Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 20: 1918 Philadelphia War Bond Parade

Episode Date: March 22, 2020

Today @donoteat01, @aliceavizandum, and @oldmananders0n talk about the deadliest parade in US history. Dont spit. Here are the slides: https://youtu.be/oifinZTKxKo Here is the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

It's the display that usually shows this that starts recording, as opposed to the one with the slides. Now, maybe I can do it that way, and that would make sense. And then just put the slides on the one that it's recording? Yeah, that might work. Well, let's see what happens. So long as you can control. It's recording this one now.

Okay. So, it works? No, no, now it's recording the main screen where I put the... Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, so it's... I tricked it. I tricked it.

Ah! Genius! Yeah, hello and welcome to Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about Justin outwitting slides. I am officially smarter than the computer. I am God. My consciousness has rose into the machine. I am beyond Twitter.

I am all things at all times. I just, you know, troned right into the computer. Good moving. Yeah. Okay. Well, now that this is less done. Now that you've defeated screen sharing. I defeated the final boss of the technology.

The final boss of the AMD screen recording software. Welcome to Well There's Your Problem. A podcast about engineering disasters, which is in and of itself a disaster and also it has slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. I also have a degree in it. I don't know, should we start like introducing like, I'm the guy who's like the engineer?

Sure. Yeah, you can like list your actual qualifications and then we can just be like, yeah, I don't know. I actually have a degree in engineering. So you know that most of the time I know what I'm talking about some of the time. Okay. All the two of you have your degree is from Drexel University. So.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. Okay. Alice Kodwell-Kelly. Oh, Justin, you forgot your fucking pronouns. My pronouns are civil and engineer. All right. Alice Kodwell-Kelly, my pronouns are she and her.

My sole qualification for this is that like I was recording another podcast before this. I have two thirds of a law degree and I'm probably going to like walk the third year because of the coronavirus just making exams impossible. Hey, congratulations. Thank you. Coming in by defaults. Hey, my dad got into Yukon law because he took a broad a history of broadcasted class at UMass and literally said to himself two months before graduation, I don't know what

to do. So I'll just fucking go to law school. I am Liam Anderson. I am still on Twitter. I like some people at Old Man Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And my qualifications are that I've lived with Do Not Eat for the past five years. And I have degrees, bachelor's degrees in math and in economics because Rutgers fucked

up the paperwork. We also have to introduce the activate windows thing. The fourth host is back. Pronouns are forward and greed. Yeah. People are missing it. It's kind of when I switched over to daylight savings time, I had to re-sync the time. And then when I re-sync the time, activate windows came back.

This wouldn't let me re-sync with the atomic clock at the Naval Observatory. It only let me re-sync with windows.com. This is the story about the fucking you not being able to email anybody over 50 miles away. Like Jesus. So anyway, what do you see on the screen here is an old timey parade going down Broad Street in Philadelphia. It looks like shit.

Fuck off. Settle down there, Glasgow. Hey, we suspended all of our orange order marches, which is very good because they're like quasi-fascist because of the coronavirus. So no parades for us. Billy Sports seems to never get to one of the goddamn things. So no parades for us either. R.I.P. Tom Brady.

No, let's not get into it. Touchdown Tom. Touchdown Tom has finally, we can count him out now. Yes. But now they're going to call him Tampa Tom and I'm going to have to sit through 17 weeks of that. Look, my one flaw as a human being is that I'm a Patriots fan. But when I read the statement, he was like, my football journey is continuing, but not

new. And I was like, well, what, space? Like, I'm going to the one place untouched by the NFL. Space. Yeah, the moon is actually in the CFL is the thing. Oh, I figured they would just be part of whatever goddamn Florida team. Now, what we're looking at here is a parade to sell war bonds in 1918. This is ugly looking float.

That's actually a sea plane with the wings cut off. So I see that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Why would you do that? Because planes were very new at the time and exciting. So in order to understand why this became the deadliest parade in United States history. As yet, yeah, TBD. We need to talk about something almost timely, which was the Spanish influenza. It's almost like we picked this on purpose.

Yes. And you said we don't plan anything. Stuck in. Oh, we didn't. We didn't really plan this one. Oh, wow. I put this all together today. I did a whole presentation on this. Oh, well, you should have offered to help them.

I did twice. This is the most kind of, oh, would you like to come up and teach the class thing? What was the Spanish flu? It was a type H1N1 influenza, right? That's similar to the swine flu from 2009, if anyone remembers that. But it was much less deadly or excuse me, much more deadly. Yeah, the two the two things you don't want to get mixed up. Swine flu was less deadly.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to get that mixed up. That is basically what the UK's like coronavirus strategy was, was we like we did an inflammable means flammable. What a country thing. We was like we were holding the graph upside down the whole time. And we were just like, oh, we should have been doing the opposite of that. OK. So this caused the the Spanish influenza was unique because it caused a disproportionate immune system response in young,

healthy people, right? And that tended to kill a lot of them. Opposite of this. Yes, you get what's called a cytokine storm, which is where your immune system sort of starts eating itself. Which is not good. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to see it happen. It's the flu. Oh, fuck, I'm going to kill myself. It's sort of like it gets like this sort of helmet fire thing

where it thinks everything is the flu. And so your organs flew, other white blood cells flew. And so it just kind of like fights all of it, which is not good. Yeah. And you tend to like die. Yes, since your body starts doing leftist in fighting. Your body becomes a pesadist. So and also, you know, this is exacerbated because it's 1918. There's not great hygiene in hospitals.

You know, there's wartime shortages of materials and food. So, you know, there's one of the reasons war is like one of the reasons why it kills young people more is that all of the young people are concentrated. And yeah, it's the reverse of normal, actually, because normally, you know, if someone has a mild case of the flu, they'll, you know, they'll basically quarantine themselves. And do that. Stay home. If you've got a really severe case of the flu, you're just going to like,

you're absolutely going to stay home. You're not going to, you know, go out public. You got a mild flu. You might, you know, go out or whatever. But when you've got a whole bunch of people with some really bad flu and they're all on loaded down train cars coming back from the front, you know, it's just going to rip through the camps, hospitals, all that stuff. Yeah. If you have a mild illness, you stay at the front.

