Archive for the ‘Dystopia’ Category

Younger Generations in West Losing Touch with Physical Reality: 2

May 12, 2021 3 comments

In the previous post of this series, I wrote about how the West (but especially its younger generations) have lost touch with physical reality. In that post, I made the point that people below a certain age are unusually eager to believe in technological progress, even though we live in an era where major technological progress hasn’t occurred in every single major area for at least two decades. And that is not an exaggeration, since even widely touted areas of progress such as technology behind highly-integrated smartphones have been around for over two decades. The only thing which has really changed about them is they cost less (largely due to manufacturing being outsourced to Asia) and there have been some incremental improvements in their performance. Curiously enough, these improvements have not really improved the speed of response or general usability of smartphones for a full decade.

People today are even more eager to believe in the promise of technological progress than they were in the 1950s-1990s, when the last wave of such progress occurred. That is why, for example, people want to believe that SpaceX will magically and totally revolutionize the space launch industry, electric cars will magically displace ICE-powered cars or why they believe that silly valley startups will magically revolutionize ‘insert random utility or industry’. You might have noticed that I kept using the word ‘magically’ in previous sentence, and yes.. it was not accidental. These people are displaying magical thinking of the sort seen among true believers in religions and cults. So what is the difference between magical and rational thinking?

Here is an example: what would you you use to treat.. say.. a upper respiratory infection most likely caused by some bacteria? Most of you might immediately say- antibiotics! OK, but which ones? Also why would you not use certain antibiotics? The thing is.. the few species of bacteria most commonly associated with community acquired upper-respiratory infections are sensitive to most available antibiotics. In other words, you could use a third-generation cephalsporin as Cefpodoxime, Cefdinir or Cefuroxime- and it would work very well. But you can almost always get away with using older ones such as Cephalexin, Amoxicillin / Clavulanic acid, Cefprozil or Azithromycin. But what is the connection of this apparent aside to the topic of magical thinking? Well.. because in past two decades many ideology driven doctors have started pushing the dangerous idea that we should not treat sore throats which look very likely to be caused by bacteria (at least partially) with antibiotics.

So why is this an example of magical thinking? See.. while many cases of sore throat are caused by viruses, there is often some secondary bacterial involvement. To make matters worse, the clinical presentation caused by Group A streptococci (most problematic bacterial species for sore throats) is often not typical. To put it bluntly, even if 90% of patients get little to no benefit from taking a antibiotic for sore throats, it will have a disproportionately large therapeutic effect for the minority who would otherwise get much worse or even end up in the hospital. Given that most commonly used antibiotics are extremely safe, it does not make sense to hold them back since the risk of harm from not giving them is thousands of times higher than the risk of prescribing them. This is also why you would user older and more well-known antibiotics than newer ones, even if the later are slightly better than older ones for this condition. But what does this have to do with topic of this post?

One of the key features of people losing touch with reality is that they become unable (or unwilling) to see the bigger picture. So let us talk about some ivy-league morons first came up with the dumb idea that treating sore throats with antibiotics was a bad idea. It all began when metrics-driven styles of management wanted doctors to find quick solutions for combating antibiotic resistance. See.. the biggest real contributors to antibiotic resistance is the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in industrial meat farming and hospitals full of very old and sick patients. However doing anything about these two main causes of antibiotic resistance requires a fundamental rethink of how we do those things. It is much easier to pretend that treating community acquired upper-respiratory infections is a major cause of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Trying to solve the wrong and insignificant problem is another feature of magical thinking.

Now you know why corporations (and mostly white liberals without any useful skills) push bullshit ideologies such as “Critical Race Theory”, “Wokeness”, “Equity not Equality” and a whole lot of nice-sounding bullshit which does nothing to address the underlying causes of problems they purport to solve. But why so so many in younger generation go along with that bullshit. Well.. some do it to avoid confrontation while others for maintaining their relative social position. However, too many wholly or partially believe this bullshit. Yes, I am making the case that a significant minority to slight majority in younger generation actually believe in all that bullshit! But how can I make such a statement- where is the evidence? OK.. tell me how charlatans such as Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and many others manage to sell so many books. Is anybody putting a gun to the heads of those who buy their books and regurgitate the trash contained within those books?

How else can you explain how “Critical Race Theory” based programs and ideas has been adopted so enthusiastically by HR departments in addition to schools and universities across the country? Do you really think that all these people are getting their marching orders from a few people at top? Have you ever considered the possibility that many of its enthusiastic promoters actually believe in that bullshit? Since we are almost at a thousand words, I will stop this post here. In next part I will show you how this form of magical thinking is behind many contemporary movements such as modern anti-natalism, environmentalism, “green energy”, “recycle everything” and other related bullshit ideas- or how magical thinking behind support for Bernie Sanders during 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries. Here is a hint- it has nothing to do with his support for socialism.

What do you think? Comments?

Preliminary Thoughts on the Current COVID-19 Situation in India

May 1, 2021 15 comments

Many readers might have recently heard something along the lines of how “the second wave of COVID-19 in India has caused the healthcare system in that country to collapse” or some other example of wishful thinking by aging western ‘liberal’ whites trying to desperately get a hardon by lapping up any news about possible mass death of non-whites in “those” countries. Of course, aging and demographically doomed white liberals lack the balls to say that it out aloud. With that in mind, let me help you understand about how things actually work in India and why western media is always especially misinformed about news from countries outside their own. What I am going to write here also applies to how western media reports on many other Asian countries, including China (even in 2021).

1] You might have noticed that almost every single source quoted by western MSM when reporting about India is either a English language media outlet or a journalist who works in those outlets. But why is this relevant? To understand what I am talking about, let us revisit a bit of history. The first generation of elites in post-independence India were almost exclusively educated in pre-independence missionary run schools, went to British universities and were uncritical worshipers of anybody who had a lighter skin color than them. In other words, they had a massive racial-inferiority complex. So how did they compensate for their shitty self-image? Well.. by constantly criticizing and belittling other Indians in the hope of gaining a few crumbs of approval from white people- typical massey sahib behavior.

The English language media in India was an extension of this pathetic belief system, with other self-hating and missionary-educated Indians being its main audience. Western news outlets were, at best, a distant second. Notably, they had no interest in engaging the vast majority of Indians- even those who are were literate in English. In the first two (or three) decades after independence, this bunch of missionary-educated self-hating media types had some real power, but by the 1980s- they had lost almost all of it. Their unwillingness to change the way the saw the world also ensured that neither Indians educated in secular English schools or those who predominately used Indian languages would see them as anything but sadly comic white ass-kissers.

But what is the relevance of this explanation to the topic of post? Well.. as it turn out, after 1991 these news outlets and journalists found a much-reduced second life as publishers of western propaganda and interfering in local politics by coordinating with western NGOs. Of course, they had no real influence on the vast majority (over 97%) of Indians- including those in power, but it didn’t matter as they were increasingly financed from.. external sources. In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, these “news” outlets have done nothing but belittling and berating Indians while exaggerating the toll of illness in that country. This might not be obvious to most of you, since you cannot compare how news about the same incident is presented in Indian English-Language Media (ELM) vs outlets in local languages. But I can!

