Dealing with mistakes. The New Normal and the Meaning of Life. Disagreements about health

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Last Saturday I delivered my speech on electromagnetic frequency radiation and the ineffectiveness of government in protecting consumers.  I mentioned the inverse square rule – the power of radiation from a point source.  My evaluator politely said I probably meant the inverse cube rule.

I thought I was right, but said nothing.  Returning home I found that the author had written “inverse square.”  It made sense to me, as the surface of a sphere (the wavefront) is a function of the square of the radius (distance from the point source).  I discovered that there is an inverse cube rule, about which I had not known, and it sometimes comes into play. 

I wrote him and asked how it applied.  He wrote back saying simply that he had made a mistake.  How refreshing!  That candor raises this gentleman in my esteem.  Since he had the honesty to admit a mistake,  I will believe him all the more when he says he is right.  I learned something.  He thinks that the inverse cube rule applies to the radius of destruction caused by an explosion.  Makes sense, since an explosion does destroy everything within a sphere.  We both learn from the exchange.

A couple of posts ago I made a mistake.  A reader caught it.  However, instead of asking if I were wrong, he berated me for being so stupid as to make such an obvious mistake.  How could a person with my credentials be so dumb?  In other words, he was a jerk about it.

Fortunately for me, his criticism of my mistake was buried amongst a good number of his own mistakes, exaggerations and assumptions.  They were pretty obvious, and other commenters called him on it.  My mistake was either overlooked or forgiven. Points to any reader who caught the error.   Please note it (politely) in a comment. 

There is a bigger message in this.  Liberals love to sneer at the rest of us, dismissing what we say as obvious garbage.  This attitude forces them to double down when they are wrong.  See Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie.  The rule has a corollary, SJWs always double down.  Title of a second book. It blinds them to the truth.

The topic at hand was vaccinations, and my point that I don’t think they are a good idea and I’m glad I didn’t get vaccinated.  My interlocutor took this as a blanket condemnation of jabs for everybody.  It is more like a word of caution.  Observe the world around you and make your own decisions.  And don’t blindly follow any guru.  A good many of the people whose ideas on health and the economy I like write supportively of Russia. This includes Vox Day above.  I will say they are wrong, and it makes me more inclined to examine their other positions, but I’m not going to rudely dismiss them out of hand.

Courtesy is an old-fashioned virtue.  As is civil discourse.  We have to humbly accept that we are all wrong at times, and graciously listen to those who disagree.

I have just uploaded the first part of my trilogy on the New Normal, grandly titled The New Normal and the Meaning of Life.  I am working on the second part, the implications of this. What will the world be like when my children reach adulthood? The third part will be how to cope – how to prepare them for that world.

I write a great deal about what’s going on now with regard to depopulation, Covid and the vaccines, education, freedom of speech and finance. On these topics I’m pretty much repeating and synthesizing what I read elsewhere. I often pass along links.

The jump that few others seem to make is to assume that what we see is real and ask what comes next. The Covid vaccines will result in depopulation. The economy is in the process of collapsing. Education likewise. These are the topics of my second video. But the big question is, what do we do about it? And that depends on a person’s meaning in life. The meaning of life in turn depends on your timeframe. If you are interested only in your own well-being as an individual, it is one thing. If your greater interest is in passing on your genome and your culture, it is quite different. That’s the topic of the first video, just uploaded.

As Casey Stengel said, one should “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” I’m getting out in front of the parade here, assuming consequences of phenomena I observe, but the reality of which most people don’t yet accept. There is a lot of room for disagreement. In a civil world (see above) I would expect people would indulge me the right to say what I want even if they think I’m wrong. And I, on my part, should be open-minded enough to accept their criticism and possibly change my point of view. That’s my objective in posting this video.

On the home front, Zoriana steadfastly refused to wear her sweater on the way home from the Toastmasters meeting on Saturday. Sunday morning she had a serious case of sniffles. Every parent in the world will draw the conclusion that A => B.  If she had worn her sweater she wouldn’t have gotten sick.

As I have often written, I am subject to this indisputable A => B logic all the time. Two days ago the women had me defrost some ground pork despite my protests that we had more than enough to eat in the refrigerator. We of course didn’t use it. I had some for dinner last night and put the rest into a patty this morning which I cooked alongside my egg. Marianna climbed into my lap to get a bite as I sat down to eat it.

Grandma had a cow. “You can’t feed Marianna fried food. It will ruin her stomach.” She grabbed a howling Marianna off my lap. Sweet are the uses of adversity. Since Grandma had forcibly taken it on herself to watch and feed Marianna, I went off to check my email.

When I told Oksana about it, saying that her mother makes her own problems, I got no sympathy. We all hear her mother complain that she is overworked, but it is hard to wrest chores away from her. She insists on doing it her own way. Oksana added gratuitously that I had ruined Eddie and Zoriana’s stomach with my terrible diet. That despite the fact that we usually eat dinner together and most days my breakfast is oatmeal. More than that, now that I’ve stopped drinking booze, coffee and tea, I think my stomach is bothering me less than anybody else in the household.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man struggles to hold his own in the battle of the sexes, the good-looking woman perseveres but still manages to be sweet about it, and the children get to spend the day with mom because I’m going to be out running errands all day. Lucky me.

Graham