The collapse of the imperial-scale welfare system, due to over-production of recipients (a special case of general imperial over-extension)

I haven't waded into political dIsCouRsE for awhile, since there has been nothing new to add from what I've already said. But with the looming possibility of food stamp (SNAP) benefits not going out for November, amid the federal government shutdown, it's worth examining the collapse of the charity / safety net sector of society, during the broader collapse of an empire -- as well as its stratospheric growth during imperial expansion.

A large majority of English-language internet content comes from outside America, as English has become the global lingua franca -- but that doesn't mean foreigners understand America, just cuz they speak English and have watched American movies or played American serial killer simulators. So when they hear about cuts to the American food stamp program, they project their own nation's status quo onto ours, and imagine cuts to their own system. But America is the last bloated empire left standing, currently entering its collapse stage, so all comparisons from foreigners will fail.

The clearest way to see this is in the scale of food aid across countries. With SNAP in the news, many Americans are suddenly shocked to discover how much of the population receives it -- about 13%, or 1 out of every 8 residents, an astonishing figure.

And that's just SNAP, not counting the various other arms of the food assistance system, such as food banks, where the estimate is about 17%, or 1 out of every 6 residents, receiving that form of food aid. Depending on the overlap between the two -- and presumably some people are getting both -- that's at least 20% of people living here relying on food aid.

Food banks don't supply every meal for every day in every month -- but neither do the benefits paid out by SNAP, which may be merely $25 a month.

Food banks de facto do not put any barriers to eligibility, unlike SNAP which is means-tested -- you have to be making below a certain income, you generally have to work if you're able-bodied and working-age, and so on, and all of this info is documented and verified by case workers. SNAP is targeted more toward rural residents, while food banks seem to be aimed more at urban or metro-area residents. So I don't think there's tons of overlap between the two, meaning the percent relying on food aid could be higher, like 25%. But it's at least 13%, based on SNAP alone.

What percent of other 1st-world countries rely on food aid? It's hard to say, cuz some bundle all social welfare pay-outs into a single allotment, and it goes toward food, housing, and other basic expenses. That is a maximum figure, then, for food stamps. Some countries don't include food payments, but do give out food packages in kind.

Regardless of these differences from the American system, no other 1st-world country is even remotely close to America's level of food assistance -- about 1-2% of the population in Sweden and Glorious Nippon, 4-5% in France and Italy, even in Poland only 3% rely on food aid. I looked for English-language stats on Russia, but sadly they're all slopaganda -- if any legit Russian-language source can be found, let me know.

So outside America, the most vulnerable 1-5% would be affected by cuts to food aid. And because those on food aid are so much lower in the social pyramid, cutting their benefits would strike their citizens as obscenely cruel.

But in America, cutting food aid "only" affects the bottom 13-25%, which of course includes the same bottom 1-5% as would be affected in other countries, but at least an extra 10% of the population higher up on the pyramid, which is between double the share who get aid outside America (in places where 5% get it), up to 8 times the share (in places where 1-2% get it).

Aside from cross-national comparisons at the same time, we can compare America today to America in years past, back to the 1970s when the system was regularized and institutionalized. There has been a jump in both the share of the American population relying on food aid, and the amount spent on food aid (inflation-adjusted, as a share of GDP, however you measure it). This traces back only to the aftermath of the 2008 Depression, from which America has never recovered (the elites only printed up $10 trillion and handed it out to moronic strivers to play around with). It spiked even further during the Covid hysteria, and 5 years later is still not down to pre-Covid levels, despite Covid being over.

There was a gradual increase during the '80s and '90s, although there was also a decrease during the second half of the '90s. So some of this can be blamed on neoliberalism and de-industrialization, but the jump since 2008 and 2020 seems more like the NGO-industrial complex seizing the opportunity to expand their operations, with the crisis du jour as a rationalization. Other 1st-world countries were destroyed by 2008 and 2020, but they didn't expand their food aid system to cover 13-25% of their population like we did.

For comparison, in 1974 as the system went nationwide, food stamp enrollment was 15 million, out of a total population of 214 million, or 7%. Since 1980, it has maxed out at 10% during a recession and/or a phase of greater funding, and dipped into the high single digits during economic recoveries and/or a phase of lesser funding. But tearing above 10% and that becoming the new normal is very recent. And by the looks of things, that percentage may only grow in the short-term.

And again, that's only SNAP, the means-tested form of food aid -- not covering the exponential increase in food bank aid, which used to be nearly non-existent and limited to soup kitchens, canned food drives, and the like, but has now expanded to rival the SNAP program itself. The estimate of 17% using them is over the course of a year, but even at the time-frame of a month, about 5% of respondents use them (see here for discussion of the 2 different national statistical surveys that ask about food security).

Food banks appear to have grown to fill a separate niche than the SNAP niche -- namely, people who don't qualify for SNAP, due to income, work status, citizenship status, difficulty / unwillingness in filling out forms, or whatever else.

There's surely some double-dippers, but most inquiries I found online about visiting food banks said they don't qualify for SNAP and are curious if the food banks will impose similar means-testing on people who show up to food banks (short answer: they will not, de facto, although they may ask you for an ID to show you reside in the area, or to sign a legally unbinding form that you pinky-swear represents your income). Food banks appear more likely to serve downwardly-mobile middle class residents of metro areas, compared to SNAP.

Then there's the growth in the amount spent on the program, aside from the rise in the percent using it. Some of the long-term growth in the SNAP budget is due to overall inflation, but the program's budget was fairly stable at about $20 billion during the '90s and early 2000s. It made a quantum leap to a new normal of about $60 billion in the wake of 2008, and made another quantum leap to a pandemic peak of $120 billion in 2022, although that has declined to a new normal that is still a quantum leap above the 2008 jump, at around $100 billion for 2024.

It doesn't matter that this is "a drop in the bucket" of the national budget, at 1-2% of federal spending -- when every single program uses up 2-3-4 times as much as it used to in just the 2000s, it collectively explodes the federal budget. And this is even more unsustainable these days, since more and more federal spending is paid for by debt -- with ever-soaring interest rates -- and by currency debasement (printing up trillions in a single year of 2020, which never gets withdrawn from circulation).

The good ol' days when "taxpayer dollars" paid for government spending are long gone -- now everybody pays a highly regressive tax, namely hyperinflation once our unsustainably skyrocketing debt gets defaulted on and no one will loan us even a small amount that is necessary, as well as currency debasement which has already shaved off a double-digit percentage of the dollar's purchasing power in the past few years alone -- and that trend is only escalating, as the dollar sinks and gold soars.

So, rather than the deluded para-political game of "musical chairs" that is a constant source of slopaganda in social media fanfic -- or picking which programs to keep and which to slash, and by how much for each program -- the reality is that every single one of those programs is going to collapse, as our empire collapses. All are bloated beyond their original purpose, beyond sustainable levels, and no one will yield, so they will all totally collapse, and be replaced by state-level replacements in the post-imperial era, much like rump states will replace the current federal state as polities.

In 5-10 years, we won't be bailing out Trump's cronies in Argentina to the tune of $40 billion on a whim, since we won't have any worthwhile currency to bail them out with anymore. We might as well hand them 40 gazillion Zimbabwe bucks.

We already have run out of actually valuable military equipment to flush down the toilet in Ukraine, and in 5-10 years, our military manufacturing industry will be even more hollowed out. So we won't be bogged down in that wasteful dead-end either.

But the point is, every one of these bloated, over-extended, ever-expanding cancerous growths on the empire is going to collapse the entire system on which they feed. They will be replaced by state-level replacements, which will not be so imperially over-extended and over-produced, since we will be in the post-imperial stage of our history.

Maybe one or two wealthy rump states, like the Grand Duchy of California, will attempt a relatively more generous welfare system than the kleinstaats that will make up New New England. But the days when well over 10% of the population is receiving food aid, will be over.

That will not be due to the poorest 1-2% getting wiped out -- they'll still be covered by the rump state welfare systems. But the over-produced group of food aid recipients will not be receiving it any longer. As in post-imperial Rome, foreigners will go back to their homelands, as wealth dries up in post-imperial America, the downwardly mobile will not have as many kids, and with no imperial-scale parasites at the top of the wealth pyramid, resources will be more evenly distributed in the rump states, so there won't be so many desperate working and middle class people either. The bloated war-losing military will be gone, the Baby Boomers will be dead, and Wall Street banks will be holding worthless currency, not real wealth with which to bully the rest of the economy.

Through these various channels, population size will collapse in post-imperial America, just as it did in the Roman Empire. The imperial capital, Rome, had over 1 million residents during the empire's peak in the 2nd century, but during the 5th C, it collapsed by an order of magnitude, or 90%, down to 100,000. It never regained the 1 million mark even after it emerged from the Dark Ages, like the Renaissance or Early Modern eras -- only after national unification brought loads of Italians from other regions of Italy to the new national capital, during the 20th C. (NB: not loads of foreigners, as during the Roman Empire.)

I don't know how long it'll take the population of New York -- and other major cities of post-imperial America -- to collapse by 90%, but they all will. It won't be hard to support the bottom 1-5% on welfare, like most non-imperial or post-imperial 1st-world countries manage today, since the total population is going to shrink down to 25-50 million. We may not collapse as hard as Rome did, since we have lots of open land to still colonize and exploit the resources of, but it will be a radical reduction.

The main thing to remember is -- everything of imperial scale is going to collapse when an empire collapses. If there is no state-level replacement, like a foreign-adventuring military, there will be no such replacement at all. There will be "no more foreign wars", just state-level militias for defense of their own territory. If there is a state-level replacement, like welfare, it will be scaled down obviously, but there will be a replacement.

Also crucial to remember -- none of this is up for debate, by anybody. Certainly not by the para-political fanfickers from social media, who treat the dIsCouRsE as though it's a "model UN" activity that will somehow magically alter the course of IRL events. That goes for both the objective / technocrat niche, as well as the subjective / moralistic niche. All fake and gay.

