Someone mentioned the Challenger Disaster and the events and decisions that led up to it. Yep, it's still depressing and it still makes me mad.
The Challenger missed its launch date by a few days because of what sure seemed like a comedy of errors. One day a wrench that would be laying on a bench in most people's garage couldn't be found in all of Cape Kennedy. The next day a power drill had to be retrieved from a guy's car in the parking lot because NASA didn't have one. These things were kind of mirthfully reported on the evening news with a 'meh ', kinda shrug,. Whattaya gonna do?
The third day was cold for Florida, too cold for the design limitations of the launch rockets and it looked like another scrub. They fatally decided to go.
The engineers and techies who had traditionally administered NASA had been replaced by the Reagan people with political appointees better suited to projecting image. In an other word; fools.
It has been reported that the Reagan Oval Office had 3 televisions running all the time to monitor news and projected image. They thought it made them better informed and more responsive. In fact, it made them more poorly informed and reactionary rather than responsive. When the blue glow they bathed themselves in began to sting with the comedy of errors at NASA they decided to act decisively.
Launching a space shuttle is tantamount to hurling a small office building into space. You can see it from over a hundred miles away even in the daytime. It's spectacular and unbelievably complicated. The engineers at NASA, to a man, rejected the idea of launching in the cold conditions that were outside design limitations. They were overruled by the Reagan political appointees, seven innocent people were killed and the program was set-back for 3 years. The design of the booster rockets was declared to be the culprit and they were redesigned. Thank God that cosmetic redesign didn't turn out to be sabotage in and of itself. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Quietly, the political people were replaced with techies. That was a broken idea that was fixed.
If the boobs in the Oval Office hadn't been watching television rather than doing their jobs that would not have happened.
Well, that was long ago and far away. Certainly, long ago but not as far away as we'd like. Stupid people tend to repeat mistakes. We still have the wrong boobs watching the wrong tube.
Here are two really funny examples of the unintended consequence of essentially mindless television. The phenomenon of bungee jumping comes from a long-forgotten PBS documentary about a rite of passage practiced by some obscure tribe that Boomers were stuck watching on some rainy Sunday or Saturday afternoon. That's just strange. This second one is hilarious. Most people think diamonds can be created by subjecting a lump of coal to tremendous pressure. That's just bullshit. That's not how diamonds are formed at all but people believe that because we saw Superman do it by squeezing a lump of coal in his Super Hand. The persistence of that idiotic idea illustrates the problem.
Donald Trump recently tried to hold a political rally in Tulsa. It was a serious mistake and a serious humiliation founded in completely ridiculous assumptions. Why? How was a decision that bad reached? Trying to spin the facts provided the answer.
The Trump people said that something like 8 million people had watched the rally on television and online. They want people to believe that was some sort of victory. Trump saw a drop in the polls as a result of the failed rally. He obviously knew it was bad news. It led him to say that TV ratings were the real polls. He touted the fact 5.1 million people had tuned into some sort of "town hall" he'd held with Sean Hannity on Fox News. It was pointed out 1.8 million had watched Chris Cuomo and 3.1 million had watched Rachel Maddow instead, at the same time. He saw that as a victory. Why?
There are 330 million Americans. It's reasonable to expect over 130 million of us will vote in November. 10 million people watching a TV no matter the content, is a meaningless drop in a very large bucket. The ratings of the various "news networks" are meaningless because they are so paltry. There is nothing of value to be divined from watching the creators of this nonsense or following those who have bothered to view it. They seem to move further and further from objective reality on a daily basis. None of these programs has ever contributed to a coherent decision nor should they be expected to. Our leaders should know that. At the very least, it looks like we should stop paying the cable bill for the White House. Again; a case of the wrong boobs watching the wrong tube.
One undeniable fact of life is this: Unless it's currently on fire or being shot into space, television is worthless as a source of information. Our leaders should know that and you should too.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Covid-19
I've been doing a lot of reading about COVID-19 and other pandemics and epidemics. Most of it I think of as "pre-COVID 19 reading" because the things being written during this emergency are too concerned with this emergency to be objective or particularly informative. There's nothing new in that.
The idea of a pandemic is fascinating. How it moves thru the world-wide population. The idea that as we develop immunity in defense, the infection mutates to evade our immunity. How it mutates to survive. In a way, it's natural selection at work in our bloodstream.
