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.