Covid and Occam’s Razor.

Covid and Occam’s Razor.

November 10, 2023

Using Abductive reasoning about The Pandemic.

I originally wrote this some time ago. It got a lot of reads then, but reading back over it I find that it needed some revision. It needed to be clearer.

It explains very well why the covid epidemic was not being dealt with. Little has changed since then. It also explains different thinking styles, and how the ones most promoted by our education systems are not very useful in real life.

Most productive reasoning is abductive reasoning. I will show how it is applied to the questions raised by the covid pandemic, to get some useful answers. Abductive reasoning also works best in a dialectic mode, with each answer leading to the next question.
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A little while before first writing this, I applied a different razor, Hanlan’s, to the problem of covid. That logical maxim states that you should not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. What I concluded was that malice usually comes from incompetence and incompetence usually leads to malice.

Much of the persistence of Covid is in the malicious incompetence of the people in key positions. Most of them are incapable of admitting a mistake. They are locked into a “received wisdom” about disease transmission, and particularly about covid, which they will not question.

So, how did so many incompetent people get into these positions and are able to stay there despite their obvious inadequacy? And, where do these strange and harmful ideas they are acting on, come from? Clearly, there is something malicious sitting above this.

This calls to mind an old rhetorical trope, the post turtle story. The story is of someone asking a grizzled old rancher in the American desert what he thought of a particular political functionary.

“He’s another ‘post turtle’” replies the rancher.

He is asked what he means by that?

“Well, every so often, driving the roads, you come on a turtle sitting up on a fence post. It obviously didn’t get there by itself. It’s completely useless there. So, you are left wondering what kind of idiot put it there.”

It is no accident that we have all these post turtles in key positions with influence over public health administration, all over the world. There is malice behind this. To examine where this malice comes from requires a different razor, Occam’s.

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Occam’s instrument has been around a lot longer than Hanlan’s razor, and has more prestige. It is not part of “Murphy’s Laws.” It is attributed to a medieval monk called John of Ockham, although he did not originate it either.

How it is usually given is; “do not multiply elements beyond necessity” or “prefer the simplest explanation consistent with the facts.” It is important to understand this and not make the basic error so many make. It is not merely “the simplest explanation”.

The important phrase is “consistent with the facts”. It might be better phrased as “the explanation which best fits the facts”. In practice this means, to apply abductive reasoning.

Occam’s razor is not really popular in university philosophy departments. These tend to be more influenced by another medieval monk, John Duns Scotus. This frustrated me when I took up some philosophy courses at a particularly hide bound university.

I know that many people were frustrated in the same way. There is always a tension in academia between philosophers and scientists. The word ‘dunce’ developed from ‘Duns Scotus’.

This is the conflict between synthetic and analytic thinking; going from known to known as opposed to using known to find unknown. Synthetic thinking is taking elements of received wisdom and assembling them so as to ‘demonstrate’ what you want to ‘show’. Analytical thinking is about using known elements to find the unknown element, and thus increasing knowledge.

A ‘Dunce Scotus’ will say that analysis does not prove anything because it does not show where every element came from. However, Dunce does not know where all the elements he/she work with came from either; they are just received from on high. Health care systems all over the world are for some reason full of dunces who can only apply what they are told from on high, without question.



Traditional learning is that there are two modes of reasoning; inductive and deductive. In recent times, a science of thinking has developed which claims that a third mode of reasoning, the abductive, is what is really used to solve most real world problems.

Inductive reasoning is mere synthesis; it is reasoning ‘before the fact’, proceeding from assumptions mistaken for truth. Economists are the biggest inductive thinkers in modern times.

Deduction is reasoning ‘after the fact’, meaning, dealing with actual facts but only within rigid rules. Deductive reasoning really only works with mathematics. It is used in legal arguments, often with bad results. Outside mathematics, the more elements or ‘variables’ you introduce, the more unreliable your reasoning is.

Most true reasoning is necessarily abductive because you cannot work out causes of things in a linear way if there are more than a few variables. The human mind does not work that way. The mind is about finding the holistic patterns in reality.

The ‘scientific method’ is really abductive thinking. To even decide what experiments to do next requires a coherent picture explaining the facts created by the last experiment. Detective work also works this way; finding the economic way to connect the dots.

So this is how I have proceeded in trying to determine exactly what is behind the covid epidemic. I swung Occam’s razor around, cutting away assumptions which do not add anything to understanding. I looked at what has happened and what has failed to happen.

