Long Shadow Of The Locust

Imagine this scenario.

You’re a farmer in a country, let’s call it, oh, just let’s say it’s called India.

You don’t have much of a farm. In your grandfather’s time it might have been quite large, and fertile, and the rains irrigated it plentifully every summer so that his crops never died of thirst. Even if there was a year or two when the monsoon rains failed, there was a tube well and more than enough groundwater to ensure that the harvest wasn’t a failure. And whatever your grandfather produced, the government guaranteed that it would buy it at a certain price, known as the minimum support price, so he knew that even if he couldn’t sell it at a bigger profit in the open market, he could still depend on a certain guaranteed level of income, just so long as his crops continued to grow.

But that was then.

Things happened. First, with increasing health care standards, no matter how imperfect, more of your grandfather’s offspring lived to adulthood than in his father’s time. So your grandfather’s farm was divided among your father and uncles. And, in time, your father married and bred, and more of your siblings survived to adulthood than in your father’s generation, which meant that his share of the farm was divided again between you and your brothers. So, you ended up with only a tiny fraction of your grandfather’s farm.

Meanwhile, other people have been breeding too, and their children, too, have been surviving to adulthood in hitherto unprecedented numbers. So, to house them and to supply food for them, and to rip coal and oil and minerals out of the ground for them, forests have been chopped down; and to supply the thirsty cities with water, rivers have been dammed and their water piped to said cities. Chimneys have been spouting smoke from factories, because the government has decided that unchecked industrialisation is the only path to “growth” – and also because the corporations owning those industries are important sources of funds for elections and to buy up politicians afterwards. All this has done enough damage to the climate that the rain has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable, so that you’ve had to rely more and more on your tube well to irrigate your patch of field. The groundwater level, in consequence, has been falling, and falling, and you’ve had to borrow money to dig your tube well deeper and deeper – and still the water continues to fall.

All this while, your own expenditures are climbing. Things are more expensive. Your tiny patch of field doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills unless you begin to plant multiple crops a year. This is turn exhausts your soil, leaching out the fertility, which earlier used to be renewed because your grandfather could afford to leave it fallow between planting seasons. So you have to buy huge amounts of fertiliser as well as farm machinery, because the old ways are no longer productive enough. Pests invade your field, and the pesticide you used to use no longer work because the pests have developed resistance. So you have to buy more expensive pesticides. Because the pesticide, fertiliser, and farm machinery are not free, you have to borrow money to buy them, so you slip into debt.

Then the government decides on “economic liberalisation”, which means that it starts systematically pandering to the corporations that provide it with money. Suddenly, your minimum support price is no longer paid on time, or is simply abolished altogether. You can’t pay your loans back to the banks from where you took them. They threaten to foreclose on your land. So, in order to pay them off, you borrow again, this time from the village moneylender. And then an unseasonal storm, which happens more and more frequently, comes along and kills off your entire harvest.

You think you have problems? Your problems are just beginning.

Because there isn’t anything like enough money coming in from your farm to pay your bills and even the interest on your loans, in between plantings and harvests you need some other income. So you look for work, as a labourer or whatever else you can manage. Work isn’t available in the vicinity, so you have to travel long distances, often to the other side of the country – and it’s a big country – to look for work. In a desperate attempt to make ends meet, you hire yourself out as a labourer for some months, rush back home, harvest and plant, try and sell on the market, try to keep your head above water, and then rush off to work as a labourer again.

Meanwhile the cost of machinery and fertiliser keeps increasing, the groundwater levels keep dropping, your debts keep piling up, some foreign company called Monsanto cajoles and bribes the government to compel you to buy seeds from it – seeds that cease to grow after one season, so every year you need to buy seed stock from Monsanto again, instead of using leftover seed from the previous year to plant again. And it begins to rain when it shouldn’t, drowning your crops, and it’s bone dry when it should be raining, so that what you have left withers to straw poking through cracked brick-hard soil. And the government, which you voted for, doesn’t care. It wants to grab your fields to hand over to its capitalist cronies for factory farms or just factories, and the worse things get for you, the better said capitalist cronies like it.

You see where we’re going with this?

Then, just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do.

You’re in the city, working at a temporary job as a construction worker, and you need to come back to your tiny farm because the harvest is due. But just as you’re about to, suddenly the government imposes a curfew because of some foreign disease that is supposedly killing people left and right. Your employer dismisses you and doesn’t even give you your back pay, on the grounds that he has no money. You can’t even step out into the street without being beaten by the police, even to buy food; and, if you do manage to sneak out of the city, you don’t have any way of getting home. There are no buses, no matter what the politicians claim, no trains, nothing. So, with no other option, you begin walking home along the highways, under the grilling midsummer sun, while the government spends taxpayer money to bring in rich Indians who abandoned the country for greener pastures abroad and suddenly find themselves unwelcome in their new homelands.

Meanwhile, your brother, who’s stayed back on the farm, has his own problems. The harvest can’t be sold because the markets and distribution systems are all shut because of the government’s lockdown. There are no preservation or storage facilities, so the produce can’t even be kept relatively fresh, and, even if there were, he couldn’t afford the fees. So what option does he have except to dump the stuff in the fields to rot in the sun?

None.

It isn’t the worst yet, oh, no.

While all this was going on, the climate worldwide has been going to hell, too. Forests have been disappearing, fossil fuels have been filling the skies with smoke and carbon dioxide, ice caps have been melting, the ocean currents have been changing as a consequence, and scientifically illiterate imbeciles have been pretending all of this is a hoax. Evaporation from oceans that are warmer than they used to be has warmed the air above and filled it with moisture. The warm air, rising, has drawn in colder air from around it to warm in turn, pick up moisture, rise, and bring in yet more colder air, until you have a gigantic vortex of rotating cloud and wind, spiralling towards land, bringing not just destruction but heavy rain wherever it goes. This thing is known as a cyclone.

This cyclone hits, shall we say, another – possibly fictional – country called Saudi Barbaria, which is mostly desert. It dumps so much rain that actual, literal lakes develop in the desert. This sudden moisture causes an equally sudden proliferation of vegetation. And, before the sun has an opportunity to parch this vegetation to mummified hay, yet another cyclone comes along and dumps another few thousand tons of water on the desert, creating even more greenery.

Great, right? Green is good, right?

Wrong.

There are animals living in that desert, notably insects, those most adaptable of all creatures. One of those insects is a, usually inconspicuous, middle-sized short-horned grasshopper called Schistocerca gregaria. This is a rather well-known insect; it’s been featured in no less than the Bible and the Koran, and you may even have heard of it under its common name.

Schistocerca gregaria is also known as the desert locust.

Locusts are grasshoppers. Grasshoppers eat vegetable matter. When there is a lot of vegetable matter, the grasshoppers lay a lot of eggs, which hatch to form many more grasshoppers, which live to grow to adulthood because of all that easily available vegetable matter, and lay more eggs, which give birth to more grasshoppers, which...

