Keith Haring Retrospect 1989
In 1884, Dr. Edwin Abbott Abbott published a book named Flatland. He appears to have meant it mainly as a social critique, but it became more famous as a mathematical “treatise”, when Einstein proposed the existence of a fourth dimension. Of course since then, physics has moved on to ideas, e.g. string theory, that suggest many more dimensions. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure I first came across Flatland in that context.
Recently I saw it mentioned somewhere and I connected it to my observation that the world appears to react to, and deal with, Covid in a one-dimensional setting -or two, if you will, since that is the main theme of Flatland-, but certainly not three. Abbott attempted to provide insight into what it means to explain a fourth dimension to a creature living in a 3-dimensional world, by taking one step back, and explaining a third dimension to one living in 2 dimensions.
First the basic ideas of the book, from Wikipedia:
Flatland (a Romance of Many Dimensions)
The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures, whereof women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. The first half of the story goes through the practicalities of existing in a two-dimensional universe as well as a history leading up to the year 1999 on the eve of the 3rd Millennium.
On New Year’s Eve, the Square dreams about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland) inhabited by “lustrous points”. These points are unable to see the Square as anything other than a set of points on a line. Thus, the Square attempts to convince the realm’s monarch of a second dimension, but is unable to do so. In the end, the monarch of Lineland tries to kill A Square rather than tolerate his nonsense any further.
Following this vision, he is himself visited by a three-dimensional sphere. Similar to the “points” in Lineland, the Square is unable to see the sphere as anything other than a circle. The Sphere then levitates up and down through the Flatland, allowing Square to see the circle expand and contract.
[..] After the Square’s mind is opened to new dimensions, he tries to convince the Sphere of the theoretical possibility of the existence of a fourth and higher spatial dimensions, but the Sphere returns his student to Flatland in disgrace. The Square then has a dream in which the Sphere visits him again, this time to introduce him to Pointland, whereof the point (sole inhabitant, monarch, and universe in one) perceives any communication as a thought originating in his own mind (cf. Solipsism):
“You see,” said my Teacher, “how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own – for he cannot conceive of any other except himself – and plumes himself upon the variety of Its Thought as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this god of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction.”
Although Flatland was not ignored when it was published, it did not obtain a great success. [..] The book was discovered again after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published, which brought to prominence the concept of a fourth dimension. Flatland was mentioned in a “Letter to the Editor” by William Garnett entitled “Euclid, Newton and Einstein”, published in Nature on 12 February 1920. In this letter Abbott is depicted, in a sense, as a prophet due to his intuition of the importance of time to explain certain phenomena.
“Some thirty or more years ago a little jeu d’esprit was written by Dr. Edwin Abbott entitled Flatland. At the time of its publication it did not attract as much attention as it deserved… If there is motion of our three-dimensional space relative to the fourth dimension, all the changes we experience and assign to the flow of time will be due simply to this movement, the whole of the future as well as the past always existing in the fourth dimension.”
Just as we cannot afford to shut down dissenting voices -but we do-, we cannot afford to have only a limited response to Covid, but -again- we do. We should have, must have, a multi-pronged, multi-dimensional response to a crisis like this, but we do not. Instead, we revert back to one dimensional “answers”, because that’s all our “leaders” can cope with.
To make the rollout of the current vaccines possible in the first place, we had to do a lot of legal juggling. First, all other substances that might have worked, had to be discredited and discarded. That enabled an Emergency Authorization Use, for -almost- entirely untested substances. Today, proud voices claim 1 billion people globally have been vaccinated. But since the world population is 7.9 billion, that leaves 6.9 billion not vaccinated people. Do we see the problem?
The problem is the virus continues to exist, and mutate, in multiple dimensions. And there is zero chance of those remaining 6.9 billion being jabbed before, say, 2025. Zero. And no, it’s not about how bad the variants, mutations, are that we see so far, it’s always about the next mutations.
The vaccines don’t protect you from getting infected or infecting others. The best they can do is make you less sick. So we have 1 billion people jabbed, of which a significant number is prone to get infected regardless, which will push the virus to continue mutating, and especially into a form that hides from the vaccines. And then there are the 6.9 billion unvaccinated who can get infected with these new much more virulent strains.
Against which the vaccines offer even less protection than against the “original” virus. A recipe for a huge disaster. How huge? Take a look at India today.
India COVID Triple-Mutant May Be Much More Deadly, Resistant To Vaccines
Scientists found two triple-mutant varieties in patient samples in four states: Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh. Researchers in the country have dubbed it the “Bengal strain” and say it has the potential to be even more infectious than the double-mutant variant. This is because three COVID variants have merged to form a new, possibly deadlier variant. The Times of India spoke to Vinod Scaria, a researcher at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in India, who said that the triple mutant was also an “immune escape variant” – a strain that helps the virus attach to human cells and hide from the immune system.
He added that it could have evolved from the double-mutant variant – which experts say is likely behind the recent surge of COVID in the country . Sreedhar Chinnaswamy, a researcher from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in India, told the Times of India that the variant also carried the E484K mutation, a characteristic found in both the South African and Brazilian variants. “In other words, you may not be safe from this variant even if you were previously infected by another strain, or even if you have been vaccinated,” said Chinnaswamy.
