The Time Trap

Stuff that creeps up and catches folk unaware by day and by night (rev 1.1)

In Chicken Or Egg? I wrote these three sentences:

Before we get stuck in there are a couple of points to note. Firstly, the small print mumbles on about first order differential which is a fancy way of saying I’ve analysed the day-on-day variations in rolling case counts and tests. This is important because it removes artefactual correlation introduced by things changing slowly over time - an analytical trap that I may well cover in a future newsletter.

The words ‘differential’, ‘first order’, ‘difference’ and ‘differencing’ keep cropping up in my newsletters along with references to Nicolas Cage and swimming pool drownings so this morning I am going to elucidate. This will call for the big pot and the family tin of assorted biscuits.

A long time ago in a parallel universe I wrote a short note called The Time Trap that you may find sitting here. Although the note originated at a point in my analytical career when I was exposing globalist myth about climate change the same principles apply to COVID and vaccines. Whilst we’ve all heard the phrase “correlation is not causation” few of us have heard the phrase “correlation can be meaningless”, and this is because I’ve made this up this very morning! It is a phrase we all need to understand and start chanting if we are to debunk globalist propaganda.

Shortly after producing The Time Trap for my readers I hit upon an amusing idea to encapsulate some of the issues at the heart of time series analysis in the form of a school project and once again resorted to simulation to illustrate a few points. That short note may be found here.

Since the mid 1990s I have noted an increasing tendency for the production of reports, papers and studies that conform to one globalist narrative or another by virtue of inappropriate methodology. Whether we are talking about carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, COVID, beef farming, sea level, vaccines, land temperature, ozone, wheat yields, polar bear populations, smallpox, Arctic sea ice, tundra wildfires or peak oil one thing that unites these areas is a small band of incumbent ‘expert’ voices with great influence who know how to fool the public (and sometimes themselves) using numbers.

If the public realised that the application of statistics has more in common with modern art than nuclear physics then the world may become a safer place.