Angina Monologue 8

His Majesty has found a new way to eat his porridge: Flavored with shredded ham and Swiss cheese, with a fried egg on top.

It’s a recipe I encountered while enjoying Brother Marriott’s hospitality on a recent business trip. I’m already regretting that I mentioned it to His Majesty, because now Palpatine enjoys breakfast more than ever; and after he’s enjoyed his breakfast, he’s certain to start monologuing.

Particularly when the morning paper provides so much added grist for the mill.

I’ve heard you complain about being made an offender for a word. Well, here’s a case of being made a violator for a word, and being fined better than $50 million as a result.

You’ll recall that LANS lost 90% of their management fee for running LANL this year, because some idiot put organic kitty litter and nitrates together in a waste drum at WIPP, and the thing blew open, spreading radioactive contamination and killing hundreds of people. Oh, dear. Except that no one was actually killed or even seriously endangered, because the drum contained low-level waste; and a minuscule quantity of radioactivity, detectable only with sensitive instruments, actually got out of the facility.  The only people that would fly into a panic over that are idiots or American voters. But I repeat myself.

Incredibly, DOE is now estimating costs of half a billion to reopen WIPP. Half a billion. A dollar isn’t what it was when the Cold War ended, but I still cannot believe that a tithe of that is real costs; the rest is bureaucratic make work.

The paper is reporting today that the investigation has uncovered the root cause of all this. A stenographer in a meeting was told “use inorganic kitty litter” and heard “use an organic kitty litter.” I am not making this up. You can’t make up [stuff] like that. I don’t know how The Onion stays in business, frankly.

I have mentioned before that I feel it my duty to faithfully report His Majesty’s remarks in all their pungency. But sometimes I just have to substitute a euphemism.

And no one caught it. Not one person reading the directive that came out of that meeting wondered how it could be right to specify organic kitty litter as an absorbent for nitrate solutions. Not one person following those instructions questioned them. Once the directive had been dictated, it was apparently graven in stone, ex cathedra, So Let It Be Done.

DOE is suggesting that there was a grave management failure in failing to have someone with sufficient high-level technical knowledge review the directive before it went out. Oh, of that there can be no doubt. There can also be no doubt that the precise details of this failure will be misdiagnosed with laser precision.

I wish His Majesty would quit bringing up lasers.

It is tempting under such circumstances to take the man at the very top and make an example of him. Sometimes this is appropriate. For example, after reviewing the video logs, I approved wholeheartedly of your actions towards Needa and Ozzel. Needa I have a grudging admiration for; nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.  Nevertheless, his fault still leaves me slack-jawed with astonishment. A small fugitive spaceship plunges at his bridge at well over 500 km/h and his reaction is to duck? Like that would do him the least good! I despise a man who refuses to look death in the face when necessary. And, had he remained unflinchingly at his post and continued observing the action, he might have realized what was up, located the Rebel spacecraft and your daughter, and reaped a well-earned reward for taking in the garbage.

Ozzel was, as you said at the time, as clumsy as he was stupid. I would have enjoyed choking the living [spit] out of him myself.

Ozzel I feel no particular remorse over. Needa has walked in my nightmares.

But you were right to spare Piett, and, based on what we know so far, it will be right to spare McMillan at LANL. Both did their best in a difficult environment, but neither was in control of events and neither was smiled on by the Fortune to which they were hostages.

Let me illustrate by analyzing the chain of events in a couple of different ways. The last clear chance to avoid the drum incident came when some technician poured Fresh Step into a drum full of nitrate waste. Why did he do it? Most likely because the instruction sheet told him to and the instruction sheet was sacrosanct. It was sacrosanct because the Integrated Safety Management program had blessed it. And the Integrated Safety Management program is something McMillan and LANL had no control over. It was something they had no choice but to adopt. For the technician, the consequences of following the instructions to the letter were less serious than the consequences of questioning the instructions, especially when there was conflicting pressure to meet an impossibly tight deadline imposed by the State of New Mexico. No man can serve two masters.

Another mode of analysis is causal chain, in which you attach blame to everyone in the chain of events who could have stopped the accident from happening. This begins with the stenographer who who was told “inorganic” and heard “an organic.” She (I’m assuming it was a she, and I’m making a few other assumptions about her demographic profile) likely knows nothing about chemistry, because that’s not the way the low-level minions are hired at government laboratories. People capable of learning organic chemistry can make a lot more money than a government stenographer does nowadays. She was likely farmiliar with the word “organic” because there are shelves labeled “organic” at her local grocery. “Organic” produce costs twice as much, so it is supposedly good, so she was primed to hear the word “organic”. “Inorganic” is probably a word she has rarely heard and which has never stuck.

