​I got on my big bike the other day even though it was raining on the highway, but hell, I ‘m not made of sugar and will not dissolve (Polish expression).  My wife says that I’m a stubborn eastern man, but somehow she is still interested in what I have to say and she tolerates me. The boys tolerate me too.
I was likely breaking some rules in these Covid times , but I just can’t sit.
I drove to service the motorcycle for the summer and somehow the guys at Serpa Automotive still keep the doors open. They told me it will take about and hour and I went for a coffee only to find out that everything around is closed. 
Starbucks with the lights out.
So I was limping around, which is another story. 
We landed in Geneva on an Emirates flight some days back and I fell on the stairs from the plane with the bags in my hand. I fractured a bone in my foot. 
Being a stubborn eastern man, I tied my shoe some more and carried on. 
It’s my right foot, and you need to know that on the motorcycle the left side is for riding, the right side is for breaking, so I am a little wild on the road. 
At the dealership I was sitting in the waiting area watching the depressing stuff on TV when I heard my bike starting, which shook the building. I may had gone a bit far with the exhaust upgrade, it sounded like somebody is starting a tank. 
Anyway, we got out from Europe on the last flight, just in time. Air Canada suspended operations until the end of April. They were flying the crew to Toronto that was supposed to service the next flight. Hasta la Vista, as they say in the south.
Lights out, as they say here.
As it happens, I got a new motorcycle jacket that just shipped from China, thick KLIM gloves and I know a place called Ania’s Deli for breakfast, about two hours drive north. 
Ania drives a Yamaha too, an FJR1300ES and she makes great food. It's a halfway stop on the way north. North is where you will find me. 

​We’ve all lived life within similar boundaries, having iPhones with the same applications, CNN on TV, Al Jazeera for some, some of us ignoring TV altogether. Dinosaur desktop computers at work loaded with ancient Microsoft software.
All that, plus financial markets priced to perfection and a slough of reality shows for the evening entertainment. Life was steady.
Then the reality changed and set us apart, the awakening coming in the form of a virus, which was always out there but somehow now it’s getting a lot of attention. 
Go figure why, it beats me. 
Now we work from home practicing “social distancing”, as going to the office requires permission, and we use Skype or similar apps to do business. 
There is an app for conferencing called “blue jeans”, as flat of a name as one can possibly imagine. May as well call it “wet towel”.
I don’t get excited about blue jeans, but try Victoria Secret blue and I will dial in. 
 
The current virus scare shows that there are no similarities from continent to continent and we’re not the same. 
The climate matters – if you have hot summers and cold winters with insect and bacteria kill, you’re better off. Living mostly in Europe for the last few years I have been watching in amazement the number of TV drug commercials for cold, flu, joint pain, muscle pain – there are hardly any of this kind in Canada. 
We get down to -40C in the winter, but also to +40C in the summer and people are healthier. This is in contrast to rainy and sun-less climate in Central and Northern Europe. 
Location matters too – Italy has the oldest population in Europe and they live in densely populated communities, in contrast to say, Canada. They have a high number of deaths every flu season.
 
Nevertheless, life will come back to normal eventually and by this I mean soon, the media is going to drop the topic like a hot potato and all will be good on the western front again. Lost taxes and increased welfare payments will put pressure on governments to lift the absurd business closures.
 
Then later in the year, come October on a random Tuesday evening I will heat the pool to the point that steam will be raising from the water and blinding me when I swim. 
And my pool is big, not Olympic size but close, and I will be enjoying it to no end. 
Then I get nasty letters from the local energy supplier about how I am not doing my part in being tame and how I am the worst among the neighbors. 
They show how bad I am in fancy graphs.
To which I say: “I pay the bills, no? Go away and focus on something else.”
 
I am under quarantine now for 14 days, today is day number six since I returned from the desert (read my Long Stem Rose for the account of it.)
I have no symptoms whatsoever, if anything, I never felt so good. I go for walks sometimes and the streets are deserted, if I meet people they make a round through the grass to keep away from me. We all seem to be living on the edge. 
 
The way life feels now is like we’re going through a big reset and we will come out better on the other side, I am convinced of that.
We have plenty of human capital: strong backs and agile minds. They just have to be reconditioned off their addictions to canned entertainments and raptures of techno-narcissism – in other words, we need to get real. Mostly that means re-adjusting our attention back to the people and the place around us, while expecting a whole lot less from distant institutions far away.
 
