Plague, squared

 In contrast to my essay below, here is a photo of Concorde's last flight. One of the truly sublime creations of human endeavours

A new post! 

One reason I want to return to this blog is for therapeutic reasons, in that this space is probably far better suited to expressing my thoughts than the comments section of CBC. 'Nuff said, I am sure, for anyone who has dared to wade into that cesspool, particularly after the three week long occupation of our capital city, Ottawa, in February of this year by about a thousand folks who called themselves truckers and demanded that the government obey them and eliminate Covid vaccine mandates for the truckers who crossed the border into the States as part of earning their living. I am attempting to cleanse myself of the toxic environment there. I may go into my reflections on that event sometime later, but a six-week long judicial inquiry wrapped up yesterday with the day-long testimony of our Prime Minister. He was interrogated, under oath, by a battery of about a dozen lawyers from various interested parties. I will say that it was an extraordinary sight, one I suspect that has never been duplicated in any nation, anywhere, at any time for a national leader with an effective majority in Parliament and a mandate from an election just one year old. Democracy and the rule of law in action, 2022 style.

Actually, I want to put down here a theory about what is happening in the west with the rising septic tide of alt-rightwingnut, authoritarian, fanatically pseudo-Christian libertarianism that is clearly threatening to sweep away at least a couple of centuries' worth of progressive improvements in the lot of the ordinary people, more than half of the population of the world, including women, people of colour, Indigenous folks, and LGBTQ2+ individuals. They have, all unknowing, been infected by a fungus. It may be a new fungus, but not necessarily. 

This essay is called Plague, Squared. I confess that several reputable journals have turned it down since I wrote it back at the end of 2021, but you may have seen a lot more reference to the possibility over that time, than I saw before. If you care to take the time, please let me know what you think.

Plague, Squared

At the time of writing it appears ever more likely that the world, or at least the 'western' part of it, broadly speaking, may be battling not just one but two new, major, deadly illnesses at once. These afflictions may even by working together and facilitating each other symbiotically in a sort of diabolical natural conspiracy. 

One disease, of course is the Covid-19 Coronavirus and its multitude of variants. It was originally transmitted somehow from bats to humans, just as wild Ebola and HIV viruses jumped mammalian Orders, from monkeys to humans due to dining on infected wild monkey meat. Covid is an impressive modern plague that since the winter of 2019-20 has infected over xxx million people worldwide and killed xx million, with over 1,000,000 dead in the United States alone -- more than the 1918-19 influenza epidemic -- which occurred when there were no virus vaccines and little in the way of effective medical treatments. 

There are signs, in the American casualty rate from this disease in particular, that in the recent past another appearently much more insidious infection may also have leaped to humans, this time via a somewhat longer inter-Class jump in the taxonomic sense, from insects to humans. There are indications this probably occurred about 2025, though it is entirely plausible that other, unidentified outbreaks have occurred many times in history. There is some solid evidence that this did occur since the Korean War. But, since taking hold of humans this time around, this infection (should it exist) has clearly worked hand-in-glove with Covid-19 to ensure in that the western world, at least, far more humans than necessary continue to succumb, dead victims of a preventable disease that can be defeated by ordinary, eminently effective, and easily delivered vaccines. It is a miracle of the modern scientific world that such vaccines became available so quickly and have been so effective for those who took the vaccines.

In reality, it seems this hypothetical second disease vector is probably far more serious and deadly than Covid-19 for its effects are not confined to the simple physical sickness and death of infected individuals. Far from it. And it also may retain at present an enormous long-term infectiousness advantage over Covid because scientists (and MSM) have yet to publicly acknowledge or, possibly, even detect its existence in humans. Judging from its apparent effects to date, however, I predict that experts (I am not one) will probably come to agree at some time in the near future that it will seem most sensible to look for a causitive agent among the parasitic insect pathogenic fungi similar to Ophiocordycepts unilateralis, or Massospora cicadina as a for-instance

There are relevant precedents supporting the plausibility of a second, concurrent, currently active underlying infection. Fungal infections capable of drastically altering human behaviours are neither new nor rare. A case in point is Ergotism, a well-known and ancient type of fungal toxicity that bridged an even wider zoological abyss than insects to humans -- a Kingdom gap, from grasses to humans. It results from eating grains, often Rye, infected by the ascomycete fungus, Claviceps purpurea. Before harvesting grain, Claviceps stealthily replaces individual grains in seed heads as they mature, with Ergots -- dark, hard-cased, purple or black kernels containing dormant fungal spores and numerous toxic alkaloid biochemicals. The ergots mingle with the healthy golden grain during harvesting, and milling the grain renders them almost undetectable. 