But it's not even up for debate by actual holders of national offices, their appointees, and their mega-donors. The American Empire is collapsing, irrevocably, and so will every institution of imperial scale along with it, to be replaced -- if at all -- by scaled-down state-level replacements, like rump states and welfare systems typical of the rest of the 1st world, not the over-extended and unsustainable system that we have erected up to this point.

Only the cold iron laws of historical dynamics have a say in the course of events, and we can see from every empire how this no-different empire will turn out, at a bird's-eye level.

Rebirth of the fertility cycle, as girls liberate themselves from hormonal birth control

A sea-change in the relations between the sexes has taken place within the last 5 years, largely without public commentary, as it did not fit into any of the dominant take-cycles (MeToo, Trump Derangement Syndrome, or wokeness in general).

Namely, girls have started to ditch hormonal birth control, en masse, for the first time since it became widespread among teens and young adults in the '90s and 2000s. The realities of the fertility cycle, which is suppressed by HBC, are going to flood the society and culture like a tidal wave that has not been felt in several decades.

True, girls are going to go through greater cramping pain during the PMS phase of their cycle, and along with that, greater irritability, snappy talk, and lashing out. But that's only a few days out of the month -- they're also going to be soaring to far higher highs during the fertile phase of their cycle, being more extraverted, excited, flirtatious, smiling laughing & giggling, and flush full of positive vibes.

Trading a couple days of crabbiness for a couple WEEKS of merrymaking? Yeah, I think we'll manage somehow. If you're a girl-liker, you're in for a real exciting change of pace, probably for the first time in your life. If you're a girl-hater, you're going to be contemplating suicide like you've never known before, as unbridled feminine hormones come crashing against your flimsy "no girls allowed" cardboard fort.

And right as the 15-year excitement cycle has entered its restless warm-up phase (as of 2020), and dudes and dudettes feel eager to come out of their shells and start mixing it up with each other again! I actually think this is part of the even longer 60-year cycle of cocooning mood / falling-crime vs. outgoing mood / rising-crime. But those are all topics for future posts in what must become an ongoing series.

For now, let's first take a look to see what THE DAYTA tell us. I first had this hunch a few weeks ago, when I noticed how full-throttle hormonal my favorite streamers are -- both during their PMS lows and their ovulating highs. I didn't recall any previous era of pop culture having young girls in such a state of nature, except my kid memories from the '80s, back before every teen was on the pill, and when there was still an outgoing mood and rising crime.

Millennials when they took over YouTube, movies / TV, music, podcasts, etc., did not show this profound cycle between snappy lows and pheromone-radiating highs. And even when the excitement cycle was restless and danceclub-friendly, such as the late 2000s, there was a pervasive message of "look but don't touch" (e.g., "My Humps"). That is, she was excited to get out of the house and go dancing, but was not actually boy-crazy or horny, so don't read that into her booty-shaking moves on the dance floor.

In the 2020s, the message is going to be, "Look -- and if you're hot, please, come touch". That doesn't mean only hot guys are going to be in demand, since the plain-looking girls will have to settle for the plain-looking guys. But they will still be boy-crazy and horny for half of their lives now, unlike earlier when the plain-looking girls wouldn't have settled for their male counterparts, having been lobotomized by HBC to feel no urge to connect with *somebody*.

* * *

Sadly, there are no data on how prevalent hormonal birth control is by age and year. Maybe if you lump all females 15-49, but that's not relevant. And maybe if you just want a snapshot here or there. But it's not tracked like the prevalence of STDs, live births, marriages, or anything else in the kinship / dating-and-mating domain.

They really don't want people to know what's going on with it, which is also why the effects of the pill are never discussed during the now-obligatory sex ed classes in high school, despite all of the girls going on the pill around that time and lasting until menopause, if they don't decide to reverse course.

And I don't mean the rare side-effects like blood clotting -- I mean the 99% common effects like flattening out your moods like an efficiently programmed robot, draining your libido, making you withdrawn, prone to migraines and depression, and the rest of what happens when your body is tricked into thinking you're pregnant, while not actually having a pair-bonded mate to support you through the process, and no actual new family life to look forward to.

So I went to the place where women might actually announce their life decisions -- Twitter. If it can fit into some kind of discourse or take-cycle, just blurt it out, and see if it goes viral. So far, no luck with going viral, but we can still track how common the decision has become.

I searched "going off hormonal" to make sure they're referring to the types of BC that disrupt the natural hormone levels and cycles, and not condoms or whatever. And while there are other variants on this phrase (like "go" off), the pattern is clear enough with this one exact phrase. And there are media reports confirming the shift during this time period, so it will do fine.

Since there are only in the single or low double digits per year, I read through each one, and weeded out those that are irrelevant (like trannies talking about going off a different kind of hormonal intervention). And when I say there's a "post" on Twitter, I mean it's about their own personal decision or debating process, not all the separate posts that are linking to the same article or YouTube video. I want to know how many different individuals are gabbing about their decision, or near-decision, to go off the pill.

* * *

From 2009 to 2014, there are only a handful of posts per year with "going off hormonal", no more than 5. And no articles on other media sites that are being linked to. This is the steady baseline, since even when HBC is common, some girls here and there are going to ditch it.

In 2015-'16, there are still only ~5 posts per year, but now there are also articles at other sites being linked to. In 2015, 3 articles: one from Pinterest, one from Facebook, and crucially, one from the feminist outlet Jezebel, which is a both-sides attempt to please the rear-guard pill-poppers and the au naturel avant-garde.

(BTW, someone in the Silicon Valley tech cartel has crippled Google's search engine so badly that that article does not appear when you specify the year of publication in your search for it. I figured it would help to narrow down the results. And yet requiring "2015" totally hides the article, while removing the year reveals it as the first result. Just another reminder that the internet is disintegrating more and more all the time, and that you cannot rely on Google's search engine for much of anything these days.)

In 2016, there are links to a fear-mongering article about going off the pill, scaring you into thinking that your vitamin D level could drop. Right, women suffered from low vitamin D levels for all of human history, until the pill became widespread in the past couple decades. Part of the knowledge-destroying, authoritarian movement known as I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE. ("You'll ovulate nothing, and you'll feel indifferent.)

In 2017, the number of posts rises above 10 for the first time and has stayed at that order of magnitude, rising ever since. There are 12 posts, and links to a YouTube personal essay video. In 2018, 14 posts, and links to another YouTube personal essay video. In 2019, 19 posts.

By 2020, the number of posts clears the 20 mark, at 28. In 2021, there are 23 posts. And in 2022 so far, there are 17 posts -- easily clearing 20, maybe even 30, by the end of the year.

Obviously, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg for the general population. For every Twitter user who spontaneously blurts out, "I'm off the pill!" -- there are thousands or millions more who are doing so IRL, without posting about it. The important thing is the soaring trend in these numbers, as well as the attendant rise in the number of articles reacting to that trend. That means it's real, not just a handful of weirdos on Twitter.

In fact, there's only a few counter-cultural / socialist / etc. types who are part of this trend. It's mainly the normies, bluechecks, and political moderates. That means it generalizes far more broadly, than if it were only the hammer & sickle, BPD art ho, or other niche demographic. Likewise for the last period of going natural and embracing each other, during the '60s, '70s, and '80s -- it was not just a niche demo of Beatniks, but a fully mainstream phenomenon in every school and town across America.

* * *

As this mother of all vibe-shifts has taken place, the articles have surrendered in the battle to finger-wag women into staying on the pill. Now they're at the bargaining and acceptance stages, like "So you're going off hormonal birth control -- *insert audible groan here* -- Here's what to expect".

Another change has been the nature of women's comments about going off HBC. During the vulnerable phase of the excitement cycle (2015-'19), when people were in a touch-me-not refractory state, they were mainly about improved mental / emotional health. But right on schedule, as the restless phase kicked off in 2020, they've begun gushing about how horned-up their libido has become -- and not in a despairing tone either! LOL.

"Why didn't somebody warn me my sex drive was going to kick into overdrive??!?! [devil horns] [starry eyes] [tongue out] [devil horns]"

None of this shift has to do with planning to get pregnant, only a handful of posts ever mention that. They simply don't want to have their minds and bodies neutered any longer, and if that means they need other forms of birth control, so be it.

And a large share of young women aren't even fucking anyway -- a topic for a future post, about how HBC was not about birth control per se, but rather part of the broader trend of psych drugs to domesticate young people's wild-and-crazy behavior, during the cocooning phase of the '90s through the 2010s, along with Adderall, Prozac, and the rest of it. That mirrored the mood-flattening drug craze of the cocooning Midcentury, epitomized by "Mother's Little Helper" -- Valium.

I don't think most guys, of any generation, understand how widespread the pill had become by the 2010s. The medical establishment was forcing it onto girls at 16, when they were never going to have sex for years, and they have stayed on it for decades. Until now -- Millennials are going to finally feel what it's like to be a real feminine agent of chaos -- and creation.

And Zoomer girls are not going to get sucked into that sterilizing vortex in the first place. Maybe they were on it for a little bit, but likely not long at all, and they're never going to spend several decades warping their nature with it. Not at a mass scale anyway.

Social life has been so dull while half the population has been given next-level lobotomies, in addition to the drugs that the boys were put on. If you're a Millennial or Zoomer, and don't have crisp memories of the entire decade of the '80s, you're in for a real surprise. It's going to start off more like the '60s, and will take several decades of these changes before it reaches '80s levels of party-time all the time.

It's not only the wild-and-crazy behavior that's going to come roaring back to life, though. Feminine outgoing-ness supports and sustains all other sorts of relationships, connections, and social networks. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, families -- all these social domains are going to become flooded with hormonal women searching for an outlet for their skyrocketing drive for engagement with others. Certainly online, where everything social is migrating to, but presumably also in whatever remnants of IRL there will be.

Secure your harness, raise your hands into the air, and get ready to shout with excitement -- these pill-killing women are about to take us on one hell of a rollercoaster ride, for the next several *decades*. Girl-haters, watch out: you better have built a bunker of misogyny, rather than that little cardboard fort. The boy-crazy barbarianettes have already begun to rampage the countryside, and they're not going to take any prisoners if you impotently try to block their libidinal path!

