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On Hiring the Wrong Expert
In the tenth book of his Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius recounts a story from fourth century BC Rhodes when that city was almost conquered by an invading Macedonian king because they had deferred to the wrong expert. A visiting architect named Callias showed people a fancy model of a giant crane that could grab and shake apart any siege engine hauled up at the city wall. Impressed, they fired the city architect, Diognetus, and hired Callias.
When the invaders arrived a short time later, the citizens implored Callias to implement his grand new tech, at which time, he was compelled to admit that it was never really feasible. So they fired him and begged Diognetus to take over. Instead of a grand technological innovation, Diognetus directed the people to punch a hole under the city wall right in front of the siege engine, which was being slowly drawn up the hill to the city. Under his direction, the citizens then collected all their sewage and waste and flushed it out of the hole until the siege machine soon became hopelessly mired in foul mud. The invaders gave up and went home.
The Rhodians were also saved by not having social media mobilized to defend Callias and his version of The Science until it was too late. Having the capacity to suppress adverse truths might have encouraged the idiots in power who hired Callias to try to prevent or delay embarrassing admissions of failure with predictable ruinous results.
Conservatives, thinking of the impact of Rush Limbaugh, once tended to believe that the internet, Twitter, blogs, cable TV, and other new species of information exchange would finally destroy the old ideological monopoly of the TV networks and major newspapers and usher in a stronger, better-informed democracy. What few, if any of us, anticipated was that the depth and breadth of some nascent appetite for certainty and group identity would foster an indifference (or outright hostility) to objective truth; an appetite government could effortlessly exploit.
Our Callias of COVID, Anthony Fauci, still has adoring fans which is a tribute to the prevalence of bad information. His “leadership” was a sham done in open conflict with both existing science and the public interest. We know with certainty (from his emails and flip-flops) that Fauci knew that mask mandates, lockdowns, and various closures (especially schools) would have little or no effect but impose great costs.
Why would he do that? It would make for a better story if there were some coherent ideological goal, financial grab, or clever conspiracy that motivated him at the start. But the evidence suggests that he became a functioning part of the grand ideological perversion of democracy and civil liberties only after he grabbed a public image and role that fed his considerable ego. If he had admitted the unambiguous scientific truth that neither he nor any other expert knew of any way to stop or substantially slow the spread, his importance would dissipate.
His de facto alliance with the subsequent emergence of a concerted ideological exploitation of the pandemic followed naturally from the narcissistic thrill of being a savior in a white coat in front of the cameras 24/7. A grand conspirator would have been better rhetorically organized than a blathering, ever-shifting egomaniac who seemed to assume his listeners were stupid.
Had Fauci been replaced at the outset by a competent, honest scientist with a normal-sized ego, how much damage could have been averted? How much more rational would the public discourse and policy have been?
The invading virus had its way with the populace while Tony Callias, et al., told us we were being protected by their expert guidance. We lost billions on the costly salvational policies that were always destined to fail and we were conquered anyway. Many (like utterly ridiculous people at PBS) still want us to praise and thank the fraudsters. And unlike the people of Rhodes in 304 BC, we have yet to admit we were wrong and rehire the real experts.
Published in General
I must admit, the image of treating Fauci’s residence as did the good citizens of Rhodes, until he too is mired in a real-life foul mess suitable to the foul mess he made of the pandemic for us all, has real appeal.
Jay Battacharya or Scott Atlas come to mind. Real scientists.
It is only going to get worse.
Bill Gates should be under subpoena so that we can determine a little bit more about who was embedded inside Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.
Gates is repeatedly stating that he only had dinner with Epstein a bunch of times. Never does he admit the global nation-hopping he and Epstein did. Nor is there any mention of how when Epstein donated monies to a program at MIT, it was put under Gates’ name so that oversight personnel at MIT would not realize the donation had come from a convicted, sex registry status sex offender named Jeffrey Epstein
But despite all that, Gates was given the ability to have an article published by The New York Times that is written for those of us who read at a second grade reading level.
Against the framework of how epidemics are similar to out of control house fires, and that fire fighters are the best way to stop fires, the article posits the theory that the best new way to figure out if the USA and the rest of the world is under attack by a new pathogen would be to employ testing sewage waste H2O’s to see if the pathogen is there.
