Monday, January 27, 2025
My dad used to tell me this story. When he was a kid the Indiana state legislature passed a law declaring the value of pi to be 3.0. Apparently, they were tired of all the squabbling and decided to clear up the mess.
I am reminded of that story in our time and what we are facing. Yes, you can have different opinions and views but as Ms. Conway said – they have alternate facts. That’s might work if you are asking what happened. As in “Did John hit Sam first, or the other way around? “But the ratio of a circumference to its diameter is the same regardless of its size and how you measure it or what units you use. You may not be able to express it exactly using a number system but it is universally the same.
My dad also talked about Gallileo. When Gallileo got in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church for saying that the Earth went around the Sun. It was said that at his trial he recanted, but as he walked out of the court room whispered, “It still moves.”
I’ve read accounts that say that is not true. Maybe it is maybe it isn’t, but he was right and the Church was not. Four hundred years later the Church admitted so. These things take time – you got to understand. It was also said that Gallileo asked a cardinal to look through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter (another sinful statement). The cardinal refused. I mean, what would have happened if he looked and saw the moons? Would he tell the truth of what he saw and go against his employer? Not a good carear move. Better to not look.
That sort of thing is similar to the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. I remember when I was working at Western Electric we were creating some of the most sophisticated injection molds in the world to make wire splice connectors. One of the engineers told me about a Bell Labs engineer claiming some sort of plastic couldn’t be made. Well, someone made it. They had a big conference. The triumphant conclusion of which was the holding up of that plastic in front of the face of the Bell Labs engineer and proudly asking, “What do you see?” The answer was, “I don’t see anything.”
Yes, truth sometimes has a hard time getting out. Eventually, it usually does. It took the British Navy seventy years to adopt the practice of sailors eating citrus to prevent scurvy. Even though they knew it to be true. Why? I don’t know. Put it under Ain’t to proud to beg. Yes I am!
So here we are with a guy who is going to be heading up the Defense Department who knows nothing about defense or running a large organization. Who has been a blowhard on Fox News. Who has ideas that have already been pointed out are in direct contradiction to the department. At his hearing he admitted he didn’t know much, if anything, about the details of running the Defense Department. He said he would have people working for him that knew. But here’s the thing. This administration is claiming they will wipe out all the experts. Will they suceed? Anyone who has been hired by the U.S. government in the last one or two years can be fired without cause. So they might start there. So many are imagining a government whose President speaks in random words – not sentences, appointing underlings who know nothing, who fire the people below them who know how to actually run their agencies. How will the agencies function? Well, we got a taste of that last time. How will those agencies function? They won’t.
We have a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. We have a threatening bird flu pandemic, and we have a person nominated to head up Health and Human Services that doesn’t believe in vaccines. Fortunately, during the last pandemic we developed MRNA methods for creating vaccines. Now the question will be can that be developed and deployed without someone getting in the way? Probably not.
Meanwhile, eggs are at an all time high and the headlines say those prices may stay high forever. Gas is up. Do you think Mr Art of The Deal can beat Joe Biden’s gas trading? I don’t think so. And to compllete the tri-fecta of economic pain for the average person the Republican Congress has a tax bill that will punish those folks. I mean there isn’t even a fig leaf on it. At least when Paul Ryan screwed us over he pointed out that a few crumsb fell off the table. Now? Well, many of the tax exemptions for average folks expire this year. And there are plans to tax other normal things regular people depend on. Ah well, too bad.
The underling President, Elon Musk, is busy telling far right Nazi groups in Germany that it’s okay to give the Nazi salute and that others need to get over it.
The President is still saying he’ll impose tariffs on other countries as punshment. Punishment to whom? It’s his hammer and boy does he want to use it. So what if it hits him in the forehead? He’s threatened Russia with sanctions. Great. Do you know how much business the Russians do with us? LIke nothing. Sounds good, if you buy the argument the tariffs hurt the country being tariffed. It doesn’t btw.
What is going to implode first? It’s hard to say.
Ayn Rand wrote in – was it The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? – ( I can’t remember they kind of run together in my mind ) … Well she wrote about the train signalling system in New York completely breaking down and the workers asked, “What should we do?” The answer was to use the old way – walking with lanterns to signal.
I just read that the war in Sudan has left a large part of the country in desperate straights. Aid workers and supplies can’t come in because the aid workers get attacked, shot, and killed. The food and supplies are stolen. So the locals have banded together in small groups to help each other. Forming food kitchens, medical facillities, etc.
Are we on about to take to the lanterns? To form our own ways of helping our neighbors? Without the government. I once read that is doesn’t matter how a system is supposed to work; it matters how it works in its failure mode. The Dems tried and succeeded. The Republicans don’t even try, and they don’t suceed, but boy do they have a great PR machine.
What I have read about the Democrats failure to win the Presidency blames several things: an insulated group of high priced consultants and a failure to connect to local groups. I have read what Bernie, AOC, and the young man who survived the shooting in Florida (which one? I know) that is now involved in politics are advocating more honest straight forward ways of dealing with problems and these will take bigger steps. They are called out as liberals, and that is tagged as a bad thing. The Republicans on the other hand yell, “Tax and Spend” about the Dems, but now at the rallies it is completely disconnected from any basis in fact or reality. This has become their base’s new reality – it’s a fantasy.
It seems both parties are entrenched in their own ways of holding onto power. AOC asked for money the other day (well, every day it seems). One of the comments was, “What are you going to use it for?” and another asked, “Don’t we pay you to do that already?”
What she and David Hogg (that’s the kid’s name!) are advocating is to work outside the normal groups, to form new groups, to set new priorities to strengthen and transform the Democratic Party. Will that work? Can it succeed? I don’t know, but I don’t see anything else.
MSNBC has had a huge falling off of viewership after the election. People are exhausted and hearing the same stuff repeated show after show – turned folks off. They’ve had enough.
I heard a guy being interviewed on NPR. He was talking about transformative change. Not just advocating for a cause but figuring out how to actually ask your elected officials to do something for your cause. His contention was that we don’t ask enough of the people who agree to help. I’m not sure I agree with that. However, I think that if you are going to try and change things you must be very specific and focused on how you are going to do it, and how you are going to direct your fellow volunteers. I am not going to sign a petition and then give $25 to “send a message” to whomever, because they ain’t listening.
I would like to hear more about how someone spent the last $5, $10, or $25 and what it accomplished.
No more bitchin’ – action! (NMB-A!)
Yeah. time for a nap.
How Trump will bring down the price of eggs:
(Hint: Didn’t he say he’d turn it around?)
Leave a Reply