this episode isnt the first, but it is the one most focused on the events of lake tahoe /incline village in 1985-1986.

it includes lots of detail about my personal journey but also lots of info about the Lake tahoe CFS outbreak, and the possible environmental and viral origins of it. We talk mold avoidance, cloud seeding, cyanobacteria, Erik Johnson, nanoparticles, and “chronic fatigue syndrome”.

here it is:
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/3Tucb

Heres my fundraiser. If any of you can support it, i implore you to.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-walker-beat-me-cfs?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cp_guide_do&member=11756239

if i recover from this illness I will be a skillful and fierce advocate. I have many of the necessary tools to do so, without the energy or resources.

thanks

(tags: Open Medicine Foundation, MCAS, mechanical basis, mechanical basis cci ME/CFS, Ron Davis, whitney dafoe, toxic mold, Jen brea mold, mold avoidance, tryptase, mmp-9, craniocervical instability, tgf beta is high in cfs and in connective tissue disorders, tgf beta)

Dauer

I am a worm in 

winter.  Inside–sickly-

sweet sap for blood. It’s 

embalming fluid, it shuts me 

down.

My voice is brittle, my

hair is brittle, I am 

prone to cracking.  

Fragility is damned and

beautiful.  I speak my

brittle voice as if

from behind a layer of 

glassine, or glass.  

My heart pumps 

slow and heavily,

driving the winter 

sap through my body.

 Something

heavy lies resigned in

my veins.  

    On the window-

panes, chrystals waltz

slowly, accumulating

stasis.  I am the inside of a 

cell in a whale’s blubber.  I am 

someplace so deep in the

ocean that light has to 

work to get there.

I shiver, ice  is in my bones, slowing

time for me.  I can see through the 

amber on my coffin, and I am fighting the

encroaching chill.

There are songs that 

come from within ice,

there are long seasons

that sing to the body, that

wrap it tight, like pagan 

gods.  

My new residence is

   Chronos’ coffin, 

wrapped in capillaries

of frost.

    Ice gods have

no mercy, their fragility

is an infection, diffusing 

outward from the axis mundi.

More brittle than angry,

their Midas touch turns

flesh to glass and 

tin, turns irises purple-

grey.  The silver in 

me reacts to light, 

needs to be washed and 

affixed, angrily begging to be

burned in acid.

Freezing a thing preserves it, at the

cost of life.  A photograph needs a

victim.  A taxidermied bear loses its

grandeur, becomes harmless.  I lose

my energy, one electron at a time.  Memories

calcify.

    Enduring is a

function of metabolism.

An infant or a humming-

bird thrum a spring

music with their 

hearts and wings.  

I sing icebergs

creaking, my vision 

fogged like frosted

glass.

(Dauer, German for “enduring”, is a hypometabolic state found in some animals such as nematodes.  Robert Naviaux, an expert in mitochondrial and metabolic diseases, found strong similarities between ME/CFS patients and animals in dauer. Info here: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/37/E5472 )

we are canaries in the coal mine, or we are sentinels–biological or ecological early warning systems for systemic disasters.

Coping with that may involve formal religious faith for some, it may Involve consuming or making art for others. I continue to present some of the things I think are related to ME/CFS , toxin /mold illness, sickness and healing and death…

grouper (liz Harris) is one of my favorite musicians.

Sat Apr 04, 2020 11:30 amI dont listen to music much since I’ve been most ill bc of sound sensitivity. Before one and a half years ago I listened to a ton of music bc I used to be a musician and while I was moderately ill it was a way to keep myself sane

I think that the musician Grouper is probably really great ambient deep ecology ethereal music , the type of music that I aspire to listen to while recovered and living in my cabin or trailer in wyoming , or the yukon, or a canyon in utah. I haven’t listened in awhile but recommend “Wide”, “Dragging a dead deer up a hill” and “headache” by grouper

groupers music totally makes me imagine living deep in a temperate forest , or even a desert , and healing in the air slowly. And it makes me think of elves in the forests and groves that elves tend to frequent.

the idea of a dense, protective and perhaps even healing forest appeals to me a lot, and I think a lot of du weldenvarden , the forest from the fantasy novels Of the Inheritance Cycle , by Christopher paolini (starting with Eragon)

tags: hypostition, cryochronology, Ron davis, Dauer, Robert Naviaux, Stasis, metabolic trap, mold avoidance

first reformed

12 monkeys

fallout new Vegas

stalker (prescience of movie wrt post apocalypse, Chernobyl etc)

solaris (alterity of environment and futility of war against environment constituted as the Other–spits back that which is thrown at it)

