False Dichotomies On Climate Change and COVID
False Dichotomies On Climate Change and COVID
Please indulge me in an historical meander to approach the topic of the headline.
YesXorNo - SUBSTACK - OCTOBER 5, 2023
Introduction
Please indulge me in an historical meander to approach the topic of the headline.
At then end of the 19th Century one of Europe's greatest mathematician's, Hilbert, posed 23 questions for mathematics for the next century of which he presented 10 during the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians at Sorbonne on 1900-08-08. Among them was one which asked if mathematics and thus formal deductive logic could be based on a formal language and set of axioms from which certain knowledge could be derived.
This lead to work by Gödel in considering formal languages and among others by Alan Turing in the mechanization of them which lead to computers. Gödel's work exposed a fundamental flaw in the formal languages of deductive logic. His insight is best captured in the following proposition:
This statement is false.
This is the smallest of the self-referential loops which disprove themselves. If the statement is assumed to be true, then its truth proves its falsehood. And, if there are only two values for 'truth', true and false, then if one assumes the statement false, this implies that it is true. The problem is that this statement cannot be proved to be either true or false, it is neither, and it can be stated in any formal language which thus dooms them all to contain propositions which cannot be proven as true or false. Thus, deductive logic based on formal languages are fundamentally limited. As a trained mathematician and computer scientist I have a natural interest in formal languages.
This discovery helps me to maintain what I consider a healthy skepticism in formal logical systems, despite their power and utility.
Climate Change
Study of the environmental movement and the nature of the public declarations of warnings of the heating of the Earth's atmosphere have revealed that some very shady characters and practices were involved in both from the outset. There is a hidden truth in this, that where opportunities exist to manipulate governments to invest in very expensive programs, leeches appear to bend those who will make the decisions about government investment towards the solutions which will benefit the leeches. Or perhaps, inspiring extreme government spending outside of 'normal' activities is an aphrodisiac for grifters.
James Corbett's investigations of Maurice Strong document the involvement of shady characters early in the environmental movement. Similarly, many including James have examined the "hockey stick" misleading representations by the various climate "science" groups early in the “climate disaster” phase accompanied by Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth”. The protestations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have always begun with political rhetoric over the normally reserved phrases used by scientists.
I wish to put forward the case that two seemly contradictory things are both happening at once. One the one hand a bunch of manipulative grifters have been involved in the environmental movement and climate change from the outset. They have been attempting to control the direction of change which will be taken by governments for a bunch of reasons. For example, to preserve the status quo on one hand, and directing change towards profits for existing powerful institutions such as the fossil fuel industry on the other. The opposing truth is that 'climate change' is real.
To reach the conclusion of the last statement reports by various panels were not the clinching factor for me. I happened to be working at a University at a department which researched environmental engineering, the actual coal face as it were, for this topic. I engaged one of the Associate Professors with whom I'd taught a course a few times to ask him about climate change. It was his response which convinced me. His core area of study is in extreme weather events and how governments can best plan for them, as lead by his full Professor who had a 'doctor doctor' (that is, an eight year long additional academic qualification achieved after his Ph.D).
The younger Associate professor informed me that the problem is best understood as the increase in the average energy density of the atmosphere. This is a natural result of the 'greenhouse' effect and is measurable. He could, I am certain, have recommended various courses and then a collection of scientific publications which would have lead me to conclude that what he was saying was well founded. Rather than invest this effort, knowing that he is a good scholar who treats his subject matter seriously, I accepted what he was saying.
Many Earth systems are non-linear. That is Chaos Theory, which I'd studied back in undergraduate physics, applies. Few things are is simple. For example, higher temperatures mean ice melt, which reduces the earth's reflectivity. This would imply greater heat absorption, but increasing temperatures create more cloud cover which has a counter effect. Limited models produce wildly varying results because it aint simple.
It all comes back to measurement. What can be measured? CO2 levels, yes. We have that data. There are many more datasets, like all of the planet’s meteorological stations, all of the satellite mounted sensors. etc.. Its gathering this data, understanding the limitations of them and then attempting to integrate these into models derived from currently agreed physics which is the interesting and challenging part. The final killer is weather itself, which is a fundamental non-linear system. This readily explained by the increasing lack of reliability by weather forcecasting services the further they move into the future. Because of the extreme importance of these weather predicting services for everything from crop yields to emergency preparedness they have considerable investment in modern computing. And still, at a week into the future the error bars of their predictions begin to invalidate their utility.
