This story is about a new market grab and a new brand of hype. Let us take a good look at the shiny marketing brochure for “eldercare technology.” It seems like the important investors, perched high, are very excited about the opportunity to squeeze more profits out of the demographic and health crises that they have previously created with their own hands — and to “monetize” the elders like captured pets, while pretending that they are doing it for the elders’ own good.

Ehm, who are our house experts on monetizing manufactured woes? The WEF folks! In 2021, they inquired: “Ageing: Looming crisis or booming opportunity?” Seemingly, the decline in health and fertility rates is a looming crisis for us, lowly peasants — but it sure is a booming opportunity for their crew!

The proverbial owners of everything are saying that “by 2050, the number of adults over the age of 65 globally will double, reaching a staggering 1.6 billion, with the largest growth in the developing world. This growth will be one of the greatest social, economic, and political transformations of our time, that will impact existing healthcare, government and social systems.” (Yay, new normal, hooray!) They continue:

“We can begin to make investments in our support systems (enabled and scaled by technology) that encompass a coordinated response from governments, society, academia, and the private sector.

To truly bring the holistic services needed to market, device makers, developers, enterprises such as retirement homes and insurance companies, civil society, policy-makers, and academia should come together to develop a unified platform that includes Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence [emphasis mine].”

Sure, when one has a hammer, everything is a nail! Meanwhile, the WEF story lists the following areas of eldercare technology:

• Robots
• Telemedicine
• Tablets for communication and entertainment
• “Smart” platforms that integrate electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records with AI and analytics (yay!!)
• Wearables
• Voice, touch, motion, and other assistive technologies
• Connected IoT devices and sensors
• Technologies for safety (monitoring and alert devices)
• Sensory aids (e.g., hearing devices)
• Gig economy services (e.g., meal delivery)
• Self-driving cars

Oh and who is literally investing in this? According to the WEF, Microsoft does. “For example, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps manage health data at scale by providing personalized care, transforming data into patient insights, enabling virtual care and care team collaboration, optimizing treatment by combining IoT and analytics, and promoting data interoperability.” Oh, shocking. But at least, it’s for our own good!

A New Creative Way to Promote Surveillance and the IoT

Something is telling me, the nursing home industry might be on its way out. There is this term, “ageing in place,” which is zombie speak for an elder not being shipped to a nursing home. Now, personally, I am not a fan of nursing homes. Being born and raised in the “old world,” I believe that children have the duty to take care of aging parents, it makes for a saner world. That is what believe for myself.

But when the WEF promotes intergenerational living, I don’t think they come from the same place that I do! And besides, making up fancy terms for living together as a family is like re-inventing trees and bees! They are trying to take ownership of something that is not theirs.

None the less, in the words of our kindly chaperons at the WEF, “ageing in place refers to the desire to be independent in a residence of one’s choice and participate in the community. Meaningful social contact and well-being are essential components of ageing in place. Instead of segregating people into communities based on age (like retirement communities), intergenerational living can provide companionship and purpose for older adults.” Awwwwwww!

Living together as a family in a large enough home can be very beautiful and spiritually rich — but in this case, they are not coming from beauty. They are saying, “Peasants, you are taking up too much space. Squeeze!”

Are they offering anything good to help the elders? No. They are just using “ageing” as a new buzzword to push their old transhumanist tricks:

• Proactively monitor health and detect potential changes — This approach helps address issues before they become medical emergencies. According to research conducted by Bern University and published in Nature, using connected sensing devices to remotely monitor motion, activities, and moving speed is a promising way to help transition healthcare from a reactive to a proactive, precision medicine-oriented approach.
• Ensure reliable access to telehealth — As of December 2022, only 62% of rural areas in China had internet access, according to Statista. Yet 37.5% of China’s older population live in rural areas, according to the World Bank. To support the elderly in these communities, there should be stable, low-cost internet access to provide telehealth services. The costs can be defrayed through the government and/or by providing basic internet service.
• Incentivize home improvements and technology investments — To support loved ones ageing with privacy and dignity, either independently or with loved ones.

Interestingly, the media and the “industry experts” are highlighting the staffing shortages and the profitability issues in the nursing home industry, and it seems to me that there is an invisible hand that is pushing to replace the nursing homes of the past with WEF’s ‘smart homes’ and the IoT. Time will tell!

In the meanwhile, the elders are clearly begging to be surveilled at home (not), and therefore, for their own good, we need smart homes, motion sensors spying on people’s hand movements and bathroom habits, wearable devices, literal cameras in the bedroom, and other fun things. Yay, new normal and new profit opportunities, yay!

And just the like Soviet state asked the young ones to brainwash their older family members into the establishment talking points of the day, we are asked to betray our elders and convince them to accept all this for our “convenience” of monitoring them. Today, we are asked to be the enables of the rapey panopticon “for everyone’s convenience and safety” — and of course, in no time, we’ll be next!

