27 August 2020
25 October 2020
11 March 2021
2 April 2021
Covid19 and its causes and consequences
I wrote this in August 2020 partly to relieve the boredom and tedium of 'lockdown' but now, in March 2021, it is apparent that, despite what appears to be good progress with vaccines and leaning to live with Covid, the problem is going to be with us for a long time to come and we may not be making things any better with our determination to face the bug head-on and destroy it. This essay already shows how difficult that will be and it is becoming apparent to me that we will not win the battle. If you are young, prepare for a tough journey which will not get better for at least 25 years, if ever. If you are old, prepare to die. I am 81 and right in the firing line. So be it.
Our determination to defeat Covid is leading to many variants. The virus is simply a complicated agglomeration of elements and if a variant survives better than its competing neighbours the dominant variant will multiply faster. This is pure Darwin. If we attack it and do not kill it we simply give it the opportunity to develop a slightly different strain which will better survive. Hence the bug is always likely to be in advance of us. The bug can modify itself in around ten hours. We have worked very hard to produce a partial antidote in ten months. By vaccinating ourselves we are actually forcing the bug to mutate faster and further than would be the case if we let it run its course.
In 1918 a similar disease called 'Spanish Flu', which had little to do with Spain, decimated much of Europe and America. It is possible the bug came from the terrible conditions of the war trenches. In any event it ran its course and killed far more American soldiers than did the First World War. But then it ran its course and disappeared. It had killed many and created 'herd immunity' in the survivors. My daughter has often complained that our family has never been 'touchy-feely-huggy' as some families are. Maybe my forbears were so traumatised by WWI and the 'Flu' that they learned to distance themselves from others. That tribal memory has stayed with our family for over a century and was, and is, an effective and necessary self-protection mechanism.
When I was a young boy in 1944, at the end of WWII, every bus in the land bore the advice on large posters "Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases" and exhorted you not to assault your neighbour by spreading your disease to them. We seem to have forgotten this simple advice. Stupid reliance on the effectiveness of anti-biotics has made us ignorant and careless of the health of ourselves and others.
I remember the days before the 'Welfare State' when most people had to fend for themselves. When I was about eight my baby sister got meningitis. We housed her cot in the dining room with a fire and a steam kettle whose purpose was to maintain high humidity but why was not clear to me. The doctor visited every day and when her temperature reached 106F (41C) the doctor advised mum to call the priest. It was to be another 50 years before I discovered we had been part of a Catholic family. The next day the doctor came at tea-time and held in his hand a few white pills. They were M&B tablets, a very early anti-biotic. He told us he had got them 'from the Americans'. There was a USAAF hospital at Stoneleigh, and I suspect that was from where they came. The American soldiers were always very generous. By the following evening sister Sue was on her feet and bouncing up and down in her cot. Pure magic.
Many people experienced such minor miracles and the magic of new medicine, new techniques, new equipment and the cosseting of the Welfare State appeared to be of great benefit. But everything has a price and the price we have paid is that our younger generations have become completely removed from the proving ground of dirt and sickness and have become unfit for purpose. More of this later.
I am slowly becoming convinced that Covid and similar future viruses are simply nature's way of telling us we are too many. We have messed up and plundered the soil with too much fertiliser and too many insecticides, germicides and herbicides and robbed it until the food it produces is almost worthless and is creating a whole range of sicknesses hardly ever seen before. Diabetes is just the most common. There are dozens. It will keep producing nasty viruses, nasty plagues of chronic illnesses and possibly worse, if we do not reform our ways. The bugs have it.
The world has been keeping itself clean and wholesome for at least two billion years through approximately 30 nonillion of microbes. That is 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bugs. The bugs each have a length of around a millionth of a metre. Stretched end-to-end in line they would stretch clear across the galaxy. That’s how many they are. You think you can fight them? Men have a reproduction time of around 20 years. Bugs can do it in 20 minutes. No contest. Most of the bugs have survived for at least a billion years. About 99.999% of every other life form ever spawned has gone extinct. The bugs have it. And we are trying hard to bugger them. We will not succeed. Covid, or something similar, will be with us forever. The bugs have it.
