*Thank* you for writing this series, Brian. I feel like I’ve been spending more time arguing with virus deniers lately than Covidians! Seriously, I had three or four show up on my last post (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-the-new-normal-front), which was about the Ministry of Truth’s censorship of “misinformation” and didn’t even have anything to do with the topic 🤷♀️
I shared your article with one of them, although I hadn’t gotten a chance to read it yet, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it and asked if you didn’t believe in dinosaurs 😆
I resisted the temptation to reply since the thread was already sprawling. The veganvillage article was sad. To not believe that cells are capable of being destroyed by microbes and yet multicellular organisms are resilient to the challenge, and that that suggests we are a part of nature at the bedrock level... ?
And how is measles vaccines stop measles by making you too sick to get sick not "crazier" than Dinosaur Trutherism? I mean it's a cool idea. But it's not a counter-argument to adaptive immunity as the mechanism for vaccines, yeesh.
OMG, you were smart not to get involved. I woke up to a spate of new, increasingly abusive messages. He is really coming unhinged. He just digs himself deeper with every response. I do *not* have the time or energy for this, which is exactly why I told him this issue is dividing the resistance and needs to be shelved until we stop the immediate threats of democide and tyranny. Yeesh is right!
Ha - yeah, pt 1 is not designed to change any Truther minds. Pt. 2 won't really be, either, I think - it's just to rescue viruses from "appeal to authority" territory, since the authorities won't stop demonizing them, and put them back in the zone where non-scientists can understand how they relate to biology. But I have a travel day tomorrow so it's going to be another day at least. I will check out the thread!
Oh yes, one of them hit me with the appeal to the authority accusation because I consider Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Tess Lawrie, and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko more credible than Dr. Andrew Kaufman.
Looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I hope you will write something that will refute their claims so I can refer future virus deniers to it and save myself hours of wasted time 😆
Thanks, I sometimes wonder if I am damaging my kids when we have dinner table discussions about why we don't know if dinosaurs are real. My kids definitely have the most cynical parents on the block, and that can dredge up emotional pain, why can't we just be easy going like the other adults? We put it like this, "Well kids, we just don't know HOW real dinosaurs really are."
They still love dinosaurs regardless. My husband will never concede a 'belief' in viruses, which is the way he has always viewed respiratory viruses. He has no scientific training, but is a critical thinker. For him contagion is null, he will never believe that he contracted something from someone, for him it is all about how symptoms manifest in the body. According to him, he can track his own behaviour (diet, habits, etc) and determine why he begins to present with symptoms (of a cold or flu). I always thought it a bit absurd, with my beginners course knowledge of pathology. The poor guy just doesn't know the right stuff, I would think. But as time goes on and I try to expand my mind to make room for more possibilities in life, how can I negate his own years of experience of getting sick? Now I am just fascinated by how these two opposite ideas can coexist. Is it one or the other? Is the 'virus' just a dream? He constantly reminds me of his friend who got Covid (pre vaccines) and was on the cusp of death who was in a coma, now a wheelchair because of the whole ordeal and not one other person in his TINY apartment household tested positive for Covid or even got sick (5 other people). Of course we will use our conventional scientific theories to explain how this can happen.... but maybe the entire game is bigger than the spike protein wars. If we already know the vaccine is a lose lose, testing is a lose lose, masking is a lose lose, lockdowns are a lose lose, These methods of containment are PILLARS of strategy that is how many years old? Like as old as the dinosaurs? Doesn't that mean we are just losing in our approach to this whole thing? Like we are talking about Covid, but honestly we don't even know what Covid is.
I always intuit contagion as something that behaves akin to an emotion, or to musical preference.
So, apartment example, emotion: One person can spend 10 minutes at the grocery store, interact with three other people, and leave in a state of rage, their mood ruined for hours. That wouldn’t make anyone else in the apartment angry.
Apartment example, music: One person can suddenly catch a strong interest in Romani folk revivalism, because an attractive coworker mentioned it. That one’s definitely not going “viral.”
Germ theory muddied the waters by subtracting the host, host theory absolutism repeats the error in reverse. Viruses, as Pt 2 will discuss, account for a model of contagion that incorporates both entities.
