Freedom in a Time of Madness,

Freedom in a Time of Madness, 

There is no valid argument for the destruction of our planet and any form of life on it.As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves. Be the change that you want to see in the world.

If the totalitarian measures being enacted at the local, state, and federal level are allowed to stand, the Constitution and the concept of freedom itself should be cremated and given a mournful burial.

“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances.” — Ex parte Milligan, U.S. Supreme Court (1866)

During the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln thought it expedient to silence those in the northern states who challenged his wartime decisions by incarcerating them in military prisons in the name of public safety, he was rebuked by a unanimous Supreme Court. The essence of the rebuke is that no matter the state of difficulties — whether war or pestilence — the Constitution protects our natural rights, and its provisions are to be upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort.

This basic principle of American law — our rights can only be interfered with by means of due process — is being put to a severe test today in most American states.

Here is the backstory.


The coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged portions of China and Italy, has arrived in the United States and our central planners have panicked. We do not have a free market here in the health care delivery system; rather, we have thousands of pages of regulations and control at the federal, state and local levels.

That control was revealed as manifestly deficient and ignorant when the virus struck. The feds have been so protective of their control of health care — an area of governance that the Supreme Court has ruled is nowhere delegated to them in the Constitution, and but for their power to tax those who defy them, would be nonexistent — that they insisted that only the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta can be trusted to test for the virus.

It took weeks of begging by governors and mayors for the feds to relent. Of course, once they acknowledged that labs throughout the country are as competent as theirs to conduct the tests, they realized that their incompetence had deprived all physicians as well as most private sector and state government-owned labs of the test kits themselves.

We all know how central economic planning diminishes freedom and adds to the cost of products. Now we know that central micromanagement of health care can kill people.

But these mayors and governors were not to be outdone by the feds in their totalitarian impulses. Many of them, particularly in the northeast and the west coast, have issued decrees that are as profoundly unconstitutional as Lincoln’s efforts to silence dissent.

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut have all issued decrees closing most retail establishments, particularly all restaurants, bars and theaters. The governor of New Jersey is threatening to ban all travel after dark. And, the mayor of New York City is threatening to ban all travel all the time.

The fulfillment of these totalitarian impulses has put more than 1 million folks out of work, closed thousands of businesses and impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions of persons — all in violation of numerous sections of the Constitution.

The Contracts Clause of the Constitution prohibits the states from interfering with lawful contracts, such as leases and employment agreements. And the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the states from interfering with life, liberty or property without a trial at which the state must prove fault. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation when the state meaningfully interferes with an owner’s chosen lawful use of his property.

Taken together, these clauses reveal the significant protections of private property in the Constitution itself. Add to this the threat of punishment that has accompanied these decrees and the fact that they are executive decrees, not legislation, and one can see the paramount rejection of basic democratic and constitutional principles in the minds and words and deeds of those who have perpetrated them.

Add to all this, the protection in the First Amendment of the right to associate and the judicially recognized right to travel — both of which are natural rights — and it is clear that these nanny state rules are unconstitutional, unlawful and unworthy of respect or compliance.

Why is this happening? Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the Devil’s bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety.

This happened here with the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s when the Federalists feared a second revolution, during the Civil War when Lincoln feared dissent and Congress feared defeat, during World War I when Wilson suppressed the speech he hated and feared, and during the Great Depression when FDR feared economic calamity and seized property without compensation. And, after 9/11, fearing another attack, Congress secretly crafted the Patriot Act’s circumvention of the Fourth Amendment and creation of the total surveillance state.

This sordid history came about when the public was fearful of the unknown and trustful of the government’s bargain. But the safety offered for the liberty sacrificed never came to pass.

Moreover, liberty is natural and personal. You can sacrifice yours, but you cannot sacrifice mine. The natural nature of personal liberty — Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence calls our rights inalienable and Madison’s Ninth Amendment reflects their nature as limitless — insulates their existence and exercise in a free society from totalitarian and even majoritarian interference.

Today, the fear of contagion gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, then is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of politicians in power?



 Andrew P. Napolitano

The Young Have Nothing to Lose But Their Chains

The Young Have Nothing to Lose But Their Chains

Never underestimate the power of a question
Straight Line Logic

The road to freedom is paved with repudiation.

