Terracotta Humbaba mask from Ur, Iraq. 2004–1595 BCE. Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraq
“The Death of Enkidu,” The Epic of Gilgamesh (Translation Sandars)
As Enkidu slept alone in his sickness, in bitterness of spirit he poured out his heart to his friend. “It was I who cut down the cedar, I who levelled the forest, I who slew Humbaba and now see what has become of me. Listen, my friend, this is the dream I dreamed last night. The heavens roared, and earth rumbled back an answer; between them stood I before an awful being, the sombre-faced man-bird; he had directed on me his purpose. His was a vampire face. his foot was a lion’s foot, his hand was an eagle’s talon. He fell on me and his claws were in my hair, he held me fast and I smothered; then he transformed me so that a my arms became wings covered with feathers. He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the place of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which no-one enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back. There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness…and there was Ereshkigal the Queen of the Underworld; and Belit-Sheri squatted in front of her, she who is the recorder of the gods and keeps the book of death. She held a table from which she read. She raised her head, she saw me and spoke: ‘Who has brought this one here?"”
Enkidu in his sickness experiences transformational and universal clarity. This clarity is conditioned on his life experience: he entered the cedar forest, cut it down and slew the monster Humbaba.
Forests and Humbabas are metaphors. They reflect the limits of human knowledge, and the need for humanity to struggle to meet these limits and move beyond them. Knowledge is a struggle that comes with hardship, violence, and death.
In fact, only in death can the struggle of knowledge be understood.
The lessons of the first work of human literature are universal.
These lessons have been forgotten.
COVID is our Cedar Forest. It is our Humbaba. But unlike Enkidu and Gilgamesh, we did not travel to the Cedar Forest and level it, killing Humbaba once and for all.
We feared the forest and the monster.
Society grounded to a halt. Culture fragmented.
Witch Doctors chattered away on TV screens and phones. We called them experts.
Mind-numbingly stupid politicians declared pointless mandates and laws. We called them wise.
The media machine ground up truth and curiosity and knowledge into a fleshy pulp. Almost everyone gobbled it down, not realizing what they were putting into their mouths.
We called ourselves informed.
The Ten Commandments of COVID
Commandment 1
There are no experts.
I am called an expert. I have multiple degrees, a tenured academic position, and an expert opinion in my field. But what does “expert” mean?
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Come closer so I can whisper you a dirty little secret.
An expert means you are wrong most of the time and you KNOW you are wrong most of the time. An expert understands that the labor and patience to even approach anything that could be called true can take a lifetime of work, and even when one approaches something that can be called true another expert might prove that all of your work simply resulted in something false.
COVID is a perfect example. How can anyone be called an expert in COVID when:
*They do not know COVID’s origins
*They cannot anticipate COVID’s mutations
*They are studying the virus in real time, precisely because they DO NOT UNDERSTAND it, and with each passing study the COVID of yesterday is not the COVID of today and will not be the COVID of tomorrow.
*They are making policy decisions NEVER MADE BEFORE. There is no expert on the ramifications and outcomes of shutting down a Global System (at every level of scale: the individual, domestic, local, social, intercontinental and global).
*They do not know the risk or effectiveness of the vaccine. They are studying this in real time on a few billion people across the globe. They are testing it on you, your family, and your children.
What have we learned so far?
Those two shots at 95% effectiveness you took last May….
ummmmmm…..yeah….
not two shots and that effectiveness really drops
ummmmmm….
so here is a third shot, and you know, let us call it a booster
and yeah…
take a fourth shot, or a second booster
ummmm…
download this app to make sure you can log in your fifth shot
ummmmm….
and we don’t know how effective that booster will be long term
and….ummmmmm….risk…
we call that safety.
There is no risk. All benefit, no risk.
All that talk of ADE and Original Antigenic Sin…don’t listen to those experts….
WE are the experts…
Take the FUCKING shots…
oh yeah! you can still transmit and get COVID…
sorry we messed that up when you first took the shot in May.
WOOPS.
Too bad you consented based on WRONG information!
There are no experts for this.
Only people with something to gain.
Commandment 2
All politicians and policy makers must be audited and investigated either immediately or the moment their special authorities have ended.