2] Consequently a lot of what is presented by Indian ELM about news stories in that country is exaggerated and (increasingly) bullshit or outright lies. Did you know, for example, that they were also pushing the idea that casualties were 10-100x higher than official numbers during first wave? Turns out, they were not- but these “news” outlets never apologized for their persistent “mistakes”. So how high were the ‘real’ causalities compared to official numbers during first COVID-19 wave in India. The best guesses, made from talking to a lot of people + going through local language media, suggest a number about 1.5x (50%) higher than the official estimates. But more importantly, the first wave left about 20% of India (over 50% in major cities) immune to that virus. And yes.. those figures are based on multiple serological studies performed at the beginning of this year.

About 150-200k people died in exchange for 250-300 million infections. The mathematically inclined among you might have noticed that this translates into a death rate of a bit less than 1 in 1,000. Which brings us to the ongoing second wave. While the first wave affected mostly poor people living in slums, chawls and crowded apartments in big and medium sized cities, this one is affecting the more well-off in cities as well as smaller towns and everyone in rest of country. So how will it play out? Well.. we know that poor people in India (even the elderly) have an unusually low risk of developing serious complications or dying from COVID-19. I expect that trend to continue. The urban middle-class and upper-middle class are a different story. Too many in this demographic have obesity and diabetes from eating high-carb food (among other reasons).

I therefore expect more excess mortality among this group (per capita) compared to, say, poor people who perform physical labor for a living. However this group accounts for a small percentage of the population on that country. Moreover, we already know that the second wave, though more intense than the first one, seems to be a significantly shorter duration. FYI- this conclusion is based on how the second wave is playing out in the most affected state aka Maharashtra- where its has already peaked. If you still want predictions about final death numbers, I am guessing that it will be about 500-600k (same as USA but in a country with over 4 times more people). I also predict that this will occur before even 50% of population is vaccinated. It is an unfortunate loss of life, but totally acceptable for vast majority of people in that country. Very few are going to miss that 1 in 2,000 or even 1 in 1,000 person (urban areas) who passed away due to COVID-19- especially if he or she was old.

3] Now let us talk about all that hyperbole about the “medical system in India collapsing due to COVID-19”. First of all, India does not have a medical system as people in west (including USA) understand that concept. There is basically zero centralized coordination of patient history, standards of treatment or even payment. The medical system in that country is really hundreds of thousands of small clinics, large clinics and hospitals of varying sizes and resources offering medical care according to the ability of patients to pay for them. Of course, you can still get excellent medical care if you have even a half-decent amount of money. But back to all that bullshit talk about the “system collapsing”.. see, there isn’t a system to collapse, just smaller and bigger nodes which will be temporarily overwhelmed.

To be clear, I am not saying that certain hospitals in some Indian cities are not overwhelmed at this moment- but you know what, they will get back to normal- either when enough sick patients die or they find new resources to take care of patients- likely both. This might sound heartless- but let us be real about something.. most governments in that country (federal and state level) have never displayed any real interest in properly funding essential public utilities such as clean drinking water, proper sewage treatment, electricity production and distribution, decent schools or enough hospitals and clinics. So don’t blame me for pointing out the logical consequences of consistently bad decisions made by elected governments over many decades in that country. It is what it is..

Now let us talk about availability of Oxygen. As it turns out, India makes a lot of liquid and compressed oxygen for industrial purposes. While the big plants for extracting it from air are concentrated in certain parts of country, moving the product to other parts by rail or road is trivial. Also, hospitals usually consume only about 1-2% of total industrial oxygen production in India. In other words, the current shortage of oxygen in some cities has everything to do with bad logistics, price gouging and poor decision-making by purchase departments in hospitals. I expect this problem to sort itself out in next 2-3 weeks. But there is one more thing I want to talk about..

While all of this is going on, the vast majority of people in that country (over 95%) don’t really care about COVID-19- because they know it is fairly harmless for them. They have much more pressing issues in their lives than a disease than almost exclusively kills a few old or fat people. They have survived far worse and have a very different view on relative risks than some aging baby boomer in an affluent west coast suburb.

What do you think? Comments?

Younger Generations in West Losing Touch with Physical Reality: 1

April 23, 2021 20 comments












what do you think?

Recent Articles about Critical Race Theory in Educational Institutions

April 15, 2021 10 comments

Over the past few months, readers of this blog might have heard come across the name of a couple of “experts” on racism such as Robin Diangelo and Ibram X. Kendi. However these two are only the proverbial tip of a iceberg of charlatans, all of whom are pushing some version of something known as Critical Race Theory. While examination of the bullshit and lies promoted by that “theory” deserve a series of its own, this post will focus on one small aspect of the damage wrought by the pushers aka promoters of this theory in educational institutions. While I don’t usually post links to outlets/ authors known for their conservative or libertarian views, it seems that nobody else is willing to even give a voice to the dissenting majority.

Link 1: The Woke Meritocracy

Students of color, particularly from immigrant backgrounds, wrote about the psychic suffering that had been inflicted on them by the dominant white culture. They had stories about having to learn to love their curly hair, their “unusual” names—in short, themselves. College applicants—and Americans generally—are increasingly asked to recount how through great difficulty they have succeeded in taking the self as the object of their love, a stage of narcissism that for earlier generations of psychoanalysts appeared not as a challenging achievement too often thwarted by an oppressive culture, but as a falling back into an infantile condition.

Members of less obviously oppressed groups had variant strategies. A number of Asian American students, for example, told me that they had written their admissions essays to demonstrate that they weren’t “like other Asians,” with narratives of how they had to challenge their strict parents and limited cultural horizons to develop passions for, as one wrote, beat-boxing and hip-hop. These are not students’ own stories. Many students in my class received tremendous amounts of help on their admissions essays from dedicated tutors at their high schools as well as private writing coaches. Their letters are a collective output, a kind of shared fantasy of the ruling class.

Link 2: A Professor Pushed Back Against ‘White Fragility’ Training

Nonetheless, a June 18 all-college email noted that the school’s president, Amy Morrison, had “made clear the expectation that all full-time employees attend Friday’s Courageous Conversations” unless they had conflicting teaching responsibilities. Parrett decided to express her qualms about the training during the training itself. What happened over the next nine months was both bizarre and oppressive. Because of a brief disruption that easily could have been brushed aside or handled with a warning not to do it again, LWTech went to war against a tenured faculty member, launching a cartoonishly over-the-top disciplinary process that included the hiring of a private investigator, dozens of interviews, and claims of widespread trauma.


In her email to me, Ames doubled down on her claim that Parrett’s behavior in the meeting had been frothingly out of control, writing that Parrett had “started aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting.” At the time, Ames didn’t know I had access to the leaked audio, in which Parrett does occasionally raise her voice to be heard but never comes across as anywhere nearly as aggressive or bullying as Ames described. When I sent Ames the audio file and asked her to point me to where Parrett yelled at anyone, a university spokeswoman who was on the thread jumped in, writing that “The audio speaks for itself but does not reflect Elisa’s visible anger.” Apparently, Parrett was “aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting” but it was the kind of aggressive yelling that doesn’t show up on audio.

