The Useful Idiots

My parents had terrible stories about polio. They saw one too many friend and family fall victim to the disease. Quite fortunate for the following generation, science quickly found a way to help eradicate the nightmare. Jonas Salk was the scientist, to be precise. But two generations later, false equivalence and couch-baked correlations are attacking the science, pegging autism to vaccines. They're not actually questioning the science, mind you. Questioning science is a good thing, in fact welcomed by true scientists. They are attacking it without real research or credible peer review.

Unqualified attacks are fueled in part by faded memory. When children are born in disconnected families with little or no memory passed on down from grandparents, and when home schooling intercepts any chance a child may have to hear about science, the recurring nightmare of ignorance emerges all over again.

During the pandemic I started an informal poll of my own: every time I would meet an anti-vaxxer I would ask them if they knew what an iron lung was. Not only did none of them know it had anything to do with polio, more than one thought it had to do with scuba diving equipment. 

For whatever it’s worth here’s the thing about conspiracies: unfortunately they do exist, in the form of a LOBBY. Powerful, political lobbies. They have small empires to protect, and a lot of money to throw at defending their existence. But in every case, science is the David against the lobby Goliath. It is NEVER the other way around. Conspiracists become the useful idiots of competing lobbies when they buy into their strategic distortions of science. 

The perception that science can be corrupted or bought is a gross misunderstanding of how science works. When people of science are corrupted they cease to be scientists. The ONLY purpose of science is seeking the truth, not hiding it. It’s no different than bad cops, bad generals, bad teachers, etc. In a relatively free and democratic society you do not shut down the institutions of teaching, police, or military because of corruption. Not unless you’re hell bent on wiping out freedom and democracy.

The tragic flaw of the useful idiot is that when they become fixated with an irregularity they can't explain they don't follow the science. They follow the noise and convince themselves that their "no one's gonna fuck with me" swagger is their claim to a noble survivalist crusade. The mother of all ironies of course is that fuck with them is exactly what lobby overlords do to and with them.

When I step into a car, or an airplane, I actually understand the science behind them. You don't have to be a scientist to do so, and I don't claim to be as smart as the scientists who developed those technologies. Pioneering scientists are amazing humans: they are super-intelligent, relentless students of science, highly respectful of the scientific method and process. Entire generations enjoy amazing improvements to quality of life thanks to scientists. But ultimately it is not the scientist I follow, it is the science.

The exact same logic applies to vaccines.

The Goliath lobbies manipulate the credibility of science, as long as they can get away with it. Examples are too many to list, but the most infamous ones include the tobacco lobby, the coal lobby, gun lobby, segregationist lobbies, etc. Only when science overwhelms the lobbies do they die or retreat. The death of a toxic lobby is a good thing. But when they  on't die and simply retreat it poses a major problem for evolution. They become sleeper cells. A generation or two later the cells are awoken as memory fades, and it’s anti-science movements, fascism, etc. all over again. The classic definition of insanity on a planetary scale.

If you ever find yourself fighting the science as opposed to the lobby that’s smearing the science, it gives me no pleasure to inform you that you have become a useful idiot. The larger tragedy being, your behavior and choices do not merely impact a pandemic, as terrible as that is by itself. Next time you are watching the news about war or insurrection "crimes", know that the leaders of those actions are NOTHING without their armies of useful idiots.

The Outside Of The Box Fallacy

There’s a classic story about a truck that had become wedged at the entrance of a tunnel, and it goes something like this:

One day, traffic had come to a stop in a metropolitan tunnel. A huge 18-wheel truck exceeded the clearance of the tunnel and got stuck. It couldn’t move forward or backward. The emergency crew were at a loss, scratching their heads as tempers began to fray. Finally a little boy on the sidelines spoke up: “Why don’t you just let air out of the tires?” They promptly did exactly that, allowing the truck to be free.

The moral of the parable is intuitive enough: fresh and simple thinking can dramatically win over entrenched and complex thought processes. I first heard the story back in the late 80’s, which is just about when the business management establishment started using the expression “think outside the box”. While the expression served its purpose for a few years, like all overused jargon it finally lost its meaning. Yet the real problem with this particular jargon lies not in its overuse, but in the logic contained within the jargon itself. 

The box represents a process that has already been designed, tested, and under execution for some time. Clear thinking, or a good strategy, actually created the process and therefore the box. Managers and employees are hired to mind the box – until bugs in the process begin to appear. These bugs can be internal (design) issues, or external (competitive) threats. Corrective pressures ensue, and suddenly everyone in the box is asked to think outside of it. This might be akin to building a house for your family, then when things start to go wrong with the house you ask your family to step outside and pretend the house does not exist. Sounds more like a Chinese fire drill than strategic thinking.

