Calendars, Pigs and Sheep

No matter who wins the American election, the “deep state” will still rule. Although by definition it lives in the deep, among the sharks, the Deep State comes to the surface from time to time with public and solemn pronouncements.

For the immediate future, its preferences are quite clear. For example, retired General Michael Hayden, who ran the CIA during the Bush Sr. administration, said that Trumpian Senator Tuberville should be “eliminated” from the human race, raising suspicions that he was calling for his physical removal. To protests, he replied that it was a metaphor. Even with regard to the election, Hayden was metaphorical: “Those with experience are really concerned.” In particular, Dick Cheney, an ardent Republican, always anti-democratic and considered the black soul of the Deep State, has publicly stated that he will vote for Kamala Harris. Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz, was more specific: despite being a Republican congresswoman from Wyoming until 2023, she said she would not only vote for Harris, but that Trump’s re-election would be an “unrecoverable catastrophe.” To her, Trump and Vance are “two pigs.”

In this setting, there is anticipation for the imminent release of Melania Trump’s autobiographical book. While waiting, you can appreciate the video in which she talks about the attack on her husband. “The silence around it feels heavy,” she says. And adds: “I can’t help but wonder why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to this story.”

Two Deep State press releases are noteworthy. In early September, Victoria Nuland confirmed that the 2022 Istanbul talks had collapsed after “advices” from Washington and London. And added that even if Donald Trump is elected, no matter what he is up to, he will not change the American line on Russia and China. A few days later, the current directors of the CIA and MI6, Bill Burns and Richard Moore, published a detailed article emphasizing that the two of them, and only the two of them, are behind the scenes and on the front lines at the same time for every significant fraud. The article mentions Europe only as that “terrible” place where the British and Americans have been heartbroken to witness indigenous violence “since 1909,” mobilizing historians, political scientists, memoirists, cryptanalysts, even sorcerers and exorcists to do the hard work of trying to figure out what the hell they wanted to suggest with that date and such reasoning. Rejecting the hypothesis that they wanted to desecrate the foundation, in 1909, at another infamous German beer hall, Zum Wildschütz of the Borussia Dortmund football team, die Schwarzgelben (the black-and-yellows), the most common interpretation was this: the elegantly, ostentatiously, super-intellectually whispered “fuck the EU” is a 100-year strategy and will survive despite all the Trump and Vance.

Although political opponents are called pigs, even real pigs don’t fare well. African swine fever is circulating in the West. It is called plague precisely because it is a disease that spreads like the plague, picking up what it finds on the street, masquerading as pork products, and spreading through contact of all kinds. The safe disposal of thousands of tons of poisoned pigs is prohibitively expensive and requires the technology of highly specialized companies. The transit of trucks contaminated in areas of origin is sufficient to spread infection; even waste traveling on ships and airplanes becomes a vector for the virus. Faced with plague, some countries are trying to close their borders, and others are trying to regain territory, while delicacies flavored with poisoned pigs have existed for some time and have delighted consumers unaware that they are becoming carriers of plague, which indirectly affects the agri-food chain, hence thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars, as well as the country’s economic, commercial, tourist, and cultural image.

Swine plague is harmless to humans. Until now. In the West, high-intensity farming, from chickens to cows, may leave behind this and many other surprises: avian flu hit geese, then moved on to birds, and, from beast to beast, made its way to humans, starting with killing a Cambodian girl and ending with the first confirmed case (in Missouri) of non-animal H5N1 infection. It’s called a spillover; it could mean a devastating pandemic. It could happen quite suddenly, and no one can explain how it started: monkeypox was silent for years, limited to small and remote outbreaks; suddenly, in August 2024, the World Health Organization declared it a global emergency.

Given rising temperatures and demographic changes, the overall context encourages arsonists to start fires. Diseases transmitted by vectors, such as ticks and mosquitoes, are growing rapidly; many pathogens multiply faster and more aggressively. Nile virus, eastern equine encephalitis, and dengue spread in severe neuroinvasive forms. Ornithosis can be transmitted by the most harmless birds, such as parrots, sparrows, and pigeons.

Those in the know are definitely talking about bioterrorism; the most pessimistic of them say we’re already up to our necks in it, and in that sense, they cite Anthony Fauci’s dramatic hearings in early 2024 and Jeffrey Sachs’s previous parliamentary testimony.

In short, Burns and Moore cranked out promising numbers because they seem to suffer from what Kahnemann and Tversky identified as imagination bias, which is the error that occurs when unknowns are underestimated because potential risks require an overabundance of imagination (and responsibility). In fact, beyond zoology and zoonoses, 97% of Americans consider more than just pigs or fur-babies as real family members. We also live in a world of wolves. Homo homini lupus est is not a banal Latin phrase, but the basis of Western political anthropology. The others know it well too – and with them it won’t be like dating in the dark to scare the sheep away.