If you're really sick, they evacuate you. Right. And so you're in a field hospital with a bunch of other people, some of whom like might just be injured or whatever. And did you see there this picture that we have here? There's like a field hospital at this point is just you stick a bunch of beds in a room. Right. Yep. And it's worth noting that super infection, which is when you get an infection on top of your infection, I believe is what ended up killing most people.

Invented by exhibit. Put an infection in your infection dog. So your mortality rate is going to be through the roof dog. Yeah, 95 percent, baby. Let's do it. So the the Spanish influenza hit twice, right? Once in the winter of 1918 through 1919 and once in the winter of 1919 through 1920 is worse in 1918 through 1919, if I recall correctly.

Yeah, that's that's something we're trying to avoid doing with the coronavirus as we quarantine everybody and then everybody gets out of quarantine and just starts like touching each other and licking things. And then everybody gets sick six months after. Yeah. More virulent. A worse strain of just appeared in August 1918 and the deadliest month for it was October 1980. Just kind of give you an idea.

Cool. I'm just looking at how uncomfortable those beds look. Like the idea that you're dying and do you just like possibly having survived the First World War and they're like, yeah, let's just get you out on to this fucking card table. That's cool. I feel good about that. Yeah, this was also exacerbated by the fact that they hadn't really invented vaccines yet. Vaccines weren't really a thing. And of course, you know, it takes time to develop those anyway.

Well, on the other hand, none of these guys ever developed autism. So it's impossible to say whether it's good or not a good point. Maybe the media suppressed it. The smallpox vaccine was invented in 1796. It's just really fucking hard to invent a vaccine for something like this. They got their they got their autism from hats. Not from yet. From vaccines. Just imagining Jenny McCarthy is like an anti-hat activist.

This is what the government doesn't want you to know, as Mercury is literally flowing out of her ears. So so, yeah, the only only real effective way to stop the transmission of Spanish flu was, you know, social distancing, such as what we're doing now. Excited to do this for the next 18 months until the vaccine is out. It's a growth, a growth industry podcasting. And of course, like in 1918, they didn't have podcasts. They only had radio, which they called the wireless and which they used

to transmit racism to each other. I love to like tune in my gigantic Victrola set into like the racial hygiene hour. And while I'm like coughing my lungs out, that's very fun to me. Hey, you just tune into like a number station, but it's just saying various slurs. I mean, to be honest, we don't know that the number stations now aren't doing that. That would be the deepest cover. That's the way you get away with saying slurs, is you just encode them

on a one time pad and you transmit them from like a shadowy government controlled radio station uncancellable. If if a white guy shouts the N word in the forest and no one's around to hear, was he racist? Jesus, I think the answer is yes. It's only going to get weirder from here. Yeah. So the Spanish flu, you know, it's Spanish in so much as the vast majority

of recorded reported cases were in Spain, right? Yeah, but it's not actually. Yeah, Spain was not in World War One. So there were no like media sensors to, you know, say, oh, you can't you can't report that as demoralizing, right? Yeah, it was everywhere. We've got to redress this issue. We've got to like stop calling it Spanish flu because it started in Kansas.

Maybe in Haskell County, Kansas, where a bunch of like guys got sick and then they joined that they got drafted and they went to Fort Riley in Kansas, which is what we're seeing here. That's a field hospital at Fort Riley and then to Europe and then the world. So it should be Kansas flu. We should call it Kansas flu. There are also theories that it came out of China and troop staging in camp in France, a British troop staging

and in France, by the way. No, I like my thing better. I like my thing better. Sure, you do. Rock, chalk, baby. I'm going to I'm going to do like a reverse Trump thing, you know, how way he's doing like the China virus. I'm going to just be like this whole time. I'm just going to be like the Kansas virus.

Kansas is a virus in and of itself. The America virus is going to get confused in three days and start calling it the China syndrome. Parabolic. Yes, when you have a fever so bad that it like starts melting the ground underneath you. This is this is a virus that turns you in a nuclear reactor. And then you anyway, the Spanish flu killed anywhere between 17 to 100 million people,

depending on what study you believe. Hmm, it's not good. Yeah, that's between one and six percent of the world population at the time. Right. And I mean, like you got these kind of these weird idiosyncrasies, like American Samoa had no cases because the governor blockaded ships. But then like Western Samoa did and lost like 10 percent of the population because New Zealand just didn't bother doing any quarantine. And so you just have a plague ship that has all of your stuff on it

just comes into port and just fucking kills everybody. It's not great. Yeah, it's gone poorly, which we're kind of seeing again, like that one that one person in South Korea, patient 31, who was just like symptomatically infected with the coronavirus and just kind of walked around Seoul for a while, then went to church and then went to a buffet, which I always knew my distrust of buffet. I knew that sneeze guard wasn't going to protect me.

Went down to the Golden Corral and downtown Seoul. There's also some stuck his face in the chocolate fountain. There's a patient in New York, New Jersey, who apparently just gave a fake name, gave a fake address and then bounced despite having. So excellent. Yeah, that's that's cool. Yeah, I mean, if you want the the local angle from my end, Glasgow, Greater Glasgow and Clyde's NHS Health Board put out a tweet

being like, hey, we're kind of disappointed that people keep stealing the hand sanitizer off of the walls of hospitals because we kind of need it. It's like, you know, you don't need sanitation in hospitals. What are you talking about? I just love the idea that instead of taking the container, there was just some mastermind pulling a heist of just like pushing the thing 50 times and just walking away with like a cup

and full of hand sanitizer is like it's worth more than gold. So the other thing we need to talk about the under for context here is war bonds. OK, the fuck is going on with all of these posters? If you can't enlist and vest, Alice, can't you read? And we have to go kill some journals. That's that's making that's making the the communism very clear. But I like the one on the left.

