Stephen Roney's Blog, page 241

That Way Madness Lies

Christ Pantocrator, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Crosby, Stills, and Nash cannot remember when they first met. Two recall it as Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon. One is certain it happened at Joni Mitchell’s house.

“That’s my truth,” says Stephen Stills.

Scott Adams speaks of “filters.” Reality may be random, but you “filter” for what you want to be true.

The idea that reality can differ person to person, or that you can choose your own, is nonsensical and immoral.

To suppose that truth can differ person to person is to say that two contradictory things can both be true, in the same sense, at the same time. This is a violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Dispense with it, and reason is not possible. Anything you say after that is as desperately random as a stray dog howling at the moon.

To suppose that you can choose what is or is not true, is to assume to yourself ultimate power, including power over all other people. It is also the definition of insanity.

Where does this postmodern madness come from? It occurs to me that it has to do with atheism.

Chesterton observed that those who no longer believe in God will believe in anything. We are seeing this concept tested and proven: as people in America and Europe turn away from religion, they turn with utter fervor to psychology, psychiatry, scientism, Marxism, space aliens, multiverses, conspiracy theories, cosmic simulations, and so forth.

We are watching our entire civilization dissolve into pandemonium.

It is time to ask an ancient question:

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody there to hear, does it make a sound?

God hears it, and so it does.

More broadly, the concept of God, or heaven, is necessary to the idea of truth; whether or not we know the truth, God knows. It is not purely subjective.

Descartes demonstrated too that the only way we can have confidence in the reality of any of our perceptions, including our sense perceptions, let alone our memories, was on the premise that God was in command, and God would not deceive.

Pull out that lynchpin, and the cosmic tent collapses.

Without God, there is no truth. For God is Truth, and Truth is God.


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A Word on Fairies

Are fairies good Christians?

Many say they are not; that they are in fact shrunken pagan gods, still worshipped into later ages by the people living in more remote places, the “heathen” or “pagan.” This, after all, is where fairies are to be found: in the woods and dells, on the margins of human settlement. Max Muller, the great nineteenth century scholar of religions, promoted this opinion. W.B. Yeats cites “Irish antiquarians” maintaining that fairies are “The gods of pagan Ireland … who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.”

Superficially plausible; yet this fancy runs afoul of the fact that there are already such “little people” in pre-Christian lands, and they are not gods: the nymphs, naiads, and dryads of Greece; the yakshas, gandharvas and apsaras of India. Korea has its dokkaebi; the Philippines have their engkanto. The Quran, too, has its djinn, who function just like fairies in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Some djinn, at least, are good Muslims. 
Muslim fairiesBut, writing in the early 17th century, the Anglican bishop of Oxford saw fairies as specifically Catholic:

By which we note, the fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Marias,
Their dances were procession.

But now, alas! They all are dead,
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

Most by now perhaps have left for Canada. My Irish-Canadian grandmother would agree. They were always hiding things in her kitchen.

Poet Yeats endorses this view, and notes that fairies remained a stronger tradition in Catholic Ireland than in Protestant England. Fairies perhaps earned their reputation as being pagan for the same reason many other aspects of Catholicism were declared pagan, in an England turned Puritan. Fairies, after all, loved beauty, and music, and dance.

Fairies do seem to find enduring accommodation in the Catholic imagination: fascinating such Catholic or “high church” authors as Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the church fathers, Origen seems to argue for their existence:

“We indeed … maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally,—that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams,—that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons. (Origen, Contra Celsus, Book 8, ch. 3).”

The simple, obvious conclusion is that “fairy” is a class of angel. This, indeed, follows from St. Augustine’s definition: “’Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit,’ from what they do, ‘angel.’’ The “fairy godmother,” the most familiar fairy in the tales, is functionally equivalent to a guardian angel. In some of Grimms’ collected fairy tales, like “The Maiden without Hands,” she is expressly an angel.