Tuesday The Burning Platform website posted an article, “Your Government In Action,” that had a Twitter video of a long line of cars in Albuquerque, the people in them waiting for coronavirus tests. I posted the following comment:

I live in Albuquerque and was not one of the idiots in line. Yesterday was a beautiful day and I rode my mountain bike for 40 minutes in the sun. It was just right, not too cold, not too hot. We have an arroyo near our house and I did some dirt biking on the loose sand, great exercise for the legs. My gym sent an email last night and it’s closing for an indefinite time. Looks like mountain biking will be the exercise for awhile. but I could tell that the fresh air and sunlight were doing me more good than time spent in my hyper-sanitized gym or cooped up in the house. I felt great. The schools have been closed and I found it disturbing that I didn’t see one kid outside playing. Sunshine and fresh air are known disinfectants, but parents are keeping their kids indoors and the world is locking up people in quarantines. No sunshine, no fresh air, only insanity.

Read a Wall Street Journal article this morning about the younger generation in Europe rebelling against the insanity, going to bars and restaurants and having dinner parties. Why not, they aren’t getting coronavirus, and when they do it amounts to a cold or minor flu. My son is 22 and has the same attitude. What all the grim statistics no longer categorize is the age of the people dying. The media still begrudgingly admit that it most severely afflicts those with compromised immune systems, i.e. primarily older people. Our gerentocracy is panicking because they’re the most at risk. One among many issues most boomers refuse to face is their own mortality. I’ve told my son several times that if his generation sits still and pays the taxes and debt service that’s going to be required to fund our generation’s “entitlements” without repudiating the debt, slashing the entitlements, and perhaps out and out revolution, his generation will deserve its fate and its shame. Boomer removal indeed. Party on kids, maybe the coronavirus will lighten the load my generation has foisted on you.

Yojimbo, a Burning Platform commentator, posted the following:

Maybe since you are against Socialism, write a simple, concise argument in an essay about why repudiation of the debt is a far better answer than the Socialism that Bernie is advocating.

Perhaps if it were short, simple, and cogent, it might circulate among the young and truly inform them and turn them away from Socialism?
Just a thought.

I replied:

That’s a good idea. I’ll see what I can do.

Here’s the article. It’s short, by my standards; I hope readers find it “simple, and cogent.”

The Young Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chains

According to usdebtclock.org, the on-the-books’ debt of the US government is almost $23.5 trillion, or over $72,000 per citizen. The four biggest items in the government’s budget are Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, defense, and interest on the debt. The government’s unfunded liabilities are over $128 trillion, or over $397,000 per citizen. Now it is true that national assets stand at $151 trillion, or over $468,000 per citizen. Unfortunately, many of those assets are debt, equity or contractual claims (like insurance and pensions) on insolvent governments or businesses, or real estate, often subject to a mortgage. The problem is that all these assets are valued at current market, which can shift dramatically in a very short time—as we’re now seeing—while the nominal value of the debt doesn’t go down, it just continues to grow, and with the coronavirus outbreak its growth rate will increase.

Taking a cue from their parents and grandparents, the younger generation wants to grant itself new entitlements—higher education, medical care, guaranteed incomes, etc. They’ve flocked to Bernie Sanders, the most prolific promiser of free stuff. The older generation owns most of the assets and because they’re retiring, whatever they “contribute” towards taxes and debt services will be far outweighed by what they’ll draw in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Consequently, for whatever it grants itself, the younger generation will be either be paying taxes or adding to its already staggering debt and unfunded liability burdens. It will be shooting itself in the foot.

There is another way that will do much more for them. Instead of voting for supposedly “free” stuff for which they’ll wind up paying, the younger generation would be far better served by repudiating the older generation’s debt and unfunded liabilities. By refusing to be debt slaves to pay for their elders’ entitlement promises to themselves, and for the forever wars they’ve waged since World War II (which the younger generation is now expected to fight), the younger generation could opt for a clean slate. There is already an undercurrent from the fringes promoting debt jubilees and the like.

For the young to be truly better off after a debt repudiation and to solidify its moral basis, they would have to swear off entitlements for themselves, to be paid for by their children and grandchildren. However, that seems like a fair trade—no entitlements, but no crushing debt service and tax loads either, and undoubtedly a far healthier economy than what now lies in prospect. In other words, more freedom, much more so than if their elders’ schemes run according to plan.

The growing debt load is not sustainable; repudiation is going to happen one way or the other. If the older generation wants to make its oft-expressed bromides about the “children,” “grandchildren,” and “future generations” anything more than self-serving pieties, it will support repudiation in a way that benefits their posterity. If they oppose it, they should at least quit lecturing the young about Sanders and “no free lunches.” They’ve been giving themselves free lunches for decades.

