Surveillance, Pandemics, and Conspiracies

Lately there have been a number of people who point to this or that proposal for tracking infected people, or recovered people, or contact tracing during an epidemic. In some cases the proposals predate this pandemic. After all, pandemic response is not a new concept. But to people reading the ideas for the first time, some immediately see a conspiracy, as if the whole reason we are suffering a pandemic is because the...

Examining the Evidence: Bill Gates wants to Microc...

Someone alerted me to a facebook post: PATENT 060606 is a Cryptocurrency System using body activity data in humans…. The patent is owned by Microsoft-Bill Gates. ..Again.. not a conspiracy theory…! For some this is absolutely shocking or unbelievable…. For others.. we have seen this coming all along…. This post isn’t to fuel fear..it’s to raise awareness… You can look up the patent here:...

Debunking the Debunkers

Israeli Professor Debunks Government Claims That Lockdowns Slow Coronavirus Infection, Proves Worldwide Decline In Spread The word that caught my attention was “debunks.” Somehow, these days that type of language triggers my conspiracy theory radar. It practically screams, “motivated reasoning” by someone who is about to go to great lengths to willfully ignore the scientific consensus–or the...

Will a Covid Vaccine be Found?

A vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is the type of logical thing we can all write into plans for how to restore society and the economy back to “normal”. Except there is no reason to believe that a vaccine will ever be found. As of right now there are no vaccines for this type of virus. Some viruses have traits that allow for easy vaccines (polio) some kind of work (flu) and some have eluded us to date (the common cold)....

Alarming Nonsense about Covid by People Who Should...

Is Coronavirus Contagious? – Nourishing Traditions Sorry, but I find this thoroughly unconvincing. For one, there have been plagues about every decade in European history back into the Middle Ages. No need to stop at 1918. The Roman era was ended by plagues and climate change in the early 600s (cooling in that case, leading to malnutrition and then disease). Plagues wiped out the Native Americans over three centuries....

The Problem Considering 5G Claims

The real problem is that human physiology is the most complicated thing in the known universe. Multiply that times 9 billion variants and it gets really hard to prove anything. So people make hypotheses, test ideas, and create conceptual frameworks for approaching the overwhelming complexity (ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, western materialistic medicine, anthroposophic medicine, shamanism, etc.). They run...

Common Sense on Covid and the Death Rate

There are many facts and opinions swirling around about the virus, the response, and everything in between. There is a lot of virus-denialism that appears more rooted in wishful thinking than a considerations of the facts. The wisdom of shutting down the economy is questioned; a quite legitimate issue in a democracy. And the very nature of the virus is up for grabs. Unfortunately so much of the commentary and quick-takes...

Smart People and Covid Conspiracies

Scientist with 4 Degrees from MIT Warns ‘Deep State’ Using Coronavirus Fear-Mongering To Suppress Dissent There was an interesting article a few years back about why really smart people were far more likely to fall for absurd conspiracy theories. Something about always being the smartest person in the room make you think you can understand other areas of expertise while skipping all the parts about learning the...

Corona Statistics and Minimizing

99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says Several people on social media were posting this link to argue that the virus is no big deal and every one is overreacting. My response: Yes, all that the virus does is bring death forward. But when it does that for 15 to 20% of everyone over 70, and does it all in the same month, that becomes a very big problem. It has a 1% death rate even among perfectly...

Response to Corona Conspiracy Video

How Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg sees the current Corona pandemic The above links to a viral video people were posting on social media. My response: I watched it. It is five days old and showing its age. He makes some very good points, but you only have to look at what is happening in Italy (and Spain and France) to realize that he can be both right and wrong. Right about a baseline persistence of corona viruses in general, but wrong...

On 5G and Electrosmog

What if electricity is just a symptom, a reflection of what we are doing with our consciousness, of where our attention is flowing? And what if much of the malignant influences attributed to the presence and spread of electricity and electromagnetic radiation around the globe were in fact attributable to what we are doing with our thoughts and our actions? Isn’t the tendency to make the presence of electricity and RF...

Astrology

I’ve noticed two types of people. Those who are inclined to believe that there must be something to astrology, and expend enormous amounts of energy trying to figure out what. And those whose starting point is innately skeptical. When the two types try to converse, there is often not a meeting of minds. I’ve skimmed through several books of what I would call “post hoc rationalizations” that uses...