Author: Jennifer Mugrage

I'm a wife, mother, Christian, closet Luddite, Neanderthal advocate, incurable book hound. I'm also the author of The Scattering Trilogy, which is set in 10,000 B.C. Buy, read, pass it on! Leave comments. Let's talk!

Blackpilled by Bitten

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

I have a friend who, shortly after he was married, came down with a mysterious illness. It was causing fatigue, pain, digestive problems, and a bunch of other debilitating symptoms. This guy is young (or was when he first became sick), handsome, and looks fit. He is not in a demographic that you would expect to have trouble being believed, but he had trouble. He’s been accused of faking. He’s been yelled at by a doctor. He and his wife used up all their money, and the illness made it difficult for him to work his job as a builder. Finally, after years of seeking solutions on their own, outside the traditional medical establishment, my friend found a doctor who was willing to look at his blood under a microscope.

Turns out, he has Lyme disease.

It took him fifteen years to get this diagnosis.

As I found out when I read this book, this sort of experience is not unusual for a Lyme patient.

Let’s start with another Lyme testimony

The author, Kris Newby, and her husband were both bitten by Lyme-bearing ticks while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. It didn’t take them 15 years to get a diagnosis … but the disease did ruin their professional lives, use up all their money, and cause them to search through more than ten doctors.

We had brain fog: we couldn’t think, multitask, or remember simple things. The crushing fatigue continued. Our necks felt like they were locked in a vice-grip. Paul’s symptoms were more muscle and joint related. He didn’t have the strength to lift his leg over a bike or press the trigger of a portable drill. Mine were more neurological. I was no longer capable of reading books aloud to my sons before bedtime … I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year. … One day I found myself at a stoplight unable to remember what the red, yellow, and green lights meant.

Rather than admit defeat, Dr. B decided that I was an attention-seeking, hysterical female whose husband was suffering from sympathy pains. He diagnosed us with a “psychosomatic couples thing.”

I spent weeks pulling strings to get an appointment with another infectious disease specialist, this one at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our first few appointments were with a young physician/fellow whom I’ll call Dr. C. …During my final appointment, Dr. C told me, “You’d have more chance of winning the lottery than both of you getting Lyme disease.” Then he strongly recommended that we both seek psychological counseling for the depression we were experiencing.

Dr. D came in at the end of the appointment, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “Sorry, we don’t have the tools to fix what is wrong with you.” Then he dismissed us as patients.

ibid, pp. 85 – 88

As it turned out, most Lyme ticks are also infected with rickettsia, another tick-borne illness that is even harder to detect than Lyme in a blood test: “If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it.” (231) More in a moment about the reasons for this double infection.

Years later, when Newby had been researching Lyme and rickettsia, she found herself again sitting in front of Dr. D., this time as a journalist rather than a patient.

As I sat in his office, I wondered if he remembered me, but I didn’t mention our previous meeting.

At the end of the meeting, I took a chance and asked him, “Are you screening for any rickettsias?”

He said he didn’t know. The genetic sequencing was being done at Columbia University … Dr. D. opened the study protocol on his laptop and realized there were no rickettsias on the screening list. He said he’d see if rickettsias could be added to the search.

As I got up to leave, he added, “When you came by my clinic before, we weren’t allowed to treat chronic Lyme disease. It was department policy. I’m sorry.”

ibid, pp. 236 – 237

The diagnostic standards: made-up

He was not wrong. The diagnostic standards for Lyme specifically deny that chronic Lyme exists.

In the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.

ibid, p. 121

It gets worse. In preparation for her documentary Under Our Skin, the author put in a FOIA request to obtain emails between CDC employees and IDSA guidelines authors. She got the runaround for five years, so they completed the documentary without it. Eventually, she received 3,000 pages of emails which revealed that “a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease … tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders. ” (124) Furthermore, “part of the group’s stated mission … was to run a covert ‘disinformation war ‘ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists … ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks.'” (123)

This pill is not just red, it’s black

The Jen of ten years ago would have been very skeptical of this kind of expose. It would have struck me as too similar to Marxist conspiracy theories where all the bad stuff in the world is caused by “capitalists,” which means primarily “big corporations,” but then is applied to anybody who doesn’t want socialism. Journalists, and Hollywood movie directors, love their government/big business conspiracies. It’s one of the very few kinds of story that get them going. Ordinarily, when I am presented with a “corrupt capitalists” narrative, I sympathize with the supposed villains of the piece because I know that the authors of the piece, if they knew my views, would probably villainize me just as readily.

