Conspiracies and Theories

“Connecting the dots’ is a term meaning to take bits of incomplete information, and to string them together into a explanatory hypothesis that explains and links them together. It came from those ‘draw by dots’ kids books of the pre-digital era where, by sequentially penciling lines from numbered dot to numbered dot, a picture eventually was drawn. This process of taking the incomplete information that is available, hypothesizing a wholistic causal explanation for it, and then using that explanation to infer an anitcipatory forecast for what it may cause next, is an old an familiar practice. In American football, it is how the defensive team calls their optional set for the next play (the ‘dot’s’ in this case being the offensive team’s lineup, as well as circumstantial data like whether its fourth down on the 3-yardline, etc.).

If you do this in financial markets, using available market data, sentiment indicators, and so-on as your ‘dots’, you occupy a professional position called analyst. That is, at-least as long as your forecast does not make odious predictions as-to the upcoming moves on the part of powerful entities like big tech, multinationals, and government. For once you do that, you can very quickly find yourself rebranded from ‘analyst’ to ‘conspiracy theorist’. It is not this process of dot-connecting to assemble ‘most-probable’ conjectures and hypotheses itself that makes you a conspiracy theorist, but rather which dots and particularly which hypothetical pictures you sketch from them that does. Weather forecasts, based on measurements of pressure, humidity, temperature, and so-on for data dots, are imperfect but reliable enough that they will forever remain very useful. Data science, the quantitative discipline of using data ‘dots; to infer forecasts of future outcomes, is now heavily relied-upon in business, strategic planning, and elsewhere. But go apply in a way that predicts massive government malfeasance and see what happens when you release your reports.

I remember being excoriated during covid lockdown 1 for going into a market without remembering to take my mask out of my glovebox and put it on. People who “questioned the spoon-fed science’ were also scorned. That included me because, as an ex praciticing research scientist I knew very well if you cant continually question and interrogate any finding, discovery, or theory, then you have discarded the scientific method and are operating outside of it. And even when a finding works exceedingly well, those who then say “we now know” are not exemplary scientists. Science is based on the presumption that we are ignorant, and that every subject, no matter how successful any investigation into it has been so far, still has surprises to reveal.

On January 8-9, pandemic ringmaster Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before the House of Representatives. If these types hearings continue as they have been, he will be held accountable for nothing. We now know that he had NIH sponsor the research at the Wuhan Lab that turned a bat coronavirus into a human pathogen, profited from it, and lied about it. And of course his story about our need for masks changed through time. In a fair-minded and logical world, I would now be able to have conversations with the people who scolded me about my lack of reflexive obedience to the covid dictats wherein I could now point out that my position was validly-founded and theirs less-so. But that’s not how it is – and none of those who wanted to disemploy, debank, censor, and otherwise suppress covid skeptics (except for some rare cases like Tim Robbins) will ever offer an apology for being so unjustly brutish to their fellow citizens.

We are in a time when big powerful entities including governments are taking increasing control over, and censorship of ordinary people, and using crises, planned or not, to do it. Several children and a schoolteacher just got stabbed in Dublin, sparking a riot against the barely-checked immigration of many people who have no intent to adopt Irish mores & values and who are paid to come into that country. Leo Varadkar, never letting a good crisis go to waste, has responded not by simply prosecuting the people who resorted to the hooliganism, but also by promising to enact further sweeping legislation restricting ‘those far-right folks who incite hate and violence’. The tell will be to see exactly what the new laws impose on the Irish – lets see.

Multinationals and governments colluded to uncork by surprise fiat on their peoples crisis-response measures like lockdowns in a coordinated, nearly-simultaneous way across the 27 EU countries, the US, Canada, Australia & New Zealand. It was the first time any society shuttered its own economy in response to a plauge. The probability that all of those governments independently decided to choose that same response in-synch is nil – it was orchestrated. Just as in football competition, when these powerful groups design such ‘plays’ to run on the people during crises to take away their freedoms and power, the only possible defensive postures they can assume must by-necessity be anticipatory. And all such construction of anticipatory scenarios by dot-connecting can be conveniently cast as ‘conspiracy theories’ by the big powers. But all they are are merely best-guesses based on the available data; what is often known in other contexts as a ‘forecast’: They are attempts to figure out what is being played and how by those big powers who never want to tell us openly themselves. And if the ‘conspiracy theorists’ (analysts ?) who posit them are shut down, we will have nothing to do but ‘wait and see’ what the powerful shower down upon us next.

Obviously, just as-in scientific hypothesizing, the sensibility and robustness of any such forecast relies upon how many dots (pieces of known information) it coherently strings together under the most feasible hypothetical scenario. But there can be other things that the powerful have been planning a particular type of action that, if it were to happen organically rather than by scheming, would by it very nature be unpredictable and unanticipatable. Besides pandemics, another such unanticipatable crisis is a mass cyber attack. So its noteworth and interesting that the WEF and affiliates expect one in 2024; do they have psychic powers of future-telling like Baba Vanga did ? If its perfectly acceptable for these people in the power circle to engage in putting forth such ‘fearmongering conspiracy theories’, then why is it not OK for us to ? And why should we not similarly demand that they show us the evidence for their own conspiracy theories or be be subject to censorship like the rest of us ? (its a rhetorical question).