There are huge confounders in susceptibility due to overall immune system health. I do "believe" in viruses, and that they are everywhere, latent, and we are constantly under attack from within and without. But our immune system status makes much of the difference. Bret Weinstein just had a great interview on vitamin d that presented evidence that the FDA recommended allowance is 10x less than it should be. That confounding variable alone, and it's surely not the only hidden variable, seems to have an outsize impact on respiratory virus activity.
With enough regularity of nutrition / exercise / low stress, who knows if adaptive immunity would ever be used. Since the tradeoffs are great - autoimmune potential - I would intuit that cyclical drops in innate immunity are a regular feature of life for vertebrates, whether due to sunlight or predator-prey cycles. It's hard to really envision how humans fit into this evolutionary precedent but I have this nagging feeling that the adaptive immune system is like anything else, "use it or lose it." There may be a long-term benefit to occasionally dropping the innate immune barrier.
"Confusing universal negotiation for universal capitulation, only creates an inauthentic “ideal” of Belief that no one can actually practice. “Science,” in the end, is just other humans, and humans cheat and lie. Meanwhile the assorted fields of Science are rife with claims that cannot be substantiated by everyday observation, cannot be cross-checked by other fields, and thus can only be verified by the same humans who make them."
There is quite a lot to unpack in this wee paragraph.
Disclaimer... I came to a deep love of science, fostered in college (early 80's), and deep readings of biology theorists, such as Barbara McClintock and Lynn Margulis, and similar, from the believing evangelical home I was raised in. I used to think science was about breaking out of belief and convention, and that it adequately supplied the tools for doing so, which greatly aided my initial (40 years ago) crisis of belief in evangelical teachings. In more recent years I have observed the "shape" of belief and its accompanying commitments dominating science (perhaps via the organising mythos of "progress" - per commenter Markael Luterra - above)... and this "shape" (whatever it is) feels to me exactly similar to the "shape" of belief that I encountered early in life in evangelicalism, which also was/is a product of humans, and humans cheat and lie (and get trapped in the webs spun by those cheats and lies). Leading to my more recent (past 10 years or so) crisis of belief in "Science".
I, too, have also noticed the increasingly common affirmation by many that "viruses do NOT exist". Which is actually constructed exactly in the way that atheists construct the affirmation that "God(s) do(es) NOT exist". That is to say, "I have not found the evidence for the claim convincing, therefore the claim is untrue".
There is a great deal of room for a more cautious, agnostic approach, maybe as follows: "A virus is something that I cannot see or feel or know about within the capacities that I personally possess. I can read about those who profess to have seen or come to know about the existence of viruses and learn a great deal that is fascinating and potentially useful, while my actual lack of capacity to confirm any of this via my own experience, keeps the essence of a virus (from my point of view, and for all practical purposes) 'imaginary'. This element allows those who create and project power via narratives to append much to this '[for all practical purposes] imaginary' entity that is simply propaganda. (Very much in the way that, in war, the '[for all practical purposes] imaginary' enemy becomes embroidered into a fearful and demonic agent which all decent people must do everything to exterminate)."
McClintock and Margulis, two heretic prophets who I greatly admire. I think McClintock in particular lit the path that will lead to an *actual* understanding of what we are / life is - a collaborative effort between genes that can functionally be thought of as autonomous, willed beings, not codes/scripts. Assigning a mechanic to this truth is secondary, though the last 5 decades of revelations into how DNA and RNA act as physical machines are exciting.
I like how you bring up war. Wherever the pretext is valid - in news rooms, or the school rooms, or the hearts and minds of discontented citizens, whatever - the war is abstract and might-as-well-be-imaginary. By the time the war becomes real - which is to say, when soldiers are actually doing their best to shoot and blow each other up over some random patch of dirt - the pretext is already absurd.
Yes, all of that re McClintock. Also, Margulis continually emphasised her view that we ARE (note, not WERE) "walking communities of bacteria". Which is very much in tune with your own theorising in re immune equilibrium.
That is to say, what I like is the "participative" or "collaborative" framing they each placed around their discoveries and their theorising. (And which you yourself appear to find congenial). Which, as you say, is very much heretical to the "control" or "extermination of threat" framing apparently preferred by those working in the more corporate-friendly arenas and marketplaces where much biological science is currently carried out.