European literature from the Middle Ages includes sporadic reports of strange outbreaks resulting in death or permanent disabilities for thousands of people, some possibly resulting in accusations of witchcraft and demonic possession due to strange behaviour. One group of monks is known to have tried to assist sufferers during a particularly terrible outbreak. This led to the diseases old name, St. Anthony's Fire. Long, damp springs at the time following cold, wet winters resulted in the most frequent outbreaks, an environmental enabler perhaps explaining why the disease may have been less well known in the sunny south of Europe and the warm Middle East.

Claviceps toxicity afflicted entire families, with one of two sets of symptoms, curiously depending on residence location. For some reason, possibly soil composition where the spores sprouted, infected victims living west of the Rhine River generally suffered painful, burning sensations and eventual gangrene in the hands and feet. East of the Rhine, convulsions, headaches and hallucinations resembling epilepsy were more common.

The causal agent of Ergotism symptoms was identified by interested physicians as early as 1695 but midwives had already discovered, studied it and were  carefully prescribing small doses of ergots to induce infant delivery in difficult births more than a century before. Interestingly, the current outbreak of symptoms, if outbreak it be, shows stronger and more visible symptoms in the 'west' than in the 'east,' although disease reporting accuracy and mass access to social media may well affect these results. One must be cautious about jumping to conclusions.

What is clear now is that we don't seem to be witnessing significant mass Claviceps poisoning symptoms, unless some new variety has appeared to produce a different but just as dreadful cocktail of neural and neuromuscular toxins, so something else may be at work. Enter the two other fungal infection candidates mentioned above. Like Claviceps, neither of these astonishingly powerful and horrifying organisms are newcomers to human awareness. Nor are these fungi at all rare, but frighteningly commonplace, depending on one's environment, and the symptoms they are known to produce after infection seem to resemble much more closely what we can see in millions of human victims today.

The first of these is a particular horror.  Ophiocordycepts unilateralis is an example, among many, of an insect-pathogenic fungus infecting primarily a specific type of ant, Camponotini, in tropical forests. It was first identified in 1859 by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Affected ants stand out due to their abnormal behaviour, which is drastically and destructively altered to become "zombie-like," as well as showing grotesque fungal appendages that appear late in the infection cycle. The fungus kills the ant in 4-10 days, but before it dies, O. unilateralis firmly guides the colonized creature to climb a plant to an astonishingly precise location appropriate for fungal growth. When the ant reaches 25 cm (10 inches) above forest floor, no more and no less, on the plant's northern side where the humidity is regularly 94-95% at between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius, O. unilateralis forces its host to lock itself with its mandibles  permanently to the underside of a leaf's central vein. There, the fungal reproductive stage creates elongated 'fruiting bodies' that sprout from the back of the dying ant's head before they rupture and release spores that fall to the forest floor, where they can be ingested by other passing ants and continue the cycle.

In more temperate climates, instead of leaf veins, the fungus prefers to direct ants to fasten themselves ot small twigs, apparently because leaves die in autumn and then fall to the ground where fungal propagation is less effective. There are at least 28 species of this particular fungus that have been identified. One researcher strongly suspects there may be hundreds more. The oldest example of a similar, but not identical organism is Allocordycepts baltica, named because its ant host was found nicely preserved in amber from ancient tree resin in the Baltic region, with a fully formed A. baltica mushroom ballooning from its rectum. It is roughly 50 million years old.

