Utopia Is a Dangerous Ideal: We Should Aim for ‘Protopia’
Everybody knows that nobody’s perfect. So why do we still strive for perfection when there could be a better path?

Utopias are idealized visions of a perfect society. Utopianisms are those ideas put into practice. This is where the trouble begins. Thomas More coined the neologism utopia for his 1516 work that launched the modern genre for a good reason. The word means ‘no place’ because when imperfect humans attempt perfectibility – personal, political, economic and social – they fail. Thus, the dark mirror of utopias are dystopias – failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems that result from utopian dreams put into practice.

The belief that humans are perfectible leads, inevitably, to mistakes when ‘a perfect society’ is designed for an imperfect species. There is no best way to live because there is so much variation in how people want to live. Therefore, there is no best society, only multiple variations on a handful of themes as dictated by our nature.

For example, utopias are especially vulnerable when a social theory based on collective ownership, communal work, authoritarian rule and a command-and-control economy collides with our natural-born desire for autonomy, individual freedom and choice. Moreover, the natural differences in ability, interests and preferences within any group of people leads to inequalities of outcomes and imperfect living and working conditions that utopias committed to equality of outcome cannot tolerate. As one of the original citizens of Robert Owen’s 19th-century New Harmony community in Indiana explained it:

    We had tried every conceivable form of organisation and government. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. … It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us … our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.

Most of these 19th-century utopian experiments were relatively harmless because, without large numbers of members, they lacked political and economic power. But add those factors, and utopian dreamers can turn into dystopian murderers. People act on their beliefs, and if you believe that the only thing preventing you and/or your family, clan, tribe, race or religion from going to heaven (or achieving heaven on Earth) is someone else or some other group, then actions know no bounds. From homicide to genocide, the murder of others in the name of some religious or ideological belief accounts for the high body counts in history’s conflicts, from the Crusades, Inquisition, witch crazes and religious wars of centuries gone to the religious cults, world wars, pogroms and genocides of the past century.

We can see that calculus behind the utopian logic in the now famous ‘trolley problem’ in which most people say they would be willing to kill one person in order to save five. Here’s the set-up: you are standing next to a fork in a railroad line with a switch to divert a trolley car that is about to kill five workers on the track. If you pull the switch, it will divert the trolley down a side track where it will kill one worker. If you do nothing, the trolley kills the five. What would you do? Most people say that they would pull the switch. If even people in Western enlightened countries today agree that it is morally permissible to kill one person to save five, imagine how easy it is to convince people living in autocratic states with utopian aspirations to kill 1,000 to save 5,000, or to exterminate 1,000,000 so that 5,000,000 might prosper. What’s a few zeros when we’re talking about infinite happiness and eternal bliss?

The fatal flaw in utilitarian utopianism is found in another thought experiment: you are a healthy bystander in a hospital waiting room in which an ER physician has five patients dying from different conditions, all of which can be saved by sacrificing you and harvesting your organs. Would anyone want to live in a society in which they might be that innocent bystander? Of course not, which is why any doctor who attempted such an atrocity would be tried and convicted for murder.

Yet this is precisely what happened with the grand 20th-century experiments in utopian socialist ideologies as manifested in Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Russia (1917-1989), Fascist Italy (1922-1943) and Nazi Germany (1933-1945), all large-scale attempts to achieve political, economic, social (and even racial) perfection, resulting in tens of millions of people murdered by their own states or killed in conflict with other states perceived to be blocking the road to paradise. The Marxist theorist and revolutionary Leon Trotsky expressed the utopian vision in a 1924 pamphlet:

    The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training. … The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

This unrealisable goal led to such bizarre experiments as those conducted by Ilya Ivanov, whom Stalin tasked in the 1920s with crossbreeding humans and apes in order to create ‘a new invincible human being’. When Ivanov failed to produce the man-ape hybrid, Stalin had him arrested, imprisoned, and exiled to Kazakhstan. As for Trotsky, once he gained power as one of the first seven members of the founding Soviet Politburo, he established concentration camps for those who refused to join in this grand utopian experiment, ultimately leading to the gulag archipelago that killed millions of Russian citizens who were also believed to be standing in the way of the imagined utopian paradise to come. When his own theory of Trotskyism opposed that of Stalinism, the dictator had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Sic semper tyrannis.

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In the second half of the 20th century, revolutionary Marxism in Cambodia, North Korea and numerous states in South America and Africa led to murders, pogroms, genocides, ethnic cleansings, revolutions, civil wars and state-sponsored conflicts, all in the name of establishing a heaven on Earth that required the elimination of recalcitrant dissenters. All told, some 94 million people died at the hands of revolutionary Marxists and utopian communists in Russia, China, North Korea and other states, a staggering number compared with the 28 million killed by the fascists. When you have to murder people by the tens of millions to achieve your utopian dream, you have instantiated only a dystopian nightmare.

The utopian quest for perfect happiness was exposed as the flawed goal that it is by George Orwell in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf:

    Hitler … has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. … [Hitler] knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice …

On the broader appeal of Fascism and Socialism, Orwell added:

    Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. … we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

What, then, should replace the idea of utopia? One answer can be found in another neologism – protopia – incremental progress in steps toward improvement, not perfection. As the futurist Kevin Kelly describes his coinage:

    Protopia is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualise. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.

In my book The Moral Arc (2015), I showed how protopian progress best describes the monumental moral achievements of the past several centuries: the attenuation of war, the abolishment of slavery, the end of torture and the death penalty, universal suffrage, liberal democracy, civil rights and liberties, same-sex marriage and animal rights. These are all examples of protopian progress in the sense that they happened one small step at a time.

A protopian future is not only practical, it is realisable.

We Are Living in a Failed State
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

when the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

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Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

David Frum: This is Trump’s fault

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Read: The coronavirus’s real and immediate threat to democracy

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.

Read: The curve is not flat enough

We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

Francis Fukuyama: The thing that determines a country’s resistance to the coronavirus

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

Read: Trump’s coronavirus message is revisionist history

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

COMMON PURPOSE FRAUD

We are witnessing a coup by the banksters who are trying to set up a globalist, corporatist, technocratic, communitarian dictatorship commonly known as the 'New World Order'. National sovereignty is being destroyed. The EU has put its satraps into Greece and Italy so that these countries are now effectively provinces of the EU. Spain and Portugal are the next targets.