James D Shapiro is another one of these "heretic prophets" of biology, by the way.
Then please add Luis P. Villarreal on your list. His book VIRUSES AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE is very insightful. Günther Witzany I had already recommended to you.
“Many such viruses have their own, ancient evolutionary history, dating to the very origin of cellular life. For example, the UV repair enzymes noted above (those involved in excision and resynthesis of damaged DNA, ligation of broken DNA, repair of oxy- gen radical damage, etc.) are unique, highly conserved virus-specific genes. Viruses create unique genes in very large numbers.“
But the actual book is a million dollars, no wonder it hasn’t reached anyone in the 16 years since. I will seek a copy.
To make sense of this craziness without resorting to absurd levels of conspiracy or malice, it is necessary to understand Science - or what I more often call Progress - as a religion. That is, a narrative about what the world is and what our role is within it, which (given our inability to fully perceive or understand the world even with the expanded toolkit of modern science) inevitably entails a measure of belief that is in many ways not markedly different from the faith-based assertions of traditional religions.
The word "vaccine" has a strong emotional meaning within this belief system. When believers in Progress hear "vaccine", their brain waves almost certainly echo those of Catholics hearing the words "baptism", "communion", or "rosary." Viruses are bad, and vaccines save us from them, as they have saved us from the great deadly terrors of the pretechnological past. That is the story, and the more strongly we believe it, the less we care to examine whether it is universally or even generally true.
I also see progressivism as a secular religion, a natural fit for the empty space left by Christianity in American culture at least. Science as a religion I see more as an artificial construct that is fundamentally awkward and, as I said, inauthentic in practice. But 2021's "outing" of latent vaccine worship surprised me. To me, "vaccines" were just like "vitamins" and "fiber," a likely overhyped 20th century health orthodoxy that would be reversed in time; a relic of the primitive era before we learned we have an innate immune system (I hadn't looked into any of the controversy; and had no idea of the insane expansion of the schedule since the 80s). I remember seeing a driveway with a "In this house, we believe..." sign side-by-side with three anti-vax signs/bumper-stickers in 2017.
For the left I think the virus became a god in 2020, changing everything. For the right, it's an issue of capitalism-worship.
The vaccines-as-savior narrative has existed since the early 20th century at least, but in a fairly mellow way, akin to the respect granted to antibiotics and C-sections as significant advances in health.
It started to take on its current religious overtones when - in the early 2000s - some scientists started to question the risks of over-vaccination and to hypothesize links between the skyrocketing number of childhood injections and the skyrocketing rates of childhood allergies, autoimmune conditions, and neurodevelopmental problems. While some studies were indeed flawed (as is true of most studies), the defense team relied on increasingly nonscientific, emotional, and religious reasoning. "We must not call into question the goodness and sanctity of vaccines; to do so is anti-science and a threat to the health of our society, etc." That set the stage for unquestioning enthusiasm for and trust in the novel vaccines that were released for SARS-CoV2.
I don't see Science and Progress as separate religions. Science writes the holy scripture of the religion of Progress. Forty years ago, before Progress came into such prominence as an ideology, science had more freedom to be objective, and the beliefs and ideologies of those who claimed to "follow the science" were more open to grow and change as scientific consensus emerged and evolved, with dissenting scholars frequently invited to debates. These days the ideology has rigidified, and the task assigned to scientists is essentially to provide justification for pre-existing belief, particularly in the realms of social science and medicine, with dissenting scholars fired, deplatformed, cancelled, and censored.
If you haven't yet read it, I recommend "After Progress" by John Michael Greer.
and getting tested is clearly the confessional, where we admit our sins (of infection) and receive our absolution after a rite of penance (isolation + retest).
Much of what we think of as science and its findings is nothing more than the transformation of an abundance of energy into something currently useful and possible, for humans, that is. Whether the story of the Big Bang or the dinosaur, they are basically like extra carbohydrates, but not essential for life as a whole. For millions of years, other living beings got along very well without science. They had no other choice, because they had, by nature, hardly an excess of energy at hand and claws and whatever and their brains were not ''lifted'' by fire food into other spheres. Spheres, in which all the stories romp, which humans tell themselves, because too much energy determines their existence. By nature no sunbeam remains somewhere unused, because so it is with energy - it wants to be changed and changed it is. This also applies to said excess, from which people with fired brains create stories and use possibilities which are by no means necessary for life.
