Author: the philosopher king

a baseball is pitched from the mound. it takes several seconds to reach the batter. the batter swings and clocks the ball into the atmosphere. it takes more than a few seconds to arc up over the outfield. it was struck with such massive force that it flies over the stands, which takes more seconds. several seconds later, that hurtling ball crashes into a car’s windshield. more seconds later, the sound of the crash and the blaring car alarm travel back into the stadium and back to the fans who begin cheering. a second or so later, the sound finally reaches the pitcher and moments later the batter. home run!

although the game can be exciting, the story is also an allegory for the relationship between time, space and causality. how much time passed between the pitch — also known as the cause — and the broken windshield — the effect? 30 seconds? 40 seconds?

can you think of any more allegories, analogies or examples where the initial cause and the effect were distant in spacetime? surprisingly, every single interaction of every single bit of energy or matter in the universe can be an example, because causality is everywhere.

economies work in a similar fashion. causes and effects can be far flung from eachother. sometimes they are so far apart that our puny brains forget they can be related. for instance, supply chains can be so long that they take months, years and sometimes decades to complete. this is where our models of economics often fall short. we often don’t know, perhaps because businesses don’t always track or sometimes can’t know the entirety of their supply chains.

what’s happening in the world now is that the links in the supply chains are breaking down, but we won’t realize that for months or years because we have nearby stock of supplies which delude us into believing we have plenty. we are unknowingly eating into our supplies right now, but those supplies will begin to run low soon. the workers and managers who supply those chains have been furloughed or laid off or locked into their houses en masse just like you and your neighbors. once we run out of supplies for our supply chains, we will experience long droughts of resources — some of them basic resources.

this is unfortunately the blind spot that social media and news media and sometimes even modern governments have. they take for granted that the shelves have always been stocked. sadly, that’s the mass delusion imposed upon us by supply chain efficiency. but efficient systems are subject to droughts even more readily than inefficient systems. and where are the backups? are you ready to put on your gloves and your hat to go out and be an agriculturist? is there enough water? enough fertilizer? enough soil? enough land? enough ploughs?

the answer is no.

you’d better hope for your sake and your neighbor’s sake that this farce ends quickly. because when the food and water and electricity stop coming, and you live in the desert, i can guarantee that there are only enough resources for one of you — between yourself and your neighbor — and one of you will be stronger than the other.

it’s funny how history gets forgotten, only if because it’s the only possible reaction the horror shows that come from history being forgotten. “yeah, we knew that,” is the collective answer afterwards.

the history of plagues have been forgotten. straight up. history … lost.

for hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been plagued. before humans, our simian ancestors were plagued for millions of years; our mammalian ancestors for hundreds of millions of years; our eukaryote and prokaryote ancestors for billions of years. “we’ve” been around a long time. evolution built us to survive plagues. it’s literally in our genes.

but then … somehow … we forgot.

our hubris blinded us.

we have cured all the diseases that need curing. we’re all good. thanks.

oh, wait. we missed a few … hundred … thousand viruses and pathogenic bacterial strains and funguses (yes yes, fungi) … ?

oopsies!

exactly how many plagues did europe encounter before the invention and distribution of antibiotics in the 1930’s and 1940’s and beyond? oh. ya know. all of them. billions of people died. b. b b b billions. with a b. fact: prior to 1930, most humans died of pathogenic diseases. we don’t even know how many children died because nobody counted. they just chucked those little corpses into back allies and went back to fucking. over the top? too much? your politically correct sensibilities not handling this well? no way? just impossible? tell that to the millions of little tiny skeletons that litter museums around the world … found in … ancient … back … alleys.

of course, it got a lot worse once we started crowding into cities … but that really did kill off the weak. and so the city folk became stronger. no kidding. no shit. evolution is not a theory. the strongest really do survive. it’s kind of comical how like clockwork it really is, all things considered.

sad!

what’s worse is that we forgot how bad plagues really are. here we are, sitting at less than a cool 100K in this country. oh, and don’t forget, it doesn’t kill people at reproductive age (15-35). or people in middle age (35+). or people beyond middle age (50+). even people in retirement age (65+) are mostly spared. the majority of people who died are truly weakened by decrepitude. depending on which obfuscation you choose to believe (and there are quite a few!), over 50% of the deaths so far have been in people over the age of 80 … which … by the way … is higher than the average lifespan in 95% of countries … so … yah.

but this is going nowhere. what does this have to do with the history of plagues? well, smartie pants, let’s get off that morbid topic and go on to your next question.

