Forty Realizations I have learnt or had further confirmed by the Covid Pandemic

I am not sure about the world but this is what I have learnt or had further confirmed.

Source: Medscape

1. Most people don't understand statistics

2. The science can be very easily politicized

3. Mathematical Models have huge margins of error.

4. Fear Porn is powerful. It can triumph over reason.

5. The CDC is not the great organization it pretends to be. Not even close.

6. The Surveillance state is growing stronger by the day and will continue to do so.

7. You can do almost anything in the name of public safety.

8. People are very willing to give up their freedoms as a whole. This is shocking.

9. There is an urgent need to educate the public on risk analysis. This of course will never happen.

10. There is no shortage of self-righteous individuals.

11. We will look down on the hard (full scale) lockdown decisions as one of the worst policy mistakes in the modern era.

12. Pandemics march to their own beat not ours. Don't underestimate the power of evolution. It has a several billion year head start on us.

13. Big Tech and Big Pharma were the winners here. Small business took it largely on the chin.

Source: MarketWatch

14. There is no limit to the hypocrisy of the elites.

Source: Daily Brett

15. Cancel culture is a powerful weapon.

16. The elites will push all sorts of boundaries to protect their business arrangements with Beijing.

Source: South China Morning Post

17. There is no deficit of rats willing to sell out other people.

18. We may never know the origin of the virus for sure as it is likely an inconvenient truth. Truth is also our biggest victim.

19. Anthony Fauci flies by the seat of his pants. His only stability is his inconsistency. The fact that he has become a secular saint for some reflects on the spiritual gap in many people's lives.

source: record.net

20. The Authoritarian Impulse is powerful.

21. The lab leak theory is looking more plausible each day.

22. Zero Covid is a myth.

23. Sweden ultimately performed better than most Western European nations of comparable or larger population than it.

24. Covid-19 bailout plans have incentivized many people to not work.

25.The vast majority of countries are under counting their death numbers.

26. The Federal government has limited power. Trump knew that. Biden knows it now (or at least I think he does).

27. Social distancing does help. Perhaps more so than any other initiative that has been tried.

28. The panic over Omicron is not justified based on the statistics from South Africa and the UK.

29. Nobody should ever listen to British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson.

30. ‘Two weeks to Flatten the Curve’ is the pandemic equivalent of the check is in the mail.

Source: The Week

31. Covid rules play second fiddle to so-called social justice initiatives, demonstrations and mass gatherings.

32. Thank G-d for such rational voices as Freddy Sayer (Unherd) and John Campbell.

Source: YouTube (Special Report)

Nursing Professor John Campbell : The Insider

33. Dr. Scott Atlas was correct with this limited (not full scale) lockdown strategy (focusing on the most vulnerable). His biggest problem was that he was too close to Trump and he was in a position of influence during an election year.

34. Herd Mentality is stronger than Herd Immunity

35. Vaccinations do decrease the rate of hospitalizations.

36. Sports games and outdoor political rallies were not the big super spreader events that we were told they would be.

37. Hepa Filters on planes are effective. Using them in classrooms makes sense as well.

38. A great deal of the best scientific analysis on Covid has come from India, South Africa and Israel. US institutions have been somewhat lacking.

39. T cell immunity will be the saving grace for the vast majority of the world population.

40. Covid will likely become a seasonal long term epidemic similar to the Flu which apparently has receded into the woodwork (go figure??).

Why did Nazi Germany view itself as Western when it is a dictatorship?

 Asked on Quora. My answer.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of what Western Civilization is. Liberal Democracy is only one facet in the political evolution of Western Civilization. Thanks to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment it has come to dominate in the contemporary (at least on paper) but historically most western nations have been subjected to various forms of monarchies (many of them absolute), plutocracies and benevolent and non-benevolent dictatorships.

Nazism whether we like it or not has its roots in the Hegelian nature of the march through history. It is not foreign to Western Civilization but a result of what can happen when political structures and necessary institutions collapse.

What are Emprical Laws? How are Newton's Laws Emprical?

 My answer on Quora

These are phenomena that at their very core are driven by the nature of what the universe is at its fundamental level and can only be elucidated through experimentation (not deductive rationalism). They could indeed be otherwise if the nature of the physical universe and its key constants were different. We can probe deeper with mathematics to explain the ‘how’ but the ‘why’ is a different beast altogether.

Newton’s Three Laws of motion emerge as special cases of a broader physics model that rests on a deeper physical base empirically in the MODERN framework. CLASSICALLY without the benefits of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both Special and General) we treat them as Empirical.

