Current events merit a quick refresher on perhaps two of the most commonly used metaphors about public policies and disasters over the past decade or so -- black swans and Swiss cheese. The terms merit review not because their usage has become hysterical as a means of attracting views and likes and generating ad revenue but because the applicability of the concepts at their core has never been more appropriate for events actually taking place.
Meet Your Metaphors
The black swan metaphor gained prominence via a book published in 2007 by Nassim Taleb which used it in describing flaws in human decision-making stemming from our tendency to confound the LIKELIHOOD of an event with its POSSIBILITY. This tendency poses two problems. First, it leads humans to assume something CANNOT happen simply out of ignorance and a lack of personal experience. Second, it leads humans to confound the PROBABILITY of an event with the MAGNITUDE of the event, resulting in disastrous possibilities not being properly weighted even if they are considered at all. The larger takeaway of Taleb's book was to point out that modern technology makes it easier for humans to create ever more complicated systems which entire collections of engineers are unable to comprehend, magnifying all of these black swan vulnerabilities.
The swiss cheese metaphor is used in nearly every post-mortem analysis of a catastrophic accident in transportation, manufacturing, banking or public health. Physical systems or processes in these sectors are said to have regulations written in blood based upon learnings from prior catastrophes that cost lives but were avoidable in hindsight. Despite reflecting decades of such learnings and stringent efforts at reducing single points of failure, it is still possible for individual oversights or abject failures of specific safety checks and preventative procedures to combine at one time to allow the collective protection of all of those systems to fail and result in disaster. Investigations into these events routinely find MULTIPLE warnings about MULTIPLE failures in MULTIPLE systems were ignored either because the existence of ALL of the failures was not visible to ALL of the participants responsible for operating the system or a single operator simply ignored them all, assuming this time would be no different. Most of the time, a SINGLE failure has no effect. But some percentage of the time, all of the holes in the swiss cheese line up and disaster enters the system at one end and makes its way to the other.
Swans, Cheese and Modern Life
In the modern world, the skies are crowded with thousands of big machines made up of millions of parts that fly at thirty thousand feet. People carry billions of small machines with tens of billions of microscopic parts that can perform billions of tasks per second. People can stare into those devices from a tent in the middle of a desert and order a product manufactured on the other side of the world that will be shipped to them and tracked like the Hope Diamond enroute to their front door. A wild animal can have a chance encounter with another animal destined for a wet market and transmit a new virus that can kill three million people across the globe in three years before public health measures can stop it.
It should already be apparent that the modern world is INCREDIBLY complicated. No single human is capable of predicting the exact response of even a tiny fraction of key systems in our economic, social and political systems to NORMAL fluctuations in inputs, much less a massive change. Given the reference to the two metaphors above, it should already be obvious where this analysis is headed. To avoid burying the lede, the point should be stated very clearly...
The optimal strategy for correcting whatever flaws might be present in an existing, galactically complicated system will NEVER involve turning off all of the monitoring gear, eliminating large numbers of the system's current operators en masse, throwing a tarp over the remaining controls visible from the outside, then leaving the system to free-run at full load and waiting to see what happens.
This is exactly what is happening in the United States. It's exactly what has been happening in other industrialized democracies over the past decade at a slightly slower pace. While the general pattern is not unique to the United States, are there specific factors unique to the United States that make the experience unique?
Bluntly, stated... HELL YES. As useful as randomly discussing some of those factors might be, it is more useful to discuss them in a more hierarchical order... In an order loosely reflecting how they compound on one another and produce a uniquely American problem.
Failure to Enforce Anti-Trust Restrictions - The last material monopoly that was successfully addressed via regulation and litigation was the breakup of AT&T that took effect in 1984. That breakup eliminated barriers to competition in long distance traffic, telecommunications equipment design and manufacturing and advertising that dropped service costs drastically and allowed new technologies to supplant old networks and support a more decentralized internet -- exactly as one would predict when looking at a monopoly in telecommunications.
