Loose Lips and The Principle of Imminent Collapse

Nature doesn't support the conditions that result in a domino effect because individual events over a long period of time serve to eliminate the interior dominoes that propagate the big collapse. 

Man creates domino sets and waits for one to be knocked over then proclaims surprise and outrage when they fall. He may also deny that he ever knew that the dominoes were all setup to fall and that his words or actions were complicit in initiating the collapse.

When there is a multitude of people making statements against a subject, it is very difficult to isolate which one or ones were instrumental in initiating actions against that subject.  Now if the subject is an idea or a law, it is appropriate to speak enthusiastically for and against the inanimate entity. But when the subject is the people who support and defend the law or idea, or those people who resist it, care must be taken to not incite action against the persons.  Indeed, it may only be the combination of causation that leads to the emergence of negative outcomes.

When a person has the ear of millions of people, that person has the responsibility to be judicious in their use of words.  The speaker of antagonistic and resentful rhetoric may not be able to be held responsible (in a legal sense) for the actions of their listeners, they are nonetheless responsible.

One can claim that it was not the intent to incite murder with such rhetoric as "reload" and "take aim" at the opposition, but those words were explicitly aimed at human beings who were running for public office.  They were not aimed at legislation that was being proposed for passage or repeal.  The national map that was published with reticules (gun sight symbols) pointed to the legislative districts where opposition candidates were running for office.  One can similarly deny that calling for the removal of opposition legislators and pointing them out on a map leads an unstable person to murder 6 people at a public legislative meeting.  The idea that a political candidate would invite constituents to come and shoot an M16 assault weapon as part of a highly contentious campaign, is appalling. However, the perpetrator of such virulent motivations cannot deny that she/he knows that somewhere out there in this nation of 307 million people that there is a significant number of loose cannons who will act upon that accumulation of rhetoric and commit violence as the result.

People who originate and propagate such language may not be convict-able of inciting murder, but they are nonetheless culpable in part for creating the conditions under which the murders were committed.  Very specific persons words are picked up and carelessly spread across the nation's airwaves.  Other less literate bloggers pick up on the words and construct a landscape of distrust, resentment and anger against individuals, some of whom now lay murdered or critically wounded.  U.S. District Judge John Roll is dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is critically wounded by the man who put his and her thoughts into action.

Prominent people have acted to incite actions by members of the American public.  Whether or not one can draw a direct line between them and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, but as nothing happens in isolation, the seeds they have sown grew out into the mayhem at that Arizona Safeway market.

No promises for the Middleclass

Millions of people came to America to seek their fortunes and to raise their families in a land where it was possible to have a better life and pass that existence on to their descendants. This was a land unlike any other in the history of the world. This was a land of opportunity where anyone (well almost anyone) could strive, work hard and accumulate assets that would see you through your latter years and maybe have some remaining at your end that your children could inherit.

Under royal subjugation one could only accrue landed wealth at the pleasure of the throne. This landed wealth is the greatest asset that can be passed from generation to generation. It is the one medium of wealth that can gain value beyond any reason if someone wants to obtain it for themselves and there is a system of laws that recognize ones rights to buy, hold and sell such property.

Under Communist rule, there is no private ownership of real property and the only wealth a man can accrue is currency and control over family labor. One can hide away excess earnings and protect it from poachers, thieves and the government itself. Under Soviet rule, the national currency was periodically changed making the old currency worth only what the government chose for it to be worth. Until about the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ruble was not exchangeable for any other currencies. In this way the Russian people and the Russian Republics could not trade with the West.

In an economy that doesn’t recognize title to and ownership of property, there is no ability to earn an income greater than the labor market is willing to pay. In such systems there is no multi-million dollar or Ruble or Yaun salary for athletes to play a sport. There is no opportunity to write a song and get a few cents each time it is played on the radio, in a movie, or on the television. There is no way to derive monitory value from inventing an idea such as text messaging on a wireless hand-held electronic device and accumulating such vast wealth that descendants for many generations would not have to be part of the workforce, unless they want to be.

