Saturday 9 May 2020

A short break to Reality

As opposed to a short break from Reality.







Recently, I've tried to make this blog an information source for medical practitioners, giving the latest and greatest info about COVID-19. While the politics is alternately interesting and infuriating, it's not really relevant to those on the front line.



I need a break though, where I stand back and try to see the Big Picture.



Let's see, I'm in a Universe where Ronald Reagan became President - then won the Cold War. Everyone won that one in fact. Between 1993 and 2001 things looked bright.



In 2001 my son was born, and the odds of that were thought to be 100:1 against. From what we know now, add a couple more zeroes to that, truly incalculable.



I changed sex in 2005 of course. (Yes I know, superficial,  not a "true" change as is found in Clownfish and other species, but the secondary sex characteristics changed completely, the primary partially , so close enough for most purposes)



2016 - I prefer not to think about, for obvious reasons.



2019 Bushfires that did as much damage as a Multimegaton Thermouclear attack, only with bad aim and no ionising radiation. Global Warming at work.



2020 A plague year. One that is on the very low end of the scale, future ones will likely be worse if we "get back to normal".



I'm not shellshocked, but I feel as if I'm in a very low order of probability part of the Multiverse, sometimes good, sometimes bad, never boring. It helps to gain some perspective by looking at the stars, or reminding myself that I think the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is the most likely. I just happen to inhabit one a few Standard Deviations away from peak probability.



Now back to our usual programming.




3 comments:

Eric TF Bat said...

Here's how I think it worked.

Some time before 2016, person or persons unknown arrived from an apocalyptic future, with one goal in mind: to prevent The Collapse. With the assistance of propaganda hackery beyond what we currently understand, they achieved their goal: they ensured that Donald J Trump was elected President.

In their timeline, Trump had flamed and burnt out after an anomalously strong showing on Super Tuesday in 2016, and the election went on to be the great Millennial recap: Bush vs Clinton. Jeb didn't stand a chance, and Clinton romped it in to the White House, buoyed by the female vote, for her, and the Latino vote, for her running mate Julian Castro. But Trump had never intended to win the nomination: his propaganda machine turned first on "Boring Bush" and then on his real target, "Crooked Hillary". He whipped up the anti-everything fervour of his base, already disillusioned with the colour-by-numbers tedium of the GOP, and turned himself in their minds into the greatest President the US never had.

By the time Clinton was assassinated in April 2019, the country was already fracturing. President Castro made it worse by declaring martial law, and the disaster was assured. Ironically, Trump suffered a series of strokes and a final, fatal heart attack that made him the first martyr of the second Civil War.

When eventually the world picked up the pieces -- because you can be sure the US was not willing to keep its agony within its borders, so everyone got a share -- they spent the last of their resources building a time machine, and the rest is (revised) history.

Of course, the sterling work done by the WHO in 2019 to stop a minor outbreak of respiratory illness before it had travelled much beyond Wuhan had been forgotten by the travellers, but you can't keep track of everything.

Anonymous said...

Life is good. You have control of how you perceive reality. No matter what the media tells you about other people in pain just look at the blue sky with much less air travel and the beautiful spring blooming flowers. No matter it fall on the southern part of the planet.

Trump and I grew up in the same area and are most likely entangled He may BS but that is part of that entangled culture. Neither him or I are in NYC anymore. Each of us is now entangled with our local environment. Perhaps you should move to a place where life is more carefree.

Hugs Lisa

Zoe Brain said...

Mars perhaps?

Luna?

Canberra is probably the safest place on the planet right now. though we have autumn leaves rather than spring flowers at the moment of course.

Carefree? Nope. Too many throughout the world are doing it tough, just not in my little corner of it.