I like the guy with like a bandage on who is just like lackadaisically firing a pistol, which like he's just like kind of like indifferent about it. That's I like that a lot. Doing a doing some Contra post or the right word. Yeah, yeah. He's also like the the German on the far right has the like pointy helmet, but also a silhouetted moustache. That's very funny. Yes.

So what's a war bond? Right. Well, wars are expensive, right? Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah. So we have a modern concept in warfare, which is, you know, you just keep printing treasury bonds, you know, forever and ever. And no one ever notices the cost of a war, right? That's how we do it today. My modern monetary theory.

I thought that we were running the government like a household and we had to like spend within our means in that belt, except for doing war crimes. Yeah, of course. We are we are running the country like a household, a household with a big printing press in the basement. You just run off money. So the the old the old concept, though, was rather than just issuing treasury bonds willy nilly like we do now is you have like specific war bond.

Specific war bonds to pay for wars, right? So, you know, you you issue war bonds, the public buys them. A lot of times, institutional investors, but you also sort of try and push them to the general public, too, right? It's it's it's a loan, right? You you pay so much and then it matures when we win the war, right? Matures, they're all they were all fixed. They were all for a fixed time, like I think the first the first war bonds,

they were called Liberty bonds in World War One matured in 30 years at like 4 percent interest or something like that. You know, but they varied over time. There were there were two Liberty loan acts at first, right? They they marketed these bonds or loans. I'm just sort of using that interchangeably because they kind of used it interchangeably. They didn't perform especially well. They were mostly bought by institutional investors rather than the general public.

And they, you know, they started like trading for like less than their value. So, you know, they were seen as like very valuable, right? That's not so good. Yeah, I want the opportunity to like do an uncut gems thing and like place like a 28 way parlay on the war. I want to like be able to best about like field goals and conversions. So the third Liberty loan act is when the government starts to, you know, drum up patriotism about the whole thing.

Like it's your patriotic duty. You know, go out, you got to buy these Liberty loans, these Liberty bonds, right? So, you know, they have like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts go sell them door to door, right? They did parades. They had a they had a special aerial stunt team from the U.S. Army. Do they would they would they would fly trainer planes over like little rural towns and do acrobatic stunts over them. And then when they when they landed afterwards after the whole town had come out to see

this new fangled flying machine, they would say buy by Liberty bonds. If you buy a Liberty bond right now, you get a free airplane ride. This was before safety was invented. Dog fights, which is not like a little dog fucking excuse me idea of like, one of these one of these bond salesman pilots, you know, going into like a 1917 dive and just absolutely eating it. This is what we're all about. They also like that they drove a lot of tanks into like city squares and stuff.

And they would just like park the tank there. And so you could like climb on the tank and stuff. And it would have like a big war bond sign on it. Would that be like would that be like the the World War One tank with the tread that went all the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's those I think. Yeah.

So they also had, you know, celebrities try and sell, you know, war bonds at rallies. Yeah. In as much as they had celebrities in 1917, it's like Fassi Arbuckle wants you to buy Liberty bonds like cool. I think Charlie Chaplin was big on trying to push war bonds. He made his own movie about it at his own expense, all just the bond. You could never trust a Swiss. Sounds not good.

It's about to say the bond sounds suspiciously close to the bond. Not that Charlie Chaplin was a fascist. We know that like the great dictator so on and so forth. But anyway. Three days of quarantine and you're having to clarify that you didn't just say that Charlie Chaplin was a fascist. We're struggling a bit, admittedly. Yeah.

So but anyway, they made it so, you know, it's your patriotic duty to go out buy war bonds, go Liberty bonds, so on and so forth. Now, so September 19, 1918, right? World War One was winding down at this point, right? And the American soldiers were coming home and the Spanish flu was very much around, right? So the first reported case of Spanish flu was on September 19, 1918. And they had that contained in the Navy Yard, right? The Navy Yard is down here, right?

You see how there's like all these piers with like boats and stuff? Yeah, stuff the Navy needs. That's on account of it being the Navy Yard. Yeah, pretty big yard. What? Oh, just there's a big yard. I was just joking about the like the varying use of the word yard here. Yes.

Within a couple of days, there were 600 sailors infected with the Spanish influenza down at the Navy Yard. It's cool. They were all doing like viral tech talks where they were like all dancing and stuff. So, you know, how do you how do you transmit that over the radio? That's a good question. Start, please. Stop, white man attempting to rap.

Stop. I mean, they did try to like they did have ways of transmitting images over a telegraph. So that's true. Yeah. I suppose if you just like did a bunch of those and then you like had the instructions to like make a flip book out of them, you could have a very long latency, 1910s TikTok. So, what was I saying? You're talking about how 600 of them had immediately got infected because washing wasn't invented yet.

And it comes down to Boston, I believe, on an infected Navy ship. Once again, once again, Boston tries to screw over Philly. So this was this was a containable problem, right? Because the Navy Yard, as you can see, like Center Center City is up here, right? The Navy Yard is all the way down here. This this line is roughly Broad Street, which we're going to talk about in a second. And then everything below about this line at this area at this time in history was just wasteland and undeveloped, right?

Much like today. Now it's yeah. Now it's still that, except it's, you know, it's the sports complex and the weird parts of South Philly as opposed to the like very normal parts. Yeah, I can't judge Glasgow. Like Glasgow still has neighborhoods that look like Stalingrad. There we got this. Yeah, we also have those.

Yeah, those those usually aren't in South Philly, though. Those are North Philly or Southwest Philly or Camden. So basically just draw a circle, right? Yeah, draw a circle, draw a circle. Looking beginning to see the beginnings of the Wu Tang logo here. All right, so they're all down in Navy Yard. They're they're quarantined away from the population, right? Yeah, sleeping on card tables in like one giant hall.