Link 3: I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.” All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.


However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.” He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.

What do you think? Comments?

Thoughts on Pathetic Attacks by SJWs on the Legacy of HP Lovecraft

April 11, 2021 19 comments

Over the past few years, a minority of pathetic and unaccomplished SJWs have been pushing the grift of “cancelling” people who might have said something which could be construed to even vaguely offensive. As many of you know, this bullshit “cancelling” has now created an increasingly nasty public backlash which will soon overwhelm and destroy these SJWs and their livelihoods. While I could write an entire series about the patheticness and hypocrisy of SJW idiots pushing this bullshit, this post concentrates on one of the more ignored aspects of their persona aka their lack of personal achievement or ability.

Some of you have read a short story or two by HP Lovecraft. In not, you have almost certainly seen a movie or TV show inspired by his work. Here are some examples: The Thing (1982), Alien (1979) and rest of series, Prometheus (2012) based on At the Mountains of Madness; Hellraiser (1987) and Hellraiser 2 (1988) take their main elements from a number of his books, In The Mouth of Madness (1994) is also based on a number of his books as is Event Horizon (1997). But Lovecraft’s influence on popular culture goes beyond far beyond adaptations and obviously inspired works. Entire new categories of horror, movie tropes and ideas in popular culture which came out of his work.

Lovecraft was the first to write at any length about the idea of non-humanoid aliens visiting earth in past to seed it with life or influence evolution. Technology-based devices which could transport you across space and time and into alien bodies.. ya, he wrote stories around those ideas before others. Isolated and inbred people who become monstrously evil creatures.. well, Lovecraft was the major inventor of that trope. Archaeologists discovering lost cities on earth which reveal remains of humanoid aliens.. he wrote about that too. Incredibly powerful and immortal extraterrestrial entities of poorly defined form.. ya, that too. Extremely ancient archaeological ruins as evidence of alien visitation.. you those too.

His stories treat continental drift on earth as fact, mention aliens using nuclear power to run their civilizations and vehicles and all this before 1940. Wonder where Stephen King gor the idea for cosmic monsters such as ‘It’? ya.. you guessed right.My point is that a lot of what we think of topics and tropes found in post-WW2 science fiction and horror stories can be traced to a guy who died in 1937 when he was just 46 years old. And all of this brings us to why his name has become controversial in the past decade. As it turns out, a guy born in 1890 USA to a old WASP family in New England had racist views about the world! Isn’t that surprising *sarcasm intended*. Isn’t it odd that he was not ‘liberal’ *more sarcasm*.

Here is the thing.. HP Lovecraft held many racist and conservative views, especially when he was younger. It did not help that he was notoriously aspy and meticulously wrote them out for future generations of SJWs to peruse while acting shocked. Having said that, Lovecraft was a far more complicated person than he is often accused of being. For example- he held anti-Semitic views, but ended up marrying a Jewish woman. He started life as a conservative, but ended up being a supporter of new-deal socialism. He looked down on non-western people, but many of his stories are set in the Middle-East, South Pacific islands and other non-western cultures. It is also clear that he had read and had some familiarity with non-western lore.

In spite of his racism, the non-western and non-white characters in his book are almost never stupid or intrinsically evil. If anything, he hated poor white people more than black or colored ones. To put it another way, Lovecraft was not the race-obsessed guy that many SJWs want to imagine. Oh ya.. and he was grew up during the most xenophobic decades in USA (1910s-1930s). The only reason we know about his racist beliefs, as opposed to the millions of others who also lived in USA during those decades, is because he was honest about said beliefs and wrote them down. Also, he was never in a position of power to enforce his beliefs.

Compare that to president Wilson (from the same era) who publicly supported the KKK and re-segregated the federal government. Or what about all those white mayors or governors who upheld racial segregation, residential redlining and tons of other racist policies? He also did not own slaves unlike many of the early presidents, including a few on our currency notes. My point is that while Lovecraft’s racism did influence his worldview and some of his stories, it had zero effect on the lives of contemporaneous black and non-white people around him.

So why do SJWs, none of whom display even a fraction of Lovecraft’s talent, keep writing large amounts of bullshit about how he should be “cancelled”. Maybe.. because they don’t have the talent to write anything as innovative and consequential in the history of american literature and popular culture as him. And here is a long-ish documentary on YouTube about HP Lovecraft that tells you a lot more about the man than some sad-sack SJW ever will..

What do you think? Comments?

Multi-Party ‘Democracies’ are Fundamentally Flawed and Unworkable

April 7, 2021 13 comments

As regular readers know, I have a history of writing about controversial ideas. Consider this as the latest one in that direction. Before we move on to the topic of this post, let me tell you a bit about how I first had this idea. It, years ago, when I tried to understand the reason behind why certain states in India have done so much better than others, even when those in former group had higher levels of systemic corruption than the later. Then after a pause of years, it resurfaced while I was watching vlogs about people living in Japan. More specifically, it came from an odd difference between Japan vs west European countries including Germany.

If you have watched even episodes of Japanology, Japanology plus and other personal vlogs about living in Japan, you start seeing something peculiar in the background. See.. unlike even west European countries (to say nothing about USA) everything in that country is well-maintained, works very well and is orderly. But even more impressive is the fact that average quality of life for people in that country is incredibly good. It goes from high quality and inexpensive food, well-maintained vending machines, excellent convenience stores to well-maintained apartments of various sizes which are affordable to people with even entry-level jobs, public transit that works incredibly well, a medical system which is both very good and affordable. In short, the system in that country is made to work for the majority.

But it doesn’t stop there. In spite of having the highest median age of any major developed country, they can build infrastructure projects on time and budget with minimal inconvenience to people. They were, for example, able to repair all the damage caused by the great Tōhoku earthquake of 2011 far more quickly than western countries faced with smaller disasters. All of this got me thinking- why is Japan as a nation able to keep making things work nicely and get big things done even though it has technically been in a recession for over twenty years. There are those who might chalk this to Japanese exceptionalism or some other moronic stereotype invented why the west. But as it turns out, Japan is far from the exception.

Jut look at how fast East-Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam etc have come from a few decades ago. China has been the world’s largest economy (in real terms) for almost a decade now, South Korea has also done exceptionally well, same with Taiwan. Even the quality of life in countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia etc has improved a lot over past few decades. More impressively, the improvement in quality of life for average people in those countries is far more widespread than western countries since 1980. Heck.. even the government of DPRK has more interest in improving the life of people in that country than current western governments have in doing the same for their own.

