Edited Transcript
It is 13 january 2022, Elijah’s Expressions.
Yesterday I was talking and referring to something called ANOVA single factor. I’m not going to go into detail about ANOVA single factor today, that’s for videos down the road. Remember I said I need to do a course on statistics. I think I will do that first, but the concept, especially the phrase single factor. What does that mean?
Well, it brings to my mind three sets of questions of three right first set which everyone knows, it’s on my website and the first set consists of the first question “What?” What’s the situation, what are the facts, what do you see, what do you hear.
Secondly, oh, which are verifiable, by the way, it’s what you hear with your own ears as
in physically hear, not hear as in hearsay. What do you perceive? In other words, so what are the facts?
Secondly, the question “So what?” What are the implications? Those of you who are sales people, you remember the acronym SPIN, right? What is the situation, what is the problem, what are the implications and so on and what do you need to do for the last one. So what does this mean and the third of the first set of three questions is “Now what?” What am I deciding to do, what are my actions? Do I continue as I am? Do I need to change something? Do I need to stop doing certain things, do I need to start doing certain things? That’s the first set of questions that comes to mind. The second set of questions when you consider anova single factor, I stress “Single factor”, Thomas Sowell has three questions that he likes to ask people when they are proposing things logical to them, maybe, or they may not have thought it through or utterly illogical or they may be pursuing their own agendas, pushing it, right? Three questions to us and the first one is “Compared to what?” You’re proposing that something is better, you’re proposing that something’s going to improve our lives, reduce waste, go green, whatever it is compared to. The second question is “What is the cost?” How much is this gonna cost, not just in terms of money but in terms of impact, and I’m not talking about disparate impact, I’m talking about real impact. How it impacts someone. Are you going to deprive them of a livelihood? Are you going to deprive them of food, water, shelter? Are you going to deprive them of vaccines, drugs, medicine, I don’t know. Personally I don’t think it’s that important, vaccines, I mean, drugs and so on, but they are a factor and many people think they are a factor. Factor it in. So how much is it going to cost not financial. Human cost, and some people may say cost of the planet. I don’t worry about that so often I’ll explain why later. The last question that Thomas Sowell has of his three questions “What hard facts, what hard evidence, do you have?” and my suggestion to all of us, including me, is always have these three questions at the back of our minds when we read something, when we watch a video, when we hear, listen in, on a conversation, things like that. These three sets of questions again – “What?”, “So what?”, “Now what?” and “Compared to what?”, “What is it gonna cost?” and “Do you have any hard facts, facts or evidence to support whatever it is you have been saying?”
I’m forcing myself to speak a lot more slowly because I realize I tend to speak too quickly. This morning I had my first COVID shot. I decided to go for the vaccination after listening, after, you know, so many objections and things like that, but looking at the overall picture, my stand is this, and I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Do vaccines help? Yes. Okay. Must you take them? Not necessarily. However, the statistics do show that for the large majority of people, and Dr Jonathan Sarfati is of this view. He’s from CMI, Creation Ministries International. It’s better to take the shot than to get the rona. In my case, since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been in contact with I don’t know, hundreds at least, thousands maybe, thousands of people in a very confined space, in and out, in and out, many people per day. I did an assay, spelt a-s-s-a-y, an assessment, of my IGG and IGM antibodies on the 12th of November. That is about a month ago, sorry, two months ago, all right. I was actually hoping for a positive result, i.e., to say that I have had been infected with a virus but no symptoms, no ill effects. In other words, my body has overcome it. I got a negative return for both so I was pretty disappointed but I mean, you know, that’s good too isn’t it? So, are you saying that after, you know, interacting with so many people, that I have not been exposed to the virus? I don’t think so! I have definitely been exposed to the virus, all right, but I did not develop any noticeable symptoms. I was telling a group of friends, doctor friends, that I’m probably a refugee from the law of averages. Does that mean I’m special? No, everyone is special. We all have characteristics. It so happens that my body is able to deal thus far that I can see, with infections. Do I have any other underlying conditions? I don’t know. I’m not worried by it. Does that mean that I should just go living as if nothing’s gonna happen? No, all right, but again, single factor. Health care is not only about pharmaceuticals, hospital beds, vaccinations and so on, it’s over all right? Again, I would like to urge you, if you’re watching this, go look up Dr Jay Bhattacharya, all right? Continue listening to Anthony Fauci, WHO and so on if you want, okay, but look around, ask questions. Ask the kinds of questions that I spoke about earlier. Come to your own conclusions and make the right decisions.