As for that posterity, instead of voting for an old guy who’s only going to enslave them more, the younger generations should coalesce around candidates who promote debt repudiation, rescind or eliminate taxes, and freedom. Unite and repudiate, you have nothing to gain from the bankrupt and corrupt status quo and nothing to lose but your chains.

Coronavirus: What it does to the body

The coronavirus emerged in only December last year, but already the world is dealing with a pandemic of the virus and the disease it causes - Covid-19.

For most, the disease is mild, but some people die.

So how is the virus attacking the body, why are some people being killed and how is it treated?

Incubation period

This is when the virus is establishing itself.

Viruses work by getting inside the cells your body is made of and then hijacking them.

The coronavirus, officially called Sars-CoV-2, can invade your body when you breathe it in (after someone coughs nearby) or you touch a contaminated surface and then your face.

It first infects the cells lining your throat, airways and lungs and turns them into "coronavirus factories" that spew out huge numbers of new viruses that go on to infect yet more cells.

At this early stage, you will not be sick and some people may never develop symptoms.

The incubation period, the time between infection and first symptoms appearing, varies widely, but is five days on average.

Media captionEverything you need to know about the coronavirus – explained in one minute by the BBC's Laura Foster

Mild disease

This is all most people will experience.

Covid-19 is a mild infection for eight out of 10 people who get it and the core symptoms are a fever and a cough.

Body aches, sore throat and a headache are all possible, but not guaranteed.

The fever, and generally feeling grotty, is a result of your immune system responding to the infection. It has recognised the virus as a hostile invader and signals to the rest of the body something is wrong by releasing chemicals called cytokines.

These rally the immune system, but also cause the body aches, pain and fever.

The coronavirus cough is initially a dry one (you're not bringing stuff up) and this is probably down to irritation of cells as they become infected by the virus.

Some people will eventually start coughing up sputum - a thick mucus containing dead lung cells killed by the virus.

These symptoms are treated with bed rest, plenty of fluids and paracetamol. You won't need specialist hospital care.

This stage lasts about a week - at which point most recover because their immune system has fought off the virus.

However, some will develop a more serious form of Covid-19.

This is the best we understand at the moment about this stage, however, there are studies emerging that suggest the disease can cause more cold-like symptoms such as a runny nose too.

• EASY STEPS: How to keep safe
• A SIMPLE GUIDE: What are the symptoms?
• WHO'S AT RISK: Are women and children less affected?
• CONTAINMENT: What it means to self-isolate
• MAPS AND CHARTS: Visual guide to the outbreak
• VIDEO: The 20-second hand wash

Severe disease

If the disease progresses it will be due to the immune system overreacting to the virus.

Those chemical signals to the rest of the body cause inflammation, but this needs to be delicately balanced. Too much inflammation can cause collateral damage throughout the body.

"The virus is triggering an imbalance in the immune response, there's too much inflammation, how it is doing this we don't know," said Dr Nathalie MacDermott, from King's College London.

Image copyrightSPL

Image captionScans of lungs infected with coronavirus showing areas of pneumonia

Inflammation of the lungs is called pneumonia.

If it was possible to travel through your mouth down the windpipe and through the tiny tubes in your lungs, you'd eventually end up in tiny little air sacs.

This is where oxygen moves into the blood and carbon dioxide moves out, but in pneumonia the tiny sacs start to fill with water and can eventually cause shortness of breath and difficulty breathing.

Some people will need a ventilator to help them breathe.

This stage is thought to affect around 14% of people, based on data from China.

Critical disease

It is estimated around 6% of cases become critically ill.

By this point the body is starting to fail and there is a real chance of death.

The problem is the immune system is now spiralling out of control and causing damage throughout the body.

It can lead to septic shock when the blood pressure drops to dangerously low levels and organs stop working properly or fail completely.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by widespread inflammation in the lungs stops the body getting enough oxygen it needs to survive. It can stop the kidneys from cleaning the blood and damage the lining of your intestines.

"The virus sets up such a huge degree of inflammation that you succumb... it becomes multi-organ failure," Dr Bharat Pankhania said.

And if the immune system cannot get on top of the virus, then it will eventually spread to every corner of the body where it can cause even more damage.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionA patient being treated with an ECMO machine

Treatment by this stage will be highly invasive and can include ECMO or extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation.

This is essentially an artificial lung that takes blood out of the body through thick tubes, oxygenates it and pumps it back in.

But eventually the damage can reach fatal levels at which organs can no longer keep the body alive.

