Monday December 7, 2020 (18 days til Christmas)
Election Day -34
45 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
First off I wish to apologize for my bad spelling in the previous titled screed:
“Breath In, Breath Out” should have been “Breathe In, Breathe Out”.
My excuse is I went to The Dan Quail School of Spelling.
(Get it? Quail should be Quayle. Ha ha ha – potato po-ta-toe.)
Speaking of Dan, we went to the movies together. Alex and I went to see “A Few Good Men.” On the way out I saw this short little guy in a white wind breaker. He seemed like he was being childishly obstinate. A woman was bent over looking directly into his face, practically at right angles. Her body language seemed to be saying, “Well, what do you want?” His body language seemed to be saying, “I don’t wanna.” This after what I presumed to be an earlier parental comment from the woman of, “You can’t have that. It’s either A or B. C isn’t available.”
This was all taken in by me in a second or two. It was at this point in time that I realized it was Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn. She was considerably taller than he.
(Interestingly, the bio facts on-line say Dan is 6’0” and Marilyn is 5’ 5”or 6”)
That night I would have guessed him at 5’ 5” and she taller than that.
I turned to tell Alex who I was looking at. Alex was four or five. He had no idea and no interest. I had turned to my left to tell Alex and was beginning to turn my head back to my right when my view was blocked by a young man who seemed to be as wide as, well, a Sumo wrestler. He was looking right at me. Chewing some pistachios I think.
I decided it was time to leave. Marilyn was still bent over Dan with that body language of “Well? What is it going to be?” and he “I don’t want to.”
But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about. First off, it was snowing this morning.
I’ve missed the cold and not seeing snow. It’s beginning to feel a lot like – Inauguration Day.
While my coffee was heating up I flipped on the TV and they were talking about how 79 years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked. One of the three historians on said something that really caught my attention, “Just because you aren’t looking for it, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” This in regard to assumptions.
I thought about Ayn Rand and the sentence she repeated over and over again in one of her books, either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. “Check your assumptions. One of them is wrong.”
I thought about Genghis Khan. How he was continually underestimated and how the opponents assumptions turned out, over and over again, to be wrong. When he attacked St. Petersburg he did so via the frozen river. They put cleats on their horses and walked on the ice. No one attacked from the river side. It therefore was not defended. His army walked right in.
Because all his men were on horseback they could cover fifty miles a day. The average army at the time would walk, covering seven to fifteen miles a day. On a forced march they could do twenty-five. Khan’s army would show up, capture a city, demand tribute, get it and be gone. The city, not seeing them anymore, assumed they were gone and stopped paying tribute. After a number of cities did this Genghis said enough and instituted new policies. He killed everyone. Why screw around? Bad assumptions on the earlier cities’ part.
What was the assumption on The Challenger? That it wouldn’t explode because none of the other space shuttle’s had?
There is the discussion of “A Black Swan Event.” Something that seemingly comes out of nowhere and changes the course of events.
Some might argue that’s what happened with the Covid pandemic. But is that true?
It certainly is for the White House. In the sense that they knew it was coming and choose to ignore it and, I guess, hope it would go away. But even that is being generous. They knew. It’s not that they didn’t see it coming. Can you imagine if you were the captain of a ship in the Navy and you saw another ship coming straight for you and you did nothing? Especially, if you saw it, knew it, and had time to take action? But instead you did nothing. Just let it happen?
That is essentially what the White House did.
Most “out of the blue” events can be shown in retrospect to be known by someone. Yet they were ignored or discounted.
(To Be Continued)
PS Mincemeat!
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