Hell, just saying that feels so good.

​I walked barefoot through the desert gate after a brutal ride through the dunes in a Toyota Land Cruiser, where the truck was leaning sideways to the point that I was loosing my sense of space. The Arab driver in traditional thwab was casually changing radio stations as he was furiously working the brakes and the steering wheel. 
“You’ve done it before, no?” I asked.
“Highway drive is boring, I live for this here”, he replied in perfect English.
“Bet you own the camp in the desert too.”
“Yes,” he gave me a wide smile, “I do”.
He parked the car high on the dune and I went down where the lights were.
“Don’t rush,” he said. “We can be the first car out or we can be the last car out. It’s all the same to me.”
As I walked down, a man with a falcon on his arm came by and I didn’t know much about falcons so I asked him.
“Look,” he said, “the Bedouins didn’t have guns to hunt for animals in the desert, but they needed to eat all the same. What’s the second fastest thing that can catch an animal?”
I was looking at the falcon he held.
“This guy here.”
“He can go 400 km/hour when he strikes.”
I looked at the bird and he didn’t look like much and the man in the white thwab read my mind and said: “that’s the idea.” 
The sunset came early in the desert and the food was ready, with belly dancing show on stage and all that. 
The cold weather came with it.
 
Being here, so far away in the south, I wanted to wait out the corona scare even though I don’t believe in any of this, but the flights were getting cancelled and I had to make my way to the airport.
I did it in a Tesla and it’s a compliant ride, but I like a car that makes healthy noise, I need a manual transmission to make me feel how the car works, what it says, how the gears engage with the engine. Is the third gear too long? Is the steering loading heavy as I get into a turn?
The Tesla experience was like driving a dynamic wheelchair and the popularity of it makes me feel out of date. Not a bad feeling actually, simply because I think the others are missing out on something that I got under my skin.
 
Nice finishes inside the car though.
 
And no, I will not talk about the corona virus this time; except for the fact that this artificial scare makes most people think that something doesn’t add up. 
That we’re all being had.
 
As Leonard Cohen had it:
 
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
And everybody knows

​Every year, worldwide, we have new types of viruses. They want to keep changing, because if they come next year in the same form, our immune system will recognize them and will not let them multiply, and they want to multiply.
There are about 100 types of viruses out there that evolve constantly, and the corona virus was always a part of it, accounting for about 7 – 15% of the mix. 
This is nothing new.
Normally about 8 - 10% of the population has some viruses that make them sick or unwell. Obviously, if the tests are performed on patients already in clinics and hospitals, that number is higher, but there still will be the corona virus present in the 7  - 15% of the virus’s mix. To assess the data and determine the level of risk, we need first to know on which group of people the tests were performed. 
The point also is this - there is no way of knowing if the corona was the reason of a patient’s illness or death – impossible to determine.
 
The province of Ontario (about 15 million people) announced 214 confirmed cases without saying on which population the tests were done. 
Premier Doug Ford introduced draconian measures, which are bringing economic activities to a halt. He declared a state of emergency and said that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. There is so far one death case “potentially related to the coronavirus.”
 
Let’s look at the cold facts, taking Germany as an example – every winter between 20,000 and 30,000 people there die of the flu. Let’s assume for simplicity that corona accounts for 10% of the death cases, meaning that it causes between 2000 and 3000 deaths every year in Germany alone, and it did for years. 
 
However, as the media focused on this subject in their typical incompetent way, forcing the politicians to come out and do something decisive, it became impossible for logical people to come out and say – “wait, there is nothing unusual happening, you are destroying the world’s economy because of a common flu.”
 
Now the damage has been done, with massive layoffs, huge losses in the stock market and bottoming commodity prices. The tourist season will be terrible for countries that rely on it the most, like Italy. 
The official approach seems to be to kill the patient to cure the disease. 
 
The critical question now is this – how is the insanity going to end?
The government’s response to this non-crisis will undermine people’s confidence in it, and at some point we will start ignoring the safety measures imposed on us, simply because there is no justification for them. 
Life will go on, some governments will fall, and I can’t believe that they do not see how they’re cutting the very branch they’re sitting on.