It seems to take a cycle of about ten years of an infection moving thru the world population for it to mutate beyond our defensive "mutation" of immunity to become a widerspread threat again. That's really interesting, thought of that way. As a side thought, it makes me wonder if the Mayans simply got the flu and it so burdened their economy that their society collapsed. Hopefully, we'll avoid that. Who knows?
This part is a result of my untutored reading so, again, who knows but I think this is right. It's reasonable to compare our experiences with influenza viruses and this novel virus because they act the same. The noted influenzas, H1N1 and so forth are results of that survival of the fittest battle between viruses and our immune systems and novel viruses are just that, novel, new. They act and track the same. That makes it reasonable and useful to compare them. It particularly makes it useful to look back at what we did before. What worked and what didn't and what we can expect. That's a little grim.
What worked and what didn't. A hundred years ago, they kept meticulous records. Just because there wasn't much they could really do doesn't mean they didn't write down what they did do. We know from their records what they tried and what gave better results. The things that have been recommended and in some cases imposed are as a result of consulting those records. That just makes sense. It's too soon to tell how well we're doing. Are we making sense?
Because of the political climate in some states, certain measures were only halfheartedly embraced and then abandoned, probably too soon. We're seeing those states begin to pay, in illness and death, for those mistakes. Following on the heels of those premature reopenings we've seen, literally, hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, abandoning social distancing but usually wearing masks. We'll see directly how that works out. If there's no spike in the spread of infection it means we just wasted everybody's time and trillions of dollars. No reasonable person is stupid enough to root for one outcome or the other. I would, eventually, like to see other studies investigating what other spreads of infection we might have slowed or stopped along with COVID-19. Have there been fewer head colds or cases of seasonal flu. STDs have probably gone down (the bars are closed), things like that.
Isn't that interesting? Well, the truth is, most of us aren't going to die and we have to divine lessons both social and economic from these things. One of the worst lessons is this. We're all in praise of our essential workers. As this emergency passes, we're going to learn there is a hard-eyed difference between essential and expendable and that difference will be defined in dollars and cents. The minimum wage is going to go up in those businesses that survive and it will probably go up more than it would have otherwise. The recession will continue. There just isn't enough government money to make up for shuttering about a third of the economy for a quarter or longer. When times are good or normal we're fantastically productive. Taxes are going to go up on our famous 1%. This money has to be paid back and we'll have to go to the people with money to pay it back. Not only that, it has starkly highlighted the mountains of excess wealth and people rightly think that concentration of wealth is unreasonable, unnecessary and unfair. Just as the medical field has looked to the past for answers and solutions, the economic community is going to do the same thing.
I don't think this is sinking in just yet. Looking to the past is going to be harder. The most vulnerable group is older people. That's getting to be a significant loss of institutional memory. One example most people can easily understand is, there's not going to be any new John Prine music but across our communities, there's going to be a lot less senior creativity, lost ideas and lost answers. Buh bye Boomer.
I think this is just sinking in. The quarantine taught us we are together and we can act with common purpose. We can identify a thing needing done and just do it together. We can, within reason, bend our government in the desired direction by just sharing agreement of what that direction should be. We're getting a feeling of 'we the people'. No capitalization. Just, we, the people.
There's a lot of us and our goals and aspirations are as complex as you might imagine in such a large group of competing and common interests but also common values. People are getting the idea that we can be the change we want, It will be fascinating to see how that all works out and we have a front-row seat.
It was said when the cannons went silent in France at the 1918 Armistice, the silence was the last time the Voice of God was heard on the earth. That's a striking idea. The voice of the Almighty expressed in silence.
That idea, related by Kurt Vonnegut, connects to this piece of free verse.
and then the whole world
walked inside and shut their doors
and said we will stop it all, everything.
to protect our weaker ones
our sicker ones, our older ones.
and nothing, nothing in the history of humankind
ever felt more like love than this
-CD
Can't we be wonderful when we listen just right?
That connects to the silence of usually bustling city streets in mid-day. Have we created enough silence that we can hear the voices of the Angels of Our Better Nature in ourselves? Mabee so.