How do they do it? Manipulating systems.

This will not end well.

This website is about the corrupt activities of Common Purpose, a fraudulent 'educational charity' acting as a change agent being used to recruit and train the commissars and apparatchiks needed to implement the British government's hidden New World Order communitarian agenda.

I have not received any legal challenge or complaint from Common Purpose or its named associates about the allegations of corruption made on this website. Why not?

If you want to find out what is going wrong in Britain (and also the USA to a certain extent) and why, you have come to the right place.

It cannot be stressed enough that Common Purpose is a criminal organisation that is dependent upon insider dealing, secrecy and corruption for its existence. Common Purpose creates control over its members by doing them 'favours', such as finding them lucrative employment in powerful positions, covering for their mistakes, and benefits from accessing its secret network. In return, Common Purpose requires that its graduates act illegally on its behalf, as salespeople for their snake-oil products, exploiting their positions of power, and helping the organisation grow in power.

There are many examples of criminal activity that will be finding their way into the public domain sooner rather than later.

Common Purpose is a pox in the soul of Britain.

Start here to find out more about how the corrupt activities of Common Purpose affect YOU.

SOME COMMON PURPOSE SCAMS

NEW: Common Purpose and Media Control.

1. Make sure the global warming fraud goes to plan. More here.

2. Perfect the art of insider dealing. More here.

3. Corrupt public servants - they then do what their friends in the Common Purpose network tell them instead of working for the public good. Make them happy to breach the Seven Principles of Public Life as set out by the Committee on Standards in Public Life and act ultra vires - beyond their powers. More here.

4. Conspire with corrupt public officials to abuse public funds. More here.

5. Silence the media - recruit media editors as Common Purpose members so the corrupt activities of Common Purpose will not be discussed in the mainstream media.

6. Censor your opponents: cpexposed.com, tpuc.org and eutruth.org.uk have all been subjected to censorship by Common Purpose.

7. Abuse due process - take council decisions outside democratic process. Councils such as Sheffield City Council have been cesspits of Common Purpose corruption for years.

8. False pretences - pretend to be an educational charity when your objectives are really political.

9. Evade tax - Common Purpose uses public sector facilities and office space for which it has made no payment nor signed any formal agreements in order to evade tax.

10. Breach data protection laws and ensure that Common Purpose members in the Information Commissioner's Office prevent action from being taken.

11. Undermine the hierarchical management structure of the police and armed forces.

12. Keep schtum - hold meetings according to the Chatham House rules with no agenda or records.

13. Collude with the disgraceful family court system to cover up cases of child abuse and child abduction.

14. Fraud - obtain money for training unlawfully by pretending the courses are of benefit to the taxpayer.

An Open Letter to the President

Dear Fucking Lunatic,

At your recent press conference - more a word salad that had a stroke and fell down stairs, you were CLEARLY so out of your depth you needed scuba gear. Within minutes of going off air your minions were backpedaling faster than Cirque De Soliel acrobats... In India a week ago, i couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking india — a country of a BILLION human souls that’s only 3000 years old, give or take.!!! Trust me - Gandhi pulled CROWDS.. You pulled a cricket stadium and half WALKED out...

Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That's like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self aware.

You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coring out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to scream!

We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse.

You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat.” How the fuck does that help?

You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that.

You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance.

You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite.

You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS!

Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four.

Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels?

Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable — or even marginally civil — to say?

You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustulant hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage.

You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms.

So fuck you Mr. President. And fuck you forever.

Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too. You'll be as useful as a chocolate teapot against a medical crisis you Bible thumping cock socket.

Isaac Asimov, the candy store kid who dreamed up robots
Our most durable ideas about robots don’t come from science, but the imagination of sci-fi pioneer Isaac Asimov
The year 2020 marks a milestone in the march of robots into popular culture: the 100th anniversary of the birth of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov coined the word 'robotics', invented the much-quoted Three Laws governing robot behavior, and passed on many myths and misconceptions that affect the way we feel about robots today.

A compulsive writer and homebody—possibly, an agoraphobic—Asimov hated to travel: ironically, for a writer who specialized in fantastic tales often set on distant worlds, he hadn't been in an airplane since being flown home from Hawaii by the US Army after being released from service just before a test blast of the atomic bomb on the Bikini Atoll. (Asimov once grimly observed that this stroke of luck probably saved his life by preventing him from getting leukemia, one of the side effects that afflicted many servicemen who were close to the blast.)

By 1956, Asimov had completed most of the stories that cemented his reputation as the grand master of science fiction, and set the ground rules for a new field of study called "robotics," a word he made up. Researchers like Marvin Minsky of MIT and William Shockley of Bell Labs had been doing pioneering work into Artificial Intelligence and Robotics since the early 1950s, but they were not well-known outside of the scientific and business communities. Asimov, on the other hand, was famous, his books so commercially successful that he quit his job as a tenured chemistry professor at Boston College to write full-time. Asimov's 1950 short story collection, I, Robot, put forward a vision of the robot as humanity's friend and protector, at a time when many humans were wondering if their own species could be trusted not to self-destruct.

Born in January 1920, or possibly October 1919—the exact date was uncertain because birth records weren't kept in the little Russian village where he came from—Asimov emigrated to Brooklyn in 1922 with his parents. Making a go of life in America turned out to be tougher than they expected, until his father scraped together enough money to buy a candy store. That decision would have a seismic impact on Isaac's future, and on robotics research and the narratives we tell ourselves about human-robot relationships to this day.

As a kid, Isaac worked long hours in the store where he became interested in two attractions that pulled in customers: a slot machine that frequently needed to be dismantled for repairs; and pulp fiction magazines featuring death rays and alien worlds. Soon after the first rocket launches in the mid-1920s, scientists announced that space travel was feasible, opening the door to exciting tales of adventure in outer space. Atomic energy—the source of the death rays—was also coming into public consciousness as a potential "super weapon." But both atomic bombs and space travel were still very much in the realm of fiction; few people actually believed they'd see either breakthrough within their lifetimes.

