News Alerts and the Complexity of #FakeNews

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. - Steve Jobs

Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity. - Peter Bergen

A lot of people who are quick to share opinions and slices of their genius have pointed out that the easy way to avoid fake news is to avoid websites like Alex Jones’ with his conspiracy rants, be careful of news feeds from Twitter and Facebook and do other similar “intelligent” things.

It’s simple, they say …. don’t go to the websites in question and you won’t be deluged with fake news.

So imagine my surprise this morning when my Android phone received an alert that the US Marine Corps had invaded CIA Headquarters with the intention of preventing the CIA from overthrowing President Trump.

I don’t hang out on conspiracy websites and I don’t give them the tiniest slice of my brain so my phone wasn’t offering me a snippet of data from some feed that I frequent or subscribe to.

But somewhere, a Google bot that gathers my news alerts was fooled by the disturbing rant of a seriously misguided individual and sent me a conspiracy-laden piece of trash as an important news alert.

Normal, balanced, healthy people will look at such an alert and either calmly disregard it or casually saunter over to CNN to see if it is really happening.

Unfortunately, we are not all like that.

There are many who struggle with mental illness, many who fill their head with conspiracist garbage, many who are filled with hatred because of various inadequacies in their own Life and many who live in more than one of these scenarios simultaneously.

A certain percentage of these people are on a hair-trigger, literally, and their first reaction is to reach for whatever is in their gun locker. 

React first, think later.

Some of those people would have Googled the headline and received a lot of hits, thus confirming some internal bias that this must be true, failing to recognize that it was a bunch of conspiracy websites all cross-posting the same article.

If some misguided individual this morning reacted to the alert, confirmed it with a quick Google search (or didn’t bother), grabbed his guns (or hers, but statistically more likely to be his) and went to his equivalent of DEFCON 1, the media would be having a field day analyzing the trigger that started the whole thing.

Of course, a conspiracist might tell me the story was planted by the CIA as a means of dulling our minds to the truth, that a constant “crying wolf” feed will eventually be used against us in some way that only they understand.

I guess we can make anything fit our circumstance, need and beliefs, can’t we?

And while I am not a fan of censorship and I recognize the slippery slope that comes when we censor the obviously wrong stuff (how that is defined is a slippery slope in itself), I wonder how we can do better to prevent such information from being passed off as an alert of legitimate concern.

The Bottom Line

While I don’t believe in censorship in general, I believe there are certain things that shouldn’t be published, including things that promote abuse of children, violence against women, intentional spread of hatred, etc.

Most fake news are opinions cast off as news with an intent to send our brains in specific directions.  Such information and intent to use information in devious ways has been around long before Facebook, Twitter and the like.  On a side note, can you imagine PT Barnum with a Twitter account?

In such cases, the onus is on us to make sure our brain receives and interprets such information and intention correctly. 

However, when emergency preparedness people tell us that we should have mobile phones handy as part of our emergency preparedness strategy and that same device alerts us to something that is potentially problematic (but which isn’t true), then we need better vetting of what our devices receive and push in our direction ….

…. before someone reacts poorly to garbage alerts and creates their own genuine alert or we all refuse to react to something important because we don’t believe it or because CNN hasn’t gotten around to analyzing it because they are too busy running for cover

In service and servanthood,

Harry

PS I have friends who work at CIA HQ.  They report that all is well there and that it’s just another day of “getting things done”.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but I will leave that with the conspiracy crowd to figure out.

The real irony here is that if an emergency were really occurring, the mobile phone network would be too overloaded to be used as a means of obtaining important information, as I noted in posts such as Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance, but alas I digress.

Kim Jong-Trump

There is a fine balance between paranoia and preparedness.  Understanding the difference can make all the difference. – Harry Tucker

A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, author, historian and independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr President, but I do say not more than ten or twenty million dead, depending on the breaks.” So said General ‘Buck’ Turgidson, urging the US president to carry out a nuclear first strike, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film ‘Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’

But nobody in Kubrick’s movie talked like Kim Jong-un (“American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,” he crowed, celebrating North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM). They didn’t talk like Donald Trump either (“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”)

Kubrick’s film came out the year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the world went to the brink of nuclear war after the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles into Cuba to deter an American invasion. It was a terrifying time, but neither US President John F. Kennedy nor the Soviet leaders used violent language. They stayed calm, and carefully backed away from the brink.