Catcall report, woketards killing off boy bands, pent-up female desire channeled into pseudo bi-curiosity

Wow, first Saturday night of the spring where I went cruising down the main drag in the city with music blasting out of the windows.

Haven't been since maybe New Year's -- everything has gone virtual, I haven't even bothered to check in on the would-be Saturday night revelers. But there was actually a decent crowd! Not as big and bustling as it should be, but compared to other public spaces, this was not as devoid of bodies. Some experiences are way less replaceable with a virtual simulation.

In pre-virtual times, this crowd would have been totally representative of the population at large. But now, when everything has gone virtual, these seemingly ordinary people are actually a self-selected elite -- the top 10% of the population for fun-loving-ness, outgoingness, and corporeality, who just cannot feel fulfilled from the simulations of The Real Thing.

So I decided to turn up the dial on the life-of-the-party behaviors that I normally roll out on such occasions. I don't need to be gentle with them, they can handle it -- they *want* it that high, that's why they came out IRL instead of staying plugged into their simulations.

First was of course some catcalling, or rather wolf baying, since I had "She Wolf" on repeat and howled out during that part of the chorus (a proper AWOOOOOOOO, not the dainty little "awoo" that she does).

Got some good looks, although since it's dark at night, it takes girls longer to figure out that it's a hot guy making the sounds, so no calls back. Will try this again in the afternoon sunshine, tomorrow or some other day. I miss getting catcalls back, performers feed off the energy of the crowd. Summer of last year and 2020 were perfect for that, so we'll see about this year.

Are they so used to online interactions that it doesn't even occur to them to call back, even if they wanted to? Is their instinctual muscle memory by now to grab their phone and tap out a text message? They'd better not be *that* online. We'll see...

Anyway, on the way back from the main drag, I fumbled around for a new CD to put in the player, and there it was -- One Direction's debut album. I'd picked it up for a couple bucks at a thrift store, and decided to put it on for the ride home. But I didn't make it more than 30 seconds into it before singing along, and thought -- I have to turn around and go back, to serenade the babes!

Just think of how deprived their senses are of that crucial experience -- it's not right to just let them wither on the vine like that. Not that I'm a professional singer, but I can belt it out if I need to, for a little while anyway. And the hits on that album do get pretty intense, they're not mellow '70s ballads or anything. The early 2010s were one of the most intense zeitgeists in human history, and One Direction was a central part of that.

The absolutely pulsating teenage yearning that was provoked by the boy band to end all boy bands... and the phenomenon only just got going with the endless trail of humped pillows left in its wake. It was more about the feeling that they were actually desired as The Only One by some hot guy, who not only wouldn't keep them their dirty little secret, but was proud to shout it to the rooftops.

So I cycled through the three songs that struck me as the most apropos -- their mega-hits "What Makes You Beautiful" and "One Thing", along with one that I was surprised was not released as a single or a music video, the wholesome party anthem "Up All Night" (I heard it for the first time tonight, but the lyrics are simple enough to pick up fast).

By the end, my voice was getting pretty shouty, and I needed some nice rosehip & hibiscus tea after getting home, but it was totally worth it. Again, it's not a technical recital for American Idol or anything -- they're just excited to be part of that level of a party atmosphere.

And those girls were just the right age to be One Direction's fanbase 10 years ago, so there was no risk of "Hmmm, I wonder if the audience will know this one or not..." They knew. It's like singing "I Want It That Way" to 24 year-olds in 2008 -- of course they remember that one! Few songs have the ability to instantly, and fully, transport you back to an earlier time and place. One of the most powerful types are those that made you feel noticed and desired as someone special, for the first time.

No amount of likes on your social media posts -- or, God forbid, donos to your OnlyFans account -- can recapture that feeling of Mr. hot guy serenading you, and as far as you were concerned, only you. (He doesn't *really* mean it toward those billion other girls in the audience...)

Aaaaaain't nothin' but a heaaaaartaaaaache

Aaaaaain't nothin' but a miiistaaaaake

The response was amazing. Not like applauding or anything fake like that, it's not the occasion to applaud a performance. It's to jump on the trend, let go of your inhibitions, and do what the singer is provoking you into doing. Smiling, running like the wind, and all that other crazy wholesome hormonal behavior.

At one point, when "Up All Night" was blasting, two cute girls in sundresses dropped whatever they were doing, to bounce and dance around on the sidewalk, each with one arm raised up to link their hand with the other's. For that pagan dancing-around-the-Maypole vibe (it is the time of the season, after all).

It's so heartwarming and rewarding to see them respond like that, and to know that a bunch of others nearby saw that duo dancing, and felt what they were feeling vicariously. Good enough, since it wasn't a club, where everyone is expected to be dancing. I can get catcalled or followed around a store some other night -- picking up everyone else's spirits is something that is usually limited to festive occasions like this.

Toward the end of the cruise, it had suddenly begun to pour buckets -- but I refused to roll up the windows. The car seats can withstand a little water, my shirt sleeve and arm that are hanging out the window will dry out. The show must go on -- even more so, when everyone's mood is tempted to go all negative, getting poured on during their Saturday night out.

So I kept the music up, the singing going, and still pounded the outside of the driver's door like a drum during the right moments. While not able to distract them from the pouring rain, this activity at least makes it feel like it's all part of one great big crazy party atmosphere, taking them out of their ordinary experiences. Not just a bummer or a downer.

BTW, I think the average guy -- at least the type willing to go out and have fun on Saturday night -- enjoys hearing One Direction's girl-crazy anthems, too. When they were teens, these songs gave voice to their own intense crush on that one special girl, who they were internally debating whether or not to reveal their feelings for.

Listening to these songs, they got to imagine themselves in the aspirational position of being a confident (and hot) guy who opens up, in hopes of winning the girl. Not just girls, sluts, or thots in general. Not interchangeable accounts on the hook-up apps. But her, the only one he can't stop thinking and feeling about.

It's risky and takes courage to sing songs like these to a girl, so the guys are imagining themselves in a courageous role, something that would motivate them to take on a confident, masculine behavior. Sorry, but sliding non-committally into a girl's DMs, or God forbid, Venmo-ing her some cash on her OnlyFans, is not courageous. Not public, for one thing. But also non-committal, almost passive-aggressive. Girls want a guy who's got guts. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

* * *

Sadly, these kinds of songs will never be made again, as our empire disintegrates, and along with it, our cultural production industries. In this case, it's not only the general breakdown of trust and cooperation at the institutional level -- and remember, there are no Trump voters in these industries, it's 100% Democrat-on-Democrat suspicion, paranoia, hate, and violence.

On top of that, there was the jihad that these puritanical libtards waged against "toxic masculinity" over the course of the woke 2010s. These boy band songs came out right at the beginning of the decade, before the avalanche of wokeness had really gotten rolling during the 2nd Obama term and after.

How can the culture industry go back on that, and make One Direction / Backstreet Boys / New Edition songs again? For the woketards, such songs are instilling in vulnerable young girls the notion that they're only worth anything via the male gaze. Wanting to be desired by a special guy, is just internalized patriarchy. Their sense of self-worth isn't supposed to react to whether, how much, or by whom, they're being desired.

Even worse, if girls react positively to such songs, they are not merely neutral bystanders on the sidelines -- they are enabling the toxic forces, and are thus guilty themselves of perpetuating the social pollution. So even if you felt like reacting positively, you have to keep a lid on it, lest the witch-hunters come after you, as a 2nd-degree troublemaker, i.e. as an enabler of the 1st-degree troublemakers (99% of the male population, who aren't gay and want to win over the girl they're crushing on).

This is like daughters who are raised by insane feminist parents, who have to play down their desire to play with dolls and bake pastries, since for the parents that's just the first baby step toward reproducing the toxic pollution of the patriarchy. Only now, it's not just a fringe group of insane parents -- it's the entirety of the culture industry, academia, and media.

The current situation is a radical break from all previous eras of our history, and contra lazy right-wing "minds", it is not only the latest in a series of such changes since The Sixties. Girls blew off the insane feminists and kept crushing on boys, and wanting to be the crush of those boys. The pressure from the culture industry was not simply lighter in degree, it qualitatively was not telling them to be ashamed for liking their crush and wanting their crush to like them back. That's why decades of boy bands were produced by that industry.

And the same dynamics are at play for the young guys listening to these songs. They're not supposed to be encouraged by such songs, because wholeheartedly and without warning letting a girl know how you feel, is non-consensual and on the slippery slope toward literal rape. If you do feel the urge to follow the model of these songs, clamp down on it, don't let it break loose where it could infect or pollute innocent victims.

Woketards pathologize what is healthy and natural, and normalize what is sick and twisted. They don't care if a guy Venmo's an OnlyFans girl some money after jerking himself off to her videos. That's transactional, financialized, virtual, mediated, and animalistic -- not romantic, fully-human, IRL, and part of the wide array of normal behavior that is not consensual.

The OF girl did ask to get paid by coomers, whereas the average high school girl does not ask for any ol' guy, perhaps someone she doesn't even know, to reveal his feelings toward her. But it happens, it's natural, it's permissible, and dealing with awkward social experiences like that is part of growing up.

* * *

So where does that leave girls' desires? They can't unabashedly express them in their natural way, because that would be enabling toxic masculinity. Well then, how about if they got horny for other girls? That would seem to be compatible with the anti-hetero agenda of the 2010s, epitomized by the gay marriage Supreme Court ruling of the 2nd Obama admin.

Per se that case was not anti-hetero, but huge decisions like that are never standalone things, they're part of a broader cluster of things happening. And in this case, it was the jihad against toxic masculinity, all those rape hoax stories in Rolling Stone and the like, Slutwalk, mattress girl, #MeToo, and by now the trans agenda.

Not only are young people feeling pressure from the culture industry, schools, etc. -- but from the very highest levels of the government, who are weighing in on one side of the culture war. And about something as non-political, and biologically basic, as feeling crushes and wanting to be crushed on by their crush.

