Live to Fight Another Day Against Long Covid: Germ Warfare Escape and Evasion TPS-0059

I have mixed feelings about addressing this topic and this issue because probably one of the tragically ironic statements of the decade so far is that people are quote, sick of COVID.

So I'm taking a broader perspective that is worthy of study, research and discourse in its own right as a broader category that includes the covid 19 pandemic an analysis thereof, but a broader category.

To explore and to continually evolve an understanding as individuals and collectively, from the lay public to scientific rigor.

For me, having many unanswered questions. There are a lot more known knowns and there are a lot less unknown, unknown years later.

Maybe I waited long enough to where people are no longer saturated by the news cycle.

Maybe you're thinking, oh, you know what? I haven't thought about it in a while because everything's back to the new normal or whatnot.

Or if you're listening to this sometime in the distant future, then the context is that I stopped talking about the pandemic because people were sick of covid and but for me, I never found anyone in my life...that's why I'm very much a loner now... There was nobody in my life who wanted to devote as much time and effort as I did into due diligence about this.

About threat modeling, the way that you would threat model as a cyber security professional, as an epidemiologist, as a war fighter, as an investor.

I guess I'm a semi-professional investor at this point, at least for myself. I don't sell the service.

I'm a freelance war fighter. I'm an eco-warrior. I'm a spiritual warrior. I do my own due diligence for my own investing. I'm very much a cyber security enthusiast and researcher. I have been a professional prepper in the sense that I have made at times a living or partial or auxiliary living teaching, permaculture and preparedness and that was the business card.

So, threat modeling, the threat probability matrix, all these things that come from corporate risk management, that come from military, technical and strategic planning, permaculture design.

A lot of this stuff was really trained into me by being an early adopter within the modern survival movement. But for me, throughout the entire pandemic, all I saw was cognitive dissonance on top of cognitive dissonance.

Most people who I knew were perversely incentivized to rationalize and minimize the severity of the pandemic, and thus were subject to misinformation and disinformation that served their perverse self-interest to be in denial about the seriousness of it.

Most importantly, the serious, just perplexing adversity, the seemingly insurmountable, perplexing, Twilight Zone is even appropriate, maybe more accessible, but the sense that the insidious nature of the pathogen made it possible for so much complexity of debate.

So much nuance to the ethics and to the severity that it was just this breeding ground for the most alienating and the most marginalizing and isolating effects

It was this heterogeneity of consensus around what is ethical, what's an ethical baseline that's a standard, regardless of how immunologically vulnerable or susceptible you as an individual might be, in whatever bracket of pre-existing conditions, health age, body mass index, etc.

There were factors of health care exposure to the frontlines of health care services industry. Retail jobs, all these class dimensions as well as other demographics. There's too many variables to create a one size fits all.

There were a lot of one size fits all metrics that were maybe too little too late, and, whistling past the graveyard, sometimes better than nothing, but also sometimes providing a false hope, which is a certain kind of psychological effect where the word is escaping me, the term.

But basically it's like the other way to think of this effect is that just because someone gives you a life jacket doesn't mean you should then go ahead and brazenly go swim in shark infested waters just because you have a life jacket.

In certain circumstances, statistics will prove out that people will be emboldened by precautionary and safety measures, because it gives them a false sense of confidence that maybe they would have not exceeded have they not had this safety measure put in place.

So it's talk about the Twilight Zone mind F paradox, but I’ll probably get into some of that stuff I'm just getting now to the framing, which is this idea about how much was revealed in this massive global experiment now looking with some hindsight of the phases so far that have come and gone, and some that are still with us.

For me, as a partially trained academic, and certainly as a citizen intellectual, if you will, a one man intelligence shop think tank, that's what I'm here to do.

I'm not making the big bucks doing it.

I'm just processing the information as I study it, and as I've been trained to be a critical thinker, to study it, to take notes.

So in the absence of people who I thought from my background, would have wanted to create a real solid study group.

There was a bit of a weekly call that I was doing with some friends where we would discuss our thoughts on the headlines . I think that was the closest thing to what I would hope for, people who are willing to just delegate homework assignments so that we could have intelligence briefings shared among us.

That lasted for a period of time. Then it's once it was clear that this wasn't going to be the end of the world as we knew it, there was less of an acute sense of of a level of alarm, and there a was little more complacency.

I don't fault those folks for going about their lives at that point pretty much they had to settle into a strategy that worked for them and that's fine and I certainly just displaced completely. I went completely off-grid, off-road and further and further away from civilization with less frequent excursions back into Babylon, as it were. I go on more focused missions, to get larger and larger quantities of supplies, that I could then extend my periods of time away for longer and longer.

That has been a telescoping effect up until this moment, where I'm now over six months into the longest duration of isolation in my entire life from society, based on the implementation of all of my training in bugging out ala the modern survival movement.

There were just a few people who wanted to engage in that due diligence process and threat model, at least for a few months on a weekly basis. I cherish them. They took the situation seriously were a juxtaposition, a point of comparison to those who didn’t.

Such as the “chin maskers”, I don't wanna feed into dehumanization on any level but with this sort of intellectual chin masking, if you will,just being like, okay, I know there's rules, but the sign is peeling off the wall anyway, and no one else is doing it...I'm kind of skeptical and being piped in all of these conspiracy theories.

So after a while it really becomes this emergent property.

I witnessed that, and in some instances, I could fully understand it and fully appreciate it in some senses. I was mortified by it and there was a lot of mixed emotions.

I was always treating it like if it's not “the big one”, I'm going to drill it like it is, because this is the best immersive opportunity.

Like in Crimson Tide, when, there's friction between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman because Gene Hackman decides to do the battle drill during a fire in order actually leverage the stress and the sense of reality and tension of that moment.

