Government Services

 Please Mister Postman

Mister Postman look and see
(Oh, yeah) Is there a letter in your bag for me?
(Please, please, Mister Postman) I been waiting a long, long time
(Oh, yeah) Since I heard from that girl of mine

There is a difference between a government service and a business

The post office is under siege these days.  Since 2006 it has been operating under rules that have assumed it is a business.  Given that its very name is the United States Postal SERVICE, I am not sure why it is assumed to be a business.  It is a government service.

You can choose to use a  business.  You are provided government services.  It may be a business decision that it is too expensive to deliver prescriptions to rural areas, but that is not a governmental decision.  The Post Office has been in existence longer than the United States has had a constitution.  As a society we have decided that while it may be unprofitable, and thus not a good business decision, to deliver some letters and packages, it is still essential to deliver every letter and package. 

 
Business can go bankrupt.  If they do, then the losers are those businesses but also the creditors and customers of that business.  Governments can NOT, by definition, go bankrupt since we as the government are also its creditors and customers.  (yes, I realize that some city governments have gone bankrupt, but that is only because some other government bailed them out.  Governments can truly go bankrupt only if every government also went bankrupt and there was no one to bail them out, e.g. make their customers and creditors whole.)

Government services are NOT supposed to make a profit.  It is nice if they do, but that is not the point.  Trying to force them to make a profit is effectively making it NOT a service and if that is the case, then we should at east be honest and also remove service from the USPS name.

Rigged Elections

 Your Cheatin' Heart

Your cheatin' heart
Will pine some day
And crave the love
You threw away

Winning by cheating is not winning at all.

As we approach the 2020 presidential election, cheating seems to be the topic of the day.  It is my observation that "he who smelt it, dealt it". If someone complains that his opponent will cheat to win, that is a pretty good indication that the person making that complaint plans to cheat to win.  Donald Trump has a long history of cheating.  He even cheated against his children when skiing by tripping them,  https://news.yahoo.com/trump-instilled-competitive-nature-kids-160853221.html.  

The lesson that he instilled is that if you win, it doesn't matter if you cheated in order to win.  I am surprised that his children didn't kill him, but maybe that I am just projecting here.  Just remember this when you hear about rigged elections or that mail-in voting is subject to cheating.  The president has figured out how he would trip Joe Biden to win, and has assumed that Joe Biden wants to trip him to win.  Thank goodness the ramp may be steep for you, Mr Trump, but it isn't that steep for others.  We all are more than willing to let you trip yourself.

Unintended Consequences

 

I Didn't Mean A Word I Said

 I didn't mean a word I said
And if I hurt you, I'm sorry
I didn't mean to lose my head
And if I made you cry, I'm sorry

Sometimes we are the cause things to happen, even if that was not our intention. 

Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren killed George Floyd.  How can that be if Justice Warren died years before George Floyd died?   Chief Justice Warren backed qualified sovereign immunity which the police officers who killed George Floyd used to rationalize their actions.  

What is qualified sovereign immunity?  If a sovereign takes an action, that action is considered to be immune from prosecution.  For example, a claim of executive privilege.  

So can sovereign immunity be claimed if that person was carrying acting on behalf of the sovereign?  This isn't just an idle question.  It is the basis for a US Supreme Court decision in Peirson v Ray in 1967 when it was ruled that “[a] policeman's lot is not so unhappy that he must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he had probable cause, and being mulcted in damages if he does.” Chief Justice Warren  voted in the majority in that decision. 

Qualified sovereign immunity is being used by police officers in their defense against murder in the George Floyd case.  It is entirely possible that the court will agree that they were covered by qualified sovereign immunity, in which case the decision of Justice Warren in 1967 led to the death of George Floyd in 2020.   The fact that Justice Warren didn’t intend George Floyd’s death does not mean that he did not in some way cause George Floyd’s death.  

It is also probable that the court will find that George Floyd's actions by taking drugs led to his death, and that death could not have been foreseen by the police officers not guilty due to reasonable doubt. If the court finds that the police officers are not guilty, then if riots following the Rodney King verdict are any indication, God help us all.

Black Lives Matter

I Will Always Love You

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of
And I wish to you joy and happiness
But above all this, I wish you love

If we are our best, not only black lives will matter. All lives will matter

I thought that my admiration for Dolly Parton had no bounds, but it just reached a whole other level.  Despite not wishing to upset her fans, many of whom do not approve of the Black Lives Matter protests, Dolly recently said that “Of course black lives matter.  Do we think our little white a**es are the only ones that matter?”   She renamed her Dixie Stampede just the Stampede years ago. She said  that " As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. That's were my heart is.  I would never dream of hurting anyone on purpose."

The song “I Will Always Love You” is Dolly’s resignation letter to her longtime boss Porter Wagner.  My own resignation letters have never sounded as beautiful and I admit that I have not always wished my old bosses love.   Black Lives Matter doesn’t say that White Lives Don’t Matter.  It says that All Lives Matter, but Black Lives are in danger.  That is the problem and we should fix it.

 

Caste

Well Did You Evah!