Another fungal group of interest in the present context consists of about a dozen species that appear to infect only those very large, summer-buzzing, flying and crawling insects called Cicadas. ONe of these was described in the state of Maryland around 1800, but not identified as a fungus until late in the century, and not properly characterized as Massospora Cicadina until the early 1920s. This fungus infects the Cicada nymphs as they crawl out of the ground to mature and mate. It colonizes the insects, replacing healthy tissues in the posterior end of their abdomen. These bits die and eventually fall off, revealing a white, chalky spore mass while the insect still lives, thereafter travelling about as a "flying salt shaker of death," shedding spores while continuing to attract other Cicadas to mate, though it is now infertile.

One might reasonably ask, what is the real relevance of these horrible fascinators to the current state of mankind? I suggest that when you connect the dots, we are seeing clear evidence (permanently and conveniently recorded live and in colour) of utterly irrational behaviour on the part of millions of human beings. Examples are probably unnecessary, but I will point out a few that come to mind, for those readers who have been conducting full time neutrino detection work in abandoned iron mines over the past decade. You can thank me later.

The early, visible symptoms of these mass infections considerably predate Covid. They began edging into the periphery of my own awareness in late 2015 or 2016 or even earlier. 

One can. of course, have differing opinions about whether the sociopolitical earthquake of Brexit was good or bad for the people of Great Britain, but on the surface to this foreign observer, it certainly seemed to many outside the country as if tens of millions of usually predictable and mostly sensible 'let's muddle through' Britons had simply taken leave of their senses. The nation abruptly volunteered to abandon its membership in the largest international trading bloc in the world. Further, it did so in a way virtually guaranteed to generate lingering hostility between long term allies and trade partners and when even Brexit's most partisan advocates came clean that 10 or even 20 years would pass before any material benefits might accrue, if ever.  All for an ephemeral and mostly spurious 'liberty' from creeping foreign bureaucrats and their regulations snd obligations, coupled with a patently impossible return to a supposedly glorious, colonial, Imperial past when Britain was atop the world's heap. Predictably, this change has wildly increased internal regulation to cope with new trade rules, quite apart from Brexit's agreed-upon terms that may threaten the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. So much for returning to a glorious past. This seems to have been a pretty good simulation of self-destructive economic and cultural behaviour, if it is not actually the real thing.

But if this particular argument for a massive loss of independent brain function in the general population of  a major western nation perhaps falls on skeptical, infertile ground, at around the same time the world witnessed the outlandish phenomenon of Donald J. Trump's rise to power on the backs of a cult-like base of tens of millions of Americans to become President of the most powerful economic and military power in the 'free' world. More than anything else in recent history, and much like Brexit, ?Trump has empowered long-festering, papered-over, cultural, class and racial cuts in the United States' body politic to expand into full-fledged, bone-exposing, purulent gashes. Talk of a second Civil War is now commonplace. And Trump's defeat in the 2020 general election has done nothing to heal these grievous insults.

Au contraire, the riveting spectacle of thousands of shouting, chanting, zombie-like men and women led by a bison-headed, half naked, face-painted, self-described shaman climbing and crawling, rather like soldier ants, to storm their way into the hallowed halls of the Great Republic and causing at least 5 deaths, never mind tens of millions of dollars damage to their own popular assembly simply brought more convincing evidence of people acting against their own basic self-interest to the fore. And many even videoed and selfied themselves committing crimes, and then published that evidence so the FBI, among others, would find it much easier to track them down. 

Compassion is truly necessary for these pitiable creatures, criminally irrational behaviour or not. They, and many of their own Congressional representatives (one of whom tried to convince her audience during a live and recorded TV interview that the terrible west coast fires of 2021 were started deliberately by a Jewish-owned space laser) genuinely do appear to have been afflicted with some sort of severe mass mental illness, facilitated by superspreader vectors such as Fox News, the dark web, Donald Trump and his minions, and QAnon.