That was an interesting deliberation that they had about that.

But anyway, for me, I'm not going to be hand wavy.

A lot of people in the modern survival movement really were.

They went straight to the conspiracy theories and straight to the disinformation, misinformation.

I looked at it, I will put the framework out there, what I'm trying to address, which is, for me, I'm saying, this is memetic germ warfare.

Because the threat is epigenetic to the virus itself. The the threat is actually in how society, because of memetic virality, because of memetic mutations, society itself becomes the spike protein that tries to get you and spike you and break you open and kill you, because of the memetic structure that is set off into this butterfly effect of madness, that goes in all directions.

I'm not saying that I am gonna draw one straight line from fact to fiction, or from truth to conspiracy, I'm just saying madness.

Chaos, the chaos effect, the butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings and then across the world a storm happens, it's all linked through some actual measurable effects.

There is a so much complexity to that you can't really model it, that it gets, it's beyond cryptography, even to understand how these patterns colliding actually end up producing these things.

For me, this theory is via memetics as germ warfare. So in order to even start to set the table of discourse around that, I'm saying it's epistemology as epidemiology, or epidemiology as epistemology.

I had some background in epistemology from my academic studies, far more than I had epidemiology.

However, I used a lot of the time that I had on my hands as I displaced from the workforce and in the city and went completely into the wild.

I was able to really study up on epidemiology, my political science, my philosophy. Epidemiology in some ways a social science based on more hard science than soft science.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised to discover the epidemiology is very vast, and actually is about all kinds of different things.

It has a lot to do with things I'm catching up on from years of neglect, math and statistics and data science.

I'm at a point now where, to me, yes, there was a heartbreaking vacuum of feeling like I didn’t have a lot of team players who wanted to spend what I thought was a bare minimum amount of time to have a good sense of due diligence about the daily information cycle. That's what I was doing the whole time.

I was filtering, then consuming and digesting and synthesizing as much information as I could, and I’d still have absurd amounts of notes. Not to appeal to any kind of logical fallacy, I'm just saying I was very neurotic about screen shots and copy and copy pasting and creating digital notebooks.

I wanted a bread crumb trail later on, so at this moment I’d be able to draw that trend line over all of those headlines.

For most people who are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they weren't trying to pay attention to any of this.

I was trying to pay attention to more of it than was even physically, psychologically, intellectually possible. I couldn't process it all. But I did wanna be able to look back. Now I can sit here like a neural linguistic programming exercise of going over your life time-line of emotional events, the way that you would look at the history of the evolution of life on Earth on a map at a museum.

Like a timeline with the little lines coming up, this is where this species evolved, or went extinct, or whatever.

If you even just take a spreadsheet and you just keep a column for the date, a column for the item, a column for the description, and it's like a journal of life events, you get an effect of basically being able to understand in context these, these estranged and separated events.

In the moment, you may not appreciate them, but when you look back at them sequentially in a concise manner like that, you actually see patterns.

Maybe I was really in a bad relationship pattern for a number of years, and then look, look at this, this good pattern, etc.

I wanted to have organized notes like that and be able to refer back to them and maybe to some extent be able to say, I told you so if I need to.

The things that were most Kafka-esque, or Twilight Zone, the things that were the most epistemologically interesting to me as a thinker, as a social critic, were the ways that this reveals what you would what you would find in social psychological experiment designs.

Things that they could never do in real life. Experiments that they probably wouldn't get past the ethics board, but that are playing out every day, in every institution, on every street, in every family, all of these social psychological experiments are being played out that reveal all kinds of nuance of good and evil and perversity of incentives.

How fear or love affect our decision making. All these things that make for great drama and great science and social science, things that are worth paying attention to.

I was most interested personally, was the ways that people would question how do we know what we know?

How do people arrive at their convictions and then and then make themselves into a into a replicating, memetic force of mutating society, basically taking an idea and then replicating it. Sometimes very poorly, very inefficiently with people who are resistant to it, but then, sometimes being very successful because people are very receptive to it.

So I'm very interested in the distortions. This would be logical fallacies, looking for, exploring and hunting intellectually for new logical fallacies that are emergent properties of the Internet age.

I cherish as the Conspirituality show where those folks were really actually starting to articulate, formalize, and organize a lot of subconscious intuition that people like me, who did come from the left and did come from some spiritual, esoteric leanings, and certainly some critique of modern medicine, critique of allopathic medicine, critique of big pharma, and certainly critique of the government...

But some of us who kept our skeptic hats on, without being tinfoil hats, remained skeptics and questioned everything.

We're not seduced by the most extreme rabbit holes of conspiracy theory, which a lot of people on the left, a lot of people who had spiritual leanings or natural health type leanings, ended up being taken for a ride.

That was a big area of interest for me, but certainly, as they say, follow the money. Because I've created a social psychological experiment for myself.

It's actually an anti-social psychological experiment because I said to myself what happens if I, apply all of my modern survival skills and I displace completely 100 % from society and I break all contact. I displace and I air-gap myself from society 100%...ideally, to never go back. Ideally, if I would have had more resources before this... and I kicked myself, and I'm kicking myself for not being more prepared because I had to compromise my hundred percent air-gap, ideal, out of necessity.

I did have to go back and work a few times, take jobs in the city a few times. I did have to go back and resupply a few times.

There was a time I even went back and did a partial quarantine as part of an extended visit at a hospital to be to be a guinea pig.

That gave me the means, though at high risk, because that was front lines in the early days of the pandemic.

People were disqualified from the medical study because they were in the same lobby as me, and they brought in COVID.

For me that was probably the most danger that I was ever in. That was the most danger that I put myself in and it was something I would hope I would never have to do again, but I did that in order to square away the funds to do a final bug out.

