Daily Ramble
Whoa! Yesterday, I hit a nerve talking about US taxes. I didn’t have a single person who took the IRS’s side of things, though. Shocking, innit.
I was speaking to a Swedish friend over the weekend. He’s a psychologist/psychiatrist (I can’t be bothered to remember the difference between the two professions, for some reason), and I asked him about the term cognitive dissonance. I’ve heard it bandied about so frequently of late that I thought hearing it from a subject matter expert would get my head wrapped around the idea. Here’s what he said, “Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort that arises from holding two conflicting ideas at the same time.” Since humans are like the rest of the creatures creeping, crawling, and swimming around our blue marble floating in the cosmos, we avoid pain and seek pleasurable sensations. Cognitive dissonance explains why we will accept an untrue solution to resolve two conflicting thoughts — it gets us out of discomfort, aka pain.
Let me give an example of the cognitive dissonance we’re all living through right now — masks. I’m not going to tread down the tired road of debating to-mask or not-to-mask — enough folks are doing that. Instead, the cognitive dissonant nerve I’m taking a pick-ax to is the one holding masks as the solution to removing influenza from the population. What am I talking about?
Let’s get there by way of data. The chart below pulled from Scientific American shows that 2021 has seen a negligible amount of influenza cases. If you’re having trouble reading the chart, 2021 is the bold red horizontal line at 0. I’m sure it’s not zero cases, but it’s a far cry from 2020’s peak of 30,000 cases per week. So soak this in for a minute: North America went from 30,000 cases per week at the peak of 2020’s influenza season to 0 in 2021. Hold that thought, please.
Ok, do you feel the cognitive dissonance? The pain of holding two conflicting thoughts at once in your mind? Have your thoughts taken you to “masks” to release the discomfort of the impossibility of influenza having disappeared in one year? It’s where I sat for a long time before the discomfort of the “unrightness” of that solution got under my craw.
So is there any actual scientific data saying that masks have eliminated influenza? Nope. Not a shred of data that I can find. Just a lot of handwaving saying it’s so. But the discomfort of having influenza disappear within a year leads us to easily accept that masks are the primary reason why it has. But really, think about it? Does that truly make sense? Masks haven’t stopped COVID-19 from spreading, but it’s stopped the flu?
Uh oh, now you need an alternative solution to stop the discomfort? Yeah, I’ve got one common-sense solution up my sleeve, and it’s also not scientifically validated. But you’re probably not going to like it and will instead revert back to believing masks are the solution. So here’s my take: the PCR test for COVID 19 has been capturing influenza as well as COVID 19 into positive test results. Why? Because the higher the cycle count on the PCR test, the more likely it is that other foreign viruses impact the positive test result, including influenza. With the medical community hypersensitive to COVID, it makes sense that most doctors were recommending COVID tests over influenza testing. Then, poof, just like magic, all the cases of influenza magically became COVID.
But yeah, I agree. So let’s go back to believing masks that aren’t doing much to stop COVID have eliminated influenza. It’s easier.
Sobering Things on the Interweb
The red line is the US stock market growth since the 2008 financial crisis. The blue line is the same but divided by the money printed by the Federal Reserve.
Do you get it yet?
Do you?
Stock prices are not rising —> the dollar is losing value.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $44.6k - $49k
Today: $44.6k - $49k
Tomorrow: $43.8k - $49k
Bitcoin’s price seems to be shrugging off the US government as if it didn’t exist. Perhaps that’s because the US just became aware of the ferocity of the social layer protecting the network, or perhaps the world realizes it doesn’t matter what any legislative body thinks of Bitcoin. The price does not seem like it wants to be held back. $49k as the next stop seems highly likely at this point. I will reassess if we should lose $45k on a daily close, but now that we’ve closed above $45k for a couple of days, the odds are reducing that we’ll close below it — at least not before heading up a bit further.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: Does Bitcoin need the United States government’s legal system to succeed?
A: No.
Bitcoin is apolitical, like gravity or the speed of light. It has proven impossible for any country to regulate out of existence. China’s actions to shut down Bitcoin mining in May, which disrupted more than 50% of the power protecting the network and caused the price to decline by more than 50%, can be seen as the most substantial governmental attack on the network ever levied. But both the price and the power protecting the Bitcoin network are now growing again. On the flip side, China’s decision to opt out has left them with very little influence over the network going forward.
So, no, even if the US were to delegitimize the entire Bitcoin network completely, it will only slow down adoption, not destroy it.
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In your recent post "Curator" you linked to a CDC notice that the EUA for the PCR test would be discontinued at year's end. Further reading of that CDC post says, "CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses." In other words, we have been blending Covid and Influenza diagnoses together. There's no better way to pump the fear than to inflate the numbers.