But, assures my friend the Associate Professor, make no mistake. The earth's average atmospheric energy density is increasing. Of course, this adds to the predictive problems which meteorologists already face with the non-linear nature of weather.
I am thus left with two truths. Climate Change is real, in the sense described by Hjalte Sørup, and that the political forces around its communication and the manner in which government's respond to it are infested with power hungry grifters. In retrospect, this is not surprising at all. However, at the time, these ideas can appear contradictory. This is especially the case when people who express alarm about the processes of governance or bending towards political rhetoric of the “good” science is also associated with flat out denial of the actual phenomena.
The 'cognitive dissonance' produced by accepting this can initially be very annoying. To make matters worse, whenever one speaks of the grifters, nay-sayers start re-purposing terms thrown at those who rejected the authority of the Warren Commission into the assassination of JFK because it was headed by the Head of the CIA, the notoriously nasty 'ends justifies the means' Alan Dulles. That term, of course, is "conspiracy theorist". All of a sudden, one is holding seemingly contradictory beliefs and being denigrated by many who are less informed using psychologically manipulative terms deployed by expert psychological manipulators, to put not too fine a point on it.
Blame and Guilt
If you haven't torn up your screen in disgust and thrown this screed into the bin yet, here we go again on another topic just designed to rip people's brains apart with emotions pulling one in one direction and logic and a balanced view of history in the other to create the mother of all cognitive dissonances.
Before we visit this primeval hellscape of mental torture I'd like to meander again to a topic I recently covered in Striving for the Achievable. The question was raised while re-visiting the topic of the 9/11 crimes, another of the pastures of cognitive dissonance.
We social apes really want to ascribe blame. It is an ingrained desire. We want to protect the fragile social fabric around us which sustains us. Miscreants who create suffering need to be identified so that they can be removed from the fabric, like a cancer from healthy tissue. We want justice for the same reasons, to empathize with those suffering and to shield ourselves and our children from people who would harm us. I consider it very important to know this to be true of myself. I expect this to be true of most others too, sociopaths and psychopaths excepted.
But, beware of this healthy desire and especially of running at it too quickly.
Courts, troublesome as they can be, have given us a pretty good method for working with the ascribing of guilt and blame. It starts with understand what happened. Only after this does one go into who did it and why. The same approach is used in science. What happened? Then, how can we explain this? Do we have existing models or do we need to think again and come up with better mental and mathematical models to explain these measured phenomena?
So, that's the plan, the order, for assigning blame and guilt: What happened, and then, if you need to, who did it and why? Sometimes, the guilt can be less important that just recognizing what happened and choosing to stop there, as may be the case for many, myself included, when it comes to 9/11. Essentially, I don’t care if it was paranoid aliens, Mossad or ‘the bankers’.
COVID
COVID, or SARS-CoV-2, is a virus with a particularly nifty mechanism to bypass the cell wall using what is known as the "spike" protein. Like all viruses, it co-opts the cell's machinery to replicate itself and then issues forth to spread its infection and re-replicate. A successful virus does not kill its host, but uses them to replicate so that it can infect other hosts and thus follow a successful evolutionary path. The other strategy is to be able to survive in hostile environments for very long periods of time to re-awaken from a dormant state and do it all again. Any combination of these two approaches is a 'success'. Re-infection strategies vary from airborne via coughs etc. to using other transport mechanisms such as mosquitoes or feces or whathaveyou. COVID is respiratory, so airborne is the natural route.
Was COVID deadly? Well, yes, but it was novel when it first came out and so not much was publicly known in the beginning. It did appear to be virulent (i.e can re-infect rapidly) and dangerous. So, professionals who work in public health warned that things could get out of control rather quickly and so caution was the best strategy. This was hyped up by various organisations/governments/media and we all know what happened then.
What we do know, and knew pretty quickly, was that COVID is particularly dangerous for the elderly, which for me means my parents. They needed to take the advice of caution seriously because they rather like living and being around for their children and grandchildren.
What also appears to be the case now is that COVID is a bit like the 'flu'. It will be a persistent threat having its own characteristics which make it more dangerous for some than others depending on existing conditions of the person whose defenses it can bypass.
Where is it from? Who did it? I don't know.