The Problem Is Real

The underlying problem of the “ageing population” is real. In the developed world, there are more elderly people requiring assistance than capable caretakers. At the same time, health issues are abound among the young as well, and many people under 65 are so unwell and “eaten into” that they are just functional enough to get by and “consume” but not functional enough to “produce.”

The arrested development of the youth is straight in our faces. And so, there is this tremendous and growing army of disabled people, including the elderly, and not enough fully functional caretakers.

Even the scientists agree. According to Our World in Data, “countries across the world have been going through an important demographic transition: from young to increasingly ageing populations. In 2017 the number of people older than 64 years old surpassed the number of children under 5 years old. This was the first time in history this was the case.”

“As the world’s elderly population continues to grow, so does the number of individuals diagnosed with cognitive impairments. It is estimated that 115 million people will have age-related memory loss by 2050.¹

The number of older adults who have difficulties performing self-care and independent-living activities increases significantly with the prevalence of cognitive impairment. This is especially true for the population over 70 years of age.²

If a person is incapable of performing these activities, continuous assistance from others is necessary. In 2010, the total worldwide cost of dementia (including medical, social, and informal care costs) was estimated to be US$604 billion.”³

So yes, the problem is real, and, given the skyrocketing rates of dementia and autism, we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet. But sadly — oh so sadly — this individually painful and collectively devastating decline in health a very predictable, if not inevitable, result of the business model of the domination and the industrial revolution: “poison everything to squeeze the maximum profit, and then squeeze additional profit by selling the antidote.” Cha-ching, and again, cha-ching!

Even more sinister is the fact that the demographic imbalance we are living through is a result of not just the industrial-scale poisoning to squeeze a buck — but also of the deliberate and massive campaign to reduce fertility, detailed in no uncertain terms in the Kissinger report.⁴

What Does “Age Tech” Look Like?

Here is how the Guardian described the pervasive video surveillance at a small dementia care unit of the Trousdale, “a private-pay senior living community in Silicon Valley where a studio starts from about $7,000 per month”:

“In late 2019, AI-based fall detection technology from a Bay Area startup, SafelyYou, was installed to monitor its 23 apartments (it is turned on in all but one apartment where the family didn’t consent). A single camera unobtrusively positioned high on each bedroom wall continuously monitors the scene.”

Here we go, a camera in the bedroom. What about privacy? Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head about the privacy, it us all for our own good! The Guardian continues:

“In 2014, Berridge interviewed 20 non-cognitively-impaired elder residents in a low-income independent living apartment building that used an AI-based monitoring system called QuietCare, based on motion detection.

It triggered an operator call to residents — escalating to family members if necessary — in cases such as a possible bathroom fall, not leaving the bedroom, a significant drop in overall activity or a significant change in nighttime bathroom use.

What she found was damning. The expectation of routine built into the system disrupted the elders’ activities and caused them to change their behaviour to try to avoid unnecessary alerts that might bother family members.

One woman stopped sleeping in her recliner because she was afraid it would show inactivity and trigger an alert. Others rushed in the bathroom for fear of the consequences if they stayed too long … Some residents begged for the sensors to be removed — though others were so lonely they tried to game the system so they could chat with the operator.

Berridge’s interviews also revealed something else worrying: evidence of benevolent coercion by social workers and family members to get the elders to adopt the technology.”

“Gray Dollar”

According to Forbes, the U.S. the Aging Economy was sized at $7.6 Trillion a year by AARP and Oxford Economics (roughly 40% of the U.S. GDP). The European Aging Economy was sized at $4 Trillion, by Oxford Economics on behalf of the European Union (roughly 20% of the European GDP). And according to TechCrunch, Big Tech companies are very much tapping into the market potential of the older demographic.

For example, “Amazon officially launched Alexa Together, which turns Alexa devices into tools for caregivers with features that allow users to call out for help, an emergency helpline, fall detection, a remote assist option to help manage device settings and an activity feed so family members can see if someone has been less active than usual.”

Google, meanwhile, started piloting a simplified Nest Hub Max interface at retirement homes in an effort to help residents feel less isolated during lockdowns. So many opportunities for tech giants to collect more data and to train their AI!

What I find particularly sinister about all this is the cynicism of the multi-phase monetary squeeze. It seems like initially, the important investors aspire to squeeze all funds out of the relatively prosperous elders of today. But then they’ll have to pivot to another model.

As today’s adults of the working age grow old without perhaps accumulating as much ‘stuff’ as their parents, they can be ushered into digital cages, reduced to pawns (more than now), and used as “digital capital” or symbolic “tokens” to commandeer the flow of funds within a nepotistic and self-regulating network of “public private partnerships,” ruled by the Big Boys.

Inside such a network, the bureaucrats with titles will be able to declare one crisis after another and make decrees to print a mountain of money or generate CBDC to pay for “solutions.” Then a handful of “friendly” corporations will be paid directly for providing the “solutions,” such as motion sensors or robots nudging the elders or the disabled about being “up to date” with vaccines, etc. A mob.