So people came to America and started their upward mobility through the officially classless society to become part of the vast Middleclass that everyone strives for unless they are already above that stratum by birthright or other good fortune. As upwardly mobile people we became quite accustomed to that idea that we were better off than the rest of the world. We had access to everything. We had energy. We had land and clear skies. We had the bread basket of the world in our backyard and could do anything we set our sites on.

Along the way someone forgot to tell us that such a social and economic situation may only be a respite from the work-a-day grind that most of the world experiences every day. We seem to have forgotten that we can fall a great distance from our perch far above the economic datum. No one ever said that ones place in the Middleclass stratum was guaranteed. We did think that one should never backslide into the realm of the poor.

The membership roster always had its ordinary level of churn. One man rises and another man slips back. One family gets the opportunity to buy a house, fix it up and send their children to good public schools. Another family loses its primary income when the automotive plant moves to another state. As long as the net membership level is maintained or grows slightly, the Middleclass itself is in a healthy place. The real trouble begins when the membership level decreases due to forces far beyond the ability of any member to counter.

Elizabeth Keebler-Ross described the five stages of dying that begins with denial. That is followed with anger, bargaining, grief and finally acceptance. A similar process works in all types of catastrophic losses. When other people observe the losses of people who have lost jobs and have few prospects for replacement, they seek to deny that there were external forces that could envelope them too. That unemployed person just did not want to work because it is so much easier to be paid to not work. That person doesn’t have the ‘work-ethic.’ That person feels he is too good to do a lesser job at lower pay. Anger ensues on everyone’s part. The unemployed person has to deal with the lack of income and the attitudes of people around him who call him a leech and a burden. The temporarily employed person is angry that he must pay the unemployment bill through taxation, debt creation and being prevailed upon to be charitable.

There are no quick fixes to be had for all the millions of unemployed people in this country. A 10% unemployment rate means about 14.5 million workers and possibly as many as 43.5 million additional family members who do not have gainful employment or access to private health care coverage. These 14.5 million unemployed people will be contending with the 200,000 or so new entries in the job market. Mature workers will be contending with the young for lower paying jobs that the business market will be offering.

This recessionary economic period has been a boon to the private sector that has been able to shed mass amounts of employees with the probable explanation that “it is the economy” that caused the reductions. When hiring is ramped up again, after just long enough to age out the former employees, wages and salaries will be substantially lower than they were when the job losses commenced. Benefits will be leaner. The job that any individual used to have is gone. A fresh new job is created in its place. Few people will be called back to the job they used to have and at the earnings they had become accustomed to. They will start all over and try to work their way back to their former status.

Analogously, private pension savings took the same hits. Many 401(k) and similar plans were decimated by three successive bubbles that burst. People who were on track for a well financed well planned retirement are now struggling to get their principle balances back to where they were in 2007. They who have the time, energy and continued employment may be able to rebuild their retirement balances before they reach an age where it is no longer possible. Many people are curtailing spending in favor of investing in their retirement accounts. Many people who are close to the date when they will cross over into retirement will not have a comfortable retirement.

Big decisions such as house buying are not on the mind of anyone who will retire in the next 15 years or less. Although they may have opted for a smaller dwelling after children are move out, the security of having that mortgage and a large paid in equity is a significant motivation to not attempt to move. With hoped-for prices at a low and continuing to fall, many home owners are waiting out the bad days of circa 2010. Another factor of not downsizing ones dwelling is the number of adult children who either remain at home or return there due to the lack of employment prospect even with a college degree. Living with ones parents in not part of the American Middleclass scenario. Adult children living with their parents may be a long term situation, one we become used to as part of what is the new normal. The multi-generational house may be on the comeback trail.

With all the millions of vacant foreclosed houses and the huge slowdown in new house construction, it is obvious that former single families have moved in with someone. They are not all living under the freeway over-pass and homeless shelters or cars.

There will be a huge psychological price to pay on all of this economic downturn. Few parents have ever had to prepare their children for the indignity of jobless parents, foreclosures and being looked upon as a burden. Even now the appearance of the insolvency of a family is kept quiet and is spoken about in hushed whispers. If there was a great conflagration such as war, flood, or earthquake, that lowered everyone equally, then there would be an easy explanation as to why the family is living so far beneath its former level. Lighting candles for light and bundling up in a cold room would be de rigueur.