So Kubrick’s fictional leaders had to stay sane too; only his generals and civilian strategic ‘experts’ were crazy. Anything else would have been too implausible even for a wild satire like ‘Strangelove’. Whereas now we live in different times.

Trump may not understand what his own words mean, but he is threatening to attack North Korea if it makes any more threats to the United States. That’s certainly how it will be translated into Korean. And Pyongyang will assume that the US attack will be nuclear, since it would be even crazier to attack a nuclear-armed country like North Korea using only conventional weapons.

Maybe the American and North Korean leaders are just two playground bullies yelling at each other, but even in their more grown-up advisers it sets up the the train of thought best described by strategic theorist Thomas Schelling: “He thinks we think he’ll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will, so we must.” This is how people can talk themselves into launching a ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘preventive’ nuclear attack.

Is this where the world finds itself at the moment? ‘Fraid so. And although a nuclear war with North Korea at this point wouldn’t even muss America’s hair – the few North Korean ICBMs would probably go astray or be shot down before they reached the US – it could kill many millions of Koreans on both sides of the border.

A million or so Japanese might die as well (that would depend on the fallout), and a few tens of thousands of US soldiers in western Pacific bases (from targeted strikes). Indeed, as the scale of the potential disaster comes home to North Korean strategists, you can see them start to play with the idea of a “limited nuclear war.”

North Korean planners have announced that they are “carefully examining” a plan for a missile attack on the big US base on Guam. In that way they could “signal their resolve” in a crisis by only hitting one isolated American military target. Their hope would be that such a limited attack would not unleash an all-out US nuclear counter-attack that would level North Korea.

‘Limited’ nuclear war typically becomes a favourite topic whenever strategists realise that using their cherished nuclear weapons any other way means unimaginable levels of death and destruction. It has never been credible, because it assumes that people will remain severely rational and unemotional while under attack by nuclear weapons.

Thinking about limited nuclear war, while unrealistic, is evidence that the planners are starting to get really scared about an all-out nuclear war, which is just what you want them to be. Nevertheless, we are entering a particularly dangerous phase of the process, not least because the other two major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia, both have land borders with North Korea. And neither of them loves or trusts the United States.

What “process” are we talking about here? The process of coming to an accommodation that lets North Korea keep a nuclear deterrent, while reassuring it that it will never have to use those weapons. Because that’s what these North Korean missiles and nuclear warheads are about: deterring an American attack aimed at changing the regime.

They couldn’t be about anything else. North Korea can never have enough missiles to attack the US or its local allies and survive: it would be national suicide. But it can have enough of them to carry out a “revenge from the grave” and impose unacceptable losses on the US if it attacks North Korea. Deterrence, as usual, is the name of the game.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson briefly said that the US was not seeking to change the North Korean regime last week, although he was almost immediately contradicted by President Trump. In the long run, however, that is the unpalatable but acceptable way out of this crisis. In fact, there is no other way out.

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A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, author, historian and independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.  Reproduced with permission from the author.

Reservoir Dogs in the White House

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. - Ernest Hemingway

A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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Anthony Zurcher, the BBC’s North America correspondent, nailed it in a report on 27 July. “Where Abraham Lincoln had his famous ‘team of rivals’ in his administration, this is something different,” Zurcher wrote. “Trump White House seems more akin to the final scene in Reservoir Dogs, where everyone is yelling and pointing a gun at someone else, and there's a good chance no one is going to come out unscathed.”

Several walking wounded have limped out of the White House since then, including ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, but nobody would call them unscathed. And in has come Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director, who appears to have escaped from the same Quentin Tarantino movie. Maybe Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink.

