Note (29JUN2020):
Don’t’ Just Do Something …
NEWS FLASH! COVID-19 reportedly is spreading among the young, supposedly as a consequence of social gathering.
Take nothing that you read at face value except that which appears on this website, of course. Questions arising are the following:
1) What constitutes a finding of COVID-19, the illness? A positive test? Such tests (e.g., presence of antibodies) may show only contact with the offending microbe not the actual presence of the potentially resulting disease.
2) Among the youth falling ill, what percentage has serious, underlying, medical conditions?
3) To what extent are the tests accurate? Reports indicate accuracy at a level of 50-70%. How many false positives?
4) Compared to other countries, what percentage of the population has been tested? How were those tested selected (e.g., at random or with symptoms)?
Have you. the reader, considered that delaying spread might inflict more damage than allowing the virus to run its course? Why?
SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent, is an RNA-virus. That class of virus mutates rapidly — clinically, for better or worse. By slowing the delay of contagion, the politicians are allowing the virus more time to mutate, possibly for the worse. If for the worse, sparing of the otherwise healthy young may end; in which case, the politicians will have created a biological, economic, and social disaster many times greater than otherwise would have been the case. COVID-19 could become “Disease X” as discussed hereinbelow.
Act rationally. Do not reäct emotionally.
“The future isn’t what it used to be.” -Yogi Berra (1925-2015)
A worldwide plague puny by historical standards. Global mass hysteria. Governments cripple their economies to protect the enfeebled old, the chronically ill, and the constitutionally weak at the expense of the young, the healthy and the strong. Politicians force the premature release of vaccines that could inflict grievous harm rather than provide proper protection. Absent a safe and effective vaccine, many of those temporarily protected ultimately will contract the illness anyway and die from it or from their underlying condition — often just old age. Given current trends, the plague will run its course then retreat.
“I looked, and there before me was a pale horse!
Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.” -Revelation 6:8
What, however, if the current trend changes for the worse? That sub-microscopic strand of nucleic acids could reconfigure inflicting a malady drastically more deadly and become the dreaded “Disease X” predicted by microbiologists. If so, it will cause a human mass extinction — possibly total, probably less. As described in a novel released in 2018, Retribution Fever, such a plague would decimate humanity without regard to race or ethnicity, youth or senescence, male or female, height or weight.
Amid the remaining human ruin and among the ravaged remnants of humanity scattered here and there, what then? Would the survivors have learned anything from the merciless catastrophe that their kind brought upon themselves?
Science has given the fundamental law of the Cosmos — efficiency in its broadest sense. Matter and energy neither can be created nor destroyed.
Excerpt from Retribution Fever:
Beginning with the most minute sub-atomic particles, everything in our universe fits together in a seemingly harmonious symphony of symmetry with a precision within billionths of 1%. Were the precision even a tiny bit less, we should not exist to recognize it — a concept known as the seemingly tautological “Anthropic Principle”. This level of precision denotes an efficiency of 100% — a level unknown anywhere on Earth, let alone in human affairs.
To some, the term, efficiency, emotionally elicits discomfort associated with a connotation of calculated coldness sometimes to the point of cruelty. In contrast, inefficiency elicits the opposite — comfort associated with a connotation of disordered, familiar warmth. Those emotional reäctions reflect the natural inefficiency in our biology, especially sociologically. We are, by our natures, highly inefficient.
Yes, human efficiency can be cold to the point of cruelty, but it need not be. Ironically the most perverse cruelties often come camouflaged in the “warm fuzzies” of kindnesses. The camouflage renders them unassailable in the public eye; especially when offered by charismatic charlatans stimulating emotion and suppressing cognition. The consequences of our allowing our behavior to be modulated more by emotion than cognition usually are adverse, often disastrous, and potentially catastrophic.
Since the dawn of human self-awareness, ideologues of many different persuasions have acted to undermine the purpose that our universe has bestowed upon individual human existence. The inescapable consequences of their deeds have been decreases in the efficiency of that existence. Accordingly, properly viewed through the lens of the Scientific Method (i.e., Specificity, Objectivity, and Accountability), to have improved human efficiency is a goal worthy of our most dedicated consideration as individuals, as nations, and as a species.
So, how to improve that efficiency? By gaining increasing understanding of the principles governing our thoughts, feelings, actions, and physiological reäctions then by bringing our actions under control of those principles in a way consistent with our unique purpose in describing and understanding our universe.
We humans never can achieve perfect efficiency. We even cannot define with precision when to measure its fundamentally indeterminate nature with regard to our own behavior; nevertheless, we can pursue perfection even though never nearing it.
Whereas necessary, Science alone will be insufficient for survivors of “Disease X”. In order to survive and prosper in peace, harmony, and freedom, they will require a moral code of absolutes under which to bring their behavior. Other than religion, what can provide such a moral code?
“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Contrary to contemporary secular relativism, everything is not simply that which you think it is and relative to everything else. There are real events in the Cosmos. There are invariants or absolutes. One, for example, is the speed of light; it is constant in the vacuum of space whatever your point of view or frame of reference. Another is time-space itself.
A silver lining to the dark cloud of death from “Disease X”? Yes.
The terrible retribution to be inflicted upon humanity by “Disease X” also will confer a cleansing with its promise of a brighter future provided the survivors choose a better way than that of the past. If they choose to return to their old ways, as George Santayana (1863-1952) opined, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
So it has been. So it is. So it will be.