Robots for Elders

MarketWatch lists the following types of eldercare robots:

• Medical Assistance Robots
• Daily Support Robots
• Spiritual Support Robots [sic]
• Other

I find the topic of eldercare robotics more disturbing than useful, and I was so disturbed by it that I recently wrote a philosophical article on the topic of eldercare bots.

“A Bossy Spy With Puppy Eyes: Miro-E”

Meet Miro (Miro-E), a cute robot designed allegedly to help the elders — but really to undercut the expectation of being taken care of by the family members during one’s old age — and to make a buck on promoting the benefits of zombiehood for all.

Why do I have so few kind words to say about this? Well, because this is yet another act of treachery. Yes, out of loneliness, people can accept a lie and get attached to an inanimate device that is programmed to mimic basic behavior of a living being, as if it were alive.

Yes, being deprived of healthy emotional “food” makes people do all sorts of tragic things. But is this a way to live? And is this a way to spend one’s old age — being lonely and getting “nudged” and spied on by an electronic device with a Disney face? What treachery, again.

(And advertising? Can you imagine how easy it will be to “suggest” to the needy elders to “ask about” this new expensive drug? For their own good, of course … Oh and this spy robot could then instantly “connect” to an AI “doctor,” who could both “recommend” and prescribe the expensive drug, right there on the spot? Sheer business genius, that eldercare robot.

Infinite opportunities for “growth,” as long as the friendly Fed keeps printing the money … but I digress.) Anyway, here is the digital eldercare device with puppy-like Disney eyes.

Reality Always Wins

Reality always wins — but this is only one part of the plot. The other part of the plot comes with pain. The ugly truth is that until reality wins, someone has to “absorb” the price of the lie.

For example, if an influential individual with pharmaceutical dollars in his eyes insists that “vaccines save lives” and chirps-chirps-chirps in a cheery voice about the benefits of the syringe, while forcing everyone to roll up the sleeve — but the vaccines don’t actually work and come with heavy side effects — the demographic that “absorbs” the price of the lie is the people who have rolled up their sleeves.

And so, when the carnage starts showing — especially as time goes by — the syringe — promoting individual becomes more and more invested in ‘damage control’: explaining away the side effects by deepening and widening scope of the initial lie, by bribing or mocking the victims, by censoring questions, etc.

In the meanwhile, as more individuals roll up their sleeves, the problem grows — and then the side effects become so wide-spread that it shifts “the norm.” And at that point, the influential individual almost sighs a sigh of relief. There are too many things that are wrong with everything, it’s hard to pinpoint the issue on any one thing, so hooray, and carry on.

A Hypothetical Tangent on Dementia and Vaccines

As of recent, I think more and more about the under-investigated issue of biological contamination in medical products, including vaccines. There is a number of organisms that can sit inside human beings for a long time and only cause drastic problem when the immunity drops. I recently wrote about the “infectious” hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease (that is gaining momentum), for example.

It seems plausible the inflammation of the brain or the CNS could be triggered (as one of the factors) by microbes, such as overgrown bacteria or intracellular parasites.

And so what would happen if, let’s say, large batches of vaccines were straight out biologically contaminated, all other significant problems aside? If that were the case, then the people with strong immune systems would not have any significant symptoms in the short term, and would possible be fine for decades — and the people whose bodies are more out of tune would potentially have their bodies invaded and experience adverse effects right away.

But the tragic reality is that even those who got injected and infected with no symptoms under this scenario, may be fine for decades, but they may still end up with raging brain inflammation and dementia as they age, or develop neurological issues, etc. etc.

And then the industry would capitalize on their disease, completely unlink it from the injection(s) they got decades ago, and sell something new to “fix” the malaise. I think about this scenario all the time. But back to the eldercare robots.

How Reality Ends Up Winning in the Realm of Eldercare Robots

In the industry marketing brochure, the robots do good: they help the caretakers to lift the elders, they remind the demented elders to take their meds, and even they even sing an occasional song.

But how does all this work out in the real world? Imagine unsupervised robotic lifting of a frail elder. What if something hurts? What if a robot does a wrong move? What if it “freezes” like all computers do?

“Robots Won’t Save Japan”

“Robots Won’t Save Japan” is a book by James Wright on eldercare robots in Japan — a country where, according to the media, the adoption rate of eldercare robots is relatively high. A shorter version of Wright’s findings can be found in his article for the MIT Technology Review:

“Problems quickly became apparent. Staff stopped using Hug [a lifting robot, manufacturer website, video] after only a few days, saying it was cumbersome and time consuming to wheel from room to room — cutting into the time they had to interact with the residents. And only a small number of them could be lifted comfortably using the machine [emphasis mine].

Paro [a cute pet-like robotic toy, video] was received more favorably by staff and residents alike. Shaped like a fluffy, soft toy seal, it can make noises, move its head, and wiggle its tail when users pet and talk to it. At first, care workers were quite happy with the robot. However, difficulties soon emerged.

