Ask A Genius 880: Five Years a Covid
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/01
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, year five of Covid.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Five years already?
Rosner: No, four years ago, and it started hitting, maybe, December 2019. So, we are at the beginning of year five. So, it is a brand-new disease, and they are still finding out a ton about it; there is much denialism coming from both sides in America. The conservatives want to deny it all together because they do not like Trump getting blamed for fucking up how he dealt with it. Still, the CDC and the Democrats are not great on working people to take care of because it looks like they do not want to be blamed for doing a lousy job on COVID-19. So, there is much denial, and few people wearing mare ask even though the COVID numbers are as high as ever. We are in the middle of a winter bump, and there is some research there; people I follow on Twitter who seem pretty legit put up research on how Covid fucks your brain. One horrifying thing it does, and I have seen the video, is that it makes your brain cells fuse if it gets in there. I do not know if it does that to everybody, but that is terrible because if you take five or six brain cells and they fuse together into one giant cell, that cell’s no good. It’s not doing brain stuff anymore. Who knows what the fuck it’s doing.
My thinking is that you don’t have to get bad Covid to get brain involvement, I would think, and probably half of America or maybe two-thirds of America has had Covid at least once, and it makes me wonder if we’re more inclined to be assholes if our brains are fucked from Covid. Now, we know that social media and the Russian fire hose model of propaganda also make us more inclined to be assholes and crazy assholes if we’re super susceptible to social media bullshit. Still, I’m wondering if it causes brain damage and makes people even worse. You can make the argument that it might make people more rage monsters because we know that guys, on average, have less impulse control than women. Women have a fatter Corpus callosum connecting their two brain hemispheres. So, I wonder if Covid gets in there and cuts a bunch of wires in your head; I wonder if that also lowers your impulse control.
I forgot to look up whether COVID-19 gets into your frontal lobe because your frontal lobe is where control of behaviour lies. People who get frontal lobe dementia lose all inhibitions and, like an upstanding doctor, can become a drug dealer. A very respectable doctor in his ’60s can just start selling drugs to whomever and using the money to pay for prostitutes and get sent to prison eventually and still be happy in prison because he’s there with all the other crazy fucker. So, that’s supposition one that we’ve seen a rise in fascism and violent crime in the US; however, it hasn’t gone up. It went up in 2020. It blipped a little bit, but it’s back down at 30-year lows. I’m thinking that are people less criminal now, or people just stay in more than they did 30 years ago because there’s more shit available online.
If fewer people are out on the street, does that reduce crime? I would guess that it does, and I’d guess that there are fewer people out on the street. So, people aren’t necessarily less crazy and crime-y; they just might be home more, I don’t know. The world’s on fire in several ways; the rise of fascism and that’s encouraged by Russia and countries that are allied with Russia, but I’m wondering if there’s a tendency to get into angry political movements if your brain’s been fucked. And then you look back at history, and maybe the largest flu pandemic epidemic in history ran from late 1918 to maybe 1921 and beyond and killed maybe 50 million people worldwide. It also associated with Encephalitis lethargica, which is a sleeping sickness that may have killed half a million people worldwide and associated with that is parkinsonism, the symptoms of Parkinson’s. They even made a movie about this about 20 years ago. Robin Williams’s Robert De Niro movie about how Oliver Sachs found out if you gave people who’d been in that epidemic and gotten sleeping sickness and had been frozen with Parkinson’s for 40 years if you gave them l Dopa could at least a while, and the movie was called Awakenings.
A vast epidemic of flu affected people’s brains; this epidemic raged from 1919 through 1921 or later because, as we’re learning from COVID, after a while, people pretend it’s over even when it isn’t. So, Italy became fascist in 1922, and Mussolini’s fascist government took over. Do you know what the Beer Hall Putsch is?
Jacobsen: No, I need to find out what the Beer Hall Putsch is. What is it?
Rosner: Before Hitler took over Germany, starting in 1933, like a decade earlier, sometime in the early 20s, I think, he unsuccessfully tried to do a coup, and it failed massively, and he went to prison for a couple of years, where he wrote Mein Kampf. So, Hitler was trying to do his fascist shit in the 1920s and then got to do it starting in 1933. You’ve got Stalin, in the same period, eventually killing 40 million of his people. The 20th century was the century of mass murder. So, within less than 20 years of the beginning of that flu epidemic, you’ve got World War II started by fascism. Japan, too, gets very aggressive, and I’m wondering if a world population, most of whom got the flu, I’m wondering if a considerable percentage of the population had slightly fucked brains made them into, to a certain extent, rage monsters who fell for fascism because that’s a pretty quick turnaround between World War I and World War II.
World War I ended in 1918, and World War II began roughly 1939. Usually, worldwide pan-European conflicts last more than decades on average between them. Of course, one primary reason World War II started was that the League of Nations and the Allies fucked Germany charging them huge bills that they couldn’t pay to pay for the cost of World War I and fucking them geographically and just not a generous treaty leading to hyperinflation. So, that’s plenty of reason for Germany to start acting up again, but I’m wondering if everything was abetted by a worldwide disease that fucked people’s brains. I looked further back, and I saw that there was a big flu pandemic from 1889 to 1894. So, 20 years before World War I, that’s a reach because that’s 20 years, and you know you’ll get a pandemic every few decades. Still, I don’t know if anybody’s ever tried to go back through history and draw a correlation between diseases that might have fucked up people’s brains and big Wars. I would guess there’s insufficient information about precisely what the diseases did. Suppose you go back to the 19th century and before; you must have been lucky to have gotten the Genome. In that case, I don’t know that we know the Genome of any of the flu pandemics from the 19th century. Still, I’m willing to argue that Covid is fucking our brains and making us more belligerent assholes now and that the flu of 1919 may have made people belligerent assholes back then.
[Recording End]
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