The idea of a pandemic is fascinating. How it moves thru the world-wide population. The idea that as we develop immunity in defense, the infection mutates to evade our immunity. How it mutates to survive. In a way, it's natural selection at work in our bloodstream.
It seems to take a cycle of about ten years of an infection moving thru the world population for it to mutate beyond our defensive "mutation" of immunity to become a widerspread threat again. That's really interesting, thought of that way. As a side thought, it makes me wonder if the Mayans simply got the flu and it so burdened their economy that their society collapsed. Hopefully, we'll avoid that. Who knows?
This part is a result of my untutored reading so, again, who knows but I think this is right. It's reasonable to compare our experiences with influenza viruses and this novel virus because they act the same. The noted influenzas, H1N1 and so forth are results of that survival of the fittest battle between viruses and our immune systems and novel viruses are just that, novel, new. They act and track the same. That makes it reasonable and useful to compare them. It particularly makes it useful to look back at what we did before. What worked and what didn't and what we can expect. That's a little grim.
What worked and what didn't. A hundred years ago, they kept meticulous records. Just because there wasn't much they could really do doesn't mean they didn't write down what they did do. We know from their records what they tried and what gave better results. The things that have been recommended and in some cases imposed are as a result of consulting those records. That just makes sense. It's too soon to tell how well we're doing. Are we making sense?
Because of the political climate in some states, certain measures were only halfheartedly embraced and then abandoned, probably too soon. We're seeing those states begin to pay, in illness and death, for those mistakes. Following on the heels of those premature reopenings we've seen, literally, hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, abandoning social distancing but usually wearing masks. We'll see directly how that works out. If there's no spike in the spread of infection it means we just wasted everybody's time and trillions of dollars. No reasonable person is stupid enough to root for one outcome or the other. I would, eventually, like to see other studies investigating what other spreads of infection we might have slowed or stopped along with COVID-19. Have there been fewer head colds or cases of seasonal flu. STDs have probably gone down (the bars are closed), things like that.
Isn't that interesting? Well, the truth is, most of us aren't going to die and we have to divine lessons both social and economic from these things. One of the worst lessons is this. We're all in praise of our essential workers. As this emergency passes, we're going to learn there is a hard-eyed difference between essential and expendable and that difference will be defined in dollars and cents. The minimum wage is going to go up in those businesses that survive and it will probably go up more than it would have otherwise. The recession will continue. There just isn't enough government money to make up for shuttering about a third of the economy for a quarter or longer. When times are good or normal we're fantastically productive. Taxes are going to go up on our famous 1%. This money has to be paid back and we'll have to go to the people with money to pay it back. Not only that, it has starkly highlighted the mountains of excess wealth and people rightly think that concentration of wealth is unreasonable, unnecessary and unfair. Just as the medical field has looked to the past for answers and solutions, the economic community is going to do the same thing.
I don't think this is sinking in just yet. Looking to the past is going to be harder. The most vulnerable group is older people. That's getting to be a significant loss of institutional memory. One example most people can easily understand is, there's not going to be any new John Prine music but across our communities, there's going to be a lot less senior creativity, lost ideas and lost answers. Buh bye Boomer.
I think this is just sinking in. The quarantine taught us we are together and we can act with common purpose. We can identify a thing needing done and just do it together. We can, within reason, bend our government in the desired direction by just sharing agreement of what that direction should be. We're getting a feeling of 'we the people'. No capitalization. Just, we, the people.
There's a lot of us and our goals and aspirations are as complex as you might imagine in such a large group of competing and common interests but also common values. People are getting the idea that we can be the change we want, It will be fascinating to see how that all works out and we have a front-row seat.
It was said when the cannons went silent in France at the 1918 Armistice, the silence was the last time the Voice of God was heard on the earth. That's a striking idea. The voice of the Almighty expressed in silence.
That idea, related by Kurt Vonnegut, connects to this piece of free verse.
and then the whole world
walked inside and shut their doors
and said we will stop it all, everything.
to protect our weaker ones
our sicker ones, our older ones.
and nothing, nothing in the history of humankind
ever felt more like love than this
-CD
Can't we be wonderful when we listen just right?
That connects to the silence of usually bustling city streets in mid-day. Have we created enough silence that we can hear the voices of the Angels of Our Better Nature in ourselves? Mabee so.
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