Following S18, E2j: Us and Them, this is the eleventh episode of my response to a long-form post by L.T. Zero, “Remember, Remember the 5th of November”, that was hosted on

One mistake L.T. Zero repeatedly makes is to assumes that what we know now must have been known everywhere in the past. I have mentioned what I call the flattening of perspective i.e., when the context of circumstances at a given time or place are overlooked.

To expand upon that, the available information that provides context, changes with time. Context must therefore be thought of as a continuum and not a snapshot.

Before coming back to this idea, let’s take a little diversion into the ‘theory of mind’ to see if it can help me explain what I think is going on.

Developmental Learning Trajectories (LTs)

The clip embedded below is exactly 104 seconds long and I hope you will take a quick look before continuing. This is a ‘Theory of Mind: Smarties task’ and the experimental subject is Tristan who was four-years old at the time. For those in the US1 Smarties are colourful candies that traditionally come in a carboard tube. They are a bit like M&M’s but with all natural colourings, flavourings and decent chocolate.

Tristan thought there would be Smarties in the Smarties tube but after he finds out that what is really inside, is a pen, he assumes that everyone else outside the room must also have that same knowledge. Again if you watch the clip you will see what I mean.

Understanding the difference between subjective and objective reality is a significant developmental step and it usually occurs about a year later at age five. I suggest that another way to look at this is to consider the context Tristan is missing.

The colourful Smarties tube provided the basis for his initial assumption that there were Smarties inside, after all, that was always what was in those tubes before so why would it occur to him that they might be repurposed? The information about the pen in the tube was unavailable to him until the tube was opened.

What he fails to recognise is that the information disclosed to him in private was not disclosed to his friends i.e., he has no conception of the possibility that what he knows, may not be known by other people.

The Relevance?

Could it be that an overload of information stripped of context is producing a form of perspective detachment that is analogous to this objectivity gap? I don’t mean that we become developmentally retarded to the point that the difference between the objective and subjective is lost to us, but that it places limitations on adult perception that should have been permanently outgrown. It this series I have been talking about the ‘flattened perspective’ that surfing a resource like Wikipedia might give a person.

Is this why I think L.T. Zero lumps all these disconnected events together in his post. He has gained a two-dimensional view of history that lacks both depth and the context of time. Is it the lack of historical framework that rendered Holly Mathnerd incapable of seeing how silly the claims made in the post are?

Admittedly, this is a bit more tricky than the ‘Smarties task’ but nevertheless, it is the kind of developmental error that would be cause of concern in children over five years of age, resurfaced undetected amongst adults online.

The Threshold of Discomfort

I recently read a book where the big trauma reveal amounted to the author being spoken to harshly as a child. There is no longer any threshold of historic discomfort below which it is impossible to be a victim.

Case in point.

The third and fourth Boomer Presidents were complicit (or worse) in forcing masks onto those children for two years, retarding their language and social development. Those two Presidents forced vaccines on children that couldn’t die from the COVID virus—vaccines which were developed and tested in months. Those Presidents and their men claimed they knew these things were perfectly safe.

“Remember, Remember the 5th of November”, Holly’s Substack, L.T. Zero

I will temporarily skip over the author’s confusion over which Presidents are Boomers to make a few general comments first. Almost any measures we could have taken during the pandemic had the potential for long-term negative impacts. It’s easy to forget that the world was dealing with an unknown virus with no idea what the incubation period was, how long it could survive as a fomite, or the fact that some carriers were asymptomatic.

When you have a contagious agent with an unfathomable downside, you have to isolate, that is true of any life threatening infectious disease we may encounter in the future. How is it we are now unlearning that? I refer you to my previous comments on our increasingly flattened perspective.

We have the luxury of protecting ourselves from various diseases via vaccination - or not as the case may be. We can look at history objectively or gaslight ourselves with selective hindsight. Some things appear to be less significant at a distance… cue 28-second clip.

I don’t want to trespass too much on other series yet to be published but will make some quick points for those of you who are still here.

1. What we know about childhood resilience to COVID-19 has been found out after the fact.

2. L.T. Zero makes the baseless claim that children ‘couldn’t die’ from COVID-19 when in fact they did. It’s cold comfort to mention that, according to all assessments, this only amounted to a very small proportion of total deaths.