The second link in the causal chain is the person who dictated the directive. Why didn’t he proofread it? I really don’t know, but my guess is the time pressure. The directive had to go out right away or there were certain and unpleasant consequences. A badly proofed directive might have bad consequences. The choice was obvious — yet wrong.

And higher management was not going to carefully review the memo, because being high level and being technically knowledgeable are increasingly incompatible in today’s technical management culture. Gifted scientists are increasingly being regarded as a commodity, to be managed like fuel oil or laptop computers. LANL has long bucked the trend — and, ironically, been criticized for it. And the high-level managers were under the same time pressure as the rest of the program.

And so on down the chain. Waste that had been accumulating for seventy years was now to be disposed of in short order or be damned. Because it benefited New Mexico politicians to please their Santa Fe constituents by looking like they were tough on LANL.

LANL has been under the gun for at least ten years. During that time, there has been fairly heavy turnover of employees and management, including shifting the management contract from University of California to Bechtel. The laboratory staff spent an entire summer under an Admiral Ozzel of a director in penitential reflection upon their imagined sins. None of this seems to have changed anything. One must wonder what has remained constant.

Except one needn’t look very far. What hasn’t changed during that time is the NNSA and the New Mexico Environmental Division.

And OSHA, and affirmative action, and ISO 9000, and a hundred other fixtures of the modern American bureaucratic culture. His Majesty is on to something here.

So naturally he abruptly shifts gears.

The real problem is that we are living in an unserious culture. No, bear with me here. All our seriousness is dissipated in the cogs of the bureaucratic machine. No seriousness is left for the actual work. It reminds me of one of my favorite economics cartoons.

It shows a class at a business school. The professor has written “Production” on the blackboard, and he tells the students, “Today, we’re going to talk about making … things. Actual things.” Two students in the back of the class, wearing expensive pinstripe suits, are upset. The first says, “Things?! I don’t want to make things. I want to make money.” The second says, “Let’s sue the business school. We could make some money that way.”

Uh-huh.

I have been reflecting on our unseriousness as I’ve been reading the paper the last few weeks. There has been some adverse weather, though nothing that won’t be forgotten by next winter. I cannot but be bemused when I read a headline screaming “Winter Storm Blankets Area” and turn and look at several inches of snow outside my window. No kidding?

Then there’s the matter of crime and punishment. Putting a man behind bars for years among other dangerous criminals, with a shockingly high incidence of prison rape, is a very serious matter. Yet it is taken so unseriously. In part, I blame crime shows that show everything about the criminal justice process except the actual punishment.

It sounds like His Majesty is going soft on crime. My own impression is that probation is so common as to render criminal conviction unserious.

I’m not going soft, Lord Vader. A lot of these miscreants should be facing a rendezvous with a knotted rope. We aren’t serious enough to do it. Prison time is a serious matter, not because we have actively made it so, but because we have passively permitted it — and the result is that the prisoners themselves, the gang leaders, are the serious ones, not the society imposing the punishment. No wonder recidivism rates are astronomical.

Religion has become unserious as well. Grace, forgiveness, and tolerance are all the rage, and Dies irae is taken about as seriously as a zombie apocalypse movie. Maybe less so. The churches sold their souls when the assented to no-fault divorce, and they have never recovered. You can’t be unserious about solemn vows made before your own priest in your own sanctuary and remain serious about anything else.

I think His Majesty does not give enough credit to those conservative churches who fought no-fault divorce tooth and nail. And grace, forgiveness, and tolerance are not unserious, but rather, misunderstood.

I was recently pointed to an online screed, which I will not dignify with a link, by a woman who was mocking Elder Oaks’ statement that the Church does not apologize. She was demanding an apology for essentially everything that is at the heart of Mormonism. She was seriously angry, yet unserious. One of her demands was an apology for spending money building temples when there were starving people in the world. This is unfair to the remarkable LDS welfare program, and ignorant of the fact (not widely trumpeted, but confirmed to me from multiple sources) that it is the tithing fund that is raided to cover shortfalls in the welfare fund and not the other way around.

But, yes, we spend money building temples when there are still starving people in the world. We were building temples even when we were uncertain where our own next meals were coming from. We were serious about them. We were serious about the vows that would be made in them. We are still serious about the temples and the vows that will be made in them.

His Majesty is right that we live in a deeply unserious culture, but you can still find serious people, if you search seriously enough.