Tag Archives: Covid-19

Emily and the House of Terror

I am coming from an illustrious line of amnestied criminals. My grandfather, a respected notary public was declared a class enemy by the communists and completely dispossessed in 1946. My father was jailed for his 100% non-violent participation in the 1956 Hungarian revolution and I was jailed for participating in a peaceful demonstration in 1972. The lives of all three of us were – in a way – destroyed by it. My grandfather was never able to practice law again; my father was not able to finish university and I was forbidden to even apply to one. (You can read more about my case here.) All three of us got rehabilitated around the same time in the early 90s.

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Faith and falsifiability

I don’t think there can be any doubt about my position on, or what I think in general about the insanity of the last two years. The reason we still have to talk about it is the many conversations I had on the subject, all too often with the same disappointing outcome of no common ground. I tried to challenge the beliefs of my opponents by asking them to provide me with some falsifiability criteria so that we can bring the conversation beyond the perpetual restating of our positions. Continue reading →

A web of interests

In “The Foundation of Theories” I tried to make the point about the inevitability of what we are seeing around us. We somehow managed to push ourselves into a corner economically, politically, philosophically, culturally and maybe even civilizationally. I also made the point that being trapped in that corner created the fertile ground for the insanity we are experiencing for the past two years.
However, none of this apparent inevitability, none of the circumstances can excuse the despicable and often criminal behaviour of so many, nor lessen the virtue of those standing up against it.
It is time to take a look at the heroes, the villains, the dupes and the victims of this scamdemic. We’ll start with the villains and their web of colluding interests. Continue reading →

The Book of Judas

In the infant days of the internet, in the early 90s, when Bill Gates declared it to be of no interest to Microsoft, I got an idea for a book of a sort. It had two inspirations: Orson Welles’ radio play adaptation of H.G. Wells’  “The War of the Worlds”  and Nikos Kazantzakis’  “The Last Temptation of Christ”. I was very young when I read the Last temptation. The conversation where Jesus asks Judas to sacrifice his integrity and reputation so that he, Jesus, can fulfill his destiny made a lasting impression on me. Until about the mid eighties I also had some concerns about overpopulation and running out of planetary resources but I grew out of it by the nineties. I just had to properly digest the zeitgeist of the time. Continue reading →

Conspiracy questions

I am still trying to get a handle on conspiracies. Forget that… I am still trying to get a handle on reality. In the end, theorizing about conspiracies is just that: an attempt to get a handle on reality.
We don’t like uncertainty. It makes us feel comfortable to know that things happen for a reason. Knowing the reason makes it easier to accept even things we do not particularly like.
Some theories are trying to foretell the future, some to explain the past. Sometimes, when the present makes no sense at all, we need to theorize about the intent that brought it to us. Religions are very elaborate conspiracy theories. Continue reading →

How I really feel

I used to have a boss I liked a lot and had a great working relationship with. His temperament was pretty much opposed to mine. He was calm, collected and impeccably polite, yet he was in a way fascinated by my very Hungarian directness and passion. It happened a few times that after listening to my public diatribe about yet another corporate malfeasance or short-sightedness, he looked at me and said: “Well, Zork, why don’t you tell us how you REALLY feel?”

After spending months of researching, collecting and sorting information; after nearly a year and a half of disheartening incredulity, frustration and anger; I am ready to let you know. Continue reading →

Cui Bono?

My mother-in-law just turned 86. She is very active, much of her time is spent with sight-seeing trips and long hikes. She is suffering from the lock-down, but she is also puzzled. She is wondering where are the piles of dead bodies promised by the experts? She is surrounded by people of her age, the highest risk age group. Not only nobody she knows is sick, but nobody she knows know anybody who is. Why is everybody trying to scare her? Why is she getting confusing and contradicting information? Why is the story changing all the time? She is not alone with the questions. Continue reading →

Exposure

 

I could not decide what would illustrate best what I am trying to say about the most important aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first picture is the infamous Mordecai Richler gazebo on Mont Royal in Montreal. It was a restoration work with a final price tag of $700,000.- Yes, that is seven hundred thousand Canadian dollars for something that you can buy brand new at Home Depot for less than $7,000.- (taxes include). It is a monument to government incompetence, waste and corruption. It is a glaring exposure of the problems that lay behind.

The second picture is about the perverse exposure of our dirty little secrets. We have many, and the pandemic with the whipped-up panic around it exposed them all. The pandemic is real, the response to it is just perverse. The problems it exposes exist on several layers. The politics, its consequences and what it says about us. Continue reading →

Keynesian dysfunction

I chanced upon an interesting TED talk about porn addiction.  The points made there are that internet porn watching is an addiction, working just like any other, exploiting our biology and eventually becoming seriously harmful. What I did not know, even though it makes perfect sense, is that excessive stimulation creates insensitivity that will lead to dysfunction.  What I did not know is that there is a widespread erectile dysfunction problem among men in their twenties. Continue reading →