Covid19 and other conspiracies (respectful discussion)

Off-Topic (In the weeds/General Discussion)
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You have to look no further than everyone’s favorite: The Nazis. And you can stop there. There is more, don’t get me wrong, but it’s enough. Basically everything we know about the human body’s response to hypothermia… is based on that research.

And you don’t have to convince me about the so-called “right side” (of history). The calendar is not an argument, and a poor regulator of morality. We (humanity) can and do relapse frequently. The entire idea that we’re always getting “better” at this is a philosophical idea known as the doctrine of perpetual progress, and it is one that cannot be proven. Sure, on the face of it, it seems true enough: Once we had slavery, now we have significantly less of it, once women could not vote, now they can, and so on. But those are just some obvious examples. There’s enough things that go the other way too. And I will not get into that!

But, all that aside. I split the thread, so if people feel like they want to discuss the TECH behind the topic (and maybe point out some missed things, because tech isn’t always good, and when it is good, there can still be some compromises involved), then there is a space to do it, and we don’t have to polute your 4000-strong thread about Eskom with these musings.

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@plonkster , just saw this … re. authors and real life …

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Well, that plays a little fast and loose with the facts :slight_smile:

The book’s original title was Futility.

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It was revised and republished under the new name in 1912. Which is the year the Titanic sunk. So some clever marketing going on there.

The ship in the book is however called the Titan, but for that I think we can blame the English language:

Selection_470

Also, the hitting of an iceberg is also the only real similarity between the stories. A good example of how how life imitates art (and vice versa), but I wouldn’t quite call it a premonition. The author of the book apparently also said that he did his homework on how ships were constructed at the time, which is why he got the scale more or less right too :slight_smile:

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If an author does their research properly … what they can imagine, man, is not good when it hits real life.

The Covid reference, the ONLY difference from what I read for over a decade of what can happen, how, who does what, who does nothing, the interwebs, internet, and social media impact, politics, bribes, cause never determined, was the death rate. Books tend to be worse, with like +80% death rate.

Covid Pandemic, “it played out like a book” … only it was real life. Authors’ freedom allowed.

Sylvia Browne and Dean Koontz are the most noted.

Another example:

Makes me wonder sometimes … so a writer crafts a novel … and the nefarious real-life character/s reads it, and decides it is a good “blueprint” as any.

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At the time I was thinking of Deon Meyer’s book “Koors” (Fever). Published in 2016.

If you have not read it, I think you will like it. The premise is a similar pandemic, but one that actually kills off a substantial part of the population, except a small minority. Meyer did his homework, so 1) some people survive on natural immunity, and 2) the vaccinated still get ill. Some of this only really becomes apparent later in the book, and I don’t want to add too many spoilers.

Further on this topic: We’ve often discussed self-unfulfilling prophecies on this medium, and I think with the 2020 pandemic there was also some of that going on.

We had the usual progression, where the virus gradually becomes more infectious, but less deadly. This is a simple result of natural selection: The variants that spread easily and don’t kill the host, will tend to dominate, and in their wake they leave a general immunity that makes the host immune (pretty seriously for the first few weeks, when the IgA and IgM antibodies are there in high numbers!) against the other variants as well.

So the one thing we haven’t quantified – and we cannot do that now, because that is simply not how it played out – is how many lives the lockdown really spared. It is easy to shake your fist at the man, and pronounce that the lockdown was a conspiracy with sinister motives, but to what extent did the more mild outcome not result from the fact that we kept people apart while Alpha and Beta were rampaging through our hospitals? Then when we opened the doors, people got exposed to the milder Delta, and the much milder Omicron.

So a lot of the “it was all a hoax” people are basing their findings on the mild outcome of the later variants, but we do not know what it would have looked like with the original versions, and now we will never know.

It really feels to me like the Y2K thing. Which uninformed people will easily call a hoax, because of how few incidents there really were. They forget that we actually engineered that outcome.

