Posted in The Bar here, I took a look.
Gee, where 'ya been Sasha? I've been talking about this with people for a very long time with plenty of pushback and people telling me that "oh no, they're really going to figure it out" and "this is the way!"
Uh, no its not.
Remember back when Covid first started I observed that the Holy Grail of bioweapon research since, well, forever was finding something that nailed your enemy but left your guys alone. The reason is obvious: You can't control where a bioweapon goes once you release it, so it had better selectively kill or disable the enemy and not you -- or you screw yourself. In addition it has to be stable on both a metabolic and mutational basis or the odds are very good that while it might not screw your people instantly it will turn into something that does.
Of course the other problem is that once you let it out you can't "un-release" it so there are no "mulligans."
People have believed they could engineer this because there is natural evidence for it. When the slave trade into the United States began it was only possible because black tribesmen were doing the capturing and selling of said slaves. In other words white dudes with ships exploited that trade but they didn't create it or dream it up -- the black people themselves did and in fact were trading slaves among themselves for a very long time before white man showed up with their ships.
The reason was simple: Due to endemic pestilence in that part of the world to which no white person had any immune resistance your expected survival time as a white person in that part of the world was 30 days. Thus without said slaves being delivered to the coast by the black tribesmen it could have never happened.
The same thing happened in what is now America. The indigenous population had zero immune resistance to common infectious agents that regularly ran through European people. Everyone knows about smallpox but smallpox was nasty-deadly to anyone and thus while there was a large difference in mortality it was in the tens of percent rather than tens of times. The big differentiating factor when it came to susceptibility was in fact measles, which was uncommonly fatal (perhaps 1 in 100) among Europeans at the time but it killed 10-20% or more of the indigenous people who got it, and being ridiculously transmissible it ripped through their populations as soon as they started to interact with Colonists.
This pattern would lead you to believe that its simply a matter of "better, faster and cheaper" data analysis that stands between you and the Holy Grail of bioweapon research -- or a cure for any of a whole bunch of nasty diseases and conditions, such as cancer.
Wrong.
Why was it wrong?
As I've pointed out repeatedly: We have a crappy understanding of how all the components of the immune system function together. We understand perhaps 10% of the whole -- and that part quite poorly. Further, we fashion ourselves as "training" it when in fact it is the continual assault by the natural world that does this. This is why mimics can work (and sort of do, most of the time) but as soon as you venture off that path into artificial stimulus or "augmenting" mimicry you're asking for trouble and are very likely to find it.
This is why mRNA was and remains stupid as the very premise of it is not mimicry but rather the deliberate abuse of cellular machinery in the body to produce an antigen. To use it if (1) you are sterile either by time or choice and (2) you have a fatal condition and thus nothing to lose then using such a thing makes sense. Why not? You can't be dead twice, since you're sterile you can't pass it on beyond yourself and thus the shot at becoming not-dead is "free", even if the odds of success are tiny. To use such a thing otherwise is to demonstrate a profound lack of mental capacity and you deserve what you get if you allow anyone to administer it to you voluntarily, and if they do so involuntarily, whether through fraud or otherwise you should kill them immediately along with everyone else associated with that act. It is that serious of an issue to tamper with that which is absolutely required for your continued existence and that of humans in general and we do not, and in the present time cannot, understand the processes involved sufficiently to tamper with them beyond pure mimicry without the risk of extreme consequence up to and including death of your person.
Indeed it is probably the balance of natural assaults and your immune system that is the magic of life on this planet. Ionizing radiation causes mutation and there are natural sources not only in the rock this planet is made of, but also from the solar and cosmic radiation that is omnipresent. That radiation is sufficient to damage DNA by knocking electrons out of an atom's orbit. Most of the time this is fatal to the cell involved -- but not always. Once in a while it results in destroyed regulation of growth, and an even lesser (by a lot) percentage of the time it is probably where mutational changes came from that drove evolution! In other words its why we, and everything else, are here -- including all the diversity of humans, their skin colors and other mutationally-created differences. It is why there are different colored eyes, hair, skin, heights and more. It in fact may well be how cellular life evolved originally and ultimately led to every single animal and plant on this rock.
But far more-importantly (and irrespective of your religious beliefs as to how this all started or happened through time) this presence of natural mutagenic influence which cannot be evaded anywhere in the universe gives rise to the fundamental requirement for an immune response -- to police that activity, hunt down and destroy abnormal cells that are identified as not following the normal cellular life-cycle above all else because if it doesn't the organism turns septic or gets cancer and dies before it can reproduce.
Incidentally this very pattern explains many other natural phenomena. For example, we know fast carbs are bad in size but over enormous numbers of generations "weeding out" those genomic lines that are less-capable of processing them means some genetic lines become more-resistant to the bad effects than others. Thus a person with a genetic line from Ireland can probably eat more potatoes without getting as fat and/or diabetic than can someone with a sub-Saharan African lineage where that intake was entirely-absent over thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. This also explains why the Inuit, who had a historical near zero cardiovascular, obesity and diabetes rate and ate nearly all animal fat and protein, specifically seal and fish, ended up with the highest obesity, diabetes and heart disease rates as soon as they got access to "Western" foods -- far more-so than someone of European descent. And it explains why the Chinese had the same thing happen when they went from being peasants consuming mostly white rice and a strictly limited caloric intake as they had no money to pay for more to having an unlimited carb, meat and seed oil diet -- and immediately blew up like balloons, going from extremely low rates of said diseases to very high ones where the Japanese, who did not generally have the same issues with privation across centuries within their population, never mind a decent amount of animal protein and fat from fish all along, didn't have that happen to nearly the same degree.
In other words its not "systemic racism" that leads to black people having more heart disease, diabetes and obesity in the United States, nor is it the much-claimed "food desert." It is simply that in general people of that genetic descent cannot eat fast carbs other than green vegetables without severe consequences and thus in general never should consume any of them because they have zero metabolic resistance to the effects since their genetic line never had exposure to them prior to a couple of hundred years ago. Individual experience will vary and some members of said population can get away with it but most cannot and thus from a public health point of view that should be the advice. But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge both fact and insist that people take agency for their own health rather than blame someone -- anyone -- else and, of course, reach for the pill bottle while screwing both their health and wallet.
Incidentally this is also why the presumption that seed oils are "ok" is exactly backward. There was precisely zero capacity for any proto-human, any human, or any other animal which might have been a human precursor to consume essentially all of them in size prior to machine processing. The presumption thus must be that for those where machine processing is required for them to exist and be used they are metabolic poisons -- without exception.
There's no evidence that we're anywhere in the neighborhood of being able to understand all of the components that go into this response and thus what we can tamper with and what we can't without serious or even fatal consequence.
That which we do not understand no computer can work since no computer actually thinks and we cannot teach it what we have no basis for.
No machine has ever demonstrated out-of-scope capacity and yet humans do it every single day and in virtually every case we don't even realize we've done it.
God forbid, by the way, if within a machine that was to ever happen. The day it does is the day we are either slaves -- all of us -- or are extinguished. Fortunately there's no evidence, despite the hype, that any such event is on the horizon.