One resident kept trying to “skin” Paro by removing its outer layer of synthetic fur, while another developed a very close attachment, refusing to eat meals or go to bed without having it by her side. Staff ended up having to keep a close eye on Paro’s interactions with residents, and it didn’t seem to reduce the repetitive behavior patterns of those with severe dementia.

Pepper [a “social” robot, video] was used to run recreation sessions that were held every afternoon. Instead of leading an activity like karaoke or having a conversation with residents, a care worker would spend some time booting up Pepper and wheeling it to the front of the room.

It would then come to life, playing some upbeat music and a prerecorded presentation in its chirpy voice, and launch into a series of upper-body exercises so the residents could follow along. But care workers quickly realized that to get residents to participate in the exercise routine, they had to stand next to the robot, copying its movements and echoing its instructions.

Since there was a relatively small set of songs and exercise routines, boredom also started to set in after a few weeks, and they ended up using Pepper less often. […]

Robear [a lifting robot, video] was an experimental research project never actually used in a care home setting, being too impractical and expensive for real-life deployment. The project has long since been retired, and its inventor has claimed that it was not a solution to the problems facing the care industry in Japan; he said migrant labor was a better answer. Since my fieldwork ended, Pepper too has been discontinued.

But such robots continue to have a long afterlife, particularly in online media — projecting and maintaining a techno — orientalist image of a futuristic Japan. This may in fact be their most successful role to date. […]

Whereas previously care workers came up with their own recreational activities, now they just had to copy Pepper. Instead of conversing and interacting with residents, now they could give them Paro to play with and monitor the interaction from a distance.

And where workers who had to lift a resident had used the occasion to have a chat and build their relationship, those using the Hug machine had to shorten the interaction so they’d have time to wheel the robot back to where it was stored.

In each case, existing social and communication — oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.”

Conclusion

Boy, what a mess are we in! I feel like we are getting closer and closer to the spot where we will have no choice but to face all our existential issues from the heart of a child — and ask ourselves why and how the poisoners-in-chief have been able to stay in charge for so long. What allowed them to keep so many people distracted and self-sabotaging? Why have so many — throughout the centuries — internalized different institutional lies despite the evidence of their own eyes? Why?

This is not good. How did we get to a place where older people, the carriers of wisdom, are expected to develop dementia, be lonely — and, while the cameras are on, interact with cute toys — and when the cameras are off, perhaps be given some sedatives and be “taken care of” this way? How did we get here?

If you ask me whether I bitterly object to the existence of functional lifting machines, for example, then the answer is no. If it were possible to create a lifting machine that is actually safe, available, and that can be used without turning human beings into robotic meatbags, I would be all for using them, with discretion and when unavoidable, to make it easier for the caregivers to do their jobs. But is it actually possible? And what is the “net” effect of eldercare bots?

And what if the “epidemic” of dementia and autism is at least in part a consequence of all the lies, all the omissions, and all the coverups by the medical mob — and it won’t get better until the mob is expelled? What if everything we’ve been taught to believe has been a lie or a half-lie?

What if our bodies are broken due to the disrupted microbiome and the unnatural amounts of poison all around us? What if the famous line about “vaccines saving lives” is just a “successful” marketing tagline?

And what if we have the power to put our energy into restoring our dignity, into healing our world, and praying like children for help and guidance so that we know what to do when we feel like we really don’t know what to do? I would like to end this story with a quote from something I wrote about loving our elders in 2021:

“I believe that accepting our elders with love is a crucial part of breaking the bulldozer-over-soul cycle. I believe that by doing so, we have a chance at expelling the ghost of the Great Reset.

The Great Reset has a political face but its essence is spiritual brokenness. The Great Reset is a culmination of the mechanistic, fearful, reactive approach to life. It’s a neurosis-driven attempt to establish total control to avoid pain. And what is the antithesis to that? Love and forgiveness. Love is a lot of work — including the love for the elders. But it is our way.”

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

• ^1, 3 World Alzheimer Report 2010: the global economic impact of dementia. Alzheimer’s Disease International
• ² “Caregiving: Helping the elderly with activity limitations”, Challenges for the 21st Century: Chronic Disabling Conditions, no. 7, pp. 1-6, May 2000
• ⁴ Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (THE KISSINGER REPORT)

• Parasites, through release of complex chemical cocktails, employ mind control techniques that put politicians and alphabet agencies to shame
• Some parasites know how to zombify their hosts, change their gender, make them alter their behavior and appearance, and even commit suicide
• The better known mind-controlling parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, tricks infected rats into being attracted to cats, the parasite’s final hosts
• People infected by toxoplasma tend to act more reckless and distracted, and there is a strong correlation between toxoplasma infection and schizophrenia and other mental disorders in humans
• Behavior of biological parasites offers insights into social interactions in human society and highlights the importance of protecting ourselves from predators, both physically and spiritually

This story is about the stunning, Hollywood-worthy mind control techniques employed by parasites in nature that turn their prey into obedient, self-destructive slaves.

I became interested in the topic as I was pondering the effectiveness of COVID propaganda and deceit in general. I then started researching parasites in detail and discovered a whole world of deceit that politicians only wish they could pull off.