“how many people die of sepsis?” you ask — because you’re a smart cookie and you know that sepsis is a deadly disease too that has a long and storied history.

well, let’s see.

1.7M people got it (approximately average) last year and 270K died — in the united states alone.

wait.

what?

yeah.

so over ten years — i can still do basic arithmetic despite how stupid facebook and google believe i am — that’s about 2.7M americans.

wait.

say that again.

yeah.

facts people! facts!

these posts are going to go on for days or weeks or months. perhaps year. why? because the mass delusion caused by us collectively forgetting how the history of plagues work is going to cause millions more deaths due to ancillary factors being ignored or under-resourced. like sepsis. which mostly happens in hospitals and is mostly caused by hospital staff. yeah. that’s the #1 vector.

to be fair, we are pretty damned good at controlling sepsis, numerically speaking. what happens if we fail to control it? well, if we don’t control it … the death toll from sepsis alone will skyrocket … because those 1.43 million people who survive sepsis every years … will survive … less … … ……. .. . . . . . . . . . . so where’s our $10T bailout for the sepsis vaccine?

but this is a post about the forgotten history of plagues. is sepsis a plague? well, in a very technical sense, yes. it’s (usually) a bacterial infection in the bloodstream where the entry point into the body is an open wound (think: surgery).

let’s forget about sepsis. so morose. so negative.

are there any other diseases that are likely to skyrocket due to lack of resources?

why, yes. there are several, in fact. let’s take a simple one. the flu. according to the (now weaponized and politicized) cdc, 80K americans died of the flu in 2018. oh, and there are at least 8 different (effective!) vaccines for the various strains of the flu. and millions upon millions upon millions of people got vaccines for the various strains of the flu in 2018. it just so happens that 80K americans died — silently, i might add — despite the fact that we have 8 vaccines. whoa. so if we didn’t have any vaccines?

yeah.

the flu is way … way … way deadlier than the current hoax virus. way.

so stop listening to the hype and the lies and stop buying into the mass delusion that your news feed (which you picked, by the way!) is pumping into your addled brain. the answers are out there. most of them are in books that have been sitting on the shelves, unread and ignored. with history in them.

go

fucking

read

them

“how many flu vaccines exist?”

even if you are smart enough to come up with the question, neither google (nor any other search engine) will present you with an answer of any kind.

the basic answer: at least 8.

the real answer: dozens.

so if the flu has at least 8 vaccines and yet still manages to kill 80K americans … hmm … finish and answer the rest of that question yourself. you can think.

the short answer: google can’t think.

the longer answer: google was designed as an ad revenue generating engine and it’s really good at avoidance of anything that won’t generate revenue. as a result it prioritizes click-bait and bait-and-switch answers instead of knowledge or facts.

parents! teach your children how to plan! just follow this 427 step plan:

• to prepare yourself, read josh waitzkin’s book: the art of learning
• do not get distracted by your corporeal
• the earlier, the better
• start at their level, work through all the levels
• they will never stop leveling up because there is not an end to the levels (fifth domain anyone?)
• use the methods that they respond to best
• transform them until they become self-aware and then help them transform themselves
• mistakes are key: let them happen
• allow ample time for rest and recovery and learning from mistakes
• failure is key: let it happen
• reboot after a failure and try a different perspective, angle or method and make sure everyone is learning from failure
• without planning, they cannot move into the next domain
• practice = learning
• practice + failure = experience
• practice + failure + planning = mastery
• practice + failure + planning + transference = wisdom
• practice + failure + planning + transference + ? = the 5th domain

first of all, let’s level set. you must generally understand the conceptual nature of the fields of global macroeconomics and behavioral economics. that’s the buy-in or ante-up. comparative advantage requires those in your intellectual domain. comparative advantage is the economic advantage (usually cost) choice between two nations for a single product or service. for example, a corporation can choose high quality bananas from hawaii or panama, but chooses those from panama because they are cheaper to buy and ship to california.

