Monday’s Review of Broken Things
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Future, Self Driving Cars, Culture

Several unlikely gears managed to grind to a new position this past week increasing the stress on all of us. What were once smoothly running machines are struggling to break free from obstruction in many. Obstruction is a major thing now. The resulting pressures are stressing the entire planet but particularly the old government machinery that is more and more out of alignment.

The gear analogy seems increasingly appropriate as we are being brought down by problems, not in the new fully electronic systems, but the old mechanical ones. That has been a nasty surprise as we now know the difference between mechanical systems and fully electronic systems that, whatever their problems to be discovered, are incredibly more efficient and easier to maintain. Unless they are filled with very old code but that is another story and a different analogy.

Naturally now these problems are appearing in old mechanical systems that should have long since been replaced but have not. Like everything else from now on everything is interrelated and integrated and that includes failure at multiple levels.

For 18th century representative governments, the foundational gears for the modern nation state, the whole thing is really beginning to look like it needs to be pushed behind the barn and left to rust.

The American Trump disaster has reached the point that some whole mechanisms have ground to a halt while others are spinning out of control and may explode into flying gears and sharp pieces. Needless to say a recently installed and important piece has proven to be really shoddy, poorly designed and just defective. That piece, called Trump, didn’t fit at all and is obviously jamming itself in a way that may not be repairable. And our warranty lapsed a couple centuries ago.

The systems that installed that piece are also defective or this wouldn’t have happened. Now this is going to require a full overhaul and no one knows how to do that anymore. Many people are trying to pretend they don’t hear the knocks, bangs and frightening racket but everyone else is trying to figure out if the whole thing is going to end up catching fire and exploding. Trump is wearing out very fast and has been stripping teeth and may end up being only a spinning disk that doesn’t engage with anyone but himself. We’re almost there.

Things are bad enough that Americans are seriously trying to do the right thing at the death of Senator John McCain. But what is that? He was a heroic prisoner of war who spent his life working fairly independently and, often, saying what needed to be said. But he was firmly committed to a party that has disintegrated into a criminal gang and brought Sarah Palin into national politics. We are all prone to hubris and mistakes and he, unlike almost everyone else in modern politics, admitted error and took responsibility. But, in the end, I think he will pay the historical price for going along when he should have called bullshit and gotten out.

Our only surviving political hero made terrible choices that contributed to the disintegration of the system and now, even he, is gone. And he took the last vestiges of national political honor with him. Who wants to die and be remembered for Sarah Palin?

Just to cover the other aging mechanical things throwing gears and parts as they disintegrate, Britain is facing BREXIT without an exit agreement that makes the disaster exactly what it was always going to be. All because the oldest parts of the population, in attitudes not necessarily age, are too crude for 21st century diversity. They only want to sync with old, rough 19th century gear trains, and want to grind up all other kinds. Not a way to survive but they will learn that eventually, I hope.

Australia, that seemed to be trundling along at least, started grinding badly with gears at the top of the government grinding badly. No one seems even sure exactly how many things have broken. That’s a really bad sign. Clunk, screech, clunk.