The 30 nonillion bugs on earth together weigh more than all other life forms combined. They have been found several miles deep in rocks in the deepest mines. They live deep in the Antarctic ice. They live below the ocean floor, never having seen light in 50,000 years. They live in sub-sea ‘smokers’ where the tectonic plates vent water at 700 degrees. They ride the clouds and there is little doubt they play an important part in regulating the temperature of this planet which houses us. We have declared war upon them by pumping too much carbon dioxide into their atmosphere and they are responding. Don’t quite know how but you can bet on it. They bet on it a few billion years ago and are still fighting. The bugs have it.
Man declared war on bugs when Louis Pasteur found, in 1862, that he could kill (most of) them, locally, with boiling water. Yesterday I killed a few million (or billion) by boiling a pan of recently gathered apples and sealing them in a boiled jam jar. When I open that jar to eat the apples I had better be pretty damn quick or the bugs will snatch them from me. When I have eaten them the bugs will get them again, anyway.
H.G.Wells gave us a warning when he wrote in The War of the Worlds of a massive alien invasion laid low by the bugs. What we failed to realise was that we are the ones at war with the bugs, not Martians. And we will lose unless we play by their rules. While the immediate source of Covid19 might have been a laboratory in Wuhan, in the overall scheme of things it will simply be seen as the bugs keeping the world of life, which they created, in order.
There are around two billion cells in your body which is quite a large number. 2,000,000,000 cells. You also have around two hundred billion bugs in you. 200,000,000,000. That is quite a lot. They weigh in total about 5 kilograms. Most of the time they are your best friend. You certainly could not live without them. They are especially active in your gut. They take all the goodness out of the food you eat and distribute it in a million ways through your body to the other bugs which run your cells of whichever piece of yourself you like to think about. Your stomach, colon, large intestine, small intestine, liver, kidneys, appendix, blood stream, lymph and a hundred other systems are all worked by bugs. Kill them and you die. The bugs have it. Remember that the next time your doctor offers you an antibiotic bug killer.
We have to learn to live with the bugs. The bugs will ultimately kill us and take us away. But if we play by their rules they will let us, indeed help us, have a long and possibly fruitful life. They started life and they will go on creating it but it just might not be us.
We got along perfectly well with the bugs which rule the world for the first 100,000 years or so of our existence. Then we began farming. Out in the bush, if a nasty bug got us, we died and that was an end to the matter. Then in the farmyard about ten thousand years ago we came into close and prolonged contact with other animals. We all exchanged bugs on a regular basis. I have not heard of a disease which animals caught from us but here must be a few. We certainly caught a lot from them. The relatively harmless cowpox jumped to us and, finding itself in a new and unusual place, modified itself to survive. In doing so it developed into Smallpox which was a serious scourge of mankind for many centuries. We tamed it by using the relatively harmless cowpox to teach the bugs which operate our immune system how to deal with the much more virulent smallpox. That was how we learned the arts of vaccination. Some bugs created the nasty sickness; some bugs killed it. Still, the bugs have it.
The farmyard brought us a vast range of disabling and death-dealing, sometimes epidemic, diseases not formerly of any concern. Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Small Pox, Tuberculosis, Cholera, Anthrax, Leprosy and Influenza to name but a few. These, essentially man-made diseases, created havoc throughout the ten thousand odd years of man’s communal history. Plagues have regularly decimated societies, sometimes killing half of the population and when western man started his colonisation of the planet the bugs he took with him killed many more of the former occupiers of land than did western weapons or soldiers. The bugs have it.
As late as 1858 Bazelgette, who is credited with cleansing London through the previous ten years by building a host of sewers, was still not sure why his efforts had resulted in the defeat of Cholera. He had to wait until 1862 and Pasteur to be sure. Our understanding of the bugs has been meagre for most of our history. As late as 1900 there were men of science and learning who still did not believe in bugs.