This is what's behind the cohort of girls born after roughly 1994, frequently mentioning how hot they find other girls, etc., while keeping a lid on any feelings they have for guys. They are not actually going to eat another girl's pussy, fall in love with another girl, introduce another girl to their parents as "my new girlfriend," or get married to / raise kids with another girl.

Lesbians cannot stand this trend, since they feel like they're being led on and faked out -- oh great, yet another performatively bi-curious, yet 100% straight girl, only fooling me into thinking we could have shared something together.

But we have to understand why this is happening, and it's very understandable. These girls are straight, but they can't express those desires without painting a target over their heads for the woketard witch-hunters. You want to get into a monogamous relationship with a guy whose reciprocation of feelings would mean all the world to you? Wow, someone's suffering from internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny, not to mention enabling toxic masculinity instead of breaking the cycle of pollution.

I reject the idea that it's these girls acting like badass girlbosses and not wanting to make themselves vulnerable or weak in any way. We've had girlboss careerists in this society for many decades, and they didn't trigger a widespread trend of silencing your hetero female desires in favor of performative bi-curiosity. If anything, they wanted to be wooed as well. They wanted to have it all, the '80s yuppie woman's dream.

And if it were about not wanting to appear weak, then that would apply to expressing desires for their fellow girls as well. After all, the other girl might reject you, might laugh in your face, might gossip about the whole deal with the other girls.

However, if the desire is not genuine, and the intention to reveal her feelings to another girl is not truly there inside of her, then there's nothing to worry about. She can call other girls hot, since they know nothing is actually going to happen. It's just the only outlet they have for expressing their desires, during a jihad against toxic masculinity.

Female sexuality may be more plastic than male sexuality, but not that much. If these changes in overt expression were reflecting a deeper change in desires, then what's stopping these girls from getting it on with another girl, dating another girl, or marrying / raising kids with another girl? If anything they're being encouraged to do so.

And yet, as lesbians will testify, these girls are not genuinely bi-curious. Lesbians can't even get the initial stages started, where they're hanging out, going on dates, and getting mildly physical, despite the bi-curious girl calling it off after a bit. That was from the old days. These days, 99% of girls who talk about other girls being hot are not even bi-curious in behavior. They just need a societally sanctioned outlet for their sexual and romantic desires, in a climate of oppressive wokeness.

So blame the woketards, not the performative bi-curious girls, who have forced others to channel their expressions in this way, however misleading it is to everyone.

I think the late '90s births are the last generation to have gotten to enjoy unfettered, natural sexuality during their formative adolescent years. As evidenced in part by the One Direction craze. That may have changed as they got into their late teens and 20s, but they at least enjoyed it during their high school years.

Girls born in the 2000s imprinted during their formative years on a different environment, where the jihad against toxic masculinity had been launched. They're never going to enjoy that crucial early round of validation from a chart-topping boy band. There won't be any more, and boys IRL and online are not going to step in to fill that gap in pop culture. I mean, I will, but I'm not from their generation.

It looks like core cohorts of Millennials, the late '80s and early '90s, will be the last generation to go through both adolescence and early adulthood under natural circumstances, before the jihad against toxic masculinity, which only struck by the time they were around 25 and fairly done with forming impressions. They imprinted instead on the 2000s, defined by America's Next Top Model and American Apparel ads. If those girls talk about other girls being hot, they truly are horny for them, and they may very well act on it.

That would seem to be the last cohorts of guys who are comfortable revealing how they feel to girls, not just mutually swiping right on an app. That includes One Direction themselves (even though some of them are gay, they were still comfortable in the role of serenading a girl).

What remains to be seen is whether these trends ever reverse, like the backlash against feminism by the late '70s and '80s -- but that was when we still had a cohesive, resilient society. During imperial disintegration, we can't rely on society's immune system kicking in when needed. In that case, the plummeting birth rates, indefinite celibacy, and performative bi-curiosity will be hallmarks of our population contraction during societal disintegration.

Re-igniting the left-right alliance; and more on regional differences caused by national ethnogenesis

I wrote another post-in-the-comments (from here and on), about the fading populist spirit from the Trump years, as shown by the greater emphasis on race and gender than class when right-wingers were reacting to the final phase of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

Namely, freaking out that so many women on the jury meant it was over for him, without asking whether those women had college degrees or not. And being unaware that Kenosha is one of the prototypical counties that had been loyal Democrats for decades, before flipping to Trump twice, due to de-industrialization, and the lack of nationally-connected employers that would make the place a magnet for over-produced elite aspirants and parasites looking for their QE handouts.

There's also a shift back to portraying the enemy of Trump, Rittenhouse, and whoever else on that side, as blue-haired cat ladies who majored in gender studies and post on TikTok. This is a fake enemy that does not exist. The real enemy is a blonde doggy mommy who lives in the suburbs, posts on Twitter (like the right-wingers themselves), and majored in a field that Rush Limbaugh Boomers would've praised as a "real major" -- law, business, or STEM.

To counteract the drift back toward performative culture wars within the upper-middle class, of the Bush and Obama years, we need to re-ignite the left-right alliance against the bitterly despised elites that was the norm of online political types just a few years ago.

The only thing I can do right now in this brief post is point you toward another podcast to listen to, and group of people to interact with on Twitter. If you're reading this blog, you're probably already familiar with Aimee Terese and the ladies from Red Scare. But I don't think I've mentioned some of the others very often.

Red Star Radio (twitter here) is the purest example of the left side of the left-right alliance. Anti-capitalist lefties, but who are against the dehumanizing cultural project of the left. Opposed to the hysterical scientism from the media about COVID-19, the lockdowns, the vaccines, masking, government mandates, etc. Also did recent episodes defending basic civil liberties in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and a new one about the questionable models behind the hysterical scientism related to climate change.

Co-hosts are Brit Alexander McKay -- member of Mancs for Marxist Masculinity -- and Canadian Leila Mechoui -- booster of Berber Babes for Bolshevism. (She hasn't explicitly said what her background is, but pretty sure it's Moroccan, or Maghrebi at any rate.) Good-natured, lighthearted, not irony-poisoned or emotivist, and not an audition for a "news comedy" show.

* * *

To add some substance to this plugging post, when I get back to the series on national dialects and ethnogenesis, the case of Britain will distinguish Northern from Southern dialects. And since we rarely get to hear Brits speaking conversationally -- usually only in songs or news media presentations -- you can listen to McKay for understanding the Northern dialects and regional cohesion vs. hostility.

Southern dialects, along the meta-ethnic frontier against the French, departed from the historical norm by lowering their vowels. This happened especially during the Great English Vowel Shift, which arose as Southerners came into intense conflict with France during the Norman Invasion and the Hundred Years War, and wanted to mark themselves as the True English, fighting on the front lines against The Other -- unlike the Northerners who were farther removed from the conflict, and whose traditional pronunciation we want to distinguish ourselves from.

This change was less imitated in the North, so that up there "luck" and "look" have more or less the same vowel (a higher vowel, whatever it is by micro-region), whereas "luck" in the South has a lower "uh" vowel like we use in America and Canada. However, Americans are a mix of Northern and Southern English, so we also use the higher, unchanged vowel as Northerners when it's written with "a". E.g., Northerners pronounce "last" as Americans & Canadians do (the trad way), whereas Southerners changed it to the lower "open wide and say ah" vowel.

The podcast is also useful to appreciate another aspect of ethnogenesis, namely that there is much tighter cohesion along the meta-ethnic frontier, and more internecine hostility farther away from it. So, the Southeast and Southwest of England feel very close to each other, despite the Southwest being more rural and the Southeast being more urbanized. They're still both Southerners -- the True English who were forged in the crucible of the conflict against the French.

Whenever McKay, who's from the Northwest, has to mention someone from the Northeast (say, Paul Joseph Watson), he reflexively gets in a dig about how they're a worthless Yorkshireman. Far away from the frontier against the French, the civil wars between Lancaster and York never fully faded away. Such hostility between neighbors did not survive along the Southern border, as they were compelled into a larger collective by the conflict with France.

To put it in American terms, the British South is like the American "West" (from the Midwest out to the Pacific coast), and their North is like our East. The standard national dialect in America is Western, whereas the least nationally normative are those along the East Coast, whether Northeastern or Southeastern. And the entire West coast is well unified, from SoCal up to Seattle, whereas the Civil War never fully faded away between the Northeast and Southeast. Even within the Northeast, Boston and New York are bitter enemies, in a way that is impossible between Seattle and San Francisco on the West coast.

That's because the meta-ethnic frontier in America has been out West, against the Indians (and later on and more briefly, the Japanese Empire).

Secession has already taken place among Northern Brits, when Ireland split off 100 years ago. (They can deny they're any sort of British, but everyone knows they're from the same family of islands and peoples.) And Scotland recently got as far as putting independence up to a popular vote. That will never happen anywhere in the South, and Celtic revival (i.e., de-Britishization of their ethnicity) has been weakest in Cornwall, as it's part of the South, compared to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the North.

The American version of this is that secession will never take place out West, whereas the East is most vulnerable to fragmentation. It reveals the cluelessness of various separatist "movements" (whites only, right-libertarians, anarcho-libs, whoever else), that they chose places in the Northwest as their spot to breakaway from the national government. In reality, it will be Florida (back East) that breaks away de jure, and recently has already begun to de facto.

Today's electoral report (open thread on elections)

Lent a hand to spank the Democrat in the only interesting race I could vote in. Couldn't tell much about the Republican, other than he was against COVID bullshit and other woketard crap. Okey-dokey then.

At this point, I'll be voting straight-R for the next few years, until we get out of COVID / etc. hell. None of them will be populists, but Democrats have rapidly plunged the country so far down into oblivion, all the R has to do is promise to make things one circle higher in hell, and it's a slam dunk with voters.

Whether the winner with voters occupies the office, is another question. Steal or no steal? Well, my state resisted the national steal in 2020, so I was not so worried about that this time either.

Even if I lived in a state stolen from Trump, I'd still vote going forward, just to make them steal it rather than win outright, and thereby deprive them of legitimacy in office for having the stain of stealing on their hands, vs. concede them legitimacy by staying home and letting them win with clean hands.