Was Stalingrad that critical a city to take in WWII or was it more a case of prestige?

 (My Answer on Quora).

There is no doubt that the City’s name placed a huge target on its back. The prestige of capture was immense especially after the Axis failure to capture Moscow in December 1941.

However Stalingrad did offer strategic importance. For one it would have given the Germans a chokehold on the Volga which did have supply line significance. In addition victory here would have allowed the 6th Army and the 4th Panzers to join up with the Caucasus Army to push towards the oil fields further south. The Wehrmacht’s campaign here had stalled by December 1942. It may have been re-energized.

Stalingrad success followed by a south linkage would have greatly benefited the German war effort providing them with necessary fuel for further drives elsewhere. It would also have interrupted Allied Lend lease supplies coming through Persia.

Defeat for the Red Army would likely have negatively impacted Soviet morale. They needed win to legitimately turn around fortunes on a longer term. The gains from the win at Moscow a year earlier did not materialize to the extent that Stalin expected them to do. They did after the real world victory at Stalingrad.

How were Newton and Huygen's ideas on the nature of light different?

(My answer on Quora)

Both Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens were brilliant minds. Where they primarily clashed was on the fundamental nature of light.

Isaac Newton source: World News, Economics and Analysis Based on Bible Prophecy

Christiaan Huygens source: ThoughtCo

Newton believed that light was made up of tint particles called corpuscles that could account for such phenomena as Reflection, Refraction and Rectilinear Propagation.

Huygens favored a wave model where each wave front consisted of wavelets that were the source for the next wave front that propagated forward. Light rays represented the direction of wave propagation.

He believed that all of the properties of light including diffraction could be explained with such a model.

Source: Olympus Science

Huygens Principle and Interference source: Physics Stack Exchange

The deadlock existed until the very early 19th century when Thomas Young carried out his famous Double Slit Experiment. Young was able to produce the characteristic wave interference pattern(alternating bands of maxima and minima) that is the definitive signature for wave like behavior.

Young’s Double Slit Experiment yields definite Interference Pattern source: lumenlearning.com

This implied that in the world of classical physics Huygens was correct - Light is a wave.

In the world of modern physics we now know that light has both a particle and wave nature and exhibits what we called Wave-Particle Duality. Light particles (photons) are however very different to Newton’s original Corpuscles or Billiard balls. 

How did Stalin become the most powerful man in the Soviet Union?

 (My answer on Quora)

Stalin played the long game and he played it well. His rise to power was a combination of opportunism and ruthlessness. The skill set set that served him best was his ability to organize that he demonstrated in earnest during the Bolshevik uprising of the July Days in 1917. He also understood the power of media propaganda through his role as the principal editor of the Bolshevik's Central Committee's newspaper.

Stalin also had a aptitude for forging alliances with other or two other power brokers to isolate a potential rival (such as Trotsky). Once done with that marriage of convenience he would play his alliance partners against one another so that he emerged from the cesspool of power. He used his pawns in the middle game and finished with his queen.

To put it mildly if the man was a contestant on Survivor nobody would have stood a chance.

Does the media accurately present Information and can it be trusted?

 (My answer on Quora).

No. The reason is that a great deal of the media is driven by the preferred narrative rather than the truth. They are also impacted by the maxim of being ‘first to publish’. Unfortunately it is becoming more evident with each passing moment that people would rather have their biases confirmed than challenged and this is what the stories cater to.

In addition ideology has corrupted a great of the reporting with many journalists seeing themselves as makers of the news rather than reporters of it. In short post-Truth tends to dominate which is why we see a litany of stories that were rushed to press, filtered through an outrage industry only to come crashing down once the dust of clarity had settled.

If you don’t believe me….check these out!!

Here is a list of 20 stories that broke the other way, in contrast to the original predominant media narrative, once the issues were flushed out.

1. Kyle Rittenhouse shootings

2. The Covington Kids

3. Jussie Smollett’s MAGA Attack

4. The Michael Brown narrative.

5. The Jacob Blake shooting

6. The Kavanaugh charges

7. No crisis at the border

8. The Border patrol using whips on illegal immigrants

9. The Duke Lacrosse rape allegations

10. Bubba Wallace’s Noose charge

12. The Steele's Dossier + the entire broader narrative of Trump Russia Collusion

13. Bill Barr not telling the truth about Mueller Report

14. Hillary Clinton will win overwhelmingly in 2016

15. The Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah

16. The Credibility of Michael Avenatti

17. The notion that the Taliban won't take Kabul

18. A successful US drone strike killing ISIS operatives in Afghanistan (August 2021)

19. Andrew Cuomo's successful handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York.

20. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

So what is the solution to all of this now that trust has been tossed under the oncoming train?

