Here’s a link to an interesting article describing an interview with a highly credentialed scientist who fled China and says she will prove that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the Covid-19 disease was produced as a bio-weapon in a Chinese lab. Her claim is that the evidence is genetic in nature, but will be understandable by laymen:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/11/chinese-virologist-says-she-has-proof-covid-19-was-made-in-wuhan-lab/
The Government of Canada presented its Throne Speech today --- about an hour of trying to buy most people’s votes it seems to me. It was like an extended gift opening on Christmas morning. Something for everyone ….. all bought on credit. You can look up the details.
I agree with the Conservative observation, reflecting the comments of the Premier of Quebec, that the federal government is stepping into Provincial jurisdiction. My observation has been that the Liberals do not pay much attention to the constitutional separation of powers. They seem to think they know how to run people’s lives better than the individuals do, and it is reflected into their forays into health care and education.
I do not agree with the Conservative objection that the country will be saddled with debt that will be borne by future generations. The give-aways are funded by borrowed money, but mainly borrowed from the Bank of Canada. It works something like this. The Government issues a debt instrument to the Bank of Canada in exchange for cash. Cash is a liability of the Bank of Canada. So the Government debits Cash and credits Due to Bank of Canada, while the Bank of Canada debits Government Bonds and credits Cash outstanding (a payable). The Cash in the hands of the Government is liquid, and it gets spent. The entry ends up being debit Deficit and credit Cash. The final result is Government accounts that have a debit Deficit balance and a credit Due to Bank of Canada balance. Debt for the next generation? No. What it does is make the Canadian dollar worth less. It is not the future generations paying for the goodies; it’s the holders of Canadian dollars. But since other countries are essentially doing similar things, the Canadian dollar likely will not lose much ground against most major currencies. Where it will lose ground is in terms of how much of various commodities, goods and services it can buy.
If we get into negative interest rates, which will make it easy to handle such foreign debt as we do have, the velocity of money will increase quickly and we will likely have a major price inflation as people spend, spend, spend. The loss in purchasing power of the Canadian dollar could likely be more than mitigated if the country did away with all income tax at every level and funded government solely through the creation of money, sales tax, and fees for services. I suspect the economy would be vigorous as companies moved here and the production of goods and services increased. The retention of income taxes combined with massive amounts of new money and very low, and even negative, interest rates is likely the road to an inflationary depression.
I started reading an eye-opening book by Dr. Stephen Gundry. I had no idea that our mitochondria, which regulate cell reproduction and operation, are not human. They have their own DNA. I gather from Dr. Gundry that our beneficial intestinal bacteria, which he calls our gut buddies, communicate with our mitochondria through bio-chemicals. The bacteria and the mitochondria are not sentient, although maybe by the time you finish reading this, there will be a news announcement about their personhood, such is the speed at which knowledge seems to grow these days. If they were sentient and engaged in dialogue, we would conscious beings that each of us humans are hosting within. The model reminds me of some people regarding Mother Earth as a living being that hosts us. And just as we, like the bacteria and mitochondria, communicate with each other while hosting those beings within our internal world that talk to one another, maybe the planet is communicating with other cosmic bodies that are each hosting a world of inter-communicating sentient lifeforms. I don’t believe any of this speculation, but hypothetically the pattern within our own bodies might be replicable on a larger scale.
By the way, Dr. Gundry informs us that a fat rat ingesting fecal matter of a skinny rat can become skinny, and vice versa. He tells us that depressed people given enemas containing fecal matter of happy people tend to become happy. It all has to do with the transference of gut buddies. Interesting reading.
We often face circumstances or phenomena we want to explain, and obtaining a likely explanation can take a lot of time --- something most of us find is demanded by many things wanting our attention. It would be nice to have a way of speedily eliminating unlikely explanations. Philosophers have recognized several rules of thumb for doing that, and they are known as philosophical razors. Such razors shave away unlikely explanations.
Some seem valid. For example, Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The reason is that a simple explanation normally embraces less assumptions than a complex explanation, and the less assumptions there are, the lower the likelihood of error.
One philosophical razor that seems to me to be a fallacy is the Sagan standard: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Accepting the Sagan standard as valid implies accepting that simple claims do not require much evidence. To me, evidence is evidence, and if the evidence points to a conclusion that is common, or if it points to a conclusion that is remarkable, it is what it is. A proposition is either proven, or it is not. Whether I assert that a cat’s name is Puff, or whether I assert that a man can bend a spoon purely by willing it to happen, both require proof. We accept the one claim more easily than the other because (1) the consequences of assuming the cat is Puff are not significant as assuming telekinesis, and (2) we know people can name their cats Puff, but we don’t know that anyone can bend spoons. Yet consequences are not proof, and I do not think that being unaware of a phenomenon heretofore is reason to dismiss its present instance. The acceptance of it should be determined by its present proof.
