pandemic – JayBall.name

There are two COVID camps. And they’re both wrong.

The two camps being, COVID is not serious, it’s an excuse for authoritarianism. And the other camp being COVID is extremely serious and the authoritarianism isn’t authoritarianism, it’s public health.

[The following remarks are my condensed version of a train of thought presented by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's recent Darkhorse livestream #94. Video posted below.]

We have to ask the question: To what extent are the narratives that we are battling over being fed to us by something that does not have our best collective interest at its core? This does not mean that we’re being fed narratives from somewhere, but that is at least a possibility that would explain in part why this pandemic is being managed so badly.

Both of these are wrong.

It is quite clear that COVID is a very dangerous disease. On the other hand, it does seem to be the excuse for an awful lot of authoritarianism that makes no sense. I suggest there is a litmus test that we can use to detect that there is something about the way this being handled that makes it evident that this is absolutely not about public health.

Consider the typical diminishing returns curve in complex systems. Imagine a simplified diminishing returns curve where the x-axis is investment. The y-axis is return. There is a shallow early phase that then curves up and becomes a steep, effectively a cliff face, in which your investment is low relative to the returns that you get for it. For example, in the early stages imagine you are trying to figure out how to skateboard, or whatever it may be, and it’s tough at first and then you hit some point where you are, like, “Oh, I’m getting this, I’m getting this!” And then what happens? At the inflection point in the curve you get the emergence of a plateau, where larger and larger investments net smaller and smaller gains. There are still returns on investment, but they get less and less.

The reason that you get a diminishing returns curve in a complex system in which there’s an objective, is that you have a hierarchy of interventions. You’ve got some stuff that’s actually “no-brainers” that work really well, and you do those things first. This is obvious, of course, because why wouldn’t you? The more of those “most evident” things you’ve already done, the more of the low-hanging fruit you’ve found, the more you’re forced to do things that, yes, work. But at increasingly larger costs. And so you get this reliable pattern because a reasonable person, or system, attempting to solve a problem will go after the low-hanging fruit first. Eventually you will be left with smaller and smaller interventions that are more and more expensive, eventually getting to a point of near pointlessness.

Our response to COVID does not show an indication that we have gone after the low-hanging fruit. At all. It’s completely insane with respect to the low-hanging fruit that we have left on the table and not invoked. For instance, the most obvious one, and the thing that I would suggest that we use as a litmus test, is the question of vitamin D. Now the vitamin D question is not simple. It’s not a simple matter of, take vitamin D = avoid COVID. You can take vitamin D and still get COVID. But the evidence strongly suggests that vitamin D deficiency makes you much more vulnerable to COVID. This is completely unambiguous. And what’s more, that people who live far from the equator, as many of us do, are very likely to be vitamin D deficient during the winter months. Why? Because vitamin D is naturally produced on the skin in response to sunlight, and so what that means is that vitamin D deficiency, which might not be inherent to humans, is very common amongst modern humans because of the way we live. Because we spend a lot of time indoors where climate control allows us to continue, but we are then chronically underexposed to sunlight that would produce vitamin D. And therefore vitamin D supplementation has tremendous value in terms of fending off COVID for people who are likely to experience deficiencies. What’s more, vitamin D is inexpensive, vitamin D is readily available, and not only does vitamin D not have serious downsides, but if you take reasonable amounts of vitamin D you are very likely to fend off other diseases because vitamin D is basically immunosuppressive. All this makes a great deal of sense, and yet we are somehow still not widely recommending vitamin D to everybody who are likely to have that deficiency in the winter. In spite of the fact that we have a raging pandemic and we could reduce the number of cases substantially by simply making that one intervention.