The dismantling of the Telecom 1.0 technology monopoly directly drove the emergence of a more versatile general purpose technology for transmitting any arbitrary data via IP networks. At the same time, exponential performance improvements in semiconductor density fostered exponential growth in computing power and software languages to implement previously unimaginable capabilities. The combination of networking and compute/software capabilities have enabled the creation of vast distributed systems supporting millions of simultaneous users and the capture and mining of petabytes of resulting information. Companies operating in those sectors have undergone the equivalent financial evolution of Standard Oil from 1870 to 1911 or US Steel from 1901 to the mid 1960s. Consolidation in one business sector begets consolidation in other sectors as they evolve to support thier ever-growing clients so firms related to banking, auditing, insurance and other needs have consolidated in lock step with these goliaths. Despite over a century of evidence of the economic damage from such consolidation, today's goliaths have continued growing with virtually zero limitations and only an occasional speed bump of financial penalties for anti-competitive practices.
Flawed Educational Systems at All Levels - Educational systems at the primary, secondary and college levels have been crippled by dismal funding and poisoned with a careerist, jackpot-style mentality that emphasizes education solely as a means to win a career and progression through the system as a proxy for proving one's suitability to "win" one of those prestigious, well-paying jobs. Lost in that shift has been any focus on teaching history and civics as inherently related topics so citizens emerge with a clear understanding of HOW the American government works and WHY it was designed to operate that way.
Our system wasn't designed by the founders as a "set-it-and-forget-it" system that COULD work unchanged for centuries and SHOULD be left unchanged for centuries. The ability to alter the rules of the game were built into the rules of the game. The founders KNEW the system they devised was flawed but they adopted it as the best that could be done at that time with those actors. Ignorance about basic history and civics has yielded a population who not only fail to recognize the fallacy of Originalist arguments that the solution to problems is to go back to a 1789 blueprint for politics but fail to recognize those espousing this approach are actually attempting to ignore ANY laws that don't fit their goals and are attempting to dismantle the legal processes in place for changing those laws.
Religiosity as a Tool for Political Manipulation -- American business spent the first seventy years of the twentieth century watching the interaction between industrial scale manufacturing and mass media technologies learning first how to identify demands then design, build and sell products to match. The United States suffered virtually no damage to its industrial capacity during World War II and enjoyed a nearly twenty year head start from 1945 to 1965 over the rest of the world perfecting the manipulation of mass media to allow business to stimulate demand for products it chose to make, turning the official business school description of the purpose of marketing on its head. Why bother listening to customers to make what they want when you can just manipulate what they want to what you've already decided to make that's profitable for you?
By 1970, lessons learned by giant corporations were adopted in politics, starting with the Republican Party and Richard Nixon. Leading up to the 1972 election, strategists for Nixon identified that anti-abortion policies were INTENSELY popular with Catholics and a sliver of some Protestant voting blocs. Eager to capture every possible bloc of support to secure himself an ego-boosting blow-out win, Nixon adopted anti-abortion language into the Republican platform. Prior to that cynical decision, issues like birth control and funding for programs like Planned Parenthood had enjoyed bi-partisan support. After that moment, Republicans applied that lesson in future elections on a ever wider range of carefully researched, hot-button "moral issues" and evangelical groups eagerly joined in, hoping to increase their influence clout by appearing to lead powerful movements.
Today, this manipulation of hot-button "moral issues" that allow a party to capture a voter and turn off all other critical thinking brain cells has distorted public debate to the point where the only allowed policy recommendations are concentrated on yard-line stripes towards the end-zones while actual policies capable of solving problems are located all over the field and are completely ignored.
