Plagues
For example, when the neocons tell you that we need a "new Pearl Harbor" to justify a transformation of America's military, you can bet a new Pearl Harbor is going to arrive as soon as they get into office.
And now, after years of Bill Gates warning us that a pandemic was going to strike and utterly transform the world as we know it. He even went so far as to "simulate" the exact scenario we're living through just before we started living through it.
So, you see my point. Sometimes seeing what's coming next is just a question of listening to what the planners are telling us. Keeping that in mind, let's look at four predictions for how the coronavirus crisis is likely to proceed from here.

The FBI is conducting a raid at Allure Medical in Shelby Township. Police confirm to 7 Action News they are assisting the feds with the raid.
It's located on 26 Mile Rd. and Van Dyke in Shelby Township. The FBI confirms the raid is in connection to a questionable treatment for coronavirus that was being offered at the center.
This is the first raid of its kind raid in Michigan over a purported treatment for COVID-19.
The FBI said it is a task force operation with the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI. Agents participating in the raid are wearing special protection because of possible risk of exposure to coronavirus.
They're gathering boxes of evidence, documents, etc. Agents arrived just after 8 a.m.
The woman, who is 65 years old, flew to Italy from the Chinese city of Wuhan where the coronavirus first broke out. She reported feeling sick on January 27 and quickly began to cough and experience high fever as well as an eye infection.
After 20 days of being in hospital, the eye infection cleared, but the virus was found in her eyes the next day. No virus was detected in her eyes or nose after that date, but on her 27th day in the hospital the virus was discovered again in her eyes.
The report claimed that the virus can replicate even when it is no longer detectable, meaning the infection potential exists even when patients seem to be healthy.
"It is up to every citizen to watch and monitor everyone else and report to the police anything they don't like," de Blasio said. "That's why we have created a new enforcement program: Knowledgeable Actors Reporting Edict Noncompliance, or KAREN for short."
With the new program, de Blasio is asking everyone to become a KAREN and use a special hotline to report anyone they see who isn't following social distancing guidelines straight to the police.
Comment: If online trade blinks out, they'll have to either end the lockdown or face mass rioting...
More than 300 Amazon warehouse workers at 50 facilities across the country have pledged to call out of work in the coming days to protest Amazon's handling of the coronavirus — the largest mass action against the company since the start of the pandemic.
In recent days, Amazon has confirmed at least 75 coronavirus cases in more than half of its 110 warehouse facilities, and experts have warned that the number of positive cases is "likely to exponentially increase" in the coming days and months due to Amazon's failure to implement an effective national safety plan for its warehouses.
"I will be calling out sick tomorrow to protest because Amazon is not allowing us to stay home and practice real social distancing," Monica Moody, a 22-year-old packer at an Amazon Fulfillment center in Concord, North Carolina and a member of United For Respect, told Motherboard. "I have to go to work and risk being exposed to this virus. I need the money. If Amazon were offering it, I would use paid sick leave."
In a series of blog posts, Amazon has outlined an evolving series of benefits and policies for its workers during the pandemic, including a $2 an hour increase in wages and two weeks of paid sick leave for those who test positive for coronavirus. While they are not punishing workers for calling out sick, the paid leave policy does not extend beyond those workers with confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases. Organizers and experts say that public pressure and worker organizing has played an important role in pressuring Amazon to expand its protections and benefits for workers but that safety equipment, cleaning protocols, and paid leave options still remain short of what is needed to curb the spread of the virus in warehouses and the communities where Amazon workers live.
The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Ambrogio Lorenzetti 's Allegory of Bad Government (1338), fresco in the town hall of Siena, Italy.
Well, history actually teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers.
Patrick Boucheron, a crack historian and a professor at the esteemed College de France, offers a very interesting perspective. Incidentally, before the onset of Covid-19, he was about to start a seminar on the Black Death medieval plague.
Boucheron's view of Boccaccio's Decameron, written in 1350 and about young Florentine aristocrats who fled to the Tuscan countryside to tell stories, focuses on the plague's character as a "horrible beginning" that tears apart social liaisons, provokes a funerary panic and has everyone wallowing in anomie.
Then he draws a historical parallel with Thucydides writing about the Athens plague in the summer of 430 BC. Pushing it to the limit, we may venture that Western literature actually starts with a plague - described in Book 1 of the Iliad by Homer.
Thucydides' description of the Great Plague - actually typhoid fever - is a literary tour de force as well. In our current setting, that's more relevant than the "Thucydides trap" controversy - as it's idle to compare the context in ancient Athens with the current US-China hybrid war.
Both Socrates and Thucydides, incidentally, survived the plague. They were tough, and acquired immunity from their earlier exposure to typhoid. Pericles, the leading citizen of Athens, was not so lucky: he died at 66, a victim of the plague.
The viral pandemic? No, silly! The viral infodemic.
Haven't you heard? There's a tsunami of fake news that's coming to get you! And if you plebs don't behave properly then your rulers are just going to have to shut down the internet for your own good.
If you haven't heard the term "infodemic" yet, then lucky you. But trust me, you're going to be hearing about this idea ad nauseum in the coming months, so you better get prepared.
So what is an infodemic, exactly? Good question. Let's turn to everybody's favorite global health agency, the World Health Organization, for that answer, shall we?
On February 2nd they released a situation report on the novel coronavirus outbreak that had a section on "Managing the 2019-nCoV 'infodemic'." This report helpfully explains that an infodemic is "an over-abundance of information - some accurate and some not - that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it."
Oh, no! Too much information? Say it ain't so! If only someone can save us from this terrible scourge of having to use our own brains and apply a little discernment to the information we encounter!
We performed follow-up measurements of this object while it was still on the PCCP webpage.
Stacking of 7 unfiltered exposures, 24 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2020, April 15.4 from Q62 (iTelescope network) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer, shows that this object is a comet with a compact coma about 15" in diameter and a tail 20" long in PA 90.
Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
Comment:
90 Days of Madness: Official Numbers Prove COVID-19 is STILL Benign