Yeah, you know, you can you can sleep on the card table. Then you you flip you you wake up, you get out of bed and you can play cards all day. Everyone's playing Solitaire to maintain the quarantine. We're going to have to do that. We're going to have to be an all like Solitaire based podcast. Don't spit. Yeah. So don't spit.

Don't spit. It looks like a shitpost. Like you're missing the apostrophe. So don't spit. Don't cast for some reason in Europe. Like parting is terrible. There are fifteen hundred cases. What is everything in different fonts?

Because you have to like hand paint every sign. It's like didn't leave enough space for fifteen hundred. So it just kind of looks like. It's a part of this. A part of the sign they have to change every day. Yeah, it's like the McDonald's thing where it's like millions served. It's like there are six hundred fifteen hundred three thousand. Yeah.

No, cool. Spitting spread Spanish. Oh, shit. Yes. I mean, this is develop an accent. This is something that like Glasgow could use. Number of people who just like spit in the gutter and like in the street here. Yeah, we I don't know.

I don't understand it. I'm going to I'm going to print out. I'm going to run up some of these and just I'm just fucking tell everybody. Don't spit. So on September 28th, there was a Liberty Loan Parade scheduled. Right. Oh, good. Yes.

This was for the fourth Liberty Loan Drive because even though the war was winding down, the government still had a bunch of bills to pay. Right. War keeps being expensive after it's over. Right. Like yes, you know, you got to move all the shit back and yeah. So it's fine. You need more war bonds.

Yeah. So this is this was going to be a big event. Right. There's going to be the big military parade down Broad Street. You can see all the cool military stuff. John Phillips, I was going to be there. Yeah, they they had the biggest celebrity in the world, John Philip Sousa. The Lin-Manuel Miranda of his day.

Yes. I just love the idea of John Philip Sousa posting like Lin-Manuel Miranda posts. Like, you know, he does those like inspirational morning posts. I fucking hate those. Oh, good morning. Good morning. It's always a good morning. I hate that shit.

Good morning. It's your self-confidence here. Just giving you a little boost. Yeah. No, I don't spit. John Philip Sousa opening for like Kanye. All right. So there was this guy Wilmer Cruisen, right?

Yes. So how about a German player? No. That we know of. Oh, good point. Good point. He may be one of the he may be one of the Huns. Again, Wilmer Cruisen sounds like the sass up to like a ligma bull.

The one guy who tried to do his job at this stupid fucking city. Yeah. Yeah. And he had a cunt. He had a clown ass name. So Wilmer Cruisen was the Philadelphia health commissioner, right? And he was, you know, he was aware of the Spanish influenza being as he was the health commissioner. And it was his call finally, whether the parade should go forward or not, right?

Sure. And of course, this being a podcast about things that go well. Well, he was under a lot of political pressure. He really was. To let this parade go forward, right? Because I don't know if he was suspected of being a hunter or not. But it's like nobody normal is named Wilmer. He said stuff like the flu won't spread beyond military camps and the press, you know, the inquirer

basically was just like, why are they reporting on all the bad news? Like, why is the city being so negative about like a pandemic? Yeah, genuinely, they were. Oh, yeah, I saw that. So he's under, you know, immense political pressure. Yeah, they were like, they were like leads that were like, why is everybody panicking? Why are you trying to kill my vibe? Yeah, it's all doom and gloom.

Nobody's happy with winning the war, you know, just be happy. Don't spit. It's only game. Why do you have to be mad? You know, there's there's stuff like the city at a quota of bonds to sell and all kinds of other stuff. So Wilmer's like, fine, I guess fucking parade. I don't care. You he was doing accelerationism. He was doing gross.

Yes, he pulled. He pulled a punches pilot is what he did. He washed his hands of the matter when no one else wanted to literally just as long as you do it for 20 seconds soap and water. You know, and this is the parade promoters didn't help with this. They were like they threw they put an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer that said, citizens, a crisis is here. The influenza epidemic imperils the success of the Fourth Liberty Loan.

The government calls upon you not to forget your duty to the fighters in France. Mom, dad, but dad. So there are some warnings posted about spreading the disease from coughing or spitting. You know, make sure you cough into your arm. Make sure you don't spit. Don't spit. I spit.

I wasn't like I didn't I didn't understand that that was the thing that people even really did until I moved up here. But yeah, people just be spitting in the street. So I don't know why. Stop it. Stop doing that. But the parade went on. All right.

So this is the only picture of the parade I know of now. I mean, look at it this way. There isn't like a gusser in the middle of the street just filled with spit. So they fucking they listened. Yeah. Or maybe all the spit washed away all the debris. Yeah. So 200,000 people show up for this parade, right?

Because there's there's nothing else to do in 1918 Philadelphia. No, no, there's that. You can listen to like Capone, Speakeasy or Behold your your like Flobber to Genation, your engineering podcast. But like aside from that, you basically have to go out and you have to go look at the dumb seaplane float, which I hate to look at. It's stupid. I hate it.

I don't respect it. Also, one thing I did find, I don't think we have a picture of this, but they had a float of like doctors and nurses from the American Red Cross in a weird medical themed Viking lifeboat. Yes. Yes. Oh my god. Like it was like it was literally it was like a long boat and the sail had like the red cross on it

and they had a bunch of like it was scrubbed up, gowned and masked doctors and nurses, just kind of like rowing this this like this long boat. It was cool. Just very normal, very normal hours. But like lots of lots of Swedish immigrants in Philadelphia. It being, you know, having started out as a Swedish colony. All right. So, you know, this is a typical very crowded Broad Street parade.