On the surface, the story is just about parasites. But on a philosophical level, this story is about our mysteriously composite nature. In everyday life, we can point our finger in the mirror and say, “This is me.” But, as a number of philosophers have pointed out and older cultures understood, what we perceive as “self” is a result of many forces, and herein lies the big mystery of life, the magical dance that we dance from birth to death.

Parasite Tricks

In nature, parasites employ techniques of manipulation and mind control that are so refined and treacherous that no alphabet agency can compete with them. They take over the minds of their hosts and, through release of chemicals, make them dramatically alter their behavior and even appearance and dedicate their entire remaining life to nurturing and protecting the parasite offspring.

Then, once the offspring is ready to move on to the next host (since parasite life cycle often consists of several different animals), the original host who has literally given their everything to “raising” parasite babies, gets murdered in cold blood.

Or sometimes, the host gets mind-controlled into behaving in ways that are atypical for uninfected animals and that turn it into easy prey for a predator who conveniently happens to be the parasite’s next host.

There are even well-documented cases of parasite “commanding” their “used up” hosts to commit suicide — as well as observations that suggest a possible strong correlation between risky behaviors in humans and parasite infections.

Mind-Controlling Protozoa Known as Toxoplasma Gondii

Toxoplasma gondii is an intracellular protozoan that causes toxoplasmosis. It is found worldwide and is capable of infecting most warm-blooded animals as intermediate hosts. To compete its life cycle, it needs to hop hosts. Its final hosts, inside which the parasites can sexually reproduce, are felines such as domestic cats.

In the environment, toxoplasma can be presumably be found in soil, water, and fertilizer. A common infection route for people is eating uncooked meat, drinking contaminated water, or accidentally ingesting the parasite after cleaning a cat litter box.

The general scientific consensus at the moment is that about one third of people worldwide are infected (including in developed countries) but in most cases, the infection is dormant — which means that upon entering the human body, the parasite quietly forms small cyst-like structures and settles in place (for example in the muscles and in the brain, brain being an organ that this parasite favors), and then just stays there for years, likely for the rest of the person’s life, while the body figures out ways to work around the latent infection.

Thus, in many cases, people with a latent toxoplasma infection have no idea that their body is harboring this bandit. However, if the immune system does not curb the invader, it leads to all sorts of havoc, and the havoc is often blamed on other causes since doctors don’t necessarily test patients with cognitive decline or psychiatric disorders for toxoplasma.

According to Kathleen McAuliffe, author of the book that inspired this article, “This Is Your Brain On Parasites,” researchers have noticed a strong correlation between toxoplasma infection and schizophrenia and other mental disorders in humans, and there have also been studies where anti-psychotic drugs inhibited toxoplasma in vitro — which makes one wonder if toxoplasma in the brain secretly drives people crazy, they act crazy, and then psychiatrists treat them as mental patients. There is also a striking COVID connection, which we’ll discuss in detail in a second.

Infected Rats Are Attracted to Cats

Toxoplasma is famous for the role it plays in behavioral modification in rats. The parasite’s ultimate destination is a cat, where it can sexually reproduce. For that reason, it very much likes to infect rodents since a cat who eats an infected rodent becomes the new host.

Through release of dopamine and a gender-specific cocktail of sex hormones, toxoplasma messes with the rats’ heads and makes them very active, unreasonably fearless, and attracted to the smell of cats. While a healthy rat would very prudently do its best to stay away from cats, infected rats are seemingly sexually aroused by cats and actively initiate contact, to their detriment.

Predictably, such a self-destructive rat gets promptly eaten, and the mind-controlling parasite settles inside its new host, the unsuspecting cat. And so it goes. Inside the cat, the parasite sexually reproduces, the cat then excretes the parasite in its feces, rats presumably get infected by accidentally ingesting the parasite scattered in the environment, and the cycle repeats.

Does Toxoplasma Control Human Behavior?

There are many theories suggesting that in fact, it does. For example, it is speculated that people infected with toxoplasma tend to be on average more reckless than the uninfected ones. Among the non-intoxicated drivers getting into car accidents, there seems to be a high percentage of people infected with toxoplasma. Same seems to be true for industrial accidents.

There is also a correlation between being infected with toxoplasma and elevated testosterone level in men (but please don’t tell that to the social justice warriors, or else we’ll be hearing about “toxic masculinity” for the rest of our lives).

Jokes aside, in their limited experiments (please take them with a grain of salt), researchers found that both men and women with toxoplasma infections were on average rated as more attractive by the members of the opposite sex, based on “blind” surveys where the participants were shown photos of infected and uninfected subjects.

On a much more alarming note, active toxoplasma infection seems to prominently contribute to the development of schizophrenia and other mental disorders, which is logical since the parasite, if unconfronted, literally eats your brain and drives you crazy.

