Prophecy (which today we call scientific modelling) rides on the back of history. Indeed, it has no meaning or relevance without history. So, I want to start with that. It’s central to the Covid Inquiry which as far as I can see has descended into an extraordinary but inevitable party game in which the contestants have lined up to be the person who can claim they wanted lockdowns the earliest of all.
At the rate things are going, I suspect the winner will be the punter who claims they thought lockdowns ought to have been brought in about 20 years ago.
It’s an unfair game because it’s all down to having to play their cards clockwise from the dealer. It means each player has the chance to up the stakes by insisting that back in those heady days of February and March 2020 they were uniquely able to see before anyone else when lockdown – now being wheeled out as the Silver Bullet that would have killed Covid – should have been wheeled out, but were only thwarted by the motley collection of orcs, cretins, and demons who surrounded them.
I had an A-level student once who went for a university interview to study History. He was asked: ”When does History begin?” and was flummoxed, having never considered that before. He returned to school and asked me. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about that either but after a moment or two I suggested that History begins when people start disagreeing about what happened, which is immediately.
I spend my every waking moment immersed in history. But I have spent my life tantalised by the impossibility of ever quite being able to grasp the true sense of the moment in the past. The truth, if there is one, is that at any given moment there are countless parallel narratives that are blurred and conflicted with, and oblivious to, one another. There is no single story which is why consensus about ‘what happened’ is impossible to achieve.
The historian Robin Lane Fox summed the problem up brilliantly in his Alexander the Great. “The past,” he said, “like the present, is made up of seasons and faces, feelings, disappointments, and things seen… It is a naïve belief that the distant past can be recovered from written texts.”
All historical narratives are therefore constructs, artefacts of historians’ minds and of those recounting their experiences. They form an essential ingredient of every culture, creating meaning and a framework to contextualise the present, and provide a foundation for the future. This does not mean they set out maliciously to deceive. They all create their own pastiches of the past blurred with the concerns and obsessions of the present day, which of course include covering one’s own tracks, saving face for the sake of professional reputations, and being wise after the event.
Let’s not be too quick though to turn this into Us and Them because we all do it. It’s in our nature.
Several years ago, I met the former state prosecutor of the state of Pennsylvania while hiking in the U.S. One of the sharpest minds I’ve ever encountered, and I have kept up with her. I asked her once what her most important experience had been in her years in the law. She said that she had learned that the most unreliable evidence of all is eyewitness testimony and never more than when it was proved to her that her own memory of an event was in error. And of course, we all know that eyewitness testimony plays a dominant part in miscarriages of justice.
The falsification of the past is therefore all around us, whether by deliberate intent or simply because we all distort or even change it. It matters not what the cause is because the effect is the same. Our mirage of the past takes on an identity of its own and becomes the metaphysical foundation of our individual and collective beliefs, prejudices, grievances, and fantasies. This is a gift to political and religious leaders, or politicised movements, who can manufacture foundation and destiny myths based on these inclinations and drive forward their own agendas.
Two of the most egregious claims of recent years have been that both Cleopatra VII of Egypt and the Roman emperor Septimius Severus were of black African heritage. The evidence that exists is that she was of Syrian and Macedonian origin. He was from Leptis Magna in North Africa, born to a Punic family whose origins were in Phoenicia (roughly modern Lebanon). It’s a rum example of modern right-on racism to steal their origins and substitute fantasy versions of the past. And from what we know, Cleopatra was a lot more Syrio-Macedonian than she might have been: she was the product of a succession of consanguineous and even outright incestuous unions.
The Roman statesman Cicero had discovered that certain jokes were being attributed to him that he knew he had never cracked. This is a phenomenon which might be coined as prestige attribution, a process by which an action, comment, or saying is given false authority by attributing it to someone whose reputation enhances its credibility and significance.
Prestige attribution also means that an opinion expressed by, or attributed to, a person with an esteemed academic or professional title is automatically imbued with authority and treated as such. ‘Scientists believe’ is, in fact, as absurd and meaningless as saying ‘the dog thinks that’ or ‘they say that’ but always carries more authority.
We find ourselves, as all ages do, trapped between the past and the future. Every instant starts as the abstract future and before a moment has occurred it has become the fleeting present and then forever the past. All societies have sought to anticipate, control, and define the future which they see tumbling towards them. Once that future is behind them there is an unholy rush to set the past in stone in multifarious different ways that suit whoever’s version it is.