*There must be total and complete transparency. All emails and correspondences related to COVID and its policy must be made public.
*All negotiations with pharmaceutical companies, all contracts signed, all financial agreements disclosed, including personal, institutional, corporate, and governmental agreements.
*All minutes from every meeting which resulted in policy decisions must be made public.
*All scientific studies along with experts consulted must be made public and hearings must be conducted by panels interrogating the science and the consultants by a diverse panel of peers.
*All violations of constitutional and human rights must carry the weight of law.
*A full and complete accounting of policy decisions must be conducted.
*Every medical official who participated in policy decisions must be audited.
I am not suggesting a kangaroo court or something like the Nuremberg trials.
It is depressing to admit that a vast swath of leaders and policy makers, who happened to be in positions of power, when COVID spread across the globe, were simply not up to the task to make the policy decisions they were tasked to make. We do not need to make believe these were good leaders. They weren’t.
Look, Trudeau is a perfectly fine PM when you want to legalize weed or pretend that gender diversity in your cabinet is the most vital social issue confronting Canadians. But when it comes to a real crisis, frankly, he should have been put back into the trunk by his ventriloquist and placed in a dark corner.
Nearly every leader was wholly incapable and incompetent in forming and implementing a proper policy response.
Let us be honest, the choices were between shit sandwich one and shit sandwich two or shit sandwich three or shit sandwich four. But after eating a shit sandwich for a while, you should realize it is shit and change course.
Remember, a right policy at the beginning becomes the wrong policy eventually.
But the reckoning is here. They had their chance. They showed themselves to be more interested in constructing and cultivating a narrative than they were about creating a multi-pronged COVID strategy that was honest about Age-Comorbidity stratification, about the need for increasing ICU capacity during seasonal surges, and about the limits of the vaccine with respect to risk (not safety) and efficacy.
Commandment 3
All profits generated from the pandemic must be confiscated.
You heard me.
We must wholly DE-INCENTIVIZE crisis capital.
All profits. This includes profits made by pharmaceutical companies, but also profit made by the medical establishment with respect to the employment of particular medical procedures against COVID.
So all those bills charged to people you plugged into a ventilator….yeah…how much did you charge them? You give that money back.
All of it.
I bet if you were not profiting from intubation, you might try to intubate less. I wonder what cheap alternatives you could have tried? We will never know.
I am not suggesting that companies not eventually profit from their research, but this profit can only come once the pandemic is declared over and society returns to normal.
All profits confiscated will be reallocated to increase hospital capacity and update medical infrastructure so the excuse of “overwhelming the hospital system” can never be used again.
Commandment 4
Legal safeguards must be established in order to prevent this situation from repeating.
*All governments must be bound by a global code of rights and obligations during pandemics.
*No government can infringe on personal or individual rights.
*All government health mandates must adhere to the rights of informed consent.
*There can be no coercion to compel individuals into a medical decision. Vaccine passports, economic indemnity through job loss or a health tax, barring individuals from social and civil society, etc must all be declared crimes against humanity.
*Governments do not have the right to shut down businesses, churches, schools or any other fundamental institution of civil society.
*All governments and policy makers must undergo a continuous audit with total and complete disclosure of information forming policy decisions.
*All statistical models that are used as a basis for policy decisions must approximate a 90% rate of accuracy in order to be employed in policy making.
*Quarantine camps must be outlawed.
Fill in your own safeguard.
Commandment 5
“Nudging” and the application of behavioural science must be outlawed.
Nudging is inherently anti-democratic.
Nudging assumes that policy makers understand and know the proper course of action with respect to an issue. Instead, policy makers should assume that perhaps they are incorrect and seek to have an open and public debate on policy and policy decisions.
Nudging not only circumvents public policy debates, it is simply another term for government propaganda.
When it comes to medical decisions, nudging violates informed consent. It has no place in medicine.
The current crisis with respect to COVID and COVID policy is in no small part caused by the employment of nudging in place of transparent and open public debate. In fact there is a huge swath of the people who have been nudged into behaviours that lack complete and total scientific and medical rationale.