So the question is, how on earth is this not our first public health recommendation to people? That if you have any danger of a vitamin D deficiency, you should do something about it. That includes making vitamin D while the sun shines – by going outside and exposing yourself to sunlight. And as that becomes less and less useful as an intervention, supplementing with biologically available vitamin D that would compensate for a deficiency. I would say that’s a litmus test. Why is it a litmus test? Because it’s the lowest hanging fruit on the tree. There is no good reason not to address the question of vitamin D deficiency first. It should have been our first intervention. And the fact that we didn’t do it, and still are not doing it, is evidence of one of two things. It is either evidence of absolutely jaw-dropping levels of incompetence (which I admit is possible). Or, that something else is driving our policy that isn’t really obsessed with preventing COVID.

Why I Will be Joining the Protest Tomorrow

More alarming to me than the threat of COVID-19, is the threat to our constitutional freedoms.

Last week I was invited by a friend to participate in a Freedom Walk this Saturday. This has forced me to consider if I’m truly willing to stand up for what I profess. I agree with the need to stand up for our rights, but trying to publicly justify why I’m doing it to has taken me the full week of my free time to compose my thoughts. This post is about 1680 words long, so if you want to skip all my reasoning below, I’ll give you the bottom line right here up front:

More alarming to me than the threat of COVID-19, is the threat to our constitutional freedoms.

If you’re interested in my line of reasoning, read on.

First, how do I make sense of the numbers?

There are a number of mathematical models designed to predict the trajectory and seriousness of COVID-19. In researching these, I admit that some of them can be confusing for my simple mind to understand. So, let me try to narrow the problem down to the simplest terms. Lets start by saying that if I know that ten people have had this condition, and I know that one person has died (and these are the only numbers that I have), then I can use the equation that one out of every ten have died (or 10%) as the measure to base my predictions of what I might expect could happen going forward. Obviously this would be very bad.

But so far, we’ve got unknown numbers. To me it seems reasonable to assume that there is only a very small portion of the population that fall in the category of either being alarmed enough by their physical symptoms to go in and have a test done, or have taken up the offer of public testing. This leaves the denominator in the above equation as essentially unknown. We’re trying to come up with a statistical number for how great a threat this thing is, but we simply don’t know how many have had it. And it’s further complicated by the fact that many people could have had it, but they weren’t symptomatic. They didn’t get tested. They experienced it; it was mild enough that they dismissed it; they never went in and got tested; they haven’t been diagnosed; and there’s no way, therefore, to know that we ought to be including them in the denominator equation. What we do see is that as this thing has been further tested, the denominator has grown. So, where at first the prediction was that the death rate could be 4%, that number has been dropping as the denominator has grown. If you test a bunch of others and you find out that a hundred people have had it and only one person has died, then you know that the death rate that has occurred is 1%. But what if the number of people who’ve had it but dismissed it (and that number is significantly greater than anyone anticipated) turns the denominator into a thousand, and only one person has died? Well, then the death rate drops all the way down to .01%, and it’s no worse than typical seasonal flu.

It seems there is an abundance of ignorance about what the denominator ought to be. Furthermore, we have no assurance that whatever the denominator turns out to be that the history of what has happened is reliable as a predictor for what will happen. The amount of alarm over the personal threat this thing is to people is extraordinarily speculative.

But that just sets the stage. That’s the current cause of hysteria, but it’s the response to the hysteria that is particularly both unprecedented and very troubling.

Where is the greatest risk?

The way in which state and national government has responded in the United States (and national governments have responded in other countries) is more alarming to me than the condition that they’re responding to. To deny people the freedom of movement, to interfere with the ability to assemble, to compromise on rights that are spelled out in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights is particularly alarming as a coercive step by government. We’re reacting to what has been called a “pandemic” as if it were a sufficient cause for suspending civil rights and constitutional rights.

Our country divides largely into two political camps, both of them are highly charged. We have the progressive or liberal or Democratic side (which is a hodgepodge of different sorts of people), on the one hand, and the conservative or the Republican or the traditionalist group of people, on the other hand (although, again, that’s a really difficult generalization to refer to). I claim no identity with either end of this spectrum as, depending on the specific issue in question, my opinion may vary and can change as my knowledge about things changes.