It goes further. I found myself daily rolling my eyes so hard that I was at risk of getting RSI. The crowd saying “masks don’t work!”. Of course they freaken do. They aren’t 100% effective, no filter is. Yes, the virus is very small, but they thankfully they don’t travel alone… they travel in a droplet with a million other mates! Did it help to point that out? Nope :slight_smile:

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Jip, read it.

In all the novels, you have sane people who think “beyond” the mass hysteria, the fake news, the urban legends, as you point out, the virus got less severe, and masks did help.

That gets “lost”. As it did during the pandemic.

Post Covid … Story time:
Wife, granddaughter, daughter, and her husband, got a weird “cold”.

Went like this:
They got sick, then ±10days later they get better. Then it came back the next day, even worse. ±10 days later, they get better, then hit them again, worse each time. Got so bad they had to go to the Dr after 30 days of being sick and get antibiotics. All of them. Baba was in the hospital for days.

Note: I have an aversion to just “go and get some antibiotics” for everything. I was so for it this time!

Now here is the thing. I did not get any of that. Not even a snivel. And I was around the wife and grandchild, as we had to babysit for a few days.

Then wham, I went down. Hard.

So the one Doc asked me: Did you get Covid? Yes. Were you vaccinated? Yes.

Not a word more was said … so I wondered … seems some of us may now be even more prone to strokes. Did not get sick, got a #*&% light stroke. Now before anyone gets all medical on me, in Dec my annual medical check was spot on. All of it, blood, blood pressure, all of it. Two and a bit months later, it hits me right between the eyes … after the people had their “flu”.

What I “missed”, and I don’t think it would have come up on any tests, was the progressive worse brain fog during that time. In the end, it took me 15min to type the email to get a doctor’s appointment. Brain says to write this, what comes on the screen … literally like: Drea Dorue, tskashjf I need a afjksh tsouf rkgjsjht ahd.

Ps. In case anyone wonders, did not want to “bother” the wife. I can do this …

Covid, was and IS bad … we have new challenges going forward.

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I think what bothers me most, is that the group of people who claim to think for themselves does it so poorly.

I won’t call myself a medical expert, but let’s just consider some facts about how a vaccine is made. So what we do, is we take a part of the thing that is going to hurt you, and we give it to you. Your body launches a response, and now you have some level of immunity. That’s the “cliff notes” version if you will.

What we do to make that “part” we give to you less dangerous, is we either dilute it, we modify it so it cannot reproduce, or we give you the dead left-over husks (which still has enough of the right proteins and stuff to scare your immune system). And that is basically the story of every vaccine out there.

Logically, what can we derive? Well, your body is going to react to what we give you. We should expect adverse effects. Some people will just feel a bit fluey… why… well, because we gave them something that has that effect. Duh! Some people may have more severe reactions, but here is the kicker: Those people would have gotten that same reaction from the real thing. Remember, we’re using the same ingredients.

Similarly – and this is a space where my thinking shifted a bit and I figured it is fair to acknowledge the naysayers – if we’re giving the virus (in a weak form) to people, and we know the virus causes certain things (blood clots, miscarriages, etc), we should at least expect that there may be a handful of similar events from vaccinated people. And that appears to be exactly what we saw.

Of course the above only really relates to the viral vector vaccines. The Janssen vaccine, and the Oxford vaccine for example, were of that kind. Jannsen used a modified human Adeno virus, and Oxford used a simian (aka monkey) virus. Again, nothing weird up to this point. We’ve been doing this for ages.

The real crockpot of distrust was with the mRNA stuff though. Because that was “new”. Aaai people. Ain’t nobody remember high school biology? So the virus cannot replicate himself, so he needs your help. So he parks next to one of your good factories (aka a cell), and sends in instructions (aka RNA) for building protein chains… and the idiot workers in the factory knows no better than to do as they are told. Voila. So the researchers figured… what if we can use that same mechanism to get a modified instruction to the cell? And that is what is (on a technical level) so awesome about the tech.

They literally designed a common delivery mechanism, where they can swap out the payload, and their delivery mechanism does not need massive amounts of human cell lining (which has ethical issues for some people) to grow large numbers of viruses to use as a vector. On a technical level, it was awesome, but few people really did their research on that level. Sadly.