Miles Mathis has authored literally thousands of science papers addressing the suppression (and errors) in science and mathematics. http://milesmathis.com/
While I had a difficult time navigating myself through this essay, perhaps due to being a non-native speaker, I still enjoyed it as I enjoy most of what you write. I also very much prefer this style of writing where the main goal of the writer is hidden for the reader to find on their own but I will make this small complaint that sometimes you are doing too good of a job hiding it.
Could be that the average person like me has been trained to be a lazy reader and my complaint is thus invalid, or perhaps you don't really target the average reader which makes my complaint invalid yet again.
You are not the only one to notice that the topic was too obscure! I have added an introduction to the top of the post. But yes, as a reader I find it harder to process arguments when I know the author wants me to be led in a certain direction; I get defensive. So I intentionally write in as "conclusion-neutral" a manner as possible.
So………having gotten a little lost after awhile, it appears you are addressing the subgroup of people who don’t believe that there IS a virus? Or are you asserting that people who refuse the injections are the same as people who deny the existence of a virus? Because I would say that most people believe there is a virus, but based on data, irrationality of policies, and general common sense, just don’t want to take an experimental non-vaccine. I admit that my limited attention span checked me out of careful reading of the Monty Hall treatise.
Ha - I suppose I did leave out the part where I described the epistemic revolt. Yes, there is a ton of chatter about "viruses aren't real," it's taking over a lot of Covid-vaccine-skeptical substack comment space. I didn't want to slow the reader down on the way to my counter-argument, but I will go back and put more context in. Thank you.
What is a virus in a Petri dish, under a microscope, in a vaccine? A word without grammar and context.
In other words, a virus is a virus when it encounters an immune system in the context of liveliness. Otherwise, it is just a bio-illogical possibility waiting for a bio-logical necessity.
Sort of. Not ''What is life?'' but ''What is a virus?" And outside living coherence a virus is just like a word caught in mid-expression and thus not a virus at all.
And culturing viruses takes advantage of the fact that under proper conditions the word will self-replicate - but even then, "success" has be measured by letting the word "play" in a biological medium, or dissecting its letters in a PCR sequence. In a way, it does bring up the Schrodinger paradox. To prove that the "cell-grown thing" is X virus, it either has to be released back into nature or dissolved into bits, it cannot just be "peeked at."
This is the point, because in the human world, these conditions are an expression of the energy available. And only this energy makes science possible and the more of it is permanently available to us, the more we believe to be progressive - and the more we get lost. The more of this energy is available, the more we believe to understand the world, because it seems to work according to our understanding. Only this creates more and more problems, which, in order to be ''solved'', require further energy. And so on and so forth, because we just do not want to accept that these problems are the consequence of our belief in the omnipotence of more and more energy.
No wonder that science has such a hard time to assign viruses to the living, because research deals predominantly only with ''viruses'' which are not yet viruses at all or with ''viruses'' which are not viruses any more.
Instead of science, how about Knowledge Art (KA)? What is the difference? The handling of energy. Science can only fulfill its role by stealing energy. It focuses on local energy needs, at the expense of global energy supply. Knowledge Art, on the other hand, avoids energy robbery by focusing on the local energy supply in the context of the global energy demand. CERN ... a hotbed of energy robbers?
And by the way, forget AI ... KA is the way to go.
*Thank* you for writing this series, Brian. I feel like I’ve been spending more time arguing with virus deniers lately than Covidians! Seriously, I had three or four show up on my last post (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-the-new-normal-front), which was about the Ministry of Truth’s censorship of “misinformation” and didn’t even have anything to do with the topic 🤷♀️
I shared your article with one of them, although I hadn’t gotten a chance to read it yet, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it and asked if you didn’t believe in dinosaurs 😆
You might be interested in reading through the exchanges (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-the-new-normal-front/comments) in case it gives you fodder for this series. I asked a couple dozen questions that blast holes in terrain theory, but I don’t think it will make a difference.
