Saturday, December 31, 2022
When Unstable Politicians Get out of Control
Another week, another seven lies …
The ABC’s AM podcast of Tuesday 14th April has the regular discussion of “The economic crisis brought on by the Covid Virus” (and I note in passing that it is less and less “the Covid-19 virus” and more and more “The Covid Virus”. What do you make of that?), and the politicians, always eager for a sound bite, noting that “No doubt about it, without the job-seeker program, the unemployment would have been a lot worse”.
Both these points of view are easily demolished.
(1) A virus is a tiny life form, about one micron in diameter. Small enough to invade a cell. As such a virus has no concept of economics. My concept of economics is limited enough, but I know more about economics than a one-micron package of functioning RNA.
I blame the economic downturn on politicians who are as eager to be seen “doing something about it” as they are to be interviewed by a microphone.
It was individuals, politicians, who decided to shut down all businesses in Bonavista and other settlements on the Bonavista Peninsula and other towns across Newfoundland, something January’s blizzard was unable to do. And not only Newfoundland, but Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario and all points west. Also the USA, the UK, and countries not too numerous to mention.
If you have ever read a history book, at what other time in the past has an elected government shut down all business in the nation?
Now I say all businesses, but of course food stores and liquor stores are not shut down, for many politicians understand the phrase “food riots”, although they can’t remember which nations it was that had them in the past. And as far as liquor stores go, I have had it confirmed by a local resident that there are more shotguns in Bonavista than there are RCMP officers.
The economic crisis is not caused by the Covid virus.
The economic crisis is caused by our politicians who are even as I type beginning to see that they have erred in ignoring Herd Immunity and the explicit reason for their being alive today:
Everyone of us humans is the apex of survival. Not one of our ancestors was struck down in infancy. Every one of my ancestors and of your ancestors survived childhood (viruses and bacterial infection) and went on to the issue of at least one offspring. That means that our species is effective at staving off viruses, and have been so effective for at least the past five million years – that approximate date of our common ancestry with chimpanzees.
The politicians need to admit their mistake and tug the not-so-mighty ship of state backwards off the economic shoals. Hold your local MPs feet to the fire and remind him/her/it that election day is drawing near. Don’t mention the shotguns, but.
(2) The fork in the road: We’ve all been there. I was there in the mid-sixties and chose the fork that led to a lifetime passion and career in Computing. I’m glad that I did. Computing has taken me around the world to live and work in different cultures and to learn about the Transilean System of the Île de France
Of course, had I stayed in geology I might have cashed in on the 1968 mineral boom in Western Australia. The six of us West Aussies in the programming school in Wollongong N.S.W. crowed and bragged with delight for six months in class.
But who can tell? How can I ever know what life I would have led had I stayed with geology instead of moving back into mathematics? I might have made more money, visited more places through geology and mining than I did in the cramped cubicles in huge corporations.
We will never know, and we can never know.
So it is with Self-Isolation (a.k.a. “Mandatory House Arrest”) which I have already pointed out “has been the bane of industrial society since at least 1968”.
When someone claims that “self-isolation is working; the number of cases/deaths is dropping” or “self-isolation is working; the rate of increase in the number of cases/deaths is dropping” – which is a different thing altogether but, being a longer string of words makes the issuer sound more knowledgeable – ask them to prove that their statement is correct.
They can’t. because self-isolation (on the current scale) is not a controlled experiment. It cannot be. There is no way that one can isolate part of the world’s population and not the other part of the world. If the other part of the world is free to fly anywhere, then the first part of the world is not isolated. Trump discovered this when he tried to stop Asians entering the USA. Canada/USA discovered this too, as did Canada and Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Chile (go look carefully at the fruit and veggies trays in your local supermarket)
School teachers are free to refute my argument on the grounds that it must be relatively easy to set up a carefully governed comparison of home-schooled children versus at-school children; and this is so. You can use scientific principles to define two groups, one a control group, and compare results down the road, but down the road will be twenty years or more. Much of my high school learning is still kicking into high gear some sixty years after the fact.
And setting up a properly controlled experiment needs to be done ahead of time.
Spontaneously banning school attendance and claiming that “this is working to reduce the spread of Covid” is a lie. It is a lie because you have no way of knowing that Covid might have been stopped in its tracks in January had we isolated just the vulnerable (very young, very old, transient ill-health) and exposed all the rest of the population overnight.
Remember that those of us humans who are alive on the face of the earth TODAY are successful, and are the offspring of successful virus fighters.
It is always safe to say that you can never know what might have been the outcome had you taken the other fork in the road.
Anyone who claims otherwise speaks with forked tongue.
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