The first deaths

Doctors have described how some patients died despite their best efforts.

The first two patients to die at Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China, detailed in the Lancet Medical journal, were seemingly healthy, although they were long-term smokers and that would have weakened their lungs.

The first, a 61-year-old man, had severe pneumonia by the time he arrived at hospital.

He was in acute respiratory distress, and despite being put on a ventilator, his lungs failed and his heart stopped beating.

He died 11 days after he was admitted.

The second patient, a 69-year-old man, also had acute respiratory distress syndrome.

He was attached to an ECMO machine but this wasn't enough. He died of severe pneumonia and septic shock when his blood pressure collapsed.

 James GallagherHealth and science correspondent

The Coronavirus Is Not Causing Deaths- - Weak Immune Systems Are Straight talk about coronavirus

The Coronavirus Is Not Causing Deaths- - Weak Immune Systems Are
Straight talk about coronavirus

Forget the toilet paper & bottled water – – grab the vitamins & trace minerals to ward off infectious disease given absence of any proven anti-viral drug or (potentially problematic) vaccine for covid-19 coronavirus.

First, recognize fear-driven decision making is counterproductive.  Fear increases demand for vitamin C, so be aware of that.  So do viruses or any infection.  Be CONCERNED, not FEARFUL.

Primary antidote

Recognize these viral epidemics come in winter when vitamin D levels are low.  As a fatty vitamin, your liver should have 3 months of vitamin D stored, but probably doesn’t.

The viruses were always there but erupt when sunshine vitamin D blood serum levels are low.  SO GO OUTSIDE, MIDDAY, AND GET SOME SUNSHINE ON YOUR SKIN to produce natural vitamin D.  Expose arms, legs, face.  Quarantines deprive people of sunshine vitamin D.

Supplement with 8000 units vitamin D3 daily (kids 2000+ units); if ill – – > take 50,000 units vitamin D3 for 3-5 days; then 8000 units daily.  This is not an overdose as physicians inject 300,000 units vitamin D for wintertime storage in your liver. 
High-risk individuals, in particular senior adults, need to initiate self-care & utilize vitamins & trace minerals.

Up to a third of hospital workers now harbor coronavirus.  So, patients who face hospitalization may be re-exposed to the pathogen.

Home treatment of lungs and throat

If you are short of breath (possibly indicative of your lungs filling with fluid), have a fever, a persistent dry cough, call your doctor first, don’t run to the hospital where germs have learned how to resist life-saving drugs.  Your doctor may elect to prescribe medicines and keep you at home.

You may develop bronchitis – mucus sticking to the airways to your lungs, which induces a cough.  Get in the shower and turn water to extreme HOT and deep breathe in the mist.  This will loosen mucus from your bronchial tubes.  You will cough up mucus.

Colds and flu are sometimes accompanied by earaches and sore throat.  Instill hydrogen peroxide in ear canals.  Garlic oil instilled into the ear is also helpful.

For sore throat, gargle with salt water, or better, with hydrogen peroxide.

If your throat is very sore, go to drug store and CHLORASEPTIC get  spray or lozenges (which you should have on hand) to anesthetize a raw throat.

Sore throat is usually caused by Streptococcus bacteria which is acid secreting.  So alkalinity kills it — salt water gargle.

The mortal consequences of wintertime lower respiratory tract infection is that your lungs may fill up with fluid, you can’t breathe, and you drown in your own fluid.  This is called pneumonia (nu-mown-ya).

Auto-immunity

Sometimes the immune system is over-responsive and creates more havoc in your lungs, resulting in uncontrollable inflammation and lungs filling with fluid.  Vitamin D, vitamin A and the red wine molecule resveratrol normalize the immune response.

Avoid drug store remedies

Do not run to the drug store and purchase aspirin or acetaminophen (Tylenol) which deplete vitamin C and glutathione and may make your infection worse.  Acetaminophen is a liver toxin.

When you go to the drug store, the pharmacist may suggest you vaccinate against the flu.  DO NOT VACCINATE FOR THE FLU WHEN YOU ARE ILL.  The vaccine may not work (you may not develop antibodies) if your immune system is weak and the vaccine IS the pathogen (virus or bacterium).

Be aware, you may develop co-infection (common cold + flu).
Blood pressure drugs

There is a warning about a class of blood pressure lowering drugs called ACE inhibitor drugs (angiotensin converting enzyme) that allow entry of the coronavirus into cells.  But what is not mentioned that ACE inhibitors deplete zinc which is required for proper T-cell activity.  T-cells, produced in the thymus gland, generates memory T-cells that produce long-lasting immunity.  Supplement with zinc.