I resisted the temptation to reply since the thread was already sprawling. The veganvillage article was sad. To not believe that cells are capable of being destroyed by microbes and yet multicellular organisms are resilient to the challenge, and that that suggests we are a part of nature at the bedrock level... ?
And how is measles vaccines stop measles by making you too sick to get sick not "crazier" than Dinosaur Trutherism? I mean it's a cool idea. But it's not a counter-argument to adaptive immunity as the mechanism for vaccines, yeesh.
OMG, you were smart not to get involved. I woke up to a spate of new, increasingly abusive messages. He is really coming unhinged. He just digs himself deeper with every response. I do *not* have the time or energy for this, which is exactly why I told him this issue is dividing the resistance and needs to be shelved until we stop the immediate threats of democide and tyranny. Yeesh is right!
Ha - yeah, pt 1 is not designed to change any Truther minds. Pt. 2 won't really be, either, I think - it's just to rescue viruses from "appeal to authority" territory, since the authorities won't stop demonizing them, and put them back in the zone where non-scientists can understand how they relate to biology. But I have a travel day tomorrow so it's going to be another day at least. I will check out the thread!
Oh yes, one of them hit me with the appeal to the authority accusation because I consider Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Tess Lawrie, and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko more credible than Dr. Andrew Kaufman.
Looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I hope you will write something that will refute their claims so I can refer future virus deniers to it and save myself hours of wasted time 😆
Thanks, I sometimes wonder if I am damaging my kids when we have dinner table discussions about why we don't know if dinosaurs are real. My kids definitely have the most cynical parents on the block, and that can dredge up emotional pain, why can't we just be easy going like the other adults? We put it like this, "Well kids, we just don't know HOW real dinosaurs really are."
They still love dinosaurs regardless. My husband will never concede a 'belief' in viruses, which is the way he has always viewed respiratory viruses. He has no scientific training, but is a critical thinker. For him contagion is null, he will never believe that he contracted something from someone, for him it is all about how symptoms manifest in the body. According to him, he can track his own behaviour (diet, habits, etc) and determine why he begins to present with symptoms (of a cold or flu). I always thought it a bit absurd, with my beginners course knowledge of pathology. The poor guy just doesn't know the right stuff, I would think. But as time goes on and I try to expand my mind to make room for more possibilities in life, how can I negate his own years of experience of getting sick? Now I am just fascinated by how these two opposite ideas can coexist. Is it one or the other? Is the 'virus' just a dream? He constantly reminds me of his friend who got Covid (pre vaccines) and was on the cusp of death who was in a coma, now a wheelchair because of the whole ordeal and not one other person in his TINY apartment household tested positive for Covid or even got sick (5 other people). Of course we will use our conventional scientific theories to explain how this can happen.... but maybe the entire game is bigger than the spike protein wars. If we already know the vaccine is a lose lose, testing is a lose lose, masking is a lose lose, lockdowns are a lose lose, These methods of containment are PILLARS of strategy that is how many years old? Like as old as the dinosaurs? Doesn't that mean we are just losing in our approach to this whole thing? Like we are talking about Covid, but honestly we don't even know what Covid is.
Thank you, excellent remarks.
I always intuit contagion as something that behaves akin to an emotion, or to musical preference.
So, apartment example, emotion: One person can spend 10 minutes at the grocery store, interact with three other people, and leave in a state of rage, their mood ruined for hours. That wouldn’t make anyone else in the apartment angry.
Apartment example, music: One person can suddenly catch a strong interest in Romani folk revivalism, because an attractive coworker mentioned it. That one’s definitely not going “viral.”
Germ theory muddied the waters by subtracting the host, host theory absolutism repeats the error in reverse. Viruses, as Pt 2 will discuss, account for a model of contagion that incorporates both entities.
There are huge confounders in susceptibility due to overall immune system health. I do "believe" in viruses, and that they are everywhere, latent, and we are constantly under attack from within and without. But our immune system status makes much of the difference. Bret Weinstein just had a great interview on vitamin d that presented evidence that the FDA recommended allowance is 10x less than it should be. That confounding variable alone, and it's surely not the only hidden variable, seems to have an outsize impact on respiratory virus activity.