The genre of the stories in the pulps wasn't new. Fantastical tales inspired by science and technology went back to the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, which speculated about the use of a revolutionary new energy source, electricity, to reanimate life. Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote novels touching on everything from time travel, to atomic-powered vehicles, to what we now call genetic engineering. But the actual term, "science fiction," wasn't coined by any of them: that distinction goes to Hugo Gernsbeck, editor of the technical journal, Modern Electrics, whose name would eventually be given to the HUGO, the annual award for the best science fiction writing.13

Gernsbeck's interest in the genre started with a field that was still fairly new in his time: electrical engineering. Even in 1911, the nature of electricity was not fully understood, and random electrocutions were not uncommon; electricians weren't just tradesmen, but daredevils, taking their lives in their hands every time they wired a house or lit up a city street.14 Gernsbeck, perhaps gripped by the same restless derring-do as his readers, wasn't satisfied with writing articles about induction coils. In 1911, he penned a short story set in the twenty-third century and serialized it over several issues of Modern Electrics, a decision that must have baffled some of the electricians who made up his subscribers. At first, Gernsbeck called his mash-up of science and fiction "scientifiction," mercifully changing that mouthful to "science fiction." He went on to publish a string of popular magazines, including Science Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, Science, and Astounding. (Gernsbeck's rich imagination didn't stretch far enough to come up with more original titles.)

Asimov's father stocked Gernsbeck's magazines in the candy store because they sold like hotcakes, but he considered them out-and-out junk. Young Isaac was forbidden to waste time reading about things that didn't exist and never would, like space travel and atomic weapons.

Despite (or possibly because of) his father's objections, Isaac began secretly reading every pulp science fiction magazine that appeared in the store, handling each one so carefully that Asimov Senior never knew they had been opened. Isaac finally managed to convince his father that one of Gernsbeck's magazines, Science Wonder Stories, had educational value—after all, the word "science" was in the title, wasn't it?15

Isaac sold his first short story when he was still an eighteen-year-old high school student, naively showing up at the offices of Amazing Stories to personally deliver it to the editor, John W. Campbell. Campbell rejected the story (eventually published by a rival Gernsbeck publication, Astounding) but encouraged Isaac to send him more. Over time, Campbell published a slew of stories that established Isaac, while still a university student, as a handsomely paid writer of science fiction.

When you read those early stories today, Asimov's weaknesses as a writer are painfully glaring. With almost no experience of the world outside of his school, the candy store, and his Brooklyn neighborhood— and no exposure to contemporary writers of his time like Hemingway or Fitzgerald—Isaac fell back on the flat, stereotypical characters and clichéd plots of pulp fiction. Isaac did have one big thing going for him, though: a science education.

By the early 1940s, Asimov was a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University, as well as a member of the many science fiction fan clubs springing up all over Brooklyn whose members' obsession with the minutiae of fantastical worlds would be familiar to any ComicCon fan in a Klingon costume today. Asimov wrote stories that appealed to this newly emerging geeky readership, staying close enough to the boundaries of science to be plausible, while still instinctively understanding how to create wondrous fictional worlds.

The working relationship between Asimov and his editor, Campbell, turned into a highly profitable one for both publisher and author. But as Asimov improved his writing and tackled more complex themes, he ran into a roadblock: Campbell insisted that he would only publish human- centered stories. Aliens could appear as stock villains but humans always had to come out on top. Campbell didn't just believe that people were superior to aliens, but that some people—white Anglo-Saxons— were superior to everyone else. Still a relatively young writer and unwilling to walk away from his lucrative gig with Campbell, Asimov looked for ways to work around his editor's prejudices. The answer: write about robots. Asimov's mechanical beings were created by humans, in their own image; as sidekicks, helpers, proxies, and, eventually, replacements. Endowed with what Asimov dubbed "positronic brains," his imaginary robots were even more cleverly constructed than the slot machine in the candy store.

Never a hands-on guy himself, Asimov was nonetheless interested in how mechanisms worked. Whenever the store's one-armed bandit had to be serviced, Isaac would watch the repairman open the machine and expose its secrets. The slot machine helped him imagine the mechanical beings in his stories.

Although Asimov can be credited with kick-starting a generation's love affair with robots, he was far from their inventor. (Even I, Robot borrowed its title from a 1939 comic book of the same name written by a pair of brothers who called themselves Eando Binder, the name eventually bestowed on the beer-swilling, cigar-smoking robot star of the TV show, Futurama.) But in writing his very first robot story, Asimov was both jumping on a new obsession of the 1920s, and mining old, deep myths going back to ancient Jewish tales of the golem, which was a man made of mud and magically brought to life, as well as stories as diverse as Pygmalion, Pinocchio, and engineering wonders like the eighteenth century, chess-playing Mechanical Turk, and other automatons.

Robots have an ancient history and a surprisingly whimsical one. Automatons have been frog marching, spinet playing, and minuet dancing their way out of the human imagination for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but it wasn't until the machine age of the early twentieth century that robots appeared as thinking, reasoning substitute humans. The word robot—Czech for "mechanical worker"—wasn't coined in a patent office or on a technical blueprint, but as the title of a fantastical play by Karel Capek, Rossum's Universal Robots, which was first performed in 1920, the reputed year of Isaac Asimov's birth. In adopting robots as his main characters, and the challenges and ethics of human life in a robotic world as one of his central themes, Asimov found his voice as a writer. His robots are more sympathetic and three-dimensional than his human characters. In exploring the dynamics of human-robot partnerships—as Asimov would do particularly well in detective/robot "buddy" stories, such as his 1954 novel Caves of Steel— he invented a subgenre within the broader world of science fiction.

Asimov's humanoid robots were governed by the Three Laws of Robotics. More whimsical than scientific, they established ground rules for an imaginary world where humans and mechanical beings coexisted. Eventually, the Three Laws were quoted by researchers in two academic fields that were still unnamed in the 1940s: artificial intelligence and robotics.