You get the idea.

And then there are so many grasshoppers that they begin to eat all the vegetation. And the cyclones don’t keep coming, so the lakes dry up, as the desert returns to its usual state, and the greenery, without water, begins to die off. So the grasshoppers crowd together to get at whatever little vegetation remains, because they don’t want to starve to death any more than you do. And when they get packed in tightly enough together, they bump against each other, just as you would in those crowded unreserved railway compartments in which you’d travel back to your hometown from your construction job in the city.

Now, unlike ordinary grasshoppers, locusts – there are many species, all of which are short-horned (that is, with short antennae) grasshoppers – do a special thing when there are a lot of them in such close proximity that their hind legs bump each other. Their biochemistry changes, with increased production of the hormone seratonin. Their bodies change colour, in the case of Schistocerca gregaria to yellowish pink and black. 

Their habits change – normally night-flyers, they now switch to flying during the day, and instead of maintaining distance from each other, they now actually seek out each other’s company. This is known as the gregarious or migratory phase. Soon, the massive agglomeration of these insects takes off in search of new food deposits to devour.

And, because of that global warming, there have been unseasonal rains here and there, so the locust swarms have plenty of food. They land, eat, have sex, lay eggs, and, with their ranks swollen by the new generations, set off again on their mission of conquest, flying up to a hundred and fifty kilometres a day. Oh, and they can cross oceans too, because when they get tired, they rest on the floating corpses of their friends who died of old age or exhaustion and float, bobbing on the waves.

Now these locusts have been migrating east and west for two years, devastating countries with names like “Ethiopia” and “Somalia”, “Yemen” and “Kenya”, which you’ve never heard of. But the government, with its overeducated bureaucrats, has most certainly heard of them. It is aware that two neighbouring countries, let’s call them, for fun, “Iran” and “Pakistan” have been hit hard in recent times. Just the previous year, in fact, Pakistan had some 40% of its crops eaten by locusts, which isn’t a small amount. In fact, a one square kilometre swarm of locusts – which is an extremely small swarm – can eat, in one day, as much food as would be needed to feed, wait for it, 35000 people. Locust swarms can extend over hundreds to thousands of square kilometres.

In reality, locusts are such a menace, and have been such a menace through history, that the United Nations’ Food And Agriculture Organisation (FAO) monitors them closely and warns governments when their countries are about to be attacked. Your own government – the same one that has stopped paying your minimum support price and is having you beaten up for coming out in the streets – knows that the locusts invaded the country last year, but did nothing, claiming that the insect swarm had receded without doing any crop damage.

Well, right now, those swarms are back. They’re back earlier than ever, in greater numbers than ever, and they’re eating their way across the west of the country. In fact they’ve been doing it for some time, but that same government and its tame media, which ignored your existence as long as possible, ignored the swarms too, until they blanketed the city of Jaipur, known for its pink sandstone construction, in a pink blanket of hungry insects. Then, suddenly, the media deigned to notice it. Because it had no choice.

So, to recapitulate.

The agriculture sector had already been devastated by shrinking farms, dropping groundwater levels, irregular and unpredictable rainfall, and cyclones, The government has taken a policy decision to let small farmers die, literally and metaphorically, by neglect so that the farming sector can be taken over by corporate cronies to set up factory farms and car manufacturing plants. Farmers are drowning in unpayable debt that keeps piling up as their land becomes agriculturally unsustainable. And then you’re walking the highways starving after being thrown out of your job without pay, the economy has packed it in, what of the harvest was collected is unsaleable and had to be thrown out to rot, and now a plague of ravening pinkish grasshoppers is eating every bit of vegetation in sight.

Right. Not only was much of this – in fact every bit of it except the COVID-19 outbreak – totally predictable, none of it just turned up overnight. All of this has been developing over years to decades, and the successive, post-1990, governments of India not just ignored it, they actively connived and encouraged most of the worst of it. They, and their paid media prostitutes, actively promoted the idea that the manufacturing industry was the only way to economic “progress”, and, to do this, the farm sector would have to be sacrificed. I remember asking multiple times on internet fora over the years whether people would be expected to eat cars and television sets, and being downvoted en masse every time.

But people cannot eat cars and television sets, and with the economy sliding downhill into the nether doldrums, there is no longer any market for cars and televisions; the vehicle industry has been moribund for well over a year. And the farm sector isn’t doing exactly well for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, so that, for the first time in thirty years, the level of average nutrition is actually dropping in India. And the Modi regime has systematically ignored all of this, including the gigantic locust plague which has been moving towards India for over two years now.

And by gigantic, I mean that this is the largest plague in 78 years. It’s also much more dangerous than any plague of comparable size 78 years ago. Why? For the simple reason that the population of the planet is much, much higher than 78 years ago, and vulnerable areas – east Africa and west and south Asia – are infinitely more stressed than they were 78 years ago. Not to speak of the fact that global warming causes more and more of the flood-drought cycle that promotes swarming, and that two of the worst affected countries, North and South Yemen (I do not consider them to be one country any longer, as a supporter of the now fait accompli South Yemeni independence), have been under invasion and a starvation blockade by Saudi Barbaria and the Imperialist States of Amerikastan since 2015.

Therefore, the chances of famine are extremely high, and, since the Modi regime has shown absolutely no signs of changing its policies, have been growing higher and higher. And now the locust swarm, which is spreading steadily eastward and northward towards the agricultural heart of India, is in the act of delivering the coup de grace.

I have noticed that the Modi regime’s pet media, after a couple of days of finally admitting the existence of the locusts, have suddenly made a point of repeatedly mentioning that the locusts “entered from Pakistan”. I assume that this is not accidental; nothing the Modi regime’s media does is innocent, accidental, or without the acquiescence of the regime. I can only speculate that if the regime fails to halt the locusts through the measures it is now allegedly taking – spraying pesticides from drones – it will move on to accusing Pakistan of deliberately sending the hordes of Schistocerca gregaria over the border to harm India. This would be on a par with the Trump regime in the Imperialist States of Amerikastan accusing China of creating COVID-19, a claim parroted by paid CIA agents on Indian social media.

Speaking of which, the Modi regime – in a desperate and transparent attempt to divert attention from its endless failures – is trying to provoke a border confrontation with China. Except for the fantasy world of Modi’s pet television channels, Republic and Times Now, this is going over like a lead balloon.

Starving people have more immediate concerns than that.

Anyway, if and when the Modi regime decides to blame Pakistan for the locusts, I’ll make it easy on them and give them proof. Here’s your Jihadi Locust, Jihadocerca pakistaneria.

You’re welcome.

Dispatches from Hindunazistan: Coronavirusation Day

Note: In this article I shall concentrate only on the situation in India and its response to COVID-19. I shall not talk about whether COVID-19 is something which justifies the global panic, a topic I have already discussed in two prior articles, here and here.

