Slow and Covid. Newsletter week of 1-20-2022
About children with slow processing speed. “Understanding, Diagnosing, and Coping with Slow Processing Speed".”
this article on the same topic is much shorter and clearer. “Fast but Slow? Processing Speed and the Gifted Child".”
I think this is a mistake for Jordan Peterson to resign to emeritus status and open a slot for who? Link from the Canadian National Post here. It is just another example of giving up ground to the enemies of Western Liberalism and rationalism. Retreating slower is not a philosophy.
This week Jews read parsahat Yitro where Moses father in law - whose name by the way is Yitro- teaches him a thing or two and then God gives the Jews their Torah. Yitro tells Moses not to judge the people himself, rather have judges (and perhaps leaders and teachers) on tiers. They should bring easy matters to their “local” judge and then if the problem is too hard it moves up the line with the court of last resort being Moses. I think it is obvious that the Jews could not get their Torah until Yitro taught them how to create an efficient system for disseminating it. Even God can’t win against a bad bureaucracy :)
“Positive” Conspiracy Theorists Versus “Negative” Conspiracy Theorists. With Apologies to Isaiah Berlin.
Sadly, the bizarre, hysterical, self serving, and group-think based reaction to Covid-19 has created more and more conspiracy theorists. People who think this whole thing is plot to depopulate the world or something. They point to the number of denials of obvious things, like the lab leak or the poor performance of the vaccines and allege its all plot of a secret council or something from the skull of Bill Gates. I admit that Bill Gates has bad ideas (remember Common Core or Jeffery Epstein for that matter) and I certainly would not to see what is in his skill, but people don’t seem to understand that the “smart” people, like Gates and the public health creeps behind much of the corona reaction have been freaking each other out for years about how “the big one” - the big humanity threating pandemic -will come anytime, even thought the way the earth is so connected today could just as well imply that it is less likely to hit as there are fewer and fewer chances that a virus will develop in a population cut off from the rest.
Covid has also created a very different type of conspiracy theorist. Many are highly educated and very bright. They are all united by the need to believe. The need to believe that the authorities know what they are doing, or what the authorities have done is justified or was justified at the time. They are doubling down on this faith as it become increasingly obvious that this is and was never true. You even see this interviews with scientists when they still deny the idea that this pandemic, like any other, goes in waves. You see this in obsession over PCR tests, even though the simple problem of them being perhaps only indicative of viral remnant has been pointed out for a year and half.
You see this in articles over the last few weeks that claim that the vaccines are incredibly efficient in stopping death etc. when the study that showed that vaccinated people actually died at a similar rate as the CDC had put as the average survival rate from Covid.
For example, hotair said that:
“Out of 1.2 million vaccinated people, just 36 died. That’s .003 percent, a phenomenal survival rate. Of those 36, slightly more than three-quarters had four comorbidities. Which is to say, even if you have three comorbidities, getting vaxxed all but guarantees that you won’t die if you’re infected.”
However in the actual study sample, 2,246 people were know to have gotten covid. So if 36 died, that means that 98.40% survived, which is similar to the 97% rate the CDC had been saying at the end of 2020 without vaccines.
Whether the vaccines work, or sort of work, I can’t say. But this need to believe in some sort of philosopher king (from Wikipedia, “According to Plato, a philosopher king is a ruler who possesses a love of wisdom, as well as intelligence, reliability, and a willingness to live a simple life”) is driving people insane.
They need to believe, not in a secret council plotting ill on the world, but in councils plotting good.
Why do so many academics have such strange ideas about the world? The academic system prizes one thing above all. Pre-planning. To get a doctorate in any field, you usually need to have known you wanted to apply to PhD programs before you even started university. So who ends up in PhD programs? The children of academics? People with immature ideas of their subject? People who no longer have any interest in their field and need to pretend to care and with tenure often have given up pretending?
Meanwhile in America. Well they stopped Trump from being re-elected. Wasn’t that the point?
For those of you who read Hebrew or use Google Translate. Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center – Ichilov Hospital, one of the leading and largest hospitals in Israel, has a serious of posts on their official twitter account attacking the policies of the Israeli Ministry of Health.
I think this journalist is even creepy than Biden.
Just saw this old clip of Desantis. Wow, he is articulate. It is nice, for once, to see an intelligent person using their intelligence to defend in intelligent ideas instead of, like is more usual, wasting it on defending stupid ones.
Boris finally comes around, only 1.5 years too late
I think we need a new word. “Wokeold,” from “cuckold” which means the husband of a women who keeps on cheating on him. Wokeold refers to men whose wives become so woke that their husbands get turned into sniveling losers and whose children become confused about their sexual identity et al.
This new Macbeth looks interesting. Denzel Washington as always steals the show. I wonder how it is.