Why do our fairy tales not more often make this clear? Perhaps because angels are a bit too frightening to young and many adult minds. While, as Chesterton has observed, fairyland is resolutely moral at all times, it tends to follow Bishop Barron’s advice, and lead the uncertain in the proper path not with appeals to morality, but to beauty.

For there are also fallen angels. These are the trolls. A Danish legend implies their true identity:

One night as a priest was going from Hiorlunde to Rolskilde, he passed by a mound in which there were music, dancing and other merriment.

At this moment some trolls sprang forth from the mount, stopped the priest’s vehicle, and said, “Whither art thou going?”

“To Landemode,” answered the priest.

They then asked him whether he thought they could be saved; to which he replied that he could not then inform them. They then appointed him to meet them with an answer in a year.

In the meantime it went ill with the coachman, who the next time he passed by the mound was overturned and killed on the spot.

When the priest came again at the end of a year, they again asked him the same question, to which he answered, “No! You are all damned!”

Scarcely had he uttered the words before the whole mount was in a blaze.

“A fairy tale,” as Laura Cready says in her 1916 Study of Fairy Tales, “is a poetic presentation of a spiritual truth.”


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So Much for Canada's International Crredibility

Seems I'm not the only one who was shocked by recent CBC coverage of the Epoch Times.



I was delighted, by the w3ay, to find the Epoch Times's special edition in my mailbox.

I figure it's a collectable now.


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News of the Apocalypse

As if plagues of locusts were not enough.


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A Journal of the Plague Year

Grocery day again today. Less crowding than even last week. Sanitary wipes are back in stock, and even on special. Most of the meat aisle is meat.

Everyone except me seemed to be wearing a face mask. My face mask blew out of my cart on the way. I found it lying on the road on the way back.

Had to get ink for my printer. I need it or I cannot file my tax return. Decided the only way was to order on Amazon and have it delivered. Amazon must be making big money right now.

Scott Adams, who used to be optimistic, is in a dark mood. He says there is little hope of a vaccine. He says we have never developed a successful vaccine for a coronavirus. The common cold is a coronavirus.

So what about treatments? An MD on YouTube says those responsible for approving new medicines are employees of drug companies. They are unlikely to approve a non-patent alternative to one of their own products. This, he thinks, explains the silence around hydroxychloroquine. There’s no money in it.

Adams points out, however, that the relative success of Israel, Germany, and India in dealing with the virus can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that they have large local pharmaceutical industries that produce hydroxychloroquine. They are therefore able to give it to mild cases.

Testing, according to Adams, is a mess. Nevertheless, the UK and US governments both insist they have enough testing ability now to allow for a move to the test and trace strategy.

Many government are putting out a smartphone app that can alert you if someone nearby has tested positive. I believe this idea originated in South Korea, and the ROK has been a model of relative success.

Other measures that ought to be tried: mandatory face masks in public; ultraviolet lights in enclosed spaces; infrared cameras at entrances, to detect anyone running a fever. Then perhaps we could restrict the lockdown to those infected and those most vulnerable.


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News of the Apocalypse

Scott Adams or Elon Musk accounts for these things by suggesting we are living in a “simulation.”

Okay; but who programmed it?

William of Ockham says God.

Would it be possible to come up with a more flawed presidential candidate than Joe Biden?

He is publicly losing his mind to senility.

He is obviously corrupt: Burisma, of course, and, worse, big payoffs from Communist China.

He has long visibly acted boorish around women, including young girls.

And now he has been “credibly charged” with sexual assault. Quite apart from whether he did it, his and his supporters’ slogan was “believe all women.”

And it seems pretty clear already from his response to the allegations that he did it.

And Biden is leading Trump in the polls.
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The Art of War

Sun Tzu
It seems rather little noticed, in the midst of the general apocalypse, but Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency yesterday. Not because of the coronavirus; that was already a declared state of emergency. About a threat to the power grid.

He says foreign adversaries are creating and increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities.

The emergency order bans the importation of equipment from “adversary nations.”

Something is going on, and it does not sound good.

I argued in this space a few days ago that war between the US and China was improbable; both had more to lose than to gain.

But I was thinking of conventional war.