However, when it comes to health, the Jen of ten years ago has seen some stuff since that time. I’ve met people with Lyme (my friend above is the most poignant example, but there have been others). I’ve met people, particularly women, who have had an extraordinarily hard time getting autoimmune type physical complaints taken seriously. I’ve even had that happen, on a small scale, to myself.

Then there have been the scandals. The ADD drugs scandal, the depression drugs scandal, the cross-sex hormones scandal, and the one we don’t talk about, which involved financial incentives for drug companies to discredit victims of their product and doctors who tried alternative treatments almost exactly like the incentives in relation to Lyme described in this book.

So yeah, I’m not that Jen anymore. I do think Newby is a little leftie (maybe a lot leftie), but that’s not why she wrote this book. She wrote it because she got Lyme disease and a series of doctors called her crazy.

My friend with Lyme also has a lot of food allergies and substance sensitivities. During You-Know-What, when one of his kids broke an arm, he was worried about bringing her to the hospital, because they might force You-Know-What on her as a condition of treatment. They got the arm treated without a jab; happy ending. But we live in a relatively red state. This is a horrible position to be in: where you’ve basically lost all trust in the people you need for critical care.

And that’s not even the bad part.

The Bad Part

Most of Bitten is neither about IDSA scandal nor about the author’s personal experience with Lyme. Instead, it follows the life of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American scientist. Chapter 2 opens with Willy’s triumph when, in 1981, he discovered spirochetes, similar to those that cause African relapsing fever, inside the midgut of a blacklegged deer tick. Burgdorfer became a hero in the medical and scientific communities after he and his team proved that these tick-borne spirochetes were what was causing the mysterious Lyme disease. He received awards and honorary degrees. (13 – 15)

Willy called his discovery “serendipity,” a happy accident.

Shortly before his death, Willy was videotaped saying that he believed that the outbreak of tick-borne diseases that started around Lyme, Connecticut, had been caused by a bioweapons release. [This] could explain why the condition we call Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose and treat–and why the epidemic is spreading so far and so fast, [but] Willy’s confession was vague and fragmented because he was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease.

ibid, pp. 15 – 17

The book then backs up and starts with Willy’s childhood in Switzerland and his Ph.D. work there on ticks mailed from East Africa which caused relapsing fever and African swine fever. He does a postdoctoral program at the University of Basel (25), then accepts a research position at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever. More ticks! In fact, the biggest tick collection in North America. “The U.S. Public Health Service, which would later be renamed the National Institutes of Health, paid for the lab by developing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines for … diseases transmitted from animal or arthropod vectors to man.” (35) As the chapters roll by, we follow Willy as he falls in love with and marries a fellow scientist who is a U.S. citizen. Already working for the U.S. government during the Cold War, he soon found himself involved in programs testing nerve gasses and biological weapons.

America’s first deployable incapacitating biological weapon was an aerosolized mix of a toxin, a virus, and a bacterium, designed to create a prolonged period of incapacitation across a population. The first component … SEB, was a toxic waste product of the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In three to twelve hours, [victims] would come down with chills, headache, muscle pain, coughing, and a fever as high as 106 F. The second component, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, would, in one to five days, cause a high fever and weakness and fatigue lasting for weeks. The third component, Q fever, would cause debilitating flulike symptoms for weeks to months … Q fever could be chronic and sometimes even fatal.

When exposed to this mass-produced germ cocktail, theoretically, few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission, making an invasion easier. And no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how nonlethal these weapons could be and wryly noted that they would be nonlethal only for someone with two nurses.

ibid, p. 145

In other words, this was a way to bomb civilians without bombing civilians.

In other words, weapons developers were mixing different germs and toxins deliberately and putting them into a form that could be easily spread.

Meanwhile, Willy was force-feeding pathogens to thousands of ticks.

Near the end of his life, Willy was interviewed on video by Tim Grey, an indie filmmaker, who later shared the tape with Newby.

