Escape from Paradise

At the end of 2013 my world unraveled when my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died roughly a year later. 

But through his brave rejection of the human meat grinder of mainstream oncology, a new world of hope and possibility emerged. In that year, I learned about the science of spontaneous remission and its association with acute infection, clues about my mother’s seemingly miraculous recovery from cancer decades earlier, and how all of this could inform our approach to cancer treatment.  

For six years I’ve largely stayed silent about my stories, , but I knew I’d want to tell them to a bigger audience someday when the time was right and I had rested and healed.

In spite of my education, I am wise enough to know that tales are usually more persuasive than hard facts. 

But I’ve decided it’s time, because I suspect these tales may help us to understand the global, medicalized, authoritarian dystopia in which we’ve found ourselves from 2020 onward. 

We didn’t get here overnight. The Medical Industrial Complex is a prison that has been building for at least 100 years, and arguably longer.

Following Robb’s death, I felt like the free-spirited and defiant heroine Kira Argounova in Ayn Rand’s novel, We The Living, which was set in mid-1920s communist Russia. The basic gist is that Kira loses everything and hatches an escape plan from Russia as it descends into totalitarianism. 

“She had to get out. 

She had to get out. 

She had to get out.”

A few days after Robb died in 2014, I decided I would move to New Zealand. I had been there 15 years prior doing research for my PhD. I had fallen in love and had always dreamed of returning.

There was nothing for me in the US anymore. I had lost my job, my spouse, and I was going to lose my home. I had expended all of my energy fighting FDA regulations, the VA bureaucracy, the doctors, and the insurance companies. 

I was emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, and financially done. And while the US was not on the same level of dystopia as communist Russia, it was headed downhill fast. I wanted a fresh start in a country which I knew to be far less corrupt and far more free. 

According to grief experts, one should not make major changes within a year of the loss of a loved one.

So there was only one thing to do. In 2015, four months to the day after Robb’s death, I boarded a one-way flight to Auckland. 

I never once second-guessed my decision. New Zealand was just as I’d remembered it: unsullied and unspoiled. And I had found exactly what I was looking for. A fresh start. Freedom. Rest. Beauty. Peace. 

Years went by. I forged a new life and new businesses. I would live there forever. 

THE END.

Six years later when covid hit in 2020, I was suddenly plunged back into the emotional milieu of 2014. 

This was a new crisis of life or death. 

But it was not just a personal emergency. It was global. Things would have to change. Without swift action, millions would die. 

The medical literature would need to be combed through for clues about treatment. Practical solutions would be needed. Pre-existing, readily available drugs would be identified as useful for other purposes, and widely deployed off-label. 

No stone would be left unturned, because there would be no time to develop a vaccine. 

…

Try not to laugh.

…

It’s safe to say that my six years in one of the least corrupt countries on earth had desensitized me to the fact that covid would be just another small act in the overall play of the Medical Industrial Complex whose tentacles now reach into the most remote corners of the globe.

Boredom and resignation set in as I observed an approach that was simply de rigueur. 

I had been through this before. 

In contrast to my hopes, I was witnessing that the western world in general, and the US in particular, was unable to break free from an unstable paradigm: a moralistic, militaristic, institutionalized War on Poverty Crime Drugs Terror Cancer Covid.

Since the mid-1960s, tens of millions of people have died in the US of terminal cancer while being denied basic, useful treatments (see Table 7) that are legal elsewhere, often in other liberal democracies. 

On average in the US, roughly half a million people die every year of terminal cancer. So, what were half a million additional lives lost to infectious disease, gobbled up by a corrupt, bureaucratic machine that had long ago been captured by a self-sustaining and self-perpetuating corporatocracy? 

Nothing. 

So in mid-2020 in New Zealand, I turned off the daily press conferences.

There was no need to spend any more time on wishful thinking or the relentless drumbeat of statistics that I could look up with a few mouse-clicks: completed PCR tests… weekly rolling averages of PCR tests… positive tests… weak positive tests… etc. And so on. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.

The discussion of what was being done for sick patients was absent.

Public health officials that initially seemed heroic and compassionate had transmuted into mindless automatons. 

The population had been transmogrified into Xanax-popping, snack-gobbling couch potatoes, gripped by the public “health” equivalent of The Days of Our Lives playing out on their TVs every day. By day. By day.

Month. After month.

Year. After. Fucking. Year.

In August 2021, something really exciting finally happened in New Zealand. The entire country shut down over a single positive case.

And then it was quietly decided that the country that had kept out covid for 1.5 years would keep it out no longer. And would simply morph into a paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian, digitally controlled dystopia.

But by that time, I was long gone. Because a year before, I’d changed the channel. 

For at least six months, from August 2020 to January 2021, I did wait patiently for sanity and normality to return. 

Then in February 2021, two things happened.

1. I discovered signs of child abuse at the border quarantine hotels resulting from government policy. 

2. In a decision reached seemingly overnight, the New Zealand government suddenly announced that it would vaccinate the entire country with the Pfizer vaccine, after having previously announced the purchase of multiple other brands. Apparently, the public would not be offered a choice. I found this odd. And when I began to investigate the agreements between South American countries and Pfizer in which Pfizer had demanded embassies and military bases as collateral, I was alarmed.

These two events in early 2021 caused a switch to flip inside of me. 

Immense dread welled up. 

I sensed then that some powerful and dark force was taking over my peaceful paradise, and that despite all assurances to the contrary, we would never return to normal. 

While I did not fully understand this dark force, I also knew that it was too powerful for me to be able to do anything about it. 

Suddenly so many of the things that I had thought of as impenetrable strengths in New Zealand (an industrious, efficient, trustworthy, innocent, and joyful people with no guile, isolated on a faraway group of islands in the South Pacific) were looking like dangerous liabilities. And it was a horrifying realization. 

The dark clouds of covidianism were looming ever larger, but the torrential rains hadn’t started yet.

“She had to get out. 

She had to get out. 

She had to get out.”

In the months following, I worked seven day weeks, sold off most of what I owned, took time to make sure I really wanted to close my businesses, and said goodbye to friends and colleagues. My six beautiful years were over.

And then I was gone. 

The American characteristics that I thought so distasteful prior to 2020 had once again become desirable. I would surround myself with ornery, jaded, and worldly-wise people who had learned the hard way to disregard the arbitrary dictates of corrupt rulers and institutions.

I knew the vastness of that great land could protect me, and it would.

I’m angry and bitter at everything that has been stolen from so many of us, and how our beautiful world is being destroyed by the dark forces of covidianism, the genocidal, psychotic tyrants forcing us to choose between our money and our lives, and the neurocrats and karentopians enabling all of this with their compliance.

In July 2021, I boarded another one-way flight, this time in the opposite direction. 

As I stepped out of LAX I was greeted by the warm, brown, murky haze. It was a breath of fresh air.

What happened long before, and since, is a tale for another post. 

Tales for many posts.