Ishmael and the Story of B

Desert Solitaire

Paradise lost (haven’t finished), Inferno

Answer to Job (but haven’t read it all) by Jung

Princess Mononoke

Miyazaki is great at intertwining theological and ecological/scientific problems. Nausicaa approaches complex second order ecological toxin effects in a way I dont think any other piece of artistic work has, all while being a compelling thriller that is a visual fea(s)t.

Okay… I’m not doing well bc of worsened pain and trouble typing, so I’ll just try and rest and adapt… although I hate it and prefer raging against the dying of the light , etc etc…however I’ll continue to update this post.

<button type="button">pain</button>

Try all of the buttons.  I dont know code but I’m trying them out.  Maybe they’ll help navigate somewhere relevant. 

Pain

pain

Part of this website is a protest, or amalgamations of various protests beyond mine. Part of it is a simple piece of history, record, and part of it is about science. and these are all related. I dont know what we’d find in my neck if we opened it up and took a connective tissue biopsy (we will know soon), but I do know that what we’d be doing is similar to both excavating an archeological site, and taking a sample of earth from a site in the Amazon. Its history, science, or maybe even art if our dying world has the luxury for that as well.

Currently my body is forcing me to slow down with my musings. and to some extent also forcing me to slow down even with simple copy and paste tasks. But I have a sisyphean task , I think. To document this all, until someone notices and cares, someone who has more power than me. someone with as much or more power than Walter Koroshetz. Maybe to get the money to get better and continue trying bleeding edge treatments all at once, id have to be famous or wealthy, things that otherwise haven’t been the main object of my life. To be an agent of history instead of being acted on not just by my environment, but by the people who triggered the butterfly effect that affected that environment that affects me.

ME/CFS, ART, ME/CFS ART, nanoparticles, fungal spores, miyazaki, disability art, chryochronology, craniocervical instability, lake tahoe, incline village outbreak, hunter x hunter, anime, nanoparticles, Edward abbey, open Medicine foundation, deep ecology)

• 

In light of the gigantic volume of anecdotal evidence regarding some kind of toxin associated with fire retardant usage, I think it’s worth thinking about the broader social and ecological and financial reasons for our policies of fire suppression and war on fire. We may not be able to prevent climate change or most ecological toxins, but what Lisa Petrison calls “fire retardant associated toxin,” (introduced here: https://paradigmchange.me/wp/outdoor-toxins/) is a tragically preventable toxin, produced by misguided short term fire suppression policies that dont even work to stop fires. And the worst thing is that it affects wilderness areas, so one can’t even escape it just by avoiding civilization.

Mike Davis may not know about mold avoidance and FRAT’s health effects, but his understanding of the economic context of development in California–which incentivizes such blatantly stupid policies as “total fire suppression”–helps us to learn what is sustaining these policies that are poisoning people exposed to these toxins. I chose to read this aloud and record it partially to expose an audience that is typically laser focused on mold avoidance related content, to class and sociological criticism that may be atypical for them, and also because, like the Edward Abbey excerpt I recently recorded, it’s very relevant to a deep understanding of ecology and its effects on human health.

So here is the recording https://youtu.be/JgHOzn4xiS4

And here is the text version of the original article: https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-finally-identify-a-deadly-toxin-thats-been-killing-birds

Erik Johnson and Lisa Petrison have been sounding the alarm for awhile about the possibility of bio toxins (mostly mold or cyanobacteria and their toxins) combining with chemicals in such a way that would make them far more virulent.

They have not gotten nearly enough credit for or attention to these theories, but recent research, including the above, has vindicated them.

The cyanobacteria in the aforementioned article didn’t make the neurotoxin until bromide was present. The source of the bromide wasn’t identified, but could have been pesticides, fracking fluid, or fire retardant.

In the Lake Tahoe outbreak that led to the coining of term and diagnostic category “chronic fatigue syndrome” by the CDC, a cyanobacteria bloom was pointed to by several people, but most prominently by Erik Johnson, as a possible factor in the illness. (https://cfsuntied.net/2014/12/04/and-now-for-something-completely-different/). He noted some additional things that could have combined with this biotoxin, like cloud seeding with silver nanoparticles, and a trichloroethylene spill in the sewer system. None of this was investigated at the time.

