The one thing this is not is a political plot. The panic and hysteria is palpable and I've spent two full notes talking about the reasons for it, which, for me, are simple: The media's glee in how they're dealing with this - they do live for this stuff and the ratings and clicks it brings - and social media fueling it in a way that is unheard of - the swine flu of a decade ago cause no panic shopping, no nothing, because social media was nothing then like it is today. People post all those empty shelf photos and people's insanity automatically kick in and panic and hysteria ensues. Last night, Facebook was filled with posts from people saying they'd be up at six in the morning to hit the market, so everyone does that. It's human nature and not the good part of human nature. Then you have people who are truly evil buying up this stuff for resale - when I see photos of the lines in Costco I see a bunch of smiling mom and pop store owners who get their stuff from big box stores, because they know they can immediately mark up this stuff and get away with it. And then there are the people, and these I've seen with my own eyeballs, who go to the market every day to restock their already overloaded freezers and garages. I don't do conspiracy theories because they're inane in the end and rather pointless. This, too, shall pass, and it would pass a lot more quickly if everyone would just calm down, just as the swine flu, which was, at this point, much worse, did.