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I “lost” 2 years of my working life fixing those before 1999/12/31 so I can vouch for it’s existance :wink: .

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Ditto!

And to think, now that “they” had 1) the funds and 2) a massive trial, we can expect some pretty cool and new vaccines and other solutions to an age-old problem … how to target the bad, and not damage the good.

Like cancer.

One of the original mRNA research “targets” was cancer cells if I read it right.

One thing that is a wee bit worrisome, antibiotics are getting pretty scarce, due to superbugs resistant to any and all antibiotics due to the overuse and the “misuse” of antibiotics, like not finishing the course.

Now here is the thing … authors have written books of such great discoveries… new tech, that went the wrong way AFTER it was implemented after all due trials and tribulations was done. :rofl:

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Indeed. I remember reading a novel by Michael Crichton. He does a lot of research, and builds in lots of sub plots that don’t relate to the overarching theme of the book, but that reflect something that his research turned up. He has lots of footnotes too.

So anyway, I went and read the footnotes. This was in 1980somethingorother. And at one point he talked about how society is getting more accusatory and people jump to conclusions more quickly.

The example he gave was that if an adult man is walking along a street, and he comes across a child who is crying, his instinct is to offer the child comfort and security and assistance, but the best thing he can do is to cross the street and not even look at the kid.

Not nice hey? And I thought that well, that’s what happens in the USA where there’s a law suit around every corner.

Then a couple of weeks later I was walking down Rockey Street in Bellevue (where I lived at the time), and I came across a little girl I’d seen and exchanged greetings with several times before. Her mother worked in one of the restaurants (or maybe more than one, since she was waitressing), and I’d see this little girl and she was always happy and greeting everybody.

But on this occasion she was sitting on the ground crying.

Did I pay attention to Mr Crichton? I did not.

I walked over to her and bent down and said something like “sweetie, what’s wrong? Can I help you?”

And within seconds it started. I heard a voice say “look at him! What’s he done to that little girl?”. Then there were several comments, one of which mentioned calling the police.

Holy moly! Now I’m in a world of suspicion & accusations. And I can’t just walk away now.

Luckily she wiped her eyes, said it was OK now and walked off (I presume to find her mother). And I could depart the scene, but I could feel the filthy stares hitting me right between the shoulder blades.

The interesting thing about this was that some of these people were sitting at tables on the pavement. So presumably they had sight of the little girl, even if they hadn’t all actually registered that she was crying. But they all did nothing. And when I involved myself and the accusations started coming nobody said “but hold on… she was already crying”. I suppose because if you say that then you get asked why YOU didn’t do anything.

And the reason you did nothing, of course, is that you will get the blame.

So that sort of situation is now a no-win for everybody. And Crichton was right: Cross the street and don’t even look.

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31

I was involved in Y2k remediation for a big corporate. I was very proud of my team and the model that we used. We first mapped out a series of transactions that a regular branch would perform. Then we calculated what the results SHOULD be. Then we got an instance of our software system, put it on a seperate server that was disconnected from our WAN, advanced the clock and started capturing those transactions, running month-end reports etc. We took back ups at every step, and if any sort of anomoly was spotted I could investigate, fix the cause, and we could go back to the data on the back up and run the day/month end again. Several bugs I found were nothing to do with Y2K, they were old, and the system had never put under this sort of scrutiny before.

Our testing ran from September 1999 to March 2000 - because there was a question mark about whether or not some programs, operating systems, firmware and so on would properly recognise 2000 as a leap year.

I found a couple of Y2K bugs. One of which would have caused us considerable trouble and possible reputational damage at the end of January. This was not actually anything in the database or the operating system or the programming language. It was just some programmer had made a decision to represent a year using only 2 digits and then use that for controlling a loop.

Anyway… on the night we were all on duty on the IT campus. I was very confident that we’d make it, but part of the legal advice we’d been given was that we had to be seen to be taking all reasonable precuations. So there we were, with a quorum of the board present as well. The directors plied us with Red Bull so there was not much sleeping going on. About 10 am, when it was clear that all was right in the world, we had breakfast then stood down.

