YouTube Blues…

Yea, I’m gonna ramble tonight… got absolutely nothing better to do than listen to music and break in a new keyboard. 

Thinking about the Problem…

Back in the days when I did useful work for a living, aka, shift supervisor in a pocket size little chemical batch plant, there was a situation that took several days, the better part of a week, to resolve. One of our distillation systems was misbehaving in a most novel manner. Damn thing simply refused to run, and no one including yours truly could figure out why. It was a head scratching cuss and discuss kind of problem, way off the book and nowhere in the history or the horror stories.

After a couple of days, when all the conventional things had been tested and dismissed as the driving cause, the situation came to a standstill. As the production line emptied out downstream of the bottleneck we all just shook our heads and, each to our own best guess, started thinking outside the box. What MIGHT make the system behave like that? It had to be something, and the general consensus was we were not on the bad side of any witches powerful enough to tinker with the laws of physics.

After a twelve hour shift where the situation had not changed in the least the operator in charge of the system wrote in her logbook “thinking about the problem.” Everyone chuckled, and no one said anything formal, she’d told the absolute truth. That was the function of the operator logbooks, to pass those critical tidbits of information shift to shift so that even if things were not running smoothly the oncoming operator had a good handle on the system status, what had been tried and to what results. The logs eliminated a lot of duplicated effort and made it easier to know what remained to be tried to get things back on track. The operator logs were a most useful thing, an evolved system and convention that shy of gross neglect or mass calamity were off limits to management critique. They were the operator’s logs, we had our own.

That distillation system was not a simple thing, but it was nowhere near, not even close, to being as complex as any social system, which brings me to the point of this post.

The social system which is the United States of America is not running right, not at all, and as far as I can see no one has enough of a workable handle on the ultimate why to attempt a repair. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about the problem. You can call this my log entry on the subject.

The Migration…

A small factoid crossed my path today, one I haven’t validated but have no reason to challenge. I heard that Oklahoma City now has a higher per capita concentration of gays and lesbians than San Francisco. That sounded pretty strange to me, didn’t make much sense at all. Why would that have happened? You’d think the LGBT folk would migrate to where they were more accepted. OKC and the local redneck regimes just really are not all that enlightened and tolerant. Why would the LGBT folk stay in, or migrate to, where they’re really, really not wanted?

 Took a bit, but only a bit, to figure out a plausible reason.  Now, the reason I came to could get me seriously flamed by the above mentioned segments of society, kind of doubt they’d want to admit to it, but still it does make sense. Let me dare the dragon here and set down the foundation of my thought.