With enough regularity of nutrition / exercise / low stress, who knows if adaptive immunity would ever be used. Since the tradeoffs are great - autoimmune potential - I would intuit that cyclical drops in innate immunity are a regular feature of life for vertebrates, whether due to sunlight or predator-prey cycles. It's hard to really envision how humans fit into this evolutionary precedent but I have this nagging feeling that the adaptive immune system is like anything else, "use it or lose it." There may be a long-term benefit to occasionally dropping the innate immune barrier.
"Confusing universal negotiation for universal capitulation, only creates an inauthentic “ideal” of Belief that no one can actually practice. “Science,” in the end, is just other humans, and humans cheat and lie. Meanwhile the assorted fields of Science are rife with claims that cannot be substantiated by everyday observation, cannot be cross-checked by other fields, and thus can only be verified by the same humans who make them."
There is quite a lot to unpack in this wee paragraph.
Disclaimer... I came to a deep love of science, fostered in college (early 80's), and deep readings of biology theorists, such as Barbara McClintock and Lynn Margulis, and similar, from the believing evangelical home I was raised in. I used to think science was about breaking out of belief and convention, and that it adequately supplied the tools for doing so, which greatly aided my initial (40 years ago) crisis of belief in evangelical teachings. In more recent years I have observed the "shape" of belief and its accompanying commitments dominating science (perhaps via the organising mythos of "progress" - per commenter Markael Luterra - above)... and this "shape" (whatever it is) feels to me exactly similar to the "shape" of belief that I encountered early in life in evangelicalism, which also was/is a product of humans, and humans cheat and lie (and get trapped in the webs spun by those cheats and lies). Leading to my more recent (past 10 years or so) crisis of belief in "Science".
I, too, have also noticed the increasingly common affirmation by many that "viruses do NOT exist". Which is actually constructed exactly in the way that atheists construct the affirmation that "God(s) do(es) NOT exist". That is to say, "I have not found the evidence for the claim convincing, therefore the claim is untrue".
There is a great deal of room for a more cautious, agnostic approach, maybe as follows: "A virus is something that I cannot see or feel or know about within the capacities that I personally possess. I can read about those who profess to have seen or come to know about the existence of viruses and learn a great deal that is fascinating and potentially useful, while my actual lack of capacity to confirm any of this via my own experience, keeps the essence of a virus (from my point of view, and for all practical purposes) 'imaginary'. This element allows those who create and project power via narratives to append much to this '[for all practical purposes] imaginary' entity that is simply propaganda. (Very much in the way that, in war, the '[for all practical purposes] imaginary' enemy becomes embroidered into a fearful and demonic agent which all decent people must do everything to exterminate)."
McClintock and Margulis, two heretic prophets who I greatly admire. I think McClintock in particular lit the path that will lead to an *actual* understanding of what we are / life is - a collaborative effort between genes that can functionally be thought of as autonomous, willed beings, not codes/scripts. Assigning a mechanic to this truth is secondary, though the last 5 decades of revelations into how DNA and RNA act as physical machines are exciting.
I like how you bring up war. Wherever the pretext is valid - in news rooms, or the school rooms, or the hearts and minds of discontented citizens, whatever - the war is abstract and might-as-well-be-imaginary. By the time the war becomes real - which is to say, when soldiers are actually doing their best to shoot and blow each other up over some random patch of dirt - the pretext is already absurd.
Yes, all of that re McClintock. Also, Margulis continually emphasised her view that we ARE (note, not WERE) "walking communities of bacteria". Which is very much in tune with your own theorising in re immune equilibrium.
That is to say, what I like is the "participative" or "collaborative" framing they each placed around their discoveries and their theorising. (And which you yourself appear to find congenial). Which, as you say, is very much heretical to the "control" or "extermination of threat" framing apparently preferred by those working in the more corporate-friendly arenas and marketplaces where much biological science is currently carried out.
James D Shapiro is another one of these "heretic prophets" of biology, by the way.
Thank you - added the name to my imm-eq. notes page. Have also been recommended Zach Bush, but still only glanced at his work.
Then please add Luis P. Villarreal on your list. His book VIRUSES AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE is very insightful. Günther Witzany I had already recommended to you.
It’s all there, in the preface - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344481672_Viruses_and_the_Evolution_of_Life !