Since then, I’ve almost never had to compromise my epidemiological resolve out of financial necessity.

I've only gone back to buy things and to procure things with money that I that I was able to leverage and invest intelligently from that last gig that I did in the city.

But anyway, that should have killed me. That should have taken me out. I should have been one of the goners at that point.

I’m not even gonna laugh about it. I should be crippled with long COVID because of that. And it's a miracle that I'm not and that I made it out of that last game of roulette, dealing with the devil, selling my soul to big pharma, to get out intact, in one piece. I made it out. h

What’s interesting from an experimental perspective looking at the social psychology of this is that because I isolated myself 100% as soon as I financially could…

When I was still partially engaged in society, I did discover that I have a susceptibility to what's called “mask rash”, and I had heinous fungal infections because I did outdoor permaculture design and installation work.

I could come and go and be kind of like a mercenary working for various crews.

They all had different degrees of vigilance with masking.

I was very serious about it, but for me, it was untenable, because it caused my face literally to rot off to where I was afraid that it flesh eating bacteria.

It was like having crotch rot or athletes foot on your face because of the moisture and working and the hot climate, the time of year, you don't wanna be working outside.

I was pro mask and pro high quality mask, but it was not possible for me to sustain that, even with a low quality mask, even with the cloth mask, because it trapped too much moisture.

It forced me to have to resign from that job opportunity and go into further austerity because of it, knowing that I couldn't even whistle past the graveyard follow the rules and not end up with my face falling off.

What saved me and what continues to save me from all cuts, scrapes and other issues with the skin, is turmeric powder.

I'm not gonna be the turmeric powder evangelist with all of my supplement lines and everything...

One of my dreams is to be a turmeric farmer. I owe it my life to it. I cherish it so much. It's on my body right now. I'm stained with it.

All my garments are stained with it. So I'm like, in the cult of turmeric.

But it's not a high demand group.

I'm not gonna try to drag anyone else into it, and I'm not giving any medical advice, but I will say, I have to shout it out because it is the sole factor that saved my face.

And I was not about to go into the hospital and get what they call super infections, double reinfected with other pathogens on top of other pathogens, opportunistically taking advantage of you and dog piling you and kicking you while you're down.

That's what killed a lot of people in hospitals, going in for one problem, then coming out riddled with a bunch of other things, including, but not limited to COVID.

I just have to establish that not only did I feel like I had a moral obligation an ethical obligation for myself to displace because I didn't have a family to tend to, I had the training and the skills and enough financial means to work, and enough opportunity, in rural land locations, first renting and then purchasing to where I could...in my rationale of threat modeling, say, this is what's best ethically and for my duty of care to society.

I wanted to drill this like it was the real thing like it's was the big one, and I can't wear a mask. As much as I want to, as much as I'm willing to, I am uniquely susceptible to mask rash and therefore in my line of work I have to bow out of society and so I did and that gave me an opportunity to do study from a unique perspective.

That notion of follow the money. It's like you apply that to how people play the the COVID choose your own adventure, the COVID twilight Zone episode of their life.

I was able to see that the reality tunnel that people would generate across all walks of life, all different friends of mine and all different strangers to me, I would just study their attitudes and their social media .

I'm not gonna name names because it was obvious, but some of the first people to really try appeal to authority and get a bunch of scientists out and doctors to come out and try to minimize it.

They we're obviously the people who were most invested in large audience events that they had already booked.

That was the biggest, most obvious application of the follow the money logic, of trying to decode how this was affecting social psychology.

This big, grand experiment showing the people who are going to cherry pick a narrative and cherry pick studies and quotes and credentials, etc. in order to craft and to bolster a narrative that protects their bottom line...The way any lobbyist would be doing exactly the same thing in order to prevent the tobacco industry from ever having to pay any settlements. Or the rail industry from putting on decent brakes.

All those perverse incentives that are baked into trade associations, just considering it a rounding error, basically to contribute to the legal force, the forces lobbying influence, that entire industry.

To me, watching there become a shadow, citizen based volunteer lobbying force to protect the bottom line of the establishment at all levels in order to minimize, the implications of not just to mask and social distance...

This is a cause for alarm such that the precautionary principle would indicate that we would be very self-sacrificing to any and all extent possible, within our means to mitigate the spread by air-gapping ourselves.

And as painful as that might be, I'm thinking well, what's your plan?

If there's a fire or flood, or an earthquake, or a volcano, or a war, you either will have drilled for it and be prepared for it and be ready to bug out or bug in in. With this, you could bug in or bug out.

I think I would much rather bug out than bug in because I'm I was surrounded by beautiful wild nature I was not boxed in by the walls closing in on me making me, wanna die or go crazy.

Again the perverse incentives and it all being revealed the people who want it to just be over with are the ones who are gonna cherry pick how to minimize it. Not unbiased. I don't think anyone's totally unbiased and objective, but it was interesting and has been interesting for me to say, I'm not trying to make a cult out of what I'm doing.

It's a trade off. I trade access to being on grid and access to being on road for I trade of the beauty and the quiet and the serenity of being remote. I trade that off for the fact that if I injure myself, I'm probably gonna die slowly and painfully, and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and there's almost never anyone to hear me scream.

So that's a trade off. I’m not gonna say I did the the morally right thing. No I just did me, and still, to this day, I’m doing me...Without long COVID and without COVID bills and without maybe even COVID infection.

I don't know. I don't know if I'm a COVID virgin or not.

The one and only time that I have had a viral sickness cycle was on February 15 of 2020, where I was most likely at an early super spreader event.

If there was ever a time were there was an opportunity, because I didn't make many opportunities after that...that was the last dance party I've been to. So if that wasn't COVID, that I survived...