Our age is no different, but we have a new way of taming the future, or so at least some of us choose to believe. Instead of omens, and reading entrails, ours is an age of modelling, or perhaps better, prophecy. The future is contained within the data and the maths. Or so we are told.
“Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous,” said George Eliot. She also said: “Probabilities – the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.”
I blame eclipses. Alone almost among natural phenomena, they can be predicted down to the last second because, uniquely, all the factors involved are known. It’s certainly an impressive human accomplishment. I stood in a back country dirt road in Nebraska on August 21st 2017, where I’d planned to be for over a decade, and watched the Moon begin its slow crawl across the solar disk exactly on cue. The sun duly disappeared and two minutes or so later, it reappeared. The irrefutable science of eclipses, the product of the extraordinary chance of our Moon’s orbit and its relative size in the sky, has given mankind the illusion that we can count our way into the future in any other way we want.
Modelling might seem to have nothing to do with history, but it does. Modelling is about trying to construct the history of the future before it happens.
Appropriately enough, it has all the shortcomings of the history of the past, and even more of its own, largely because not all the factors are known or ever can be known.
We now have a whole industry of people from scientists to educationalists bent on convincing us that their measurements of the past, as selective and as biased as any written history, contain the secrets of the future which they map out with breezy hubris and expect us all to modify our behaviour in the light of their sacred revelations.
Yet time after time we see that the future they have predicted without being there never quite happens which of course leads to the circular argument of claiming that the only reason the predicted outcomes didn’t happen is because we did as we were told. On the rare occasions someone does predict the future they rarely concede that it might have been a lucky strike.
Look at the ludicrous efforts to predict election results. If you think about it, the practice is almost beyond laughable, but even worse it creates a sense of expectation that might in practice through media coverage actually help the outcome approximate to the prediction: how many people don’t bother to vote because of the polls?
Covid’s Usual Suspects have been lining up at the Inquiry, bent on manufacturing a revisionist version of the pandemic in which they were all on lockdown message, only handicapped by Government ministers who were variously ‘bamboozled’ by their wisdom or other obstructive agents. We’ve already seen how Patrick Vallance found a way to explain how the words that came out of his mouth about herd immunity actually meant he was a lockdown hawk.
Meanwhile, various ex-Government ministers are now starting to appear. The redoubtable Matt Hancock is the most prominent so far, and needless to say, it now turns out he was even further ahead on the lockdown curve than everyone else around him. Fancy that! Handicapped by the people around him, he was thwarted in his attempt to bring in lockdown three weeks sooner. Had he been able to, then “many lives would have been saved”. Of course they would.
Not might have but would have. An implicit certainty.
Here we have his version of another future that would have happened, had he been given a chance to preside over it. Since that isn’t what happened, he has resorted to the refuge of all such people – he has created the retrospective myth of an alternate reality that he owns but which only exists in a parallel universe of his own imagination. It’s predicated on his own version of the history of the past in which he was the bastion of wisdom and foresight. Only the “toxic culture” of Whitehall obstructed him, with Dominic Cummings wheeled out as the Evil Genius.
Call me a cynic, but had the first lockdown been brought in three weeks earlier than it was, I fancy we’d now be subjected to all the Inquiry’s red carpet guest stars telling us that they knew back then it should have been brought in three weeks before that. Or three months. Or three years.
Of course, they all thought lockdowns should have been harder and faster. I have an uncomfortable feeling that this is a hypothesis they are all champing at the bit to test at the earliest opportunity. When it comes, I hope there’ll be enough time for me to catch a plane to Mexico City and join my youngest son.
It’s a desperate attempt to separate themselves from the effects of Covid because if only we’d locked down three weeks earlier it would all have been so much better. Of course, one possibility is that it would have been a lot worse in ways we cannot now imagine. Or maybe without lockdowns it might have been no worse or even better. The empirical evidence of Sweden is being swept conveniently under the carpet.
Yet “it was both politicians and scientists making mistakes” said the BBC’s Nick Triggle, in my opinion the only journalist in that organisation who has emerged from Covid with any credibility. In that piece he focuses on a consummate failure to consider the wider consequences of an unprecedented lockdown policy, among them “rising rates of mental health problems in the young, record-high hospital waiting lists and continued attendance problems at school”:
A consequence of this was that SAGE came to define the debate. Its meeting papers were pored over by the media and commentators when they were published and used to suggest scientists were calling for action when in reality SAGE was only providing information for ministers to make decisions.
But because they focused solely on the consequences of doing something or not, there was no counter narrative of what those options would mean for the economy, education or wider wellbeing.