I should have known it would be this way, but I was still taken somewhat by surprise when the Modi regime not too subtly attempted to turn the COVID-19 issue into a Hindu versus Muslim affair. It happened like this:

There is a Muslim movement called the Tablighi Jamaat which was founded in India in 1925 and which is focussed on “purifying” the faith from within. Although fundamentalist, this group is and always has been entirely peaceful and one important reason the then Brutish rulers of India tolerated it was that the very concept of jihad has never, in any form, featured in its teachings.  I’ve read Tablighi Jamaat literature, by the way; the amount of rituals required by them even before doing such a thing as going to sleep is mind-boggling, and I’m not surprised that most Muslims avoid these people just like most adherents of any religion avoid hectoring True Believers telling them how they should live their lives.

Anyway, this Tablighi Jamaat has its headquarters in a mosque complex called the Nizamuddin Markaz in Delhi. From the 13^th to 15^th March – remember those dates – it held a congregation attended by 2000 delegates from all over India and abroad; there were people from this city as well as from such countries as Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Barbaria, Malaysia and Indonesia. Many of the delegates, who dispersed back to their home places or elsewhere in the country, subsequently developed symptoms of COVID-19 and several have died.

Suddenly, the Modi media are playing up the Tablighi Jamaat as a dangerous fundamentalist organisation, hinting that it deliberately sought to spread COVID-19 around the country, and the people who attended the function are being “tracked down” on television channels as though they were terrorists, not possible and certainly unwitting carriers of a disease. The word “manhunt” is in fact being used to talk about the Jamaat’s current head, Maulana Muhammad Saad, whose whereabouts are allegedly, at this writing, “unknown”. Modifellating Bhaktonazis (the term I use for Modi worshippers) are flooding Indian WhatsApp with videos (some of which date back to 2018, and are about a totally different Muslim group, the Bohras) as “proof” that the Jamaat are “spreading Coronavirus deliberately”. The 960 foreign delegates have been declared persona non grata, as though they’d bring the virus back in if they fell ill, recovered, and decided to visit India again. One Gangadhar J., a businessman from this city, has gone on Fakebook demanding that Modi implement an emergency. Because, obviously, we are not being oppressed quite enough already, you know.

All this is despite the fact that when the Tablighi Jamaat meeting was held, legally there was no restriction on gatherings; 13^th to 15^th March was seven to nine days before Narendrabhai Damodardasbhai Modi’s allegedly voluntary “People’s Curfew” of 22^nd March, and nine to eleven days before his three week long national lockdown, which began on the 24^th.  Ergo, while the wisdom of holding a congregation in the middle of a pandemic can be questioned, legally there was nothing against it. And though the Nizamuddin Markaz literally shares a boundary wall with the local police station, it had ignored the gathering totally.

Some of the Modifellating Bhaktonazi claptrap is so ludicrous as to be amusing. There’s a famous Pakistani cricketer called Shahid Afridi, who’s set up a foundation for providing emergency medical equipment to South Asian countries (not just Pakistan, all South Asian countries). Two equally famous Indian cricketers, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh – no, they are not related – called on Indians to donate to the foundation. Modifellating Bhaktonazis on Twitter immediately declared these two gentlemen “anti national traitors”.  That is despite Yuvraj Singh being the prime reason why India won the cricket World Cup in 2011 while said Modifellating Bhaktonazis were sitting at home watching him on television.

Meanwhile, the brunt of the “anti-coronavirus” efforts continue to fall, quite literally – in the shape of police batons – on the backs of the poor. 

[Source]

At the time of writing (the evening of 2^nd April, less than halfway through Modi’s national lockdown), there have been, officially and including the dead and recovered, 2341 cases.

I believe that this is a gross underestimate. I believe that the actual number is at least ten to twenty times, and probably fifty to a hundred times, greater.

Here are my reasons, as expressed in a message I wrote on WhatsApp :

 1. COVID-19 is asymptomatic in at least 25% of cases - that means it produces no symptoms at all, not a sniff, not a cough, not a sneeze. But the people infected are still fully capable of passing on viruses. 

2. The great majority - up to 74% of the remaining 75% - show subclinical symptoms, that is, mild temperature and/or cough with or without sneezing (that in this season can be just mistaken as common cold, industrial pollution, pollen or dust allergy, or not even noticed). But these 74% like the other 25% are also fully capable of passing on the virus.

3. Therefore, fully 99% of the infections don't show up as symptoms that get reported to any medical professional*. That's anywhere in the world, not just here.  

4. Unlike SARS, for instance, even the remaining 1% of COVID-19 sufferers are infective long before they start displaying symptoms. This is basically why this virus spreads quickly. In this it's identical to most respiratory viruses; SARS was actually an exception.  

5. There aren't enough test kits to test everyone or even more than a small sample.  

6.  In India we have a peculiar set of circumstances that make it extremely unlikely that the majority of the remaining 1% will visit any doctor: 

(a) The widespread illiteracy and ignorance of the rural population and the urban poor. Most of them don't know what a Coronavirus is. They don't know what it does. All that they know is that suddenly they can't work and they're beaten by police if they step into the streets. Since they have to make a living somehow they'll do whatever they can and social distancing is the last thing on their minds. 
(b) Indians as a nation don't want to go to the doctor. It's literally the last resort. Even for toothache the first thing they do is buy a painkiller from a chemist’s shop and try to get through it. If they have any illness their first stop is the local homeopath or kaviraj (herbalist) or some quack or astrologer. The doctor is reserved for when all other treatments have failed. 
(c) I am ashamed to say this but a huge number of Indian doctors are openly contemptuous about the problems of the poor. Step into any North Indian hospital and watch how they talk to poor patients and compare it with how they behave with the middle class (the rich wouldn't go to those hospitals anyway). Their only interest is to shove off the problem, give a few pills and get rid of the patient. The last thing they would do is take a detailed history and do all the necessary, and expensive, tests, which the poor don’t want because they’re unaffordable in time and money anyway.  Not only do they don't have time for that, they know that if they do come up with a Coronavirus case they... 
(d) …run the real risk of being locked into quarantine, or as in Telengana thrown out of their rented houses, and this is a powerful incentive to not find any Coronavirus case. Especially true for private practitioners. 
(e) The vicious behaviour of the police, which makes it difficult to impossible for poor people even to go to the hospital if they're sick. Those photos and videos of police beating poor people that keep being shared on Indian WhatsApp, often as a joke? They are not funny. They are an acute danger to everyone, not just the poor, because people being forced out of public view aren't people who cease to exist or who are incapable of contracting or passing on the disease. 
(f) The Nizamuddin Markaz thing where certain television channels are treating the tracking down of attendees as though it was a manhunt and they're dangerous terrorists. For reasons we don't need to go into here, Muslims in hyperpopulated North India are overwhelmingly confined to ghettoes in squalid conditions, and have become habituated to treating any authority as a threat. They believe that they could be blamed en masse if any of the Tablighi Jamaat attendees admits to being among them so they'll hide the fact. 
(g) Migrant workers in general know that if they are isolated they'll lose livelihood and they'll do a lot to hide from authority to stop being put in isolation. Also any worker who is found infected with COVID-19 can say goodbye to employment for the rest of his or her life, and knows it, too. 
(h) Typically when poor people die they die at home and not in hospital, their deaths go unrecorded, and if they die of Coronavirus nobody will be any the wiser. 
(i) A villager who knows or suspects he has COVID-19 is at risk of being attacked  by other villagers, his family thrown out, his house burnt, himself lynched, as a "contaminant", so he's got an extremely good reason to keep silent about it. 