Fun fact: Scaramuccia (literally "little skirmisher"), also known as Scaramouche, is a stock character of the Italian commedia dell'arte. He combines the roles of a clownish servant and a masked assassin carrying out his master’s will. He often ends up decapitated.

Things are falling apart in the White House much faster than even the keenest observers of Donald Trump’s behaviour would have predicted, and the important part is not the dysfunction. The United States would work just fine – in fact, rather better – if Trump never managed to turn his tweets into reality. What matters is that he is cutting his links with the Republican Party.

Trump was never a real Republican. As a genuine populist, he is ideology-free. If Barack Obama had fallen under a bus and Trump had chosen to run for the presidency in 2008, he could just as easily have sought the Democratic nomination.

Senior Republicans knew this, and they tried quite hard to stop him from winning the Republican nomination last year. After that they were stuck with him, and he did win the White House for them, so they have been in an uncomfortable partnership ever since. That is now coming to an end.

Part of the unwritten deal was that establishment Republicans get senior roles in the Trump White House. Reince Priebus, dismissed last Friday, was the most important of those people. He followed deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, communications director Mike Dubke, press secretary Sean Spicer and press aide Michael Short, all of whom had already been pushed out.

What’s left are alt-right white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, New Yorkers with Democratic leanings like Anthony Scaramucci, Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Gary Cohn, Trump family members (Donald Jr and Ivanka), ex-businessmen like foreign secretary Rex Tillerson (who may be about to quit), and a triumvirate of generals in high civilian office.

This is a recipe for paralysis, but who cares? Did you really want a White House team that enabled Donald Trump to impose his will (or rather, his whims) on the United States and, to some extent, on the world? Well, no, and neither do senior Republicans – but they do care very much about controlling the White House.

Republicans who think long-term are well aware that the changing demography of the US population is eating away at their core vote. This may be their last chance, with control of both Houses of Congress and (at least in theory) of the presidency, to reshape their image and their policies in ways that will appeal to at least some of the emerging minorities.

They can’t do that if they don’t control the White House, and the only way they could regain control there is for Trump to go and Vice-President Mike Pence (a real Republican) to take over. A successful impeachment could accomplish that.

It would be very hard to engineer such a thing without splitting the Republican Party, even if the current FBI investigation comes up with damning evidence of Trump’s ties with Russia. Nevertheless, the likelihood of an impeachment is rising from almost zero to something quite a bit higher.

It would be a big gamble. The Republicans in Congress couldn’t really get Trump out before November 2018, and the turbulence of an impeachment might cost them their control of Congress in the mid-term elections. In an ideal outcome, however, it would give the Republicans time to go into the the 2020 election with President Pence in charge at the White House and some solid legislative achievements under their belts.

What would Trump do if he faced impeachment? Maybe he would do a kind of plea bargain and resign, but that would be quite out of character. His instinct would be to fight, and he fights mainly by creating diversions. The best diversion is a war, but against whom?

Even Trump would have trouble selling a war against Iran to the American public. Despite all the propaganda, they don’t really feel threatened by Iran. Whereas North Korea says and does things provocative enough to let Trump make a (flimsy) case for attacking it.

If he thought his presidency was at stake, he certainly would.

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A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.  Reproduced with permission from the author.

Being Drawn Into Anger? Understand the Downside First

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. – Aristotle

When anger rises, think of the consequences. – Confucius

With the final remnants of the most recent snowfall behind us, I took some time from a crazy schedule today to conduct some business with my local bank branch.  While the snowmelt is upon us, the parking lot was still snow-covered and so with no visible parking spot lines visible, I parked next to the line of vehicles and proceeded towards the door.

As I approached the door of the bank, a man approached me and said “Hey a-hole”.

I turned to see who was speaking and he said “Yeah, you f*ing a-hole, do you know how to f*ing park inside a f*ing parking space?”

I indicated that the parking lot was snow covered, that actual parking spaces could not be easily located and so I had parked next to the line of cars where in fact, none of the cars were likely in “official” parking spaces.