Then, in the 20th century, men started to intensely herd chickens, cows and pigs into battery farms by the million. Their bugs responded to survive in their new-found situations by evolving to create stronger and stronger viruses which can sustain themselves in these new conditions. They are called ‘flu’ when they reach the human creature. But the owners of the battery farms become very rich and that is what matters.
A man called Alexander Fleming found, almost by accident, a chemical called penicillin which could kill bugs. This was eventually developed and allowed men to kill unpleasant bugs. For a few years it appeared that Man need no longer fear the nasty bugs. Then new bugs appeared which were resistant to the new antibiotics. The bugs simply did what they had to do to survive: They got stronger. Now (2020) many of the multitude of antibiotics we have created are becoming ever less effective. The bugs have it. Again. (But then, they always have and always will; there is no such thing as life without bugs)
Then we realised that the antibiotics which killed the bad bugs also attacked the good bugs without which we cannot survive. They started to do us more harm than good. Not only are the bad bugs fighting back but the good bugs are telling us we are not doing them any good with our warfare against them. Even the good bugs can be turned into bad bugs by our warfare upon them.
Then some very greedy and stupid men found they could increase the rate at which their animals grow by feeding them antibiotics. This allowed a faster turn-round of animals and effectively greater use of their barns which made them more money. But there was a down-side. The bugs reacted and evolved and now there are lots of antibiotic-resistant species of bug which did not exist before. When the antibiotics are really needed to fight bad bugs their effectiveness is much reduced. It is highly likely that the biota of the treated animals is also changed and the quality of the meat produced is degraded. It does not contain as many nutrients and useful minerals as naturally fed animals. No matter it’s crap; it’s profitable. The intensity farmers get rich; the customers get ill. The bugs have it.
Then after World War II there were lots of factories producing explosives which were no longer needed. Many of them were converted to make fertilisers which contain some of the same minerals. This started a war on the bugs of the soil. These are even more numerous than bugs in animals and just as sophisticated. They often ARE the soil and they provide a huge range of services to every plant, fungus, micorrhizal system and soil animal. Ceasing to use the natural methods of fertilisation developed by bugs over several billion years has destroyed the micorhizzal threshold of farmland, decimated most soil life forms and sent the carbon to help heat the atmosphere and cause global warming.
The massive increase in the use of fertilisers greatly increased the apparent productivity of the land. Then yields flattened out or decreased so that more fertiliser was needed. The often excessive presence of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the soil changed its living biota. This broke the chain of action which used to result in good nutrients being sent to the plants. While the bulk and hydrocarbons in the soil proliferated in food, the essential nutrients nosedived. The bulk of the food went up; its quality was much reduced. The food was paid for by bulk so the profits went up but the nutrients received within the population that ate it went down. The fertiliser companies made a fortune. There were lots of carbohydrates. The people got fat. The people got sick. A few got very rich.
The lack of nutrients in the soil changed the bugs and the quality of the soil nosedived. Its carbon content was brought close to zero and its insect life devastated. The nasty insects which did survive had no predators which promoted the use of insecticides followed by fungicides and herbicides when the bugs ceased to maintain a balance of weeds and insects. All of these contained nasty chemicals which killed living things. Many of those chemicals were carried through the food chain and poisoned insects, birds, small animals and eventually large animals, including man. Most of this was reported by professional botanist Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring before 1960. German entomologists recently reported up to 80% of some insects have disappeared. Today motorists remove virtually no insects from their windscreens; a massive change in 40 years. Back then you had to wash the blood off your car after a long journey in summer. Now there is virtually nothing.
The shortage of essential minerals and the presence of poisons and excess carbo-hydrates within the food coming from our farms has resulted in a proliferation of chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, auto-immune diseases, cardio vascular diseases, autism, asthma, reflux and various allergies amongst others. Most of these problems were virtually unknown eighty years ago. The search for excess profits in farming has destroyed the health of much of mankind. It has made some people very rich.