The whole system is in fact giving the poor an incentive to not go to the authorities if they fall sick. This is not a viable way of countering an epidemic.

*Just 1% of infected people developing severe symptoms may sound as not much of a problem, and, yes, normally it would not be a problem. It would definitely not be a problem in a country which has not systematically neglected its public health care sector in favour of obscenely expensive and corrupt private healthcare. But in India, which has, and which also has a gigantic population, 1% means more cases than the hospital system – such as it is – can bear. The Modi regime has attempted to convert some train carriages into makeshift hospitals, and Modifellating Bhaktonazis on WhatsApp are celebrating it as a triumph, as though a train carriage is an adequate substitute for a purpose built hospital. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

Literally minutes after I’d written the above message, news broke that doctors in Indore, in central India, had been attacked after they’d gone to a poor locality to track down people who might have come in contact with COVID-19 positive people. The locals, terrified (for reasons I mentioned above) at the idea of someone in the locality being found COVID-19 positive, assaulted the doctors and two of them were injured. Modi media, ignoring the reasons why people might be reluctant to be compelled to starve for weeks and be stigmatised for life, promptly went ballistic, and it’s almost certain that we’ll see a further militarisation of the so-called “anti-Coronavirus effort” shortly.

Talking of militarisation, I’m anticipating being conscripted into the “campaign” in the near future. Yesterday – 1^st April, and, no, it was not an April Fool’s joke – the government of my state, which has yet to see a single confirmed case but has imposed a curfew on top of Modi’s lockdown,  asked doctors, dentists, and traditional medicine practitioners (“AAYUSH”) to report to the district health authorities for service in the Great Big War On Corona. At the moment this is still “voluntary” but I doubt it will stay that way for long.

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Before I finish, let me make four additional observations unrelated to the rest of this article.

First: While everyone’s going on and on and on about COVID-19, which (as readers of my previous articles will be aware) I do not consider to be anywhere like the threat it’s presented as, the real holocaust is already upon us – has already been upon us for years now. It has nothing to do with viruses; it concerns drug resistant bacteria.

Right, while everyone’s going off their nut at COVID-19, drug resistance in bacteria is exploding and is already a terrible problem. Ask any doctor or dentist and you’ll hear the same thing: antibiotics we could rely on to be effective ten years ago are usually totally useless now. diseases like tuberculosis, once almost eliminated, are making a roaring comeback. In fifteen to twenty years the antibiotic era – which has doubled life expectancy after WWII – is likely to be over. What then?

I don’t know. And you don’t know, either, because this isn’t something the media sees fit to tell you.

Second:  If I see another idiot babble online about how COVID-19 should be tackled by developing “herd immunity” I’ll hit them over the head with a, regrettably virtual, hammer.

What is this “herd immunity”? As far as I can make out, it’s the idea that if enough people in a population become resistant to an infectious disease, there won’t be enough vulnerable people left for the infective agent to find new victims. Therefore, the proponents of this idea aver, people should attempt to contract the illness to become immune to it.

Now this might have made sense a couple of hundred years ago, when most populations were largely isolated and any travel was a slow affair stretching over days to weeks, or even months, allowing for enough time for infected people to develop the illness and die or recover in between. In today’s era of mass air transport, where even the opposite side of the planet is only hours away, however, it’s a bad joke. Either every member of a population is immune, or else those not immunised will remain at risk until and unless the infective agent is isolated and eliminated.

I’ll give you an example that I’ve seen myself. India began mass vaccination against poliomyelitis many decades ago; by the time I was a child, in the early 1970s, vaccination against polio was standard. I remember being vaccinated myself; it’s one of my earliest memories. However, there used to be a family that lived a few hundred metres from here. The father, on the premise that his parents and he had never contracted polio despite not being vaccinated, chose to not vaccinate his own son; the child, of course, developed polio and is on crutches for the rest of his life.

All this is common sense, and the only reason I can think of that proponents of “herd immunity” continue to push their bunkum is that they think of themselves as cattle. Their intellect certainly suggests it.

Third: People who imagine that the rights they are so eagerly giving up in order to “fight COVID-19” will ever be restored, or that the actions that governments and their corporate owners are taking to “fight the virus” will not be used as a precedent in future, are likely to have a rather interesting rude awakening.

Fourth: If western governments insist on trying to blame China for “spreading Coronavirus”, well, then, China can quite legitimately charge said western governments' overlord the Imperialist States of Amerikastan for spreading the fall armyworm caterpillar, a devastating pest of crops from maize to rice to fruit. This caterpillar, which is of North American origin, is eating its way across Africa and Asia, and is actually a near-perfect bioweapon, since it devastates crops literally overnight, appearing apparently out of nowhere.

And, seeing that it mysteriously turned up in Africa, all the way across the Atlantic - somehow skipping Amerikastan-allied Europe - and then as mysteriously in Asia, an actual bioweapon it might be, too.

I absolutely would not exclude that.

The Great Corona Panic Of 2020: The Indian Perspective

Anyone likely to read this will already have been made familiar – like it or not – with the COVID-19 outbreak that is making everyone run to buy masks and toilet paper before cowering under their beds clutching cans of hand sanitiser. I am, therefore, not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by repeating all the stuff about how it appeared in China (though that is increasingly coming under question), spread to Italy and Iran and Germany, etc. That is not why I am writing this.

In this article I will focus on only a few points:

First, whether the panic over COVID-19 is justified, and, if not, why this panic exists, and whom does it serve.

Second, whether COVID-19 is likely to have been created as a biological weapon.

Third, the Modi regime’s response to COVID-19 and its implications for India.

Note:  In this article I will refer to this virus as COVID-19 for simplicity, out of all the other terms being used for it. It is merely one of a whole family of related coronaviruses, and so while the term Coronavirus is technically correct, in this instance we are dealing with COVID-19 only.