High risk individuals

If you are in a high-risk group (diabetes, overweight, smoker, drinker, or take immune suppressant drugs, or vitamin C-depleting drugs such as cortisone, aspirin, acetaminophen or diuretics), you may benefit from dietary supplements for immune support (disease treatment would likely require intravenous vitamin C and trace mineral treatment).

Underused nutritional therapy: don’t ask your doctor

How long is modern medicine going to go on casting a blind eye to nutritional medicine before millions of lives are lost?  The hope of a vaccine looms, but is months away.  Even with a 100% vaccination rate and 100% vaccine effectiveness, by my calculations it is likely such a vaccine would generate more hospitalizations and deaths than the disease itself because of the weak immune status of the individual.

Risk of infection is low and death is nil.

Among healthy adults the risk for infection is very, very small, and the risk for death is almost nil – – in China 3000 (avoidable) deaths in 58 million or 5 in 100,000).  Infection and mortality rates are much lower in the U.S.  Most of those deaths were among fragile, unhealthy adults over age 70.

The number of reported cases of infection may be far lower than what actually occurs because some patients may never come in contact with the medical care system and recover at home, some only experiencing a mild fever or never even exhibiting symptoms whatsoever.

So, the reported number of infections may be low due to non-reporting and therefore the percentage of individuals infected or who die may be inaccurately high.

At this point in time, in China ~80,000 were infected and some were hospitalized and ~3000 of the 80,000 succumbed.  But just hospitalization alone increases the mortality risk due to medication errors, exposure to antibiotic-resistant germs, and low-vitamin D levels due to sun-deprivation.

Inaccurate testing

Testing is inaccurate and is not instructive as to the type of therapy needed.

The COVID-19 coronavirus test is inaccurate and produces many false positive results.  The COVID-19 coronavirus is very infectious, but among healthy individuals may not even produce symptoms or just a mild fever.
YOU WANT TO GET INFECTED so you will develop natural life-long antibodies.  Then you will not need to be vaccinated with a new unproven vaccine, like what happened in 1976 with the swine flu – the vaccine causing thousands of cases of paralysis (Guillain barre syndrome).

A Harvard professor says up 70% of the global population will be infected with coronavirus within the next year.  That is actually a positive because most will naturally develop antibodies.  If one were to say 70% of the world just got vaccinated against coronavirus that would be considered a major achievement but if 70% were naturally immunized against coronavirus without a needle and syringe that would be considered a dire problem.  Why?

Modern medicine continues to talk out of two sides of its mouth.  Put another way, 70-90% of the world may develop natural antibodies against coronavirus without problematic vaccines.

Among high-risk groups (smokers, drinkers, immune-compromised, heart problems, over age 70), the risk for infection from ANY circulating virus or bacterium is considerable, to the point of being life threatening.

Host resistance

Don’t try and run and hide from viruses.  So, are all the deaths due to coronavirus?  Probably none of them if you consider the problem is not infection but failed host resistance.  Coronavirus was in circulation before the winter flu season.  Low seasonal vitamin D levels triggered eruptions of the coronavirus as well as other viruses and bacteria, including tuberculosis, which is also a lung disease.

This author continues to cite data showing the risk for infection is very low, even in China where there is air pollution, polluted water, and poor health habits (68% of males smoke tobacco; 46% drink alcohol) – – – 1/10th of one-percent or 1 in 1000 infection rate and 3.4 deaths among the 1000 infected persons (which in the population as a whole (healthy and infected) is still only a 0.00005% or 5 in 100,000 mortality rate.

A frightening headline news report cites a university professor’s claim that 96 million Americans could be infected and 4.8 million hospitalized with COVID-19 coronavirus, with a 1 in 10 chance of dying, citing increasing mortality rates with advancing age (3.6% for 60-69 years of age; 8% age 70-79 and 14.8% aged 80 and over).  THAT IS A WORST-CASE SCENARIO that will subside once spring comes and more the earth tilts back toward the sun and our vitamin D blood levels rise.

Those age groups are considered high risk for ANY infections and subsequent mortality.

Overlooking seasonal flu

For whatever reasons, modern medicine is giving the false notion that the only infectious lung disease that is killing adults this wintertime is COVID-19 coronavirus. What happened to seasonal influenza which reportedly kills thousands every year?  Of course, that flu number is specious, used as a fear tactic to get the public to vaccinate.

