Hello New Rounding the Earth Readers!

Let Us Enjoy This Pandemonium Together

After yesterday's article about safety signals hit 25,000 reads in under 24 hours (now 30,000), I thought it best to pause, take a deep breath, and go see a movie with my wife for the first time in well over a year. After all, it is an unusual position for me to be in with a growing inbox with more communications from journalists than from students trying to build a tool box for solving Diophantine equations or model combinatorial recursion problems.

First, I'd like to thank all the many new subscribers. I hope that you continue to find the work here valuable, and I hope to learn plenty from you along the journey. In fact, that is part of the point of this project---I'd like to keep rounding the interesting flat zones of my own world.

If you are interested in catching up on the many articles here, I point you to my pinned article that both shares a few of my overarching concerns with the world, then provides a summarized list of links to everything I've written (maybe 75 articles) here this year. Hopefully my dyslexia and tendency to write from midnight to 5 AM for much of the year did not make all of them painfully unreadable.

Now, I'd like to explain a few things about this substack thing I type into every couple of days or so. Several years ago I began to re-imagine my vocational journey as something like an educational enterprise aimed at adults. I strongly suspected that during my lifetime, the world would undergo some major changes and that most all of the politicians and "thought leaders" were largely wrong in the way they steered their educated followers. But explaining my thoughts would take time, and perhaps a handful of articles on underemphasized topics like economic game theory and [actual] history. I wanted to break down some topics that I suspect many people are highly confused about, but most of all lay out the tools for how to think about difficult problems so that people do not have to rely on the hierarchies of proxy trust that fail big when they fail. Oh boy, here we all are being sucked through a vortex we cannot even see. Perhaps if we maneuver wisely, we can craft a better world on the other side.

In the meantime, several life events derailed a planned launch of the Rounding the Earth brand, and the concept nearly went the way of a small stack of projects I did not pursue over the years. But at some point last year---around the time Trump first conjured hydroxychloroquine into existence---I realized that there was something quite odd going on. Maybe many quite odd things going on. So, I began to reach out to friends (including doctors and researchers) around the world, reading research, and taking notes. Over a thousand pages of notes on all manner of pandemonium. By early August, I began writing a book under the working title The Chloroquine Wars about what I perceived as a highly sophisticated propaganda campaign against actual medical treatment of SARS-CoV-2. After a grueling election (even though I've never voted for the major party candidates, except scarcely in local elections), I was behind what I perceived as the window of opportunity for publishing such a fast-moving story, and took a break to recover some energy.

In February, I shared on Facebook a picture of a contact in India holding a Ziverdo treatment kit for COVID-19 including ivermectin. For the petulant offence of demonstration that India really was using the drug, I suffered a 30 day ban from Facebook. I'd suffered short bans prior while running a group of a few hundred people interested in examining published research and other evidence regarding the efficacy of early treatment options, and later another 30-day ban for reporting on a zoom meeting with Indian doctors and medical officials. A bit irked over Facebook's strange belief that some kind of evidence we don't yet know about demonstrated the inefficacy of ivermectin, I started this substack where I began publishing a mix of chapters from my unpublished book, and current events---and a handful of other topics of interest, or that I find subtly, but importantly intertwined in all the pandemonium. This way I could get out the most unique parts of the book more quickly. After a time, I started getting involved in publishing research and analysis as well. I am writing up the analysis of the world's best COVID-19 treatment results to date [so that most of the medicines used can be further ignored]. But at least we all get closer to certainty about the name of the beast in question.

More recently, topics feel more serious. I was not at first overly concerned with vaccine safety, though the advertising campaigns promoting the experimental vaccines gave me pause. I'd already suspected that the "don't do anything to treat COVID, including the use of cheap safe medicines and zinc ionophores or supplements, until you're hospitalized and risking death or long term impairment" was disturbingly intended to propel vaccines into profitable orbit. Now I am concerned that they are killing and crippling more people than they're saving, and that billions of people are being used as guinea pigs in what is at best an experiment and at worst a reorganization of world power. This isn't going to end well.

Going back to my goals as an educator...I'd like to do what I can. Science and medicine are topics that go extremely deep. Being married to a geneticist/biochemist, I have to make up a lot of understanding from those who get their hands dirtier than I do having never diagnosed a patient or done serious bench work. I try to focus where I best know how, which is in the use of statistics, which I applied to numerous careers (actuarial sciences, bond trading, stock option trading, textbook writing, forensic analysis, cryptocurrency trading, and a blog many years ago where I ferreted out many seemingly fraudulent or poorly conducted studies or analyses the ways I have here, here, here, here, here, and here).

My larger goal (than teaching what I can, and sharing from the labor of my and my friends' investigations) is to encourage networks of knowledge exchange. Build ties in your community and support those around you. Reach beyond where you need to, but aim for a high degree of local community-based self-sufficiency. Much of the reason an out of control and financially desperate media can be bought to play information games with its audience (that self-selects into partisan bias-confirmation entertainment media) is the control that an increasingly centrally organized society has handed increasingly corrupt corporations and institutions, often run by the kunlangeta. It is time that more people step out of the slumber of comfort, proxy trust, and easy wealth brought by the mechanisms of dollar dominance. If you don't want your children brainwashed, manage their education. If you want to know how to push society back toward decentralized capitalism without psychopathic monopolists, learn economics and game theory. If you don't know what it means that we are most all pressured brutally by prisoner's dilemmas (perhaps the single most important topic in understanding the economics of politics), do the reading. Maybe you'll figure out why Bitcoin is such a hot topic when you do.

Learn ruthlessly. Test your knowledge quickly, improve, and move forward. Take care of your families. Spend time with your friends---the real life friends who give hugs or share projects or coffee with. Subscribe to a few writers you find valuable, then don't depend on them too much.

Hopefully, when the pandemonium subsides, if it does so without the global upheaval I have long expected would result in a 9.0+ Triffin-quake, I'll happily write more about education (a domain in which I built a few companies) and economic game theory. In the meantime, there is more immediately at stake.

I'm certain that I have views and opinions that are wrong, and they are ever shifting. I do my best to document sources that I use, and show work where I can. I sometimes communicate with readers to learn more. In fact, most of the early RTE subscribers were scientists, mathematicians, doctors, technologists, documentarians, analysts of various sorts, and other friends who shared information pertinent to my book project. I learned a great deal from all of them. More importantly is that a network of people, communicating and examining issues, discovers more, faster, and better self-corrects. In fact, that is the story of science in a nutshell. I'm appreciative that new readers are joining the journey.

Special thanks to all the paid subscribers. Your contributions allow me to spend more time researching and writing---entirely independent of the corrupt institutions many of us have begun to understand needed greater examination than most anyone knew.

One last thought: much of what I intended with The Chloroquine Wars articles was for those of you reading to be able to counter the asymmetric information warfare you see online. There is no point in responding to the bots, but when your friends or family make questionable or false statements they heard from the experts, the "trusted" media, or "fact checkers", instead of spending an hour or two thoughtfully laying out half a dozen sources, you can leverage the time I put into RTE.