Those theories of cyanobacteria or molds combining with chemicals from the environment are similar to what happened in the original study:

“After finding the toxin, the research team picked up speed. They isolated the compound containing bromide and confirmed it was present in the dead birds that showed lesions. They looked at the hydrilla plant itself and discovered it’s able to enrich bromide from the environment, making it even more available to the cyanobacteria. “The concentration of bromide in the plant is much higher than in the water or in the sediment where the plant grows,” says Niedermeyer. “This is kind of intriguing, but we don’t know why the plant does it.”

But in this murder mystery, identifying the culprit isn’t quite the same as ending the story. The team still has a lot of questions. Did the cyanobacteria invade with the hydrilla or was it already in the water? Is the bromide naturally occurring, or could it be coming from man-made sources like coal-fired power plants and flame retardants? Hydrilla is such a persistent pest that people have tried using herbicides like diquat dibromide to kill it off; could that herbicide be the source of the ingredient that creates this toxin? Wilde and Niedermeyer think it’s possible.”

I believe that many scientists strongly underestimate environmental factors in human disease due to a cognitive bias in which we consider ourselves apart from “nature”. This happens to even the smartest scientist. Robert Naviaux (who may be an exception to the trend of scientists ignoring environmental causes of chronic illness) noted that environmental toxins are likely to be a factor in CFS as well as most diseases. (http://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/the-28th-amendment-project/).

However, no scientist has investigated Erik Johnsons theories, or Lisa Petrisons. I criticize Ron Davis not because I don’t think he’s intelligent. I consider him more intelligent than most scientists and more intelligent than me. But intelligent people can easily miss simple patterns that a less academic person could pick up with somewhat common sense heuristics. The Open Medicine Foundation and Ron davis have the best minds and skillsets and funding to investigate environmental toxins, out of all of the ME/CFS researchers, but they are doing a poor job on it.

I’m currently in a bad flair, so this is a very incomplete post, but I will update it with more scientific theories related to Fire Retardant Associated Toxins, cyanobacteria, and this recent study; as well as my ideas on deep ecology and cognitive bias. In the meantime, here is a video that is an attempt at me understanding the mechanisms behind this bias by scientist such as Ron Davis of Stanford, and the whole Open Medicine Foundation

Here’s a relevant forum thread about various studies related to cyanobacteria and mold and nanoparticles:

https://forums.phoenixrising.me/threads/mold-colonies-aggregate-and-use-environmental-nanoparticles-becoming-more-pathogenic.77128/

Relevant quote: “

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/27/7087

I really can’t overstate how huge this article is. There have been previous articles showing that molds can use nanoparticles in interesting ways in the lab, and separately that nanoparticles themselves can act differently re the immune system than diffsize particles. But this article puts that all together and studies the interaction Btwn molds and various kinds of nanoparticles both in the lab and in samples from the “wild” showing that mold colonies aggregate nanoparticles in a way that alters the molds pathogenicity! The authors suggest that it’s probable or possible that most mold in the wild is doing this, and so models based on standard mycotoxin toxicity from labs, don’t accounts for this behavior. And it’s published in a good journal.”

Hopefully Ron Davis from the OMF/Open Medicine Foundation will investigate this, or perhaps Robert Naviaux. I have contacted them about similar, previous studies but they were uninterested, which find strange, given that Naviaux has emphasized the importance of a plethora of environmental stressors in chronic disease.

Some closing thoughts and quotes from Erik Johnson about the Lake Tahoe epidemic:

https://mobile.twitter.com/erikmoldwarrior/status/1330212416899133448

“I think it’s pretty obvious. Lake Tahoe had a massive cyanobacteria bloom. Everyone downwind had a suppressed immune system. Doctors blamed all the various viruses and bacterial infections they found, but not the cyano bloom. Creating mass “CFS” confusion…

https://mobile.twitter.com/erikmoldwarrior/status/1330652150754467841

And I believe that when one puts all the clues together, it adds up to an atmospheric influx of particulates which was highly concentrated in the “bowl” of Lake Tahoe due to the shape of the Sierra Nevada’s. ‘Mountain Effect” Launching the cyanobacteria bloom”