What could go wrong with this idea? For one thing, it would be rather easy to have the inner circle of people spike the waste water that is to be tested, using the pathogen.
In any event, to even discuss these matters means we are behind the curve.
Gates is always in the top two of donors to The Who, the number one donor being the USA when we are led by Commie Dems.
The Who has recently gotten over 150 nations to cede their sovereignty to the Who, the moment that any new pandemic is declared. (And for Gates and Fauci, that declaration won’t be soon enough.)
And yes, Fauci has retired from his top spot at NIAIDS, but he has volunteered to be the new spokesperson for all things mRNA vaccine and pandemic.
Testing sewage is how we know that COVID was in Milan months before the initial March ’20 outbreak. Unless you bribe the people doing the collecting and testing, it would take a hell of lot of planted virus to be picked up by random testing.
Citation for that?
In any event, for 2 years in the USA under the spell of the COV hoax, doctors were bribed by hospital administrators who were bribed to not perform actual patient care and instead medically kidnap individuals, and then kill them. (My posted OP from a year ago focused on one family in Wisconsin’s adult Down syndrome daughter who was kidnapped and killed. Another Op I wrote focused on the Chicago area woman who attempted to be released from a Catholic hospital in that region. Even having a named power of attorney lawyer couldn’t get her out of that hospital in time to avoid being killed.)
So yes, they can easily figure out a system to bring every water-testing individual or group aboard their needed control protocols. (Remember, most water/sanitation techs and engineers have never had to take the Hippocratic oath. So they have even less ethical guidance than med professionals have.)
Glenn Beck interviews David Sacks, who also states that our “experts” are not about solutions. And certainly are not our friends.
His thesis is not just that the experts do not solve our crises, they actually create them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx2Uh9iU8GM
David Sacks interview with Glenn Beck
Cite?
not an obscure fact. The positive results in Italian sewer was in the news globally and in NIH cites. In previous posts I cited that fact and the Red Cross sample testing that also confirmed widespread distribution of the virus at least as early as December ’19.
i don’t have a problem with testing. The key is to bar the kinds of stupid manipulations and power grabs that we got with COVID.
And yes our “expert” class sucks. The fear- mongering “climate porn” and “science- based” attacks on the innocence of our children are contemptible. Bill Gates is not as smart as he thinks he is and is following the policy fantasies of his butt-kissing hordes of sycophants and grifters.
Just out of curiosity, how does one test sewage for a virus? Electron scanning for viral images in sewage samples. PCR testing? Growing viruses in living petri dishes (eggs or whatnot) in the lab to see what grows?
You can read about it here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/
I would need to understand it better before I would dare attempt a summary.
“If he had admitted the unambiguous scientific truth that neither he nor any other expert knew of any way to stop or substantially slow the spread, his importance would dissipate.”
This has to be a big part of it.
In most real-life decisions, people with expertise in various fields are needed, not just a single expert. In a business decision about a new product launch, you will generally want the views of the engineers (‘can we make something to do X?), the manufacturing people (‘what will it cost us per unit to make it’?), the salesmen (‘can you sell it?’) and the finance people (‘do we have enough money to fund this development?’)…and others, likely including lawyers.
Analogously in dealing with an epidemic.
See the case study in my post On Trusting Experts…and Which Experts to Trust.
“ What few anticipated was the …”
..“breath and depth of nascent appetite for certainty and group identity would foster an indifference ( or outright hostility) to the objective truth”
Brilliant turn of a phase describing what is at it’s core one of the greatest problems America faces today.
For if serious and in depth investigation of the facts faces such outright hostility not only from the Woke Community but also from their fellow travelers among our elites and the so-called “conservative “ Never Trumpers which it surely does, we will surely have great difficulty solving almost all of the problems we face today as a society.
Successful problem solving absolutely requires the free flow of ideas or it just won’t solve a thing, but it seems that the open hostility from so many to a free and open discussion is really an assault on actually solving problems in ways that that would change the now very corrupt established order and is actually a bare knuckled defense of our status quo no matter how damaging to society that status quo is.
One sees that consistently in our discussions here at Ricochet where one clique consistently tries to shut down any discussion that runs afoul of what our now thoroughly discredited Mainstream Media/Big Tech censorship happy “Ministry of Truth “ tries to shove down our throats on a daily basis.