It was definitely weird, it definitely felt like a novel experience of being sick, but it didn't debilitate me for more than a few days.

I don't think it was even broadly known that there was a potential of there being a novel corona virus out there.

So at that time, my routine, or my trained response to it, was just self isolate because of the ethics of not transmitting anything, period, ever. And settle in with what I need so that I can endure the cycle of it.

I did my self natural healing thing. I'm not gonna patent or trademark that or even say much about it. I just remember every day it was an interesting.

An intimate experience of pushing through a cycle of being ill.

I just treated it like I would anything that would be winter seasonal exposure. Also I was up all night dancing and in a crowd of people, indoor setting.

In the morning I woke up with a tickle on the back of my throat. That party got me with something.

But other than that, I have not any symptoms of cold or flu since mid February of 2020.

So if I've had any of the strains of waves of COVID and associated strains of the waves since then, I had no symptoms. If I have some sort of smoldering, persistent viral load, then my long COVID is so mild I'm not aware of it.

I'm not about to go and get any kind of tests to find out what antibodies I have or don't have, or whether I might have reservoirs of the virus of any strain floating around in me somewhere.

I did get the two doses of the original vaccine, and I'm not gonna make any further statement about about my thoughts or feelings about that.

It's not really relevant at this point. I will put out those disclaimers and those self disclosures about my biases, and my status and whatnot as I continue to explore this epidemiological, epistemic, memetic germ warfare state of the world that we're in.

I haven't said anything that I considered to be profound about my analysis where, with where we're at.

I will just say that what I was able to continually observe and study and take notes on, and to be intrigued by was the correlation between how “bought-in” to the status quo someone’s personal finances are or not.

There's people who their bias is that they wanna be doing their religious practice. And so there was a lot of obvious backlash and constitutional litigation, even around the constitutionality of lockdowns because of people's right to assemble and freedom of religion, etc.

To me it's one example of, obviously, these people, the people who were going to choose a social public or semi-public social ritual, religious experience and they're going to violate multiple levels of states of emergency declarations of rules and laws that would apply to them that would suspend certain freedoms that they may have otherwise had...

A lot of that was contested, there was some percentage of the population of shall we say minimizers, or people who were lobbyists for the status quo...the narrative of preserve the status quo.

They did not use the precautionary principle regarding COVID, 19, or corona virus, SARS, COV2.

What I'm trying to look at is the cohort of the population that became de facto lobbyists for the status quo.

What was the nuance within that cohort that brought them there?

I'm want to acknowledge that prima facia, on its face, yes, there was a percentage of people who were just like, we are going to go to church and sing at the top of our lungs no matter what, because that's what we do, period.

We will implicitly disregard any warnings to the contrary, and thereby we will proceed. We’ve waived our right to be dissuaded by the state or by public health officials, and we will therefore intrinsically embrace the consequences.

Basically, you you cannot say that you didn't know better. You can't say that you weren't warned.

You proceeded with full knowledge that this could be life threatening, it could be dangerous.

You could have blood on your hands, etc.

Within that cohort there were the people who who flouted the restrictions.

You're not gonna tell me what to do because I'm gonna practice my religion and maybe I came to this country, or my ancestors came to this country because they were willing to die on that hill and carry that cross.

That was a cross they wanted to carry.

Like I wanna be able to religious freedom myself and others to death thank you very much. This country was created to give me the freedom to do that.

So I get that. The irony is not lost on me though.

I'm gonna sit back by myself and study science and go, hum, I'm going to do my spiritual practice alone. I'm gonna look at my lexicon of spiritual teachers that I can look to, was there time and place to go into the desert and go be in the desert for a period of isolation...

All right, everybody, now is the time to go face your demons alone.

Don't come to the church. Don't come to sing and don't super spread an unknown new virus, because we don't know who to trust and we don't know what to think.

So go and face your demons alone, and we'll come back, we'll regroup when it's safe to do so.

I really would love to know what congregations actually took an opportunity to say, we're being reminded of the plagues.

We're being reminded of the end of the world. This is the time to...I mean, aren't there spiritual warriors who were survivors of the plagues of the inner world like that?

To me, The Stand Stephen King's work, I'm just leaning into that Stu character played by Gary Sinise.

Even to this day, what a pandemic will do is it will bring people's true colors to the surface.

And nobody did a better job of tapping into the character development and the nuance of the expression of good and evil in the face of a pandemic than Stephen King did in The Stand.

I had that archetype etched into me as a fan of that work, going back to when I was exposed to it as a film in 1994. I read one Stephen King and that was not The Stand but I remember in early days of the pandemic all these films were coming out on online at the time, and there were a lot of people posting the full TV series, the mini series of The Stand.

I think everybody now should watch that film and ask, who was I most like as a character?

Maybe it doesn’t have a case fatality rate of the level the virus in The Stand, but there were so many things that were prophetic about it. Everything from cognitive dissonance around the quality of mask you're using, to the lab leak theory, to the cover ups, to the things that people would do to squirm around restrictions, the things that people would do to be perversely incentivized to go against what they were trained to do. Go against the law and then become super spreaders by default .

So many things. I could just go on forever.

But I will say to this day, I feel like even the soundtrack of The Stand is in my heart deeply, because I feel like, although most people are still alive out there, I feel so estranged and alienated from the people who I can no longer relate to.

In a sense, I'm dead to the world and the world is as empty, and as post apocalyptic as it almost really was for the people in The Stand.

The only people that I would want to regroup with are people who take it as seriously as I did and always have.

And to this day, would would say to themselves, the long COVID roulette, ethics and game theory are such that I would myself rather die alone than live, knowing that I could have been responsible, knowingly or unknowingly for putting that curse on anybody.

