Thoughts on Breonna Taylor and What Happens Next

Things are awful in Louisville. But not necessarily the apocalyptic end we predicted.

As you peruse social media, the internet, and even your e-mail, note that you’re being fed information that a computer thinks you want to see and has established you’ll respond to. The more you seek out certain points of view and information, the more that becomes the world you see online. The computer is smart enough to feed you stuff based on what you and others like you have liked in the past and the present. It’s not smart enough to fact check it or tell you if it’s a reliable source.

It’s tough for me to speak up because I have family and friends who are police officers or support them behind the scenes. In my heart I feel that what I know of these people means they are the “good guys”. I know it’s not an easy job when you see the worst humanity has to offer, but I like to think that these people I know respond with compassion, a desire to deescalate, and a cool head.

What is clear to me is that it is time to do a serious examination of the culture, policies, procedures, hiring practices, and more of the LMPD and the local justice system. That examination must be thorough and have a plan for change that is carried out, monitored, reported on at regular intervals, and adjusted based on findings.

And if we’re going to give police the “a few bad apples” defense, we need to recognize that the same is true in Louisville’s West End, and that our city has some serious systemic flaws that have marginalized the people who live there, which creates challenges that those of us who live in the suburbs with access to full time jobs, benefits, transportation, childcare, inexpensive and readily available groceries, and more do not have.

Seriously addressing these issues requires us to step away from the world where our thinking can be continually reinforced and hardened by outside forces. It requires an empathy for a world that is not our own and listening to things we don’t really want to hear said. We need to take what we see, hear, and experience through our opened eyes and push for change and action.

Here’s hoping that this is the catalyst for real change in Louisville, and not just another bandaid we use in hopes that it goes away.

When Did My Friends And Family Get So Insane? — The Social Dilemma - A Review

My wife and I have a conversation so much that the sentences are probably embedded in our walls by now.  How do seemingly rational people believe such incredible nonsense in the age of Trump?   How did we become a world where people believe COVID is a hoax (despite killing 192,000 people as of today), vaccines are billionaire plots to implant microchips,  human trafficking rings are run out of DC pizza parlors, and the Kardashians are truly people who exist?   How is it that we’ve become a country where reality is no longer defined by facts?  Is it Fox News?  OANN?  Facebook? Twitter?  

Enter The Social Dilemma, a great new documentary on Netflix, which describes how social media and the internet at large shapes our viewpoints and reinforces our thinking, regardless of whether it’s based in fact or not.   

The Social Dilemma intersperses interviews with numerous tech founders, innovators, programmers, and computer pioneers with the story of a fictional teenage boy who falls down a social media rabbit hole.  He soon becomes alienated from friends and family while being drawn to extremist points of view. Driving his behavior are internet algorithms, represented by men who call the shots on social media and the internet.  The men discuss what he's doing, what they can do to keep him engaged, and how to bring him back to his phone when he briefly makes a bet with his mom that he can go without his phone for a week.  All the while they are looking for the ads they can push his way to maximize profits.   

This fictional narrative is surprisingly effective at demonstrating how social media works to shape and reinforce world views, showing the ways in which our apps, websites, and phones are being used to figure out what we respond to and feed us more and more of the same, all in the name of selling our information and time to other companies.   

Watching the movie, it becomes clear how someone who isn't savvy in identifying reliability of sources, questioning data, or evaluating the quality of information being presented can get sucked into a continuous feed of increasing insanity.  

Let's say one friend posts a scientifically accurate video about why vaccines are necessary and another friend posts an alarmist one about how they cause autism that includes lots of  compelling misinformation.  You watch the first one for 10 seconds and stop it.  You watch the second one for its entire length as you're drawn in by the information and presentation.  The website measures your reaction to both in as many ways as it can and feeds you more content based on the time spent and your reaction.  Next an app you use accesses this information and you see a tweet with a second video about how the HPV vaccine is killing teenagers.  You got this one because people who liked that first video also engaged with this tweet.  You watch video for most of its length.  So the algorithms feed you another video that people just like you engage with.  Maybe this one is about how Bill Gates is implanting microchips to control people via his global vaccination push.  You watch that all the way through.  Each time you provide information that you are interested in this type of content, you tend to get more of it, which in time shapes your reality that information you aren't engaging with must be false.   