So what is the common thread running through these successful East-Asian countries? Well.. a person from west might say it is race- however this belief is a consequence of their own ignorance about that part of the world. A far better explanation comes down to the fact that these countries, even the ones which are nominally democracies, are effectively single-party systems. And yes.. the way the Chinese system functions in real-life is far closer to a one-party democracy than a despotic totalitarian system. Here is why.. unlike traditional despotic systems- incompetent people are either not allowed to rise to positions of authority or removed from them once their incompetence becomes obvious. In case you wondering.. this is what voting in democracies is supposed to achieve.

And then there is the issue of corporate capture of governments. See.. unlike multi-party ‘democracies’, countries that are effectively single-party systems are basically immune to capture by corporate interests. That is why countries such as Japan and China can pursue policies to maintain low rents and prices for housing, build good infrastructure on time and budget, ensure maximal levels of employment for their populations etc. This is also why Japan can prioritize the ability of their people to buy high quality and relatively inexpensive food, maintain long-term employment at decent jobs, maintain infrastructure etc even if it means accepting lower rates of profit for corporations. Ironically USA was rather close to a one-party system (in form, if not name) between 1933 and 1973- now widely seen as its golden age.

In summary, one-party systems with some democratic feedback turn out to be far superior to multi-party democracies in real life. A large part of their superiority comes down to the fact that single-party systems with democratic feedback allow long-term thinking and planning to occur. Moreover they are far more resistant to corporate capture and all of the subsequent negative effects than multi-party ‘democracies’. In fact, I would go so far as to say that multi-party ‘democracies’ are only accountable to large corporations and plutocrats. And ya.. almost every single Indian state which has done well compared to the median was effectively a single-party system for decades. Competent governance by people with long-term goals matters far more than levels of systemic corruption.

What do you think? Comments?

The Main Reason Why CGI-Heavy Movies are Highly Unmemorable

March 30, 2021 10 comments

Almost a decade ago, I had written a couple of posts about how the rapidly decreasing cost of photo-realistic CGI was changing the production of even low-budget films and TV shows. As it often turns out, I was right and the last decade has seen a huge increase in the use of various types of CGI- especially in low-budget films and TV shows. However this huge increase in use of CGI has gone hand-in-hand a highly problematic trend. The vast majority of movies and TV shows produced in past decade (actually more like 15 years) have been very unmemorable.

To some extent, this is caused by studios milking their “intellectual properties” beyond a point of return (X-Men, Star Wars, Marvel Franchise etc). However even novel “properties” such as ‘Black Panther’ or less-milked one such as ‘Aladdin’, ‘The Lion King’ etc don’t have the long legs unlike similar ones in past. Let me explain this with a couple of examples. See.. the original Star Wars or first Jurassic Park movie created a huge franchise. Moreover anybody who has seen them can easily remember and retell the overall story arc a couple of decades after having last watched it. The Same applies for first Matrix movie, Back to the Future etc. Now try doing the the same for most top 10 movies for each year in the past decade or more.

How many fondly remember the Avatar, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2012, Up, The Twilight Saga: New Moon or Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker or Aladdin. Now compare the general apathy for financially successful films from past decade to the cultural impact of far less financially successful ones from past such as Porky’s, Revenge of Nerds, American Pie or even The Breakfast Club. How come low-budget sex comedies from 1980s and 1990s have had a far bigger cultural impact than carefully designed movies costing 200 million bucks a piece? Heck, the original Austin Powers movie has had a far bigger cultural impact than Avatar.

Well.. here is one possible explanation. Let me ask you something.. how many of you have seen a real life tights-clad “Superhero”, Godzilla, King-Kong, Dinosaur, Zombie, Goblin, Elf, Hobbit, Wizard or any of the stuff which studios spent tens of millions on when making those movies. How many of you have seen real-life examples of people doing what they do in those “Superhero” movies? Have you seen multiple buildings destroyed close up? Are you starting to see what I am getting at? Now contrast this to the fact that we all have seen and interacted with tons of people who are thin, fat, hot, ugly, nice and assholes.

All entertainment (oral stories, written literature, movies, TV shows, video games etc) require people to partially suspend their belief in reality. However, the ability of entertainment to connect with their audience requires that they are well-grounded in relatable reality at some level. The first nine seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ connected so well with their audience because the motivations and behavior of characters were grounded in relatable reality. Of course, you can go to the other extreme and have something which is almost unmoored from reality such as ‘Phineas and Ferb’, ‘Family Guy’, ‘Animaniacs’ etc. But there is a very good reason why almost all of the unrealistic stuff has historically been either cartoons, puppets or farce.

Until the early 2000s, the relatively high cost and poor realism of CGI forced movie directors, producers and editors to restrict their use and focus on story and character development. In such movies, CGI played a supporting role to the core of the story. That is why the original Jaws, Star Wars, Jurassic Park type movies feel far more real than their later sequels. They were centered around relatable human characters rather than special effects and characters without any analogue in real-life. The thing is.. over the long-term, people will only care about and remember stuff which has some connection to their reality, even if it is in the form of a parody or farce. The rest is just easily forgotten spectacle.

To make matters worse, movies and shows which are almost entirely based in visual spectacle age far more poorly than those that are not. This is why, for example, rewatching the newer batch of Star Wars films feels so bland when compared to original Star Wars trilogy. Heck.. watching them on a 4K TV is closer to watching a splashy but poorly-acted cinema-school productions than something which resembling movies which cost over 100 million, a piece, to produce. I have a feeling that this MBA and financialism-based model of making movies, TV shows and video games is not sustainable – even in the medium term. On the bright side, very few will remember this phase of the entertainment industry in future.

What do you think? Comments?

Interesting Blog: Blind Spots

March 25, 2021 11 comments

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog called Blind Spots. It is largely about the many blind spots often displayed by supposedly “smart” and “credentialed” people which are caused by worship of ideas, stories, theories, and signalling. Too bad, it only contains a few posts.

Accountancy is the Priesthood of Modern Life

Like the priests and bishops of old, it has become quite standard for the accountants within the finance function to stand at the apex of influence within our organisations and tell the rest of us what and how to think about business. It is routine that the finance function is more influential than and dictates to marketing and other income-generating teams but it is extremely rare to see the inverse. It is even becoming increasingly common for CFOs to hold dominion over cybersecurity and other IT functions when it would be inconceivable to imagine a finance department answering into a computer science-educated Chief Technology Officer.


I’ve written before about the blinding effect abstractions can have on us when we drift into thinking the symbols are more real than the things they were created to represent. Money is a representation of value. A scoring system against which we can grade the worth of real life things. Without the resources to buy with it, it is completely worthless. Accountancy-thought, due to the ease with which costs can be counted compared to benefit, or money can be counted compared to the value of real-life stuff, has led us to develop a habit of over-focus on cash to the neglect of the things that cash can buy, which is presumably what we were all in it for in the first place.

Capitalism is Bad for Business

Commerce is roughly as old as recorded history itself. The later-stage first farmers appear to have been the first humans to trade with one another over 5,000 years ago in the fertile crescent region we now know as the Middle East. For as long as we produced surplus to what we needed, we sold that excess in markets. As things developed further, the demand, and therefore supply, evolved for specialists and skilled tradespeople who could work with metals, furs, wood, or pottery. And so the trade in services was also born.