“Well aren’t you a f*ing stupid a-hole”, he replied and he advanced towards me with a string of foul-mouthed phrases.

I replied as I maintained space between us that if he could have politely pointed out an actual parking space, I would have been happy to park in said space.  I also indicated that I didn’t appreciate being spoken to as I was being addressed and that calmly speaking to people is an easier, better way to address problems, whether real or perceived.

He told me that he was trying to teach me a lesson (using colorful metaphors as he told me this), I ignored him, recorded his plate # in case it mattered later and went into the bank.  As I left him, he continued his litany of profanity behind me.

Technically the odds were stacked against him.  I stand at 6’3”, I’m physically active and I have a martial arts background.  He was perhaps 10-15 years older and was grossly out of shape and so his best option should something physical ensue was the bottle of Windex he was using to clean his windshield.

He was taking a  big chance.  If I had a temper easily tipped over the edge, if I was being treated for issues such as anger management, if I was having a bad day or if I was one of those people who liked finding trouble when it was presented to me, his day (and mine) may have ended differently.

That’s the problem with unrestrained, unnecessary anger - things can get out of hand quickly and the results can be problematic or even catastrophic.

As one person present noted during the incident, my being calm and speaking to him calmly and respectfully seemed to anger him more until he seemed ready to lose control altogether.  They also pointed out to me that he was parked in the one spot that was cleared of snow, a parking spot designated for drivers with disabilities, but he had no such tag that allowed him to park in that spot.  Righteousness, when applied inconsistently, can create complexity.  Let he who is without sin …. well …. you know.

What he doesn’t realize is that by walking away from him, I may have saved his Life or mine.  I doubt if he would thank me though – he likely would have found something else to be angry over or may have been angered by the fact that he could not induce me into a more complex situation (there are people in the world who intentionally create drama for too many reasons to discuss here).

As an aside, the woman in front of me inside the bank, who later left with him when she had finished her business, seemed genuinely nice and gentle with bank staff.  I hope for her sake that she doesn’t suffer abuse at the hands of this individual although statistics suggest otherwise.

Anger is never the answer.

However ….

People writing op-eds in Berkeley newspapers this week indicated that the violent, damaging riots on campus in the last week were justified, even if people were hurt and private property was destroyed.

Russia and the US continue to believe that continued sabre rattling and troop build-ups in Europe will produce what they desire (whatever that is).

People tearing each other up in the streets and in social media over differences of political color are not solving any problems either but they continue to do it unabated just in case a solution manifests by accident.

The list goes on.

That’s the problem with anger – it converts us into irrational, illogical animals who are focused on power, superiority and winning at any cost, having lost sight of the potential downside should things escalate beyond the point which we anticipated and for which we are not prepared to handle.

We must also be careful when others attempt to induce us into “battle mode”.  A person induced into becoming angry is vulnerable to being manipulated, controlled or directed, allowing that person to become an agent for someone else’s agenda.

And when that happens, nobody wins.

The Bottom Line

Intentionally creating a hostile situation or allowing someone to draw us into one invites us into a potential escalation that may have unforeseen, irrevocable effects that hurt a lot of innocent people.

Unless your Life is in trouble, count to ten first and keep talking (not shouting).  It matters - you may save a relationship, a business or a Life in doing so.

As for the owner of plate R*R-5*0, you owe me a deep debt of gratitude.

But don’t push your luck – some day, someone may give you the trouble you seek and will speak to you with their fists (or a weapon) instead of trying to calm you down.

And if that happens, everyone loses.

Demand and give respect – stay calm in the face of anxiety and anger.  Fact-filled, respectful dialog solves most problems.

That is the only way we will solve the problems that the world faces today.

If you believe you have another way and can prove it works, I’m all ears.

But don’t shout at me – I am tone-deaf to the ignorant.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

PS It is always interesting to observe the reaction of an aggressive individual who expects their target to cower in fear or to respond in anger.  When neither happens, it often freezes them in place or causes them to get even more angry.  In my many years in NYC, we assume that the other person we are interacting with is either crazier than we are or has a gun (or both), providing additional impetus to keep our wits about us.

