22 March 2020 - #MAGAAnalysis #Coronavirus
Friends, it's time to hail two heroes, @1GigiSims and @TamaraLeigh_llc. Today, we'll focus on Gigi's work. Tomorrow, Tamara's.
Friends, it's time to hail two heroes, @1GigiSims and @TamaraLeigh_llc. Today, we'll focus on Gigi's work. Tomorrow, Tamara's.
2) Let's just talk about Gigi herself 1st. I don't know her well. I assume she has an intelligence background, but I'm not sure. What I do know is that she has extraordinary analytic and creative capabilities. Her threads are beyond extraordinary. If you don't follow her yet, do.
3) There is something I call a @GenFlynn nexus of support and analysis here at Twitter. @1GigiSims is one of its great leaders. Her work on Gen Flynn's story is unparalleled. Again, if you haven't followed Gigi yet, please do so now, and look for her Gen Flynn work.
4) Now, let's turn back to her short thread, posted yesterday, on @Coronavirus. There's an incredible story there. In the coming posts, I'm going to attempt to retell that story from a complete novice layman's perspective. It is about a bio-weapon of mass destruction.
5) Gigi does, as always, a spectacular job laying out the basic logic and facts. That's one of the things I love most about her work. Her facts are always 100% documented and her logical analysis of those facts is always flawless. And please mind, I do not use that word lightly.
6) Allow me to share how I read Gigi's thread. First, I read her own words and quotes slowly and carefully. Second, I click on the images she posts from Allen Bond's article. Third, from post 10, I have the article itself up as a tab in my browser, and will read it in full, soon.
7) I brag that one of the keys to my ability to read is this. There is a principle that, of all people, L. Ron Hubbard introduced about reading. He taught that people's comprehension of what they read is limited by their vocabulary. Stick with me...
8) Hubbard teaches us that the first time you read a word you do not understand, your mind begins to wander, and you begin to lose comprehension. We might call his theory the Hard Vocabulary Theory of Reading and Comprehension. I 100% agree with this theory.
9) So, what I do when reading is note every term I do not understand, carefully. If I determine I am going to actually master the work, I write each term I don't know down, as a list, a numbered list. And, when I get truly diligent, I then study each term, one by one.
10) Such diligent study is a rare thing for me. So, I realized long ago I needed a strategy for reading things I will NOT master in that slow, methodical manner. I call this strategy the Logical Zoom Out method. I'll explain...
11) When I zoom out, I simply say to myself something like, 'I don't know what that term means, but I get the basic idea, the flow of the logic in the overall story, so, I'll just keep reading.' Does that make sense? I just zoom out and track the logic of the story.
12) What I'm about to do is share the results of that process, as I just employed it over Gigi's great work, and over the quotes and images she posted from Bond's incredible report. And, I'll give you the bottom line right now, first...
13) The bottom line is this. The state of the art in bio-weapon design is not done at the nano-scale level of moving molecules and atoms around, designing a virus from the ground up. Rather, it is done by working with nature, syncing up with viruses found in nature.
14) Now, let's slow down and flesh that out a bit. We think of a bio-lag as culturing stuff - I'm not a biologist, so just let me have the word "stuff," please) in a petri dish. Sure, we can think of vials of chemical this, or centrifuges separating out this and that, too.
15) But all this traditional, high school biology lab stuff misleads us. There is a far more ancient approach we should employ to wrap our minds around this. Animal husbandry. We want goats and cows that give us the most milk, right. So, we breed them for that purpose.
16) All we do is find the most productive members of our herd, and focus most attention and tender loving support on them. Follow it out. You find one cow that produces more milk than all the rest. So, you take her off the production line, and use her for breeding.
17) Of course you still milk her, but you give her every extra special form of care. And, you dedicate her for breeding, far more than you care about her milk. Then, you repeat. Of her offspring, you find the most milk-productive of the next generation, and do the same.
18) This method of breeding has been in place for about 10,000 years or so. Another quick example. The wheat that we use to make our bread today, is countless thousands of breed generations away from the original grasses upon which wheat farming was founded.
19) From reading Gigi's work, and the images she snapped from Bond's article, I glean that virus farming is the actual method of bio-weapon design today. And low and behold, as a cow gives milk, bats and pigs give us viruses that can "skip" to humans. Go figure!
20) I won't even try to talk about proteins, amino acids, or how they function in a virus. That's just too far for my limited science education to address. At least so far. But, let's pause on that. Who remembers Isaac Asimov? If you do, you likely remember his science fiction.
21) While I love his science fiction in my youth, I later discovered that Asimov's science fact work was, to my eye, a far greater contribution. As a little experiment, I just went to Amazon.com and purchased this book. I'll explain why...
amazon.com/gp/product/B00…
amazon.com/gp/product/B00…
22) There are many pages of books by Asimov there, and the first two and half pages are all fiction. But, in the middle of page three, I found the book above, one I did not own, which was the first science fact book that came up. It looks fantastic and I need to read it!
23) Later on, I'll keep looking and searching until I find whatever work of his that comes closest to proteins, and closest to viruses. Once I find it, I'll buy it, read it, and report back to you. Now, let me ask, are following the method of study so far?
24) Evidently, if we're going to come to determine if we're already in a biological war with China, if they have executed a first strike attack with a weapon of biological mass destruction, we're going to need a basic understanding of viruses and protein science, as laymen.
25) Homework aside, let's get back to our story. It appears that there is a strain of viruses in bats that can be cultured in a laboratory for their ability to attach to proteins in humans. If this is right - I'm pretty sure it is - that's how you camouflage your bio-weapon.