You know, if you've ever been to a parade on Broad Street, you know, well, usually it's, I mean, almost universally, it's just a lot of people getting extremely drunk in public. Yeah. That's it's my right as an American asshole. I'm glad that we're not like continuing that tradition through our current pandemic of just like Americans getting drunk in public and being all up in each other's personal space. Not for a lack of time though. Yeah, it's about to say Mayor Kenny almost didn't cancel the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Cool. That's fine. Alcohol alcohol is like it's preventative. You just you keep your BAC above like five maybe fine. It's absolutely true. I mean, at that point, it's more of a true a Christian. Exactly right. That is first.

You were the virus. You're just playing a game of chicken. Just feeling really bad for the virus that doesn't know what it's got itself into. It's like inside your body and it's having to fight off that. All the things I've done to my body in the last 28 years. Like, yeah, good luck, motherfucker. Yeah. Developed a severe resistance to like dyed green pints.

Cool. Yeah. This is unfortunately now a Bud Light resistant virus. You're going to have to switch to Miller light. Oh, man, we should just like I figured out the problem. The solution to the like Glasgow hand sanitizer theft is we should just like have bottles of buckfast on the hand sanitizer stations because nothing is surviving that like paint stripper. It's just free liquor dispensers around the city.

We'll get there. We'll get there. Well, they'll have to. They shut down all the wine and spirits. I know I was talking about the thing. This is this is why you got a stockpile. That's the thing way ahead of you. Yeah.

You're going to have like a room full of like cases of alcohol. Yeah. No, it's cool. You know, as I said, Wilmer Kruisen had issued guidance on, you know, how to avoid spreading the disease at the don't spit. I'll spit. Yes. That was the whole guidance.

And it's like, OK, the next day, Wilmer comes out and says, all right, we need to issue more strict guidance here after the parade, you know, avoid crowds, cover your mouth when you sneeze, stop spitting, so on and so forth. Avoiding crowds was the new one. But at this point, you know, you shut in the barn door after all the horses have gone. Right. Within 72 hours, every hospital bed in the city was full. Beesh.

That's not so good. I mean, we're getting there. At time of going to recording, we're like waiting like for that to happen, maybe like a couple of weeks, a month, maybe. Yep. That's cool. And in Britain, like basically, we just did the exact same thing. We just kind of like put off doing the suppression stuff because we didn't feel like it.

And so like you got these tweets of like, yeah, we had this tweet of like the worst band in the world, Stereophonics, doing an absolutely packed, I don't know why, gig in Cardiff. And I was just like, you look at this this footage of like, all of these people shoulder to shoulder in like a totally full room, listening to music that is not good. And you're like, you're not only are you dying for something that's kind of like mediocre, but you're also possibly killing a bunch of other people.

And that's unforgivable. If you have to break quarantine, see a better band. I've enjoyed the, you know, Boris Johnson's whole thing is Meltdown in real time or whatever the hell he's doing. Hi, I'm Boris Johnson, and this is Jackass. Boris Knoxville, yeah. Not sure why they had to deliver the briefing from like inside a shopping cart that was being pushed down a steep hill.

But yeah, it's fine. Into a swimming pool that's marked coronavirus. Still over the beat, tetherball, man. So, all right, but on October 3rd, major restrictions are enacted, right? So they close all the schools, churches, restaurants, stores, so on and so forth. A large gatherings are banned, strict quarantining starts, and it doesn't do shit, right? Of course, like I saw the one, the like head of infectious disease control from the World Health Organization talking about like Ebola outbreaks.

And one of the things that he said was the only virtue you can have in this is like not hesitating at all because the time to do the thing that you think you should do is like two weeks ago. So, yeah, no, that's that's that's cool. We can you can like you can put it off and you can have your little sea plain float. But it is no worth it. To give an example, funerals could only be attended by adult family members. They couldn't be held in churches or public spaces.

They closed the bars in Philly, so everybody went to Camden and then Camden closed the bars two days later. Andrew Cuomo did this. Yeah. Andrew Cuomo did this. He said that he didn't want to close the bars in New York because people would go to Connecticut and drive drunk. Yeah, I'm going to talk about how it's true in Philadelphia's darkest hour, though,

the Commonwealth Brewing Company allowed the city to use its cold brewing facility as a morgue. That is true. Awesome. I like that. I'm just looking at this photo. So I like the guy on like the far left in the middle who's just like he just has a broom. I think that's a broom. Yeah, it's fine.

It's it's like we sweep you up all the spit. It's the thing. Yes. Don't spit. Don't. You know, so this was the point where as Leah mentioned earlier, the Philadelphia Inquirer went off on him as like talk of cheerful things instead of disease. The authorities seem to be going daft.

What are they trying to do? Scare everyone to death? Yes. Preferable to die by influenza, man. We had two days of like the worst kind of lick spittles of the British press being like, oh, well, actually, this this this like virus strategy that we're doing that no one else is doing is actually is this guided by the science and it's quite good. Sure, why not?

And just kind of just kind of ridiculing anyone who was like, are you sure? So, yeah, no, this is good. Always trust the press at all times. I don't understand how all of you all in the British Isles haven't just burned down every newspaper. Inshallah, you know, all I can say. I'll save that for when we're like tying things together at the end and we'll put a big bow on it.

But I have like some thoughts about what this means and how like it says a lot about our society and things of that nature. Yes. Well, it turns out the authorities weren't trying to scare everyone to death because, you know, or they couldn't because by two weeks after the parade, 4,500 people were dead. That'll do it. Of influenza. So, you know, the hospitals were overflowing.

The funeral homes were overflowing. I don't think there were any laws against price gouging at this point. So, no, of course, that's just entrepreneurship. Yeah. Cascades were unaffordable. Undertakers started price gouging. Sure, why not? Yeah, so now I can dispose of their dead loved ones at all.