Legitimacy makes a hell of a difference in getting their agenda rammed through -- look at how pathetic the Biden admin has been in doing literally anything that was not pushing an open door (e.g. vaxx mandates, where only the already eager libtards followed the orders).

Biden's WH is not only illegitimate for having to stop the ballot counting in multiple states on election day 2020 -- which delegitimized him in the eyes of Republicans and independents -- but for only coming out of the Dem primary due to Obama terminating the voting process. When Dem voters were free to choose, they said "Anybody But Biden". Kamala had to drop out even earlier, earning ZERO delegates.

Who does the DNC select, then? The last-place choices among their own voters -- Biden and Kamala, rather than, say, Bernie / Buttgag / Bloomberg / anyone else. Even if Dem voters were OK with their party stealing the general, they did not want those two specific losers to be the beneficiaries -- they would've wanted Bernie / Buttgag / Bloomberg / whoever, to wind up in the WH via a steal. So Biden and Kamala are illegitimate in the eyes of many Democrats, too.

Even his most loyal demographic group, African-Americans, have deserted him -- they are the most opposed to getting vaxxed. So much so that they'd rather stick to their guns on staying pureblood and risk "biting the hand that feeds".

Of course they aren't getting fed much by Biden anyway, so what are they losing? They have to pay the same inflated food prices, gas prices, etc., that the Trump chuds have to pay. They were not given a "Don't inflate my prices, merchant, I voted for Biden" card by the new admin. Nor cash hand-outs to defray the inflated prices. If they don't get to take anything from the admin, why should they give anything to it?

I experimented a little today with masking -- the elections board website said they're only encouraged, not required to vote. And sure enough, there was only an unmanned table at the entrance saying they're encouraged, and take a free mask if you don't have one. But I waltzed through barefaced, all the way through the ID check and explanation of how the machine works.

Still, I decided to play it safe at the end and put on a mask for the first time in over half a year, while clicking the touchscreen and feeding my ballot into the reader machine. Just in case the poll workers or a camera was noting which ballots were submitted by unmasked people and deleted their votes from the total.

But now that I see the guy won by a healthy margin, it likely wouldn't have made a difference if I had kept the mask off the whole time. So I won't be wearing it again to vote.

Also, a car with some girls catcalled me as I was walking over to the polling location. "Hot Trump guys lusted after by Democrat girls" is still a thing, all these years later. Didn't have the heart to shout back that I'm on my way to keep the COVID police out of office. But I didn't have to -- I'm just protecting them and their social lives, whether they realize it or not. That put me in a good mood, feeling rewarded, before even arriving to the voting booth.

Still, I'll never feel truly rewarded in the voting booth until I get to cast a vote for Tulsi "Gaia from Captain Planet" Gabbard. That's my biggest regret from last year's COVID craziness -- not voting for her in the Dem primary, since it was effectively long over. But then I could've added another rare-bird feather to my libtard-heart-attack hat -- Nader 2000, Trump 2016 and '20, and Tulsi... really missed out on that one. Doesn't have the same effect to say that's who I would've voted for, without actually casting the ballot.

Reunite the band, Tulsi, don't leave us all hanging.

One of the few women so wholesome she could get away with dressing up as a priestess for Halloween, without it coming off slutty and sacrilegious. "The spirit of aloha compels you!" she urges to a friend dressed up as a foaming-at-the-mouth libtard witch-hunter.

You know how some guys would fake an injury to be tended to by a cute nurse? Why wouldn't they pretend to be a rabid panic-monger, if they knew Tulsi herself would be sent to cure them of their ills?

Do Catholic girls fantasize about this stuff when they see a hot priest? We know how they'll fake an injury to get attention from a hot doctor, or their schoolmates in general. Can't imagine there's too many hot nuns for the Catholic boys to dream about, and they're not the ones who perform exorcisms in any case.

Not something I ever sensed in my Methodist church growing up, anyway. More proof of Catholic libidinal energy.

Insect-borne pathogens enrich picture of dynamics of diseases spread by shared medium, not encounters between sick and healthy

In this next installment of the revival of anticontagion theory, we'll zoom out to see how broad the class of diseases is that are described by the model. We want as general of a picture as we can manage, so that aspects of one sub-group can clue us in to what's going on in another group that's less well understood.

We've already covered a classic non-contagious disease like cholera, which is transmitted via a contaminated shared medium (i.e. water), into which the sick shed pathogens, and from which the healthy consume them, not through a sick and a healthy individual having an encounter. And we've shown that coronaviruses infecting humans and bats -- including the one causing SARS-2 -- are another textbook case, where they are spread through the medium of indoor air, not encounters between sick and healthy.

Now we return to the other major diseases that motivated the 19th-century debate over how diseases were spread -- plague and yellow fever. These are borne by insects (fleas and mosquitoes), which bite a sick person and thereby become carriers of the pathogens in the sick person's blood, then travel to a healthy person, bite them, and transfer these pathogens, making this person sick. We can add malaria and others to the list.

But first, there is one insect-borne disease that was classified as contagious -- i.e., spread through encounters -- even by the anticontagionists way back in the 19th C., which means we ought to consider treating it as such today as well. That is typhus (not to be confused with typhoid fever), which is spread by the human body louse. It was known to spread from one person to the next who were in close contact with each other in crowded settings like jails, hence the nickname "gaol fever".

What distinguishes typhus from all the others is that its insect carrier is not very mobile between human hosts -- unlike fleas that jump long distances, and which are riding on the backs of rats from one place to another, and unlike mosquitoes and flies that can fly long distances. The body louse only walks or crawls around a single host (their body and their clothing), so that the next host must be very close in order to crawl from one to the next.

This requires an encounter between a sick and a healthy person, so it behaves like other contagious diseases. For example, it does spread more as a function of higher population density, like in jails.

So technically, the diseases described by the shared-medium model are "mobile" insect-borne diseases, but I will drop that qualifier as too cumbersome, now that it's understood.

* * *

Recall what the shared-medium model is tracking -- not only susceptible, infected, and recovered individuals, but also the concentration of the pathogen within the medium. I'll put up the formal mathematical model, and analyze it, later. First we're just getting all the conceptual stuff covered, so that the model will be motivated and make sense the first time around. Presenting the equations etc. first, and then explaining the details of it all, is putting the cart before the horse.

What, then, is the "medium" for an insect-borne disease? Why, the entire local population of the relevant insect. It may sound strange to describe it as a medium, since unlike water and air, people do not rely on mosquitoes, flies, and fleas to go about their daily business. However, those insects do rely on us for their survival -- so we very much come into inevitable contact with those species, even if it's them seeking out us rather than the other way around.

And by adding up a bunch of individual insects into an entire local population, they are like drops of water that add up to the entire local public water supply, or molecules of air that add up to the entire local volume of indoor air. The number of insects carrying the pathogen, as a share of their entire local population, is the same as the concentration of cholera particles in the water supply, or coronavirus particles in the indoor air of some locale.

A sick person "sheds" their pathogens into the medium by getting bitten by the insect, like someone with cholera excreting into the water supply, or someone with a coronavirus breathing into the air of an indoor building. Then a susceptible person comes into contact with this medium by being bitten by an insect. If it is a carrier, it's as though the person were drinking contaminated water or breathing contaminated air. If it's not a carrier, it's as though they were drinking a virus-free cup of water or breathing from a virus-free pocket of air.

Not every insect is a carrier, just as not every drop of water in the system contains cholera, and not every pocket of indoor air contains coronavirus. But as the concentration of the pathogen in the medium increases, it becomes more likely that a susceptible person will become infected by "consuming" or coming into contact with the medium.

There are differences among these shared-medium diseases, such as those whose medium is mobile -- running water in a public supply, jumping and flying insects -- vs. fairly fixed in place -- stagnant indoor air, slow crawling insects. But this is only a difference of degree, not kind, so we don't need multiple models to cover them. There will be a parameter for how frequently a sick person, or a susceptible person, comes into contact with the medium -- which will be higher for the mobile-medium diseases, and lower for the fixed-medium diseases.

* * *

What lessons can we learn from insect-borne diseases, when looking at the prospect of dealing with SARS-2 or other respiratory diseases? Crucially, a vaccine is unlikely to solve the problem, and solutions will have to affect other parts of the environment to purify the medium -- or eradicate the medium altogether, if it's not beneficial for us anyway (like fleas and mosquitoes, and unlike air and water).

Even the non-mobile insect-borne disease, typhus, lacks a vaccine. And so do the other big ones spread by mobile insects, like malaria and plague.

The sole exception is yellow fever, but that vaccine is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent outbreaks. The US and places under its control -- like the Panama Canal and Cuba -- eradicated the disease during the early 1900s through changing the environmental conditions. Namely, improved sanitation, spraying residences with pesticide, preventing stagnant water from forming (where the mosquitoes lay their eggs), and disrupting stagnant water by spraying it with oil. Control or eradication of the insect species remained the primary method of combating the disease during the Midcentury, when DDT was widely used.

A vaccine was developed by the 1940s, but was secondary at best even then, and did not play any role during the eradication of the early 20th C. It was beaten back in tropical regions as well, primarily through changing the parts of the ecosystem affecting the mosquitoes, not through mass vaccination of the human population.

Yellow fever has in fact reemerged as of the 1980s, despite availability of the vaccine, which does well in clinical studies but whose effects are evidently overwhelmed in the changing real-world ecologies of the past several decades. Since the most parsimonious explanation of the rise and fall of the disease up through the early 20th C. does not include the vaccine in the picture, we don't need to invoke it during the recent resurgence either.

Over the past 30 or so years, urbanization has skyrocketed in tropical regions, and since humans are the food source for mosquitoes, this has led to a surge in the mosquito population in those areas. With more mosquitoes swarming around, people come into contact with the medium far more often than before. Overcrowding strains the public water supply, so more people store their own water in large tubs near their house, which makes them stagnant and perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Overcrowding strains sanitation services as well. These regions are a lot filthier than they used to be.

And perhaps just as importantly, pesticide use has fallen off a cliff, especially DDT. Pesticides are like a vaccine in that their widespread use will trigger a co-evolutionary arms race, where the target adapts by becoming resistant to the obstacle. Pesticides and vaccines also have side-effects on people, which must be weighed against their benefits.