Take one example of “boxed” strategic thinking: Iridium was a $5 billion satellite-telephone venture investment by Motorola that filed for Chapter 11 less than a year after the wireless phone system went live. Pundits have been all over the Iridium case study, for the most part agreeing that it was a case of falling in love with a technology idea at the expense of a market reality: Motorola was betting on a wireless technology that had been proven for more than 30 years, with a guarantee to cover the entire globe, regardless of what the market need was for businessmen in the middle of the Sahara desert desperately needing to make a call.

If there is something that Motorola was good at – and still is to be fair – it is boxes. Radio boxes, more precisely: from the first automobile radios, to RF (Radio Frequency) communication devices for the military and for commercial use. But it didn’t just master the production of communication boxes; it also pioneered the Six Sigma process, the mother of all operational quality control processes. So given this track record in strategic as well as process excellence, what went wrong with Iridium? Had Motorola fallen blindly in love with the promise of satellite communications technology, or with its own capability to build the perfect box?

My bet is that neither of those two indictments is as relevant as the fact that Motorola had lost sight of how to think -- never mind where to think. Motorola’s founder Paul Galvin came from the Michelangelo Buonarotti school of visionary thinking: when guys like Michelangelo stand in front of a huge block of marble, they don't see a chunk of rock like the average mortal, they see the David inside of it; Galvin looked at a car radio and didn't just see an RF receiver box, he thought about the driving experience inside the car. Almost seventy years later, Galvin’s successors looked up to the skies and dreamed of sixty-six satellites covering wireless communications for the entire surface of our planet. Apparently they forgot to look back down at earth and find their David, or at least, the ultimate communication experience. 

If only there had been a little boy standing in the sidelines to remind Iridium guys that not much more than 10% of the surface of our planet is actually inhabited -- 1% if you consider only urban areas.

The Shortest Yard

"The NFL and its fans have no right to profess concern. It's hypocrisy. Yes, I understand that the sport may not have caused Hamlin's condition. That's not my point. My point is that the sport destroys bodies and lives, and we love it.

Stop telling me you're concerned, or stop watching. Am I pissing you off? I hope so."

- Scott Wilson, attorney for NFL concussion case

“The sport”. 

I mean, you’re not really pissing me off Mr. Wilson, but you have poked my morbid curiosity. As a numbers guy I had to conduct my own due diligence. And sure, I was just called a hypocrite. By a lawyer, but l’ll let that one slide for now. 

I’m sure I’ve been a hypocrite from time to time, like most mortals. But like anything else it’s not about falling for hypocrisy, from time to time. It’s what you do about it. 

I’m a little stumped by the contradiction of data available on the subject. Credible sources like the Mayo Clinic and similar agree that ”most” TBIs (Traumatic Brain Injury) are caused by falling. Especially elderly and children. One law firm sets falling at 47%, consistent with the label of “most”. The other categories include traffic accidents - 16%, “struck by something - 15%” (which could be sports), assault - 9%, other - 13%. 

But then it gets sloppy after that. The TOTAL incidents in the US are listed at around 2.8 million (between 1.5 million and 3 million). So far so good, except some credible sites say ALL of those are sports related, while others say that 47% of the 2.8 million are from falls. So which is it??

Regardless of the sloppiness from credible sources on OVERALL numbers, there is some consistency on how SPORTS break down.

American football accounts for just under 11% of either sports TBIs or all TBIs. Either way it’s not the highest incidence within sports: rugby has a higher rate at just under 13%. American football is 2nd, followed by women’s ice hockey and then men’s ice hockey. 5th place is women’s soccer, 6th is men’s soccer. 

So as far as I can tell, the leading causes ranking of TBI looks like this (USA):

1. Falling

2. Traffic Accidents

4. Assault

5. Rugby (men)

6. American Football (men)

7. Hockey (women)

8. Hockey (men)

9. Soccer (women)

10. Soccer (men)

“The sport”. Which one are we talking about, Mr. Wilson? 

The reasons athletes are drawn to sports vary from fun to passion, but money takes center stage among the top performers. Which also means there’s huge profit to be made by the owners of sports franchises, leagues, events, broadcasters and related (merchandise, etc). And that’s where it gets “stupid”. For every greed dollar that turns a blind eye to the risks carried by the athletes, there’s a greed dollar for those that would sue by distorting the same risks. 