Okay fair enough.
But the only reason Gates wants that testing is because that is the way he states The WHO can come in and bring about the needed societal shut downs.
Don’t forget the major two interviews that he did with BBC and CBS in Spring 2020.
He made it very clear that:
One: The only way to stop the COV pandemic was to get all 7 billion humans on the planet vaxxed for COVID.
Two: The only real way for us to make each other happy, once we all realized how dangerous COV was, would be for the authorities to somehow bring abut what normal people would want: Continual surveillance such that each of us would know if the neighbor has COV currently, has had it, has been vaccinated, as well as what that neighbor’s temperature happens to be, what their heart rate is, and other measurements related to overall health.
So guess what? As he announced on these interviews that we in the public would not want to be without that surveillance, maybe <as his cerebral lightbulb went on> he himself could bring all his digital knowledge and the ability he has to use such knowledge to the forefront of the fight against COVID. (And one can assume all such future pandemics.)
Then within a week or two, again still in Spring 2020, Bill Clinton is there announcing how the Clinton Global Initiative is totally willing to accept the challenge of surveilling the public’s health. this he offered to0 do despite it being the biggest public health initiative ever.
Scientists independent of Fauci/Gates/Clinton knew from the get go that lockdowns would cause more pain than other approaches. (For proof: see Sweden.) They also knew from the get go that 6 feet separation from other humans does notthing for preventing spread of respiratory infection – but is the required distance for AI/5G that would be the technology reading our health parameters when we are out of the house.
In reading thru old New York magazines, newspapers & also Vanity Fair, post Epstein having served his prison sentence, I was not surprised to find how much global jet setting Epstein, Clinton and Gates all did together.
Bill Gates creates the policies.
Follow the money.
Follow it for decades.
Who is the donor who kept the British Imperial College computer modeler Ferguson’s career alive after Ferguson “goofed” by using a computer model stipulating that the hoof and mouth disease would be so onerous that every cattle owner in Britain had to destroy their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep?
Who has set up shell companies whose research is used by Gates to justify some health policy that he wants to unveil? (Forget the name of the place, but one such shell company owned by Gates was over in England. Then whenever any indie researcher started making waves about one particular set of vaccines being too risky, this place would provide research showing the indie researcher was wrong. Gates could then continue on with his health protocols, and slam the media with all this research: “Hey, this stuff is so safe. Look at the research done by this British science institute and company!” And never ever revealing he had funded it!)
Look at how many of the very most prominent (and heavily Red Chinese-controlled) organizations in their world trace a good deal of their monies back to Gates.
And allow him to hold vast influence over their structured assignments -one of which is to end national sovereignty.
https://americanfaith.com/5-globalist-organizations-supported-by-bill-gates/
From the above article:
After reading the excellent article that the Columbia Review of Journalism published in Aug 2020, I wrote this linked to OP to demonstrate the tremendous influence that Gates holds by using his foundations to donate monies to 50 non-profit media outlets.
Among these outlets are the BBC and also NPR radio. As well as American-based “Media Matters” which is an org that has – or at least once had – as its mission statement the investigation of and insurance that media outlets are not under the thumb of outside influence.
https://ricochet.com/797196/how-bill-gates-money-helps-make-gates-look-good/
Also, Elon Musk went ahead and made an AI program and platform open sourced, so that there would be equality and ability for programmers of every background to use and develop it.
But Bill Gates saw to it that MicroSoft went in and grabbed that AI program and platform, so it will now be run by MicroSoft and then leased out to others. Banking and health insurers will be using that platform.
Look to Gates involvement in Event 201, which took place in Oct 2019, and was the “trial run” simulation of a “COVID-like” pandemic. Gates is still saluting that style of simulation.
Does he have partners? Yes of course. He has people like Fauci as a partner. Also the top people in all the above list orgs referred to in reply 15. Like Tedros at The WHO.
He has been the middle man for China, ably selling both the Indian government and Indian farmers on the notion of using Monsanto’s GM RoundUp ready seed. While China has steered clear of GMO’s, their buddy Gates took out a good deal of Indian farming by peddling this crap to the Indians.
The end result of Indian cotton farmers using RoundUp ready seed for cotton was the suicides of between 200,000 and 400,000 dirt poor farmers.