In reality, the most far-reaching element of these economic policies was the promotion of shareholder value above everything else in society. When you decide that the most important thing in a society is that people be able to invest in something and sell it for a higher price, it has the effect of turning everything and everyone in that society into a gambling chip: companies, property, even people. We call this effect financialisation. Think of any financial instrument as a gambling chip; it is something you can buy in the hope of either selling it at a higher price or earning a dividend or rent off of without having to work.

What do you think? Comments?

Indulging the Delusions of Mentally Ill People Always Ends Badly: 2

March 21, 2021 5 comments









What do you think? Comments?

Indulging the Delusions of Mentally Ill People Always Ends Badly: 1

March 17, 2021 58 comments

One of the more darkly comic features of our current era is how mass culture in West elevates and celebrates the viewpoints of people suffering from serious mentally illness over those who are normal. And yes.. we all know what ‘normal’ means even if some aren’t willing to admit it. How else do you explain why so many sad morons are willing to go along with the delusional rants of self-important autistic puppets such as Greta Thunberg. This is also the case for many other spokespersons for “environmentalism”- which is basically recycled secular Catholicism. To be fair.. a lot of the so-called Catholic “saints” of previous centuries were not right in the head, so I guess this problem isn’t that especially new.

However, it is far easier to excuse the average person of previous eras for going along with the rants of mentally ill people because the general levels of literacy and education were very low in those times. To put it another way, an illiterate 13th century peasant worshiping some mentally ill person as a “saint” is way more understandable than a university-educated person doing the same in the 21st century. Yet, as we enter the second decade of this century, every passing day seems to bring yet another confirmation that we are in an era where mass culture seems to almost excursively celebrate people who are mentally ill. To be clear, I am not dumping on one side or segment since the majority of famous capitalists and billionaires are just as fucked up in the head as the most ardent environmentalists.

With that out of the way, let us talk about one example of how “mass culture” elevates and celebrates the views of people who are.. well.. not right in the head. Some readers might remember that I have written a few posts about the “trans” ideology (link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4). And yes.. it is an ideology. While I believe that adults should have the right to request surgical mutilation of their secondary sexual features, even if they are not right in the head, the same cannot be said for children under the age of legal consent- especially if they are being sold a delusion which is totally detached from reality. But why does any of this matter and why is validating the delusions of mentally ill people so incredibly dangerous?

While I will talk about the dangerous effects of believing in “anthropogenic climate change”, “zero carbon energy” and other more mainstream delusions in subsequent posts, this one will focus on the real harm being caused by believing in that ideology- including the now inevitable backlash. But first, let us talk about how incredibly delusional this ideology is and how it has spread. Did you know that within the past two years there have been more than a handful of articles in supposedly respectable medical journals which are trying to say that ‘biological sex is not real’ because of long-known edge examples of abnormalities which occur in less than 1 in 1000 individuals. More than a few medical specialist associations have made similar official statements to help validate that ideology in past 2-3 years. Some might say.. but what harm can come out of these sad attempts by timid people to avoid controversy?

Let me ask you something.. would you keep believing someone who told you that ice was hot or the sky was green, even if you knew that the person was saying it to avoid confrontation with somebody else? Don’t you think that making bullshit statements on one topic affects the credibility of that person on anything else they might say. But why does this matter? Well.. if a credentialed medical person said that ‘biological sex is not real, would you still believe their views on other topics such as treating an illness or the efficacy of vaccinations? Gaining public trust, for people or institutions, always takes much longer time and effort than nuking it. But why does public credibility of professionals and institutions matter? Well.. societies where people have low levels of trust are far less stable and functional than those which do. Even before this latest fiasco, public trust in the medical profession was not especially high.

But it gets worse.. much worse. Consider what happens to journalists who write anything that is even mildly critical of trans ideology. A recent example of this is Jesse Singal. The short version of this story is that he once wrote a mildly critical article about the ideology in The Atlantic. Ever since then, he as been the target of continuous harassment and outright slander by trans “activists” and their “allies”. This has reached levels where these so-called “activists” and their “allies” make up totally bullshit lies about him. However, unlike people who point out that Biden is not mentally all there (which is observably correct) and are removed from social media platforms, there are no negative consequences for the losers making up all these lies.

Which brings us how institutions (including corporations) are handling these trans “activists” and their careerist “allies”. You might have seen tons of examples where everybody from ACLU to Amazon are busy telling the public that “trans women are real women” etc. You might also have come across examples of corporations tweeting their support for “womxn”, “latinx” and other totally made-up names that normal cares about or believes. But how did we reach this point? Well.. you are not going to like the answer. See, all of this ridiculous shit with no connection to reality became prevalent because almost nobody wanted to call them out when these cults were in their infancy. At that times, most people (including liberals such as Jesse Singal) went out of their way to try and “understand” people who were clearly not right in the head. They did so because they wanted to prove their “liberal” credentials.

As it turns out, trying to support and “understand” the mindset and actions of people who are clearly not right in the head only ends up validating their delusions and leads to an increase in their demands. That is how we went from “trans people are vulnerable” to “let us normalize medical and surgical intervention in vulnerable children” and “trans women are real women”. To summarize, indulging people who are clearly not right in the head to prove your own “liberal” credentials very often backfires on those who do it. In upcoming parts of this series, I will show you how the same principle applies to a bunch of mental pathologies found in late capitalist societies. And yes.. there is a connection between these cults and late capitalism.

What do you think? Comments?

Why are ‘Celebrities’ so Prone to Social Contagion and Virtue Display?

March 9, 2021 9 comments

In the past, I have written about unusually high rates of female celebrities reporting sexual abuse and the high levels of narcissism, attention Whoring and extra-woke SJW-ism among ‘celebrities’ in general. It is no secret that ‘celebrities’ (especially those in the entertainment sector) of western countries exhibit a lot of behaviors that are.. well.. uncommon among the general population of those countries. While I have my own theories about the reasons behind the apparent clustering of odd behavior patterns and life-experiences among those who are ‘celebrities’ or aspiring to be one, that is a topic best discussed in a future post. Maybe we can also discuss why western societies require ‘celebrities’ to an extent not necessary for other cultures and countries. Hint.. it has something to do with social atomization.

Now let us talk about another annoying pattern behavior of ‘celebrities’- namely their high susceptibility to social contagion and virtue display. What makes this behavior even more peculiar is that anybody with more than half-a-brain can see the hilarious fakeness of their behavior. Some of you might remember hearing all those jokes about Hollywood celebrities adopting black children from Africa about 10-15 years ago. Or how the children of actors, musicians and models started coming out gay, lesbian, queer etc at record numbers in past decade. While the rates of alternative sexual orientations do vary across different populations, it is a bit suspicious when those rates are 5-10 times those for rest of population.