​The rain came down hard just after midnight and I like rain, it fills up the space and it makes a better background noise than TV.
The Caribbean islands are perfect for this – you get the rain in the night and beautiful sunshine in the morning. Like the rain washes away the sins. 
An interesting thing – there are no animal sights in the South, in Canada I will see the deer and hear the coyotes, see the squirrels too, which are black in Ontario.
I will take Muskoka over Barbados every day of the year, you know.
 
Outside the coronavirus panic continues. My sons just flew in from Toronto and the plane was almost empty. Felt like taking a private jet, they said.
More controversial are claims that political structures become top-heavy after long periods of success, and these bloated, brittle hierarchies lose the flexibility and boldness needed to deal with novel challenges hitting at the same time.Their response to the crisis is pathetic. 
This applies directly to China, which is experiencing not just a public health crisis (Covid-19 pandemic) but a host of overlapping crises triggered by the epidemic.
As for the export economy: Chinese companies were already relocating abroad as a result of the trade war with the US, to Mexico for example, where the labor cost is just as low and that country is within the NAFTA zone. This will only accelerate going forward.
One thing is clear for me – this is the end of China as a global manufacturing hub, there is no going back. The important question is what comes next over there – the ruling party needs to keep people employed otherwise they will be on the streets soon. China doesn't have the domestic market to absorb the factories output. A lot of people will learn the lesson that the domestic demand is the key, not the export economy.
 
Problem is that we’re dominated by the political left, that is incapable of acting in the crisis. Someone needs to put the foot down and stop the nonsense. The left refuses to accept that every value system produces a hierarchy and if you dispense with the hierarchy, you dispense with the value system. It’s a Marxist thinking that we can somehow not shake off and it is now coming to hunt us. We’re looking at major confusion and swings that will get the best of most people. It’s coming.

​I went to cut my hair the other day, and I know the guy who owns the place for years now. He was one of the first to read my book and he liked it. 
He said “I almost read the whole thing.” Good enough.
 
“You know where the coronavirus comes from?” he asked.
“If you said Wuhan I walk out.”
“From a brewery in Mexico, along with the lyme disease.”
 
Got to love the Italians, they never give up to be cheerful no matter how bad it gets.
 
Now Milan is the European center of the virus, likely because of the fashion shows and the many Chinese visitors shopping. Not their fault, except how the virus got out of a lab in China, it didn’t appear out of thin air in the world. Nobody is investigating it.
 
The media said that 41 people died in Italy last day alone from this. That’s tragic.
 
For the rest of us, we’re about to find out what we’ve wrought with the wonders of globalism. Is there anything you can think of over at the Wall Mart or the Walgreens that isn’t made in China?
The message is getting out — though not from US authorities yet — that everybody may soon be spending a lot of time home alone.
 
Switzerland banned events with more than 1,000 people (why that number, exactly is not clear), Japan has canceled school for the time being — duration unknown for now. The auto show in Geneva in cancelled. 
 
Of all the many-networked systems the world depends on, banking and finance are the most fragile, the most susceptible to danger of disorder. And, of course, that is exactly what we’re seeing in the stock markets – they’re diving hard.
Purchasing Managers’ Indices (PMIs) are a tally of how executives see their own company – whether business activity at their company rose or fell, whether they added or shed staff, etc. 
A value above 50 means expansion; a value below 50 means contraction.
 
And in China, both, the PMI for the non-manufacturing sector and the PMI for the manufacturing sector, released on March 1, have collapsed to unfathomable lows (from 54.1 in January to below 30 now). After that time, the government site with this info became not accessible (error # 502, whatever that means).
ANZ banking group estimated, based on migration data of workers returning to the city from their villages, that about 50% of the workers had returned to their jobs as of this weekend, but that China’s economy was operating at only 20% capacity, hampered by issues ranging from lacking parts to other workers not having returned to work. 
Despite repeated pleads from health officials not to buy face masks, which will not work, people can’t stop snatching up masks and respirators.
 
Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades, and now is the time to act on those plans, as a WHO official in Geneva was lecturing the other day. 
Let’s see how efficient are the governments that cost us a fortune in taxes. 
Efficient in protecting their own people, that is.
 
For all of you stacking up on food for the coming apocalypse, just remember – rice comes from China and pasta from Italy.