There’s no excuse for turning a blind eye to the risks of sport injuries. But that also means the nature of sports may one day end up looking like a chess game. Don’t touch me, don’t even look at me. And we better sit down before one of us gets hurt.  

For their part, distorters and hyperbole artists live by the “ends justifies the means” rule of war. So technically in the name of a good cause (defeating an evil enemy or defending an injured athlete) the truth can be sacrificed. To the point of fighting symptoms without understanding the cause.

The shortest yard is the first one. The last yard is the longest. Go deep or go home.

The Pareto Principle

Some of you know it as the 80/20 Rule. The principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from roughly 20% of causes. In other words, a minority percentage of causes have a substantial majority effect.

Politicians and their patron saint Niccolò Machiavelli have known this simple crowd control algorithm for centuries. But to be fair to them it’s not just governments and their politicians who live and die by the Pareto Principle. Capitalism thrives on it, artists are tormented by it.

The internet and its virtual communities of social platforms adopted the principle from day one. It was a prime directive practically ripped from Machiavelli’s “The Prince”: capture no more than 20% of traffic, then tell the world that you are the world. How small can you go in the 20% club and still assume the “I’m king of the world!” position? Well, we now know what share of the social media market $44 billion will buy: 9%. As our Titanic hero Elon Musk would say, “let that sink in.” 

Comedian Bill Burr has quipped an interesting number on more than one occasion, when poked about the blowback from audiences over his sarcasm about women. “What, like 20 of them?” he scoffs, mocking the relatively small number of booers or hecklers. But regardless of how he truly feels about women, you may want to pay close attention to his defiance of the Pareto Principle. Some internet neighborhoods have condemned the likes of him and Dave Chappelle as public enemies. Yet reality is the eighty percent undertow behind the shallow shores of the twenty percent. As Chappelle and Burr enter the deep end of accountability, they manage to outsmart the Pareto effect. They are the Schrödinger cats of the comedy circuit.

If comedy’s not your thing, maybe the dark side of the 80/20 ratio will grab your attention.  The two political parties in the US have never enjoyed much more than 20% of actual population support, never mind 51% of voters over the past few decades. And yet, every time a new politician is sworn in they can’t help but parrot the same tired dogma: “The American people have spoken.” They sure have. Somewhere between half and eighty percent either disapprove of you or at best are apathetic. 

When the American Republican Party splintered in recent years from mainstream conservatism to neo-fascist movements, it mastered the Pareto Principle as an alternative fact maker. Ripped from the cover of survival coffee-table books, it convinced itself that when standing up to a bear you should make yourself look bigger. “Never mind those votes, they’re not real anyway. Look over here, deep into my huuuge eyes... then close your little mind and let me take you back, to a magical place from the past that never existed.”

So the next time you cruise the internet’s underworld, watching the rage Geiger counter shoot up by the thousands and the thirst traps by the millions, you may want to remind yourself about the Pareto Principle. Eighty percent of reality is beyond the interest of media and social platforms. They weren’t developed to enlighten you in the first place, their prime directive is to sell. What you’re seeing is blinding you from what you’re not. Which is how selling works. 

One of society’s greatest oxymorons is street wisdom. Survival is powered by instinct, not by wisdom. Street instinct is the king of urban myths, and as such it roars as the ruling monarch of the internet. 

The Rise of The American Taliban

Today’s US Democratic Party was started by two Southerners, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Against the wishes of fellow founders George Washington and John Adams, the political party approach to US government was born. It was actually called the Democratic-Republican Party back then. Its platform was tainted from the start, very much protecting the “economic interests” of the South - A.K.A. slavery. 

Fast-forward to FDR, 1930's. By then an entire lifetime since the Civil War had come and gone. Many northerners had flocked to an evolved Democratic Party, one that somehow managed to acquire a soul. Except of course for the Southern Democrats. They took their politics into their own hands, creating an underground society called the Ku Klux Klan. 

Fast forward again, this time only half a generation to President Johnson, mid-1960’s. When Johnson signed and passed the Civil Rights Act, most Northern Democrats and most Republicans supported the Act. But the Southern Democrats rose the specter of the Civil War again, politically for the time being. By Nixon’s election in ‘68 the Republican Party had sold its soul to the devil, courting the average American Southerner for votes. Thus begun the Republican Party's obsession with winning at any cost - by hook or crook.

