Potentially Targeted,
Ugo Bardi's "Age of Exterminations'' series gives useful perspective on how societies have exterminated members, or classes within a society, for the profit of others, or sometimes because there was not enough food from a bad crop year.
Let me start with the base case of human society killing some members of an extended family/clan as "witches" when heavy rains or drought have drastically reduced the supply of food. In the area of Tanzania studied, fed by rain-supplied agriculture, there are twice as many witch-killings in years of excessive rainfall, when crops are damaged, as in years of normal rainfall. The victims are typically elderly women, killed by family-members.
Poverty and Witch Killing, Edward Miguel, U. Cal. Berkeley, 2005
I would take the above as mostly a case of famine killing poor people. Western witch killings in Europe and North America did come in hard times, bad winters, the Little Ice Age, but also befell those with some property, and little protection. there was profit to be made.
Killing an elderly great-aunt, when everybody is hungry, seems like a variation on the theme of people starving to death in famine.
The Age of Exterminations VI: "The Great Famine To Come", looks at the Irish Potato Famine as a historical example.
The Irish people were subsisting on potatoes, brought from the new world, and much of the land was owned by others, who produced grain and livestock for export and to feed the troops of the British Empire.
The Irish peasant farmers had been saddled with all of the risk, and they died when potato blight destroyed their food.
The crown was "reluctant" to interfere in the economic markets...
The Irish peasants had "owned nothing and were happy", until they had no food, having unknowingly assumed all of the economic risk of the system by having no other recourse but to eat potatoes they grew, or to die.
The lesson here is that having no options, which is to be poor, and not to "own the means of food production" makes one a ready target for extermination through widespread famine. Universal Basic Income would be a chute into this outcome, as would any form of government handout that became an only-means-of-eating.
So, to kill large numbers of poor people, cut off the food supply. It can look like anything made it happen. It happens periodically.
Professor Bardi looks at The Limits To Growth graphs and the revision to that. We can expect industrialized food production and delivery to have major problems as industrial economy contracts. (Mr. Gates seems to be well invested in farmland.)
One might find ways to assure one's food, water and fuel through a hard spell, but one would not be able to do so in a social vacuum.
Consider helping feed your community, or being a member of a community that largely feeds itself, if that is possible.
The Age Of Exterminations IV: "How To Kill The Rich", looks at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum. Wealth is sustained through force, through threat of violence. The rich who are inadequately protected by private armies, or a government army, are subject to ambush, sudden and overwhelming ambush.
It's typically rich and powerful sociopaths that can conspire to do this.
That could include the king, the pope, the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, or the army, but it has to be people with trained killers who can keep a secret.
The next two essays seem to share the common thread of killing those who are somewhat gullible, susceptible to propaganda, and crowd mania.
The Age Of Exterminations III: "How to Exterminate The Young", is really about exterminating a lot of the young men in a society in WW-1.
Propagandized young Italian men got whipped into a mass rage and went off to take back pieces of Italy from Austrians who were offering to give it back if Italy remained neutral. Half of them died. People became much more wary after that.
In the US, it was the Civil War that made Americans wary.
Mechanized warfare is mass slaughter. The survivors will subsequently understand that.
It has mostly been wiped from the American memory by having smaller wars in places nobody knows, starting with Grenada.
Americans could be susceptible again. Vietnam is almost forgotten now, almost...
The Age Of Exterminations V: "Suicide As A Weapon Of Mass Destruction", is really about tricking people into taking poison, but they will do it best, if they do not know they are taking poison. They could just be doing something "good for their health", or "going to a hospital", or "taking a shower".
Poisoners throughout history have been a devious and cunning lot.
Sometimes the people who do not take the poison with everybody else get shot. Sometimes they get away.
Sometimes people do kill themselves and their families, rather than be taken by enemy soldiers.
I think that is different from being tricked into taking poison...
COVID Vaccines in teenagers::
This week’s U.S. data for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
21,921 total adverse events, including 1,325 rated as serious and 25 reported deaths. Two of the 25 deaths were suicides.
The most recent death involves a 12-year-old girl (VAERS I.D. 1784945) who died from a respiratory tract hemorrhage 22 days after receiving her first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine.