First published by Astounding magazine in 1942 as part of Asimov's fourth robot story "Runaround", the Three Laws stated that:

    A robot may not injure a human 
being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 


    A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 


    A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

According to Asimov's biographer Michael Wilson in Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction (New York, Carrol & Graff, 2005), "Asimov was flattered that he had established a set of pseudoscientific laws. Despite the fact that in the early 1940s the science of robotics was a purely fictional thing, he somehow knew that one day they would provide the foundation for a real set of laws."

The Three Laws would continue to appear not only in the world of robot-driven books and films—like Aliens (1986), where the laws are synopsized by the synthetic human Bishop when trying to reassure the robot-phobic heroine Ellen Ripley—but by some real-world roboticists and AI researchers, who are now considering how to develop a moral code for machines that may one day have to make independent, life-or-death decisions.

JUST IN: SECRET BEHIND THE CORONAVIRUS LEAKED.
"""""""'''"'""''''"""""''""
I am a senior Chinese military intelligence officer and I know the truth about the coronavirus outbreak. It is far worse than the media are telling you.
I am a Chinese citizen in Wuhan who occupies — or perhaps occupied — a high-ranking position in military intelligence. I am also a member of the Chinese Communist Party. As a senior official near the top of the Party, I have access to a great deal of classified information and I have been involved in many top secret government projects. I have a doctorate from a leading university in a western country, which is why I am able to write my account in English.

I have information that I believe could lead to the overthrow of my government. It is also relevant to billions of people outside of China, all of whom are now in existential peril.

It will not surprise you to hear that if my identity were to be revealed, my life would be in grave danger, as would those of my wife and son. I ask you to respect the fact that I have stripped out of this account all facts that would make it easy to identify me.

By now you will be familiar with the recent outbreak of 2019-nCoV, also known as NCP, or simply "coronavirus". You will have heard that it originated in Wuhan, an industrial city in China, and that it came from an animal — most likely a bat or a pangolin — that was sold in a wild animal market. You will have been told that it is an influenza-like illness that can in severe cases cause pneumonia, respiratory failure and death. Finally, you may have heard that although the disease is highly infectious, it is dangerous only to the elderly or to those who have a compromised immune system. The official lethality rate is approximately 2% or so.

All of that is a bunch of lies concocted by the Chinese state with the tacit support of the U.S. deep state and its friends in the European Union, Russia and Australia, and spread by the docile media in all of those countries.

Let me start by telling you that the world does not operate the way you think it does. Although countries like the US and China vie for global dominance, that competition is restricted to certain limited areas. In most ways, the two countries are more interested in cooperation so that they can stop other competing countries from gaining more power. They also have a shared interest in keeping real power out of the hands of their "ordinary" citizens. To this end, they have many different mechanisms by which they control the overwhelming majority of their media outlets. The Americans in particular have perfected the art of creating made-up "divisions" between their two main parties which are designed to hide the fact that both serve the same masters.

These same nations also posses technology that is far more advanced than you can imagine and which is kept carefully hidden from public view. This includes advanced artificial intelligence capable of undermining and deciding any election in the world; biological and chemical agents that can manipulate and control the thinking patterns and behaviours of citizens to terrifying degrees; highly sophisticated manipulation techniques using hypnotic practices entirely unknown to the public; and other things that I will not go into now. My point is that the great nations do not compete so much as work together. Their principal goal is to shield the true workings of the world from the "uninitiated" public.

Just to give you one example, there aren’t actually any nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The U.S. and the Soviet Union scrapped them all in the 1970s, as did their client states. Everyone realised that those weapons could not be used without destroying the whole world, so there was no need for them; but by pretending that they still had them, the big players were able to keep the non-nuclear powers in line.

Let me return to the virus.

Last year, large-scale anti-government protests erupted in Hong Kong. The Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party considered these to be a grave threat to the integrity and stability of the motherland. The U.S. government and the EU both knew that the Chinese were secretly working on a biological agent that was supposed to make the protesters docile and obedient. Without going into detail, I worked on that project. We tried to develop a sort of spray that could be dispersed from helicopters or drones and that would lead to mental retardation and behavioural change.

Naturally, as Hong Kong is one of the most open and international cities in the world, the Party decided that it was too risky to release the agent in Hong Kong without first testing it. For this, it needed a great number of human guinea pigs. Two groups were identified for this.

First, we rounded up a large number of so-called "islamic radicals" in Xinjiang Province and took them to what we called "training camps". We had already been using these camps for human experimentation for several years, but the Hong Kong protests meant that we redoubled our efforts. We exposed the inmates to various "alpha" experimental agents. As these were odourless and invisible, the subjects were not aware that they were taking part in medical trials. The resulting high rates of cancer, premature dementia, suicidal depression and death by organ failure could easily be suppressed, as the camps are located in very remote parts of our motherland.

Once the initial experiments had yielded a "beta" agent, it was transported to Hubei Province, where it was deployed in a special military testing facility outside the city of Wuhan. This was not even a particularly well-kept secret: the existence of this facility has been reported in international news. Even the fact that it is located close to the wild animal market is a known fact.

By then our President had already introduced a "social credit" system that allowed us to identify disloyal, counter-revolutionary and bourgeois elements in our society. Using the social credit scores — which are taken from online activity, electronic shopping behaviour and reports from informers in civil society — we selected some of the worst offenders. These included human rights lawyers and activists, Christians, homosexuals, artists, intellectuals, people who speak foreign languages, and other undesirables.

Once these troublemakers had been collected and placed in the testing facility, we exposed them to the Agent, which is biochemical in nature and spread in an invisible aerosol, akin to certain viruses. Initial results were encouraging, as we saw significant cognitive decline and reduction in higher mental processing facilities. Essentially, our undesirables were becoming mildly mentally disabled, which is precisely the effect we wanted to produce in order to pacify the restive population of Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the Agent also had other effects. About one week after the retardation set in, our subjects developed major anxiety and panic attacks. Eventually they developed symptoms akin to those of paranoid schizophrenics. At that point, their bodies rapidly deteriorated. They developed massive internal bleeding; the walls of their arteries dissolved; they bled out of their eyes and orifices, and their tissue disintegrated.

To put it in a more direct Western manner, they started to melt.