And based on what we heard at the Inquiry last and this week, those considerations seem to have been virtually eliminated from the rush to be the person who wanted lockdown before everyone else.
This is how it happens. Our modelling or political geniuses tell us what the future is going to be, their own forward version of future history. Then the real future, every part of it, one by one, becomes the present but never as we were told it would be. In another instant it has tumbled into the past, in theory now immutable and inevitable except that of course it is now manipulated, redrawn, and rebranded so that what was a false account of the future is now a false account of the past.
We are watching that happening in real time at the Covid Inquiry. The past is being reconstructed by the witnesses and participants. In that mythologised past, hindsight can be reimagined as a new alternate reality.
As Dan Hodges amply explained in the Mail, the problem was that politicians were confronted with scientists who in reality didn’t have a clue what to do, were floundering around, giving conflicting advice, and generally causing mayhem. As usual, real events didn’t pan out according to the plans and predictions.
To be fair, what else would one have expected? Who would or could have known what to do? But in an age of Experts no-one wants to admit that being an expert doesn’t usually mean being very expert at all. It exposes the unpalatable fact that most of what goes on around us on this planet is far bigger than us and doesn’t operate automatically according to the rules we have invented to understand all these phenomena. It also exposes the fact that none of them gave any serious consideration to the consequences of lockdown, negligence on an epic scale currently being obliterated at the Inquiry.
Everyone is entitled to change their minds, to admit they got it wrong, to come to the realisation that their expertise and experience wasn’t equal to the occasion, that we are very small pieces of a vast edifice of circumstances that rearrange themselves in spectacularly unpredictable ways.
“A little humility would become you Mozart,” says a court official in the movie Amadeus. It would also do well for all those at the Covid Inquiry and perhaps all of us who think we would have known better.
But, hey, what do I know? Fancies of history and predictions of the future are part of who and what we are. We have to believe we know the past and can control the future, while at the same time blaming others for their fake versions of the past and the future. Or else we’d all go mad. Or madder than we already are.
There is a history in all men’s lives,
Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt II
Figuring the natures of the times deceas’d;
The which observ’d, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time.
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You provide answer based upon close scurtiny of past events. Given that our whole understanding and epistomelogy is falling apart and that this is the meaning of our times and that Apocalypse means the lifting of the veil. There will be deeper discreditings than this one. But what is all of this tryng to tell you? It is trying to guide you to the realm of the spirit where no one can help or guide to to get there. Just listen to the vibe of our time and the feeling in the air and try to find resonance.
The only way to see the past or present or future is through clairyoyance. And that is a difficult and rocky path for all those who are called to it. Doesn’t matter that is the beauty of our species. Our humanity shines stronger than ever in this time in my view. In a time of unveiling I think that clairvoyance will be shared with everyojne.
That sounds esoteric, but it’s true that there is a lot that we don’t know.
Do you not see the permanent damage that you are doing the mythos of your country. You really have and you really are. I am not a particularly nationalistic person but people like you make me feel sick. Perhaps you desire a call to arms. I would advise against it.
The future can never resemble a model because a model is essentially a projection of a trend. Each moment in the future is blest with its own magic. Nobody knows it. Anyone who tells you that they do is heading for a fall. I have learned that. There are forces which give us pictures or projections but if you listen closely they tell you to listen to more important things. I am sure that I don’t need to mention them. All I can say is have a realistic estmation of your own abilities.
could do is make the meeting hall where you choose to get together, to be as beautiful and resonant as possible. Then when you have them beguiled you can charm them with your words. It doesn’t matter. No gentleman can support such action.
Have you been drinking all night and not been to bed?
This statement annoys me. It suggests that what I think would be good for me is equivalent to what someone else thinks is good for me.
During COVID – and constantly. in public life – there are people who think they have the authority and right to make decisions for everyone. Those people should have more humility and accept they don’t know what is best for everyone. But they don’t.
I have every right to decide what is best for me – be it buy a petrol car or an electric one, wear a mask or not, go out into the street or stay at home – and to reject someone else’s opinion isn’t per se a lack of humility.
And that seems to me the essential difference between the two camps – it’s not a simple difference of opinion about what the “right” thing to do is, but a difference of opinion about the proper limits on the ability of the collective to impose their will on the individual. We need a different country.
The author seems to assume that “something had to be done” and the poor old government had to make a choice, probably made a mistake but it was a genuine one. There’s a base assumption that the state has every right to make such decisions, even if they turn out to be wrong, as long as they are entered into honestly.
