Omicron Lights: They're MILD...!

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

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

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I Love New York

Here’s one in solidarity with our comrades and neighbors in the UK, where PM Boris Johnson is basically engaged in the same kind of slow genocide currently being revved up in NYC and elsewhere in the USA — forcing children back into school buildings with inadequate protection or distancing and no remote instruction options during a surge in one of the deadliest pandemics of the past century — with the attendant government and media distortions and cover-ups galore.

The TL;DR here is that they just don’t care anymore, or at least have quit pretending to care. Every goddamn politician and TV talker using the term “herd immunity” doesn’t really know or care what it really means; it’s their vile-ass code for “let everybody die” — or, for the rest of us, “look the hell out”.

So, it’s grand to see that parents are waking up and doing it for themselves both in the UK, and in New York City, where DeBlasio is desperately trying to plaster a big ol’ happy-ass “I Heart NY” sticker on the whole mass-homicidal debacle that’s already killing children in the UK and here across the Pond.

Just a little something to keep in mind the next time you see the entire US press plastered with images of fascist chuds screaming and crying about their “medical freedom” when required to comply with the simplest and most basic and effective public-health measures.

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Bite the Big Apple

ya got rats on the West Side, bedbugs Uptown!
What a mess! This town’s in tatters!
–rolling stones

So, what’s the deal with New York City, anyway? Is it hypocritical — or schizoid? I’ve been asking this question a lot lately, while checking out the news from NYC about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and the attendant right-wing racist street zaniness. New York City’s always had this outward image of a progressive, multicultural, hip city — a cradle of the US labor movement, the birthplace of outfits like the Yippies, the city where people like Andy Warhol, Peter Max, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith first emerged as major artists — versus a long-present simmering vile nasty core of racism and class war, where Amadou Diallo and a host of other Black Americans and African immigrants were brutally tortured and murdered by the police, and systematic gentrification drove the poor and working class out of places like Tompkins Square and Brooklyn.

I was recently discussing this with my friend Isis, a cohort in the Town Hell Posse and native New Yorker. She seemed totally down with the wormy, rotten core idea, and filled me in on New York City’s historic record of racism, xenophobia and classism. “Y’know that old Stones song, ‘Shattered’? That pretty much says it!” Suddenly, the conversation shifted to sketching in some plans to go to NYC to cover the big anti-Islamic hate rally being held on September 11, and how we could use “Shattered” for our motif and background music; my mind suddenly fixated on the line that goes go ahead, bite the Big Apple — don’t mind the maggots!

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