Vladimir Putin: The Useful Puppet

The hardest part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch. - Scott Glenn as Captain Bart Mancuso - The Hunt For Red October

The #1206 “fiction” series continues …

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In a well-lit, expansive boardroom, a group of agitated men and women argued around the boardroom table in the JFK Conference Room.  The meeting facilitator standing at the head of the table pleaded for order.  This was not an uncommon sight in this room these days, a room better known to the outside world as the White House Situation Room.

“Can we have one conversation here?”, the facilitator yelled above the din.

He waited patiently for about a minute as people gradually returned to their seats before clearing his throat and beginning to speak.

“Thank you”, he said. 

Turning towards the large screen behind him, he pointed to the presentation displayed before them.  “Now as you can see”, he continued, “In our effort to distract the people from the reality that we are unable to solve our education, healthcare, law enforcement, military and infrastructure needs, we have pretty much exhausted the list of deflections.”

He paused and then continued.

“The Black Lives Matter movement was useful but turned more violent than we anticipated”, he said, “The promotion of gender equality was useful but we allowed it to get too complicated to be useful.  I mean, who in the hell thought of 31 allowable genders for a driver’s licence in New York City?  Our leverage of folks in Hollywood has produced a backlash claiming hypocrisy since many of the people we have tapped to step up for us have become mired in their own personal shit about their own demons and indefensible positions.”

He advanced to the next slide in his presentation.  It showed lyrics from a Beyoncé song and photos of Miley Cyrus.

“Can you lick my skittles, that's the sweetest in the middle, pink that's the flavor, solve the riddle”, he read. “These are lyrics by someone the First Lady is calling a role model for young women?”, he asked.

“And this picture of Cyrus at a concert riding a giant ….”, he paused again and shook his head.

He advanced to the next slide.

“And this stuff about Trump”, he said, “It seemed effective at first but his band of dedicated idiots seem unswayable.  Even leveraging storms and telling people that this one is the one that will kill all their families and make parts of the country uninhabitable didn’t frighten too many people.  Running political commercials on the weather channels as people were trying to get updates probably didn’t help us either.”

“Anyway”, he said, “This stuff with Putin had better be working.  We need something to take people’s mind off of our lack of effectiveness.  Putin’s a hot head and it shouldn’t be that difficult to get him riled up and rattling the war sabres.  The key that I must stress to you is that while we publicly threaten to bomb places like Iran and Aleppo, we must constantly keep in contract with the Kremlin to assure them there is no real threat.  That way the people fear a war is imminent while it really isn’t.  Fear and anger, my friends, is the way to manipulate people the best.”

A voice from the back of the room spoke up.

“And where does this take us?”, she asked.

“Excellent question”, replied the facilitator, “It provides us with two useful options.  Either we get Hillary elected to the White House as planned or things go off the rails with Trump and we use Putin’s war cries to justify the invocation of Executive Directive 51 and we retain power.  For those of you not familiar with the directive, here is the brief summary.”

He advanced the presentation to the next slide and waited for the participants to read it.  It read:

The Presidential Directive defines the power to execute procedures for continuity of the federal government in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Such an emergency is construed as any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions. 

The Directive gives full executive, judicial and legislative power to the President of the United States, with full control over food, water, energy distribution, transportation and communication mechanisms in the country, including the Internet.  It also provides for the dissolution of Congress and the Senate if required as well as the waiving of any elections until such time as the President believes the nation to be safe.

After waiting for a minute or so, the facilitator broke the silence.

“Fully legal as defined under the law”, he said, smiling, “We just need our puppet in the Kremlin to play along.”

“But aren’t tensions between us and the Russians getting extraordinarily high?”, the same voice asked from the back of the room.

“Absolutely”, the facilitator replied, “But we need to take Russia to the very edge to make ED 51 look like the only legitimate option.  We’ve played chicken many times in the past and it always works.”