It looks like two separate methods of RT-PCR, which is the go-to method for detecting RNA or RNA viruses.
I think Fauci & co. had a somewhat different problem – they refused to change their ideas. It was mask + social distance + vaccines. No treatments, no discussion of preventative measures like proper nutrition (esp. vitamin D) or exercise, not even use of air purifiers. All of these had solid scientific evidence, often quite early on. Add in a massive dose of elitism – viewing the public as being too stupid to be told the truth or trusted – and you have a recipe for disaster.
The fundamental error at Three Mile Island was fixating on one indication and one scenario. Basically, they thought there was too much water in the reactor loop when they had the opposite problem. There was a gauge that was giving an erroneous reading, and they did not stop to consider the gauge might be incorrect.
Good point.
it is also true that usually the product or program that is developed tends to be a success if people are able to question issues that they foresee before the product or program is released.
When people who might be able to contribute to a product or program’s release are forced to assume the position of “yes men” then it is likely the situation will end up FUBAR.
With COVID, the product that was released – that is the infection itself – had as its major functions to control the populace of the world, in order to set us up for the Central Bank Digital Currency.CBDC.
It also had as one of its major functions the ability to enforce the mRNA vaccinations of every one of the earth’s 7 billion people. (Bill Gates pronouncement in either his CBS or BBC interview, Spring 2020.
The COVID pandemic was systematically handled overnight with airports across the globe all using the same signage, same banners, same slogans, within 24 hrs of one another, before there were more than a handful of people who had died of the disease outside of China.
This in and of itself set off alarm bells.
As rigid responses and flip flopping and outright lies were told and then discerned, those who were not inside the inner circles of Tedros, of Fauci, of Gates, were scorned for asking questions.
The public went along with lockdowns because “two weeks to flatten the curve.” By week three, that was a lie, right?
The major regulation that was written by Congress sometime after 2015, and involved when a vaccine could be released clearly stipulated that such an item can only be released if there are no “available, proven and effective remedies” for the infection that the vaccine was developed for.
The regulation was overlooked. Those aware of HCQ + zinc being effective were scorned and threatened with the loss of their medical licenses.
Anyway here we all are. It has been FUBAR, and to pull it all off a second time, there will need to be a more draconian approach to those who question things.
My take upon this is that this indicates that the social credit scoring allowed by CBDC will have to first be established. How far away we are from that, I don’t know. (6 months? A year?)
No idea. Fifty years ago I was a lab tech and processed stool specimens for parasites, bacterial infection, blood etc. How one collects and detects viruses seems like black magic by comparison.
You are talking about a diversity of informed opinion leading to an understanding of both possibilities and limitations, trade-offs versus solutions, tested hypotheses and humility. That is all like so-five-minutes-ago. Now, we decide what version of the truth seems most consonant with prevailing ideology and silence and destroy those who defy The Consensus.
L. Sprague de Camp wrote a novel in which the siege of Rhodes was an element. The book was The Bronze God of Rhodes. It was the fourth (chronologically) of a series of five historical novels he wrote set in Ancient Times.
Ron DeSantis said in his interview with Piers Morgan, “I would have fired Fauci.”
Ron DeSantis for President in 2024 !!
Would require brass balls and thick skin to have done that.
The three stooges (Fauci, Birx, Redfield) running the WH task force ran and hid when Scott Atlas brought in a heavyweight panel that got facetime with Trump. That night Rachel Maddow accused the White House of a new “let ‘er rip” strategy that would result in millions of deaths flashing big numbers across a map of the USA. The real scientists were accused of callous indifference while media idiots were echoing Fauci talking points that it was only expert guidance, closures, and masks that were keeping even more deaths from happening. That assumption of policy effectiveness was stupid then and we know with certainty now that it was crap.
Fauci may be a lousy scientist and lacking in integrity but he does know how to play the game and use media. As a martyr, he would have been on the air every night talking about how ignoring The Science was killing millions and how the anti-science GOP was responsible for every death. Real science would have been crushed by vested interest, partisan interest, the media monolith, and bureaucratic (even Deep State) interests. Trump did not have the patience or skill to master the essence of the Great Barrington critique of the policy his task force was pushing nor the gravitas and discipline to put that truth into a speech. Reagan at his best would have found it uphill to fight the mandate-lovers and scare-mongers.