1. Never let a good crisis go to waste: COVID-19 for fun and profit.

You know what they say: when the media is all talking about something and demanding that you focus your attention on it, look for what they’re trying to distract you from. In this case there are undoubtedly many things they’re trying to distract you from; the world debt bubble that’s finally collapsing is just one of those.

I’m not an economist, but I’m not a total idiot, and it has always seemed to me that an economic system based on creating “money” out of thin air, “lending” it by shuffling strings of zeroes from one file on a computer to another, and “earning interest” by shuffling it back again, would ultimately come up against an insurmountable problem, to wit, that it’s all just strings of zeroes on a computer file. There’s only so long you can bring up zeroes before it all crashes to, well, zero. And when it does, the people doing the zero shuffling will be in hot water unless they can make everyone look at something else while frantically typing yet more zeroes into their computers.

It’s not exactly a secret that the world stock markets are crashing, They are crashing for many reasons, but one important reason is that the pile of debt made of strings of zeroes has grown to the point where it can’t be piled up any further and is beginning to avalanche down. At this stage it’s extremely useful that a sudden pandemic has caused international travel and trade to come to a shuddering standstill because, well, that’s an excellent thing to blame for the strings of zeroes coming sliding down on everyone’s head.

Then there’s the Amerikastani defeat in West Asia. Let’s not beat around the George W Bush – Amerikastan has suffered a bad defeat there. It had expected a compliant Sunni dictatorship in Syria like its client state of Jordan to emerge long ago, either to occupy the whole country or else the Arab areas while a Kurd zionistan was set up in the north. It splurged enormous amounts of propaganda, money, headchoppers, Kurds, and rat line weapons into this. It lost. It also attempted to crush Iran. Iran, though bloodied, is still standing and Amerikastan no longer dares – after the missile barrage on its occupied Ain al Asad airbase in January – to attack or threaten Iran directly. Amerikastani occupation war criminals in Iraq are isolated in their holes while Iraqi militia – far stronger and more experienced after 17 years of the war Amerikastan brought to their country – rain rockets on their heads. All these are coming together in an election year. That is not a good thing for Amerikastani politicians.    

Then there are the slaves of the European Union. This is the same EU which destroyed Yugoslavia, then Serbia, and then Libya, the same EU which pretends to care about freedom and democracy while buying oil from al Qaeda in Syria. This EU long ago realised that the flood of refugees its own policies had unleashed would crack its so-called unity open like an egg. It knew that it had to close its borders. Politically it couldn’t close borders after decades of demanding that everyone open theirs; and when aspiring member the Ottoman state pushed refugees across the border in an obvious blackmail tactic, Greek border guards found themselves blamed for beating back said blackmail tactic. But a pandemic? Why, that’s a lovely excuse to close borders. Even the Denmark of the Muhammad Cartoon-drawing Jyllands Posten closed its borders with Merkelist Germany. I’ll bet the gerontophile Macronist regime will also use COVID-19, or the fear thereof, to finally crush the two year long Gilets Jaunes protests in France. It’s like a gift to them.

Then, while a pandemic is extremely bad news to some businesses – airlines, for example – it’s extremely good news for some others. You know all those jokes about people buying toilet paper by the ton? You know how supermarket shelves are emptying out? Well, nobody is giving those goods away. Every sale means profits for somebody. Mass panic buying makes lots of profits for some people.

Major pharmaceutical profits are waiting to happen as well. Already there’s babble about vaccines that will prevent COVID-19 infection. Now viruses have an extremely well known tendency to mutate into various strains. All genetic material, both DNA and RNA, do mutate while copying themselves (that’s what mutation is, a mistake in copying). Viruses, unlike literally every other form of life, are active only when copying themselves. They do not breathe. They do not eat. They are inert when they are outside a living cell, and when they are inside a living cell, all they are doing is making more viruses. So their extreme multiplication rate means a very high mutation rate. And if you invent a vaccine to protect against one strain of virus, there is absolutely no kind of guarantee that the vaccine will be effective against another strain of the same virus. Therefore I discount the chances of these vaccines being effective. But you can be sure that they will be marketed and possibly made compulsory, and that the vaccine manufacturers – who have already, as an “emergency” measure, dispensed with time-consuming (and costly) laboratory trials - will make a very good profit from them.

It’s also going to be handy for politicians who are eagerly waiting to kill off subsidised medical programmes. Let’s imagine there’s a country (we’ll call it “Britain”, just for fun) with a long standing and quite successful publicly funded health service (let’s imagine it’s called the “National Health Service”). Let’s also imagine that certain political forces have been long out to snuff out this NHS so private medicine and health insurance companies can make a fortune. Now a pandemic that swamps the NHS hospitals and eradicates the old people who form the primary NHS beneficiaries will be wonderfully convenient for that, won’t it? And helping along the pandemic by essentially taking no steps whatsoever makes total sense, does it not?

As to how dangerous COVID-19 is, once again let me remind you what I said about looking to see what the media is trying to distract you from. It is true that people are dying from COVID-19 infection. But who are these people?

Well, they are mostly people who fall into one of these categories:

People who are elderly and already have compromised health and immune systems. Ageing societies with a high proportion of retirees will see a correspondingly higher death rate.

People whose respiratory tracts are already damaged by other factors: for example, chronic air pollution as in China or chronic bronchitis or emphysema from smoking – again as in China. A substantial number of the people who died in Iran are actually veterans of the Iran Iraq war of the 1980s and were at the receiving end of Saddam Hussein’s Amerikastani-supplied, Amerikastani-targeted, chemical weapons. Their raddled respiratory systems, burned by nerve agents and mustard gas, simply could not stand the strain.

People who are denied treatment because of other factors, such as hospital beds being unavailable because every one is occupied and so triage is performed with those “less likely to be successfully treated” turned away. Ironically this turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy since this usually means the elderly turned away while the young – who are already with their more robust health much likelier to survive – being treated.

Collateral damage: people with other, curable illnesses, who will not receive treatment because of the hospitals being full to the brim with (often far less ill) COVID-19 infected. I would even suggest that by the time the dust has settled this section will comprise more fatalities than the rest put together. This is exactly why the Chinese built all those speciality Coronavirus hospitals in Hubei province, so that normal hospitals could keep functioning and treat people with other illnesses.

If you disregard the collateral damage, the actual mortality rate from COVID-19 is fairly low. It is, at the most, 3.5% in China, and even in Italy it is about 7%. That’s actually not very high where pandemics are concerned, and in fact it may even be a massive overestimate. Why? Because that’s the official death rate among people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 infection. Any infectious disease has a substantial number of infected people who either do not show any symptoms or else show subclinical symptoms; someone with COVID-19 may have a sore throat or a very mild fever, not a potentially fatal respiratory collapse, and will thereby never come to the attention of the health system. They may have symptoms that are identical to common influenza, will be thought to be suffering from common influenza, and recover like people do from common influenza. So the actual, undocumented, number of COVID-19 infections may be much higher than thought, which means that the death rate may be far less than commonly stated. Meanwhile the influenza I just mentioned kills something like 40000 Amerikastanis alone every year, and killed between 50 and a hundred million in the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. And let’s not forget tuberculosis, which is resurgent and increasingly difficult to treat, malaria, ditto, and so on and so forth. But those aren’t “sexy” (as we used to say when I was back in dental college) illnesses; there’s little to no profit to be squeezed out of them and so nobody even mentions them anymore.