the argument

this method by analogy can be transferred to behavioral economics. two people have equal skill sets in terms of their learning ability. they have matched intellects, matched knowledgebases, matched toolkits. how does a hiring manager choose one? there can be a comparative advantage that is unrelated to the skill set. for example, the hiring manager can pick the person who smells badly over the person who smells good.

the counterargument

unfortunately, this — among other downsides — plays into all sorts of biases that are both inherent and observed (think: racism). it’s generally viewed as “wrong” for a hiring manager to use certain personal attributes influence decision-making, especially during the hiring process. let’s say we live in a world where racism doesn’t exist (hint: it does) and said managers don’t enable it (hint: they do). then what’s the comparative advantage between person A and person B? there might not be any! the study of behavior — in a way — is a study of groups and sometimes stereotypes. let’s assume that hiring managers can use advantages but not disadvantages, just to prevent the argument from failing. fine. what’s the comparative advantage then? bribery? gifts? that gives the capitalist or the wealthier person the advantage. what else? nicer clothes? that gives the more fashionable or resourceful person the advantage.

this is a slippery slope. eventually, the person who can mold themselves into a member of the “culture” can excel.

let’s say the culture is the old boys club. all you have to do is … first be a boy … second be white … third be unscrupulously willing to trade anything for anything … ouch.

sounds like white privilege. sounds like male privilege. sounds like the privilege of the majority or privilege of the culturally elite. as all feedback loops go, so goes this one.

the answer is simple. you must suppress your morals, ethics and standards — all in exchange for your standars of living. you must intentionally become a sociopath or a psychopath. you must abandon your humanity and become a machine.

the retort

that is argumentation from a deep wellspring of emotion. it is an appeal to the righteous and the angry. it is child’s play on the field of rhetoric (did you see that? ad hominem attack).

as an individual organism, i have an evolutionary right to survive. as a self-aware entity, i have a right to thrive. my survival and my thriving require me to take the comparative advantage and game it and utilize it and economize it. i am required to get good utility out of it. therefore, i will take the bath and wear the nice clothes. however, i will not poke the bear, kick the dog, and rustle the ant’s nest. instead, i will let the bear hibernate until it is starved, i will let the sleeping dog lie, and i will pour poisoned honey on the ant’s nest.

the conclusion

our civilization was designed with you as the means of production. the future requires that you be the product. you can be a sweet tasting milk that the elite gobble up, or you can be a cow that makes sweet tasting milk. you have the choice for now. but be sure that you understand that you are not the elite and you never will be. you are the cow or you are the milk. nothing more.

what? does it cost too much to put people into concentration camps and gas them and burn the bodies? why not just imprison them in their own homes for their own “safety?” pump up the rhetoric some more, nazis. pump that propaganda into the system like laughing gas — except not to cause laughter but slaughter. make the republicans and democrats battle it out in the political arena while the economy collapses and a mild cold virus decimates the octogenarians. fear, greed and political agendas are an awesome combination. let’s see what this newfangled combination of human failings you’ve birthed does to human civilization. many a civilization has collapsed for much lesser evils. let’s see if you paid attention in history class.

humans can be programmed just like machines. but there is a definite limit.

i will define the context since it might not be obvious to the outside observer or to audiences without prior knowledge of this context.

in computer science, there are essentially two models for giving commands to machines (i.e., programming them): imperative and declarative.

imperative programming — just like the prototypical use of the word imperative in general studies — decrees that one entity (usually a human) issues commands to another entity (usually a machine, but often other humans and sometimes non-human animals). for example, “joe instructed the machine to buy shares of stock when the share price lowers to $3.50.” the example implies that joe has specific instructions (for specific reasons) and has already made those decisions a priori. the action is carried out when the trigger occurs. it implies, to some degree, that the machine is stupid and the human is smart. this has been the typical, unmarked command structure in computer programming for many decades.