Death usually occurred through multiple organ failure. This was preceded by at least five days of severe agony which could not be alleviated by painkillers. It was at this time that I first violated our protocol: one subject, an elderly lady who had published defamatory cartoons of our President, begged me for death with such insistence that I took pity and shot her. I was reprimanded, but fortunately the complaint was dropped when I agreed to reimburse the cost of the bullet. I swore to myself never again to show such unnecessary emotion.

We decided that our Agent was unusable. It was far too destructive for our purposes. We wanted the population of Hong Kong to submit to us; we did not want to exterminate it.

Naturally, our American friends had by then taken an interest in our work and asked us for a sample for their own research and testing purposes. They hinted that they wished to use it to resolve certain difficulties in Venezuela. Normally we would have agreed, as we maintain friendly relations with the CIA, but given the extremely toxic nature of the Agent, we declined.

This, as it turned out, was a grave mistake. The CIA was convinced that we had developed something very powerful and wanted to keep it to ourselves. They offered a great deal of money to one of our researchers. Foolishly, he agreed to sell them a specimen. We found out just in time for the handover and tried to stop it from happening. In the ensuing shoot-out — don’t bother to look for it in the news, it was never reported anywhere — several dozen people were killed.

More importantly, however, the Agent escaped.

The shoot-out took place at the wild animal market which has been reported as the location of the "animal to human" transmission that started the outbreak. But of course there was no such transmission; it was just the location where the CIA was supposed to receive the sealed vial containing the Agent. The vial shattered when it was dropped by the traitor who had agreed to sell it to the Americans.

By now I understand you will be sceptical. If I really am who I say I am, why would I be sharing this information on the internet? Let me assure you that I am no friend of the Western system of governance. I love my motherland and I am loyal to the Communist Party. It has lifted hundreds of millions of my compatriots out of squalor and poverty. However, I am also a human being and I have a conscience.

Most importantly, I have a wife and a son.

Once we realised that the Agent had escaped and would start to spread, we swiftly put all of Wuhan into lockdown. I was one of those tasked to manage the fallout of the contamination. Of course we could not keep such a huge undertaking secret, so we decided to order our state media to report that a "coronavirus" had broken out in Wuhan.

In reality, of course, there is no "coronavirus". It was all made up.

It was one of my colleagues who came up with the genius idea of pretending that people with the common flu suffered from the coronavirus. This allowed us to hide the true nature of the disease. Let me explain.

It is currently flu season in China. When we realised that we could no longer control the spread of the Agent, we sent our men to all the hospitals and instructed all doctors to diagnose every case of the common flu as "coronavirus". We came up with a new name — 2019-nCoV — and handed out "factsheets" that described a made-up illness.

The result of this decision was that tens of thousands of individuals who were simply suffering from a cold or flu were now diagnosed as having a mysterious coronavirus that, although infectious, was not often lethal. While this frightened the public, it allowed us to push the narrative that the disease was not that deadly; it also gave us time to prepare for the catastrophe that was sure to come by imposing a lockdown on Wuhan and other cities in Hubei Province.

You have not heard this in the news — and given the size of Wuhan, with its population of 11 million, it is not known even to many of the residents — but within days thousands upon thousands were infected and before long they suffered the agonising deaths that I have already described. Within a week, there were so many corpses that we did not know what to do with them, so we ordered the surviving social credit prisoners to drive the bodies into the countryside and bury them in mass graves. But it was very difficult to keep this activity secret, and we could not even keep up as there were so many corpses. We planted a story that five million residents had "fled" Wuhan. In reality, of course, many of those people had died from the Agent.

I was working around the clock helping to orchestrate this cover-up. When I think back to my actions now, I feel great shame. At the time I still believed that I was fighting for my motherland and that the rule of the Party was right and just. But deep down, I had already begun to have doubts.

My faith in the Party was shaken even more deeply when I learnt what had happened to Dr Li Wenliang. He was one of the few doctors who refused falsely to diagnose flu patients with the "coronavirus". As a punishment, he was sent to help transport dead bodies to mass graves. The expectation was that he would be infected with the Agent and die an agonising death, but to our great surprise, he did not contract the illness.

You have of course read that he died of "coronavirus". You have been misinformed. A sergeant of the People’s Armed Police injected him with a mixture of heroin and mercury that caused his lungs to deflate.

When I found out about this I became unsure whether or not I was doing the right thing. While I believe that it is appropriate for a government to rule with a severe hand, I do not think that it was right to kill Dr Li. He was a compassionate and kind man and he cared about his patients; how can our motherland not benefit from having such a doctor?

I shared my concerns with my wife, but she convinced me that I should not say anything to my superiors. She said that it was too dangerous; that they valued loyalty above everything else; and that I would only find trouble if I admitted to my doubts about their practices. She also pointed out that we benefited from priority medical treatment. As senior officials, we received regular supplies of the highly-sophisticated hazmat masks that are the only known technology that can prevent infection. She implored me to think of our son, who is still small. If I spoke out and were caught, our lives would be at risk.

Around the same time, it became clear that the Agent was entirely beyond our control. It was spreading like wildfire throughout Hubei Province and beyond, infecting tens of millions and causing them all to die.

I understand that what I just said is difficult to believe, because you have been told that there have been only about 50,000 infections, and far fewer deaths. But these are the influenza infections that have been falsely passed off as the non-existent "coronavirus". The Agent is far, far more contagious than that, and its fatality rate, unlike the "coronavirus", is not 2%.

No, its fatality rate is 100%. Nobody recovers from it. Everybody who contracts it dies.

And a lot of people are contracting it.

Hubei Province lies in ruins. The various travel restrictions and lockdowns that have been imposed were not created to stop the spread of the Agent — none of them can stop it, not embargoes, not face masks or hand sanitiser — but to stop the survivors from seeing the catastrophe with their own eyes.

I am part of the greatest cover-up in human history: the hiding of the deaths of tens of millions. Very soon, Hubei Province will be no more than a giant mortuary, and the truth will come out.

For me, the turning point came when the Party told yet another lie, and that lie was too dreadful even for me to accept. You may have heard that China built a new hospital, called Huoshenshan Hospital, in Wuhan, in order to provide additional quarantine and isolation facilities for infected patients. You may have heard that they built it in only ten days.