So, yes, COVID-19 is a dangerous disease, but its lethality has been overstated. Yes, said overstatement is a deliberate and cynical ploy. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

2. A Weapon Of Convenience? COVID-19 as a biological bullet to the brain.

Now, I admit I’m not a microbiologist. I am not a weapons designer. And while I am certain that micro-organisms have been and are being actively researched for use as biological weapons, I have no direct or indirect knowledge about them. Therefore the following statements will be a mixture of speculation mixed with common sense.

I’ll say this first and get it over with: if used on anything but a small scale, biological weapons are stupid.  Let’s say you want to annihilate a small country, for instance something about the size of Rwanda. Then you might be able to use something relatively quick acting and very lethal, something of the order of Ebola, and you might be able to temporarily cause some devastation. Not total annihilation because the infected people will soon die before they can spread around the infection too far. But you could kill some tens of thousands, maybe. You couldn’t do much more.

Now in a small country (like Rwanda again) this may represent a relatively big blow. But try it in a country the size of China? That’s a drop in the ocean. The outbreak will be swiftly sealed off and controlled. It won’t even be a stumbling block. In other words, it’s pointless.

Or you could create a disease with a long incubation period, which would spread far and wide before it manifested itself. But by the same standards it would spread far and wide. With the massive amount of international travel these days it would not, could not, stay confined to your target country. It would, sooner rather than later – if you’ve got the facilities for biological weapons research, you’re a relatively rich and powerful country with a lot of international traffic – come back to hit you.

Perhaps you could – I don’t know if it’s even possible – tailor your biological weapon to attack a particular racial group, by matching it to some characteristic in the target group’s genome. Now that itself creates more problems for you.

First: Almost no racial group is confined to one single country, and those that are, are typically minorities even within that country. For instance, you are, let’s say, an enemy of the People’s Republic of China. You therefore create a virus to attack Chinese. But Chinese are East Asians who share their genes with other East Asian nations, some of which – South Korea, Japan, and the so-called nation of “Taiwan” – are your “allies” (to be more accurate, vassals), and also, having considerable trade relations with China, will get infected almost immediately. Then there are substantial numbers of ethnic Chinese living in other vassal nations, like Singapore, and in your own country, not to speak of Quisling-infested Hong Kong, which your own colonial possession Britain is desperate to recolonise. Those Quislings, being ethnic Chinese, would be eradicated by your germs, and that would be slightly awkward for you.

Or you could create germs to eliminate, say, the Derung ethnic group in China. Which would lead you to eliminate....the 7000 Derung in the People’s Republic of China.

Second: as I said above, viruses have an extraordinarily high mutation rate. Basically, if a gene in the virus can change, at some point it will do so. The genes you’ve lovingly fitted to receptors in East Asian lungs will – before you can say biogenocide – turn right round and mutate into forms that hunger to attach to receptors in your own, non-Chinese lungs, and then where are you?

Where Amerikastan and its EUvassals are headed for, I suspect.

There is only one way even a limited biological weapon makes some kind of sense. That’s if you target the weapon, not at people, but at something of enormous economic value to said people. For instance suppose you have a nation whose economy is dependent on, oh, sugar, or bananas (a literal banana republic). You create a disease that will attack only sugarcane or bananas, and you can probably do massive damage to their economy. If it’s a food staple like yams, you may even be able to create a food shortage or famine. But you can’t do it if you attack the people directly. And if your target is a very large and diverse country, you can’t do it at all.

3. Go Corona Corona Go: Modistan and the Very Bad, No Good, Absolutely Terrible Virus:

One of the many videos going around Indian Whatsapp depicts Modi regime minister Ramdas Athawale chanting “Corona Go Go Corona” in an alleged attempt to compel the virus, it seems, to pack up its bags and return to wherever it came from (or perhaps go to Pakistan, I don’t know, who can tell with these people). While this was remarkably stupid, there is a lot that’s pretty interesting in the phases of India’s response to COVID-19.

Right at the start of the epidemic in China, Indian media responded with actual elation. China, apparently, would collapse economically and its status as the manufacturing capital of the world would come to a screeching halt; it would be, who else, India which would immediately take over. How this feat was to be managed was of course not mentioned. In any case at that very time the Modi regime was faced with massive protests, including in Delhi – which culminated in an anti Muslim pogrom (another Modi trademark) when Trump came visiting in February. Therefore the tame Modi media was busy with praising Trump and condemning the protestors, and had little time to talk of COVID-19.

Then, apparently overnight, a simultaneous panic offensive began. All of a sudden the Modi media could talk of nothing except COVID-19. Grovellingly servile rags like Outlook (once an independent voice) and India Today (ditto) even set up special Coronavirus sections on their websites that soon crept over the rest of the stories. They even swamped the crash of one of India’s biggest private banks, Yes Bank, due to systematic fraud by the promoters. They submerged the continuing implosion of the economy under Modi’s ministrations. That Modi openly and shamelessly set out to purchase the government of the state of Madhya Pradesh, the election to which his party lost two years ago, by triggering the defection of a dynastic politician was less mentioned than Coronavirus.

I do not think that this is merely coincidental.

Even the phone services weren’t spared. Call anyone now and you immediately hear a recording of somebody coughing. Then there’s a long lecture, in English, of what you should do to avoid infection (apparently don’t touch anyone, don’t interact with anyone) and then, only then, will the phone ring on the other end. Assuming you haven’t hung up in disgust by that time, naturally.

Masks and hand sanitisers began to cost like gold. Modi shut down the borders while the servile media breathlessly spoke of how Indians had “escaped from Wuhan”. That the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan has been brought under control merely made this more comical. Even more ridiculously, as of this writing, there have been 108 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in India and two confirmed deaths. That’s what, a death rate of 1.85%, not including one idiot who imagined he had COVID-19 and immediately killed himself.

Of course this is not going to stay like that, and everyone knows it. COVID-19 has an incubation period of about two weeks, which means that these 108 were infected two weeks ago. By the time they’ve begun displaying symptoms they have already been shedding viruses for many days. Many other people will already have been infected, and they will already, even as I write this, be infecting others. Ergo, there will be a quite predictable and massive explosion in the numbers of infected by the end of this month. And then the panic will really begin.