Try this seven step mechanism for making sense of a story in a Post Truth world.

1. Hold back on making judgement for any issue until more of the evidence is available

2. Go back to the source material instead of relying on secondary or tertiary descriptors.

3. Train yourself to recognize narratives. Watch out for journalists who editorialize.

4. Flip paradigms. Ask yourself if the shoe was on the other foot would you still feel/think that way?

5. Train yourself to separate fact from feeling. Remember that the truth is more important than your own preconceived bias and your specific ideology.

6. Familiarize yourself with the other side of the argument.

7. Always entertain the notion that you could be wrong.

Yes…this requires work and patience. However at the end of the day your soul will thank you.

What does Gibbs Free Energy measure?

 (My answer on Quora).

Gibb’s Free Energy (delta G) measures the maximum amount of reversible work that can be extracted from a system. The caveat though is that the system has to be at constant temperature and pressure (or volume). It must also be a closed system (that is one that does not exchange matter although it can exchange heat and work)

Gibb’s Energy (also known as available energy) is given by the symbol G and is named after the American chemist Josiah Gibbs. The unit of G (like all energies) is Joules (J).

When a system is in chemical equilibrium G is minimized. Delta G becomes zero which implies that no spontaneous energy can be extracted from the system at this pressure and temperature.

What mistakes did Napoleon make in the Russian campaign?

(My answer on Quora)

The negative outcome of the Russian campaign in 1812 was a function of several key errors, misjudgements and logistical factors that would ultimately prove to be deleterious for the Grande Armée. Much of this by virtue of the chain of command, points back to Napoleon and significant failures of planning and necessary anticipation.

These factors were:

1. The wholesale underestimation of Russian resistance and the competency of their Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov (a master of the war of attrition).
2. Russian Dirt Roads. They proved to be a nightmare for French transportation and supply lines who at the best of times were overextended.
3. The Russian Scorched Earth policy which took a heavy toll on an army that historically marches on its stomach.
4. The Grande Armée was ill-equipped for the Cold winter (by French standards). Bivouac shelters used by the soldiers were ineffective. Oddly enough the Russians considered this a mild winter.
5. The Russians kept robbing the French of decisive victories by skillful retreat. They also used guerilla warfare and Cossack hit and run techniques to wear down the French.
6. Disease - namely diphtheria, dysentery and typhus - this spread rapidly through the French army and proved difficult to control.

What are some examples of political gaslighting?

(My answer on Quora)

Gaslighting is a colloquialism that is defined as making someone question their own reality. The term is also used informally to describe someone who persistently puts forth a false narrative which leads another person to doubt their own perceptions. (Wikipedia).

The term originates from the 1944 movie Gaslight but has found its way into the social sciences as well as politics. It is a useful but odious device for shutting down debate.

Source: Blackburn center

Answers here on Quora are deliberately littered with gaslighting responses that serve to advance a specific point of view while cynically negating all alternatives in the cheapest way possible. Gaslighting answers are anti-intellectual and anathema to the elucidation of the truth.

Here are five examples that I have come across routinely on Quora. These are often repeated by some of Quora’s popular writers to great fanfare.

1.Critical Race Theory is a legal framework and is therefore not taught in schools.

Reality:

This is a classic example of using the No True Scotmen fallacy in a gaslighting context. At one point we were told by those in the know that there is nothing to worry about with respect to CRT. Now apparently it has only a very narrow range of applicability. Which one is it?

Why are states banning critical race theory?

It's important to understand what critical race theory is and is not.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/

The truth is that the version of critical race theory that is taught in schools is a modified form of the overarching legal theory. It has been specifically adapted for school age teaching and re-branded by the more benign phrase Anti-Racism Pedagogy. By necessity it lacks the intellectual sophistication of the parent theory but is still framed in the same language of systemic injustice and the problematic whiteness of institutional structures (aka white supremacy culture).

It is predicated on a divisiveness that has substituted race for class. This concern that is further heightened by the fact that it is presented as moral dogma to a captive audience.

Yes the United States has a troubled history (as does virtually every country on this planet) but there are far better ways of teaching the nation’s political and cultural legacy than pushing it uncritically through a deliberately highlighted ideological narrative that has been poisoned from the get go.