That too is a lie.

Sure, they did build something in six days. But it was not a hospital. The true nature of the building was top secret. Initially, I was naive enough to believe that the Party was demonstrating its compassion and care for the people. But then my superiors sent me to Huoshenshan. I was shown around the installation by a military police officer called Corporal Meng (this is not his real name). It was there that I saw the truth.

As I have mentioned, the only way to protect oneself from the Agent is by wearing a special protective mask that is entirely unlike those available commercially. Even medical professionals do not have access to it. It is available only to biomedical warfare researchers and it contains extremely advanced technology.

These masks need to be kept at a particular temperature to offer full protection, and lose their effectiveness very quickly. As I have also already said, one of the benefits of my position was that both my family and I had access to regular supplies, which is why were safe when compared to civilians, doctors and even lower-level government officials, all of whom wore utterly ineffective surgical masks in the misguided belief that they would protect them.

And so, wearing this special equipment, I went to Huoshenshan with Corporal Meng.

Whatever you want to call that place, it is not a hospital. Sure, the entrance looks like a hospital and in the ward at the front of the complex, there are what appear to be normal medical beds. There, thousands of infected patients lie, all of them in the early stages of the disease. I walked along those long, white corridors next to Corporal Meng, his angular face dispassionate in his military fatigues, and saw hundreds upon hundreds of identical hospital beds on which squirmed the terrified and diseased inhabitants of Wuhan. Their cries and pleas haunt me in the long nights in which I now am unable to sleep.

But this was merely the beginning. Eventually the Corporal took me to the rear of this front section. There, locked metal gates led to what he called the "middle section". The patients in the front are unaware of its existence. It is there that the more advanced cases are kept, in what most closely resembles a mental asylum.

Immediately upon entering this part of Huoshenshan I was struck by the dim lighting and stench of vomit and human waste. Here the unfortunates roamed freely, their minds gradually disintegrating in endless panic attacks and psychotic episodes. Here too there were no more doctors, merely gorilla-faced men in black uniforms who belonged to some secret branch of the military police I had never heard of.

They appeared to have been selected for their cruelty, for they beat and degraded the patients in the most sadistic manner. Many of the inmates had regressed to childlike states and lay on the floor weeping like infants and begging for compassion that they did not receive. There was cruel pleasure in the eyes of these thugs as they brutalised the unfortunates. They beat them with batons, sprayed pepper spray into their eyes and kicked them with their steel-capped boots. As I was from military intelligence, the guards did not even attempt to hide their activities. They even invited me to join; in every way, they treated me as one of them.

Yes, one of them. I stood in the grey staff bathroom of Huoshenshan and looked into a cheap mirror and asked myself — is this really what you are? Are you really like them?

But the violence was not merely an expression of sadism, for the poor inmates were not there to be cared for.

They were there to work.

There was one more set of doors, and beyond them lay what the Corporal called the "Core". And it was there that I saw it — piles and piles of dead bodies, stacked on top of one another all the way to the ceiling. There were men, women and children, elderlies and toddlers, rich and poor, beautiful and misshapen, proud and humble.

They were all of them dead. Our Agent made no distinction between any of them.

I gasped when the Corporal led me to the Core. I cannot count how many there were, but it was many, many thousands. And in the midst of the piles of corpses was a kind of path, and I heard a roaring sound in the distance. The miserable patients from the middle section picked up the dead and carried and dragged them away into the dark, even as the guards beat them with truncheons.

It took me a little while before I grasped what was happening. I simply could not believe what lay at the end of that path in the Core.

It was an enormous furnace, with great fires roaring within.

One by one, their minds destroyed and their bodies twisted, the dying men and women carried the corpses to the furnace and cast them inside in a doomed attempt to hide the dreadful truth. I saw several of them collapse from exhaustion only for their lifeless bodies to be added to the mountains of corpses on both sides. In a seemingly endless line they went, their emaciated bodies clad in grey overalls, their backs bent under the weight of their dreadful cargo. Many howled and groaned in terror and their voices joined in a sorrowful cacophony that lingered over the roar of the fires.

In deep shock, I stared at the boundless horror before me. Beside me stood Corporal Meng, his freshly-shaved face as emotionless as before. When I turned to face him, he looked at me. His mouth smiled, but his eyes did not.

"We use the energy to operate Huoshenshan," he said. "We save the state considerable resources in this way. And look," — he waved at the gallery of the dead — "there are so many of them here. You could almost describe it as renewable energy." He laughed and waved his hand in a strangely camp gesture.

I stood speechless and stared at the infernal scenes before me. Men in black uniforms screamed like daemons at the wretches who were disposing of the corpses for them. They stripped the dead of anything that had value — jewellery, cash, expensive clothing — and tossed these items onto an enormous pile next to the furnace. When I asked the Corporal what would be done with the items, they said that they would be used to pay for the "healthcare expenses" incurred by the patients’ stay in Huoshenshan.

I vomited in the toilet. When I flushed and came out of the stall, Corporal Meng stood by the door and looked at me. His face was as blank as before, but in his eyes I thought I registered a very faint trace of contempt. You are ten years my senior, the look said, but you are soft.

I thanked him for his service and went home.

When I arrived, I saw that I had received hundreds of updates on the encrypted device the Party uses to communicate to insiders. The news were unimaginably grim. The State Legal and Economic Commission had allocated funds for the construction of dozens of facilities like Huoshenshan all throughout China. The Agent had spread not only to every single province of the motherland, but to most other nations in the world. Fortunately, we had agreements in place with other governments — they agreed to pretend that the infections were due to a coronavirus. They were just as worried as we were that a panic might break out in their countries. The Americans in particular were terrified that the S&P 500 might decline. This, they said, would be unacceptable in an election year, so we could count on their full support.

Of course the World Health Organisation also helped us. For a long time, the only issue with the WHO has been that we have been locked in a contest with the Americans about who bribes them more. They released all sorts of sophisticated misinformation about having decoded the DNA of the so-called coronavirus. All this has allowed us to stave off a global panic.

For now.