He started to speak again when the phone in the middle of the conference room table rang, interrupting him.

The facilitator nodded to someone sitting closer to the phone and the person pressed the speakerphone button.

The entire room listened quietly as the voice on the other end of the phone, in a quick, breathless, nervous voice, explained how an accident had occurred and the Volgodonsk, a Russian warship deployed off the coast of Yemen, had just been sunk by a nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missile.

“How did this happen?”, asked the facilitator as the color drained away from his face.

“We don’t know”, replied the voice on the phone, “Some idiot over there made a mistake on our side and let it fly.  There’s almost too much chatter to keep up with what’s happening.”

The voice paused for a moment.  “I gotta go”, it said, “There’s too much going on here.  Someone will call you when we have more information.”

The phone line was cut and the person next to the phone turned it off.  The room buzzed with nervous tension as multiple conversations exploded simultaneously.

“People, people”, the facilitator yelled once more, “Please, may we have one meeting at a time here?  This is probably a minor incident.  Cooler heads will prevail.”

He was still trying to get control of the meeting when one of the Presidential aides burst into the room.

He bent over and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

“The President …….. taken to PEOC”, he said in broken sentences, “Bogies approaching over the pole ….. more on Atlantic and Pacific coasts ……”

A thousand questions for the aide came from all directions.

He didn’t have much time to answer.

It didn’t matter anyway.

To be continued.

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© 2016 – Harry Tucker – All Rights Reserved

Background

The PEOC, or Presidential Emergency Operations Center, is one of many bunkers where the President can go in times of emergency.  While it is not the ideal location, it is the best one if you have less than two minutes before a catastrophic event.

Executive Directive 51 is real and perfectly legal.  It would be politically unpopular but desperate times call for desperate measures from desperate people.

People who say that there are too many checks and balances in place that would prevent an accidental launch of a missile should recall what happened with the USS Vincenees when it shot down an Iranian commercial jet liner.

The other stuff is conjecture.  As a long-time Wall Street strategy guy, I and people I work with know that anger and fear are the most powerful tools available.  Feel-good moments can inspire others but if you want someone to act quickly without thinking, it is best to make them feel afraid or angry.  Both emotions cloud logical thinking and people will do things against their better judgement and character as long as others don’t give them time to stop and think rationally. 

As for distractions and deflections used by politicians, ask almost any politician any difficult question, even repeatedly and notice how the question is answered …. and is not.  The intention is that you will eventually give up and walk away. “Mission accomplished”, thinks the politician when this happens.

By the way, there is an interesting treatment of this subject in the 1984 movie “Countdown to Looking Glass” where things go from routine to out of control very quickly.  Thirty two years later, it is still an interesting, relevant and disturbing movie.

I’m not a pessimist.  I’m an optimistic realist, who believes that a better world is within our grasp only when we acknowledge the difficulties and imperfections around us.  We must neutralize difficulty in order to realize a better world that we are capable of creating.

As a strategy guy, it is my role to identify all plausible scenarios, including the unlikely, the unpopular, the unsavory and the unpalatable.

Risk mitigation requires people to understand all the risks, otherwise it is often the risk ignored, played down or hidden that proves to be the problematic one in the end.

We need to call out the people who put us at risk and hold them accountable for if such risk becomes reality, we die and they live.

I don’t think that’s a fair exchange.

What do you think?

You may now return to worrying about what color your next iPhone or Android phone will be or what the latest memes are on Facebook.

That is all that matters, after all.

Isn’t it?

Series Origin

This series, a departure from my usual musings, is inspired as a result of conversations with former senior advisors to multiple Presidents of the United States, senior officers in the US Military and other interesting folks as well as my own professional background as a Wall St. / Fortune 25 strategy advisor and large-scale technology architect.

While this musing is just “fiction” (note the quotes) and a departure from my musings on technology, strategy, politics and society, as a strategy guy, I do everything for a reason and with a measurable outcome in mind. :-)

This “fictional” musing is a continuation of the #1206 series noted here.