The question for you is, “Are you free to make the right decisions? What are you entangled in that causes you not to be free? What are you entangled in and causes you to fear, all right, I mean, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic they were throwing nurses off the bus why because the nurses have been in contact with COVID patients, what’s the logic? People rushing to stockpile stuff from the supermarket, and of all the things you stockpile toilet paper, and even if you stockpile rice, okay, we eat lots of rice here, this is Singapore, you stockpile polished rice! You don’t go for a healthier variety, so to speak, unpolished rice. Get a grip! Take charge! Don’t run around like frightened jackrabbits at every shadow that passes overhead. Right now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go back, all right, to my computer screen. I’m gonna look through some news articles that come to me in my email. Straits Times morning brief. I haven’t subscribed to the newspaper I’m just on the on the mailing list. I think it’s good enough for the time being. Maybe tomorrow and onwards, since I’m on rest, okay, but which reminds me, I didn’t jog here, I took a slow walk. I’ll go through some news articles and then we’re gonna wrap up today’s video.
I’m back at home and I’m sitting in front of my computer screen as you can see. This is one of the articles. You can go, please go back read up the article for yourself don’t just take what I say even though it’s on the screen, okay, this is a part of it, it’s not all of it but I want to zero in on a couple of things because there’s just too many things, too many details, all right, for me to talk about, and you’ve probably heard a lot of them but I want to emphasize one thing, if you see here, it says at COP26, which was in Glasgow, I think, almost 200 nations agreed to revisit and strengthen their 2030 climate targets, all right, and the next line here, under the Paris agreement, countries should take steps. What does that mean? I mean it’s like NATO right, telling NATO members, for example, you need to spend two percent of your GDP on defense. Well, people like me are not interested whether you spend two percent or point two or twenty percent of your GDP on, or whatever your percentage is. I want to see your armored battle groups. I want to see your armored cavalry regiments. I want to see your attack helicopter brigades. I want to see your star wars, your anti-missile defenses, what are you doing, what have you done and what are you in the process of doing, all right, and not simply buying a few SSBNs. For those of you who don’t know, SSBN stands for Sub-Surface Ballistic Nuclear. So what concrete steps are you taking? There’s no country that’s actually saying they’re gonna take concrete steps, right? China and India, for example, are not going to reduce their coal consumption because they need the electricity. I mean, the rest of the world has electricity and you have done it at their expense, so why should they give up their electricity for a very amorphous, ambiguous thing like climate change?
So what are the concrete steps? Remember the questions that I asked earlier as well. There is another thing which I saw. Not going green is not an option and I read into this like this – it’s not about going green, it is about living more responsibly. Are we being more responsible, because it doesn’t matter whether you go green. For example, the amount of energy that it takes to make a hybrid car is actually greater than if you had driven an ordinary car. We have already taken steps, for example, talking about cars, we eliminated lead from petrol. The amount of harmful emissions in the car exhaust has been very very much reduced, and as I said earlier and in other videos, is carbon dioxide really an issue all? Even scientists tell us that in the past the earth’s temperature was 15 degrees warmer than it is now, much much warmer. Well, the oceans didn’t boil away, they’re still here. In fact, if you go to City Square Mall in Singapore you will find on one of the walls something that says “Do you know that not one drop of water has ever escaped the planet since its formation?”, or since when you think it was formed? It’s not really about going green. If we need to ride this roller coaster, if we really are forced to ride on this bandwagon then it’s not really about going green, it is how to optimize resources, how to live responsibly how not to waste things. You remember, I mean, as countries were industrializing, the US and all over the world right, what happened before the discovery of what petroleum could do. When they were extracting kerosene, for example, you know gas and so on they just burned it off and and they poured it into streams. So that is irresponsible behavior. If going green is going to get rid of that kind of irresponsible behavior we may have no choice but to ride on it. We are a small nation, only five million of us. Frankly, the globe doesn’t care about us. We need to lead in other ways. If you’re an agricultural country, putting caps, taxing the poor farmer, as Victor Davis Hanson said, sventy percent of the grapes that he grows, the authorities in California just come and take it away. It belongs to them, they say. Now, is that Constitutional? I don’t think so but they do it anyway. It is about responsible living.
There’s another one here, which is we are going to equip workers with new skills and so on and so forth. I like everything that is said here, that because the infrastructure, the economy, is going to change, the industry landscape is going to change, the ways of making a living are going to change, right, but it’s not just equipping people with the skills to so called go green or artificial intelligence or whatever you’re telling people that hey, you know, now robots are gonna do most of the work. What we want you to do is to control the computers that control the robots. Well, my friend, electricity still needs to be generated for all that to work.
