world. If you are doomscrolling, then you have found the right page, because today I am all about the Doom.
Before I get into my trademark idiotic ramblings, let me first warn you that I am fevered with plague today. That is, I am writing from a fevered mind as I have contracted Arcturus. If you haven’t heard of Arcturus, you will. It is the new COVID variant grabbing all the headlines. But everyone has decided that COVID is over, and so no one is paying attention to those headlines.
Again, you will.
I came down with Arcturus on Thursday and my health has gotten progressively worse since then. It is now Sunday, and I have had two nights of lying awake in a fevered sweat with weird visions passing in and out of my mind. If this is your first time reading this blog, then you should know that I am an expat currently residing in South Korea. I just learned that Korea has reported 152 cases of Arcturus so far, and you can count on that number rising in the coming week.
I’m here to tell you – Arcturus is very bad news. You don’t want this. I hate to get graphic on you, but my head is an endless fountain of green snot pouring from every hole in my face. In the last 48 hours, I have coughed up things that would make Stephen King blanche. And I have been sweating profusely, lying on my bed, trying to muster the strength to drag my dying ass to the local hospital, but the weather has been just miserable. It’s May 7, and it feels like a rainy day in late November. If I go out in this shit to hail a cab, I will probably die by the side of the road. And from what I have been reading, there’s not much that medical science can do about Arcturus anyway but treat it with the same drugs used on the Baby Covid virus that put us all into quarantine for two years. And they have little effect on this bad-ass blight. So I have chosen to ride it out in my heated apartment.
My lower back/kidneys are jabbed with sharp pain with every cough, and I am coughing constantly. The fever makes it hard to navigate around my apartment. And now I’m here, sitting at my keyboard, sending out a warning to you.
Mask up. This isn’t over. It hasn’t even really started. And now that everyone is of the mindset that COVID is “over,” and no one will go easily into quarantine again, I can guarantee you – millions if not billions are going to die. If this Arcturus strain isn’t the Beast, the next one will be. It’s only a matter of time now. Believe me when I tell you, however: Arcturus is awful. There’s no other way to describe it. I have never been this sick. Ever. What a name. “Arcturus.” Sounds like something from a Michael Crichton novel.
And this is just the start. My fevered visions have also been telling me it is time to leave Korea. I had already planned to leave this year. I had been working down in Daegu, and let me tell you – Daegu sucks. I didn’t want my last year in Korea to be spent there, so I made a deal with myself: If I got a university job in or near Seoul, I would stay for one more year of expat fun. And although the odds were against it, I landed a job about an hour from Seoul by train. The area is beautiful and the community is nice, so I signed on for one more year.
But now I don’t know if I will last for that year. If this new outbreak goes the way I expect it will, it might not be possible to leave Korea in a year. It might be better to get out now while the getting’s good. And the super-flu isn’t the only reason to abandon my comfortable foothold on this rocky little peninsula. There is also the growing menace of China. China and Russia have been sowing seeds of discord in the USA, dividing the political parties to a point where partisanship has become blind zealotry. Certain powers of this world know that the easiest path to defeating an opponent is to divide and conquer. The US government has used this strategy successfully on its own people for decades now, so why shouldn’t outside enemies employ the same tried and true tactics? As Yeshua said in Matthew 12:25, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” They know why Lincoln noted this same passage the last time the US was torn apart, and they know that with the US thrown into the turmoil of yet another general election of undesirable candidates, the US will be in no place to put up much of a fight should China decide to take Taiwan – a move they are obviously building towards.
If you have read this blog before, then you know I do not like either of the political parties in the USA. In the reality behind the scenery, I think they are the same party – the Corporate Party. And many of their more prominent mouthpieces are more interested in business relations with China and Russia than they are in the lofty old ideals of America. And when Arcturus, or God forbid some even worse COVID strain, starts to take the toll I know it will, well… the world is ripe for chaos.
And I do not want to be in Korea when the shit hits the fan. Korea will likely be attacked early by China and North Korea as it is a major base of US military operations in Asia. Japan will also likely be drawn in early. As the US is distracted by the sudden chaos of yet another hotly contested US presidential election which will cripple Congress’s ability to act on the war in Asia, Russia will make its move against NATO. I don’t know how everything will unfold region to region, and which nation/corporations will form allegiances, but I do know this: Korea will not exist in five years. Korea will be obliterated and the remains divided up by China.
Korea won’t be the only nation to vanish from the world map – there will be others, but Korea is the one that I can name with certainty now. Korea has been propped up by the US for decades as a deterrent to the rise of Chinese communism, but that ship has sailed. Now Korea is a pawn to be sacrificed. Korea is done. Even North Korea, which has also been propped up by both China and the USA — for China, it was a buffer zone, and for the USA, it was an excuse to build a military presence around China — will be wiped out of existence as the time of its usefulness has passed.
And this new pandemic – the one that will literally kill millions if not billions simply because the last pandemic has everyone with their guard down and thinking “It’s over” – will be a major catalyst to the coming chaos.
We always knew the plan was depopulation on a massive scale. And here it comes. Brace yourselves. Get someplace that is relatively safe. I need to move because I know for damn sure Korea isn’t safe. Korea is doomed. Maybe not this year, but soon. Soon and forever.
Or maybe that’s just the fever talking.
thecontemplativeape 