Another recent death includes a 15-year-old male who died six days after receiving his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. According to his VAERS report (VAERS I.D. 1764974), the previously healthy teen complained of brief unilateral shoulder pain five days after receiving his COVID vaccine.
The next day he played with two friends at a community pond, swung on a rope swing, flipped into the air, and landed in the water feet first. He surfaced, laughed and told his friends “Wow, that hurt!” He then swam toward shore underwater, as was his usual routine, but did not re-emerge.
An autopsy showed no external indication of a head injury, but there was a small subgaleal hemorrhage — a rare, but lethal bleeding disorder — over the left occiput. In addition, the boy had a mildly elevated cardiac mass, increased left ventricular wall thickness and small foci of myocardial inflammation of the lateral wall of the left ventricle with myocyte necrosis
(dead heart muscle)
consistent with myocardial infarction.
Look at the slides. Do a quick skim. This fully-vaccinated man supports early antiviral treatment for low-risk young people, and for anybody who catches COVID.
FDA experts ask why Kids are “dropping like flies” right after getting the Covid-19 Vaccine as they meet to debate authorisation of the Pfizer jab for 5-11-year-olds
Scientist Whose Wife Was Injured by COVID Vaccine Tells FDA: ‘Please Do Not Give This to Kids’ During his 3-minute testimony, Dressen, a chemist with an extensive background in researching and assessing the degree of efficacy in new technologies, told the FDA advisory panel Pfizer’s vaccine “failed any reasonable risk-benefit calculus in connection with children.”
Dressen said:
“Your decision is being rushed, based on incomplete data from underpowered trials, insufficient to predict rates of severe and long-lasting adverse reactions. I urge the committee to reject the EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] modification and direct Pfizer to perform trials that will decisively demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks for children. I understand firsthand the impact that you will or will not have with the decision you’re going to make today.”
"Original Antigenic Sin" is an off-putting term for a really critical immunologic mechanism, which is well explained and documented here. I'd like to call it something less prone to cause people's minds to immediately shut off, something like "Immunological Imprinting". (Hats off to Konrad Lorenz.)
Oh, look, that's what this article in Nature calls it; just what I thought of. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23977-1
Here is the article that Marjorie sent me, explaining that the human adaptive immune system creates an antibody response to the first variant of a viral family that it gets infected by. Flu is an example, and coronavirus is a family that keeps mutating and adapting as time goes by, like influenza.
The memory B cells that are ready to make those antibodies go on vacation until the virus comes back, then pounce into action with the response they know so well. They do that in a couple of days, well before novice immune cells can mount a new response, more specific to this mutated variant.
That usually works OK, but not always, and sometimes it can be worse than nothing if the new virus has mutated to exploit that fixed antibody response.
That is called "ADE", antibody dependent enhancement of viral pathogenicity, and it is one of the banes of vaccine makers. It usually only happens when the vaccine is the first exposure of a naive immune system to a viral family. It happened with a Rotavirus vaccine in the US, and recently with a Dengue vaccine in the tropics. That Dengue vaccine killed a lot of kids when they caught a different strain of Dengue from what they had been vaccinated against. It inhibited one Dengue virus, but enhanced the new improved version.
It is already apparent how that is working with coronaviruses in general and with COVID vaccines against the January 2020 spike protein in particular. People who have had other coronaviruses in the past mount that response again, early, and it is not specific to SARS-CoV-2, but it is usually good enough to keep the viral load down from the outset and prevent more than mild illness.
Those same people who had prior coronavirus infection do not make as many specific antibodies to the 2020 spike protein when they get vaccinated, because they mainly trigger the prior learned response.
People who get the January 2020 spike protein as an imprint are already making antibodies known to enhance certain infectious actions of the Delta variant, helping it to enter human cells more rapidly.
They do not make any antibodies to the other 84% of a coronavirus, and they might never be any good at doing that for the rest of their lives.
Any children who have not already caught a coronavirus, who are vaccinated with current products, may be impaired from ever mounting an adequate immune response to any future coronavirus...
That is precisely a very bad thing to do to each of those children, and to the human herd.
Children should NOT get vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Harvard University professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff.
“They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they’re not a big threat. They don’t die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk." Thanks Jeremy.
Defending Life
(pictured in Mexican avocado orchard, replanted after February deep-freeze)