I am asking a question. The one that I highlighted is when we decarbonize electricity production, it says here we are to import four gigawatts of electricity by 2035. The question that I have is import from where? How is it that we are able to import from, I don’t know, Indonesia, Philippines, whatever. How are they producing this extra four gigawatts of electricity that they can export to us? What are they using? Coal? Compost from markets? What are they using, okay, and just here you know, just to throw this in, people are talking about nuclear, right, and they are saying that the new nuclear reactors and so on are cleaner they are not as dangerous. They are not like Three Mile Island, they are not like Chernobyl, they are not like Fukushima, right, and yet people are hesitant, I mean, of course, with good reason right, you know where nuclear can go ,but really, is it nuclear or is it heat? What are we actually wanting? We want heat from whatever reactors you build. What do we want the heat for? Well, we want the heat to boil water. What do we want to boil water for?To make steam. What do we want the steam for? To drive something, to make something go round and round or to make something go back and forth. Are we really living in the nuclear age with regards to industry? No. We are still in the Steam Age. It’s called the nuclear age because of weapons, that’s the only reason it’s called the nuclear age.
Read the news, but read them and ask these questions, don’t just go read it and then leave it as that and go run with it and get excited and say we’re gonna save the planet, we’re gonna cut our emissions, yeah, Singapore has done it, blah blah blah. I mean, it is good, but cool down, take it easy, take a step back and think. Really think. Why is this necessary and why are we taking these steps? If people don’t want to buy stuff from us we might very well be selling opium to them as what the British did to China before and that of course resulted in the opium wars, the loss of Hong Kong by china and so on. Was what the British did morally acceptable? Of course not! Okay, they did it anyway. We need to be sober, we need to be hard, you know, cold. We need to make decisions in cold blood and decide what’s best for Singapore moving forward. So whichever side of this debate you’re on, whether you are for going green, whether you’re saying status quo, whether you’re saying no, I mean, there are many many aspects to it. I mean all of us want to live in a clean place, right? Well be more diligent! Today when you roam around in the parks and just take a walk around your HDB estate. You see litter. We have had decades of don’t litter, keep Singapore clean. I still see plastic bags, cans, you know, food wrappings strewn all over the place. So until we get our act together and we personally make sure that Singapore is clean, well going green is just another virtue signaling exercise and my take is this. Don’t criticize the government. The government is really doing what it can. It’s very hard, uh, cool-headed, very hard-nosed, because it has to be. This world is not going to forgive you. This world is not going to accommodate your weaknesses. If you’ve watched the movie “Forrest Gump”, in one stage, you know, he was playing football and they asked him to play football not because he’s a great player but because he can run. People will use you. People will exploit you. Ask yourself the three questions. Make your decision. Go with it with your eyes open. That’s it for this stage.
Well thanks for staying with me up to this point. You’ve all heard what I’ve said about going green and things like that. Nothing wrong with going green, let me reiterate. Just open your eyes and don’t jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Now, if you want more discussions, small tutorial style discussions like this, come and join me on my site. The link to my membership page is in the description of this video. I only charge you a dollar a day, charged by the month. You can stay for as many months as you like. You can leave for as long as you like, I will not chase you! I want people who are coming in who think and who believe that this platform is going to help you sharpen your thinking by sharpening your questions as what Dr Amy Zegart of the Hoover Institution said. I’m taking a lot of quotes from Hoover Institution now. People like Alan Weiss, George Friedman and so on and so forth. I think that they’re pretty advanced, pretty forward-looking and pretty level-headed at the same time. Very dispassionate, in other words. You don’t allow, we, me included, we do not allow our biases to come in and to cloud our reasoning, because when that happens we can reason correctly all the way to the wrong conclusion a lot. After all, you and I, we are human, but if you want to sharpen your thinking, raise the quality of your questions, do something better with your life, not to just enjoy your life but to make positive contributions to other people by helping them to shape their thinking as well, come on board! Doesn’t cost you much. Features – they’re on the site, they’re on the page as well. Once a week, minimum at this point in time, Zoom huddles. As time goes on, who knows, in-person, four or five people, I don’t know, so come on board, get things to help me to get things started and I’ll see you online. Thank you for watching and have a good day. Go logically, do not fear, be thankful, be joyful. I’ll see you next time!