declarative programming, which is a bit more esoteric and hard to grasp, defines functions or behaviors, not commands. the reason this is esoteric is because it implies that machines know how to interpret the required behaviors and then act accordingly. for example, “Joe turned on the flag in the computer’s memory that set the behavior of his app to always check for security breaches before letting a user log into his system.” the example implies some sort of sentience, which if taken seriously would be false reasoning. what it really means is that the machine had been programmed with said behaviors by a human at some point in the past. in a slightly more frightening scenario, it implies that the machine has learned (hence the term machine learning), typically through various forms of analysis that are known to be optimized for (at this point, binary processing) machines — for instance, statistical analysis, neural networks, etc. basically, the machines are thought of as having “artificial intelligence” that can creates models that can then form the basis for their behaviors. regardless, data must be gathered or observed before the machine can learn. beyond the potentially frightening and esoteric nature of declarative programming, it’s hard to grasp because humans (and other animals) don’t seem to work this way. or do they?

can declarations be applied to models of human behavior and humans themselves?

two very interesting questions, which will need quite a lot of thought and analysis to understand. my intuitions say “no.”

why would it matter? because it’s being done, consequences be damned. i have observed that leading-edge proponents of our technological revolution are attempting to pass from one domain into the next by applying declarations to human systems (also known as markets) and humans themselves.

as always, i will attempt to look to the five domains for inspiration here. (don’t be afraid of the five domains — they are just a tool in the toolkit of analysis, like a hammer or an electron scanning microscope.)

as with any new technology, there is risk of failure. unfortunately, passing from one domain (or in this case, creating a new domain) involves considerably more risk. think about the change in human civilization when metal technology was invented (and adopted) or — more fittingly — when communism was idealized. communism is a declarative model of human behavior. it declares that human systems will behave in a certain way. unfortunately, the humans in those systems didn’t want to (could not?) behave in such a manner and the communist system — which was enforced in the ussr through authoritarianism and continues to be enforced in China through flat deception) fell apart or had to be adapted.

what are the declarations being applied in today’s world?

• washing hands is required
• touching your face is forbidden
• staying home and forgoing entertainment and socialization is compulsory
• wearing a face covering is the law

do these sound familiar at all? perhaps a clue can be found in the old testament, the new testament and the quran.

more insidious are the unrealistic (and often fantastic or physically impossible) declarations:

• order everything you need through an app
• the real world is a game or a simulation

why are these insidious? it comes down to (ironically) the means of production on the one hand and on the other the causality of the physical world. the means of production don’t exist without humans to run the system. the dream of the terrifying technology-industrialists is that the machines will build themselves. sure, maybe in a thousand years after they’ve replaced us. for now, not a chance. therefore, humans will have to do the jobs. that necessitates putting some humans into a class they might not want to be in. that sounds an awful lot like slavery doesn’t it? but less abstract is the belief that the rules of physical reality can be subverted through gamification or by “breaking the simulation.” folks, gamification will only take you so far. everybody will figure out that you’ve gamed the system and within minutes your niche will be flooded with copycats who are far better than you are at your game. second, there is no simulation. that’s the reasoning of a great imagination or a fantasy. so far, we haven’t found any ways to break to laws of physics. and believe me when i say, we are trying and have been trying very hard for a very, very long time.

what is the final outcome here? failure, on a grand scale. humans are humans. they behave the way evolution “programmed” them to behave. certain animals can be trained to behave in certain ways, like elephants on a tight-rope, but that expectation only goes so far. any fool can see that the elephant can do nothing more than walk a tightrope. that’s literally the limit of its abilities, no matter what tricks you try to teach it or spells you conjure or insults you hurl at it or switches you beat it with. regardless of whether you apply imperatives or declarations, the elephant will neither fly nor speak. likewise, humans will always be humans, and the only way to change that is to get rid of the humans and replace them with … something … else.

good luck with that.

*** never forget that the slavic word for slave is robot, and the roman word for slave is slav. that’s a poetic way of saying that we’ve been here before already (a couple of times in fact).

the title says it all, right?

except it’s probably going to cost a lot more than ten trillion dollars.

when all is said and done, the people who would have died without quarantine will have died. the great social-distancing experiment will prove to be a giant failure. it already is. it’s ludicrous of policy makers to assume or hope that a quarantine would ever have worked. yet they keep banging that drum. “all you have to do is stay home…” really? just stay home? and what, starve?

anyway, the experiment failed. it’s time to realize that. optimism and political correctness can’t change the facts or reality. my dear millennials and gen z’ers, marvel and disney are works of fiction. you cannot stop a virus with hope and lies any more than you can build a house out of bubble gum and match sticks.