I have heard among this clan,
You are called the forgotten man
(Is that what they're saying, well did you evah!)
What a swell party this is

It isn't enough to make fun of High Society.  Something should be done about the caste system that enables High Society.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson has a new book titled Caste. While I have not yet read the book I am looking forward to doing so.  Meanwhile I have been following Ms. Wilkerson's appearances on her promotional tour.  Unlike Ms Wilkerson's comments during her appearance on Fresh Air, I do not think that caste in the United States is only bipolar; white and black. It is far more nuanced and hierarchical than that. I am: 

• the grandchild of an illegal immigrant (admittedly from Canada); 
• the child of a father who  dropped out of school to work at a low paying factory job; 
• was unable to speak to the only grandparent who was alive during my life because she only spoke Polish and I only spoke English;  
• the brother ( the best man at my wedding and the godfather of my oldest son) of an openly Gay Man; and 
• raised as a Roman Catholic. 

But I graduated from two Ivy League schools and, and earned a higher income as a professional engineer, and I know that I have often been assumed to be a member of a "higher caste". 

I may not have claimed that my ancestry was Swedish, did not attended a military high school but dodged the draft, and while my grandfather did not die of the 1918 Spanish Flu, I know that my father's bother and sister did and I get the year correct, but I too was also never accepted by the upper caste in Manhattan.  I know that the caste system has affected me, and I assume that it also has affected the mental health of those who practice and believe in it.

Survival of the Fittest

If I Were King of the Forest!

What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder?       
Courage! 
What makes the dawn come up like thunder?
Courage!
What makes the Hottentot so hot?
What puts the "ape" in apricot?
What have they got that I ain't got?
Courage!

The lion might be king of the jungle, but not every lion is king.

Survival of the fittest applies to the species, not to the individual.  Survival is an individual game, and the fittest individual doesn’t always win .  If you don’t believe this, I offer the CBS TV Show Survivor as Exhibit A.  It was originally expected that the fittest survivor would “win” this TV game show.  Instead the game is such that the strongest members of the tribes are among the first voted out.  The remaining tribe members do not want to sit across from a fitter player in the final tribal vote.  So the fittest player is almost guaranteed not to be the winner of Survivor.  ( For Survivor fans, I do understand about winning immunity challenges.  I am talking about “blindsides”  after the fittest loses an immunity challenge.)

In the game of life, the fittest individual also does not always win.  The fittest species, of which an individual is a member, does.  That should not be a surprise to anyone.  The Major League Baseball batting champ, or the Most Valuable Player,  often does not play for the World Series winning team. Ted Williams of the Red Sox was my boyhood idol and a great player, but he never won a World Series ring.

Acting like survival of the fittest is the only way to win the game of life is an alternate fact.

Valuing Risk:Part 3

Knock on Wood 

It's like thunder, lightning

The way you love me is frightening

You better knock, knock on wood 

The Risk of dying by being stuck by lighting is made of its Likelihood AND its Consequences

I didn’t expect to revisit the issue of risk again but a recent article by Dan Reed in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2020/07/30/if-covid-19-really-isnt-a-big-threat-to-the-average-airline-passenger-but-no-airline-bothers-to-tell-the-story-does-it-make-any-noise/#66cb955427f6 made me reconsider this.  In the article, it appears that likelihood is being confused with risk.  Risk is the product of likelihood AND consequences, not only likelihood.  For example, the likelihood of being struck by lightning may be very low, but the consequences of being struck by lightning might be very dire.

For example the likelihood of being stuck by lightning is said to be 0.0002% or 1 in 500,000, and the likelihood of dying after being stuck by lighting is close to 100%.  The risk of dying by being struck by lightning thus is also 0.0002%.  The likelihood of contracting COVID-19 on an airplane has been given as  0.013% and there is a 5% chance of dying from COVID -19 after contracting it.  Thus the risk of dying from COVID after flying is 0.00065%.  The risk can be mitigated by altering the likelihood OR the consequences.  The likelihood of being struck by lightning if you seek shelter is 0%. Thus the risk of dying from lightning if you seek shelter during a thunder and lightning storm is 0%.  The likelihood of contracting COVID-19,  if you don’t fly is 0% and thus the risk of dying from COVID-19 after flying, if you don’t fly, is also 0%.  Of course you could also address the CONSEQUENCE of dying from COVID-19 by making sure that you have ICU beds and ventilators available.  Or you could also lower the LIKELIHOOD of contracting COVID-19 by social distancing and only visiting places that require the wearing of masks.

The likelihood of contracting COVID-19 after flying is 76 times less than being struck by lightning.  However the risk of dying after contracting COVID-19 after flying is only 3.8 times less than the risk of dying after being struck by lightning.  If we mitigate the risk of dying from lightning by seeking shelter, then not flying is also a reasonable response.

The likelihood of getting soaking wet if you are unprotected in a rainstorm is 100%.  The consequences of being uncomfortable until you are dry is  100%.  The consequence of dying from being soaked after being in a rainstorm is close to zero.  Thus I was personally reasonable , or so I say, to attend a college homecoming football game 50 years ago in hopes of seeing my team win, because the risk of harm was low, even if the likelihood of getting wet was high.  By the way, my college team lost that game anyway 😒