With that in mind, let us talk about the latest social contagion spreading among ‘celebrities’. Have a look at the picture below to understand what I am talking about. FYI: I cam across this image on Twatter. While I was initially skeptical about the photo-montage, a little background research shows that it is factually accurate. Here is the one about Megan Fox and her son, Gwen Stefani and her son, Adele and her son and there are many more. So what are your theories about why so many ‘celebrities’ are enthusiastic about screwing over the developing identities of their children? Isn’t it also a bit odd that we almost never saw this sort of stuff before 2015-2016. If this isn’t an example of social contagion, I don’t know what is..

What do you think? Comments?

Anyone Else Having a Foreboding of Large-Scale Global Instability?

March 3, 2021 19 comments

As many know, I have a strong interest in many areas beyond my professional expertise. One of them is history, specifically as reconstructed from multiple independent and often contrary sources. The context of historical events also matters. It is, for example, hard to understand why WW1 kept going for over four years even though almost every party in that conflict was losing people and material on an industrial scale over that timespan. Hint: it had as much to do with ideology of nationalism, race-based ethnocentric beliefs and mass culture as it to do with the productive capabilities of industrialized countries. My point is that all “official” history is outright bullshit and the past can only be only understood by careful reconstruction of the course of events as seen from multiple viewpoints in the proper context.

With that in mind, let us talk about an interesting pattern that keeps popping up throughout history- but especially within the past 150 years. Outbreaks of large scale wars, civil wars, collapse of empires and widespread generalized global instability tend to follow a general pattern. To better understand what I talking about, let us focus on a few events in past 110 years such as WW1, collapse of some old European empires in its aftermath, inter-nation conflict in eastern Europe during 1920s, warlord era in 1912-1949 China, WW2, post-WW2 collapse of European colonialism, collapse of USSR, beginning of collapse for american empire after 2003 etc. Ever wondered if there is a common thread running through all these events other than them occurring within past 100 years?

Well.. there is one. As it turns out, almost nobody was able to predict that these events would occur even 3-5 years before they occurred. But why were so many unable to foresee a course of events which in retrospective seem inevitable? Why were all the “geniuses” and “experts” of that era unable to foresee how disastrous WW1 would turn out? One possible explanation is that too many of these “experts” had such a strong vested interest in the status quo that they were unwilling to consider a world where that would change. But why were the contrarian “experts” of those eras also blind to the actual likelihood of these massive and systemic events. What cause almost all the “smart” people of that era to ignore the obvious?

Here is my hypothesis about why so many were oblivious to the real risk of large systemic events. The short version is that even decaying systems appear far stronger than they turn out to be under real stress. This is why, for example, why the Ottoman Empire, Romanov dynasty and Ottoman empire looked far stronger in 1914 than they turned out to be under real-life adverse conditions. This is also why nobody foresaw the collapse of USSR and all those other communist regimes in Eastern Europe as late as 1986. It is also why the USA of 2003 thought they had the capability to occupy Iraq and subdue all those pesky Arabs in that country. Or why almost nobody imagined that the GFC of 2008 would occur.

Complex systems, especially highly-centralized ones, are always much more fragile than they appear. BTW- China is a significantly more functionally decentralized system than USA or other western countries. And this leads us to the next question- how do we determine which systems are fragile or whether current trends will lead to some “unforeseen” outcome? Let me answer the second question first. See.. to model the effect of any trend, you have to first identify it. For example, the effect of European style nationalism on intra-ethnic conflict were not fully appreciated until after WW1. But could this trend have been identified before 1914?

Well.. yes, because the problematic effects of “modern” nationalism were obvious in Balkans and outlying parts of the Ottoman empire for at least a couple of decades before WW1 started. Similarly, the ability of industrialization to prolong wars and fundamentally change their nature was obvious as far back the american civil war and hard to ignore after the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The arms race, colonialism race and potential for conflict among European countries were obvious for at least two decades before WW1. So why did even the contrarian “smart” people of that era ignore these obvious trends? The simple answer is that they thought that a system which could handle all these trends and contradictions for a decade or two would be able to keep doing so indefinitely.

This is also why, for example, all of the signs of socio-economic stagnation in USSR and other East-European communist countries which began in early-1970s was ignored and seen as unimportant till it wasn’t. It is also why so many western China “experts” were unable to see the real long-term effects of outsourcing manufacturing on a huge scale to that country. But what does any of this mean for the era we live in today? For starters, we live in an era of multiple systemic trends which will end in disaster- sooner or later. Consider, for example, how USA and the west approach nuclear proliferation. You have to a pretty delusional white ivy-leaguer, if you think that DPRK is going to give up or even slow down its acquisition of nuclear weapons and ICBMs. The same is now almost inevitable for Iran and they too are very likely to go down that particular path in near future.

Then there is the issue of continued and escalating conflicts with Russia on a number of issues ranging from oil and gas pipelines to nuclear weapon deployment and proxy wars. Then there is the trend of China becoming the predominant manufacturing superpower and largest functional economy of our era- without accepting western-style financialism. Did I mention that they also have nukes and ICBMs. We cannot forget that all of this occurring in addition to the slow-motion collapse of american military capabilities and civil society in addition to a profound demographic decline among its European allies. We cannot also forget that the “west” has been in a state of technological stagnation for past twenty years while rest of world has either caught up or moved on. All these systemic trends are adding up rather quickly.

Now add in the massive socio-economic issues caused by the botched handling of COVID-19 pandemic by western countries. Do you really think that public trust in public institutions of those countries has not experienced a serious decline within past year. So you really think all the half-assed and open-ended authoritarian measures instituted by these countries won’t cause serious blow-back and greatly increased levels of political polarization. I just don’t see a way how the combination of multiple and irreconcilable systemic trends exacerbated by more acute trends such as those caused by mismanaging COVID-19 pandemic can lead to anything other that widespread global instability that will upset the rotten status quo.

And yes.. there are other trends and issues such as precarity and childlessness of younger generations in western countries which I have barely touched upon in this post.

What do you think? Comments?

Public Health “Experts” Have Fucked up Official COVID-19 Messaging

February 23, 2021 15 comments

As many of you have realized by now, the official messaging about (and recommendations by) COVID-19 by most public health “experts” has been incredibly bad- and it would still be a big understatement. While some of you might think that their disastrously bad messaging and policies will only cause short-term damage to public trust in medicine, I think otherwise. As you will see in rest of this post, many of the incredibly stupid recommendations and policies which are vociferously promoted by most public health “experts” are going to have some truly awful long-term consequences. Here is just a preliminary list..

1] I am sure that in the past few weeks, most of you have read many articles quoting public health “experts”, including leaky faucet, repeating the same bullshit- namely, that widespread vaccination won’t change their policy recommendations about ineffectual face-mask wearing, useless “social distancing” or other stuff such as reopening schools or public gatherings and events such as indoor restaurants, drinking establishments, music concerts, sporting events etc. And this raises an important question- what is the motivation for most people under 50 to get vaccinated (especially with untested mRNA-based vaccines) if nothing is going to change in the foreseeable future. It is is now common knowledge that COVID-19 infection in people under 50 has an extremely low mortality rate (about 1 in a few thousand).