What seems to have happened, and become apparent suddenly, is the emergence of a new Cold War, between the US and China, in which China is seeking dominance by non-military means, but no other holds barred. By indirection.

It is strange that this is coming to a head at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic, if the coronavirus pandemic is not a part of this plan.

It is too much to think the Chinese deliberately let the virus loose In Wuhan; the virus is indiscriminate, and they would not start by killing their own people. But once it was loose, they seem to have behaved suspiciously: shutting down travel out of Wuhan except overseas, by air. There are signs they deliberately spread the virus to north Italy: one guy who was part of a Chinese government front organization was standing on street corners asking for hugs with the sign “I am not a virus.” They withheld and suppressed information to other governments, while buying up all the protective equipment they could on the world market. Now they are shipping out protective equipment, and test kits, that turn out to be defective. Is this incompetence, or design?

It may be, too, that the virus escaped from a government lab. And it may be that the lab was working on weaponizing viruses.

Meantime, things seem to be heating up in the South China Sea. This seems to have been initiated by China, sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat, then driving off a US Navy ship. They are trying, as they were inevitably going to sooner or later, to assert sovereignty over those sea lanes. Perhaps they hope the US will be too distracted by the virus to respond.

The rumours are spreading that, apart from electrical equipment, many things being imported from China have built-in vulnerabilities allowing Chinese spying and, potentially, control: 5G, Zoom for teleconferencing, HuaWei phones, and so forth.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Trump called out the navy to stop drug trafficking, suggesting there was a sudden surge in the middle of the pandemic. We have long been thinking the problem was Mexico, and I was thinking Venezuela. On that basis, the call made little sense: the border with Mexico was closed. And the navy was of no use at that border. But the ultimate source for most of these opioids is China. They must come across that ocean. Has China been deliberately flooding the Americas with these drugs, inspired by what opium did to disrupt and weaken Qing Dynasty society?

It is beginning to look, as well, as though China has been doing a lot of bribery around the world. The belt and road initiative has been buying governments, but that is above board. There is something else going on. The WHO is in their pocket. This does not seem to be adequately accounted for by the official funding: as Trump keeps saying, the US pays ten times the portion of their budget that China does. It looks as though people, government officials and others, are being bought individually. We are recently hearing of American academics having been bought. The absurdly pro-regime coverage recently from the CBC makes me suspect that Canadian journalists are being bought. Other evidence is how media outlets in the US and Canada swiftly fell in line behind the claim that it was racist to call COVID-19 the "Chinese virus." YouTuber JJ McCullough tells of being offered money by the Chinese government to spread their propaganda on his channel.

It belatedly occurs to me that this is exactly the Chinese way. No open conflict. Everything is done through “back doors.” One day you wake up, and someone new is calling the shots.

It’s war, Jim, but not war as we know it.


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The Perils of Vegetarianism--And Social Science

Pythagoras advocating vegetarianism
Recent pieces in the Toronto Sun and Daily Mail report “Study links vegetarian and vegan diets to increased likelihood of depression (Sun) and “Eating meat may improve mental health and one in three vegetarians are depressed” (Daily Mail).

This is an interesting illustration of the problems with social science research.

Several studies have shown the opposite: that a Mediterranean or traditionally Japanese diet, essentially a vegetarian diet allowing seafood, reduce the risk of depression by about a third.

How is this possible?

Compare this: suppose you did a study of the depressed that uncovered the shocking fact that an actual majority of the depressed have visited psychiatrists? One could then produce the equivalent headline: “Study links psychiatry to depression”; “Avoiding psychiatrists may improve mental health.”

It is entirely possible that depressives gravitate to vegetarianism because it eases their symptoms.

Correlation is not causation; because it is not, one can easily make a social science study arrive at opposite conclusions, depending on what you want it to say.

Accordingly, our current “scientific” approach to “mental health,” relying as it does on such statistical correlations, has only a fifty percent chance of giving a helpful instead of a harmful suggestion on any given point.

In other words, avoiding psychiatrists may improve mental health.