Yet the situation was worsening with astonishing speed. I am reluctant to reveal too much on this point, as it would make it too easy for my enemies to identify me, but we quickly began to implement measures to protect our most senior leaders. If you look at the world news, you will see that Xi Jinping, our President, disappeared for approximately one week after the outbreak, before being seen again with the leader of Cambodia.

You should know that the person who met the Cambodian leader was not President Xi. It was a body double who had, for many years, been trained to look and sound just like our President. President Xi is of course not careless enough to risk his own death. He is safely ensconced in a secret bunker underneath Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Party in Beijing.

Nor was he the only leader who is in hiding. In fact, I can assure you that over half of all senior Party members are currently being imitated by trained actors who are following instructions given to them via special implants. Do you really think that our Prime Minister would risk his life by going to Wuhan?

All of this means that our government has become utterly paralysed and the functions of the state have been taken over by the military.

It became clear to me that our efforts were pointless. Yes, the lockdowns, travel bans and targeted assassinations of rebellious journalists allowed us to hide the true situation in Wuhan; but I knew that this would not last. Once the mass deaths begin in the rest of the world — in our estimation, this should happen within the next week or so — everyone will know the truth. It will become clear that we cannot protect ourselves from the Agent. Surgical masks, hand sanitiser, gloves — nothing can stop it. Nothing except the special hazmat masks, but those cannot be produced in anything like sufficient quantities. You, an ordinary person, will never even receive one, let alone a sufficient number to see you through the coming holocaust.

For those of you reading this, therefore, all I can suggest is that you keep your loved ones close to you. Hug them, tell them what they mean to you. Enjoy the time you have left with them. It is not typical in Chinese culture to express one’s feelings in this way, but I have learnt the importance of such gestures.

I promised my wife that I would show this document to her before I posted it.

Yet I broke my word.

I hear her weep in loud, hoarse sobs in the bedroom, and the keyboard of my laptop is wet with my own tears. Not long ago, we received results of the regular tests that are part of our "priority medical treatment", and we learnt that my son had been infected with the Agent.

The military police that has supplied me with the special protective mask had been giving expired and ineffective masks to my son, masks that senior officials had already worn and then discarded when they ceased to protect them. My own masks, on the other hand, had always been of the necessary quality.

I suppose they decided that my son was of lower priority than me. I suppose my son could not help them with their cover-up.

We had long ago decided that we would be different — we would be honest with him, always. And so when he asked us, we told him the truth. We told him that he was very sick. He asked more, and we told him he would not get better.

He continued asking, and we told him that he would die. He is very small, but he was old enough to understand.

His terrified wails will haunt me for the rest of my miserable days in this world.

Let them come. Let them do with me as they will. I no longer care.

It's been 20 years since The Cure released what was meant to be their swansong, "Bloodflowers". A highly underrated album on it's initial 2000 release, and two decades on "Bloodflowers" remains perhaps the most underrated album of The Cure's career thus far. And while there are more than a few underrated albums throughout The Cure's back catalogue it is"Bloodflowers" for me which is the most deserving of a reappraisal!

"Bloodflowers" was intended to be the end of a career yet it almost sounded like the beginning of a new era! An era where the musicianship took centre stage & after nearly 25 years perfecting their craft it felt entirely natural for the remaining members of the ever-changing band line-up to showcase just how skilled they had become as musicians. If this was to be the final curtain then The Cure were going out on a musical high! Quite ironic considering "Bloodflowers" was the bands most downbeat album since 1989's majestic "Disintegration" a decade earlier...

The Cure's 1996 album "Wild Mood Swings" was underrated in it's own right, but it was also admitadly a hit & miss affair. "Wild Mood Swings" was criticised by some fans for it's "Pop" leanings, but they had nothing to complain about on "Bloodflowers". An album that is very much the sound of a seasoned band rediscovering themselves. There is not a single "Pop" song on "Bloodflowers". Infact the album takes an almost operatic form as each epic "piece" fits together. Like a chain of flowers in a garden of musical greatness. The essence of The Cure was well & truly back on "Bloodflowers". The band's most atmospheric work in well over a decade & an album which absolutely deserves its place beside the majestic "Pornography" (1982) & "Disintegration" (1989) as part of the TRILOGY envisioned by Robert Smith himself!

"Bloodflowers" is mature & reflective both musically & lyrically. The band's approach is more reminiscent of earlier offerings "Seventeen Seconds" (1980) & 'Faith" (1981) than any of their more recent 90's offerings. An approach which they'd also adopt on the aformentioned "Pornography" & "Disintegration". Infact i myself consider all five albums connected as part of what I call The Cure's PENTALOGY. Each of the five albums feel like a singular entity that's split into several pieces. They are not a "mood swing affair" like "The Top" (1984), "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" (1987) or indeed "Wild Mood Swings" (1996). Nor could they be described as "radio-friendly" like "Three Imaginary Boys" (1979), "The Head On The Door" (1985) or "Wish" (1992) probably are.

Robert Smith had a very specific vision for Bloodflowers not to be an easy listening experience, but his original musical ideas for the album were quite different from what ended up on the final product. Early recordings such as "Possession" & "Coming Up" were heavy on Electronica & in retrospect it is quite unsurprising considering the time period that "Bloodflowers" was being recorded. Between the years 1997 & 1999, Robert Smith had been dabbling more in Electronica than ever before. He recorded a trilogy of electronically driven songs, but still credited each to The Cure despite the band having no input whatsoever...