They were able to keep that devil more or less corked in a bottle between 1968 and 2001. On September 11, 2001 the devil uncorked itself from the bottle and The American Taliban was born. They staged a coup of the Republican Party. George Bush Jr. was the last conservative from the Party of Lincoln. That party was all but dead by the time Barack Obama became president, because Obama became president. After Obama, Le Déluge: Donald Trump became the first American Taliban Party president.

True to form of political oppression disguised as a legitimate party, the American Taliban party has yet to win a presidency through a popular vote. And that’s in spite of the most flagrant gerrymandering in the history of democracy. But gerrymandering may not be enough: fascist sleeper cells have been dog-whistled to awaken, through the systematic installation of Taliban Party judges. If Donald Trump's short presidency managed anything it was to set in place a number of party-loyal judges across America's democracy. Like explosives set in a controlled implosion. What we recently witnessed in the Ritterhouse case was the full-on awakening of the American Taliban Militia. A dystopian bookend to a year that started with a fascist insurrection in the formerly-sacred US Capitol.

The specter of the Civil War is no longer a ghost. We may be witnessing the beginning of the second coming of America's Civil War. Except this time there is no Republican Party to win it. There's only the party that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison - two slave-owning Southerners - started.

Political Parties And The Death of Nations

Twelve score and five years ago the United States of America declared independence from the oppression of a single, arbitrary monarchy. Imperfect as that declaration was it was a big step in the right direction. More people gained liberty from oppression, though sadly not exactly for all. 

So that challenge from day one, the one on page one of the constitution, was much more of a mission than we've ever bothered to understand: go forth and form a more perfect union. It was the founders way of telling us that they knew they weren’t perfect. Because a threat to liberty anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And as God was their witness they knew damn well that they never quite honored that “all men are created equal” bit.

Seven score and nineteen years ago the northern side of an almost one-hundred year old union set out to correct that “liberty and justice for all” brain fart. It was the bloodiest conflict the Union had, and still has ever seen. No foreign enemy has ever incurred more deaths on Americans than Americans themselves. I mean, don’t get me wrong: had Hitler or the Soviet Politburo not been stopped that self-owned wound would have been tragically dwarfed. 

One score ago some cave-dwellers hijacked four commercial aircrafts and weaponized them against our imperfect union. A union they accused of all the evils in the world - as if the evils that they incur on their own people are magically exempt from their messed up sense of cave-justice. 

The US today is not so much at a crossroads as it is at the edge of a cliff. It has managed to successfully fight oppression from monarchy, slave mongers, fascism, and even Stone Age cave dwellers. It’s been at the edge of this cliff before. Cornered here by itself actually - seven score and nineteen years ago. But something ominous has happened: the same two internal forces that drove us to that Civil War cliff never quite went away. Sadly, one of those forces went into “sleeper cell” mode. The kind we often accuse foreign threats of spawning, like the alien mother in hibernation.  

One score ago America’s domestic sleeper cell was awoken, on the day the two towers were fallen. The no-longer-sleeping alien mother took one look at the two ruling parties of America and picked one to assimilate by eating its insides. Temporarily disguised as a legitimate political party it swiftly pushed the US back to the edge of the cliff. 

The enemy within always has and always will be our own worst enemy. We are now way overdue to declare independence from an archaic party system. A party system that has incurred more damage on our own people than monarchy, fascism, communism, and stone-age cave dwellers combined. I’ve crunched the numbers already, like a hundred times since I thought to myself: this can’t be right. I’m not going to rehash those numbers now, please do your own math. But no matter how you shuffle the numbers, these two American parties, whether you think one is benevolent and the other one is an Alien bitch, are not going to walk away from their gravy train. Even if they know it might save our country, they will sooner conduct it off the cliff. 

Et Tu, YouTube?

Most of the time I really don’t have much use for trying to defend vaccines, or why masks are important. And therein lies our cross to bear. The truth is the majority of people, even the fairly well educated ones, are never going to be experts in most, if any, scientific fields.

I’ve read the occasional books, journals, articles, none of which ever turned me into a scientist. So then what… are we destined to blow a lot of hot air without ever really knowing what we’re talking about? I mean, it’s practically written in our DNA: “Go forth and talk out of your ass because there is ZERO chance you will EVER understand where you came from and where you’re going.” I mean, only the entire meaning of life, that’s all. 

And yet we all get over that existentialist kick in the ass fairly quickly. Well, maybe not that quickly. We spend our first four years on earth (give or take), crying, whining, and throwing tantrums like we are being tortured within inches of our lives by our own DNA. Perhaps in some incomprehensible way, we are. 