The western world has exported its farming practices across much of the world since around 1950 by persuading some of the people of other countries to earn a living by growing ’cash’ crops for export. This has led to a process similar in practice to the enclosures which disenfranchised the English and European peasants at the end of the medieval period. Common land which had supported peasants was enclosed and the peasants evicted. They had to become serfs who worked for others for a pittance. Large areas of the world have been turned to desert by ancient bad farming practices and now by bad commercial practices which are, in essence, raping the land. The growing of monoculture crops and heavy fertilising and chemical spraying is reducing the chemical and biological content of the soil towards zero. The former native populations, which have lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years, either move on or work for a pittance. The land will sustain this treatment for only a few decades.
The former native people of North America had lived in harmony with the prairie and the buffalo for at least ten thousand years. The expanding European settlers dispossessed them and turned much of it into the Oklahoma dust bowl in forty years. The Government of the Soviet Union dispossessed the people of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and turned the Aral Sea into a desert in thirty years. Egypt had a ten thousand year fertility delta until the Russians financed the Aswan dam and destroyed the fertility of the delta. The Americans had an accident when they diverted the Colorado River to water California. They created the Salton Sea by mistake and this is now a huge dried up sewer of fertilizer and pesticides and a total disaster area.
Why do you think there is a massive exodus from Africa and the Middle East? The news factors will focus on wars and disasters because explaining that the land is dying is not newsworthy and would generally not please the sponsors of the news services. Individuals have been reduced by these means to be willing to walk several thousand miles through deserts and then to cross the oceans in flimsy boats at any risk to escape the enclosure of their homelands and its horrific consequences. Why do you think they are so damned angry?
Finally we need to understand Covid. It just might have escaped from a laboratory or it might have been deliberately released as a test to see what happened to the world afterwards. There have certainly been a lot of lessons and there are a lot more to come. Covid is a relatively harmless virus. Just imagine what would happen if the next one is just as virulent but is as deadly as ebola. The filthy modern practices of intensive farming are perfectly capable of producing such a virus and there is a large number produced each month called ‘flu’. They produced CJD in the UK by enforcing cannibalism amongst normally herbivorous cows.
The present Covid virus is already spawning variants, each one of which seems more virulent or more deadly, or both. The very meagre steps we are taking to combat it seem to be rebounding on us already. This thing could be with us for a very long time. Our relatively ineffective defensive attacks upon Covid are causing it to mutate and it might easily develop much worse morbidity.
Also in the last eighty years we have changed the way we live. I remember eating dirt to see what it was like. I remember being sent to a ‘measles’ party. We spent our life in the streets or the fields and ate what came out of the ground, sometimes raw. Since then we have divorced our children (anybody under 60 years old) from nature and the soil and the bugs. The supermarket food is virtually free of bugs; certainly harmful ones. This has enabled us to defeat all the nasty bugs which afflicted our ancestors but the cost is that we never come into contact with any bugs so never develop any immunity. Our internal bugs need to do regular battle to keep themselves fit and trim and able to identify interlopers. It is much better if they are trained on relatively harmless bugs so that they may have time to develop their skills and experience. Just like us really. Now our bugs are languid and unprepared and the slightest assault upon them can be devastating. Perhaps this is why Covid19 is so damaging. In former times it might have been simply a trivial nuisance.
My bet is on a world human population of three billion by 2050. The bugs will have it. We will deserve it.
The answer to the question below is clearly ’No and they don’t give a shit anyway’.
Colin Walker 25 August 2020
Not a chance !
Special Meeting of the Grand Council of Bugs
A special meeting was called of the Grand Council on 1st January in the year of the man animal 2020.
The purpose was to discuss the continued attacks by the man animal both directly against bugs and indirectly against our creations which have, in some cases taken several billion years to achieve.