   1. It’s now de rigueur to be blasé about the fact that less than 0.04% of the deceased were children and young adults under 20 years old but we need to restore the context.

   2. To put that percentage into context, we must remember that an estimated 4.4 million people perished due to COVID-19, so 0.04% of that amounts to 17,400 young people - it’s a real number of entire futures entirely obliterated. You might consider that to be small but it’s not nothing. Also remember, that approximately 8178 of those were nine years old or younger, a figure that on its own is 2.7 times the death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (where 2996 people were killed).2

3. The mortality figures be undoubtedly worse in the counterfactual scenario that L.T. Zero seems to favour i.e., one where social restrictions and vaccines didn’t exist.

4. The aim of social restrictions was to make the environment unfriendly to the virus in order to inhibit its transmission. That is a common objective that applies even if you believe we should have taken no action and waited for herd immunity to be achieved - assuming it would be possible.

5. The environment internal to an organism is made unfriendly to viruses by the immune system. A vaccination can help ready the immune system to make it hostile to a virus that it has not ever encountered. Those of us who have worked across the world understand the need to be inoculated against certain diseases.

6. In a series to be published this year cover the question over drug trials, their path to approval, net health risks and contraindications. I can’t do the subject justice here, but perhaps I should mention that any kind of accelerated testing, uses the bandwidth that resources can buy to reduce time to qualification.

7. Asymptomatic carriers are ideal vectors for any transmissible disease. The environment internal to the organism is friendly to the virus, allowing it a platform to propagate from, while the carrier remains healthy and mobile.

8. As with any respiratory transmissible virus, masks serve to increase the probability that transmission is interrupted in the airborne phase, as does social distancing. Of course, even if we were to be walking around in pressurised suits, it would only be playing the odds.3

The pandemic impacted us all but the greatest threat to psychological development in children cannot be wearing masks or facing certain types of restrictions. I am not saying there are no consequences but it can’t be greater than experiencing life via (or behind) electronic intermediaries. An increase in social ineptitude predated any pandemic and it shows up in many ways including the retreat into immersive virtual worlds, social contagions and fashionable neuroses.

On the subject of safety, it is worth remembering that in the Americas, food additives are used that are not permitted anywhere else in the developed world. This includes hormones in livestock feed and pesticides that also enter the human food-chain. It is not normal to have store bought bread with the half-life of Carbon 14. There is precious little outrage about that. To talk about any drug or processed food as being ‘perfectly safe’ is as idiotic as saying the shell bearings in your engine’s crankcase are perfectly frictionless or a pendulum is a perpetual motion machine.

In engineering we make distinctions between ‘ideal’ conditions (that we use to set boundaries) and ‘real world’ applications that operate within them. In our measurements we need to know the difference between the ‘actual’ and the ‘indicated’. In reality, beyond a certain resolution, there are no absolutes. In the real world, remember, we play the odds.

The measures taken during the pandemic, it was about being safer on average than contracting COVID-19 at a time when most people in the world had no idea what they were dealing with.

Interrupting the path to transmission was an obvious strategy and it is really a form of barrier engineering. In another series (#16) on engineering, I mention two safety engineering concepts -

• LOPA (Layers Of Protection Analysis)

• The Swiss Cheese Model

- it’s not published yet otherwise I would link it. Unfortunately I had to hold it back because it ties into two other series that I have not finished writing. I regret this because the engineering model works very well as an explanation.

To be honest the bottleneck is a problem I am currently working on …

Let’s get back on track.

The Boomer government’s propaganda apparatus told us that the protests were peaceful while its minions burned down cities, while its mouthpieces covered up the extent of the warfare on American streets.

“Remember, Remember the 5th of November”, Holly’s Substack, L.T. Zero

I assume this is about the protests during the pandemic but you may well ask yourselves:

• Who or what constitutes the propaganda apparatus?

• Who are the government ‘minions’ that ‘burned down cities’?

• Who are the mouthpieces?