But once we figure out how to break the cycle of being stuck in the first Four Stages of Grief (Kübler-Ross Model) during our initiation on earth, our hazing if you will, we eventually find the labyrinth’s exit to that fifth and final stage: Acceptance. The wisest of religious folks even came up with a prayer (The Serenity Prayer for those of us who were raised Catholic) to sooth and remind us of that rite of passage: “God give me the strength to change the things I can, the patience to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I always thought it peculiar that we have to ask a mystical being for that, when we essentially have zero choice in the matter. We might as well pray for oxygen.

Fine. We are more practically “born” into this life the day we discover Acceptance. The Shangri-la of our brief journey through this thing we call life. Just in time to be deemed self-manageable enough to be shipped out of the house for the first time. Away from the mothership, to something us Westerners call Kindergarten. Of course some moms or parents may scoff here, reminding me of the ground zero of kindergarten: Day Care. But not a lot of self-manageable skills there, let’s agree on that.  

So back to our quest to understand science, or undermine it in the case of those who never quite found their way out of the first four stages of grief (especially Anger). Maybe our part is to at least try to understand the basics of science, in order not to stand in the way of ourselves. Besides, it’s true enough: there are a few “mad” scientists out there. There’s nothing wrong with being on guard. 

Upon reading about a certain subject, enough to poke thru the surface, I often proceed to entertain the devil’s advocate for a bit. After all, even science teaches us that to prove something you should also explore how the opposite is or isn’t true. 

So far so good. But all good intentions, if milked for too long, lead to a rabbit hole. In the realm of undermining science, that hole is known as mental masturbation. AKA conspiracy theory.

Which is probably how Occam’s Razor came to be, if I were to take a wild guess. “All else being equal the simpler explanation is the better one.” Seems fair enough, except I’m pretty sure old Occam’s razor cuts both ways.  Oversimplification and overcomplication, opposite  sharpenings of the same blade, will invariably and soon enough make the knife disappear.

……

I was perusing recently through humanity’s new Encyclopedia Brittanica, AKA Google, about the science of masks. To understand better how they work, and sure, how they don’t. So Dr. Google refers me over to the YouTube department, for some dynamic visuals on the subject. As I scroll down the list of lessons on the subject, I notice something a little disturbing: the first two or three video posts are created to positively explain the science behind masks, fair enough. But the subsequent eight or so try to lure you into that rabbit hole of semi-science, pseudo-science, and just downright anti-science. Good grief. Really, YouTube? But more importantly, why. Or should I ask in the new lingo of abbreviations: WTF?

Et tu, Brute? You might as well change your name to YouHub, because you KNOW what the pre-fifth stagers are doing in there. Oh yeah, you perverter of science: they are masturbating their minds like their mental penis will never fall off. And I use the word “penis” in its non-binary form here.

But every dark cloud does eventually collapse down to the earth’s surface, every dark tunnel does invariably have a light at the opposite end. It was at that precise bewilderment that I experienced an epiphany. Those poor souls that dive into the rabbit hole of skepticism without ever resurfacing from it, instead digging deeper down to the second, third and fourth circles of pseudo and anti-science hell, never set out to understand anything in the first place. They set out to kill. They kill what they fear, they fear what they don’t understand. That’s what happens when the unfortunate ones never find their way out of the first four stages of Kübler-Ross. It’s a deafening, maddening pinballing between anger and depression. A nightmare where dark clouds never collapse, where dark tunnels have no light at the other end. 

……

At the end of one of the first realistic disaster films (Earthquake, 1974), Charlton Heston’s gritty semi-hero character has to make an existentialist Sophie’s Choice: survive in the ever-after aftermath of the planet’s worst mega-earthquake ever, along with his young, hot and fleshy lover, or jump into a savage torrent of flooding to rescue his nagging old wife, with the obvious understanding that it would be a certain and fairly instant death. I think you know which one our semi-hero chose.

Apparently that’s what’s required of us: never leave a fellow human behind. Maybe there’s a sixth stage of life, beyond acceptance. A stage where we no longer merely survive. A stage where we thrive. Rather than ridicule, or worse, condemn our fellow humans stuck in the fourth circle of Kübler-Ross hell, maybe we need to jump in the foxhole with them sometimes. Stretch our arm as deep we can down that rabbit hole, in hope that we can pull them up. No need to self-sacrifice in the process, unless it’s that important to you. But the alternative, perpetual disdain and contempt for them, is only going to turn you into the monster you are fighting.

......

“I believe humanity will not merely endure: it will prevail.”

 - William Faulkner on his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.