Not just the right but the obligation. It’s reached a point where to do nothing just isn’t an option. Deciding to stay out the way and let people decide things for themselves is nowadays is gross negligence and a dereliction of duty by the state. Something must be done. Anything. And like you say even if it’s a catastrophe, as.long as it was in good faith, all good.
Indeed, obligation, good point.
I don’t want to be in the same country as people who believe that. I don’t feel I have much common ground with the majority of people I know personally.
I had lunch with my ex last week.
It was clear that she’d forgotten that I’ve never been jabbed, have never worn a mask, have never taken any notice of the moronic rules/guidelines.
Which strongly suggests that I’m the only person she knows who has behaved in that way.
Other than people I’ve met through sceptic forums, I only know five people in real life who did not take the “covid vaccine” and two of those are me and my Mrs.
I know only two, my niece and her husband. Depressing.
Bloody hell I thought I had it bad.
Very sadly I have to agree with you tof:
“I don’t feel I have much common ground with the majority of people I know personally.”
What is missing is one statement of fact, namely that governments everywhere acted in unison. This has nothing to do with stupid modellers and confused politicians because in truth they had all been given their scripts.
And if it was all headless Chickens panicking all over the place, and some point the panic driven cock-ups would go in our favour. But as we say, every crisis was an excuse to suck individual liberties and reward to the state.
Every penny paid in tax is a decision taken out of your hands.
Often those decisions are made by people who actively hate you.
“Often those decisions are made by people who actively hate you.”
That feeling is becoming mutual…
“That feeling is
becomingmutual…”Apologies tof.
And now they want Council taxpayers to pay for their heating because they’re mostly working from home!
Governments though are given responsibility to supposedly look after what is best for all individuals. ——-If they think it is best to go to war then they will do that. If they think it is best to double your electricity bill based on assumptions about the climate they will do that. If they decide everyone should wear a mask then they will do that. ——Governments cannot be expected to make decisions based on what individuals think or believe otherwise they would never do anything because we all have different world views. Our only hope is that governments do the right thing based on what is best overall and they do that honestly taking all information into account. ———–Alas governments today are less trusted than ever before and many are realising that they have agenda’s other than what is best for their own citizens and now pander to unaccountable Supra National Institutions (UN, WEF, WHO etc) rather than to the people who vote for them
“…the problem was that politicians were confronted with scientists who in reality didn’t have a clue what to do, were floundering around, giving conflicting advice, and generally causing mayhem. As usual, real events didn’t pan out according to the plans and predictions.
To be fair, what else would one have expected? Who would or could have known what to do?”
Seriously? Words fail me.
“Yet “it was both politicians and scientists making mistakes”…”
God give me strength.
Mistakes?
Lockstep, dictated from somewhere (WHO or beyond). Scientists and politicians knew exactly what to do, and did it – ditch long-standing plans which amounted to doing very little (which is what had always been done and would have been the correct thing to do) and shut down the world, and sell everyone an untested “vaccine”. Yeah, floundering.
“Who would or could have known what to do?”
The people who had drawn up the established response.
Which was replaced by opposite policies on the basis of no evidence or reasoning process whatsoever.
Sweden, the people who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.
All just a cockup.
Does the author not read the other articles on this website. Plenty of evidence of collusion just like with Swine Flu in 2009.
It was a full 180 on the flick of a dime, but yeah, just cock-up FFS. Why are they all rewarded for failure is a reasonable question.
There is a central issue which everyone needs to address, which can vaguely be described as the understanding of the paramaters of consciousness. I don’t want to go into it given the gravity of our geopolitical situation I just want to say it doesn’t matter as lomg as you’re honest. We might get chastised or deleted but we probably won’t get a 2000 lb bomb dropped on our head. There were some severely damaged chidren after thhose weeks of Israeli bombardment and some had made tentative recoveries only to hear the bombardment again. Take it from me, this event is probably the most important event in 4000 years in terms of the feelings that are evoked. I never take refuge in prejudice but all of my friends, all very well-educated people, have said that they will feel nothing but loathing for Jews in the future. I mean total peacenik types I would’ve never imagined they aould talk that way.
If you just spend a few months studying the philosophy of science you will see all of these issues brought out into the daylight. In Norway for example there is a basic philsophy course which you have to take in order to underpin any degree, which includes philosophy of science. I think that this is a wise idea. On the other side philosophers care little for science which leads to its own occlusion.There is no way to point people in the right direction we just owe it to make the attempt.
Modelling appears to be the modern equivalent of scapulimancy.