26) If I've got this right, we can now fill in for the word "skip." How does a virus skip from one species to another? It's structure somehow attaches to the proteins in the first specie's cells in so similar a manner to the second specie's cells, that the skip succeeds.
27) Now let's take a gigantic step backward in time. As I understand it, by evolutionary theory, life was formed about 4 billion years ago, after many failed "attempts." There were many protocells that failed, due to the toxic environment they spawned into.
28) The problem, as I understand it, was that life seemed to generate, to excrete if you will, oxygen, which was completely toxic to those early cells. They polluted their environment and rapidly went extinct. Until...cosmic drum roll please, a mutation occurred in one of them.
29) That mutation empowered that first surviving cell species to breathe, to breath in oxygen. What had been toxic pollution then became the very basis of all life on earth. Well, most of it. Aerobic life commenced. There are anaerobic cells to this day.
30) Aerobic is just a fancy term for oxygen breathing. We do have, even now, cells that don't breathe oxygen. How about that. I know they exist, but that's the limit of my knowledge on that topic, for now! It's the aerobic cellular life that we care about.
31) And why do we care? Because, again as I understand it, they were basically viruses. Maybe proto-viruses? As always in these technical areas, I beg and plead, you experts out there, come in and correct all the egregious errors I'm blundering into as a layman. Please!
32) But, taking what I've got as if it weren't 100% wrong, when we look at evolution, we're essentially looking at the evolution of viruses into other things. They split up into this type and that type. Proto-organs such as light sensors and sound sensors evolved.
33) Then over another billion years or so, the blink of the evolutionary clock, you've got little creatures that can "see" or "hear." And from cells, we get organisms, which, when combined together, become organs in a little animalcule type thingy.
34) Again skipping forward a few more billion years (who's counting?) we find 10,000 years ago those famers breading wheat that we discussed above. Do you see, the process of selection, survival of some fittest thing has always been the method. And that, according to Bond is...
35) According to my laymen's reading of Bond's article, such a selection process has now been speeded up to between 10 and 20 years or so, by bio-weapons engineers, and has reached critical mass as today's most hellacious weapon of mass destruction.
36) If this is right - and I desperately wish it not to be so - then here's where we are. We created that atomic bomb during WWII, and then, during the Cold War, thermonuclear war was the one thing that had to be avoided at all costs. And we had a strategy.
37) Our strategy was called, as you likely know, Mutually Assured Destruction. I won't spend any time with that right now, but I assure you, I have done my homework on it. My own personal little story of homework on it is, well, kind of an important one. Another day, though.
38) Suffice it to say, I went from opposing nuclear weapons to being their greatest fan. I have found that I love to convert in life, but again, that's another story. It was a successful strategy. It not only won the Cold War for us, it proved actually preventative as it hoped.
39) If I read Bond's article correctly, we must face the fact that while the nuclear age is still in full force to this day, we have now entered the age of biological warfare, and apparently, we have NOT had a strategy so far. The key words there are..."so far."
40) As I watch @POTUS' daily Coronavirus briefings, however, I see a new strategy for defending against biological warfare emerging. I'll describe what I'm seeing, just a little. First, I'll try to name this new strategy. I see it for now as Individually Assured Survival.
41) I'll again go slowly here. When I first commenced my study and daily practice of swordsmanship I soon found a great strategic question. What is more important, I asked, defense or offense. And the answer I was given, invariably at first, was offense.
42) I was skeptical but there was a good basis for this case in the art I focused on, the German Tradition, the Fore Strike, the first strike, was honored above all. But as centuries passed, the literature seemed to move towards defense.
43) It wasn't until I returned to my study of Master Sun Tzu that I came to buy into the supremacy of defense over offense, which is where I stand today. When I spar, I don't attack at first, at all. I defend as I measure the method and strengths of my opponent.
44) I find that my opponent's enthusiasm drops as he fails to penetrate my openings due to my adequate defense. Then, when he's dispirited enough, I seek out his own weaknesses and openings, and work to widen those openings. Then, finally, I strike offensively.
45) This is what I suspect will be the case for nations in the age of biological warfare. The nation that will win, will NEVER employ a biological weapon. But, it's biological defense capability will top the world. And that is precisely what I see Trump and team creating.
46) I won't turn my attention to offensive strategy in this new age for the moment. Also, another day. But, will skip forward to the next stage of the new warfare environment. Well, let me lay out the four stages I've analyzed previously, again.
47) What I see as this war's stages are:
1) Biological attack
2) Economic
3) Social
4) Military (or Kinetic, or Traditional, Conventional-to-Nuclear) attack
1) Biological attack
2) Economic
3) Social
4) Military (or Kinetic, or Traditional, Conventional-to-Nuclear) attack
48) My fear is that China has commenced the first three stages of attack. My confidence is that Trump is already strongly at work defeating all three, and in success, and his military might, he will stave off stage four. The point remains, defense is the most important, first.
49) But let's finish up by returning to @1GigiSims work itself. Gigi is a forward leaning analyst. She finds the cutting edge, the bleeding up-to-the-moment most important information. She brilliantly analyzes it, and gives it to us when we need it most. And more...
50) Beyond her research and analysis, Gigi is a brilliant artist of the form. My threads are verbal. Her's are both verbal and artistic. Not that writing isn't an art, it is. But her combination of words and visuals is a gift for which we must all thank her. Please do so!