Why shared-medium diseases are so hard to control via vaccines is a separate matter, which I'll speculate on sometime later. The point for now is simply that they are, and therefore we should not expect vaccines to do much work in controlling respiratory diseases, which spread through shared indoor air volumes, whether SARS-2 or anything else.

Improving sanitation and disrupting other parts of the transmission cycle -- before a susceptible person comes into contact with the already contaminated medium -- is the only reliable way to solve these problems. Draining stagnant water areas so mosquitoes can't breed, poisoning the rat population so plague-carrying fleas have no vehicles to get close to people, separating outgoing and ingoing water supplies to prevent cholera from passing from sewage to drinking water, and ventilating indoor spaces as much as possible to prevent respiratory pathogens from filling up the air.

SARS-1 and MERS coronaviruses spread via contaminated medium (indoor air), not encounters; beating respiratory "diseases of civilization" requires superior ventilation

Brief navigating note: I've added a new category tag for all posts in this ongoing series about diseases that are supposedly transmitted via encounters, but which are in fact transmitted via a contaminated shared medium. It's "Neo-Anticontagionism" -- "contagion" referring to contact and touching, i.e. close encounters, as the way diseases are spread. It appears at the end of every post in the series, as well as in the sidebar on the right called "Category Index". I don't know how long the series will be, but it's important and distinctive enough to put it all in one convenient place.

This post will look at the two most famous coronaviruses aside from SARS-CoV-2, which also cause acute and severe respiratory symptoms in human beings, namely SARS-CoV-1 (causing the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of the 2000s), and MERS-CoV (causing the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of the 2010s).

I'm sure the broad lessons about transmission from these three well-studied cases will generalize to other coronaviruses that infect humans, it's just that these three have received a lot more attention and funding to study compared to the coronaviruses that cause less severe symptoms.

* * *

If SARS-CoV-1 were spread through encounters, then it should have crossed the species barrier outdoors, since bats (the virus' reservoir) have encounters with other species outdoors. In fact, of all their inter-species interactions, most take place outdoors because when they are indoors roosting, they are far within the depths of their protective caves, where only their fellow bats and some cave-dwelling animals live.

Also, the list of species to whom bats transmitted the virus should resemble those whose habitats are close to, or overlap with, the habitats of bats. Those would be the species with 1 degree of removal from the reservoir -- of course it could then be spread to other species in contact with the 1-degree species but not the bats themselves. But a 1-degree ring of species around bat-colonized caves should be identifiable.

In reality, the other species that bats gave SARS-CoV-1 to were localized within a single market in Guangdong, China (see here). These multiple inter-species crossovers could not have easily happened in the wild, given their vast and not-so-overlapping range of habitats. But when they are all concentrated into a single place, by people who trade in wildlife of various habitats, then these crossovers with multiple species are easy.

The market was not for dead animals being sold for food or their pelts, but a live-animal market for wildlife. It was enclosed and informal, not an open-air market, nor one with advanced HVAC and filtration systems to achieve aircraft-levels of ventilation. So an infected individual was alive, exhaling into the fairly stagnant air volume, from which all the other individuals -- of whatever species -- were inhaling.

As we saw with SARS-CoV-2, the alternative model of "high population density and more frequent encounters" can be ruled out by the specifics here. Namely, because the animals were being sold, they were all caged and grouped by species -- here's a section with a bunch of palm civets, there's a section with raccoon dogs, and so on. Some sellers would only have one of these species for sale, preventing contact with other species.

The density / contact model could only explain the spread among individuals grouped tightly together -- this particular grouping of palm civets in this particular seller's stall. Or if that seller had palm civets and raccoon dogs grouped next to each other, then among that combined population. The animals are not roaming around the market, so they cannot spread it through encounters with any other animals in a different stall.

The only mobile species that could transfer the virus from one place to another within the market is humans -- some guy spends a lot of time in close contact with animals in one place, wanders somewhere else, and spends a lot of time in contact with other animals. However, that would implicate customers or shoppers who spent a long time browsing around the market -- but in fact, it was the workers of the market who made up most of the SARS cases, and they spend most of their time in their own stall tending to their own population of animals. They are the least mobile and free-ranging of the humans in that market.

These facts can be explained, though, by the model of a contaminated shared medium, namely a poorly ventilated indoor air volume. The virus particles get an initial impulse when pushed out of the lungs during exhalation, so they can coast or glide for awhile, in addition to their movement by diffusion. They can -- and do -- travel through space, without needing an infected individual to move around as their vehicle. When an animal, of whatever species, inhales these particles that have traveled far from their source, they get infected in turn -- without an encounter.

That explains why multiple individuals of one species get it, why the same species gets it no matter whose stall they're in, and why multiple species get it -- all of them are connected by the shared volume of enclosed, stagnant air. It also explains why workers get it more than shoppers -- they spend far more time immersed in the market's enclosed air volume.

* * *

MERS-CoV got less attention because the SARS-1 outbreak happened in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak, which primed everyone to be more vigilant about a novel respiratory disease that could be spread by terrorists or hostile foreigners. That post-9/11 mood had faded by 2005 or so, and by the time of the MERS outbreak in 2012, it had all but dissipated -- even though this new disease was coming from Saudi Arabia and had the phrase "Middle East" in its name. And ISIS was chopping off heads, not using bioweapons, so there was nothing big in the background to make people pay special attention to MERS.

But it did get scholarly attention because it was another new coronavirus infecting humans, so maybe it could shed light on SARS and help us prevent any further coronavirus epidemics. Nope! They drew the wrong lessons, based on the reigning false model of diseases spread through encounters, and here we are now with SARS 2.0. Again, the current coronavirus is not deadly enough to need to stop society in order to solve it, but the people investigating SARS and MERS should have been able to prevent it, or at least deal with it based on reality after it was already unfolding, rather than continue to treat it as a person-to-person encounter disease, instead of the contaminated shared medium disease that it so obviously is.

MERS' reservoir is a microbat species that prefers shelter while roosting, as usual. (It does have an unusually cool name, though: the Egyptian tomb bat.) The main species it has crossed over to is dromedary camels, and to a lesser extent humans.

With their usual contagion-theory blinders on, researchers focused on the fact that a man who had died of MERS had been in close contact with a camel that was also infected, indeed he had been applying medicine to its nose which showed strange secretions. The inference is that the virus was present in the nasal secretions, the man touched these secretions, and then his own nose or face, which sent it into his lungs, spreading the disease through a close-contact encounter.

But how the hell did the camel get it from the bat? Did a healthy camel sniff a sick bat's secretion-oozing nose? Or maybe the bat felt mischievous and targeted the camel, smearing its nose on the poor camel's nose, while taunting him with, "Now you got my gerrrrms, now you got my gerrrrms!"

C'mon, people.

One team came close to the truth, when they found MERS-CoV in an air sample collected from the barn of a camel-owner who had come down with MERS, and whose camels were sick with MERS (see here). This proved it could be airborne, that it could stably aerosolize, and that it was at the scene of the crime at the right time.

But as usual, airborne or aerosolized respiratory diseases were treated as spread through close contact, i.e. the proverbial "cough or sneeze in the face". "Proverbial," and yet an act which has never actually happened between two individuals of any species, at any time in our planet's existence. However, it is required by the ideology of ballistic / encounter-based models, so it simply must happen so frequently as to be proverbial.

And again, how could the camel get it from the bat? The human owner was close to the camel -- close enough to be applying medicine to its nose. OK, maybe it spreads directly in an airborne way over a distance of several feet. But bats roost way up on the ceiling of the barn, or high up on one of the walls. The bat was not roosting within several feet of the camel's head. Therefore, close contact (airborne or otherwise) is ruled out.

Only the shared medium model explains the multi-species crossovers. The bat finds a structure where it can roost, and this camel barn is poorly ventilated like all houses for livestock. While roosting, it exhales into the stagnant enclosed volume of air in the barn. While not roaming around outside, the camels stay in the barn breathing that air. The human owner of the camels also spends time in the barn doing various chores, breathing that air -- whether or not the bat is there at that time (it could be out foraging), and whether or not the camel is there at that time (it could be out grazing). Other humans could enter the barn, for that matter (such as a guest who is just chatting with the owner, while both are inside the barn).

Since the aerosolized virus particles get both an initial boost during exhalation, as well as diffusion, they can travel from way up where the bat is roosting, to where the camel is resting, or where the human is doing his chores. The stagnant indoor air connects them all.

A later review article (see here) provides further confirmation of the shared medium model, although it is not aware of that. It looks at various factors to explain why MERS is emerging in the Arabian peninsula during the 2010s. One major factor they point to is the sedentarization of nomadic pastoralists, owing to the immense wealth that the Gulf states (such as Qatar) began to enjoy after nationalizing their oil and gas supplies (mostly completed by the 1970s), and as they began to spend some of that wealth to encourage the nomads within their populations to settle down, so the state could better administer them.

Camels that are part of a nomadic herd do not spend any time at all inside of an enclosed volume of air. There are no permanent structures for dwelling or gathering, and even the tents that are put up temporarily are for people and their things, while the camels rest outside of them. Only when nomads begin to sedentarize, do they build permanent dwellings for their livestock, like barns.

Bats are not drawn to roosting near nomadic herds, since there is nothing for them to hang from on a regular basis. Perhaps their tents -- but those are only good for a short while, and then they're gone. Bats want a reliable den to provide security, not having to tag along with a nomadic group, which would be far and few between. Only the sedentarization of the nomads would bring a structure that would tempt the bats to roost inside of -- the barn (and perhaps the human owner's home, although that space is more vigilantly policed by its dwellers).

Notice again the inability of the contact / encounter model to explain these facts that attend sedentarization. Camels and their owners are in close contact all the time when they are nomadic -- being ridden, being tended to, being shown affection, being milked, and so on and so forth. Whatever pathogens infect camels, have ample opportunity to cross the species barrier to humans. And yet, no MERS-like crossover events among nomadic camel-owners -- only when they settle down and build barns, which does, however, introduce a shared medium that could become contaminated (indoor air).