For having them die of COVID, or them become victims of long COVID...because I let my guard down, because I had to just get my dance on or my party on or whatever.

For me, I'm still, and love me or hate me…

I wasn't really toxic about it, there's nobody who I shamed about it I just kept to myself did my own thing and what The Stand was able to teach me as a spiritual lesson, is that the spiritual path is not always the easy path.

The hard thing to do in this time is to displace and go on a pilgrimage into the unknown of isolation.

And you are going to have a lot of demon battles to, and so here I am.

I'm doing it every day right now, to this moment, I'm fighting demons because they, they really take advantage of the fact you have no public persona when you're isolating.

You don't have to put up much of a facade, because there's nobody to hide your demon fights from.

In public, in society and among friends, in order to be in polite society, you have to hide the fights.

Like those scenes in Fight Club, where they have the long, the wide angle shots of Edward Norton fighting nobody and punching himself.

I'm not saying I'm actually bloodying myself and bludgeoning myself, but the funny thing is that, I think for most people, I mean, I don't really talk to myself more than I would have in society...

I think the best analogy I could actually make is the Edgar suit that we all wear with in reference to Men in Black.

I can't remember his name, bless his heart, he's played Private Gomer Pile. He played Abbie Hoffman. I can't remember his name was an actor, but brilliant actor, but he played Edgar in the original Men in Black, where he was basically infested, he was possessed and actually inhabited by this parasitic alien infection that was able to somehow kind of survive within his skin, make him appear to those who knew him as sort of not himself, to say the least, it was able to persist within his body.

The thing is, the way that they portrayed him going from the before and after, alien possessed, alien parasitized Edgar…

All of us in society, until we have full dementia, or until our potentially latent schizophrenia gets full blown, or if we’re not on meth or bath salts or whatever, basically we're not having a moment where our defenses are taken down.

We all are inches away from looking like Edgar.

His wife said it was like something was wearing an Edgar suit.

It was so insightful the way they did depict that.

And I feel like everybody's demons are crawling through them.

Like Beetle Guise, who said, I got demons running all through me, all through me.

You know, demons are real, I would prefer to call them trans-dimensional parasitic organisms that do exist on, for lack of a more clinical term, on a multi- dimensional plane that is as yet “meta visible”.

Not so much metaphysical, but it's meta visible because we don't have scientifically the instruments yet to actually put them under a microscope.

But the science is evolving to a point where what used to be yesterday's science fiction and paranormal studies become much more palatable to talk about scientifically.

As our instruments evolve, and as our discourse evolves around it, I think our demons are wearing us like an Edgar suit at all times.

And how visible those demons jerking us around is, us struggling with them, how visible that is on the surface, going from a having Tourette’s on one end, meaning you're a homeless person on the sidewalk or on the street corner at the intersection, screaming profanities and throwing things and looking straight through people.

Not even yelling and screaming at anyone in particular, but just shouting profanities.

That Edgar suit is falling apart at the seams at that point, right?

And the demons, the trans dimensional parasitic organisms…the human shell that's still sort of animate but being puppeteered in that state, they're not even putting up a fight with those demons.

Whereas somebody who is getting dressed down and chewed out by their boss, and they're sitting there fighting their demons because they would love to go off on their boss, but they can't, and so they're suppressing it.

So the Edgar suit is being... it's like you can almost see that inner battle going on, where you wanna unleash the Tourette’s on your boss. But you're fighting to be civil. You're fighting to be sociable. You're fighting to keep your job. You don't even want to emit the body language of displeasure, because you have got to play the act like you're just, totally, sir, yes, sir, totally, accepting this feedback.

So to live by precautionary principle in the face of an unknown virus, to go off and to be in remote quarantine isolation. It's not easier. It's harder because the demons know, and they will, opportunistically, gang up on you when you're alone and when you're most vulnerable.

So you don't go out to the desert because there's no demons out there. You go out the desert because you want to do the gladiator training in fighting demons, because that's where you're gonna be able to have less distraction, gloves will come off, and they will reveal themselves.

You won't be half fighting them, because you're sort of mostly engaged in just going through the niceties of keeping that Edgar suit very very tightly bound.

More and more every day I say to myself, this was a Stephen King life. This is a Stephen King life. Because I'm a fan of Stephen King, I can't say that I wasn't warned.

I will make the best of this Stephen King life.

There are those with a cognitive dissonance mind that says to them, I'm living in Disney World. But the reality is, they're actually living in a Stephen King world, where the truth is, that this reality, now more so than ever, every day, is so beyond comprehension a horror movie that you have to watch every sci fi and horror movie at the same time concurrently to grasp it.

Like a million screens running in order to distill how poignant they all were and to actually have a clue about how embedded we really are in the truth of all those things, the more people grasp for the Disney World, simple solution...

Oh, whistle past the graveyard. Give me this simple, rational, cherry picked narrative so I can just go back to my status quo, whether it's because it's my business or my mind is dependent on it.

No, the hard path, the grueling path is the path of the precautionary principle, and where that leads to the implications of the ethics.

I'm not selling this as being easy and fun because it's not.

And for most people, it's the least desirable thing to do, and it is the most difficult thing to do, because to take the implications just on paper, the back of the napkin implications of the game theory, what ifs on the back of a napkin…

Whatever that might be...if I threw a banana peel over my shoulder and walked away and went out of earshot and didn't hear the person screaming that broke their neck after they slipped on my banana peel.

It's like compounding in this kaleidoscope of epidemiological math of super spreading and the nuances of air filtration and mask filtration and the swiss cheese effect.

I remember being given a math homework assignment in elementary school, you make a good faith effort to use what they’ve taught you to do, which is to think about the problem apply tools that you've learned to solve the problem.