As an addendum, the employment of fear and hysteria to motivate behaviour must be outlawed. Institutional employment of fear on a populous is a form of terrorism and it ought to be treated as such.
Commandment 6
The informational ecosystem of media and social media must be wholly reimagined.
There must be a vigorous reorganization of our systems of information. Any and all informational pathways must be wholly transparent.
*The people have the right to see all editorial decisions as to what is reported on and what is not reported on by media outlets.
*All minutes from meetings by media and news organizations must be made public.
*Issues of particular import must have equal representation of all view points. Not TWO view points but ALL view points.
*All programming that is simply Opinion Editorialization (as for example The View) must be accompanied by a viewership warning that the opinions expressed are made by uninformed people and should not be taken as information, but rather as entertainment.
*Fact-Checking must undergo a legal process by which a broad and diverse collection of experts in domains of knowledge check the veracity of information. The process by which something is deemed a “fact” must undergo total and complete transparent scrutiny.
*Access to power must be de-incentivized as it results in misaligning the primary role of a journalist, which is to inform a populous, so a populous can make informed decisions, AND to investigate any and all abuses of power, unethical behaviour, and malfeasance.
*Social Media must be regulated. Social Media companies cannot ban individuals from their platforms or act as mouthpieces of institutions of power. Social Media companies must publish all minutes and have all of their internal correspondence open for public perusal.
Commandment 7
All data related to the pandemic must be easily accessed and understood.
*Only those who have died directly from a disease must be counted as having died from that disease.
*Clear, health guidance on age and comorbidity must be published.
*Rates of risk must be published. For COVID risk for a healthy 5 year old is WHOLLY different than for an 85 year old in extremely poor health. Everyone must understand their own individual risk, and this risk must be situated among a broader context of risk so that people can make appropriate health decisions based on accurate risk assessment.
*Data on negative outcomes from policy must also be published. For example, the CDC must also publish data related to the outcomes of COVID policy with respect to mental health, sexual violence, divorce, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence, crime, bankruptcy, unemployment, etc etc. Citizens must have clear and easy access to accurate information on the negative outcomes of policy decisions.
*Full and complete yearly audits on the information are to be conducted. Any manipulation of the data in order to influence public perception must be punishable by law.
Commandment 8
A recommitment to an humanistic education
Humanistic education must be reintegrated into public school education. Students must read from a broad swath of literature in order to understand basic ideas on life, death, ethics, morality, emotion, philosophy, religion, poetry, and politics.
We must educate our children and young people in a way that allows them to draw from the intellectual history of humanity in order to understand their own moment in the long story of the human.
Had the vast majority of the population been able to situate the present moment of COVID among plagues of the past that killed 20,30, 40 percent of the population—in contrast to the present moment of a 1.7% population increase of 81,000,000 people during each year of the pandemic—it is likely that mental health crises, along with a number of other crises, could have been mitigated.
We have to assume that the failure of our educational systems is purposeful by policy makers. Parents and pedagogues must reassert an educational system that can elevate human consciousness and make it less susceptible to powerful institutions and interests.
Commandment 9
Once this awful moment in global malfeasance of the miasmatic state concludes there must be a moment of mass reconciliation.
The divisions in society are deep, and we are nearing a moment when they will become permanent.
Business owners and their patrons who participated in the actions of vaccine passports and medical apartheid must take accountability for actively participating in the bio-medical state that served to discriminate and segregate.
One cannot say we were simply following the mandates. You must own your moral and ethical behaviour.
It was wrong what you did. And you must accept that, for a moment, you became so demoralized by your government you did harm to civic society.
The doctors, nurses, lawyers and judges who refused to give medical treatment, or did not question the medical treatment they were giving, or who refused legal advice to those who made a different medical decision than you, or who adjudicated cases according to medical discrimination…all of you must accept your complicity.
It was wrong what you did. And you must accept that, for a moment, you became so demoralized by your government you did harm to civic society.
And for everyone else who demonized this person or that person based on their medical decisions…
It was wrong what you did. And you must accept that, for a moment, you became so demoralized by your government you did harm to civic society.
Apologize.
Commandment 10
Any future pandemic immediately enacts the above 9 safeguards.