So, what to do with rotting corpses became a matter of public health because, you know, the corpses just rotting was spreading more diseases, of course. Yeah, that's if I can quote from the Philly Voice article I was reading about this quote. Some bodies, this is about the morgue. Philly's only morgue back in the day at 13th and Wood had several hundred corpses in it. Despite a capacity for 36, bodies were unembalmed, not stored properly, covered only by dirty sheets. Quote, some bodies were mortified and the stench was nauseating. In the rear of the building, the doors were open and bodies lying all over the floor,

a spectacle for gaping curiosity seekers, including young children. I love that you can just do that back in the day. People also started coughing up blood and blood from their noses, ears and eyes, which are very nice. Philly goes hard, man, if nothing else, we commit. I do like that, like, just taking the kids to go and see some dead bodies was like a thing. Like, I feel like there was this gap in between, like, when you stopped having public executions and this and then it just kind of comes roaring back here, like, hey, let's take the kids to,

like, poke some corpses with a stick. Well, I mean, they still take the kids to go see dead bodies. The YouTuber guy did it. Oh, that's true. Yeah, the kids, the kid was more efficient now because the kids do it themselves. They just go on LiveLeak and like, the whole, like, first 15 years of their lives is watching ISIS beheading videos and shit. It gets bad enough at some point that Bill Telephone

restricts all non-medical telephone calls. You couldn't use the telephone except that it was a medical emergency. Well, what is a medical telephone call in this context of just being like, Doctor, my wife has the hysteria. It's just two doctors having to call each other up with the old-timey telephone because they want to discuss the new theories of scientific racism. They want to discuss the shape of the Irish brain pan is the thing. And that's an emergency.

Yeah, the telephone switch station was next to the phrenologist office. The one other anecdote is that nurses were kidnapped because there were so few nurses to work, you know, either with the war effort or just because they were working themselves to the bone to treat all these people. But there's an anecdote about a nurse being just a guy grabbing, pulling a nurse into a taxi and then basically saying, I'll give you any amount of money to treat my wife. But yeah, I'm trying to think of the jokes I can make here. Do you think they were just like, hello, nurse?

Do you think when he grabbed her in the taxi, he was like, bore out voice, my wife? What if she wasn't a nurse? She just looked like one. Yeah, what if she was cosplaying? These sexy Halloween costumes are all out of control. The 1918 sexy Halloween costume. And it was right around that time. Yeah, it's true. November, right?

Yeah. So here's a bunch of people digging a mass grave to throw all the bodies in. That's some fantastic grave digging. Like very straight lines there. That's, you know, you appreciate the quality of the ditch digging. So what's the fallout of this? Well, in the end, Philadelphia becomes just the epicenter of Spanish Invalenza in the United States. About 13,000 people were dead in total by the end of this.

Well, they contrasted a lot with St. Louis because St. Louis had a health commissioner who did cancel everything. And so they got off pretty lightly. So I think St. Louis was 600 dead in total because they cancelled their Liberty Bond Parade. And so this was the deadliest parade in the history of the United States. Now, what you may wonder about is how many Liberty Bonds did they sell? Yes, of course. Right.

And the thing is, I don't know how many they sold. What I do know is the government defaulted on the fourth Liberty Bond sale. That's a sure good. Jesus. Of course. Because there was some bullshit about the gold standard. This is like a libertarian nightmare. It's like the government just kind of kills you while it's trying to get money out of you.

And then it doesn't pay you back because of the gold stats. This is the exact kind of shit that right now, at this very moment, the Libertarian Party Convention, which is going ahead despite coronavirus, that guy is going to take all of his clothes off and scream into a microphone about. And maybe they're onto something. Maybe they are because, Jesus, I can't think of a better argument for libertarianism than the government being like, hey, go to this parade to spend money on us. And then they don't pay you back.

And also you die. Oh, yeah. Don't forget that. Oh, God, there's like a thousand bodies, just a waiting burial by October 12th. And there were not enough undertakers. So, yeah, just bodies. Just act at the streets. Just doing stuff.

You get a steam shovel or whatever the technology is at that time. And you just kind of like bulldozing. Right up with price catching people hot. Yeah, you get Mike Mulligan out here with the steam shovel. Just John Henry undertaker. Piles and corpses. Just the idea of like a truck, a source, but it's a hearse. Look, we cope with the bleakness in our own ways here.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday at the municipal arena. Hercesaurus. I mean, this is the thing, right? Like the Spanish flu. Fuck, I said I wasn't going to call it that. Kansas flu is like by any metric much, much worse than the coronavirus. Not least because people kind of wash their hands now, maybe, and they don't make you sleep on a like a card table just in a room

with like 500 other dudes who all have it. And also like this was much more deadly just as a disease. So like this is kind of instructive, but it's not like we're not saying go out and invest in steam shovel shares for when hercesaurus. No, Alice is not saying that. Alice is like, let's all be clear. Well, there wouldn't be any points in investing in those because the stock market is down to fuck.

I don't even know what now. Buy the dip. Well, it rallied $1,000 because markets are rational and you're the idiots. Yeah, buy low, sell high. Invest in, I don't know if there's a multinational undertaker chain. Yep, I'm sure it's coming. The WWE, I think. Yes.

All right. So what did we learn from this? Well, I'm going to kind of guess and say nothing. Yes, this was November 11th of that year on Broad Street. Just all of the survivors just out and about. Yeah, cool. Yeah, they're out there celebrating the war's over. Wait, hold up a second.

I need to use a mat and something. You see in the top right corner, does that say don't waste tea? And then above that, it says the what? I don't know if it says the war. Don't waste it. Or I don't know. Is there a Union Jack in my city? Have we learned something?