“If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”

“Yeah. It sounds like, throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have …”

Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper … the paper from 1952?”

In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds–an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.

ibid, pp. 100 – 101

So now you know why I’m blackpilled when it comes to “science” and “medicine” and the NIH. This is why Lyme is going around ruining people’s lives. Because it was designed to.

Black-pilled, but still not a hippie

The book closes, as all hippie books must, with the obligatory chapter blaming Western colonialism.

Big Hole [Montana] was the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce. … U.S. soldiers ambushed them while they were sleeping. The Nez Perce lost eight-nine people, mostly women and children, and the U.S. soldiers lost twenty-nine, with an additional forty injured.

Two months later, Chief Joseph surrendered.

The Native Americans who used to live here understood that they were part of nature, not the overlords of all living things.

When the white settlers arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, they clear-cut the trees around Hamilton for their houses, railroad ties, and mine shafts. This fostered the overgrowth of brush, which led to a proliferation of small mammals, the blood meal hosts for the wood ticks that carry Rickettsia rickettsi. The spotted fever epidemic at the turn of the last century was fueled by this disruption of a previously balanced ecosystem.

ibid, pp. 245 – 247

Now, you know that I have a special interest in American Indians, and feel as much sympathy for them as anybody. And just for the record, I am against the massacre of civilians. That said, it is ridiculous to imply that the settling of North America by Europeans is responsible for the existence of the Lyme epidemic, or of disease in general.

It is a fact of history that people groups move, expand, colonize, and kill each other. And as a result of these people movements, ecology changes, and new diseases spread or become prominent. All this is true. It does not follow that, before any given people movement, the ecosystem was perfectly “balanced,” or that there was no disease and no death. There would have been different causes of death, different diseases, and different wars. The Anasazi, for example, were severely malnourished. The Aztecs were systematically wiping out all the other peoples in central Mexico. Montana was not Eden. It’s a fallen world.

Rather than blaming the U.S. soldiers who killed the Nez Perce for the Lyme epidemic, let’s blame them for what they actually did; namely, killing the Nez Perce. And call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I feel that the blame for the Lyme epidemic should fall on the Cold War era government bioweapons bureaucrats and scientists who actually infected ticks with Lyme and rickettsia, and apparently allowed them to escape somewhere on Long Island. I feel that Occam’s Razor would lead us to point towards them as the culprits, rather than to something big and vague like colonialism. Just a thought.

And I do blame them. Despite my semi-defense of colonialism as the way of the world, no, I do not think it’s a good idea to create a cocktail of infectious agents that result in chronic, debilitating, hard-to-diagnose disease, and then to put this into a form that is easy to disseminate. You don’t have to be a naive, anti-war hippie to realize that this is a terrible idea that is sure to bring Murphy’s Law crashing down upon your head. In the same way, I am just a humble non-scientist but I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a genetic “vaccine” packaged in a lipid particle that instructs the body to make a disease, for which you cannot control the dosage or where it goes in the human body. And I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to stop testing this concoction halfway through, turn up your nose at long-term testing, bill it to the public as safe and effective, ignore contrary data, suppress alternative treatment methods, and then demonize and gaslight people who report injuries. It just seems that there are a few things that might could go wrong there. Just a thought.

Quote: All Is Vanity

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

His slaves carried his litter behind him, acting as a bodyguard, but he was not afraid of Pompeii after dark. He knew every stone of the town, every hump and hollow in the road, every storefront, every drain. The vast full moon and the occasional streetlight–another of his innovations–showed him the way home clearly enough. But it was not just Pompeii’s buildings he knew. It was its people, and the mysterious workings of its soul, especially at elections…

Pompeii, p. 207

Farmlands and Paganism

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

Besides growing up around farms and reading a lot of literature set there, I’ve always kind of craved traditions, folk costumes, and folk practices. It’s not because I like being circumscribed in everything I do–I’m kind of a free spirit actually–but because I sensed these traditions and customs and bits of folk wisdom represented a thick culture, rooted in the distant past, that I as an American lacked. Traditional ways, whatever they were and wherever I read about them, seemed at the same time intriguingly exotic, and almost familiar.

