This year has witnessed so many strange happenings that it remains difficult to keep track of them all:
botched elections (predicted to be so to boot!), corporate donations to BLM, CHOP/CHAZ
(Seattle autonomous zone), “murder” hornets, peaceful protests that destroyed lives and property,
wildfires gone wild, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and incredible attempts to stop it via
socioeconicide.
Viewed separately, each phenomenon appears bizarre. Viewed holistically, we are clearly in the midst
of the zombie apocalypse. I don’t mean some Hollywood concoction like The Dawn of the Walking Dead
28 Weeks Later (that’s a mashup of three different franchises for the uninitiated), I mean the original,
authentic zombie, a person whose mind has been taken over by another.
Mind control sounds all sci- fi but it need not be. In fact, even fungi can do it. Scientists have discovered
new types of fungus that infect ant brains, forcing the ants to anchor themselves to leaves and other
stable places where the spores develop, kill the ant, feed on it, and then use it as a platform to spread to
other ants.
Other examples abound: A type of wasp larvae infects a spider, inducing it to build a nice cocoon in
which the larvae lives after it kills and eats the spider. Another type of wasp partially paralyzes a
cockroach, leads it by its antennae to her underground lair, then feeds the roach to its youngin’.
A type of flatworm lives in live cow liver. It places its eggs in the cow’s GI tract, where the inevitable
happens. Cow dung-eating snails then consume the flatworm eggs, which the snail turns into slime
balls that ants eat. The flatworm larvae then infect the ants’ brains, inducing the ants to sit motionless
on the tips of grass leaves where, you guessed it, a cow is likely to chomp ‘em down.
Another type of fluke produces larvae in a type of ocean snail, inducing it to attach to the gills of a type
of small fish, from whence the larvae can infect the fish’s brain, inducing it into spasms that attract
the attention of sea birds. Once in the sea bird, the flukes mature and reproduce. Their eggs land on
someone’s head or, more likely, the ocean, where ocean snails eat them and repeat the cycle anew.
Hairworms infect crickets, driving them toward lights, which in nature often means moonlight dancing on
water. The crickets then drown, allowing the hairworms to reproduce in the wet cricket corpse.
You might think that your brain is too sophisticated to be as easily controlled as that of an insect or other
creepy crawler. That’s true but the defining characteristic of zombies is that they don’t realize they are
being controlled. If they realized their plight, they could resist.
A leading candidate for causing zombie-like behavior in humans is a cervid (deer) affliction called
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). The CDC has worried about CWD jumping the species barrier for
years and in Fall 2019 the popular media was awash in stories of “zombie deer.” I don’t mean fringe
sites, I mean the most trusted sources of news, including the almost infallible CNN. Like the ants
awaiting certain death by cow, zombie deer easily fall victim to predators, including orange-vested
ones and ones that go vroom vroom, allowing the nasties to spread to scavengers and humans.
While few people consume the flesh of wild cervids where CWD is endemic, it could have crossed into
domestic species via captive cervids and from there into humans. Unlike Mad Cow Disease, which
resided in bovine brains (and few eat such organs any more), CWD resides in the muscle
(meat) too and is not destroyed by cooking.
Consider the symptoms of people who have died of mysterious prion (brain) ailments in recent years,
as reported by the CDC (so it must be true because they are “the” scientists!):
“One of the patients died after an illness lasting 5–6 months that was characterized by progressive
aphasia [inability to understand language], memory loss, social withdrawal, vision disturbances, and
seizure activity leading to status epilepticus and induced coma.”
“The second patient died from an illness lasting ≈16 months. The patient’s illness began with behavioral
changes, including unusual outbursts of anger and depression. Confusion, memory loss, gait
disturbances, incontinence, headaches, and photophobia also developed.”
It is possible that further mutations have rendered the ailment less deadly and more contagious,
spreading perhaps through human saliva or a common blood vector like mosquitoes, as that is the most
successful reproductive “strategy” and hence the path of most pathogens. If zombification weren’t
plausible, why would the CDC maintain a zombie preparedness page?
Before you grab your shotgun and start hunting human zombies, I should explain how manipulative
the above narrative is. It cites authorities like CNN and the CDC and combines plausible but unproven
speculation about mutation with half-truths (if you actually follow the link, it turns out that the CDC’s
zombie page is a publicity hook) with real evidence of symptoms. I did everything but call it “novel”
because that would have made it too obvious that I was deliberately trying to mirror the tactics used to gin up fear over the coronavirus.
Were I an epidemiologist (or physicist), I daresay I could publish a model with Neil Ferguson,
funded by the Gates Foundation, showing that in a year 100 billion people will be zombified unless
[insert favorite policy here: stop hunting and trapping; release all captive animals “back” into the wild;
beg Gaia’s forgiveness through mass human sacrifice, etc.].
I am not joking about publication: a 2017 peer-reviewed study predicted that zombies would wipe out
humanity in 100 days. And it was published by physicists (like Ferguson) employing a standard
epidemiological model. Like an infamous Covid model, it was rooted in a student project and
somehow published even though the students involved were smart enough to realize that the
model’s assumptions drove the outcome: un-zombified people would not change their behaviors
and could not kill the zombies. Truth is (a) stranger!
The real zombie apocalypse occurring now didn’t start with Mother Nature. Humans caused it, but not
in a conspiratorial plot. According to impeccable sources like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and
NPR, zombification is slavery is zombification. New World enslavers, they show, sought to turn their
human chattels into biological machines who (that?) did as they were bid and nothing more. While
some slaves resisted zombified enslavement, many others succumbed and became the mindless
“tools” of their masters.
Slavery is now rightly eschewed as immoral and uneconomic (if profitable for enslavers) but
governments remained interested in zombification, in the creation of passive workers and citizens
easily tricked by mindless mantras like “Your vote is your voice” and “Flatten the curve.” It’s not that
any individual or state controls the thoughts of everyone all the time, it is that people are kept vulnerable
to manipulation by means of an educational system that encourages rote memorization and focuses
students on external rewards, like grades and awards, instead of the intrinsic joy of learning.
Unfortunately, modern zombies are more difficult to detect than the drooling, brain-hungry figments
of Hollywood’s imagination. Analogous to some alcoholics, they are “high- functioning” zombies, q
uite capable of serving as a specialized cog in some bureaucratic machine or running heavy machinery.
But they are not entirely free people either and hence horrible citizens in a Republic that requires
eternal vigilance for its success. But there is a tell: try explaining Public Choice theory to suspected
zombies. If they still don’t get it after the third attempt, definitely stay at least six Congressional
districts away.
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