The first of these songs, "Wrong Number", was the most memorable, not least because it featured on The Cure's 1997 compilation, "Galore". The truth however is that "Wrong Number" was recorded with Reeves Gabrels (who would not officially join The Cure for more than a decade later).
Robert Smith then covered Depeche Mode's 1990 classic, 'World In My Eyes", for a tribute album. It was a solo recording, but Smith still credited the cover to The Cure. Smith's DM cover actually began life as an official Cure recording of another DM track, "Walking In My Shoes". When the sessions of the intended cover proved fruitless Smith changed his mind on both the song he chose to cover & the use of his band members themselves. "World In My Eyes" was recorded by Smith alone "in the style of The Cure" ;)

The final Smith solo recording was, "More Than This", which was recorded with producer Paul Corkett specifically for the soundtrack of "The X-Files Movie" aka "The X-Files:Fight The Future" (1998). "More Than This" also veered even further into the realms of Electronica than the earlier "Wrong Number" or "World In My Eyes". Another confirmation of Smith's growing interest in exploring the genre which he'd last played around with back in 1983! So in retrospect one can definetly see where Smith was headed when the earliest sessions for "Bloodflowers" produced the aformentioned "Possession" & "Coming Up". Two songs more reliant on synths & sampling than they were guitars & drums. One does wonder just how far Robert Smith would have taken the Electronica route had the autumnal motif for "Out Of This World" not changed his mind about the direction of sound. Such an impact the composition made on Smith that "Possession" was removed from the tracklist while "Coming Up" only resurfaced as a "bonus track" on the Australian version of the album.

"Out Of This World" was not only the song which influenced Robert Smith's final vision for the "Bloodflowers" album, but it was also chosen to be the opening track. The song captures the essence of autumn with it's asthetical appreciation of the dreary season shot through a distinctly dreamy musical lens. Uncharacteristically for an opener on a Cure album, "Out Of This World" has a calmer, more melodic arrangement. This approach was better fitting of a band who were older, wiser & winding down.
The song was actually released as a promotional radio single against the wishes of Robert Smith. "Bloodflowers" was intended to be an album in the purest sense. None of the songs recorded were ever intended to be released as singles & Robert Smith had always intended the album to be one epic mood piece rather than another collection of radio friendly tunes. "Bloodflowers" certainly succeeded at that even if it did greatly limit promotion of the album around the world.

The album's densely layered second track, "Watching Me Fall" clocks in at 11+ minutes. Such a sprawling experience may not exactly the most conventional choice for the second song on the tracklist. Yet it flows so perfectly on an album which houses back to back epics. With the exception of one track (the 3 & 1/2 minute "There Is No If"), the songs on "Bloodflowers" all exceed the 5 minute mark, with "Watching Me Fall" being the most epic of them all!
Musically the song is an intense fusion of blaring guitars with a blizzard of electronic effects. A snowstorm of sound in both structure & motif, "Watching Me Fall" references the season of winter on an album most associate with it's predecessor, autumn. For me the song is part of a seasonal transition which defines the first half of the Bloodflowers album.

The next track, the evergreen "Where The Birds Always Sing" is painted with the colour of spring. Watery piano keys rain down on the furtile surface of warm synths as surging guitar solos paint an aural portrait of a flower blossoming with life! "Where The Birds Always Sing" seems to take it's musical cue from the memorable guitar solo on The Cure's classic 1994 song "Burn" (from the soundtrack to "The Crow"). A song which itself took it's own musical cue from two of the bands past works (1982's "The Hanging Garden" & 1987's "The Snakepit").

Had any true singles been released from the album then I feel the musically warm "Maybe Someday" would have been a perfect choice for two specific reasons. Firstly the song was written by Robert Smith about his band & how he felt about their place in the music industry at that moment. "Maybe Someday" is essentially a goodbye song with a twist. Robert sings of wanting to end it all & practically walking away from the band before giving the fans words of hope as he utters the songs title.
"Maybe Someday" is the only upbeat song on the album but even then it's not entirely sure of itself. Robert is adamant about his intentions but concedes that there is always the possibility of returning...maybe...someday. There is still passion in his heart for the band he has fronted for decades & even as he walks away he feels the need to reassure the fans who keep his passion burning.

The guitar driven tour de force, "The Last Day Of Summer" is the centrepiece on an album which for me depicts the cycle of a year. Bloodflowers lingers on the season of autumn once the album crosses the half-way mark ("The Last Day Of Summer"), but the first half is very much a swift musical transition from autumn ("Out Of This World") to winter ("Watching Me Fall") to spring ("Where The Birds Always Sing") to summer ("Maybe Someday").
The evocative power of "The Last Day Of Summer" will never die no matter what time of the year the song is played!

My personal favourite song on the album, "The Loudest Sound". One of the most powerful yet overlooked tracks that Robert Smith has ever written! Drenched in melancholy from the outset, with a deep, deliberate bass cords like droplets of blood from a dying rose (the flower of romance!).
"The Loudest Sound" is as gorgeous as it is gloomy. Lyrically the song is a devastating portrait of a dying relationship, but layed upon such a beautiful deathbed of musical tranquility. Opening with gentle purcussion & soothing keyboards, the song begins with a nice melodious calm, picking up considerable urgency when the guitar kicks in to deliver, well the loudest sound of all! "The Loudest Sound" reminds me of the songs "A Strange Day" (1982) & "Homesick" (1989) from Bloodflowers respective companion albums "Pornography" & "Disintegration".

Elsewhere on the album, "39" is as self-explanitory as song titles comes with a "pushing-40" Robert Smith revisiting the theme of aging which has been commonplace throughout his career (most notably on "Disintegration" a decade earlier).
Meanwhile on the delicate "There Is No If", Smith's lyrics may infact use a decaying relationship as a metaphor for the impending end of his band of over two decades. "Bloodflowers" was intended to be the final album of The Cure's career after all! Thankfully that was not to be, but had it been then the "Bloodflowers" album would have been one hell of a swansong! "There Is No If" is as heartbreaking & as haunting as anything The Cure have ever recorded .

The album closes with fittingly intense title track itself! Led by dramatic tribal beats & awash with synths not heard since the "Disintegration" album, "Bloodflowers" begins to blossom as the guitars rain down like lightning bolts. An emotionally charged anthem which would have sent The Cure out in a blaze of gloomy glory had it been their final recording. In the eyes of Robert Smith & for much of the CUREmunity, "Bloodflowers" concludes the TRILOGY which began with "Pornography" & continued with "Disintegration". The three endings of a three stage act spanning 18 years. Each album captures what Smith considers the best representation of The Cure up to their respective points in time. For me personally, "Bloodflowers" remains The Cure's finest work of the 21st Century thus far. And 20 years on I still have FAITH that MAYBE, SOMEDAY they'll deliver an album to surpass it!