Daily Archives: November 19, 2009

We’ve all heard the sto­ries about the government’s web­site, Recovery.gov, and they are replete with tales of errors that, were they to occur in a busi­ness, would get the peo­ple respon­si­ble arrested or sued.

A county with 50 jobs cre­ated, only upon closer scrutiny no jobs were cre­ated at all, but exist­ing employ­ees all got raises.  Or a new cen­tral air con­di­tion­ing plant was installed.  Or the park­ing lot resur­faced.  Or a bet­ter brand of cof­fee put in the lunchroom.

Then there are the non-existent Con­gres­sional dis­tricts.  Quite a few of them.  Mil­lions spent in places which don’t exist.  A sim­ple cler­i­cal error, we are told. Could hap­pen to anybody.

No. It couldn’t. It could hap­pen only to an idiot who didn’t insist on com­puter pro­grams at least as good as what the owner of a $10 mil­lion plumb­ing whole­sale com­pany would insist upon. I used to do these things.  When a cus­tomer num­ber is entered it is checked by the com­puter to see if it is a valid num­ber. If it isn’t the entry isn’t accepted.  The same goes for

• a part number
• a sales­man number
• a unit of mea­sure (foot, box, each, coil, pound, dozen, etc.)
• a gen­eral ledger (account­ing chart) number
• stock quan­tity
• a ven­dor number
• a ship date

Every time some­thing was entered that could be checked it was. The oper­a­tor couldn’t enter an invalid sales ter­ri­tory because the sys­tem wouldn’t allow it. This was in 1979 on rudi­men­tary mini-computers with 10-megabyte hard dri­ves and 256K of mem­ory for the whole com­puter with four work­sta­tions. They don’t make a cell phone today with those limitations.

Today with all the lightening-fast hard­ware and unlim­ited on-line stor­age these geniuses can’t check to see if a Con­gres­sional dis­trict exists before assign­ing X mil­lion dol­lars of Stim­u­lus money to it.  The sys­tems I worked on would ship an order, cut an invoice, record the pay­ment, do the pay­roll, and at the end of the month the gen­eral ledger had bet­ter bal­ance to the penny.

Now they think they’re OK of they’re only off a bil­lion or so because they sent money to peo­ple, but they don’t know who, who work some­where, just where is uncer­tain, in places that don’t exist.

And they say com­puter pro­gram­ming is hard.  Even a child could do it.  Do this well, any­way.  And get paid $18,000,000 for it, too.

What???  Oh!  And I for­got Chris Matthews.  And if you’re won­der­ing what O.J. Simp­son, Sarah Palin, Andy Warhol, Nancy Pelosi, and Oh!  Chris Matthews have in com­mon… here ’tis.

In a New York Times bloghet­tini called “The Moment” may be found the fol­low­ing passage:

The sim­plic­ity of Warhol’s method — straight­for­ward por­traits shot with the Big Shot cam­era — gives the tiny images (4 1/4″ x 3 3/8″) a purity and sin­cer­ity that belies the radi­ance and aura of great­ness com­ing from the sit­ters. Even today, there is some­thing tingle-inducing…

OK.  That explains Warhol and we know who’s sus­cep­ti­ble to tin­gles, but how’d Sarah, Nancy, and O.J. get in there?

Because this is very weird, that’s how.

In 1994 O.J. Simp­son was arrested for mur­der and two mag­a­zines ran his mugshot on their cov­ers.  There was a to-do about it because Time “enhanced” the photo to make it more threat­en­ing. Take a very good look at them because there will be a test.

The O.J. Mag­a­zine Covers

The Moment may be found HERE.  Take a good look at the pic­ture #9. O.J. shot in 1977.  A good artist is sup­posed to be able to look beyond the sur­face to cap­ture a more com­plete real­ity and put it on can­vas or in a sculp­ture. But a Polaroid? Warhol takes a photo of a foot­ball star and it looks essen­tially like his mug shot 17 years later when he’s arrested for butcher­ing his ex-wife and a waiter.

Now look in the upper left-hand cor­ner of the Newsweek cover.  See it

Health Care: Who’s afraid of “Rationing”?

Rationing?  Death Pan­els, any­one? And the scare quotes around Rationing show that it was as silly and impos­si­ble then as it is now.  Oh! Know any­body over 64, no mat­ter how at-risk, who got a flu shot?

That’s how we get O.J., Saracuda, Andy, Nancy, and Chris together in the same blog post.  Unre­lated things hap­pen­ing over a 32 year span all focused right here.

Carl Jung would call it syn­chronic­ity.  I told you it was weird.

And mono­chro­matic too!