CAEIRO (2)

Health as a Competitive Advantage: Recent events have shown that the sicker we are as a society, the more susceptible we are to disease, and the more of us die. The post-COVID period is going to be characterised by distress. In the western world, we have shot our arrow at a shadow, and now there isn’t much left in the tank.

In the UK and Canada, where health is largely financed by the government, it will be important to control the cost of health care by improving the health of the general population. This need not be complicated or expensive. It would involve eating less, moving more, and measuring key biomarkers from time to time.

Whoever can get to a reasonably healthy population will lower their healthcare costs significantly and free up resources. Some financial, but mostly the brain and brawn of the populace for wealth creation.

Fighting the Last War: The SARS-COV-2 virus seems to be resolving itself, not with vaccination but with the far older method of accommodation. Humans and the virus are reaching an accommodation, as it is in both our interests to survive and this is the way nature works. Lots of things are beyond our capabilities. One of these impossibilities is vaccinating the world before the virus runs its natural course after having somehow arrived in the Human population. One result of this will be a multi-tiered world, where travel and trade will be dictated by your COVID status, with, bizarrely, “vaccinated” being the highest, followed by “negative test” and lastly, only in some places, “antibodies.” To my mind these three states should be reversed, but then again I have always been a bit upside down.

More important is what we are preparing to do as a world: fight COVID-19. Like Generals in peacetime, we prepare for the last war. To put COVID-19 into perspective, it is the 7th new virus to enter the human population this century, at least one other has been discovered since COVID-19, and we can expect more and should be preparing for a more sustainable approach. It is not a stretch to say that civilisation as we know it cannot survive another two pandemics in the next decade.

One way things should change is the use of modeling to identify possible outcomes and recommending actions. The models being used do not have enough dimensions. What is needed is simulation, a method used by the military to test strategy. Simulation creates as far as is possible with current technology a complete environment with complex relationships, like the real world. Governments that can afford it should devote the resources necessary to simulate their nations and then play out various scenarios to see the possible outcomes. Obviously, a diverse group of people with many different skill sets will be needed to do this properly.

Limits of the Current Approach: COVID-19 has shown that the way we do things, certainly in the western world, does not work when confronted with reality. This is not to say that western liberal democracy is not a desirable system, as for me it remains the best system in the world. However, it is no longer practiced in the West. In short, citizens lack competence because they have been manipulated into a catonic and idiotic state by a variety of elites. It is useful for these elites to have a compliant mass on whom they can impose their will and secure their positions while creating the world they imagine they want.

So we are nudged in the directions that are considered best for us to go, all the time bombarded by propaganda from sophisticated media guided by AI, making fools of even the brightest. Those in control, whom we have voted for by the ballot or the purchase, use the power we have given them to self-aggrandise by pursuing goals that they find emotionally satisfying, having convinced themself that they are making the world a better place.

Real world consequences ensue, which a crisis like this pandemic lays bare with an immediacy to which we have become un-accustomed. Take Denmark, where there are no longer mink. North of fifteen million mink were culled on the orders of a government which by its own admission did not have sufficient evidence to do so. An entire industry was wiped out, and thousands of livelihoods ended. The leadership in Denmark is progressive, educated, aware, and they’re generally good citizens of the world. They also are of the mindset that the fur industry is evil and needs to stop. They claim that their actions were pure, intended only to protect Denmark and the world from new and deadly COVID variants which were incubating within the Mink, waiting for the moment to jump to a human host and render vaccines ineffective.

It is widely understood that the human mind is vulnerable to manipulation and all but incapable of overcoming bias. Yet this is almost never considered, neither by the incompetent citizen or the ruling elites. Decisions like the culling of the mink will be defended as the right thing to do by the leaders, who have convinced themselves that they were impartial, acting only with the best interests of the country and the world in mind. Incompetent citizens shrug their shoulders and move on.

Denmark is an example which comes easily to mind as I write, but I could take any country and tell a similar story about the pandemic.

Climate Summit: The UK will hold a Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland (which at the time of writing is still in the UK) later this year. It is billed as COP 26. COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and will be attended by the countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - a treaty agreed in 1994. The 2021 summit will be the 26th meeting, which is why it's called COP26.