This isn't limited to just individual websites.  Ever wonder why so many websites offer you the option of Google or Facebook to login?  Each one offers the algorithms behind these companies more information about you and what you respond to, and uses that to further feed you content that reinforces what you respond to.  And each decision you make provides them a bit more data to ensure you stay engaged.  

The problem is that nobody is policing the information you're fed except you.  These algorithms are just as happy to feed you videos on how climate change is a hoax created by Bob from Big Oil as they are sending you lengthy research studies written by respected climate scientists.  As long as you're watching, clicking, interacting, and sharing that information, more of the same will be coming your way.  Should you abruptly shift what you view or watch, the algorithms will eventually adjust to show you new content aimed at your new interests.  

It's scary to watch, and the presentation makes even those of us who were aware of the intrusive mechanics of social media want to log off and move off the grid to a cabin in Montana.   

If you need an excuse to lay off the Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook for awhile, I highly recommend The Social Dilemma 

Let Them Play?

Other than a run at bowling, I have never been athletic.  Part of it was my aversion to getting injured, part of it was my aversion to physical activity in 95 degree heat indexes, and part of it was a complete lack of talent helped by a vision problem not properly diagnosed until I was in my twenties.  Academic team was more my speed.  Torn ACLs are rare and the only thing you risk spraining is your mind.   

While I love professional sports, I’ve never quite understood why high school athletics appeals to anyone who isn’t a parent or a high school student.  Our high school teams were seldom great, and Friday nights you were more likely to find me nerding out at my Commodore 64 playing games or listening to CDs than you were to see me at a football game.  In fact, the only football game I remember attending was homecoming, which was required of all class officers.  (I was Class Treasurer. I hated math and never counted a dime).  While I do look back on my high school days with a certain nostalgia, my desire to revisit my high school days died sometime after my third year on Facebook.   

Another thing I’m less a fan of as I get older is death.  Losing my dad two years ago made it clear to me that “he lived a good long life” is a meaningless phrase when you miss someone every day.   

So in these days of COVID-19, I do not understand our continuous drive to force a return to everything we used to do, when it’s clear that what we used to do isn’t a great way of containing the virus.

But that apparently isn’t going to stop high school athletics.  Today parents, coaches, and students are rallying in Frankfort to let kids play.  And today Kentucky’s largest district will meet to discuss returning to play fall sports.  

This comes just days after the Kentucky High School Athletic Association voted to resume play.  The KHSAA believes that low contact sports like football and soccer can be played safely, and to show their confidence in the safety of bringing kids together, they held their via Zoom.   

We’re all tired of COVID-19.  We all want to get back to normal.  We all want to run free without sweating our faces off in a poorly fit piece of cloth while sanding our skin down to the bone every time we wash our hands.   

But I also am tired of us ignoring the reality.  The older you get, the more likely COVID-19 will kill you.   And as a consequence, many of us have sacrificed things we love and being with the people we love to lessen those odds.  I’ve limited contact with my mom because I still feel the pain of losing my father two years ago and don’t want to inadvertently hurt her.  And I wear a mask, distance, and go out as little as possible so that I don’t inadvertently hurt others.  The fact is, the more we try to “get back to normal” the more we delay our ability to do so.  And we leave a trail of dead along the way.  

But I get it.  Sports are fun. Sports build character.  Sports are a great diversion. My daughter and niece played volleyball.  My dad coached my brother in baseball for years.  It was fun to cheer them and their teammates on.  For many kids, this could be their final year to prove themselves for scholarship opportunities or build college resumes.  It’s important. And maybe it’s not that risky.  As certain politicians always tell us, “kids are much less likely than adults to die of the virus!”  If that isn’t a ringing endorsement of returning to play, I don’t know what is.   

So if we want to risk reopening sports in the next few weeks, as they say in the Hunger Games, “may the odds be forever in our favor.”   Let’s just hope we leave a smaller body count than they did in Panem.  

I Have a COVID 19 Headache

My head hurts.