Enter, stage right, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19. Today many of the tens of millions of these same Donald Trump supporters continue to support similarly mind-boggling claims; not just that Trump won the election of 2020, but also that the deep state combined with the WHO, WEF and other organizations are attempting to contaminate citizens' precious bodily fluids (profound homage must be given here to that 1964 Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers film, Dr. Strangelove), by covid vaccinations which insert microchips, kill thousands of individuals (more than the virus itself). They further assert that Democrats are not only part of an evil cabal of lizard-people embedded in the deep state running a child-trafficking and sacrifice network out of government buildings and pizza parlours. Sadly, it is not possible to to refute such belief systems with plain, old facts. Their proponents hold fast to such absurdities, literally with a death grip, just like fungi-instructed ants biting down on leaf veins. 

I am not a virologist or an entomologist or an expert in fungal organisms, and I have little doubt that these dots I have connected have largely escaped notice because thousands of brilliant scientists and physicians are struggling simply to analyze, keep up with and predict the next iteration of the novel Covid virus. But when one looks back over the past century at how the advent of life-saving, proven safe and effective vaccines, the latest one produced in almost miraculously quick time by an extraordinary, wartime-like joint co-operative effort by government and industry, but also the plethora of others invented since 1900 that have changed the human health landscape vastly for the better, and the fact that they were not just accepted by the general populace, but eagerly sought out for the most part, it is pretty clear that something has changed radically here. 

I think it is plausible, at least, to find the reason for the teetering stability and sanity of the western world in the emergence of a new human-pathogenic fungus that has jumped across time and vast biological chasms to afflict us from out of some dismal place in earth's biosphere. Perhaps some billion-year old organism was pumped out of the ground as an oil well began to run dry. Or maybe a much younger one re-emerged from melting 50,000 year-old Siberian permafrost, as did a virus recently revived by scientists in 2022. There are seemingly an infinite variety of methods for such grim agents to voyage into our neural circuitry. What else can so conveniently explain the madness we see daily? And this is not just occurring in cousin Jonathan's domain south of the border, nor overseas. In Alberta, as health caregivers went from heroes to zeroes, an unvaccinated patient who had been rescued from untimely Covid-19 death by and exhausted, understaffed and overworked hospital team, turned at the door of the ICU and shouted that they were all "killers" because he thought they were the ones that were trying to do him in. 

Compassionate, palliative care for people dying of Covid-19 due to such a dreadful double infection may be the only possible course for the rest of us, who have (apparently foolishly) endured the totally evil, beast-marked, tracking device-injected vaccine doses. We are apparently doomed to remain behind watching in horror as this supposed 'rapture' takes implacable, mandible-locked hold in the minds of our fellow citizens and family. That is, of course, if our systems and organizations are actually robust enough to survive the simultaneous onslaught of the nth iteration of Covid and mass insanity due to an infection by the idiot fungus.

There is abundant evidence that a similar fungus has in the past driven humans mad. Claviceps Purpura, an ascomycete type of fungus, is such an organism. Since 1695 this fungus, which normally infects a variety of wild and domesticated grasses including rye, wheat and oats, has been known to poison humans after being eaten in bread made from contaminated flour. The symptoms of the poisoning are called Ergotism, and they are quite variable apparently depending upon the kind of soil the organism grew in. Two main types of pathologies arise. One produces a dry gangrene of the limbs accompanied by vomiting and diarrhea. The other manifestation is marked by muscular convulsions, double vision and hallucinations. The poison is an alkaloid similar in its chemistry to LSD. Both were often fatal, though the affliction is relatively rare now due to improved standards for grain flours purity. 

By Dominique Jacquin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7021543

My point, however, in conclusion, is that there is a long and well-established biology related to fungal organisms that can take control of insects' actions leading to their death and/or that can affect and kill humans. There seems little reason not to examine for the presence of unknown fungi those individuals suffering from hallucinations such as Jewish space lasers, or the predicted return from death of J.F. Kennedy or, more relevantly, an international conspiracy among 'globalizers' to contaminate precious human bodily fluids with unsafe injections that include unsafe vaccines and electronic tracking devices. I suggest that the fact that this apparent infection seems to be spreading fairly rapidly is cause for concern. The recent (2022) somewhat irrational occupation of the capital of Canada by hundreds of truckers protesting their inability to enter the United States because of an American vaccine requirement to cross the border seems another case in point.