Most of the last sentence is not my own and contains the Rhetoric, Propaganda and Dialect characteristic of the modern construction of reality, which is at its core unreal. Here is the important bit I have to say: like the response to COVID-19, this too is rooted in fantasy. Unlike the Pandemic, the consequences of this illusion will not be apparent for decades, if not centuries.

The only way out of COVID-19 was to create 3 trillion dollars in cash flow for Pharmaceutical companies over the next 5 years. The way to stop and reverse climate change is to move on from the evil fossil-fuel-burning internal combustion engines to electric engines. We buy it, and our financial and more importantly our mental resources are turned towards making this true.

A practical example of the impracticality of these solutions, and why, even if we (or they) are brilliant enough to solve all the issues around battery production (capacity, weight, electricity), said solutions will still not be able to sustain us worldwide in even a modest existence. Secondly, they ultimately will not have any less of a negative environmental impact than what we now experience. At best we may be able to shift the problem, but not solve it.

The example has to do with flying, which I understand is being electrified. Billions of dollars and some of the best minds in the world are pursuing everything from flying taxis to airliners running on batteries. Let me point you to the Celera 500 L from Otto Aviation. Full disclosure, all I know about this aircraft is from Google and YouTube. It is a flying egg developed by an American missile engineer and accident investigator, and is powered by a single Russian diesel engine. It flies as high as a fighter jet, as fast as a business jet, as far as a major airliner, and burns the fuel of a motor scooter.

A stock market flotation would flop, as it does not tick any of the feel good boxes. This remarkable piece of engineering will likely disappear from history, which as we know is unpredictable.

The climate will continue to change.

War and the Future: A weapons and tactics test was carried out over a six week period in the disputed Nagorno Karabakh region, an area contested by Armenia and Azerbaijan. A longstanding dispute which has seen many battles come to life has flared up once again in the midst of the pandemic. The history of this conflict or indeed its relevance is beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that the Azerbaijanis, using drones bought from Israel and (mostly) Turkey and employing tactics which they clearly did not originate, reduced a Russian supplied and trained army to mush in about 10 days.

This is the most significant change in warfare since Churchill sanctioned the tank. All the considerations about drones, AI, autonomous vehicles, et cetera have been overtaken by events. The killer robot is among us. It is an equaliser of sorts, as the weak can for cheap build a very effective offensive weapon.

The strong have nuclear weapons, and if the situation is grave enough, will use them against the weak; especially as the retaliation, if possible, will not be nuclear.

While major conflicts are inevitable within the next few years, it is important that the strong be able to counter the weak without resorting to nuclear.

Let the drone wars begin.

FAREWELL: Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Born on a kitchen table by candlelight, on the run before he could walk, posing rich, living poor.

Everybody went away, it is strange when you are young, to feel your own mortality.

Conscious of the end, this one decided to live.

Top Of his class at Dartmouth, some say that had he stayed, he would have gone all the way.

Marry a Princess? Not a bad idea, a penniless immigrant with worthless titles, doing OK.

But then the Princess became a Queen, not something she wished for. It is what it is.

Maybe there is someone who knows what went through his mind, what the calculations and considerations were. Advice? It would be but a guess, no man alive, or for that matter dead, had faced anything quite like this.

And so, consort to the Queen, always behind, a life of action exchanged for one of ceremony.

Over the years he grew more steady, even as all around him faltered. Having died young, it was his resolve to live well.

Duty, service, to love and care. Twenty thousand Royal appearances, many of those the markers of life, weddings and funerals.

And now Sir, one last Appearance, and it is done.

If you think life has dealt you a bad hand, look to the Prince, who was a Duke.

Fernando Pessoa was the greatest writer in the Portugese language (he also published in English and French). He wrote under at least 75 names (including three female names) that he called heteronyms, because each character held views independent of him. He wrote on a wide variety of topics from travel to philosophy, and was an accomplished poet. Alberto Caeiro was known as “master of the heteronyms''. While he was not the first, what distinguishes him to me is his commitment to reality. That brings me to the title of this blog, which I hope to return to from time to time to delve into the reality of things.