There is even a hypothesis that tragically, toxoplasma may be a strong contributing factor in some cases of human suicide. After all, when inside an intermediate host, what toxoplasma wants is for the host to die and be eaten by a cat (and it may or may not know that the intermediate host is not a rat), which may explain why infected people are more prone to taking risks, etc. It is also possible that toxoplasma makes human beings particularly enamored with cats.

All of this is covered in great detail in the aforementioned book by Kathleen McAuliffe, “This Is Your Brain On Parasites,” which I highly recommend.

I would also posit that a healthy person in a non-toxic environment is unlikely to be impacted by this parasite; however, we don’t live in a non-toxic environment, and our immune systems are under a constant stress — which suggests that modern people may be more at risk of being actively infected than our ancestors in the olden days, when people were physically active and spiritually alert, and when air, water, and food weren’t poisoned on a massive scale. We can only wonder …

Toxoplasma and COVID

As I was researching this topic, I found that the list of folk remedies and herbs that may inhibit toxoplasma greatly overlaps with the list of remedies that seem to work against COVID (the forbidden list, that is).

That made me wonder if somehow, toxoplasma works hand in hand with the product of synthetic biology known as the spike protein. So I looked, and sure enough, there is at least one study that lists toxoplasmosis as a serious risk factor for severe COVID or, as I would put it, severe spike protein toxicity upon environmental exposure or as a result of COVID injections.

In related matters, it has been observed that the severity of COVID correlates with the pre-existing health of the microbiome (the amount of bifidobacterial in the gut, among other things), and the toxoplasma theory could complement the gut microbiome side of the story.

On my end, I would love to see more doctors test their COVID patients for toxoplasma to see what they find. Something to ponder!

Suicidal Crickets

In the words of Kathleen McAuliffe:

“The anecdotal reports were wild. Crickets that normally inhabited the forest floor and didn’t swim were leaping headfirst into ponds and streams. Frédéric Thomas suspected that a worm seen wriggling out of the insect’s body as it drowned was behind the cricket’s suicidal impulse, but the only way to be sure was to go to New Zealand, where the phenomenon had been reported.”

“In 1996, Thomas, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier in France, applied to the French government for money to investigate the matter, confident his proposal would be funded … but the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) — France’s equivalent of the United States’ National Science Foundation — turned down the proposal.

He was so angered by their decision that he decided to go on a hunger strike, and he told the president of France, Jacques Chirac.”

“His message … was passed up the chain of command to high-level officials. Far from generating laughter, his letter appears to have sent the French government into a panic. Officials from the administration were promptly dispatched to his university, where they pressed the chairman of his department to prevent him from carrying out his threat …

Evidently the officials were unsettled by the thought of an emaciated Thomas turning public sentiment against the government. They put so much pressure on Thomas that he finally agreed to withdraw his threat.”

The day was saved by the Swiss billionaire named Luc Hoffmann who offered some funding. And so the scientist went to New Zealand–where he promptly discovered that it was near impossible to track infected crickets at night, in nature, even with flashlights.

“Thomas was forced to admit defeat … but before doing so, he sent a photo to a university colleague of a worm emerging from a cricket … The friend posted the picture in his department’s coffee station, where a lab technician happened to see it. A cousin of his in Montpellier cleaned pools for a living, he wrote Thomas, and they were full of the worms.”

“Thomas was highly skeptical … so he assumed the technician was mistaken. But when he got back to France, he met with the technician’s cousin and gave him a jar of alcohol in which to put any worms that he found in pools. Thomas figured he’d never see the fellow again, but a week later the man returned with a jarful of worms. He had collected them from a pool at a nearby resort.”

Turned out, the technician’s cousin was telling the truth, the pool was full of worms! Thomas then convinced his wife to go with him to a romantic getaway at that spa — and, after dinner, instead of going back to the hotel room with his wife, he went straight to the pool and started collecting suicidal crickets. To each one’s own but I commiserate with the wife!

It turned out that the scientist’s hunch was right, and that the crickets running toward their death were indeed infected by fully grown parasites.

“In addition to inhabiting crickets, the worms also turned up inside grasshoppers and katydids that similarly developed a mysterious attraction to water. Indeed, the ‘enchanted’ insects came in droves. On a typical summer’s night, over a hundred flocked to the pool.”

But how was the parasite able to control the insects?

“Once the hairworms break free of their hosts, the team discovered, they mate in the water, and the females then lay a string of eggs, which develop into larvae. As they swim around, they bump into the larger larvae of mosquitoes and hop aboard them, hiding inside them as tiny cysts (think of nested Russian dolls).

When those mosquito larvae morph into winged adults, they take flight, carrying the parasite with them to land, where they die and are eaten by crickets. The dormant cyst then springs to life, eventually growing into a worm three or four times the length of the insect’s body when uncoiled.”

“A team led by Biron made another intriguing discovery. Compared to healthy controls, the stricken insects have higher amounts of a protein involved in sight, possibly altering their visual perception. This revelation prompted the French researchers to explore whether crickets harboring the parasite are attracted to light. Indeed they were, whereas the healthy insects preferred the dark.