but hey — the upside is that more science is being done now than at any other point in history. the up-side is that there will most definitely be vaccines and antigens and rapid testing for all sorts of viruses. the downside is that the ultimate cost will be well over ten trillion dollars.

the problem is that vaccines sometimes have limited efficacy. in 2018, for instance, 80K american people “died” of the flu (illnesses related to or exacerbated by it). that’s staggering, considering we have vaccines for nearly 20 different varieties of flu viruses. what would that figure be without the vaccines? if the historical numbers are to be believed, hundreds of thousands or even millions.

so take your diapers off and grow up. it’s time to realize that facts are facts. your desire and your will are meaningless in a physical reality defined by biochemical processes that have shaped evolution of rna-based life over the last 3 billion years. god is not hiding in the numbers. you are a biological machine, and you follow the rules of governing biological machines unerringly.

sorry, kid. it was never “fair” for your parents, grand parents, great-grand parents, or any ancestors — or any one for that matter — and it will certainly never be “fair” for you. it may seem illogical, but just remember, logic is an abstract construct of the human imagination, just like “fairness.”

sometimes idiots like to accuse other people — ironically, competent people — of being idiots. in a way, it’s their defense mechanism.

in other cases, smart people — wonks — like to accuse other people — idiots and other wonks — of being idiots. likewise, it’s their defense mechanism.

both accusations look the same and result in the same conclusion, yet they stem from different root causes.

in the first case, idiots are not intelligent enough or — in some cases –knowledgable enough — to understand what’s going on in any given context or situation. they react for any number of reasons, but often out of pride. pride — in this case, the christianic sin of pride — prevents them from admitting their position and station in life. yet, it’s not always pride that does so. any number of emotions, such as fear and anger, can also trigger their reactions.

in the second case, wonks misunderstand the world around them, usually because of signal processing, pattern recognition, recollection failures or communication errors. they often become such experts in their own subject (or — frustratingly — more than one) that they fail to recognize that they are making the fundamental attribution error (see: sociology). instead of blaming the actual cause or even the root cause, they find it easier to blame the most conveniently located sentient being for all and every issue. in — more often than not — rare cases, the person on the receiving end of the attack could actually lack intelligence or knowledge.

in my life, there are a countless examples of both cases. both frustrate me unerringly. it seems that for each situation i need a different coping mechanism. sometimes the attack is light, sometimes it’s heavy. i am myself guilty of the attack on occasion. i have become more aware of others and myself as time goes on. this is the curse of experience. the true test of wisdom is having enough coping mechanisms and the situational knowledge of when to deploy. in other words, i am in the third domain and trying to find a way to move to the fourth.

i’ll continue working on it.

as a postscript, i’d like to summarize the domains in this post for posterity. the theme or motif of this post seems to be conscious awareness, so i will call this the domains of awareness. as always, the null domain does not count as a domain, but here it is the complete lack of conscious awareness: infants, developing infants, fetuses, embryos, etc. the first domain encompasses toddlers, children and pre-teens; or in other words, beginners, padawans, novices, whatever. the second domain is pre-teens and anyone who is an intermediate — knowledgeable without experience. the third domain is experienced people who lack wisdom. the fourth domain is wise people. and of course the fifth domain, as always, in somewhat undefined, somewhat unknowable, and perhaps unattainable. i will speculate that the fifth domain is transcendence or post-humanism.

there’s a war going on. it’s not being waged in the valleys nor on the plains, nor in the mountains nor on the sea. there are no swords, guns nor bombs. where is it? it’s in our heads. it’s in the collective consciousness. people just believe they are right. there are piles and piles of evidence yet the ones in power are all powerful. it’s not a power backed up by forces, but power backed up by threats and sustained by fear. wear your mask, or else! it’s almost like they’re invading russia, like napoleon or hitler, yet there is no army. and elon is right. the fascists do currently have the upper hand. they rule with fear.

nonetheless, the ideas will lose out to data. no one knows what the future will bring, but the writing is on the wall: the massive amount of data will eventually win. but we’ve been here and done this before. isn’t it obvious? if mother nature wanted us dead, we’d all be dead. seriously. look at a real plague. look at a real epidemic. no. this is ideological warfare.

oh. and when this is all over, some politicians and policy makers and media moguls and shills should go to jail for lies and massive incompetence.