Let me summarise what L.T. Zero is asking you to believe. The ‘Boomer government’ is responsible for the propaganda, the protests against the propaganda and both sides of the ‘warfare on American streets’. The government burnt down cities and then their ‘mouthpieces’ covered it up.

Good luck making any sense out of that without persuading a horse to kick you in the head first.

Its apparatchiks took away the public speaking privileges and banking privileges of those who questioned their certainty, their values, and their policies.

ibid.

So did this happen everywhere and always at the behest of Boomers? Of course not. In 2020 the youngest Boomers were already 56 years old. Those trying to censor speech online and on campuses are predominantly from post-Boomer generations over the past sixty years.

Sure, some dangerous precedents were set during the pandemic particularly in Canada, but it is inevitable in any state of emergency that mistakes will be made. I am not defending what was done just the fact that some of what L.T. Zero is talking about now were seen as potentially dangerous super-spreader events at the time. I am certain we will have a better appreciation of what the true impact of that was in the future. Meanwhile it is easy to second-guess, particularly if like L.T. Zero, your relationship with the truth is not monogamous.

The fourth Boomer President set the FBI on parents who objected to radical curricular changes, and on citizens who purchased legal weapons for home defense, and on business owners who transgressed the political fashions of the day.

ibid.

In the context of this ludicrous set of claims, it hardly seems to matter, yet I feel obliged to point out that Donald Trump was the fourth Boomer President. L.T Zero is so blinded by his personal agenda that he cannot be trusted to get a single thing right. He is talking about Joe Biden but fails to notice that he was not a Boomer President by any definition you might devise. Why? Because he was born before the baby boom and didn’t become president until 2021.

Let me outline this carefully so I need not repeat myself. We have had four Presidents born during the Boomer years and each one was elected to serve two terms.

• Bill Clinton was 46 when he became president in 1992 and was 50 for his second term in 1996.

• George W. Bush was 54 in 2000 and 58 for his reelection in 2004.

• Barack Obama born was elected in 2008 at age 47 and again in 2012 at 55.

• Donald Trump came to office in 2017 when he was 71 and returned as President last month (January 2025) at age 78.

That’s it.

Gen Xers are now in the 44 - 61 years old age bracket and the Constitution stipulates that a President must be a minimum of 35 years old, which currently means anyone born before 1990 i.e. there are 26 qualifying birth years post-Boomer. Whose fault is it that America has yet to produce a single viable presidential candidate born after 1964?

Incidentally, in the UK there have been three Gen-X Prime Ministers viz. David Cameron, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak and one borderline Boomer, Boris Johnson born halfway through 1964. Together they are probably the worst four Prime Ministers in British history.

I can’t be bothered to play devil’s advocate as to why this is the case, but if you are a Gen-Xer and believe in this generational bullshit, it’s a question for you and not me.

His apparatchiks and allies castrated our sons, mutilated our daughters, and passed laws terminating our parental rights if we objected.

ibid.

The person he is referring to here is the non-Boomer Joe Biden but what generations might his ‘apparatchiks’ belong to? The kids who are now having to navigate this mess are being taught by which generations exactly?

Ask yourself -

• How many of the surgeons willing to perform these surgeries on children are Boomers?

• What are the demographics for the lawmakers at federal and state level who made this possible?

• Who are the parents in these situations?

or to phrase the question slightly differently,

• How many parents of school aged children are sixty-years old?

Check for yourselves because I assure you the information is out there.

Also,

Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).

“HOW MANY ADULTS AND YOUTH IDENTIFY AS TRANSGENDER IN THE UNITED STATES?” Williams Institute, Jody L. Herman, Andrew R. Flores Kathryn K. O’Neill, June 2022

So the parents of these young people are not Boomers nor is it predominantly Boomers who are taking away parental rights.

Recall my response to the earlier claim that Boomers were responsible for removing the children of Gen-Xers.

Workforce Demographics in 2022 for Child, Family and Social Workers

[…]

Derived from - “Data USA: Child, family, and school social workers”

[…]

…25-34 year olds tend to dominate the sector (at almost 70% of all appointments)

“S18, E2j: Us and Them”, The Vigne Intervention

These accusations all miss Boomers by a minimum of almost three decades.

Next, S18, E2l: My Generation, Baby