To be honest, it's been hurting for awhile. Not so much pain as this continuous pressurized fog that shoves against my temples and makes my brain overload.  

Are we really this stupid?   Have we gone insane?  

When I was a teenager three decades ago, I felt like our state and country valued education, expertise, and intelligence.  We were the country that put a man on the moon.  We pioneered computers.  We did it with science, engineering, technology, and a lot of smart people working toward a common goal that inspires.   We treasured teachers, education, and saw college as a lofty goal.  Even in our poorest regions people understood the value of teachers and a decent education.  We trusted science and medicine to give us better things.  A career was something you spent loyal to a company with the trust that you'd have decent benefits and retirement.  We had a notion that each generation living better than the next was a loftier goal than a few of us being a billionaire.  

But somewhere along the way, perhaps with the rise of faith in politics, the triumph of Wall Street over main street, the growth of the internet,  or social media, we decided that expertise didn't matter.  Kindness didn't matter.  Hard work didn't matter.  Doing the right thing didn't matter.  Long term success was to be sacrificed for short term gains.   And idiocy was A-OK.  

We're witnessing it now during the COVID-19 pandemic as the simple acts of wearing a mask, physical distancing, and limiting our interactions are now seen as divisive issues.  We see politicians and the public alike dismissing the dangers of the disease and beating their chests about refusing to wear a mask like they're the guy standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.  

The stupidity seems to be raging like wildfire in Kentucky these days.  Republicans in our state General Assembly have been continuously attacking our Governor for trying to slow the spread of COVID-19 in any way they can.  Most seem to reject the idea that it will be difficult for school children to follow COVID guidelines while they themselves can't even be bothered to wear masks and physically distance themselves in their own meetings to reopen schools.  

The height of stupidity came this week when the Interim Joint Committee on Education met to discuss reopening schools.  The leader of the committee meeting, Regina Huff, sat for most of the meeting with her face covering down around her neck, even though she was sitting less than six feet away from a staffer.  Next to her was Maxwell Wise, her cochair, who led the last meeting of the committee maskless and found out he was positive for COVID not long after.  He and his fellow committee members didn't seem to recognize or care that Huff and a man sitting in the back of the audience were not wearing masks during the meeting.  

The man in the back of the room was Dennis Buschman, an alleged concerned parent testifying that schools needed to reopen.  With his medical and epidemiological expertise as a JROTC instructor, he found it ridiculous that schools hadn't reopened since kids are at a low risk of death from the virus.  He went on to compare COVID to driving, which causes far more deaths of kids, but is something we do everyday without a second thought.  Of course, the proudly maskless expert on COVID failed to mention that in most states we're required to wear a seatbelt on our body when we drive to protect ourselves, and we are subject to laws meant to protect not just us, but others.  You know, kind of like wearing a mask.   

I have yet to understand why we've turned COVID into a political hot potato.  The Governor is attacked for trying to save lives.  Our Secretary of State is attacked for trying to reach a bipartisan agreement on making it easier for people to safely vote.  Certainly Beshear has made some missteps, and some of the logic on what is reopening and what isn't is flawed.  But that doesn't mean that everything he says and does is wrong, or in the worst interest of Kentucky, or the health of its people.  Rather than work together to find the quickest and safest way to "reopen" the state for the benefit of all Kentuckians using science, reason, and the knowledge that we may have to continually revisit what we do, many in our state seem to have taken the stance that these measures are a burden to them, an attack on their masculinity, and an infringement on their freedom akin to being tossed in a facial gulag.  

No reasonable human being should be sitting in a meeting about reopening schools maskless.  No education committee chairman should be inviting conspiracy minded people to speak as experts.  Those that teach our youth shouldn't be representing their organizations in a manner contrary to that organization's own stated policies.  And our discussions on education should be grounded in the reality of our public education system, its students, its teachers, and their families, not a political ideology driven by a need to attack the opposing party.   

The members of our education committee are acting like the worst students in class, cherry picking evidence, pushing their own selfish needs over the needs of the whole, and refusing to comply with even the simplest of requests to maintain safety and order in the classroom.   

We deserve better than what we get in Frankfort.   Here's hoping that the whims of these same people don't wind up getting children or their families harmed or killed.