Reading, Writing, and Racism: the NEA’s Campaign to Gaslight Parents | National Review

American moms and dads now know that forcing critical race theory onto children is a priority for teachers’ unions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/reading-writing-and-racism-the-neas-campaign-to-gaslight-parents/

Anti-Racist Pedagogy Resources

Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism: A Developmental Approach  Authors: Louise Derman-Sparks and Carol Brunson Phillips Drawing on experience teaching a college course, this book explains the process that evolves as teachers and students grapple with learning about racism and becoming antiracist. Racism is defined as an institutionalized system of economic, political, social,… Read More

https://tlc.missouri.edu/anti-racist-pedagogy-resources/

2. Political Correctness is not a reality but a necessary request for people to be polite and not so mean.

Reality: The emergence of cancel culture, big tech censorship, speech codes and constraints on dogma eviscerate this attempt at gaslighting. Only the most naive partisan or deliberate grifter would make the case that the ability to speak freely about difficult topics hasn’t been put through the meat grinder of the political lens.

Political Correctness is a neologism that represents the cumulative efforts to restrict the level of discourse to narrowly defined parameters predetermined by so-called acceptable ideology. The Will to Power plays a key role. If one frames the debate within ‘acceptable’ parameters then tough-to-deal with inconveniences magically disappear. One can then target the heretics which seems to be the purpose of those who use euphemisms to hide their actual intent.

Source: Cato Institute

Source: Los Angeles Times

3. Questioning the Scientific consensus is equivalent to science denial.

Reality: Science is not an ideology. It a broad method of examining claims through empirical investigation and then drawing conclusion that have predictive value. It uses the framework of mathematics and statistics to analyze the evidence thereby opening up further avenues of investigation to test deeper claims. In this regard it has been very successful.

However when the practitioners of science become dogmatic and political in their outlook to the point that they transform the practice of science into a milieu dominated by groupthink.

The willful neglect of contrary evidence and the elevation of the power dynamic of credentialism then takes precedence and science crosses over into the realm of the ideology of scientism.

This invariably results in stagnant thinking, the formation of a closed secular priesthood/authority and the sacrifice of the rigorous scientific methodology to preordained conclusions.

Questioning such a tainted groupthink becomes the moral obligation of all who value necessary skepticism and free inquiry. Science remember is ultimately about understanding the physical reality. It is certainly not a popularity contest. No single person is the Science. Period.

Source: Syracuse.com

4. That story is false as it was first reported in media outlet X. X is a …………………(insert pejorative) media outlet.

Reality: A story either has merit, some merit or no merit. This is determined by examining the claims that the story itself makes . Yes some publications have more of a history of carrying meritless stories but this does not detract from the critical analysis that should be applied to the story alone.

Using the perceived bias of the reporting site as a substitute for the rigor required in dismissal or acceptance is a cheap and self serving slight of hand. It also has a history of being littered with folly. Remember Walter Duranty…

Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow

Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow

https://www.amazon.ca/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007

5. There are doctored pictures out there showing Chinese ill-treatment of the Uyghurs. Therefore the Chinese government is not guilty of human rights abuses in this context. The Western Media is deliberately trying to defame China.

Reality: This line is a favorite among supporters of the CCP, 50 Cent army and their fellow travelers. Yes there are some doctored pictures out there as is the case with other human rights abuses.

This however does not diminish the reality fact that the Uyghurs have indeed suffered abuse at the hands of Beijing’s authoritarian regime. Numerous human right sites have reported on this. In addition stories of Uyghur persecution have appeared on media outlets on both sides of the political spectrum. These are the same outlets that are normally at each other’s throat on a variety of issues. To assume that all of these outlets act as one on this particular issue is both ridiculous and insulting to the victims of such abuse. It also reflects a certain degree of projection from the situation that exists in China where the central authority does indeed control the media message with minimal push back.

'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

In new testimony, former detainees of China's detention camps describe systematic rape and torture.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071

China’s Uyghurs living in a ‘dystopian hellscape’, says Amnesty report

Widespread internment, torture and rights abuses have been claimed by former detainees as Beijing continues a policy of denial

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/10/china-uyghur-xinjiang-dystopian-hellscape-says-amnesty-international-report

China’s Horrifying War on Uighur Women | National Review

New evidence shows that the CCP has been systematically targeting Uighurs in a draconian birth-control campaign. The U.S. must respond forcefully.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/chinas-horrifying-war-on-uyghur-women/

Now one could add more stories to the catalog of political and social gaslighting. Clearly this approach has efficacy in swinging opinions to favor a specific narrative. For lazy thinkers it provides a quick fix for the Confirmation Bias sub-routine.

For those interested in a deeper debate it is best to relegate such mind games to the effluent stream of zero information rhetoric and let it marinate there.