“Many such viruses have their own, ancient evolutionary history, dating to the very origin of cellular life. For example, the UV repair enzymes noted above (those involved in excision and resynthesis of damaged DNA, ligation of broken DNA, repair of oxy- gen radical damage, etc.) are unique, highly conserved virus-specific genes. Viruses create unique genes in very large numbers.“
But the actual book is a million dollars, no wonder it hasn’t reached anyone in the 16 years since. I will seek a copy.
A million dollars ... lucky me. How about a more affordable book? Here we go:
Günther Witzany - Viruses: Essential Agents of Life
A bargain ... for life.
Now COVID-19 is the substance of things hoped for (to introduce mRNA vaccines), the evidence of things (viruses / GoF research) not seen.
Fauci 11:1
To make sense of this craziness without resorting to absurd levels of conspiracy or malice, it is necessary to understand Science - or what I more often call Progress - as a religion. That is, a narrative about what the world is and what our role is within it, which (given our inability to fully perceive or understand the world even with the expanded toolkit of modern science) inevitably entails a measure of belief that is in many ways not markedly different from the faith-based assertions of traditional religions.
The word "vaccine" has a strong emotional meaning within this belief system. When believers in Progress hear "vaccine", their brain waves almost certainly echo those of Catholics hearing the words "baptism", "communion", or "rosary." Viruses are bad, and vaccines save us from them, as they have saved us from the great deadly terrors of the pretechnological past. That is the story, and the more strongly we believe it, the less we care to examine whether it is universally or even generally true.
I like where you're going with this...
Toby Rogers unearthed a thread by Forrest Maready on exactly those lines - https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-existential-abyss-is-key-to-understanding.
I also see progressivism as a secular religion, a natural fit for the empty space left by Christianity in American culture at least. Science as a religion I see more as an artificial construct that is fundamentally awkward and, as I said, inauthentic in practice. But 2021's "outing" of latent vaccine worship surprised me. To me, "vaccines" were just like "vitamins" and "fiber," a likely overhyped 20th century health orthodoxy that would be reversed in time; a relic of the primitive era before we learned we have an innate immune system (I hadn't looked into any of the controversy; and had no idea of the insane expansion of the schedule since the 80s). I remember seeing a driveway with a "In this house, we believe..." sign side-by-side with three anti-vax signs/bumper-stickers in 2017.
For the left I think the virus became a god in 2020, changing everything. For the right, it's an issue of capitalism-worship.
The vaccines-as-savior narrative has existed since the early 20th century at least, but in a fairly mellow way, akin to the respect granted to antibiotics and C-sections as significant advances in health.
It started to take on its current religious overtones when - in the early 2000s - some scientists started to question the risks of over-vaccination and to hypothesize links between the skyrocketing number of childhood injections and the skyrocketing rates of childhood allergies, autoimmune conditions, and neurodevelopmental problems. While some studies were indeed flawed (as is true of most studies), the defense team relied on increasingly nonscientific, emotional, and religious reasoning. "We must not call into question the goodness and sanctity of vaccines; to do so is anti-science and a threat to the health of our society, etc." That set the stage for unquestioning enthusiasm for and trust in the novel vaccines that were released for SARS-CoV2.
I don't see Science and Progress as separate religions. Science writes the holy scripture of the religion of Progress. Forty years ago, before Progress came into such prominence as an ideology, science had more freedom to be objective, and the beliefs and ideologies of those who claimed to "follow the science" were more open to grow and change as scientific consensus emerged and evolved, with dissenting scholars frequently invited to debates. These days the ideology has rigidified, and the task assigned to scientists is essentially to provide justification for pre-existing belief, particularly in the realms of social science and medicine, with dissenting scholars fired, deplatformed, cancelled, and censored.
If you haven't yet read it, I recommend "After Progress" by John Michael Greer.
and getting tested is clearly the confessional, where we admit our sins (of infection) and receive our absolution after a rite of penance (isolation + retest).
Bless me father for I have sneezed.
Recite 10x Hail Faucis and see me in the morning.