The Substitution of Money for Speech -- Corporations have grown in economic power to dwarf individuals. A majority of individual citizens lack an understanding of civics and the merits of limiting power both in business and government. Businesses have perfected the use of mass media to manipulate public demand for any product. Political parties have learned from business to use the same techniques to perfect the use of mass media to manipulate public perception of issues and policies. Then the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that held that corporations have the same free speech rights as individual citizens. In the case Citizens United, the plaintiff Citizens United (an Orwellian name for a political action committee dedicated to fouling election campaign finance laws to benefit corpporations, not individual citizens) argued they should have been able to pay to have an anti-Clinton (Hillary) film aired on DirecTV and pay for ads promoting the film. Their request had been denied by the Federal Election Committee for dubious reasons and the case went up the appeals ladder, eventually reaching the Supreme Court.
In what is now recognized as a signature move by Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative justices, the majority on the Court took the opportunity to use the case in front of them to not only reject a specific result in a specific case they did not like but to over-reach and establish a vastly wider "principal" of conservative dogma having zero prior intellectual or legal provenance in American law and Constitutional history. Their decision not only held Citizens United had a right to pay to air its film but further held that all limits on corporate spending on any political campaigns were unconstitutional and must be eliminated entirely. Spending money is intrinsically part of disseminating speech so any limit on spending by an individual or association of individuals is a limit on speech itself, a First Amendment violation.
What's transpired since? Arguably, the United States HAS "more political speech", if you measure by minutes of airtime and eyeball reach online. In reality, real citizens are flooded with advertisements crafted by phantom Astro-turf political action committees funded with untraceable "dark money" with Orwellian names like Citizens for Our Fracking Future or Americans for Justice. With unlimited wallets, these organizations bid up advertising costs during campaigns, making it more expensive or impossible for individual candidates trying to avoid PACs to run counter-ads. All of this extra Citizens United speech has an additional perverse benefit to those paying for the ads. While the VOLUME of the ads drowns out any competing ads attempting to convey viable policy ideas, the TONE of the ads turns off the vast majority of voters, helping fuel disgust with and apathy towards the process. This suppresses turnout and makes it easier for those manipulating the message to more carefully segment the remaining "market" and manipulate them into voting as desired.
Back to the Thesis
What is the point? Here it is again.
The optimal strategy for correcting whatever flaws might be present in an existing, galactically complicated system will NEVER involve turning off all of the monitoring gear, eliminating large numbers of the system's current operators en masse, throwing a tarp over the remaining controls visible from the outside, then leaving the system to free-run and see what happens.
The United States has a poorly functioning, understaffed commercial aviation system that has encountering skyrocketing numbers of on-ground and in-air near collisions (and now actual collisions) and jet designs with catastrophic flaws resulting from lax inspection and regulation of manufacturers and contractors.
What is the United States doing in response?
It is dangling an unconstrained retirement offer (with a subliminal threat behind it) to all federal employees, including air traffic controllers. It takes at least two years to become fully certified as an ATC and current ATCs are operating at workloads that no newbie could possibly handle on Day One. And ATC is not a career one can suddenly select as a mid-career shift to fill new vacancies. FAA regulations require new trainees to be no older than thirty years old.
Ukraine, an ally of the United States and of Europe, has been under attack for three years from Russia and has done an amazing job not only defending its territory but providing valuable insight into the effectiveness of modern weapons systems, demonstrating the value of many American systems and the futility of many of Russia. Such insights should be informing trillions in future defense spending over the coming years. It can be argued Ukraine has not only unmasked Russia as a paper tiger but has exhausted much of its remaining economic power, doing more to defeat an American enemy than any strategy devised by American politicians.
What is the United States doing in response?
The American President seems hell bent on aligning America with Russia and abandoning NATO. Trump is planning a meeting with the Russian President -- who just directed a bomb attack on the Chernobyl nuclear plant sarcophagus on February 14 via drone -- while leaving out the President of Ukraine. The President has not only taken to blaming Ukraine for being invaded but has begun referring to its President as a dictator. At the same time, the Vice President is attending NATO conferences and lecturing American allies on their supposed suppression of speech and censorship as the Trump Administration issued edicts banning the Associated Press from the White House until they adopt the term "Gulf of America". The Trump Administration has removed thousands of web pages from government web sites supplying a variety of scientific, financial and medical data paid for by taxpayers and used across industries lest it be used to contradict Trump positions on any issue. Trump's minions also cut staff within the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) which provides safety and security support in nuclear facilities (weapons and power related) throughout the world.