I just I just feel like the whole process of the war was just like putting up evermore elaborate signs to just tell people don't do this thing with no apostrophe. This is like we pan around and there's like a 50 foot high illuminated. Don't spit. Like, cool. I mean, this is the thing, right? Like, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that like we learned nothing. I feel like with both the coronavirus and the American flu, it's kind of it's a sea

change, right? Like you come out of this period of unsustainable horror of the First World War and like for better or worse, the moment is like filled with possibility, right? Like all is changed, changed utterly and the terrible beauty is born. And so I don't know what's going to happen with this other bullshit that we're currently going through. But like we've already had a conservative government here just institute kind of like fucking like universal basic income and nationalizing shit because it was inevitable

than it had to. So who the fuck knows, right? But it's the problem with epidemics in general or pandemics is that they kind of their exploitative of the worst traits of a society. It's war, it's poverty, it's inequality, it's spitting in the street for some reason. And like in order for any of those things to change, there has to be some kind of some some tumult and it's not good. Of course, it isn't many people are going to like not be great out of this invest in

steam shovels. But like it's one of those kind of things where it's the only way where things change. And maybe just maybe there are some improvements out of this, just like how after this happened, people kind of started maybe occasionally very seldom washing their hands. So who's to say? But that's that's my hope. Yeah, I just hope we don't we don't do what we seem to be doing here in the United States where now the now the Republicans are proposing UBI and stuff like this embarrassing.

Yeah, it's fucking embarrassing. And like the Democrats are like, oh, you got to mean test that shit, bro. You can claw it back. That's so fucking embarrassing. Is it these people of the elected officials seem to fucking forget that like if you want to claw it back via like increased taxes or whatever else you could do that. And they're just so fucking afraid of these people who are going to be like, well, why are you giving it to everyone?

And it's like, because it's a fucking national crisis, dipshit, like shit changes. Like I don't fucking I will never be able to understand as long as I live the fucking cowardice of Democrats, like in times of great moral and it pisses me off so much because we're just going to get Joe fucking Biden, who's out here saying the same dumb racist grandfather shit I've had to hear since fucking 1979 about how like America's not ready for this or that. It's like bullshit, man. I'm so fucking tired of this of like managed to flying death. And I'm so this is what we can hope for right?

Is that is that like history, history, history outpaces them, right? Wouldn't be the first time it's happened to the Democrats. Might be the last. We don't know. Oh, Democrats are feeling pretty wiggish right now. Just for the good of the country, just die already. But like the thing the thing we had here was that like we have we have now a three month pause on paying mortgages, but nothing if you're renting and most people are renting.

It's just these like half ass, half big things that piss me off so much. I'd like to admit fucking Romney is flanking you to the left of economic policy. And Kamala Harris is out here like, well, my lived act would get fucked. I don't fucking care. You can't don't don't don't get this edit, please. Please censor me. Yeah. Liam out here using gendered insults.

Yeah, sorry. I my brother would be very disappointed if he used the word. Um, but I'm so it's so fucking embarrassing to be to like to get your hopes up. Oh, wait, I got a I got a swear button. Say bitch again. Yeah, well, we'll work with a little late, but that's fine. It was a little late. Yeah.

Oh, god damn it. What? Whatever. It's fine. We just like it. Just go back and put that on all of the other various bitches. Uh, I also have a tone generator, Alice. It's just not live.

But I have a button and I'm so excited that I have a button. Anyway, like, yeah, we may have to like, I don't know what's going to happen. None of us know what's going to happen. It both isn't as bad as this. We also didn't just have the First World War. So, you know, that's an extra bonus, right? We didn't just spend the last four years. Just like knee deep and like blood and like shit and everything.

So, yeah, I don't know how coronavirus or whatever is going to play out. But in the meantime, please, please, please wash your fucking hands. Don't be a fucking hero, man. It's that same shit and feeling. I'm just, oh, I'm young and I'm not going to die. It's like probably not. But I honestly hope you do if you're that fucking stupid. If when you're washing your hands, what you should do is get a moisturizing soap

so your hands don't dry out. Like it's really annoying. I got you. I got you the moisturizing one. That's why we have 100 ounces of sauce soap in the living room right now. Yeah. Well, I got the last one at the pharmacy. So, you know, hmm, shout out to people with eczema who like just fucking.

Absolutely just like fucking dying out here with like just like wearing two boxing gloves looking at. Yeah. No, it's just I see your sacrifice and I salute you. Thank you for not like killing my mom. Yeah. Everybody else, everybody who's going to clubs and like who is on the street. Fuck you.

Yeah. Fuck you. What is it? It's like a like a 1% slightly less mortality rate if you're between 20 and 29, which is like that's me. It's like point, point, point something, point three or four or something like that. It might be like point. Oh, well, I thought, hmm, who's to say?

But like I fervently hope that like if there's any justice that's entirely comprised of the people who were just like, yeah, it's just flu. I'll just say it's fine. I'll go over it. It's yeah. I mean, if your idea of recreation is going into a club and getting packed in with like 1500 people and it's like the goddamn black hole of Calcutta in there. Just don't just don't do that.

Don't do that. I don't understand why people do that in the first place, but don't do that. Oh, did you did you did you see the thing that people have been doing in Italy, whether like doing like they're playing music and like they're doing lights and stuff off of the balconies. And it's like, no, no, I stay home to avoid that. Yes.

01:00:17,400 --> 01:00:19,320 Look how the species carries on. And I'm like, really wish it wasn't like this. Yeah. Yeah. President she fire when ready. Yes. I agree. President she is save us.

Yeah. Well, there's your Poseidon. Yeah. So anyway, and next next week, assuming President she doesn't save us. We'll be an episode on the Tacoma's Narrows bridge disaster. Yes. And we will we will keep the content factory churning for as long as we are able is the thing. We'll go into the content.

This one. Yeah. This this one obviously you probably wouldn't want to wouldn't would not want to have listened to if you were trying to like keep your mind off of it. So we're going to have more stuff that is like that for you soon. And like so if you just want to like enjoy your quarantine with like an hour of like hearing about how I don't know a mine exploded because a donkey kicked over a lamp or something. We're going to be we're going to be there for you with that.