In eastern Pennsylvania, where I spent my earliest years, many of the farmers were Pennsylvania Dutch–i.e., German immigrants. They had their own language, a dialect of German that my dad was able to pick up due to having majored in German. They had their own foods, like shoefly pie and scrapple. And they had a little, tiny bit of superstition: hex signs painted on barns. As a kid, I knew that these pretty little designs were called hex signs, but I had no idea of the connection between the word hex and spells or witches.

The Pennsylvania Dutch were nominally Christian, though I understand from my dad that they, like the Amish, often had a shallow and moralistic understanding of the Bible, and in fact sometimes didn’t have a Bible in a language they could read.

Despite their attractions, the Germans were to me among the least interesting of pagan farmers. I was more interested in British, Scots, and Irish folklore. It seemed warmer and more colorful somehow, and we had plenty of that around too, being in the Appalachians. It was also readily available in literature.

The connections between farming, weather-watching, astronomy, and European pagan religion are ancient and obvious. Here is Will Durant on Roman practices:

When [the Roman peasant] left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of the gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater–Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. … Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit.

Caesar and Christ, p. 59

Farming is so labor-intensive, so high-stakes, so heartbreaking, so subject to factors beyond human control, that it tends to produce nervous and conservative people. It would be impossible to engage in it for generations without coming to a profound humility before whatever entity you have been led to believe determines whether your whole year of work will be wiped out within a few days. For Christian farmers, that entity is the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. For post-Christian farmers, such as Wendell Berry, it’s the earth itself, I suppose, the environment. For pagans, it’s not hard to understand why they might be reluctant to let go of all the little rituals that stand between them and disaster.

Thus, paganism hangs on longer among country folk than in the city. If you want your eyeballs to be assaulted with an astonishing variety of pagan superstitions still proudly held by modern Americans, go get yourself a Farmer’s Almanac and look in the classifieds section.

“But modern Americans are returning to paganism!” you say. “It’s part of the New Age. It’s trendy, not traditional.”

Don’t I know it. I have met a few neopagans in my day. The one I knew best, was raised in a nominally Roman Catholic home. She was innovating with her paganism, part of the modern self-worshipping, I’ll-make-it-up-as-I-go ethos. The neopagans in the back pages of The Farmer’s Almanac don’t give me that vibe. I could be wrong, but it seems like they never left.

Where is the line between weather-watching, paying attention to the phases of the moon when you plant, following the zodiac along with the yearly calendar, hiring a water-witch, hanging a horseshoe over your door to protect your entryway with iron, and full-on pagan worship? How much of it is science, and how much is just doing things the way your mother did them? And how many “mindlessly followed” folk traditions turn out to have a sound scientific basis?

I’m guessing that Christian farmers in the modern age may have given up some valuable folk knowledge in an effort to avoid idolatry. Idolatry is a deadly poison, though, so no doubt, the sacrifice is worth it. If your eye cause you to sin, pluck it out. I hope that, as the generations roll by, we can build a culture that’s even richer than the pagan one we left behind.

3D Map of the Mediterranean

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

Get a white signboard from Hobby Lobby.

Freehand the coastlines in pencil while looking at a map for reference. Paint the seas, using Duckduckgo to find out relative depths. Start adding topography using plaster-of-Paris coated gauze strips.

Continue adding topography.

Some of these mountainous areas threatened to come loose after they dried. I simply applied some Elmer’s glue under them.

Paint as desired. I protected some of the smaller bodies of water by squeezing a thick layer of Elmer’s on top of them.

When dry, paint grassy areas with craft glue and sprinkle on “grass” that you can get in the model railroads aisle. Let dry, then vacuum up loose “grass.”

Show to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders.

Quote: Indirect Communication II

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Lena is rocked by the strength of her urge to give Trey [all the information] she has. For generations, this townland has been begging for someone to come along and defy it wholesale, blow all its endless, unbreakable, unspoken rules to smithereens and let everyone choke on the dust. If Trey has the spine and the will to do it, she deserves the chance. Lena only wishes she had got there herself, back when she was young enough and wild enough to throw everything else away.

Tana French, The Hunter, p. 402

I Like Farmlands

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.

Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)

Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.

My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.

And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.

These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.

The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.

My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.

When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.

However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.

The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.

The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.

Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.

Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.

I like ’em.