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Here Comes the Sun

Bad news has been unrelenting, so it seems, for some while. I think we may now finally be seeing some rays of sunshine.

Remdesavir seems to be somewhat helpful. A now concluded study showed a 31% faster recovery. It showed no change in death rate, but that may be because the study was ended early. Once it proved effective, the moral obligation was to offer it to all patients involved.

Contrary to many reports, it looks as though hydroxychloraquine is not dead. As noted yesterday in this space, a Ph.D. has compared total cases against active cases, state by state, and seems to show a difference for states in which hydroxychloroquine is more widely available. This suggests that it too shortens the course of the illness.

If hydroxychloraquine has not shown the same clear effect in clinical trials, it may be because the drug, being in limited supply, is generally given even in trials only to patients in very poor condition, already in hospital. And this may not be the stage of the illness for which it is effective.

Dr. Didier-Raoult, the French virologist who has strongly advocated hydroxychloroquine therapy, says viruses usually just burn themselves out; we do not understand why. He believes, accordingly, that Dr. Fauci in the US is probably wrong to think there will be a second wave of COVID-19 in the fall. I had said this before: SARS, Swine Flu, MERS, Ebola, seemed to burn themselves out. With any luck, COVID-19 will too. An Israeli mathematician thinks he recognizes a pattern of seven or eight weeks of virulence, after first community spread, beyond which it subsides. If the Chinese government figures are anything near accurate, this would seem to fit their evidence.

Plasma treatment also seems effective. The problem here seems only that quantities are inevitably limited.

After all the fears of lack of respirators, it seems the US has a great surplus. This surely had been our greatest fear: people being taken off respirators to die, or dying in the corridor because there were no respirators left. Moreover, it seems now as though less aggressive techniques may be more effective.

The news that the virus is sensitive to heat, temperature, light, and UV light, seems promising in two ways. For one thing, it suggests some relatively non-invasive new treatments. For example, just pumping warmer air into the lungs might make a difference.

For another, it makes it likely the virus will die back naturally for summer.

We had been worried that re-infection was possible; this would be devastating. Then vaccines would not work; herd immunity would not work. Sooner or later, we might simply all die of coronavirus. But it seems now confirmed that this does not happen. Prior results were testing failures.

Testing seems to have rapidly gotten better, and the US at least is concentrating on turning out test kits. Testing is almost a solution by itself. Until now, we have been quarantining upside down: locking everyone in. With efficient testing, we can quarantine right side up: locking in only the infected, and perhaps the most vulnerable, while business goes on for the rest of us.

There is an obvious and unexplained difference between the course of the virus in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, compared to Iran, Europe and America. The former, although they got the virus sooner, have lower rates of spread, and lower death rates.

The obvious explanation is that these are cultures that commonly use face masks in the street.

There is a second consideration: why do some able-bodied people of equivalent age suffer far more serious symptoms than others? There may be a genetic component; but there is a good chance it has to do with how strong the original exposure was: how many virus cells spread and bred before the body was able to muster its immune response.

Aside from reducing the spread, face masks combined with social distancing may more or less ensure that initial dosing is relatively mild. Almost, in a good number of cases, like a vaccination.

An Indonesian study shows vitamin D also matters. Those with low levels of vitamin D are more likely to catch the virus, and more likely to have a bad result.

Dr. John Campbell suggests that this may be behind the odd fact that meat packers seem to have become centres of spread, in the US and Canada. Why meat packers?

And why meat packers here, and not in Europe?

Campbell says that recent Somali immigrants tend to take these factory jobs. Aside from living communally, they are dark-skinned. Darker skin generates less vitamin D. They work inside. Sunlight generates vitamin D.

So the virus might claim fewer victims if we checked vitamin D levels, and took supplements.

Add all this together, and it seems as though we might have a program, even in the absence of anything more.



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Remember Hydroxychloraquine?

A Twitter thread comparing states in the US based on how liberal they are in allowing the use of hydroxychloraquine and CIVID-19 recovery rates. It does make it look as though the drug has a significant benefit.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.