Yes. Oh, we are like the sixth emergency service. Yes. The thin podcast line. Yeah. We can't actually make that flag because there's no color of sound to put in to put in the middle there. You have to put like a little like audio wave.

Yes. Like a like a waveform. You know that sword they have on the Saudi Arabian flag. Maybe we could just use that. Yeah. Oh, that's a cool sword too. This is the problem with Saudi Arabia is like for a fucking evil country. They have a cool flag.

Yeah, that's true. That'll just be the podcaster flag will be the Saudi Arabian flag. But instead of the Arabic text, it just says podcasting. It just says podcasting in Arabic for some reason. Oh, you know, you know, someone's going to make that and like replace the account with it. Their rules. Thank you for all the feedback, by the way. Yes.

I'm so happy with all of our fans, by the way. The problematics, because I asked them at one point, we should probably have like a name for them. And they were like, oh, problematics. And I'm like, yeah, I like the problematics. I like the idea. So just being like, yeah, I'm really like trying to impress like they're all at a date, God forbid. Like, yeah, real problem head.

You know, those are like, God forbid if you ever get big enough, where somebody brags about knowing us personally. I fucking hope you don't. Yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of problems. I think they're already listening out there who are getting ready for a date. First of all, what the fuck are you doing? And second of all, definitely brag about us.

Do your date. Yeah, brag about us on your Skype date. Yes. Brag about us in your Zoom university lecture. Brag about us to your pets, who you're staying home with. On your Zoom group date. Yeah, and lean out of your balcony and scream at people to listen to the podcast. Yeah, I could just do that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, do that. We need some super liminal marketing. And yeah, and don't spit. Don't spit. Don't spit. Don't spit. All right.

Any pitches before we go? Commercials, etc. Listen to Trash Future. I've been trying to like push that more because our subscribers are getting stagnant and we can't do that. Even though we are posting cringe, we cannot afford to lose subscriber. That's like half my income. This is the other half.

So subscribe to our Patreon. Yes. Subscribe to the Trash Future Patreon. I'm on the next Trash Future Patreon episode. Yes. Yeah, you are. And I'm not because I literally, I was so sick, I slept through it. Damn.

Yeah, I know. I know. I don't know if it was the coronavirus or what, but I was just out for days and I just, I slept through it. So if you want to listen to Justin do All About Eve shit and take my place and be a better Trash Future host than me, listen to Trash Future. We talked about Elon Musk's Mars Colonnation plant. Colonization.

I'm sure that's… Yeah. I'm sure… Yes. I actually would also like to pick pitch. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. You may know me from such podcasts as this one. So in the next few weeks, I'm going to be…

I don't have a ton of it, you know, beyond the initial topics. I'm going to be doing a bunch of audio histories. They're probably going to just be kind of roughly recorded just about things I personally find interesting. I got to talk to a dude I need about the audio and such. But look for that. It's going to be like my drunk history, except you're always drunk. So I just…

History. Oh, you're starting a solo career. Well… That's me. What you have to do is you have to have us on as guests and then be like Liam's drunk history featuring. Oh, yeah, I like that. There you go.

So I guess that'll do it for this week. Yes? We good? Yeah. And shirts. Shirts are coming. Yeah, she's one of those talks to the printer. We have…

I did talk to the printer. Yeah. He hasn't gotten back to me. I got to yell at him again. Yeah, god damn it. I never had the union treat. Yeah. Oh, only this podcast would both be dependent for shirts on a guy named Union Pete

and also not have Union Pete get back to us. Get your shit together, Union Pete. So when the shirts get here, they will be union made. Yes, yes, they will. Buy Union Pete. Yeah. It's a really good design. We're really happy with it.

We don't want to spoil it yet. What we have told you so far, I think, is that they are designed by Matt Lobchanski, who also did the Trash Future shirts, which you can also get. It's super good. And also, you have to subscribe to our Patreon for them to make sense. Yes. So do that, too. I mean, it would be kind of a flex just to wear the shirt without understanding the joke.

I would appreciate that, I guess. Give us your money. Yeah, sure. Yes. Yeah. All right. So Mike Bloomberg never did pay us. No.

I still have the tear up. Yeah. I don't know if I should take the tear down or maybe I'll just leave it there. You should leave it there in case. Yeah. You should add like a means tested Kamala Harris tear where it's like $250 a month. I'd have to add about 1200 tears to get to the Kamala Harris. Oh, yeah, I did play it.

Let's just take a second to thank whichever guy is subscribed at $34.50 a month for our Patreon. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it's $11 each and change. Yeah. I could buy a whole bunch of like I could buy like a nice Not anymore. Not anymore.

Whatever I was going to buy, I can't buy it anymore because I'm stuck in my house. You can maybe go out once a week to stand in line for an hour. Two meters apart from everyone else to buy like a kind of beans or something. Every single person when we're out of this quarantine is going to have saved up like three months of income, assuming they're still getting paid. And they're all going to Lisa Camaro. That's true. We're all going to Lisa Camaro.

And also there's going to be like, you know what the problem is in 100 years time, people are going to be incredibly mad at Boomer 2 because everybody's going to like fuck and like nine months after the end of quarantine population spike like that. And they're going to be insufferable. So yeah, watch out for that. That makes us the greatest generation. Yeah, because we're podcasters. Because we're the ones who fucking survived coronavirus and the posting wars and the

posting wars and beat climate change. 01:09:39,080 --> 01:09:42,120 Whatever World War III is going to be, we're going to win that too. We're all going to be in the Iranian army defeating the great Satan. Yes. Well here, avenging the memory of General Sulaimani. Yes. Yes.

All right. Yashahid. Glad we all have an optimistic vision of the future. Yeah, that's it. You got it. You got it. Otherwise you'd go crazy. And don't don't do that.

Yes. All right. Stay safe. Stay indoors. Don't spit. Don't spit. Don't spit. Yep.

All right. That's the podcast. Bye everyone. All right. That was good. Yeah.