I got answers. Every time I answer a question, it leads to another question. The chain of answers builds up a picture which starts to fit with the known facts.

I am not going to recount every detail of my dialectic process. I mean my process of questioning and analysing. That is impossible to do, and even approximating it would get very boring.

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The starting question to ask is, why is covid so difficult to get under control? The answer is, it could easily be brought under control. Efforts to do so have been blocked.

What is blocking these efforts? There is a universally consistent campaign to block them, which could only come from a very powerful world wide network. The only such network is the Globalist financial capitalists, which are well described by many solid sources.

What is these people’s interest in keeping a very damaging pandemic going? They believe it is in their interests to reduce the world’s population and keep it passivized. They discuss this in their internal publications and discussions, not really bothering to hide them. Reducing and reversing population and productivity growth is a very old goal of these people.

Was the covid epidemic artificially created in order to achieve that goal? The answer is that it almost certainly was. More on that below.

Given this capability and motivation, why has the pandemic not been much more severe? The answer is that if you want to wage a biological war on the whole human race, you want an agent that works slowly and is only just bad enough.

If you introduce some really terrible disease, people will react strongly to it. Governments which are modestly competent will adopt strict measures and take full direction of their health systems. In places where there is no adequate government, panic and rebellion will result in destruction of what the oligarchy wants to maintain, as well as what it wants to reduce.

It may also lead to an identification of the source of the pandemic. This would result in the destruction of the Globalist network and probably serious consequences for its members and beneficiaries.

What other interests would these people have in keeping a pandemic going? These include; increased profits from imperfect treatments and vaccines, enabling social control measures, and that the economic contraction and population reduction increases the relative value of their own holdings. It also prevents the rise of threats to their own hegemony.

What powerful interests are more harmed than advantaged by the pandemic, and why do they not react? The other great branch of capitalism are the industrialists. Unlike financialist globalists, whose incomes are based on charging rents and interest, these people are more locally based and their wealth is tied up in exploiting a labor force to produce goods at a profit.

Industrialists usually think in the short term. The pandemic and decline in the health and productivity of populations will harm them in the long term. In the short term, they tend to see an epidemic as a way to break down public goods which they may see as a useless expense and an interference.

Industrial capitalists hate anything ‘public’, including public health. Public health makes an industry out of keeping people alive who should just die. Medicine should only be for the useful population, and for the wealthy.

Faced with pandemic and the public health response to it, industrial capitalists put their networks of intimidation and control to work to ‘open up’ the economy. They assume they have an infinite supply of human cattle who can be brought up from anywhere to replace those killed or disabled. Finally, Industrialists generally subscribe to eugenic ideas and believe they should be applied to deal with the pandemic.

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Why does not the “public sector” respond to protect the population and enforce pandemic measures? There is very little public sector any more. It was always limited in the face of capitalist oligarchic control of society. In the past forty plus years of neoliberalism, it has been hollowed out.

In the first year of the pandemic, public government was able to take some feeble actions to protect the populations from the disease. Now, Globalism is trying to tell us that with the development of vaccines, the pandemic emergency is over. The Industrialist/Nationalist element is trying to tell us that it never occurred, but was only an attack on our ‘liberties’.

How will the pandemic finally end? It will not in the foreseeable future. It is now impossible in the ‘western’ countries to organize an effective protection of the public as the pandemic continues to degrade the health of the “low value” population.

Other countries which are not ruled over by these kinds of oligarchies are able to protect their people to some degree. However, new strains of covid will keep developing in countries which refuse to control it, as the virus mutates. That is assuming new strains are not being juiced up in American biowar labs.

It is presently impossible for countries with a functioning public sector to isolate their populations. They will keep being ‘reseeded’ with new strains from the neoliberal countries. They must finally be able to disconnect from these covidian countries, banning travel to them until their neoliberal regimes are removed.

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Now to return to the question of whether the pandemic virus was artificially created. In my first version of this article, I said this is the kind of question for which judgement should be withheld until sufficient information is acquired. As one scientist who has been looking into the subject has been quoted as saying; the chain of coincidences is now getting very long.

It seems that this question turns on something called a ‘Furan break’ within the DNA strand of the covid virus. My biological knowledge is quite limited, but it seems this is unlikely to have occurred naturally. It is responsible for the adaptability and infectiousness of the virus.