Don't come back the next day and say aliens or the dog ate my homework, or I gave up halfway because I didn't trust that you weren't working for the cabal, or that you didn't have money invested in big pharma...all the rationales that people would use to fall short rather than apply the skills that they have.

You have critical thinking skills. You have maybe taken civics. You've probably taken math. You've probably taken health, you cannot don't act dumb or lie and say that you do not have the problem solving skill sets to take this situation that's in real life and give it a good faith problem solving effort, the way you would have given a math problem that you rolled your eyes at.

Not because it was easy, but because you thought it was stupid or you didn't care for it. I don't even see people putting in that level of effort.

Again, the perverse incentives. I think it's fun and engaging and interesting to play devil's advocate against my own biases.

How could my approach to this situation be straw manned or steel manned, or steel or straw personed.

Just to develop a healthy habit of looking at things from all sides . I would see people get so dug into positions with such rigidity, doubling down on such cognitive bias.

It was really terrifying. I think some people they've come out of it, and they would come out against and call themselves out later, they have a self-reckoning.

What an opportunity to as a inquisitive, critical thinking social scientist.

Take the cognitive capacity that I still have, not being in a state of chronic pain or deprivation cognitively, because of acute effects or long covid effects, I'm able to sit back and go, well, I know a few things, on the back of my napkin, I'm pretty sure I didn't kill anybody through my negligent behavior.

I definitely know that I didn't publicly undermine the precautionary principle. I didn't publicly minimize or downplay the severity of the virus in a way that I would have to have to apologize for and have to admit that I was very wrong.

And maybe, not out of trying to deflect or out of self preservation, try to minimize my culpability by blaming others and say, oh, I was just following orders, or I was influenced by so and so, but actually just be able to, if I was one of the deniers and I was out there very aggressively encouraging other people to behave in ways that would be compounding negligent person slaughter.

Memetic germ warfare is what I'm calling it. You would hope that, in a tribunal of those people, either officially or unofficially, that they would say, not only out of self preservation, or to push responsibility further up the chain of command, but just to say...hey, you know, I was, being fed information and influence from these sources which now, I'm more critical of and I'll be honest about that, intellectually honest about that, emotionally honest about that.

I don't know if anyone's making a documentary about the people who are having a reckoning with themselves. About maybe drinking too much of so and so's poisoned sugary fruit flavored beverage. And now I really realize that it was all about protecting someone else's bottom line, or my bottom line.

And we use things like the Constitution and religious freedom, and we used all this cover and concealment and misdirection, actually to just cover up our perverse incentives.

And actually was all essentially just hyper capitalistic for us all along.

I would love to know more about the people who have had that reckoning.

I would even more care, not out of the sense of pure indulging in the energy of “I told you so”, but because I have got more feeds coming into my daily briefings..on a daily basis, I pipe in as much long COVID information as I possibly can, within the scope of my ability to actually understand and read any of the scientific material.

I'll take some of the good summaries, the digests of it.

To me, I'm living in The Stand. I'm living in a Stephen King horror reality.

Watching the treachery of those trying to live in a Disney World fantasy, and I'm mortified because I'm living in the Stephen King horror reality.

That's why this whole time, until this day, my bias is that I am going to be, I'm going to over-represent, the appeals to emotion of those who suffer with long COVID.

I want to fall asleep every night to the screams of their agony, almost, literally.

I'm almost that dead serious about...don't let me fall asleep. Your job is to keep me awake as if you're driving on a long drive and you want someone to talk to you so you don't fall asleep like, that's how I feel about long COVID and piping in the long covid survivor narratives.

Because I'm not looking for the cherry picked narrative of look how few people died, and look how much it was like the flu, and look how wrong the mask extremists were. And look how much money this public official had invested in this, whatever, whatever.

To me, that’s all food for conspiracy theories that serve the status quo, lobbyist narrative with all of the different stakeholders...what I would just call unprecautionary COVID minimizers...the “back to normals”.

Most people are just kind of like, let's just get this over with. I wanna put it behind us. I wanna get out of lockdown. I wanna not test everywhere I go. The mask really is like, I can't understand what people are saying, and I get a mask rash too if I'm honest.

And from being mildly agitated and mildly inconvenienced, to it being extremely disruptive to have to live in the COVID restriction compliant paradigm...I get it.

Let's just call it the back to normal thing. So I get the back to normal thing, there are so many subcultures who are the stakeholders in the minimizer, throw precaution to the wind narrative.

Most people their bias is gonna be, I wanna go back to normal and I'll just applaud and eat up and pipe in all of the confirmation bias. You're gonna wanna be in an echo chamber of confirmation bias.

Whereas my feed is more than anything else, if I were to have to distill from all of the things that I pipe into my experience, of the feeds of the Internet, into my life, the clustering within all of those different, very diverse inputs, I would like to say it would be long covid studies which would include continuing to follow doctor Eric Ding, continuing to follow the Survivor Corps threads and a lot of the sub threads and sub feeds that I get from them. The People’s CDC is one. There's COVID IRT., Eric Tople. There’s so many I can't even count that filter into my week, sometimes multiple times a day.

I want to, at all costs resist what I know is a cognitive bias tendency, to get lazy and to get complacent and to fall back into letting your guard down.

The only, the best way I know of to be constantly reminded of the stakes of the game of what some people are now finally calling long covered roulette...

I spend a lot of my time reading about the studies, reading the symptoms, watching and listening to and reading the narratives, and not just the celebrity stories,but everyday people.

So to me, I'm in The Stand, I'm in the Stephen King reality.

I am trying to be the Stu character, the Gary Sinise character in the film, what he has to endure in order to be the righteous man.

Can you dig your man? He's a righteous man.