Let me stress again, it’s always about the next mutations, not these ones. But triple mutant, with immune escape, is pretty bad already. People are dying in the streets, in the parking lots of hospitals. And that’s just the beginning. If this graph from IHME (healthdata.org) is only half right, a full catastrophe is developing there. Yesterday there were some 350,000 new cases in one day, the graph predicts 4 times that many about 3 weeks from now.
Obviously, the US ban on exporting raw materials for vaccines is insane, as is Angela Merkel saying that “Of course, we have only allowed India to become such a large pharmaceutical producer in the first place, also from the European side, in the expectation that this should then also be complied with.” But that’s just the start of the insanity.
If we don’t get enormous amounts of oxygen, beds, PPE, vaccines, HCQ, ivermectin, doctors, nurses etc. etc. over there from our own countries right now, we will be able to see live on TV and the interwebs in mid-May how a completely preventable disaster, comparable only to the largest famines of the past century, will unfold. And India will not forget that; nor will the rest of Asia. And neither should we. India is merely yet another dimension that we elect not to see.
I published Dr. Geert VanDenBossche’s open letter about the risk of mass vaccinations on March 11. In it, he said:
[..] when the pressure exerted by the army’s (read: population’s) immune defense starts to threaten viral replication and transmission, the virus will take on another coat so that it can no longer be easily recognized and, therefore, attacked by the host immune system. The virus is now able to escape immunity (so-called: ‘immune escape’). However, the virus can only rely on this strategy provided it stlll has room enough to replicate.
Well, it is happening as we speak.
The day after, March 12, 2021, I wrote in Only:
• ONLY doctors are experts.
• We use ONLY vaccines to fight Covid, no prophylactics. No vitamin D, HCQ or ivermectin.
• We have ONLY Emergency Use Authorization vaccines.
• We can soon ONLY travel after having been inoculated with such vaccines.
• We can ONLY express officially approved opinions.
I could add: we can apparently ONLY exist in one dimension. That’s what made me think back of Flatland. But instead, we must move on to as many dimensions as we can. Because if we don’t, and we thereby limit our responses, we invite the endemic Sars-COV-2 virus to occupy those dimensions.
It is criminally insane to not try to boost everyone’s immune systems with something as simple as vitamin D, or to take HCQ and ivermection more serious, or dexamethasone, or any other repurposable drugs. We simply need to move in as many dimensions as we can, because the virus does, too.
Problem is, if ivermectin would be proven to be effective as a prophylactic or treatment, even it were just 50%, the Emergency Authorization Use for the mRNA vaccines would be in shaky legal territory.
It was hilarious to see Jeffrey Tucker at AIER yesterday repost this March 2020 article (but not so hilarious when you think about the consequences):
The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea
But what is this mention of the high-school daughter of 14? Her name is Laura M. Glass, and she recently declined to be interviewed when the Albuquerque Journal did a deep dive of this history. Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact.
What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed. Laura’s name appears on the foundational paper arguing for lockdowns and forced human separation.
That paper is Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006). It set out a model for forced separation and applied it with good results backwards in time to 1957. They conclude with a chilling call for what amounts to a totalitarian lockdown, all stated very matter-of-factly.
[..] In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics. The primary author of this paper was Robert J. Glass, a complex-systems analyst with Sandia National Laboratories. He had no medical training, much less an expertise in immunology or epidemiology.
But this is also oh-so typical of how the entire western world deals with this issue. Myopic, self-obsessed, profit-oriented, and lying through their teeth. The problem is not whether the present vaccines are somewhat effective or not, the problem is that we don’t know but run with them anyway. And leave a country like India to fend for itself, while complaining they don’t give us enough vaccines while their own people die in the streets.
There are many stories about side effects, blood clots in particular, which were predicted but ignored, for Chrissake. The problem is that in order to “live” in the one dimension of the present vaccines, we had to close ourselves off from all other dimensions. And that we cannot afford. This will not end well.
Lockdowns are not a one-dimensional thing either. They have a great effect on people’s mental – and physical- health, but nobody seems to care. Covid is the only dimension we recognize. And that’s also funny: Einstein suggested time -or space-time, more accurately- as a fourth dimension, but your Flatland politicians have no qualms about locking you down for an infinite amount of time, as if that is inconsequential.
We better inject some actual science into this whole discussion, or else. Then again, so far, there isn’t even a discussion at all. Dissenting voices are banned. Just one of many things we cannot afford. Science? It’s nothing to do with science. Just politics. Presently, people in the west are told that is they get “fully vaccinated”, they will be able to get back to “normal”. But that is a lie, or at least even Pfizer et al themselves give no guarantee that transmission will stop.
EU countries see similar numbers of infections, hospitalizations etc. today that they did 2-3-4 months ago. Then, the numbers were used to justify more restrictions. Now, the same numbers are used to justify “opening up”. Ergo, the politicians and their “science” advisors failed spectacularly, but their PR people phrase it as a success story. It would be funny if it weren’t so…
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