Spilled Milk

You are now entering the no tears zone.

I learned of the 911 attack when the phone next to my hospital bed rang incessantly. I picked up and my then wife said “TURN YOUR TV ON RIGHT NOW!” I did so and as this was twenty two years ago and through an opiate fog as I was experiencing my first kidney stone, I think what I recall is this:

Both towers had already been hit by the time I got the call. I just laid there looking at it. The international voice carrier I used to work for had a switch share with General Telecom on the 105^th floor of the north tower.

One of my wife’s cousins had been there for the 1993 bombing. She was in a cafeteria in the south tower and when she saw the debris falling from the first impact to the north tower, she didn’t even return to desk, she took off running, skipping the elevators. We heard she was safe some time between the collapse of the south and north tower.

A college friend reported that his brother, a career military man, was in the Pentagon, but his office was in another section, and he was fine.

The voice carrier had equipment in the famous carrier hotels at 60 Hudson and 111 8^th Avenue. I’d worked in both of those facilities but had never been to the offices in the north tower. I had taken a couple calls from people who worked there in the prior year, but didn’t really know any of them. They were above the impact and did not get out.

I watched. I slept. I got on IRC, and one of the regulars in our channel was missing. He was living in New Jersey, going to school in NYC, and riding the PATH train to the final station in the underground of the WTC. Things were a bit busy, we didn’t hear from him for five days.

Despite having left the voice carrier, I ended up spending a week in NYC working on the telco aspect of the cleanup. This was well after the recovery efforts, I remember looking out a window in 60 Hudson the last night the vertical memorial lights were lit. Tribeca was an absolute ghost town and the power cables were above ground, protected by little asphalt berms with wooden covers over the top.

And a final coda. Seven years after the attack I agreed to cat sit for a friend of a friend. She was introducing me to her furry friends and I asked about the guy in a picture with her. He had been a restaurant manager in the south tower and his life insurance had paid for her sprawling Victorian bed & breakfast.

Attention Conservation Notice: An annual day of mourning would be fine, this annual day of politicized wallowing in what has become a distant second in terms of civilian deaths can stop any ol’ time now. If you’re into the whole clash of civilizations just click close, because this will piss you off.

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Reality of the 2020s:

2,977 civilians died on September 11^th, 2001. More Americans than that died every day of the 37 days between January 2^nd and February 7^th of 2021. The last day that Trump was in office 3,215 people died. We’ve cooked the books in this area a number of ways, but you can’t do that with excess mortality. There are a variety of scientific reports about it but nobody disagrees that we hit the million dead mark some time ago.

The last smallpox case in the world was that of Ali Maow Maalin in Merca, Somalia, when I was ten years old. He survived that, only to die of malaria while performing polio vaccinations to tamp down an outbreak during 2013.

We have, as a species, become a bit confused about what truly matters. Crushing infectious diseases was a fervently wished for godlike power for all but the most recent century of our species existence. We’re throwing that away, one missed inoculation at a time.

Scissoring:

During a recent call with a person who is interested in influence operations they used the term scissoring and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. For those who just got internet access last week, this term today is applied to lesbian couples vigorously rubbing themselves together for pleasure.

Once I regained my seat and calmed a startled tuxedo cat, I heard the explanation and while the term could use some work the underlying concept of The Covington Scissor is clear. Ross Douhat’s summary is good:

In a short story published last October, “Sort by Controversial,” Scott Alexander imagines a Silicon Valley company that accidentally comes up with an algorithm to generate what it calls a “Scissor.” The scissor is a statement, an idea or a scenario that’s somehow perfectly calibrated to tear people apart — not just by generating disagreement, but by generating total incredulity that somebody could possibly disagree with your interpretation of the controversy, followed by escalating fury and paranoia and polarization, until the debate seems like a completely existential, win-or-perish fight.

Just look around, the internet is crawling with examples.

Algorithms:

I am becoming a little more post-algorithmic with each passing day. Twitter is shite, I only keep a no follower sock for when people send me links. The trends are laughable since blue checks became easily purchased rather than hard won honors. I can’t speak to Facebook, having ceased to use it eleven years ago. I use YouTube but I have a browser extension that lets me banish channels that offend my sensibilities. I instantly terminate:

• Fox, Newsman, OANN, and any of their imitators.

• Any occasional right wing extremist they slip in, Andy Ngo for example.

• Any wildlife documentary channel with some photoshopped thumbnail.

• Lately any channel using the keywords INSANE or TERRIFYING.

Thanks to this combination of no tolerance for agitprop, and quietly using “Do not recommend” for things that just don’t interest me, say wildlife documentary clips in a language other than English, I’ve pretty well scared YouTube into never showing me anything new. Just they other day I got a little popup dialog asking if I wanted them to find me some fresh stuff, and I agreed.

Overall their system is just … it’s not right. I found a physiotherapist I liked for my nagging sprained knee. I do not need to watch six videos about each of the 206 bones in the human body. I watched a video about nootropics, since I’ve had really good luck with one called Noopept. This turned me on to boron, which has also been really effective for me. Again, I do not need to watch a clutch of videos about every single purported supplement under the sun.

The only algorithms I like are the ones I’ve created for myself. Content in Inoreader arrives in a serial fashion from sources I hand picked. I’ve made some rules to do things like automatically turning some of them into PDFs. I used to have this with Twitter streaming, but alas, Elmo is despoiling that global common, so I now keep watch for its successor(s).

Appropriate Mourning:

2,977 Americans died in the 911 Attack because “I don’t think anybody could have predicted” … except that Tom Clancy published Debt of Honor in 1994. And we might want to revisit Rainbow Six from 1998.

If you could manage to call up one of the COVID19 deceased, what do you think they’d say?

Some would be angry – “Avenge me!”

But I think most would say “Please tell me we learned our lesson, so that my untimely death served some greater purpose.”

If YOU have learned something about public corruption, disinformation, or the endless sleaze they facilitate, why don’t you curl up your fist and strike a blow for objective reality? Because right now a failure to do that might get the following inscribed in your tombstone, assuming there’s even someone left to bury you.

“A waste of a perfectly good pair of opposable thumbs, but in the end at least he was biodegradable.”