Here I would like to point to the group that aligns itself with a traditionalist view, those who are satisfied that President Trump is one of them, that he’s for small government and in protecting their constitutional rights. My question is, where was the outcry from this group when we all sat and watched as Trump set in motion the measures that have been undertaken that we now see threatening the very rights that we assume he was supposed to be protecting? My guess is that they were probably sitting in stunned silence (as was I) without even being aware of what was happening to these liberties right before our very eyes.

It is interesting to observe, in retrospect, that the greatest encroachments to our freedoms in recent history have happened under Republican presidents. The USA Patriot Act, that has practically suspended our 4th Amendment, happened under George W. Bush. For those who might remember, the Patriot Act got pushed through, in an unprecedented three days, through both House and Senate (introduced in the House 23rd Oct 2001, passed in the Senate on 24th Oct, signed by George Bush on Oct 26th 2001). Watch carefully as this pandemic will also be used as justification to rush through legislation that could further threaten our liberties. For example, Utah’s bill H.B. 3009 that was recently introduced (16 Apr, 2020) and has fortunately been stalled for the moment. In essence what H.B. 3009 has proposed is to canonize, or make official, the very things that have been imposed on the public these last several weeks. In other words, this implies that the measures that have been undertaken these last several weeks were done unconstitutionally (in both the state and the nation).

I don’t point out that these encroachments to our liberties have take place under Republican presidents to accuse the conservative party as responsible for loss of our rights, but rather to show how the circumstances, with Trump as president, have played out as opposed to what we might expect if it were under someone else. Consider, for example, if the lock-down had been attempted by Obama. Would the conservative traditionalists submitted so quickly? Or would we have seen push-back and outcry at the outset? Because it was Trump, in whom there is so much trust by conservatives, his actions have been more easily tolerated.

Who to blame is not the point…

In the present circumstances, it should not matter to anyone that you trust a President. It shouldn’t matter if people consider the activities are being done by someone they regard as benign. Everything that’s happening at the moment is setting a precedent for what we can expect to see happen again in similar circumstances.

It’s our reaction to this ill-defined, unproven, unknown viral threat that has interfered with commerce, shut down businesses, confined people to homes, resulted in police going about telling groups of people that they have to break up. The idea of social distancing and crowd control isolates people and puts everyone in an extraordinary, vulnerable, and disadvantageous position because of the inability to assemble freely and the inability to move and exercise your liberties that are guaranteed by the Constitution.

Whatever it is that we think we are submitting to for necessary circumstances right now, if this proves to be no more threatening than the common flu in any given flu season, we’re establishing the precedent that public health and welfare can be guarded by the abrogation of constitutional and civil rights, in order to protect people against what may be a relatively small threat in the end. We simply don’t know what that end will be, but we’re acting as if the presence of the mere threat (with its ill-defined contours) is enough to justify all of the extraordinary measures that are currently being taken.

Because the submission to the authority of the state is “popular” — that is, the approval of President Trump’s handling of this is greater than 50% — what that means is the majority of the American people, at present, are willing to allow totalitarian steps to be taken in order to guard against an ill-defined and currently unknown natural threat that exists. That ought to alarm us more than anything else that’s currently going on. Democracy and freedom is a very delicate flower. It can be destroyed by conspiring men that we have been warned about in revelation (that addresses, specifically, the government of the United States). It may be that, in all of this, President Trump has the best of intentions. It may be that he can be trusted. However, trusting one man with the ability to do it (simply because his political views align with your political views) sets a precedent which a later President (that you do not trust and whose political views are greatly at variance with your own) can rely upon and point back to and pose the question, “Why, if it’s wrong, did you submit before? Why, if you didn’t expect this to be the role for the government to occupy in circumstances that require dramatic steps to be taken in order to guard public health, why did you not raise a protest?”
(Many ideas expressed in this article were taken from the podcast “Whipsawed“)

The Delicate Nature of Our Unsettled Existence

Imagine the earth, balanced precariously in space as it wobbles like a top on its axis, being held in place by whatever incredible combination of miraculous conditions that hold everything together.