We do know that various shady groups, not least the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation were involved in "role playing" an almost identical outbreak just weeks before the earliest COVID warnings. It has "plan-demic" written all over it. But, and an important but, it is not terrible policy to consider impending major threats to society. It just happens that these mechanisms have been used repeatedly to provide cover for false flag attacks. The London 7/7 bombings are a classic example of this. So, the COVID epidemic lends itself to the term 'plan-demic' whether it was planned or not.
The best research I've seen is by Ron Unz. SARS-CoV-2 seems to me a product of US bio-weapons research. It was released in Wuhan, a central transport hub of China, at a time to promote a rapid dispersal in China. I guess that the intended effects were primarily to weaken China's economy. I am not ascribing the release to any authorized US group, and consider it far more likely that this was a limited knowledge highly compartmentalized operation. These programs, called Special Access Programs (both links are to PDFs), exist in the US, especially in areas of serious military technology, including things like advanced avionics, other things related to UFOs and material science.
One of the strongest counter arguments to this bioweapons theory is “How did it get to Iran so quickly then?” This is fairly easily countered with “The people who wanted to weaken China probably have a similar level of animosity to Iran, so two controlled outbreaks seems plausible.” If you’re interested in the hypothesis, see Unz’s work. Be warned: allocate about a day to read his 9 000 odd words and verify at least some of the reference material.
I don't care if you agree with me (or Unz, actually) about the origins or not. I am not certain about the origins, I've just offered that which I consider the best hypothesis I've found.
What I do know, is that the elderly did need to take the public health warnings seriously. In various places around the world, government responses to the public health risk, which we now know to have been partially exaggerated but didn't know that at the time, were heavy handed to the point of effectively denying privileges which many consider as rights. [Please see George Carlin below on "rights and privileges".]
So, this is my cognitive dissonance. I need to respect the intelligent, cautious behaviour of my parents and at the same time understand that some government responses were heavy handed and probably deliberately manipulated to be so, and that in all likelihood the whole thing was a geopolitical attack by a bunch of sociopaths who are addicted to US hegemony which resulted in the 'excess' deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. How 'dja like them mental apples?
More Gratuitous Advice
But, we can do this. Its difficult, but we can. We can be compassionate for those who suffer, know fairly well what happened, hold probable blame and still pursue life addressing that which matters to us.
We do not need to fall into logical traps of false dichotomies or suffer for cognitive dissonance. Everyone who researches these troubling topics around false flag events and the power of something as strange as little pieces of green paper will need to find methods to deal with shock and dissonance from time to time. Good luck with that.
I find our beautiful planet, humor, love (the giving and receiving thereof, or participating therein), compassion, music (or the creative arts more generally) to be of assistance. Your mileage may vary.
Peace be with you.
Sources
Hilbert's problems, Wikipedia
Meet Maurice Strong: Globalist, Oiligarch, "Environmentalist", James Corbett, The Corbett Report, 2016-02-01
Interview 1131 - Elaine Dewar on Maurice Strong's Cloak of Green, James Corbett, The Corbett Report, 2016-02-02
Episode 282 - The IPCC Exposed, James Corbett, The Corbett Report, 2013-09-28
The IPCC Prepares to Release More Hot Air, James Corbett, The Corbett Report, 2018-10-07
Allen Dulles, Wikipedia
'The Brothers,' by Stephen Kinzer (a review of the book), Adam LeBor, The New York Times, 2013-11-08
Memorandum for Special Access Program (SAP) Senior Working Group [PDF], [US] Department of Defence, 2016-01-07
SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAMS [PDF], CDSE pulse Volume 1 Issue 12, 2020-12
Striving for the Achievable, YesXorNo, YesXorNo, 2023-08-08
American Pravda: "The Truth" and "The Whole Truth" About the Origins of Covid-19, Ron Unz, Unz Review, 2021-05-10
Ten Years of American Pravda and The Unz Review, Ron Unz, The Unz Review, 2023-06-05
George Carlin -Rights and Privileges, George Carlin, uploaded by ViamanaRama, on 2008-06-24
[More George Carlin for sanity preservation: download the audio using the usual tool; yt-dlp -x.
The links are to the youtube page with the audio.]
FM and Am, George Carlin (Album), ...
George Carlin - Napalm and Silly Putty, George Carlin (Album), ...
George Carlin Reading His Book:"Brain Droppings", George Carlin (Book reading), ...
Culture (as if you needed more)
Sinéad O'Connor - Black Boys on Mopeds (Official Audio), Sinéad O'Connor (from her 1990 album ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got’), Chrysalis Records, uploaded 2022-09-30
ORIGINAL >