When I got home, the radio was on in the kitchen - a talk show. And it had started: The world hadn’t ended, our bank deposits were still safe and available, planes hadn’t fallen out of the sky. And so, dear listener, you see: It was a big fat lie all along, told by IT guys who wanted bigger budgets.

It struck me that people don’t like a mundaneprosaic but true story. It was almost like they would have been happier if everything had come tumbling down. That developers all over the world had heeded the warning and done the necessary remedial work was the one thing that nobody had allowed themselves to imagine. It had to be the end of the world or a massive porkie: No other scenario would do.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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32

Every single time we release a new firmware version for the GX device, the same happens. All the old bugs are found. Sometimes we fix them. Sometimes we say “not a regression!” and leave them for next time :slight_smile:

I heard similar things from male teachers. If a male teacher is giving a student assistance, the door had better be open so that any passerby can see into the classroom. That way, nobody can make accusations. Including the student.

It feels so wrong, but sadly we also know how the world got to be in this state.

Crichton writes good books. Though there is that one time he named the bad guy after some real-life person he had a disagreement with. Which was hugely entertaining too.

Another writer I quite liked 20 years ago, who since branched into that sort of thing, is Robin Cooke. He wrote a book with a fictional story about how medical testing may eventually make it possible to know beforehand who will get ill. Those people then won’t be able to get insurance. The people who test negative, won’t need insurance.

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I came across this interview WHY Centralization is a DISASTER and threatens us all - Nick Hudson explains! of Nick Hudson and his rule of thumb.
“I have a rule of thumb for diagnosing a centralization scam. If we can detect (1) a propagandized global crisis, (2) admitting only global solutions, and (3) with dissenting voices viciously silenced, then we can know with certainty that we are dealing with a scam.”
I really like the way he explains everything.

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I’m a fan of decentralisation. Especially in politics. I’m quite the fan of GK Chesterton too, and he wrote this in a London Newspaper about a hundred years ago:

THE men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged today.

Of course I am not advocating for actually doing that (and neither was he), but some things needs to be more local.

With that said, you can also have propaganda surrounding a very legitimate crisis. That was one kind of argument that really frustrates me every time it comes up: There is propaganda around this, therefore it is false!

That’s like the time Jacob Zuma said that his prosecution has been politicised, therefore it cannot (fairly) continue. Not to mention, he took part in the politicising!

That was actually another sort of mind-changing moment for me during the pandemic: Have we ever considered that those who were AGAINST the suggested course of action didn’t perhaps have their own agenda and propaganda? Some of them were actually very well organised!

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Adding to that, as I agree with you … when I hear Global Warming is a “scam”, then what on earth are these scientists smoking? Wait, where they not “silenced” originally?

So yes, spot on, wondered the same … about Covid AND Global Warming.

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In the end, I believe one should have the humility to admit: I was wrong about some things. We were wrong about some things.

In the beginning, I very easily dismissed reports of “vaccine injuries”. I was wrong about that. Injuries are a real thing, and we should expect them. We’re putting something foreign into your body with a very specific goal in mind: To get the body to launch an immune response. Sometimes, that sort of thing goes bad. That is why sometimes, people get Guillain-Barré syndrome after being infected with Chickenpox. If you administer a medicine to 3 billion people… you’re going to get non-zero adverse results!

We were also wrong about the R0 value, which made some of the early estimates wrong. A fact that a lot of people used to declare it a hoax.

You see, that is why I so so often not to assume malice when incompetence suffices. Do we really suppose people knew what they were doing in that first few weeks? We were learning about the damn thing while we were fighting it!

Also, there was this very humourous comic from XKCD at the time. Wanted to share that.

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Always best to explain anything using Star Wars :smiley:

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Just to make something very clear … I’m always wrong. Always.

Till I’m not.

It is a good thing I’m always wrong too … because if get it right, o bugger.