If you’re a cricket that lives in the forest, said Thomas, what in your surroundings is brightest of all at night? An open area filled with water — an excellent reflector of moonlight. By tinkering with the settings of the cricket’s visual system, he believes, the worm mesmerizes its host. It’s effectively whispering to the insect, ‘Go toward the light.’”

It is also possible that the infected insects were running toward water to get rid of the unbearable sensation of having a worm occupying most of their body. Scientists can only guess but it makes sense, too.

The plot gets even more bizarre, however. Ponds are full of frogs and other creatures that would snap a suicidal cricket in seconds, and what happens to the worm? The parasite knows how to travel back from as far as a frog’s stomach and squirm out of a frog’s mouth or nose. James Bond got nothing on this parasite.

A Scene From a Horror Movie

Another parasite, called guinea worm, compels people to go into water, using a completely different mechanism. More from Kathleen McAuliffe:

“The worm, which is now mostly limited to Sudan, gets into people when they drink stagnant water contaminated with water fleas that carry its larvae. The acid in the human stomach kills the water flea, but not the parasites inside it, which develop into worms that slip through the walls of the intestines and mate inside the abdominal muscles. The males, which are only an inch long, then die and are absorbed by the body.”

“But the female grows and grows, eventually stretching a yard in length as the worm develops, it snakes through the body’s connective tissue toward a lower extremity — typically a foot or calf. After about a year, the female is pregnant with a bustling brood of larvae. To usher them forth into the world, she migrates up to the surface of the person’s skin.”

“Until this point, the parasite has used various types of subterfuge to remain invisible to the immune system, but now she releases an acid that causes the victim’s skin to bubble into a painful blister (the disease is called, not surprisingly, dracunculiasis, Latin for ‘affliction with little dragons’). If she’s lucky, this burning sensation will compel the sufferer to dunk the inflamed limb in the nearest body of water.”

“The moment the worm senses the aqueous environment, she breaks through the person’s skin and begins disgorging her young through her mouth. Hundreds of thousands of the larvae are ejected with each convulsion. Over the next few days, whenever she comes in contact with water, she again vomits up babies by the thousands.

Once released, they swim around until they find a berth inside a new water flea and then repeat the ghastly cycle that will torment more humans — or sometimes the very same ones.”

There is a method of pulling the worm out of the wound, which typically takes several days and involves wrapping the worm around a stick. It is speculated, that this process could be the basis for the contemporary symbol of medicine, Rod of Asclepius.

Deadly Attraction and Predators in Snails’ Eyes

The flatworm Leucochloridium “replicates inside a bird’s digestive system and gets excreted in its waste, so a snail feasting on bird droppings may accidentally ingest the worm’s eggs. Once inside the snail, the eggs hatch and eventually grow into long tubes that take over its brain and invade its eyestalks — the first step in the snail’s dramatic makeover.

As its eyestalks swell in size, their walls are stretched so thin that it’s possible to see the parasite within — and what a dazzling sight it is. The worm is bedecked in colorful, pulsating bands, which are in fact pouches packed full of its rambunctious larvae.”

“As the snail morphs, it abandons its nocturnal lifestyle and becomes active during the day … To a songbird overhead, those plump, pulsating stalks look like caterpillar grubs, enticing it to swoop down and peck on them. The victim of the ruse gets a beak full of tiny parasites that will soon reproduce inside its body. As for the snail, it may not only survive the ordeal but also go on to regenerate its eyestalks.”

Free Cheese? Welcome to the Mousetrap

Another parasite, Flamingolepis liguloides, whose final host is flamingoes, is a master manipulator. When infected, the larva changes the color of the shrimp from transparent to red, making them noticeable to birds. The parasite also castrates the shrimp, expands its life span, and compels them to gather in large swarms, making them easy prey for flamingoes.

From the flamingoes’ perspective, it sure is awfully convenient to stumble upon this massive shrimp feast. But by eating the easy prey, the birds become infected with the parasite. A metaphor for life?

Zombified

Parasitic wasp Polysphincta gutfreundi turns its spider hosts into full-on zombies. First, the wasp deposits its eggs into the spider’s abdomen. When the larvae grows, it starts producing chemicals that compel the spider to completely change how it weaves its web and to weave sturdy, weird-shaped “fortress” to protect the larvae.

The larvae keep snacking on the spider’s body all along, until its ready to form a cocoon, and then it kills the spider, forms a cocoon — which is then safely attached to the web previously made by spider. Then it hatches from the cocoon, and the story repeats.

William Eberhard, an entomologist and arachnologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Universidad de Costa Rica, researched this phenomenon and concluded that the larvae first released a cocktail of chemicals that messed with the spider’s central nervous system, and then, when it was ready to make a cocoon, a poison to kill it.

In one of his experiments, he did away with the larvae before it killed the spider, and the spider fully recovered its original web making pattern. Another wasp, Ampulex compressa, also known as the “jewel wasp,” performs “neurosurgery” to achieve its aims. Its prey is Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach.