Maybe only a few hundred Americans succumb to the flu each year.  With coronavirus test kits giving false positive and false negative test results, are any numbers involving infection rates accurate at all?

The Centers for Disease Control claims seasonal flu in 2018-19 caused 35.5 million infections, 490,600 hospitalizations and 34,200 deaths. These numbers are very specious.  Even if valid, and among all who got the flu (35.5 million, only 9 in 10,000 would die — 34,200).  But the CDC mixes flu deaths in with pneumonia deaths to frighten Americans to get vaccinated.  Most of those 34,200 deaths were due to pneumonia.

Mass vaccination
It would be highly unwise to attempt to vaccinate all 7 billion people on the planet to prevent, by my calculations, 1 death in 362,069 people.  Almost 100,000 people (99,995 to be precise) would have to vaccinated to prevent 5 deaths.

Build your resistance to disease

The world has gone bonkers, with the misdirected masses stocking up on toilet paper and bottled water instead of vitamins and trace minerals to ward off an infectious disease.  While looking down its nose at nutritional therapy, modern medicine has yet to fully put into practice therapies that produce what only a few physicians prescribe – – vitamins and trace minerals targeted at high-risk individuals, to boost immunity (what is called host resistance) among high-risk individuals against influenza, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

No vaccine could possibly help vulnerable seniors since vaccines rely on an intact immune system to produce antibodies against infectious disease.

Do the obvious

Vitamin D3 is the most obvious and potentially effective nutrient that can be used against corona and other viruses as well as pathogenic bacteria.

In China, 50 cases of moderate to severe COVID-19 coronavirus infections were given intravenous vitamin C.  Hospital stays were shortened by 3-5 days.  There were no side effects with vitamin C therapy.  ALL PATIENTS IMPROVED – NO MORTALITY!

If ill, increase oral vitamin C to 3000 milligrams every 4 hours.

When ill, zinc acetate lozenges will shorten the course of a cold or flu.

Detect, Deter and Annihilate: How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

Detect, Deter and Annihilate: How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.”— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

What do zombies have to do with the U.S. government’s plans for dealing with a coronavirus outbreak?

Read on, and I’ll tell you.

The zombie narrative was popularized by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they’re not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

For a while there, zombies could be found lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc at gun shows, battling corsets in movies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and running for their lives in 5K charity races.

Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.

For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.” The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in mock military drills.

Fear the Walking Dead—AMC’s spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series—drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”

Forbes found Fear’s quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government—i.e., the military—to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.

We’re seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads.

What we have yet to experience (although it may only be a matter of time) is that the government through the imposition of martial law could pose a greater threat to our safety (and our freedoms) than any virus.

As the Atlantic noted about Fear the Walking Dead: “The villains aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”

Indeed, zombie fiction perfectly embodies the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders.

As journalist Andrea Peyser reports:

Coinciding with Halloween 2012, a five-day national conference was put on by the HALO Corp. in San Diego for more than 1,000 first responders, military personnel and law enforcement types. It included workshops produced by a Hollywood-affiliated firm in…overcoming a zombie invasion. Actors were made up to look like flesh-chomping monsters. The Department of Homeland Security even paid the $1,000 entry fees for an unknown number of participants…

“Zombie disaster” drills were held in October 2012 and ’13 at California’s Sutter Roseville Medical Center. The exercises allowed medical center staff “to test response to a deadly infectious disease, a mass-casualty event, terrorism event and security procedures”… 

[In October 2014], REI outdoor-gear stores in Soho and around the country are to hold free classes in zombie preparedness, which the stores have been providing for about three years.

The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises were us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?

Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.

That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens they perceived to be disgruntled or anti-government.

Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.

Fast forward a few years more and local police were being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.

The Obama administration then hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.

Nothing has changed for the better under the Trump Administration.

Those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), continue to be promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

“We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government. This coronavirus merely ups the ante.

So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.

However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.

The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with a dangerous disease or dangerous ideas about freedom.

Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law.

As the DOD training manual states: “zombies [stand-ins for “we the people”] are horribly dangerous to all human life and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life. Therefore having a population that is not composed of zombies or at risk from their malign influence is vital to U.S. and Allied national interests.”

So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. citizen) uprising?

The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:

Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.

Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the government’s ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.

Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the government’s zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats. Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were “previously” U.S. citizens.

Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.

Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.

Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.

Notice the similarities?

Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law.

As It points out in the book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: whether the threat to national security comes in the form of imaginary zombies, actual terrorists, American citizens infected with the coronavirus, or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the government’s response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.