What is really disturbing about viruses is that it is no longer necessary to have the virus itself in order to propagate it. Viruses are the simplest organisms. All that is needed to produce them is a printout of the genetic sequence.

This is why it has been so quick and easy to produce a vaccine for the disease. This has been pounced on by the ’antivax’ people to prove the ‘hoax’.

What is really interesting is how slightly different versions of the virus seemed to turn up in far distant parts of the planet almost simultaneously. No one is ever able to find a ‘patient zero’ in any outbreak.

Other powerful information points; the American military and intelligence community has this network of biowar labs all over the planet. Incredibly, they are looking for biowar agents which can target specific populations.

The implausible explanation for these is that they are looking for ways to protect populations from epidemics or from biowar. Somehow, doing this has to involve ‘gain of function’ experiments. That is, genetically modifying disease producing viruses.

A year and a half later, we have further information about the longer term effects of the covid virus. The way this disease works fits too neatly with the known agenda of globalists. I assert that the chain of coincidence has gone beyond reasonable doubt.

First of all, it is just deadly enough. Unlike the previous epidemics of SARS type viruses, it does not kill large numbers of young and healthy people straight away. Thus it does not provoke either panic or aggressive reactions from governments.

Its real destructive potential is not apparent until later. It seems designed to wear down the health and productivity, and even creativity, of those populations which cannot afford to properly protect themselves from it. That is, those populations which the global elite would like to reduce.

Thus, the wealthy make sure they have the protections against the covid infection which they deny everyone else. This could rightly be called “biological class war.”

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An example of an irrelevant point is the nonetheless interesting question of why the Chinese were involved in ‘gain of function’ research in their Wuhan lab, at the request of the American centre for Disease Control. Perhaps they were trying to learn something about the American’s programs. However, the idea that covid is a Chinese attack on the world, or a collusion between China and Western Globalists, is implausible and a distraction.

The Chinese would know covid is just as dangerous to themselves as to anyone else. They were clearly caught as surprised and unprepared for it as anyone. They have done more than anyone to contain and eliminate covid world wide.

This accusation comes from western interests who are spoiling for a fight with China because of its rising economic and military power. These are also the people organizing the obstruction of measures to contain and eliminate covid. It is misdirection of blame for something they are doing themselves.

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There are many unanswered questions about the covid pandemic, but the big question is now sufficiently clear. It was deliberately created and deliberately spread. The effort to keep it circulating continues.

So, this is what we see when we reduce irrelevant elements and look for the explanation that fits. It may not be what we want to see. That is, we are under attack from powerful people who want to see the rest of us as their cattle herd, or as an out of control nuisance.

This immediately points to the need to deal with these people in some way. This may be too hard for a lot of people. So, they will think about it in a synthesizing way. That is, they will take it as given to them that covid never really happened, was a ‘hoax’, and they can go on as normal.

Alternatively, people can take from on high what is given to them and arrange it into some justification for simply ‘living with’ the virus. It is becoming ‘milder’ over time, nothing can be done about it, eventually we will get an effective vaccine or treatment, and so on.

The piece which will not fit with any of these scenarios is that the disease is real and was deliberately created and maintained. The force which created and maintained it is real and still present. It has all the means and motive to continue maintaining it and to produce new diseases.

It is clear we are in an age of disease and economic decline. It is not inevitable but is being deliberately created. It will continue until the malicious forces causing it are deterred and eliminated. How that may come about is a subject for another essay.

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One thing which will be essential to a better future is a better educated population. People must stop synthesizing. They must stop accepting whatever is given to them and arranging it in their minds in whatever way allows them to function without getting into trouble with authority.

Partly this is about getting all the loaded guns away from people’s heads. It also involves educating people to think in an abductive way. That is, to take in what is before them, use the razors and other equipment to cut away what is not relevant, and find the best fit.

This means, to form a clear mental picture of the reality before us. It means, to see what is missing from the picture, and use analysis to find the missing piece. This does not mean, to make anything up; that does not work.

When you follow a dialectic chain of reasoning about a problem or issue, you soon discover when something is wrong with your fact set, and you need to go back and look again. This is how proper thinking is done.

The problem with thinking properly is that it usually tells you what you do not really want to know. Telling it to other people tends to get you into trouble.

Thus, thinking requires commitment. I think real wisdom is more about character than raw brain power. I have said enough.