Contact theory could explain why bats don't spread disease to camels in nomadic settings, because they have no close encounters outside of barns. But the shared medium explains this as well, in addition to all the other crucial facts.

* * *

Let's end with a return to the grand historical view, in which I think most respiratory "diseases of civilization" adapted themselves to the shared mediums that only arose with sedentarization, such as the indoor air of buildings (akin to waterborne diseases arising with public water systems). The case of MERS shows this in-tandem development unfolding in real time, as nomads settled down and instantly got stricken with an infectious respiratory disease.

Pathogens that travel through a respiratory route have almost no chance of spreading in epidemic fashion among nomads, because the currents of a fresh-air environment will scatter them quickly, rather than allow them to build up within a highly-visited space.

Adapting ourselves, and our livestock, to these sedentary environments requires sanitizing them. Not by spraying antibacterial disinfectant on all surfaces -- that's not how they spread. But by treating the medium with a pathogen neutralizer (that has no bad side effects), or creating some kind of current that will carry the pathogens quickly away, or separating outgoing from ingoing channels of that medium.

In the case of contaminated indoor air, the solution is improving ventilation and filtration, to such an extent that earlier times will look as backward as we presently view the public water systems of the pre-20th-century West.

Coronaviruses spread via enclosed air, from bat caves to indoor buildings, not via encounters: a window into respiratory diseases of civilization

To recap the project I've stumbled onto, most diseases thought to be transmitted through personal encounters are in fact spread through a contaminated shared medium, into which a sick individual emits pathogens, and from which a healthy person takes them in -- without needing to be in the same place at the same time, perhaps never coming close to encountering each other during their entire lives. See here for the overview based on the case of 19th-C. cholera in Europe, and here for the contemporary example of SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19).

This post will briefly look at the non-human origin of coronaviruses that now infect humans, and how their transmission dynamics can shed light on how they circulate within a human population.

Recall the most important fact about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 -- it never occurs outdoors, but only indoors, especially where ventilation is poor. This means the particles are suspended in a stagnant air volume, much like a pond of stagnant water. A sick individual exhales particles into the enclosed air volume, and at some other time, perhaps after the original sick person has left the building, someone else enters the building, immerses themselves in the now-contaminated air volume, and breathes the particles in, becoming sick in turn.

All of these coronaviruses that infect humans ultimately come from pathogens infecting bats. (A separate family of coronaviruses originated in rodents, and infect pigs and other livestock, but via a fecal-to-oral route).

What do bats do? They roost -- hang upside-down while not active, and seek shelter when they are so vulnerable. The large bats that could take on predators may roost in forests, but the microbats that are too small to defend themselves mano-a-mano, roost in more defensible environments like caves. Human-infecting coronaviruses come specifically from these microbat species.

What is a cave? A great big "indoor" enclosure of air, with minimal ventilation inside, and whose opening to the outdoors is small relative to the size of the interior. Ventilation is basically zero where the bats roost -- not right inside the entrance, which would make them easy pickings for predators, but deeper back into the recesses of the cave.

Crucially, these caves are communally shared -- it's not like each bat or its family has its own detached bat-cave like Batman does. There are a whole bunch of them in there, coming and going without any bouncers to regulate the entrance. So the cave air is not only stagnant, but acts as a public medium that connects all of the individual bats that exhale into it and inhale from it, much as a stagnant pond of water connects all of the fish that swim within it -- or all of the ducks that feed from it (but that's for a later post on the non-encounter-based spread of influenza!).

So, one infected bat exhales while roosting in the cave, and the virus particles become aerosolized -- they are part of that air volume, just as inseparable from it as the oxygen. Healthy bats inhale air from this now-contaminated medium, not necessarily right next to the original sick bat. The virus particles travel by diffusion, which is slow, but they also start off with an initial impulse coming from the pressure that the lungs exert to expel the air from within the bat into the surrounding air (even more oomph in that initial burst if the sick individual has a cough or sneeze, as in humans).

The end result is that virus particles spread to regions of the cave far away from the source bat. It doesn't matter if it takes awhile for this spread to happen -- the sick bat is holed up in there roosting for hours on end, day in and day out, and the same is true for the healthy bats. A healthy bat may have a preferred roosting spot that is "far" from the roosting spot of the sick bat -- outside of the distance that a typical breath, cough, or sneeze immediately reaches -- but given some time, those particles can travel to reach him, too. Proximity is not needed.

However, couldn't you explain this indoor transmission by appealing to population density, which is required by the direct contact / encounter model? I.e., if transmission happened through encounters, such encounters are more likely when individuals are packed more tightly into the same space. So a bunch of bats roosting in clusters could be spreading it to each other through close encounters, not through a medium like the stagnant air.

But there are two facts that rule against this alternative explanation. First, it only says that transmission would be greater inside the cave than outside of it -- not that outdoor transmission would be near zero. And bats do in fact encounter other bats, and other species, outside of caves, for enough time to breathe near them and pass along pathogens. And yet spillover from bats to other species only takes place where the two species share an indoor air volume (typically poorly ventilated), such as an indoor market or restaurant. Not out in the wild.

And second, these coronaviruses should also be endemic to the macrobat species that roost in trees rather than caves. They also hang around for hours on end, and in clusters where they are in close proximity to one another. The difference is that these environments have superior ventilation, being outdoors. A really dense forest with leaves enshrouding the branches, or that form a canopy and "walls", could be somewhat of an enclosure, blocking the totally free flow of air. But even that is much more open to air currents than caves.

And forget about it if it's anything other than a tropical rainforest. Bats that roost in trees like you see in a typical park are not immersed in an enclosed volume of stagnant air at all. No structure is enclosing the trees, and the branches and leaves of the tree itself leave lots of open space in multiple directions to the "outside" world.

So much else is shared between the microbat and macrobat species' physiologies, that it should be trivial for coronaviruses to plague the tree-roosting macrobats -- and yet it's only the poor cave-roosting microbats who are beset by coronaviruses. Only the model of a shared medium can account for that, not the encounter / density model.

If some disease were spread among macrobats in trees, it would be the tree that was the public medium connecting all of the individuals. Perhaps if a pathogen they picked up on their feet penetrated the tree bark and spread from one branch to another, where it infected another bat who was roosting far from the original sick bat. But not a pathogen that travels through the respiratory route -- there's no enclosed medium of air in a tree.

That wraps up the proof that coronaviruses among bats are transmitted not through encounters, close contact, and higher density, but through a contaminated shared medium.

We can draw a further lesson, though, by noting that a pathogen is far more likely to cross a species barrier if the new ecology is similar to the old ecology. Fewer selective sweeps of random mutations would be needed to adapt the pathogen to its new host species.

So, is there any similarity between the environments that cave-roosting bats inhabit, and human beings? Well, if those humans have sedentarized and spend enough of their time within enclosed structures, especially ones that are shared with multiple other people. Not hunter-gatherers, and probably not nomadic pastoralists. But agrarian and industrial societies? Absolutely. I think that's what the respiratory class of the "diseases of civilization" are -- pathogens adapted to stagnant indoor air of shared buildings, scarcely different from those infecting untreated public water supplies that arose with sedentary agrarian societies.

And sadly for the animal species we have domesticated, these conditions apply to their structures as well. Unless they belong to purely nomadic pastoralists, they spend a fair amount of time within an enclosed building of some kind -- a barn, a stable, a doghouse, something. Both to corral them into an easily manageable place, rather than chase after them individually, but also to protect them from predators, and provide shelter from the elements.

And in an even sicker twist of fate, their human owners spend a decent amount of time in those animal buildings as well -- they aren't like a detached guest house, where the livestock do their own thing and take care of themselves. Human beings enter those animal buildings to tend to their needs, spending a fair amount of time immersed in the same stagnant volume of air as their animals. Crucially, humans enter the animal building even when the animals are not there -- to clean the place up, to restock the animals' feed, and other barn chores.

That sharing of stagnant air is the route through which a respiratory pathogen crosses the species barrier between humans and their domesticated livestock -- not direct contact or close encounters, since the sick animal could be outside the barn at the time their human owner is inside it doing chores. But the stagnant volume of air containing aerosolized virus particles is still there, even when the animals are out and about, due to limited ventilation.

In the next post in this series, we'll look specifically at two more coronaviruses that have crossed from bats to humans, and perhaps some intermediate species along the way. Namely SARS-1 and MERS. Both cases confirm the model of transmission through a contaminated shared medium rather than encounters between the sick and the healthy.

Coronaviruses spread through contaminated medium (indoor air), not personal encounters; solution is sanitation of spaces, not targeting individuals

Having looked at the history of cholera in the previous post, we'll draw some lessons for the current SARS 2.0 pandemic (COVID-19), and in a follow-up post, the outbreaks of SARS 1.0 and MERS in the 2000s and 2010s. That is, the other coronaviruses that were harmful to human beings. The pattern probably extends to other coronaviruses, and other respiratory infectious diseases, but I'll stick to these three cases since there's a lot of interest in them, hence a lot known about them, and they're part of the same family.

First, though, the current pandemic is not harmful enough to warrant a "drop everything" effort to eradicate the virus. It is far less deadly than SARS 1.0 and MERS, or influenza for anyone under 65 or 75. This is not a contribution to the Zero COVID insanity, or anything like that. This is strictly an investigation into the transmission dynamics of this family of viruses, and of respiratory infectious diseases more broadly.

The mathematical models they require are very different, and more complex, from the standard epidemic models (S-I-R), as the pathogen is not spread through person-to-person encounters, but through a medium -- into which a sick person sheds pathogens, and from which a healthy person contracts them, all without having to be within a mile of each other for their entire lives. Instead of only tracking individuals who are susceptible, infected, and recovered, we now need to also keep track of the concentration of the pathogen in the medium, and describe how the susceptibles and infecteds interact with this medium, since they do not interact with each other (for disease transmission). From a 3-variable system of differential equations, we must expand into a 4-variable system.