The Naskapi Tribe used to heat up the bones of a dead animal on the fire until the first crack developed. That crack would be used to indicate the direction in which the next hunting party should set off.
And, of course, both modelling and scapulimancy suffer from the same weaknesses, susceptibility to interpretation and manipulation.
That being said, burning some old bones is a great deal cheaper than Professor Pantsdown’s stipend so I recommend that the government sacks all its modellers and gives the Tribal Chief of all the Naskapi, Chief Theresa Chemaganish, located, I believe, in Kawawachikamach, a call….
Modelling can surely be useful but the key thing is to keep checking whether what the model predicted actually then comes to pass, and continually refine it if it proves inaccurate. That’s clearly not always how it is used…
Of course models are useful, I agree, but, as the man said, they are all wrong.
I think we all know that disreputable chancer modellers, of which there are not a few, pretty much make it up (manipulate to get the desired ‘right’ answer) as they go along…..to fit the narrative given by the financier, very much like pollsters…..
Far cheaper to burn some bones and get the same answer anyway.
Presumably you’ll get him on the dog and bone.
Home sweet home….
Coup detat’s true identity revealed
Much of ‘science’ is 100% junk. Much of ‘the science’ terrain is in dispute. Newtonian gravity vs shadow gravity, Einstein’s abstract maths and STR which are so full of holes it makes swiss cheese look solid, bang religion, climate fascism, the flu fascism, the shrew to you theology, endless ages – most of these are metaphysical projects and much of it evil.
Speaking of history I will say this – I get more of a ‘renaissance’ imbibing Aquinas, Bonaventure, Assisi and Buridan – than I do from the ‘enlightenment’ where abstractions replace reality, proofs eschewed for hand-waving, all the way down to Einstein.
As for models – laughable. These idiots can’t model what happened yesterday and as Mann et al and Climategate proved – most of them are bullshit. As Rona elaborated, worse than bullshit, more like horseshit. Data fraud and make up propaganda is now science. Show me the flying virus from the air, with the dna of the ‘disease’. If you can’t show it, shut up.
As someone who has built complex data models I know that ‘my peers’ don’t have a fracking clue and anything I build will be approved. So much for consensus.
And as for “Germ Theory”……… Utter nonsense
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/first-do-harm-a-sorry-tale-in-the-daily-mail/
Daily Mail obviously under paid instruction to go after a doctor who happens to be operating in the best interests of her patients. No surprises.
What’s the TLDR version?
BTW Engineering modelling works, if you don’t believe so then don’t fly or drive anywhere. QED is the most accurate physics model according to Feynman.
Modelling outside the hard sciences however is usually performed by people not up to hard science.
https://x.com/kimdotcom/status/1730230555000574003
From Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram.
A Whistleblower has put out the fact that the Pfizer “vaccines” were deliberately tainted.
An epidemiologist has stated that “the vaccines are the pathogen.”
Indeed. So much for “scientists” “floundering”.
I’m afraid much of this article seems like re-heated cockup theory to me.
The alternative to serial cock-ups all in the same direction all over the world at roughly the same time by fundamentally well-meaning people has implications so horrific that people like Guy just dare not consider it
I think there’s a good deal of denial going on, and wishful thinking. I don’t seem to be capable of this – the future looks pretty bleak to me.
I agree.
I’d say history begins the moment something is past.
From that point onwards, it is a matter of opinion, not fact.
Prophecy, the history of the duture, scripturally, is different. The prophet is either 100% accurate or is not. In the Old Testament, the rules for false prophets were severe.
Modelling is NOT science. ———Does anyone think a pocket calculator is mathematics? ———The calculator is a tool that helps you do calculations quicker than you would do them yourself. It does not provide the answer to things whose variables and parameters you don’t know. Similarly with a climate model if you do not understand the effects of clouds, or water vapour, or the correct value for Climate Sensitivity to greenhouse gasses and you simply enter a guess or an assumption into your model the answer you get will not be worth anything. That is shown to be true by the fact that climate models have all been way off the mark till now and they cannot even hindcast climate that we know has occurred. I recall a Lead Author at the IPCC saying that “There has to be something fundamentally wrong with our models as a 20 year pause in warming does not appear in any of them”. ———-He still thinks there is global warming and believes that to be true, but believing things are true is religion, not science.—-Modelling is not science
Is the truth what we think it is, or the present activity of thinking ? It seems to be thought that creates the subjective reality of time, within whose contextuality we think we live. Modelling seems to be what we do all the time…