I remember as a teenager on a family vacation in Oregon, joining my dad and uncle in a small boat where we ventured out into the ocean to try our luck at some deep sea fishing. All we caught were a few crabs before the waves started swelling higher and higher. It was quite frightening, plummeting down 30 foot high waves of water in the small fishing boat as we made our way back to shore.

I’m sure that anyone who has experienced even a remote semblance of a storm while in a boat on the ocean can appreciate what an utter helpless feeling it is to be at the mercy of the elements. How incredibly delicate and unstable are our lives in the broader perspective of things.

Imagine the earth, balanced precariously in space as it wobbles like a top on its axis, being held in place by whatever incredible combination of miraculous conditions that hold everything together. And ponder the incredibly tiny sliver of space we call our atmosphere within which we rely for our existence.

“The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn’t very much of it. It extends upwards for about 190 kilometers, which might seem reasonably generous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of standard desktop globe, it would only be about the thickness of a couple of coats of varnish.”
Bill Bryson, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, pg 97

I’m almost finished with my reading of the Book of Enoch. Yesterday morning’s reading of chapter 101 compared our uncertain and fragile lives with man’s propensity for arrogance against God:

Examine the heaven, you sons of heaven, and all the works of the Most High; and be afraid to do evil in his presence. 2. If he closes the windows of heaven and hinders the rain and the dew from descending upon the earth because of you, what will you do? 3. Or, if he sends his anger against you (and) your deeds, is it not you who would entreat him? Because you utter bold and hard (words) against his righteousness, you shall have no peace. 4. Do you not see the sailors of the ships, how their ships are tossed up and down by the billows and are shaken by the winds, and they become anxious? 5. On this account (it is evident that) they are seized by fear, for they will discharge all their valuable property – the goods that are with them – into the sea, they think in their hearts that the sea will swallow them up and they will perish in it. 6. Is not the entire sea and all her waters and all her movements the very work of the Most High? Has he not ordered her courses of action and her waters – (indeed) her totality – with sand? 7. At his rebuke they become frightened, and she dries up then her fish die and all that is in her. But you, sinners, who are upon the earth, fear him not! 8. Did he not make the heaven and the earth and all that is in them? Who gave the knowledge of wisdom to all those who move upon the earth and in the sea? 9. Do not the sailors of the ships fear the sea? Yet the sinners do not fear the Most High.
1 En 101, Old Testamant Pseudepigrapha, James H. Charlesworth

Consider King Benjamin’s description that we are supported and preserved by God’s power moment to moment, how He lends us breath and sustains us that we may live and move and do according to our own will (Mosiah 2:21. See also Acts 17:28). Not only does God put up with our brass overconfidence in ourselves, he sustains us in the very act of our disdain for His role in supporting us day by day.

In 2 Enoch, God put it this way:

“There is no counselor and no successor, only myself, eternal, not made by hands. My unchanging thought is (my) counselor, and my word is (my) deed. And my eyes behold all things. If I turn my face away, then all falls into destruction; but if I look at it, then all is stable.”
2 Enoch (A) 33:4, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:157, emphasis mine.

All it involves for God’s spirit to “no longer strive with man” (Gen 6:3) is for Him to withdraw His gaze.

In the last few weeks a great alarm has been raised about a viral pandemic. It illustrates something about all nations and institutions: Although they may seem durable, they are all vulnerable and easily destroyed by very simple means. Like locusts destroying crops of Egypt in the story of Exodus (Ex 10:12-20), great societies are shaken through the smallest of means.

The good news is that although all this has given us a glimpse of how unstable our lives and society can be, it is also evident that God has not yet withdrawn His gaze. There is still much work yet to be done in the Lord’s vineyard (see Jacob 5:47-51). Will we be among those branches who respond favorably to the unsettling pruning, digging, cutting, moving and grafting that is currently underway?