But the math models will wait for another post. The purpose of this post is to properly frame and understand how these coronaviruses are transmitted, what this implies about any attempts to control or eradicate them, and how broadly the results generalize to other respiratory diseases. For while COVID-19 is nothing more than a bad cold, it would still be nice to not have yet another source of bad colds, if the solution is cheap and easy (unlike the expensive, difficult, and failed attempts so far -- masks, social distancing, lockdowns, vaccines, etc.). And if the solution is good, it will impact all sorts of pathogens transmitted in the same way, not just the relatively benign one that causes COVID-19.

Let's start with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The most stunning fact about its transmission is that it never takes place outdoors. This alone eliminates the person-to-person encounter model -- people encounter other people outdoors all the time. The virus travels through the respiratory route, and people breathe all the time out in the open, not just in the privacy of behind closed doors. And yet, no outdoor transmission. Conclusion: it's not passed along through encounters.

It only gets transmitted indoors, especially where ventilation is poor. In that case, the indoor air is acting like a stagnant pond of water -- a medium that is just as physically real as any liquid or solid. Spergs seem to have a problem understanding that the gaseous phase of matter is still matter, but it is. And the more enveloped it is, with little escaping or coming in, the more it is just like a stagnant pond.

All of the super-spreader events have taken place indoors, with poor ventilation. Spring Break on a Miami beach? No. But a church group meeting for an hour or so in the same room? Yes.

One exception to this rule is the inside of an aircraft. These should be ideal super-spreader environments, since people are packed in there for hours on end, drawing passengers from all sorts of different places where the virus could be spreading. And there is a known roster of who was there -- zero difficulty for "contact-tracing" methods that would lead investigators back to a particular flight that all the sick people had taken.

Why don't aircraft interiors serve as super-spreader spaces? Because their air is refreshed -- old air sent out, new air drawn in -- at a far higher rate than just about any other space that ordinary people find themselves in (offices, homes, restaurants, retail, etc.). Think about it: have you ever entered a plane and felt like it was even remotely musty, stuffy, stagnant? Hot during summer, maybe, but not oppressive in its air quality.

Of course, someone infected could travel by plane and spread the disease once they landed and entered some other indoor space with poorer ventilation than a plane. But not to the other passengers and crew during that flight itself.

Immediately we discover one of the most powerful ways to stop the spread of this and similarly transmitted pathogens -- amp up the refresh rate of the air indoors. Natural ventilation would do well, but if that's not feasible, then through the HVAC system. Whether or not the increase in power costs would be justified by the decrease in disease cases is an empirical matter, and could vary from one virus to the other. But it's the best place to start.

Note that this solution has nothing to do with individuals, whether sick or healthy. It's changing the environment where the contaminated medium is located. This would be akin to altering a stagnant pond of water into a moving river supplied by a fresh mountain spring. Whatever germs that had been deposited in one part of the river by a sick person would be carried away by the current. Always safer to drink running water than stagnant water.

* * *

The specifics of how a COVID-19 victim deposits virus particles into the indoor air is not too relevant. We could be wholly ignorant of microscopic phenomena, and still conclude that this thing is transmitted through stagnant indoor air, and try to solve it by improving ventilation. But as it happens, we do know how the virus contaminates the medium: a sick person enters the indoor space, expels air from their lungs in various ways (breathing, talking, coughing, etc.), and the particles are small enough to become suspended in the air (aerosols).

It's like mixing sugar into your coffee -- once you do so, it's part of the coffee. The sugar crystals are not large enough to sink to the bottom, and they're just mixed throughout the entire volume of liquid. You can't drink your way around them -- every sip has some sugar in it.

Virus particles exhaled into indoor air is not quite as thorough of a mixing process -- nothing is stirring them all around the indoor volume to get them everywhere. But their tendency is to diffuse in every which direction, so they will mix themselves evenly into the air (although diffusion is a slow process). Most likely there are clouds of particles where the sick person had exhaled, and other virus-free pockets far away where they had not been. However, there's no way to detect these virus clouds through any of your bodily senses, so there's still no way to navigate your way around them. Once they're there, someone's bound to walk through them and breathe them in -- perhaps minutes or hours later, without having any encounter with the sick person who exhaled them.

The main things that affect how many virus particles there are in the medium are the number of infected people who come into contact with it, and the duration of their contact. Does some supermarket have only 1, or maybe 10, or 50 infecteds wander through it on a given day? And do those infecteds wander around for just 5 minutes or 50 minutes exhaling particles?

The same is true for how many new cases a given space can generate -- how many susceptible people wander through it, and for how long of a visit?

* * *

Now we see why lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and even vaccines are not working to stop the spread.

Lockdowns left several crucial buildings operating, like supermarkets.

Social distancing came from the incorrect view of close personal encounters as the transmission, while also forcing people -- sick and healthy alike -- to spend more time immersed in the medium, as they have to take more winding paths to avoid others.

Masks are too crude to filter out the tiny virus particles, but they did trick people into spending more time immersed in the medium because they thought their face-armor was a magical protector. This also increased the number passing through, who otherwise would've stayed away without their supposedly magical armor.

Vaccines seem to be playing a similar role, encouraging more people to pass through a space, and to spend more time inside it, fooled into believing they're magically protected. If they neutralized the virus, that would be one thing, but they don't appear to do that, only ameliorate symptoms, which means they're about as useless as masks at stopping transmission. They may in fact be worse than masks in that regard, since masks do not ameliorate symptoms -- so if you got it, you were laid out for several days to a week, and you were not going to indoor spaces outside the home. The vaccine lessens your symptoms, leaving you more able to leave the home and spread your virus particles throughout indoor spaces.

Of course vaccine mandates are even worse, compelling even more people to become not-so-bed-ridden spreaders if they contract the virus.

Strange, isn't it? All of the mass-scale solutions have been totally ineffective at stopping the spread, clamping down on hospitalizations, deaths, and so on. And we're only just getting started in the autumn season -- get ready for winter!

These solutions all failed because they were based on the personal encounter model of transmission. They're all about minimizing risk when two people come near each other, as though COVID-19 were an STD, and The Experts were telling you to wear a condom and get the HPV vaccine. But that's not how this sucker works.

The main thing we can do is to sanitize the indoor air quality. Improve natural and artificial ventilation to fully change the air more often, so that virus particles that enter the medium do not hang around for very long. Improve filtration to remove particles. Perhaps put something into the air to kill the virus, if such a substance exists, and if there are no side-effects to breathing it in -- highly doubtful, but still a possibility, better than vaccinating every last individual.

These are the lessons from cholera, another example of an infectious agent spread through a medium rather than person-to-person. Unfortunately we cannot separate outgoing vs. ingoing air volumes, like they were able to do with sewage water vs. drinking water. That leaves the other methods of sanitation (improving flow / reducing stagnancy, filtration, treatment with virus-killers).

* * *

I doubt these improvements will be made in my lifetime, and highly doubt they'll be taken up during the current pandemic. Just as the anti-contagionist John Snow did not solve the cholera pandemics of his day simply by figuring out what medium was transmitting the disease. Too many other interests at play in public health.

For one thing, sanitation places all the costs on the elites, whether private or public. A single individual citizen cannot do anything to alter the ventilation of any indoor building outside the home. That's on the owners and operators of the buildings. He could try pressuring them, but I mean he is unable to do anything in virtue of his role as a lowly citizen, whereas owners and operators can make changes any time they feel like it.

We live in a time of wicked elites, not benign or mutualistic elites. Just like John Snow's climate, living in Dickensian / Victorian England. Not until the Progressive Era and New Deal did they finally clean up the water supplies and end cholera. Our wicked elites would rather every one of us shoulder the burden -- stay apart from each other, wear a mask, get the jab, etc. (And even then, to no effect.)

I imagine Dickensian elites had a similar "let them eat cake" attitude toward solving cholera. Just stay away from other people who show symptoms of cholera, or stay away from each other altogether. Put a cloth -- any old cloth -- over the mouth of your glass when you drink water from it that might be contaminated with cholera. If you have cholera, put your excretion through a baking sieve before it goes into the sewer. We must all do our part.

If they'd had vaccines back then, their Dickensian elites would've said the same thing as ours -- everyone get a jab so that when you come into contact with a public water supply that we refuse to clean up, you won't come down with such nasty symptoms when you inevitably contract the pathogen.

Or maybe they would've said just build your own private water system. Don't ever drink from the public one, and don't ever send your excrement into it. Then what's the point of it being there? Exactly like the "stay home" solution -- sorry, you can't avoid indoor spaces outside the home, even if you do have a fake work-from-home job. We all have to go to indoor places outside the home, and we all have to breathe, just as we all have to excrete and drink.

Sanitation of public goods and spaces is what we need, not the impossible task of isolation from those necessities.

The other major reason I don't see the correct decision being made anytime soon is that sanitation of public spaces is a unifying solution, and our current climate is one of hyper-polarization and antagonism. There's no way to identify if you're a member of Team Us or Team Them, if the elites are just cleaning up the indoor air. No masks to wear as tribal membership badges. No personal decision whether or not to get vaccinated, or whether or not to submit to vaccine passports, and so on and so forth.

Americans, and those in their sphere of influence, are a crumbling empire, going through a disintegrative phase. They are dead-set on antagonizing their so-called fellow citizens, and polarizing any situation that might offer a common solution.

Again, the current pandemic is not a huge problem in need of solving at the expense of everything else. But it would be worth terminating if it were cheap and easy. And future pandemics might not be so relatively painless as this one. Not to mention existing respiratory diseases -- might be nice to get rid of some of those, too.

But none of that will happen until the polarization reaches a maximum, and after that cataclysm, the elite ranks get thinned out, with the remainder not wanting to be so antagonistic and polarized as earlier, lest the cataclysm strike all over again. This is a description of how things work, not a consultant's pitch to a team of managers about "here's your problem, now here's your solution". They won't listen, and you're just LARP-ing by behaving otherwise.

Somebody has to set all this stuff down, though, for the record -- and in the hopes that it gets preserved long enough to be useful when the society has survived the cataclysm, and the elites become less wicked after passing through the Great Winnowing.