One of the hugest problems with India is something that not one – not a single one – of the COVID-19-obsessed media I’ve seen has talked about. It’s this: all this obsession is all about the exposure of the upper and Great Indian Muddle Class to the virus. The poor – invisible at the best of times – are not talked about at all. It’s these same poor and working class people who couldn’t even begin to afford the hand sanitisers and face masks which will putatively save us all from COVID-19, while making their suppliers quite coincidentally richer. Also these poor people can’t afford to fall sick. Suppose one of them does fall ill. He goes to a hospital, and is “screened” for COVID-19, and is put in quarantine for fourteen days. So is his entire family. Well, then, where does he find money to eat? Will his employer, assuming he has one, keep his job open? (The answer is, ha, you wish.) If he’s in a small town or village, it will get much worse than that. Superstitious mobs are more likely than not to descend on his house and burn it down, and drive away or even lynch him and his family members before they can “spread the disease”. And he knows all this. The very panic the Modi regime is fostering actually makes it much less likely that he will go for treatment at all.

So what does he do? Simply out of self preservation, if he falls ill, he and his family conceal it. Whatever the illness is, they carry on as usual. Maybe it’s something else, and he recovers. Maybe it’s COVID-19, and he may or may not recover. But whether he does or not, he is not going to go to hospital if he can avoid it, and all the while he will be shedding viruses which – with the abysmal hygiene standards of the average Indian slum – will be liberally shared around.

Right at the start of the epidemic, I had made a prediction: the Chinese would successfully contain it and it would burn out. But if it ever got established in India, then it would be here to stay.

We are, it appears, rolling out the welcome mat.

Now, how long before we come to this?

New Parasitic Wasp Discovered

Rueters, 1^st April 2019

By Kanmani Ponnu

With additional reporting by Peppa Chamatthu

Researchers at the Department of Parasitology, Hops Johnkins Medical Institute, Washington DC, today announced that they had found a major new parasite of human nervous systems.

The creature is the larva of a microscopic wasp, the smallest ever discovered, smaller than some single celled organisms. It has yet to be issued a formal biological name, but the Hops Johnkins Parasitology Department has shortlisted one for consideration.

“The animal is truly remarkable,” the head of the Department of Parasitology, Dr Hector Oaks, told Rueters over the telephone. “Not only is it so small, but its mode of infection is more like a virus than an animal.”

The parasite, Dr Oaks said, is, like other wasps and bees, a member of the order Hymenoptera of Class Insecta, Phylum Arthropoda, the group that includes butterflies and cockroaches, crabs and lobsters, spiders and millipedes. It is the larva of the adult, which itself is so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.

“The adult wasp,” Dr Oaks said, “has evolved drastically away from the original form but only in size; it can still handily be recognised for what it is under the microscope. It is, however, the larva that is parasitic. This larva, which is white, is sharply curved except for its tail end, so that it closely resembles a sickle in shape. It is so tiny that it can enter the body of the nerve cells, the neurons, and gestate inside them before moving to other cells.

The female, winged, wasp (above), compared to single celled animals, and the wingless male (below)

“This animal,” Dr Oaks continued, “has developed parasitic tactics hitherto unknown among other multicellular organisms. The wasp lays its eggs on the surface of a person’s skin. The larva hatches on the skin, and crawls down the duct of a sweat gland until it reaches the inner skin layer, the dermis. There it bores its way out of the sweat gland and crawls around until it finds a neuron, which, of course, is not difficult since the skin is richly supplied with nerve endings. It bores its way into the neuron with its sharp sickle end, and there, inside the cell, it settles down to feed and lay eggs.”

Dr Oaks went on to say that the wasp larva is the only multicellular organism known in which the juvenile form also lays eggs. “It is one of the most remarkable evolutionary adaptations ever seen,” he said. “The larva is born pregnant, and is in fact little more than a bag of eggs. Once it settles down in a neuron, it absorbs nutrition from the cell cytoplasm, and swells up until it bursts open, releasing the eggs. These eggs resemble tiny blue rods with a blob at the end, so that they look rather like a hammer. Each hatches within hours, releasing more larvae, known as Stage II larvae. These Stage II larvae are externally identical to the first, or Stage I, larva, but are of course even smaller. They burrow out of the neuron and move along the body of the nerve, absorbing nutrients as they travel, until, eventually, they reach the brain.

“Once they arrive at the brain, each larva begins to secrete chemicals called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters, of course, are naturally produced by the human brain, but the parasitic wasp produces mimics which override the genuine neurotransmitters and significantly affect the behaviour of the host. Parasitic wasps are well known for their ability to convert their hosts into “zombies” which obey the commands of the parasites, but this is the first instance where such an action has been seen in a human being.

“The effect in a human is to drive the afflicted person to seek out others, both affected and unaffected, and to congregate with them in large numbers. Meanwhile, some of the larvae, but not all, crawl out of the brain and back down the nerves until they reach the closest skin, usually that of the face. They then burrow out of the nerve endings and wander around the dermis until they find a sweat gland. Each larva that has survived up to this point immediately curls up and secretes a capsule around itself, which has five points, which under the microscope resembles a star and is dark red in colour. Inside that capsule the larva pupates and emerges as a new adult wasp, which crawls up the sweat gland duct until it reaches the surface of the skin. There it waits, secreting chemicals known as pheromones, which attract wasps of the opposite sex. After mating on the skin, the males, which have no wings or functional mouth parts, die; the females, which are now pregnant, fly off to find new hosts on whose skin to lay eggs and begin the cycle over again.

“Meanwhile, the larvae that have remained in the brain continue to produce neurotransmitters that modify the host’s behaviour in drastic ways. First, as already stated, the parasite compels the infected person to congregate with other people, both infected and otherwise; the sufferer will, in fact, be driven to organise such meetings, by the internet if necessary. This means that the pregnant female wasp has more potential hosts to infect, while the male has the opportunity to mate with females from other hosts and avoid the risks of inbreeding. Secondly, it drastically changes, for reasons so far unknown, not just the behaviour but the political beliefs of the affected person.

“And in what way does it do this? You only have to look at the shapes of the various stages of the larval parasite. While the adult female looks like a very, very tiny wasp, with wings like tendrils, and the male similar but with no wings at all, the larva looks, first, like a white sickle. Then it produces eggs that resemble tiny blue hammers. And in its final stage, the pupa, it looks like a dark red star.

“Is that not enough? The larva in its various forms looks like a white sickle, a blue hammer, and a red star. Clearly there is only one way it can affect the political beliefs of those it infects!

“Yes,” Dr Oaks concluded. “We have confirmed that this parasitic wasp turns its victims into Russian bots, trolls, agents, and zombies. And we therefore suggest that it can only have one name appropriate to it – Moscowaspus vladimirputinii - after the evil Russian dictator, who must in some way be responsible. And we will recommend to the Pentagon that the United States must start World War Three at once!"

For more on this story,  click here.