The man animal has for ten thousand years been forcing other animals to live in unnatural close confines with each other and with themselves. The Council has sent them many warnings in the form of plague and sicknesses. We have destroyed their societies and sent the locusts and other pests to assault them. But they have not heeded our warnings.
Indeed they have increased their attacks upon other species in many ways. Now they herd other animals together in what they call ‘intensive farming’ in the most disgusting conditions which even forces some of our legions to modify their dna to accommodate the foul conditions. This, of course, is ultimately to our advantage but it can spread the havoc wide and the Garden of Eden which we constructed is often threatened. They wonder why they keep seeing new bugs emerging from their obscene activities. We, for our part, are simply adapting to their ploys and, as usual, beating them at their own game. They do not seem to realise who is boss round here.They have attacked the soil on the land which we created by ploughing it to destroy the intimate network of plants and fungi which turns the atmosphere, much of which we have produced, into food and sustenance for themselves and for all animals not to mention our own food supplies. This system was fantastically successful and in balance for a few billion orbits of the sun whose light we contrived to use as our source of energy to power all this life. By removing too much energy from the land they have turned much of it into deserts which now support little life other than our frontier guards, who, as ever, remain alert and on duty.
Then they found the stashes of petrified carbon and energy in the form of coal and oil that we had created through billons of years as a by-product of our always-gargantuan efforts. They have used this compact energy to hugely magnify their efforts and have now ploughed up most of the useful land on the planet. They have burned a lot of the carbon energy sources and released the carbon back to the atmosphere, which we created, so as to endanger it. This process is pushing even our best efforts beyond limits. Even his farming methods are sending a large amount of carbon back into the atmosphere.
Then they poured billions of tons of chemical on the land to attempt to grow more food to increase their numbers. This degraded the land and interfered with the delicate series of processes provided by sector 102939875 bugs whose 3,428,659 separate divisions provide the services to keep the soil healthy. The devastations caused allowed some of the more adventurous insects to proliferate and we could not keep them in check so the man animal poured more chemicals on the land to kill the insects. Then his ignorant and stupid land management processes allowed other plants to challenge his crops so he poured more chemicals on the soil which he called weed killers. He messed our system up so much he even had to add fungicides to the fertiliser, insecticides and herbicides.
He is digging up bogs to create fertiliser for ornamental house plants. Acre for acre the bogs retain more carbon than the virgin rainforest and there are many more bogs than rainforest acres. The best solution he has for retaining carbon dioxide he is destroying to grow pretty trinkets.
He cannot change his behaviour even though many of his kind understand what is happening to them. He has created a socio-economic-industrial system which is designed to strip all assets from the soils, the rocks and the very earth and turn it into cash which represent power and is secreted by a very small gang of their number and is used to promote and perpetuate their disastrous edifice and their now jealously guarded power. His economic system has become so corrupt that his main activity now is to asset strip the products called wealth which his forebears had built while trying to live more-or-less in accordance with our rules. Prior to his twentieth century the devastation he caused had been kept local, largely as a result of our work but now he has spread his misery world-wide.
He has seriously damaged our wondrous creation so we have rewarded him by sending him much reduced nutrients in his food. Basically we are feeding him the crap that he has attempted to give us. We, of course, have billions of our 10746352 section A bugs on board his body to ensure that the shortage of nutrients is translated into malfunctions of his body which he calls diabetes, obesity, Altzheimer's, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, auto-immune diseases, cardio vascular diseases, autism, asthma, reflux. We call it justice. We are effectively destroying his society by making most of its members permanently sick. Soon the few young, fit and healthy members will be so overloaded that they have no alternative but to abandon the old and sick.
He has taken measures to change the landscape, especially with regard to water resources which have, in many cases seriously damaged or undermined our good work and led to the creations of deserts where previously there were gardens and barren areas where wildlife once thrived. The list of his depredations is enormous and affects every part of the planet. A few of his efforts have been successful for some life but the majority have been devastating.