After leaving office in 2020, Trump was indicted on federal charges related to possession and leaking of highly classified national security information. Evidence brought forth with the charges showed Trump stockpiled dozens of boxes of such documents in public rooms within his Florida compound, instructed subordinates with zero clearance to see such documents to move them repeatedly away from FBI agents sent to confiscate them and even transported some of them to his compound in New Jersey where he showed some of them to friends and friendly reporters.
What has Trump done regarding the protection of sensitive government data since taking office?
He has allowed an unelected and unappointed outsider to bring in outside parties and give them completely unrestricted access to numerous federal computer systems, including the EPA, USAID, the IRS and the Treasury's entire payment system handling disbursement of payments for the entire federal government. Who are these outside parties? In some cases, they are TEENAGERS or early 20-somethings who have no college degree or experience in accounting, auditing or even formal software engineering. They just happen to have worked in roles at one of Musk's companies, he likes them so there they are, with access to petabytes of data that could likelly already be replicated to cloud data centers where it could immediately wind up under the control of hackers and foreign adversaries. Imagine if the CEO of a firm worth $30 billion dollars announced to his board of directors that he wasn't sure about the company's computer security so he unilaterally decided to hire his neighbor's college drop-out son to come in and poke around a bit. You know, kick the tires. Imagine if the CEO told his CIO that the kid should get root userid access to every system and the ability to create new users.
Well, what's this kid's name? Has HR at least run a background check on him? I don't know his name but he's supposed to be real smart with them there computers. Just get him credentialed and get out of the way.
Does anyone think that CEO would survive that board meeting? Does anyone think that CEO should survive that board meeting?
During Trump's time under federal indictment -- indictments brought in after months of review by a grand jury that voted to bring in every one of those indictments -- he claimed the Department of Justice had been weaponized to persecute him.
What has Trump done regarding use of the Justice Department since taking office?
Trump has explicitly directed Justice Department leaders to identify anyone within the DOJ who participated in any of the cases against Trump and summarize them up the chain. Trump has explicitly directed DOJ leadership to find SOMEONE in the Biden Administration to prosecute... ...to begin sending a message of retribution. Trump's acting Deputy Attorney General worked for nearly a month to negotiate a written quid pro quo deal with New York City Mayor Eric Adams to drop federal charges against Adams related to foreign corruption involving Turkey and rigging of fire safety inspections on Turkey's behalf. In exchange for dropping the charges, Adams would pledge to support Trump immigration policies within NYC, providing Trump with a partial illusion of "support" for his policies from big Blue cities. In arranging the deal, Trump's lead Emil Bove not only put the quid pro quo part in writing to Adams but to the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York office (SDNY) as well,. Bove stated there were no problems with the legal charges and evidence or the conduct of the agents but that Adams is needed in his role as Mayor to support Trump policies regarding immigration. Perhaps the coup de grace of the quid pro qo is that Bove directed the US Attorney to file to dismiss the charges WITHOUT prejudice, so it remained possible to refile the charges at a later date. Of course, the obvious motivation there is to hold the threat of future prosecution over Adams' head to ensure he continues voicing support for Trump to Trump's satisfaction. This move triggered the resignation of SEVEN United States Attorneys between the SDNY division and DC division.
During Democratic Administrations, Republicans continually threaten to or actually shut down the federal government as a means of attempting to limit increases in the debt ceiling to lower out of control spending on liberal policies.
What are Republicans now proposing with full control of all branches of government?