That character gives an opportunity for all of us to judge ourselves against.

And it's not like judging ourselves against the perfection of a saint.

It's just to trying to be fair and judicious.

Like, I don't have a lot of those problems because I've removed myself so fully that I don't have to deal with the conflicts of interest and the messiness that it would be to be involved in, like being in a family or being responsible for dependents or employees.

I had a little bit of that because I've worked with some contractors.

I've hired a little bit of help but at this point, I'm far removed from any of those compromises and complexity.

So I think about, not what would Jesus do? But what would Stu do? In a complicated situation where doing the most good for the most people, and doing a sort of moral and ethical triage, understanding the spiritual battlefield is messy and the physical plane is messy.

There's a line, I hope I can remember it. I don't know if it was directly from the book, but I know Steven King put a lot of effort into rewriting the screenplay many times.

I owe him so much for the impact of that work on my life because of how much hell he went through to produce the material so that I could find me.

I do think it's considered one of his most popular works. So much epic, timeless social value, so many themes that we're all supposed to have learned in Sunday School.

But you learn very quickly that, those learnings seem to wear off. If it wasn't Christian Sunday School, which I maybe went to two or three times by accident.

We're very astray from not strict morality, as per any kind of religious doctrine, but we're just so drunk on prosperity and self interest that we can't be bothered.

We're so entitled. We can't be bothered by the things that, in that story... what a righteous man would be bothered by, you know, being moderate and humble and solving hard problems, and having to counterbalance and look at trade offs and be strong.

To be upstanding in the desolation of feeling very estranged and alienated from a world where you're like, I don't want to succumb to the people who I now feel like are are like honestly sadly...

Not to demonize them, I’ll say it with compassion but I would say, I think what I I discovered is that the impulse, or the sort of gravity that pulls people into sociopathy, the way that they can glaze over and enter into a mass hypnosis.

A mass hypnotic trance of cognitive dissonance, about ethical implications, of being a negligent actor, a negligent force of perpetrating death on others, how quickly people can convince themselves that they're absolved of any of obligation to be considerate. It would have been easier just to be compliant with some of the restrictions. It's harder to be flippant towards them and to be to rebel against them.

The Stand warned me, times are gonna get rough and they're gonna demand of you that the temptation to fall from grace is gonna be all around you. Now everybody wants you to surrender your defenses and join the cult. Most people out there are living in this cult of disregard of the precautionary principle.

As a prepper there's a word for that, it's called, you guessed it, zombies, right?

I don't wanna be dehumanizing. I expected a lot of these things to happen.

What I did not expect was some of my fellow preppers to not only minimize the virus like having the fire marshal who always said, know how to use a fire extinguisher and have a fire escape ladder on the second story of your house and do fire drills.

Like having the fire marshal who told you to do all those things, and when there's a fire they're gonna tell you do the opposite.

Make fun of anybody who had the fire escape ladder. Make fun of anybody who did fire drills. Make fun of people and and even go and beat them up.

Encourage group mob violence against people who did fire drills and who had a fire escape ladder and who had fire extinguishers.

That's how, that's how betrayed I feel. That is how mortified and surprised and shocked, and how unexpected I was to have my colleagues who I thought were my allies in the movement become apart of the back to normal agenda.

If I say follow the money, well, a lot of people's bottom line would be hurt.

For me, more than anything else, what protected me being a toady to those kind of bullies. What I would have to attribute more than anything for me not being swept up in that..

The thing that’s been most important and redemptive, what really gave me this iron will of precautionary principle...

It wasn't being a tin foil hat prepper, critical of all the government agencies, critical a big pharma.

If I were to attribute one single factor, it was the Community Emergency Response Training Course.

It was brought into my purview because of the prepping that was being done around 2012, within the sort of Burning Man community, which I had never been to Burning Man, but I was part of the Visionary Arts Movement if you will, at the time. I brought sort of the punk shadow visionary art to it.

I even at a time joined the movement from an apocalyptic, sort of crust punk aesthetic.

I created an alignment with the zeitgeist of that time, what I called an edible visionary art park and thanks to having done that, I was able to attract in a lot of beautiful souls and, one of them, who happened to be a visionary artist par excellence, her partner introduced to me the source of the food that I'm eating right now, which was like L.A.’s best kept secret.

I'm not gonna say it by name in this context for various reasons, but L.A.’s best kept secret is...what they call the Produce District, there are bulk food suppliers that have will call that’s open to the public, where you can, without a business license and without a business account...

You can go in as a will call cash customer and walk out with boxes or pallets or truckloads, or as much as you want, of food that you would be buying out of the bulk bins at the grocery store, and you're gonna pay half price for them if you get them in real bulk.

Everything that goes into my five gallon buckets, it all comes from that place that I was made aware of during that time. And it all points to the folks that were delegates of the Community Emergency Response team training.

They came to my Edible Visionary Art Park to help me form a group that was like a conscious visionary movement survival group that we called the Resilience Study Group.

There were ex-military, burning man people there, people who had just freshly come out of the CERT training course.

I remember the manual, they dropped like a 2" thick manual on the table.

It was sometime around the middle of 2012, in the countdown to December that I took the CERT training course with my beloved at the time, and it the most humbling experience of my life, because I was forced to have an appreciation for what first responders have to deal with in terms of the asinine ignorance and stupidity of the people that they serve and that they risk their lives for on a daily basis.

You have no clue about risk mitigation or sanitation or fire prevention or anything.

No moderation whatsoever and no care or concern. Everything is a hedonistic party, and I am going to push every limit of every boundary as far as I can, just hoping not to get a whole bunch of citations at once.

People are gonna litter, they're going to not wash their hands, they're going to speed, they're going to not wear their seat belts. They're gonna throw cigarette butts on the forest floor.