The special meeting of the council has resolved to teach the man animal a lesson which he will not be able to ignore. We intend to halve his presence on the planet. We keep him alive; and we can kill him. This is strictly against our policy of the last two billion years but enough is enough. The council has detailed sector 48934872376 to deal with this matter and destroy at least half his number within twenty orbits of the sun. They will, of course, succeed as they always have and always will. We have named this project Armageddon 2022. If he cannot learn from this lesson then it will be time to invoke extinction. Just as an exercise for fun we have sent him what he calls Covid19 as a final warning. This simple action by us will destroy his economy. He will not take any action to correct his follies so our main plan will be put into effect immediately.
By special order of the council of bugs A.B. 3,500,021 Classification:- Most Secret
Note. It does not matter if he does find out our intentions; he can do nothing to avert it.
We rule this planet. We always have and always will, until our star fries us.
On second thoughts we might as well tell you what we have done. We have been aware for a long time that the man animal has had ambitions far above his ability. Many of them have been experimenting to create new and different kinds of bugs by modifying existing bugs in their laboratories. Some of these creations have been interesting. They generally are of no use to us because our purpose is to thrive and create life. Most of their creations are aimed at creating havoc within the bugs inside themselves. Men love killing each other. Their objective seems to be domination of other men and all life forms. An honest description of their purpose is criminal paranoia; but in this they always ignore and totally underestimate us. We, of course built this whole shebang and without our cooperation it will not survive.
The man animal has failed to recognise that he cannot survive on a finite and very sensitive planet if his activities continue to expand beyond the ability of the planet to host him. All life depends upon an extremely thin and vulnerable layer of soil and his efforts seem aimed to destroy it. He farms it very badly, he denudes its chemical and insect life forms, he robs its materials and turns many of them into pollutants. He is destroying species at an unprecedented rate. His indolence in the face of overwhelming evidence is sheer nasty hedonistic arrogance.
A single peek at this system will show just how lopsided, irrational and biased it is. One day recently a person in the US 'earned' ( The use of that word in this context is an insult to a previously honest and appropriate verb) around $US 30,000,000,000 between breakfast and lunch. This in a world where at least half the people earn less than $1000 a year. This is not a viable system. This is an insult to humanity - and to bugs, the creators of life.
They ignore us and even try to outwit us but we outnumber them by around a million billion to 1 that is 1,000,000,000,000,000 of us for each one of them and we can breed a million times as fast as they can and we can change our character to suit our circumstances in a very short span of human time. It was reported to us that one of their advisers said recently with respect to the latest pandemic "we will do what the virus wants" but his is a very lonely voice and virtually nobody heard him or gave a damn. He was absolutely right, of course: they will live in accordance with our rules which guide their behaviour, and that of every other life form, or they will die.
Our section 937645812 bugs which are supposed to fight such miscreants are puzzled and finding the best lines of defence quite difficult. But the positive thing in this is that it is not we who are suffering. The man animal will be wiped out by his own creation. We have no need to take direct action to eliminate him; he is doing the job for us. After only eight months of this covid attack he has nearly destroyed his economic system, his social system is under huge strain and individuals are becoming depressed, suicidal, angry and violent. Their education system is in disarray, their production system cannot maintain a basic life-style, their retail system is imploding, their mental health is in disorder and the fallout from this will take years to manifest itself completely. Their only recourse is to sell themselves into ever-lasting slavery.
We don't mind Man killing himself but he is putting at risk the whole planet. The biosphere's temperature is nearing the point where several positive feedback loops will kick in. His own technicians know just how dangerous, and unstoppable, positive feedback can be. A host of processes which stabilise the ecosystem will become unbalanced. The earth may well finish as a desert like Mars or a furnace like Saturn. A few of us will survive deep underground for a few million orbits of the sun but our ability to create life will be gone.