To make matters worse, this position makes people wonder if other vaccines are effective. By claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective enough to let western societies go back to the way they were before March 2020, these dumbfucks are providing an amazing amount of free ammunition for anti-vaxxers. Think about it.. if the vaccines that are claimed to be 95% effective (which they are not) cannot stop the spread of an infection to the satisfaction of these morons, what is the point of taking any other vaccine? I predict that we will see a huge increase in public skepticism towards vaccination, in general, in aftermath of this pandemic. It does not help that many diseases controlled by widespread childhood vaccination such as measles, chickenpox, rubella, mumps etc are quite rare nowadays and not dangerous to well-nourished children who are under 12 and living in developed countries.

2] Now let us talk about the side-effect profile of vaccines- specifically those based on mRNA (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna). As I have written in previous posts, the 2nd dose of both vaccines causes moderately severe side-effects resembling influenza which last 2-3 days in about 20-30% of those who take it. While this side-effect profile is acceptable in those above 70, it is not clear how most people under 50 (who are not brainwashed or addicted to virtue display) will accept vaccines if it causes a more severe illness in a higher percentage of them than the infection itself. And it keeps on getting interesting..

Not content to pretend that vaccines won’t change their ineffectual and moronic policies, the idiots have also spend a lot of time pretending that COVID-19 vaccines (specifically mRNA based) are free of serious side-effects. However even a cursory look at data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of USA and Europe says otherwise. While the rates of vaccine-related death in older people is probably somewhere between 1 in few thousand, it is real and about 100x the rate for other common vaccines such as those for Influenza. They also demonstrate a noticeable tendency to cause otherwise rare side-effects such as idiopathic thrombocytopenia and 3rd trimester miscarriage in otherwise healthy pregnant women. Reports of moderate side effects such as disturbed menstruation patterns, pronged swollen axillary lymph nodes, transient peripheral neuropathy etc are far more common.

3] All this talk about vaccines brings us the issues of “mutants” or “new strains” of COVID-19 whose detection is breathlessly reported every day by the MSM. The morons aka public health “experts” want you to believe that these are unprecedented and will somehow render existing vaccines useless. Of course, as before these idiots betray their lack of understanding of viruses and the human immune system. So let me restate the obvious- the genetic material in all viruses, and living creatures in general, constantly mutates. While this process is slower in significantly faster in RNA-based viruses such as Coronaviruses than organisms which use DNA to store their genetic information (like human beings), it occurs nonetheless.

But here is the funny thing.. Coronaviruses have among the smallest rate of mutations for any major family of RNA viruses. Nor as they have segmented genomes capable of large-scale recombination like Influenza viruses. But what does any of this mean? Well.. for starters, the immune system of all vertebrates has evolved a number of tricks to deal with very similar viruses. These range from producing a mixture of antibodies to a single viral antigen which bind at overlapping sites to immune cell activation directed at multiple overlapping sequences (epitopes) from that antigen. Did I mention that all viruses contain more than one type of antigen.This is why it is possible to develop efficacious vaccines against RNA viruses such as those which cause Polio, Yellow Fever, Measles and many others even though they are more prone to mutations than COVID-19. But you won’t hear this from public health “experts”.

4] We should also talk about how the COVID-19 response has polarized people by politics and ideology. It is no secret that what people believe about the validity of official response to this pandemic is highly dependent on their political leanings and ideology. Currently promoted public health measures seem to have no effect on cumulative rates of hospitalization and death due to COVID-19. If you don’t believe me, just compare Florida with California or Sweden and UK. To make matters more interesting, countries in East, South-East, South Asia and Africa have far lower (20-100 times) rates of hospitalization and death than what one might predict based on their population characteristics. And yes.. this effect is very obvious even after aggressively adjusting for age structure of their populations.

So what is going on? If you asked me.. I would say that those populations very likely have partial cross-immunity (mostly cell-based) from previous infections by other Coronaviruses. And let us clear about something, in countries such as India more than 50% of the urban population now exhibit serological evidence of previous infection by COVID-19 compared to rates of a few percent about 5-6 months ago. The point I am trying to make is all of the much vaunted and promoted public health measures have no worthwhile effect on the spread of COVID-19. But try telling any of this to the credentialed losers and “expert”-worshipers. You know.. the same types of people who have made a secular cult out of mindlessly repeating the rancid farts emanating from the mouths of all these ineffectual “experts”.

It is this cult of worshiping morons that is being everything from their resistance to reopening schools and universities, restaurants and bars etc. These are also the same idiots who pretend that international travel is dangerous in spite of western countries being the most heavily infected in world. We are already seeing a significant minority of this group defecting to the pro-open/normalization side because they are now being personally inconvenienced. Expect a severe electoral backlash against those seen as supporting ineffectual but highly damaging lockdowns and expert-worshipers (aka Democrats) in 2022 and likely 2024.

What do you think? Comments?

Delaying Functional Adulthood is Biggest Societal Mistake of Our Era

February 18, 2021 25 comments

Almost a decade ago, I read an article which bemoaned that the average age for getting your first research grant as a principal investigator in american universities was now 42 and rising. A couple years later, I read another article about how female academics delaying childbearing till their late-30s to early-40s resulted in a lot of heartbreak due to the inevitable miscarriages and fertility problems. Some of you might have also read how Gen Xers, Millennials etc have a small fraction of the wealth their parent’s generation had accumulated at the same age. All of this got me thinking whether deliberately obstructing functional adulthood, now the default in every western country in past couple of decades, was the biggest societal mistake of this era with massive downstream negative consequences.

I am sure many of you, especially those from coastal areas, have heard tons of stories about guys in their 40s with decent jobs but unable to afford their own apartment or houses. And it is not just men, since the low rate of women in long-term relationships in such areas results in many of them living with roommates or their relatives. Now I am certainly not suggesting that being part of a nuclear family in a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence should be the default. Indeed, many countries and cultures (outside the west) have significantly more communitarian living arrangements. But there is a major difference between people living in multi-generational households in Spain, Italy, India, China etc. In those countries, society is structured around such living arrangements.

In contrast to that, societies in west European countries and north America are built around the assumption that almost everybody will live in some sort of nuclear family. These societies are structured around the assumption that people will pair up, marry or cohabitate, pop out 2-3 kids and so on in a certain sequence and at a specific pace. This set of assumptions affects everything from the design and growth of suburbs, projection of automobile sales, tax receipts for schools and infrastructure, funding assumptions for universities and other post-secondary institutions etc. To put it another way, the continuity of a large part of money flow in western societies is dependent on most people living the status quo lifestyle.

But the adverse effects of societies creating circumstances that delay functional adulthood go far beyond than disrupting established patterns of money flow. For starters, these societies are built around the myth that a certain type of lifestyle (individualistic, nuclear family etc) is the only way to be perceived as successful by your peers. Contrast this to places such Spain, Italy, Mexico, India, China etc where there are many almost equally acceptable pathways to be seen as successful and “normal”. While the preferred lifestyle in western countries was realistically achievable for a majority as late as the 1990s, it hasn’t been so for about two decades- especially if you live in larger metros- coastal or not.