“Though dwarfed in stature by its prey, a female jewel wasp that has caught the scent of an American roach will aggressively pursue and attack it — even if that means following the fleeing insect into a house. The roach puts up a mighty struggle, flailing its legs and tucking in its head to fend off the attack, but usually to no avail.”

“With lightning speed, the wasp stings the roach’s midsection, injecting an agent that will temporarily paralyze it so that the behemoth will stay still for the delicate procedure to follow. Like an evil doctor wielding a syringe, she again inserts her stinger, this time into the roach’s brain, and gingerly moves it around for half a minute or so until she finds exactly the right spot, whereupon she injects a venom.

Shortly thereafter, the paralytic agent delivered by the first sting wears off. In spite of having full use of its limbs and the same ability to sense its surroundings as any normal roach, it’s strangely submissive. The venom, according to Frederic Libersat, a neuroethologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, has turned the roach into a ‘zombie’ that will henceforth take its orders from the wasp and willingly tolerate her abuse.”

“Indeed, the roach doesn’t protest in the least when she twists off part of one of its antennae with her powerful mandible and proceeds to suck the liquid oozing from it like soda from a straw. The wasp then does the same thing to its other antenna and, assured that the roach will go nowhere, leaves it alone for about twenty minutes as she searches for a burrow where she’ll lay an egg to be nourished by the roach.”

“Meanwhile, her brainwashed slave [as a result of injected chemicals] busies itself grooming — picking fungal spores, tiny worms, and other parasites off itself — providing a sterile surface for the wasp to glue its egg. When the wasp returns, she seizes the roach by the stump of one of its antennae and ‘walks it like a dog on a leash to her burrow’ … Thanks to its cooperation, she doesn’t have to waste energy dragging the massive roach.”

“Equally important … she doesn’t ‘need to paralyze all the respiratory system, so the thing will stay alive and fresh. Her larvae need to feed five or six days on this fresh meat, which you don’t want to rot.’

The wasp enters the burrow first, tugs the cockroach in behind her, lays an egg on the exoskeleton of its leg, and then leaves to search for twigs and debris to stop up the opening, thus entombing the fully alert roach. Her offspring then proceeds to clean out the roach’s body from top to bottom, at which point the fledgling wasp emerges from the burrow to repeat the cycle.”

Infected Crabs That Change Gender to Serve the Parasite

Sacculina is a barnacles that attacks crabs. The female predator attacks the crab and injects its cells into the animal. The cells eventually grow into larvae that take over the crab’s eyestalks, its nervous system, and other organs. The crab continues to walk around and eat but at that point, it is completely overtaken by the parasite.

The parasite castrates the crab and does “gender reassignment surgery” on male crabs turning them into females. It then grows through the crabs belly and forms a pouch where a pregnant female crab would typically develop a pouch for its offspring.

What seems to happen next is that the parasite releases chemicals to attract parasite mates who fertilize the invader. The crab, presumably thinking that its own babies, takes care of the pouch, cleans and protects it, then goes into deep waters to “give birth” to alien babies. According to researchers, the infected crab becomes a slave to the parasite for the rest of its life.

Are Human Beings Exempt?

We all want to believe that we are masters of our thinking and our choices, at all times. It is, however, unlikely, and just like animals, people can fall prey to visible and invisible predators. Over the course of my life, I came to believe that predators are a part of life, and that in order for us to stay alive and to thrive, we have to develop and maintain spiritual clarity and physical health and face any challenge with courage and faith in our goodness.

When We Look in the Mirror, Whom Do We See?

Every cell in our body and every microorganism that populates us contribute to our sensations, our choices, our self-perception, and our very identity. In modern culture, we learn to label the physical elements that carry our DNA as “us,” and external organisms as “the outside world.” But it is far more complex, and the line between “us” and “the world” is not a hard line.

It makes practical sense to look at our identity as a combination of “elements and forces that are harmonious to our health and well-being” and “elements and forces whose relationship to us is of parasites and vampires.”

For example, our own healthy cells, doing what they are designed to do, are our friends. “Good” bacteria helping us with many important functions, including a strong immune system, are our friends. Spiritual forces that resonate with our dignity and our life’s purpose are our friends.

Then on the other hand, we also have enemies who are parasitic or antagonistic. They try to ride us and vampire our resources for their own benefit, either physically or spiritually, or both. When thinking about them, it’s important to keep our focus firmly on our own well-being and dignity and not be scared. They serve an existential purpose but we don’t need to dwell on the intentionality of parasites and vampires.

They have their path, they may be simply feeding but what’s important to us is that their life’s purpose is not aligned with ours, and we have absolutely no obligation to feed or accommodate them because we are here on Earth to do our job, and we are responsible for doing our job successfully and protecting our purpose from invaders. It is the task of our life to love, support, and cherish our friends and keep the enemies at bay.

Truly, we are mysterious, composite beings whose different parts exist on different levels and in different worlds, some visible and some merely felt — and yet there is something that binds it all together and makes us who we are. That force that animates us is love.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.