Long Pig

You know the story, repeated ad nauseam in bad nineteenth-century novels like RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, a whole genre of Italian exploitation films, and cartoons galore: explorer or missionary goes into the jungles of darkest Africa or South America, or ends up being shipwrecked on a Pacific island. Explorer or missionary is captured by savage native peoples and – if not saved at the last moment by the hero – is boiled in a pot and eaten. There’s even a name for it: Long Pig.

Well, did this ever actually happen?

Back when I was in school, I remember reading an article in a science magazine on cannibalism. According to that article, actual verified instances of cannibalism were incredibly rare, if one disregarded instances of starving people resorting to it in extreme situations (or, as a corollary, psychopaths like the German cannibal Armin Meiwes). 

These are not cannibals

This is a cannibal

Specifically, the article considered cultural cannibalism – cannibalism as a cultural practice. What it said was that most instances cited could be put down to one of these factors:

       1.     Missionary and explorer propaganda, designed to impress Europeans with tales of the savage and how valiant white men had to take on the burden of civilising them. One instance would be an account during the voyage of Captain Cook, where

“As Cook examined one of these bones, he realised in consternation that it might be from a human forearm. He asked one of the family members if these were not dog bones, but in answer the man took hold of the flesh of his own forearm and pretended to chew it.

Joseph Bank noted later: Tho we had from the first of our arrival upon the [New Zealand] coast constantly heard the Indians acknowledge the custom of eating their enemies we had never before had a proof of it, but this amounted almost to demonstration: the bones were clearly human, ... and on the grisly ends which were gnawed were evident marks of teeth, and these were accidentally found in a provision basket.” [Source]

However, unless those bones were preserved and can be tested today for toothmarks in a forensic lab, I’d say that without independent confirmation, Captain Cook’s account can be firmly put in that category.

   2.  A lot of tribes told tales of other tribes who ate human flesh. In fact, these tribes used it as a propaganda weapon against their rivals. Missionaries told of how tribes would tell them, “Do not go up river, because the tribes there are fierce, and they eat men.” Whether they actually ate people was moot – the intention was to prejudice the listener. (And this also raises the question of why the listener should be prejudiced by hearing this, which is something we’ll be discussing later in this article.)

In either of these cases, the “evidence”, such as it is, seems anecdotal rather than hard; rather like the “evidence” for the Loch Ness Monster, which only makes sense if one accepts the Monster (or the phenomenon of cannibalism) is real to start off with, rather than keeping an open mind.

This isn’t meant to be confused with headhunting, a practice which most definitely existed, and well into the twentieth century among some peoples like the Shuar (“Jivaro”) of South America who are infamous for creating shrunken heads. In fact, the Shuar practice was actually encouraged by Westerners who bought the shrunken heads as curios and created a market for them.

Also, there’s the curious case of human sacrifice, which occurred all over the world, from the Aztecs (who cut the beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims with obsidian knives) to India, where bandit gangs would sacrifice captives to the goddess Kali. (As a matter of fact, stray incidents of human sacrifice, generally of kidnapped children, still occur in India today. One happened in the western part of this state earlier this year.) The interesting thing is that both taking heads for trophies and sacrificing humans to please the gods stood as stand-alone practices. They were not followed by the general consumption of the flesh of the victim, even though sacrificed goats or chickens are eaten.

Going on that basis, there does seem to be something of a cultural taboo against cannibalism.

I’m not saying there weren’t stray incidents of cannibalism, of course. It’s perfectly possible that some warriors might have eaten, for instance, the hearts of their enemies in the belief that it would give them the enemy’s courage. What I am saying is that this wouldn’t rank as a regular, continuous practice which might be considered to be part of a culture.

Why should this be? Why should humans, who consume caterpillars and whales with equal felicity, have a revulsion against eating their own kind? 

If one can eat this...

I believe we can find an explanation.

If you think about it, cannibalism isn’t all that common in nature. Starving lions and hyaenas, wolves and jackals won’t eat dead members of the group even if in extremis. Spiders, scorpions, sharks and Humboldt squids will, on occasion, but you’ll find that on the whole there are more predators who won’t eat their own sort than those who will – and among mammals, cannibalism is remarkably hard to find.

Yes, there is forced cannibalism, as of cattle being fed the ground up body parts of their fellows along with their fodder. This is a routine practice in factory farming, but hasn’t had very good effects – bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also called “mad cow disease”, is spread when cattle are forced to consume beef products to give them cheap, easily assimilated protein. The cause of this is something called a prion.

What are prions? This isn’t a digression, because I believe prions are an important explanation for the relative rarity of steady cannibalism in human societies and in nature.

A prion is probably the simplest and smallest external disease-causing factor which exists. Unlike bacteria, fungi or protozoa, prions aren’t living organisms. They aren’t even on the border of living and non-living, like viruses. Prions don’t have DNA or RNA; they are simply improperly folded proteins. When introduced into an organism, like a crystal which when put in a saturated solution of a salt causes salt to precipitate out of the solution, the prion causes normal proteins to convert into the prion form, which then goes on to cause cell damage and eventually cell death, to the detriment of the organism as a whole. Cows develop holes in their brains caused by swallowing prions along with beef products meant to fatten them up. That’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

And it’s not just cattle, either. There’s the case of human spongiform encephalopathy.  

As far as I know, there’s only one cultural instance of what might be called cannibalism, and that is in the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. Among these people, the bodies of the dead used to be ceremonially consumed by their fellow villagers, in a practice intended to return the deceased person’s “life force” to the village. This was the cause of transmission of a prion causing a disease called Kuru or “laughing sickness”, an incurable degenerative malady of the central nervous system.  One of the features of Kuru is that the majority of victims were women and children; this was because the prions were concentrated in the brain, which was among the body parts left for women and children to consume after the men had taken the choice parts, the muscle and fat.

Considered on this basis, the taboo against cannibalism might make real, evolutionary sense. Some ancient protohumans, like Peking Man, were perhaps cannibals, but the practice doesn't ever seem to have become widespread across protohuman populations. Why not?

If a society – or a species – had a high incidence of cannibalism, the circulation of prions would mean that there would be a high level of debility and mortality among those who did eat their own kind. Those who did not, for whatever reason, would have a higher chance of spreading their genes to the next generation, thus ensuring that their offspring would also be less liable to be eaters of their own dead. Simple evolutionary competition would then mean the non-cannibals would displace the cannibals.

Pretty soon, cannibalism would become a biological threat to the tribe, even though its members wouldn’t consciously verbalise it to themselves in such terms. What they’d do is condemn cannibalism as a forbidden act, like incest, another extremely common taboo worldwide. (If at all it was allowed, only specific categories of people - like priests - would be permitted it, and then only of ritually permissible parts of the body, like the heart, which wouldn't be loaded with prions.)

In general, cannibals would be worthy of disgust and hatred, something less than human.

And that’s why the missionaries and the explorers lied.