Apr 252021
 


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…

 

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Nov 162014
 
 November 16, 2014  Posted by at 10:25 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Negro woman carrying shoes home from church Mississippi Delta July 1936

Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel after 20 years, was released recently. Unfortunately for Jim and Jeff and the Farrelly brothers, unintended humor will always be funnier than the scripted kind, no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Case in point: the Dumber slapstick was easily upstaged over the past few days by the G20 summit in Brisbane.

Not only did the pedantic Anglo-Saxon power hungry freak show of Harper, Cameron and Abbott (nobody even noticed Obama) give Vladimir V. Putin a good laugh with their empty chest thumping, entirely spin doctor scripted and entirely aimed at their domestic media and audiences, these so-called leaders also came up with no less than 800(!) measures they claim will boost global economic growth by 2.1%, or $2 trillion. Over 5 years, or some useless and opaque number like that (2018?).

It would seem to be painfully obvious that what the world needs really urgently badly today is not so much economic growth, but growth in the dendrites, synapses and neurons in the heads of both our leaders and of those who put them where they are, ourselves. No use holding your breath. As things are, none of us are any smarter than either Dumb or Dumber.

As Brussels and the leaders of the allegedly healthy economies in the North sacrifice southern Europe on the altar of their megalomania, the G20 does the same with emerging economies and the even poorer rest of the world. The formerly rich part of the world has gotten stuck in its own dreams and faulty models, and the only place left to eke out any semblance of growth is weaker nations. The Roman empire revisited.

If the G20 nations could have ‘grown’ growth at a 2.1% clip with the sort of ease with which their reports were issued this weekend, they would have done so already, all along, long ago. The fact that they haven’t, it doesn’t get any simpler, implies that they can’t this time either. It’s all hot air, and perhaps that’s too positive still, make that tepid.

Still, when the Anglo-Saxon dipshits are together they have the guts to make such claims, just as when they’re together they have the guts to ‘shirtfront’ Putin. Canada’s Harper reportedly shook hands with Putin and told him to get out of Ukraine. Nobody present wanted to quote the reaction he got, but I’m thinking a simple ‘You first’ is a distinct possibility. None of these guys have anything on Putin, and they all know it. So does he.

Meanwhile, their home media have cooked up the Putin is Bad story to such heights that they can’t be seen as doing nothing, even if proof for any of the allegations concerning what Russia is supposed to be guilty of is still sorely lacking. The Anglo-Saxons need enemies to make their stories stick, so the ‘he probably shot down that plane’ line is awfully helpful.

And that dumber-ass approach is the same one they use for their economic, what shall we call it, ‘policies'(?), it’s the exact same thing. It’s the surface that counts, not what’s underneath it. It’s the storyline, not the veracity of it. Who in the west still doubts that Putin is a bad man? Very few. Though he hasn’t done anything for which the west has provided any proof.

It’s a tale in the spirit of Little Red Riding Hood, and just as credible. The 2.1% growth story doesn’t even attain that level of credulity, because it’s made up out of nothing at all. It would sound cute to say that the nonsense that emanated from the G20 summit is unrivaled, but it’s not. These boyos rival their own emptiness at every single occasion they get.

All they do is make sure that their access to the public (our) coffers is used to garner profit for their paymasters, at the cost of the taxpayer (again, us). That’s both their mission and their MO. And we all know that once you’ve been PM or FM and you served your superiors well, your life will be comfortable ever after.

That said, there is no vision, there is nothing. There’s a desire to amass power, and then to hold on to it and serve the bankrupt system, but none of it has anything to do with the people these guys and dolls are supposed to represent. And it can only lead to things like what the London School of Economics claims in a new report:

How The UK Coalition Has Helped The Rich By Hitting The Poor

A landmark study of the coalition’s tax and welfare policies six months before the general election reveals how money has been transferred from the poorest to the better off, apparently refuting the chancellor of the exchequer’s claims that the country has been “all in it together”. According to independent research to be published on Monday and seen by the Observer, George Osborne has been engaged in a significant transfer of income from the least well-off half of the population to the more affluent in the past four years.

That whole growth target is nothing but a way to justify more of what the LSE has noticed. A way to take away more money from the poor, through austerity, and through so-called reform IMF-style, after which the conclusion will be that the policies have failed, but the reality will be that the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. In the eyes of the G20 policy makers that will mean a success, even if it will be 180º different from what their public utterances have been.

We’re not only being fooled all the time and wherever we look, we’re being fooled by a bunch of stupid spin-scripted programmed assclowns. But we are the ones who put them where they are. As long as we hang on to our existing procedures for electing our leaders, only megalomaniac assclowns will float to the surface.

And they will, to a man, use their positions to rob us blind while pretending to have our best interests at mind. It’s what allowing money to enter your political system will always lead to: you can elect only made men. Which leads to Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Jeb Bush or Hillary. What about how this works is not clear?

The OECD even wants to do the G20 one better, they want 4% growth. I’ll tell you one thing: the western world will NEVER have a 4% growth rate again. Or at least not this century. And not before many millions of Europeans and Americans have gone down in hunger and misery.

We Need To Ramp Up Global Growth: OECD

The global economy should be growing at a much faster pace, the chief economist of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned on Sunday, as world leaders agreed on hundreds of measures they hope will boost expansion. “As the emerging markets become a greater share of the global economy, we really ought to be seeing the global economy growing at 4% or more, so the tone is dour,” said OECD Chief Economist Catherine Mann, speaking to CNBC at the G-20 summit in Brisbane over the weekend.

Growth of 4% is well behind the group’s projected global gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.3% for this year. In its latest Economic Outlook, published earlier this month, the OECD warned of “major risks on the horizon” for the world’s economy, such as further market volatility, high levels of debt and a stagnation in the euro zone recovery.

Mann’s comments come as world leaders at the G-20 agreed on measures they said will equate to 2.1% new growth, inject $2 trillion into the world economy and create millions of jobs. The Paris-based OECD has previously outlined a target of adding around 2 percentage points to global GDP by 2018, relative to the 2013 level. [..]

Mann was optimistic that job creation would increase in tandem with global growth, as countries ramped up infrastructure investment. “We know that there’s usually a relationship between growth and jobs. It’s not always a tight relationship. There’s always an issue about the distribution, where the jobs are being created, what sectors, what countries and some of the disconnect there can be,” she said. “Mismatch can be a problem, but I do think we are going to see job creation go hand in hand with global growth.”

Need I say more after reading that? The lunatics are guiding us off the cliff. I know most people feel there’s nothing they can do to change the course their countries and governments have taken, but I also think that perhaps all these people need to realize they don’t have much of a choice anymore. If getting up from your couch for your own sake isn’t enough of a incentive, how about doing it for your kids and grandkids? How about doing it just because it feels right, because silently supporting assclowns while gobbling up cheese doodles in your comfy chair should never have been your thing? Didn’t you once have promise?