Much of what we think of as science and its findings is nothing more than the transformation of an abundance of energy into something currently useful and possible, for humans, that is. Whether the story of the Big Bang or the dinosaur, they are basically like extra carbohydrates, but not essential for life as a whole. For millions of years, other living beings got along very well without science. They had no other choice, because they had, by nature, hardly an excess of energy at hand and claws and whatever and their brains were not ''lifted'' by fire food into other spheres. Spheres, in which all the stories romp, which humans tell themselves, because too much energy determines their existence. By nature no sunbeam remains somewhere unused, because so it is with energy - it wants to be changed and changed it is. This also applies to said excess, from which people with fired brains create stories and use possibilities which are by no means necessary for life.
Miles Mathis has authored literally thousands of science papers addressing the suppression (and errors) in science and mathematics. http://milesmathis.com/
While I had a difficult time navigating myself through this essay, perhaps due to being a non-native speaker, I still enjoyed it as I enjoy most of what you write. I also very much prefer this style of writing where the main goal of the writer is hidden for the reader to find on their own but I will make this small complaint that sometimes you are doing too good of a job hiding it.
Could be that the average person like me has been trained to be a lazy reader and my complaint is thus invalid, or perhaps you don't really target the average reader which makes my complaint invalid yet again.
You are not the only one to notice that the topic was too obscure! I have added an introduction to the top of the post. But yes, as a reader I find it harder to process arguments when I know the author wants me to be led in a certain direction; I get defensive. So I intentionally write in as "conclusion-neutral" a manner as possible.
So………having gotten a little lost after awhile, it appears you are addressing the subgroup of people who don’t believe that there IS a virus? Or are you asserting that people who refuse the injections are the same as people who deny the existence of a virus? Because I would say that most people believe there is a virus, but based on data, irrationality of policies, and general common sense, just don’t want to take an experimental non-vaccine. I admit that my limited attention span checked me out of careful reading of the Monty Hall treatise.
Ha - I suppose I did leave out the part where I described the epistemic revolt. Yes, there is a ton of chatter about "viruses aren't real," it's taking over a lot of Covid-vaccine-skeptical substack comment space. I didn't want to slow the reader down on the way to my counter-argument, but I will go back and put more context in. Thank you.
Footnotes are always opt-in reading, naturally.
Spectacular writing. Right up there with kunstler but without the cussing.
What is a virus in a Petri dish, under a microscope, in a vaccine? A word without grammar and context.
In other words, a virus is a virus when it encounters an immune system in the context of liveliness. Otherwise, it is just a bio-illogical possibility waiting for a bio-logical necessity.
Sounds like Schrodinger's virus?
Sort of. Not ''What is life?'' but ''What is a virus?" And outside living coherence a virus is just like a word caught in mid-expression and thus not a virus at all.
And culturing viruses takes advantage of the fact that under proper conditions the word will self-replicate - but even then, "success" has be measured by letting the word "play" in a biological medium, or dissecting its letters in a PCR sequence. In a way, it does bring up the Schrodinger paradox. To prove that the "cell-grown thing" is X virus, it either has to be released back into nature or dissolved into bits, it cannot just be "peeked at."
''under proper conditions''
This is the point, because in the human world, these conditions are an expression of the energy available. And only this energy makes science possible and the more of it is permanently available to us, the more we believe to be progressive - and the more we get lost. The more of this energy is available, the more we believe to understand the world, because it seems to work according to our understanding. Only this creates more and more problems, which, in order to be ''solved'', require further energy. And so on and so forth, because we just do not want to accept that these problems are the consequence of our belief in the omnipotence of more and more energy.
No wonder that science has such a hard time to assign viruses to the living, because research deals predominantly only with ''viruses'' which are not yet viruses at all or with ''viruses'' which are not viruses any more.
Instead of science, how about Knowledge Art (KA)? What is the difference? The handling of energy. Science can only fulfill its role by stealing energy. It focuses on local energy needs, at the expense of global energy supply. Knowledge Art, on the other hand, avoids energy robbery by focusing on the local energy supply in the context of the global energy demand. CERN ... a hotbed of energy robbers?
And by the way, forget AI ... KA is the way to go.
Damn
A picture, telling more than 1000 words:
https://guidovobig.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/pic20201.png
someone doth ramble a bit
Correct.
"Rambling" is just relevant information the listener does not have the patience or wisdom to absorb.
A slow walk, without direction. Perhaps a stone upturned or two.