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How to interact with people in an uncertain world

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I want to propose three general ground rules for interacting with people right now.

The rules are: (1) When you make plans, make them very specific, and avoid changing them at the last minute. (2) Defer to the most cautious person in your presence. (3) Do not take it personally if someone is more cautious than you.
To elaborate, with examples I made up:
(1) Be very detailed about any plans you make to see other people. If you invite friends over to sit in your driveway and have a drink, don’t suggest as people arrive that you sit on the back deck instead. Among your friends might be someone intending to give herself 10 feet of space instead of 6. She might have been excited about the driveway idea because it’s not only outdoors but effectively unbounded; she knew she’d be able to make as much space for herself as she felt she needed. Then you move to the deck and space is more limited, and she is faced with a really awkward decision.
If you and your co-worker decide to order from Domino’s, don’t switch it up and order from a local place instead. Your co-worker might be reassured by Domino’s no-human-contact-out-of-the-oven policy. That might be the most important thing to him.
So maybe you’re rolling your eyes right now and thinking, “But all the latest research shows that transmission on food surfaces is not something to be concerned about. Domino’s policy is overkill.” Or, “Transmission outdoors is super unlikely. The deck is fine!”
Not the point!
The point is that trying to make decisions on the fly is incredibly stressful. You might be 100% confident that you understand the relative risk of things. But you don’t know what other people’s understanding is. And the split-second after being told that the location or the menu has changed is not a good scenario for evaluating risk, especially with an audience. Don’t put people in that position.
(2) On that note, when you and a person in your presence have different (verbalized or apparent) levels of caution, the obvious and decent thing to do is match the more cautious person’s behaviors. If you don’t wear a mask but you notice one of your co-workers tends to, then put on a mask when you are going to be anywhere near them. Their mask usage is a clear indicator that they think mask usage is important. So match that caution in their presence as a courtesy, whether or not you acknowledge the public health value of wearing one.
If you and a friend want to take a walk, and you weren’t thinking 6 feet of space was essential, but they suggest a route and mention that they like it because there is plenty of space to give each other 6 feet, then be conscientious and pay attention, and give them space. If you get to a narrow area, recognize that you’ll have to go single-file until it widens again.
Look for body language. Get in the habit of noticing whether people are inching away or leaning back. This tells you that they are not comfortable. They are more cautious than your instincts. That doesn’t mean your instincts are wrong. But in the presence of this person, you need to defer to theirs.
(3) This also doesn’t mean that this person has an issue with you in particular. Do not take it personally.
Some people are approaching the world with an understanding that there are essentially two groups of people: the ones I live with, and everyone else. From a public health perspective, the standards I apply to interacting with anyone in the latter group should be consistent, whether you are someone I work with, a friend, a relative, or a stranger. I do not and cannot know whether you are carrying a potentially deadly, poorly understood, highly contagious virus, so to the greatest extent possible, I’m going to behave like you are carrying it, no matter who you are. It is more nuanced than that, of course, but not much. The point is, even if you’re not careless, the relative you just met for lunch yesterday might have been careless over the weekend. I do not, and cannot know.
So if someone says no thanks to your back deck or favorite pizza, or they wear a mask in a situation you find unnecessary, or they give you a wide berth around the corner of the trail, it’s really, truly, not about you. People want to interact with the world, and some of us never stop thinking about how to do it right in this not-at-all right world we find ourselves in.
I hope these are ideas people can agree to. I hope that, even if you are tired of modifying your behavior, or skeptical about the seriousness of this virus, you will consider these thoughts with a spirit of kindness. I hope, if you have kids, you will talk to them about how their behavior can not only affect other people’s physical health, but also their emotional well-being while trying to navigate many decisions.
Thanks for reading. Be good to each other. Stay safe. Deep breaths.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

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From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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