An ever bigger problem stemming from this profound mismatch between reality and theory is that the inability of most people to achieve a supposedly “normal” lifestyle causes them to lose faith in those societies and their institutions. That is why, for example, people above 30 who have never married or been in long-term relationships seldom do so later. It is also why a majority of people have zero trust in anything coming out the mouth of “experts” or other “credentialed” people. Such people are also not connected to the society they live in and have little to zero interest in its continuation past their own death. In other words, you end up with many highly alienated people who could care less if the system burned down in front of them.

A further consequence of societies intentionally delaying functional adulthood is that little to no progress occurs because most people are too busy chasing scarce financial opportunities or fickle social status. Therefore very few, if any, devote their livers or careers to doing anything aimed at improving the dying status quo. There is a reason why scientific advances went down over past 40 years but especially in past two decades. There is a reason why soya boys without any real abilities beyond pretending to understand, being culturally relevant etc seem to be the most common type you see in younger age groups. In summary, societies putting obstacles in the path of people becoming functional adults are doomed to slow collapse and growing irrelevance. This isn’t going to end well- is it?

What do you think? Comments?

Long-Term Effects of Mismanaging COVID-19 Pandemic in West : 1

February 11, 2021 25 comments

As some of you might recall, I have written multiple posts (such as link 1, link 2) on the short-term effects of western countries mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic. It is gratifying to see that many of my predictions have come to pass and the rest look inevitable with each passing day. You might have heard that most people in large countries such as India and Brazil have largely stopped using face-masks and “social distancing” for past few months now and life in those countries has pretty much gone back to normal- at least for the majority whose sense of self doesn’t depend on need from approval by old white people. The same is true for almost every country in Africa and most of South-East and South Asia. Rest of world has seen that virus was nowhere as bad as incompetent “credentialed” old white people were pretending.

This is not to say that the virus is harmless, but something as bad as 1957 and 1968 Influenza pandemics is not something worth closing your economy over- doubly so if there is no clear exit strategy. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, still ongoing and politically-motivated school closings in many american states have already pissed off a significant percentage of their populations. You can also be very sure that the ill-will generated by these stupid stunts (along with revenue shortfalls) will have some nasty medium-term consequences for future funding of K-12 education in this country. Same is true for any future business or employment prospects for post-secondary educational institutions- especially in Anglo countries.

It goes without saying that the incompetent and “credentialed” leadershit + bureaucracy of these countries is going about their lives as if their stupid actions aren’t going to bite them in the ass later. You might have seen the sad farce of ‘Impeachment 2’ being played out in the capital of this nation, while the urgent needs of tens of millions for monetary compensation and assistance are ignored and belittled. And guess what.. Trump won’t be impeached by the necessary 2/3rd majority of Senate, once again. Then again, it has clear for over the past two decades that american political system has lost whatever touch it once had it with the lives of the majority. I am sure that all of this will end well for everyone concerned *sarcasm*.

So let us move to the longer-term effects of mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic by most western countries, but especially USA. As you will see, there are going to be some major and somewhat unexpected consequences of all the shit that has gone down over past year.

1] Many of you might have noticed that a lot of the bad, stupid and disastrous decisions were driven by mathematical models of infection spread and mortality. While such models have historically been useless and a complete shitshow, this was the first time that many people believed in the worthless predictions of these incomplete and unrealistic models. You might remember that many prominent epidemiologists (especially from UK) claiming that Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of COVID-19 was 3-13%, when in reality it is close to zero (less than 1 in 1,000 for age-groups younger than 70. You might also remember these same dumbfucks claiming that COVID-19 would kill tens of millions in the ‘global south’ while those regions turned out to be the most resistant to death from that infection. FYI, the population-wide IFR is closer to 0.2 or 0.3, even in aging developed countries.

Turns out that many average people have also noticed the almost total lack of connection of these models and their predictions to real-world outcomes. Now think of another popular type of models used to predict changes in reality. Yes, I am talking about “anthropogenic climate change” models. You can bet a lot of money that the utter failure of mathematical models from “prestigious institutions” peopled by “credential experts” to predict the real world course of COVID-19 pandemic will have massive effects of the willingness of people to believe in the predictions made by priests of that other secular religion aka environmentalism. This will be doubly so because implementing the suggestions made by the first set of morons has been so disastrous for the lives of majority. Expect a large increase in the number of people who will question the secular religion of ‘anthropogenic climate change’ and support for parties and leaders who don’t care about all that bullshit.

2] It goes without saying that the public-facing and administrative part of medical profession has not risen up to the occasion. From their unwillingess to even entertain the possibility that COVID-19 virus was an accidental leak from a Chinese research lab to their constant abrupt changes on issues ranging from the efficacy of face-masks to various therapeutic modalities for treating the infection and its complications- it is fair to say to say that the profession (especially its public-facing administrative side) has clearly demonstrated their deficiencies in the very topics they they claim expertise. And people have, once again, noticed this lack of competence. To make matters worse, many administrative types from this profession have facilitated the poor and disastrous decisions taken by political leaders and bureaucrats. These include pretending that all hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients when such occurrences were rare and no more common than in a bad influenza season.

To make matters worse, they have provided legitimacy to some of the worst decisions made during this pandemic- from closing small business, restaurants etc while letting large ones remain open to supporting the ill-advised school closures in many states run by democratic party. It does not help that many have actively obstructed or ignored trials of drugs which reduce mortality and morbidity from that disease. Their mindless promotion of mRNA vaccines for mass use in populations who are not at high risk of death from COVID-19, despite a rapidly increasing incidence of serious and deadly side-effects in addition to their less that stellar efficacy is unlikely to help their public image. While the degree of trust in medical profession has been on the decline for at least two decades, it is almost guaranteed that their bungling of the response to COVID-19 is going to accelerate that trend.

But it will be worse, as they are also the public face for another class of very bad decisions. Have you wondered how many people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities died alone and lonely of causes other than COVID-19 over past year? This is important because over 50% of those who enter such facilities don’t survive for over two years. Do you see what I am saying? And then there is the issue of all those who died of suicide, drug overdoses and late diagnosis of otherwise treatable conditions. In many countries, the number of under-50s who have died of suicides and overdoses is many times the number who have died from COVID-19. And let us be realistic, 80-somethings in nursing homes and assisted living don’t have much longer left on this earth unlike those under 50. If you think that all of this is not going to have any effect on their already worsening public image.. I have a bridge to sell. And yes.. there will be consequences, especially in this bad economy and widespread despair.

In the next part, I will go into how the liberal and leftist calls for even severe restrictions and shutdowns will doom them to political irrelevance in the foreseeable future. Will also go into how the role of internet monopolies in attempting to squash any dissenters who don’t profess faith in the “official truth” will have some incredibly bad and long-term consequences for the former’s future. 2021 might prove to be interesting than 2020.

What do you think? Comments?