The hard-ass, "bad cop" Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing a budget that would renew existing tax cuts benefitting the rich and add additional reductions, all forecasted to cost at least $3.3 trillion over ten years. Those House Republican fanatics DO have a plan to pay for that, by cutting Medicare and other health programs crucial to tens of millions of Americans. Of course, the "reasonable" Republicans in the Senate, the "good cops" in the charade, are joining Trump in claiming those programs will NOT be cut. What will happen? The tax cuts will be passed because they've been bought and paid for in the 2024 election. The Medicare cuts will NOT occur because even Republicans can read polls and realize the program is popular with the vast majority of the public. And thus, deficits will rise under Republican legislation by at least $3.3 trillion over ten years while the rich pocket their tax cuts and the wealth equality gap grows larger.
Predicting the Future
The real point behind the main point already repeated twice is this...
Anyone stating they can predict a black swan is already logically adrift. If they truly understood the concept of a black swan event, they would know a true "black swan event" cannot be predicted because, by definition, the event itself cannot even be articulated because it is so foreign to our understanding of reality and the possible. It can only be identified in hindsight. But when an event is raised as a black swan, it shouldn't be blown off as a logical impossibility based on esoteric abstractions about the knowable. An event first identified as a "black swan" should immediately be considered as a non-zero probability with some non-zero cost. Argue about the probability and the cost all day. But if that event involves a system depended on by hundreds of millions of people or has billion or trillion dollar costs, get that topic on the table where it can be considered.
Similarly, don't be tempted into discounting the concerns raised in the public about what is happening because those raising the concerns cannot predict to the month or the day exactly when a SPECIFIC change in a SPECIFIC area will result in a SPECIFIC catastrophe. If Team Trump was ONLY targeting one narrow area of policy, that might be possible. In reality, Team Trump is targeting ALL aspects of government -- in law enforcement, public health, science, workplace safety and finance -- simultaneously without even the pretense of limiting actions to those that are plausibly legal. That widens the range of uncontrolled inputs being applied to an already unknowable system, making exact predictions even more impossible.
Finally, don't get hung up on being provided exact estimates in terms of dollars or people who might be effected. The nature of the damage likely to occur is bad enough at the lowest likely magnitudes to warrant objection. At some level of abstraction, specifics won't really matter. Another few rounds of tariffs that trigger a collapse in manufacturing and job losses? Will it matter if the next possible pandemic kills twenty thousand versus five hundred thousand if better public health systems could have avoided all of those deaths? Superficial oversight of traditional banks and new cryptocurrency markets that temporarily prop up Trump's billion dollar stake in a meme coin that results in another global financial meltdown? A drug approved due to pressure from a donor that harms millions of patients? Lax safety standards triggering a massive chemical plant explosion or a power plant and electrical grid failure? Or maybe just another predictable fire or hurricane season followed by ZERO financial aid from the federal government (ask Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia how his constituents feel about shouldering $3.3 billion in economic losses after Helene without FEMA aid rejected by Trump). Or maybe a collapse in markets for American crops as USAID programs buying those crops and giving them away abroad are cut and all that supply floods domestic markets and tanks prices?
Republicans have control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. There is NOTHING preventing them from proposing and enacting virtually ANY policy they like. Yet , for the most part, Republicans are not governing, they are willingly ceding their power to the rule of one person whose sole motivations involve enriching himself, enriching those willing to stroke his ego and settling petty grievances against anyone who has ever offended him in the past or dares to question his authority going forward.
Nothing pursued to date has any intent or actual likelihood of improving any aspect of life not only for citizens of the United States but citizens of the world. Everything pursued to date increases the likelihood of a catastrophe after a few hundred or few thousand critical people doing jobs few understand are either eliminated or become so overworked that a failure slips by undetected. And another. And another. And a couple more. Until all the holes line up in the Swiss cheese. And a black swan comes marching through those holes from one end to the other and emerges in your neighborhood.
The only thing Americans can be sure of over the coming months is that the harmful effects generated by current actions will not just rain down upon Trump supporters who would surely deserve it. They will rain down on all Americans. And there isn't a umbrella on the planet big enough to deflect the harm back where it belongs.
This is not a drill. This is the real deal.
WTH
