Red pills, blue pills and other white noise.

We live in an age where information is available to anyone who wants it.

The information is easy to find. If you want to know how to bake sourdough bread there are about fifty thousand videos that you can watch on line. If you want to change the oil in your car or learn to play an instrument there are literally millions of videos on YouTube alone that will show you how to do it.

Some of these videos are good, some are mediocre and a few of them are terrible. What they do however is teach. You absorb the content and apply the lesson.

The results speak for themselves. In my line of work I’m usually looking for information. I may need information on how to piece components together to build a system. Sometimes I may need to configure a certain piece of hardware in a certain manner to perform a specific task, so I look for information.

There are usually hundreds of videos and millions of posts on how to do exactly what I’m trying to do. Most of the information is terrible, some are mediocre and a very few of them are good.

What I’ve found is that the more technical a problem becomes, the more differing opinions, and bad outcomes, you will have.

This information overload is the driving force in the world today. How do we sift through all the data that is presented to us and make decisions on what to do and what decisions to make in any 24 hour period that we collectively call a day.
Humans like to keep it simple, there are biological reasons and cultural reasons but the result is that we are hard wired to see things in a certain way. Systems and hierarchies are clear and concise and our human brains are soothed by this. Even if the explanation provided by the system is outlandish, people can be convinced if there is an underlying “cause” running things.

For most of us to be comfortable there has to be a Deus Ex Machina running the show, either literally or figuratively.
An orderly system with simple answers. Wether for good or bad, we look for patterns and systems to account for and explain what is going on.
As I too am human I tend to look at things this way but I keep a couple things in mind. The first thing is that chaos is a system (I will go into the chaos theory another time so as they say on Facebook, do your own research) and the second thing I keep in mind is Occam’s razor.
To put it succinctly Occam’s razor states that the simplest answer is most likely the correct answer.

Occam says the simple explanation is usually right

Covid-19 has brought these things to a head.
Too much information and too many sources has muddied the waters for a great many. There are innumerable conspiracy theories around Covid-19. Most are too complicated for laymen to understand, and only a certain few enlightened individuals can decipher the intricate web of the Illuminati and their minions. Fortunately several of these gurus show up on my social media feeds so I have been able to ascertain the gist of the conspiracy.

Some years ago, nefarious forces got together with governments, and industrialists for goals that are too deep for typical minds to comprehend. One of the plots they decided to hatch was a novel virus to be released in 2020. The virus would be hatched in a lab in China, and be allowed to “escape” into the general population.

The virus would spread worldwide but since China invented the virus, they would distribute a cure and casualties in China would be small. The rest of the world however would fall prey to the evil geniuses behind the virus. It would infect every part of the world to varying degree and destroy businesses and economies.

To what end you ask? Well from what I can understand there are two goals:

1) To infringe on individual rights everywhere by enforcing lockdowns and making people wear masks against their will

2) To develop a vaccine that will allow Bill Gates to not only track everyone on earth but to also wipe out a large portion of the population due to side effects from the vaccine.

Despite the obvious flaws in the “logic” of such arguments, many intelligent people (and a large number of morons) believe some or all of this claptrap.
They are emboldened by internet “sources” and a treasure trove of bad information and half baked ideas.

These ideas fly in the face of the human experience. Anyone who has had to organize even the smallest happening, knows that there are far too many factors and wild cards for any such conspiracy to be pulled off. Furthermore no-one, not even the social media soothsayers can ever articulate the end game for this conspiracy.

Fortunately for everyone else, I have arrived just in time with my theory on the Covid-19 crisis. It is fact based and appears to stand up to scrutiny so feel free to discard it and ridicule my “logical fallacies”.

Humans will eat just about anything.

Lobsters were thought of as garbage because they are bottom feeders

It boggles my mind that way back in time some guy looked at a lobster and decided that it looked tasty. For uncounted millennia though humans have been eating gross things under questionable circumstances. This practice is uncommon in the west, unless you count Whole Foods, but in some parts of the world crazy stuff goes on.

One of these hotbeds of crazy food markets is China. In China they have thee things called wet markets where all kinds of animals can be bought for consumption. These places are makeshift, wildly unsanitary and some of the animals on sale are unappetizing to say the least. Scientists say, and I mean real scientists not YouTubers wearing a white coat, that the disease probably originated from bats.

The bats had it and some of these bats were bought and consumed at a wet market in Wuhan China. Now the Chinese say it wasn’t the bat soup that caused the outbreak. They say that the market was the epicentre because it became a super spreader event. Nevertheless there we were earlier this year at the start of a global pandemic. If you remember back to earlier when I spoke of chaos, this is where chaos becomes a factor.

Chaos in and of itself is not a bad thing.

Chaos is the driving force behind discovery and innovation in the long run. In the short term however chaos leads to unpredictable outcomes.

China fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you perceive the world is a totalitarian state. As such there is less chaos when it comes to the general population.

When the virus started raging they may or may not have given the world a timely heads up, but they issued a strict lockdown and travel ban. People adhered to the directions because China has a pretty orderly society on account of the murderous regime.

The end result is that China has up to this point half as many cases as the US has deaths. Add to this that people in that part of the world wear masks whenever they are infectious and you have a recipe for success.

Results have varied in other parts of the world. Countries with populists leaders and large populations of individualists have fared the worst. Doing things for personal liberty rather than common good results in a chaotic response.

Rather than looking to government for a rational nationwide solution to the crisis. People turned to the internet for information. What did they find? Crackpot theories, anti-vax, conspiracies, anti-mask religious zealots, anti-mask personal freedom crackpots, deliberate misinformation, disinformation and bots.


Lots and lots of bots.

All of this leads to a disorderly disjointed chaotic response.
By and large civic minded individuals will shelter in place or avoid crowds, or wear a mask if they feel their actions can mitigate a bad situation for themselves, their families and society at large. The opposite holds true for those with a libertarian bent. Don’t take my word for this, the numbers speak for themselves.

There are of course other factors at play here because, there is a lack of uniformity even within systems, but as a whole this situation is playing out in an obvious manner. There is no conspiracy, there are no overlords, just tragic events playing out on a global scale.


To paraphrase Occam. “If you are standing on a city street and you hear hoofbeats behind you, odds are it’s a horse and not a zebra”.