Rick Kinnaird

Day 953 Friday August 16, 2019

446 Days until the 2020 election and 528 days until the Inauguration

“It’s complicated.” (No, it’s not.)

The Mystery of Mitch revealed.

My first real job was working for Western Electric in a factory. We made the hardware that the phone companies used to break out pairs of wires from large cables that ran out of the central offices to your home. This included hardware for electric protection from lightning or from a line that had picked up added electric current by running next to a higher powered electric line. The fuse thingee that did that dual job was called a “unit protector.” It was a screw top hollowed piece of brass (think 50 caliber machine gun spent shell) that housed a slug of lead, spring loaded. It also housed two pieces of carbon separated by a ring of porcelain. The idea being that the carefully separated carbon would only allow so much electricity to pass. Therefore if your line ran next to a high powered electric line and picked up extra current it would be bled off by the separated carbon. The lead and the spring were for lightning. If a huge spike came the lead would melt, the spring would push and break the connection. It was because of unit protection that no one in the old Bell System ever got killed by lightning or electric overload. 

We put these unit protectors in blocks of plastic with cables running out the bottom. The units were called the N-Type unit protector. The story goes that the Bell Labs engineer asked the Western Electric engineer what he wanted to call it and the Western Electric engineer said “anything” (you want to call it.) They had a bad connection (this was like 1929) and the Labbie heard “N,” hence N-type.

When I came to the factory as a bright eyed college educated know-it-all everyone said that the N-type job was complicated because there were so many different types of unit protector models and few if any knew what they all were or even how many different types there were. “It’s very complicated.” I was told.

“There’s different types of unit protectors, different lengths of cables, different number of unit protectors in a block, and different kinds of cables used, depending. It’s complicated.” Is what I was told.

I looked at the various types (ie models). Turns out the numbers were 2,4,4,2.

That is two types of actual unit protectors we could screw into a block. Four different lengths of cables, four different models of blocks of block to hold various number of unit protectors (I think 10, 12, 25, and 50), and two different types of cable: plastic or lead.

I laid it out in a grid: length of cable by number of unit protectors in a block (that’s a 4×4 grid for a total 16 different types). Each block in my grid could have either lead or plastic cable and one kind or another of unit protector. (that’s 2×2 or 4). Therefore, 16 models times 4 was 64. that was the number of different types of N-Type unit protectors Western Electric made – 64. With one exception, they had one wacky one that took a different unit protector so the math was (4x4x2x2)+1=65.

I had made clear something that had been considered “complicated” for 40 years.

Wendy’s used to run an ad campaign that said they’d cook your burger anyway you wanted it, and add whatever you wanted, just for you – 256 different ways. It was complicated, there were so many choices: pickles, mustard, tomato, mayo, onion, lettuce, ketchup, cheese. So many choices. I could only come up with 255 combinations. I ended up listing out all the combos. Then it hit me. A plain burger, no toppings was what I was missing. I figured out that you can lay this out on a single 8 bit byte (oh man tech meets (meats? ha ha, I’m a riot!) burgerland.) You lay out 8 check boxes, either the customer wants it or they don’t. How many choices are there? It two to the eight power or 256. The box I forgot was when it was all unchecked (ie all zeros.) 

In both cases people told me it was complicated. It’s not. You have to take some time to think about it. To lay out the problem, until it becomes clear in your mind. (and then some idiot friend (you know who you are!) will come along and say, “Yes. Of course, isn’t that obvious?”)

So now we get to politics. Well, let’s start with religion. Or more specifically morality. The minister who baptized me once asked my brother, “Can you think of a new sin?” (The answer is “No.” Just in case you were racking your brain.) The point being that the things that are considered sins are pretty well known. Now, let’s move to politics.

Specifically, let’s look at Mitch McConnell and his actions in the last few years. They seemed bizarre to me. “Why would he do that?” I’d ask myself. “It’s complicated.” I was told.

Based on my experience with “complication” my antenna immediately went up to say, “No, it’s not.” It may take some paying attention, but complicated? I doubt it. Sometimes you have to wait and ponder things. You may have to wait on new evidence to emerge. You may be looking at the problem in the wrong way. But once you put all the pieces together (and scrap the ones that aren’t part of the situation, but you didn’t know it at the time.) Then the problem can be, usually, easily defined. (Leading to your idiot friend saying, “Well, yes. Of course.”)

Sometimes the problem and it’s answer are staring you in the face and you can’t believe it. Like the 90 meter wave that hit Crete and wiped out the Minotians. Okay, not a good example: how about the valence of an atom being thought to be one value when it was really another? Hence, Linus Pauling couldn’t construct the DNA molecule, but Watson and Crick did because they asked, “What if?” Or what about the death of the Roman Republic? It died because everyone thought that it couldn’t (die).

Most things that are “complicated” are that way because there is too much information needed for us to hold it all in our brains to figure it out. DNA and what each part does is an example. On one level, it’s not complicated: four atoms. On another it’s super complicated because there are so many of them and they are put together in so many different combinations and structures. In order to understand DNA, we as humans need to construct building blocks of strings of the stuff and try to figure our what those little parts are doing. It’s complicated because there is so much stuff.

But Mitch McConnell? Is what he has done complicated in comparison? 

If you assume that we elect basically good people, who believe in the values of this country (however you wish to define them) then McConnell’s behavior doesn’t make much sense.

But if you look at his actions and say to yourself, “Based on the actions alone, what do I think is going on?” In other words, “What is motivating Mitch McConnell to act the way he is acting?”

Well, it then becomes pretty obvious. He’s a greedy little self-serving man, who doesn’t give a damn about you or me, or this country. He’s in it for all he can get, with a weird twist that I haven’t quite figured out. That is “Why is he nominating all these unqualified people to judgeships?” I think, like the 90 meter wave, the answer is staring me in the face, and like those poor bastards several millennia ago. I don’t want to believe it, but the answer seems to be, “Because I can.”

Trump may be more criminal than McConnell, but McConnell is more traitorous than Trump. By that I mean he has done more things to bring long term harm to this country than Trump. But as a team? They have been wrecking this country and everything it has stood for.

This isn’t about left versus right, conservative versus liberal. This is about who we are as a people and what we stand for.

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m done for now.

Exeunt, stage left.

446 Days until the 2020 election and 528 days until the Inauguration

PS Komodo I dunno