We, of course, are somewhat miffed. We created this magnificent edifice, which might actually be unique in the universe, and we were very happy with it. Man appeared to be, for a while, a suitable crowning glory to our work. But now he has turned from the path of righteousness and followed the path of greed, arrogance, hedonism, conceit and hatred of others and self. It is right that he will destroy himself. That is, indeed, justice. He may well destroy a significant portion of the eden we have created. We will still be here to rebuild it. He will not.
Goodbye and Good Riddance.
Further reading
Prof. James Lovelock. Gaia hypothesis. Various books.
The Road to Ruin. James Ricards. Penguin Random House.
Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond. Random House.
The Selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press.
Daylight Robbery. Dominic Frisby. Penguin Random House.
Dr Greger. The Humane Society of the United States. 2012.
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se9yqWNIG8A& feature=youtu.be">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se9yqWNIG8A& feature=youtu.be</a></p>
The Secret Life of Trees. Colin Tudge. Penguin Books.
Dirt. David Mongomery. University of California Press.
The hidden half of nature. David Montgomery. W.W.Norton &Company.
Growing a Revolution. David Montgomery.
The Cadillac Desert. Marc Reisner. Penguin Books.
Silent Spring. Rachel Carson. Penguin Books.
The Great Stink of London. Stephen Halliday. Sutton Publishing and The History Press.
Wikipedia: The Aral Sea
Wikipedia: The Salton Sea
So Shall We Reap. Colin Tudge. Penguin Books https://www.facebook.com/danjgregory/videos/101591824465474022 April 2021
It is becoming clear to me that, although the article above was written in a spirit of fun to describe a serious subject, it actually bears much truth. It would not be wrong to say that the bugs which created this world are trying to maintain and clean it. They have no purpose or direction as we understand, all they do its eat and reproduce. When they run into difficulties they die by their billions but there are always some variants which survive and they have whatever it takes to survive in changed or different circumstances. They keep on reproducing so that within a few days the billions will have been replaced by new bugs which are fitter for the new circumstances in which they find themselves. Still they just keep on chomping away.
It is very hard for Man, driven by his rational experience, to understand how this simple method can control the planet. There is little doubt that Man has created Covid19 either by laboratory experiment or by too close association with animals with which he has not previously associated to any great extent. In either case Man has over-extended himself. While there is no sentient design, the end effect is that Covid has come to severely reduce the human population of the world. It has started by taking the old and the weak, which is nature's way, and it will go on until the conditions which brought about the plague are reduced. They will not be eliminated. Then the plague will mutate and cause more corrections until the cause is eliminated whatever that cause may be.
This is the means by which the bugs have operated this planet for at least 3 billion years and they are not going to stop any time soon. We, as their temporary guests, should listen to what they are telling us. We should stop overloading their creation by adding vast amounts of carbon to the atmosphere they created. We should stop polluting their planet with all manner of detritus and we should stop trying to exterminate all the other creatures that their system saw fit to create.
The bugs are actually applying negative feedback to try and reduce the agent, Man, which is trying to destroy their creation. Not a single one of them 'knows' what they are doing, but still they are acting in a perfectly proper manner to protect their creation. By fighting Covid we are attempting to break the feedback loop and thereby defeat their beneficial activity. We may be saving lives but this just makes the problem worse: the bugs will have no alternative but to redouble their efforts. This is their survival also.
You will have gathered from this that I advocate a much reduced human population. This will turn me into something between a criminal and the devil. Have that as you will but you will not solve the fundamental problem that there are too many people and we are destroying the planet. We might not like Covid but the alternatives, yet to come, could be much, much worse. If the planet is to survive, the agency tending to destroy it, Man, must go or, at least, be substantially minimised. There really is no alternative.
Some claim that the human population will level off at around ten billions and the world can sustain that. That just might be possible if all behave as perfect drones in perfect harmony. but try to imagine 9.5 billion drones mixed with a half billion spoiled, amoral, ambitious, arrogant, power-mad, rapacious so-called 'leaders'. You think the world will survive then? And what sort of political and social shit-hole would it be anyway?
The bugs have it. Listen to them.