They're just gonna be so negligent.

It's one thing to take a first aid training, which I had done and was certified in that, but it was the next level thing that I knew was an obligation I would have to do.

You're exempt, obviously, if you're a first responder, maybe to some extent, if you're in the military and therefore some things are drilled into you already..to be medically prepared and to be squared away in all these different ways, you know, to do drills, have plans to displace from the enemy and all that kind of stuff.

You're supposed to have a go bag, otherwise you'll get smoked.

You could be in dereliction of duty and have bigger consequences.

But as a civilian who's not a first responder, you call yourself a prepper, the Community Emergency response team training, it’s a must. It's free.

It was developed by FEMA, so you're gonna have to check your tinfoil hat at the door. I'm sorry.

It's the Community Emergency Response Team Level one training.

I can't remember how many hours it was total but it's its own kind of a semester kind of a thing in your life.

And I did not join the official community of other CERT members at a higher level.

I would say I'm an under achiever in that regard.

But I make up for it in other ways, I do have infinite respect for them and infinite respect for the structure that was designed to be the fabric of the idea of what you might informally call a federally funded and sanctioned, locally administered medical militia.

We live in such a ratcheted up world of just hazards upon hazards.

Literally everything is leaning against us and we're basically in an iron maiden of our own making.

You know, a medieval torture device where it's like a coffin with spikes that they close on you and they they squeeze you into it and they drop the lid on you...

And you wouldn't know that if you didn't take the CERT course, rolling out that caution tape, you know what I mean?

Like rolling out that triage, mass mass casualty event protocol, that was just all theoretical.

We did very minimal drilling of that in one little scratching the surface course.

I think about the people who have done triage and mass casualty events many times in their career as first responders or as battlefield medics.

They should know better. They do know better. And there those of them who treated this the way they were trained to treat it.

Not to have an attitude of laziness or, or being in denial about it.

Everybody cuts corners. Everybody gets complacent here and there.

But the people who know how to do mass casualty event administration, as first responders and the people like me who at least are aware of the science and the architecture of the thinking, just how to begin to approach thinking about doing the most good for the most people.

And risk mitigation, understanding vectors of transmission at a mass scale, like snapping into an emergency response mode.

That's what that course did for me.

I'm not gonna say I'm a hero. I'm not a hero.

I didn't do any outreach to the public to help people suffering with covid, I didn't put myself at risk.

If anything, I'm an anti hero, because at best I just saved myself, I just didn't want to be part of the problem by at least subtracting myself from the equation, which is it's not heroic to do.

There’s a marine Iraq War veteran politician, he basically said there was so much death and so many threats to your life, you just resigned completely to the notion that you would just die at any time.

In that state of mind, you stop caring about yourself…you stop being concerned with whether or not you're gonna live or die...at that point, all you have control over because you have no more control over your death or how you might die, you only have control over your honor and how you'll be remembered.

I’m haunted by those sentiments because I’m guilty of disgraceful conduct. I went out in a disgraceful manner in the eyes of a few people. I failed in my last attempts and opportunities to redeem myself after falling from grace.

I'm not the honorable person I thought I was, or tried to be.

In effect, the people who I cared most about, I hurt the most.

I may never have the opportunity to repair that damage.

I have to live with that but, I will learn from that, I will not inflict that on other people.

I’ll try to re-set my moral compass by that.

I will endeavor to not set up a circumstance where it's possible for me to endanger others.

As far as I know, I’m responsible for only emotional collateral damage from this life. I didn't cause great bodily injury, harm or death to anybody that I know of.

In the life that I spent in the world of chaos and danger and risk and motorization, ego and intoxication and just gang violence and street violence and litigation, liability, all the things that happen in the city.

I escaped from that…

I don't get to live the hipster life anymore, I don't get to go to the hipster bar I don't get to go to the hipster taco truck.

I sacrifice all those things and I may I eat the same food that I grow and that I import every day.

Out here by myself in the middle of the what I consider the promised land for myself…

I get to do a lot of reflecting on my social career.

How will I be remembered? I think, for the most part, I will be remembered as a good person, as a righteous man.

Though there are those whose hearts I broke or those who will not remember me in a high favor, or in a disgraced manner...

I’ve had many opportunities to either step up or step down as a man.

But there are people who would say, I'm alive because of him. He saved my life. And that doesn't mean he'll never do wrong, and I'll never hear criticism of him.

I will say that there are people out there whose lives I did save in more ways than one.

There's more people's whose hearts I mended than I broke.

Both kinds of people populate my dreams. I’m getting visited by people who come to haunt me for what I did wrong to them. I’m also getting visited by people who wanna come and love on me because of how good of a lover I was on them.

I'm in this interesting realm of post society...outwardly socially mobile.

I left society, and now I have, thankfully, a conscience that is self-healing.

It's working itself out. And the shadow material that needs to come up. I'm working through it. I have a relatively clean conscience, and I sleep very well, my dreams are filled with meaningful encounters with the people who I could have been better to, reminding me of that so that I do better in the future with other people, including myself.

The mind striving to be healthy, the spiritual allies and the divine hands of origami.

I've been dealt the hand that I've been dealt.

I'm certainly a problem child of God. Certainly a problem child for my spirit guides, their hands are full with this one.

All the demonic forces, they've always had a field day with me and they're not on vacation now, by any means.

So here we here, I am just living in what I would call the reality that we are all actually always living in, we are all living in a Stephen King horror reality.

There's people who are carving themselves into having an iron will to confront the spiritual battles of that truth and that reality.

Whereas the laziest people are looking for escape mechanisms of cognitive dissonance so that they can construct a veneer of Disney World fantasy, so they can avoid the truth of the harsh Stephen King reality world.