America has been special for most of its history. That special nature was mainly attributable to its self reliance for food resources and energy. But after we outgrew those domestic resources and came to depend on the resources of other nations, we have made ourselves vulnerable to the reliability, availability and cost of those resources. Even as our consumption of energy has increased so has the consumption of the rest of the world. Their socio-economic standards have been steadily rising as ours have declined. They have become more Middleclass and the American Middleclass has diminished based on the mathematical principle of “average.”

There are only so much resources to go around. There is only a fixed amount of petroleum to get from the ground. Unless we develop an innovative solution to power and fund our lifestyle and/or modify that lifestyle we will continue to slide toward that average.

While the remainder of the world still envies living at that average, we view that average from the other side of the equal sign as wholly unacceptable.

Oil and Water and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

What you don't know about the Principle of Imminent Collapse will kill you. It will kill many people, animals and plant life on which we depend. One only ignores the Principle of Imminent Collapse at the peril of our lives.


The 2010 hurricane season is soon upon us and there is oil in that there water that will be spread over the land in a fashion never before seen. It is not a matter of if, but when the storm will come. There are 14 to 24 major storm events predicted by NOAA for this year. Hurricane intensity numbers of 2, 3, 4 and 5 will have a much lesser degree of importance than whether the storm track coincides with the oil-laden waters of the Gulf of Mexico and possibly the East coast of the US if the oil tracks around the southern tip of Florida.


Hurricane Rita roared into the Gulf of Mexico and then skipped across the southern portion of Florida from the Gulf side to the Atlantic side. Katina took aim at New Orleans and made a storm surge of 17 feet carrying gulf water far inland. Flooding raised toxins and petro chemicals from the rivers and out of the damaged industrial plants along the Mississippi River. Now that the "source water" is so heavily laden with crude oil, it will be pushed ashore and be lifted by the evaporation and convection forces of the storms that make their way into the Gulf. We may even see oily rain coating everything for hundreds of square miles of land area far from the Gulf Waters.



The rupture of the pipes at the Deepwater Horizon well and the resultant spew of crude into the water may only be the smaller portion of the damage done to the global environment. When the oil reached the coastal marshes and beaches, that is when the greater damage was done. The oceans do have a large albeit finite capacity to mitigate the oil itself. Oil is an organic compound and there are natural processes that will degrade it over time. There is also the "Dilution Solution" where if it is churned enough, the concentration will fall. But the halving effect of adding equal parts contaminated water to uncontaminated water may indeed reduce the concentration of the oil but it doesn't eliminate it. Time will do that part.


The problem with allowing time to solve this problem is that we have so little of it until the first tropical depressions start heading toward the Gulf and the oil there. The 75 to 100 mph winds of even moderate hurricanes will pick up the surface oil and whip it inland. Oil plumes, still deep in the water will be pushed landward and be heaped up on the shores in a manner like never before.


As of the early month of June 2010, the oil has only been in the Gulf waters. The ecological damage to the shoreline was 24 miles of beach and marsh. That would only be the beginning. Thirty-three percent of the Gulf waters were placed of-limits for fishing. What we say about the magnitude of this oil drilling blow out in October 2010 will be the more significant.


When an Engineer ignores the Principle of Imminent Collapse he/she can set off a catastrophe of global proportions. It is not very comforting to think that everything could end with someone tripping over the extension cord.


One could argue that it was not a terrible decision to circumvent a safety measure for a system that has a small change of needing to be activated while it is off-line. Ordering a small change in a complex mechanical system may seem innocuous , but doing that was the cause of the skywalk collapse in Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 2001 that killed 114 people in 1981. Writing a test procedure that involved using a candle flame to check for air leakage around foam insulation in a nuclear power plant almost touched off a disaster of Chernobyl proportions at the Browns Ferry nuclear facility in 1975. One could argue that the use of 20/20 hindsight is not a good predictor of future events.


Past performance is not an indicator of how well a stock will do in the marketplace, is what every financial advisor and purveyor of recommendations to buy has to say to cover their butts. This being true doesn't exempt professionals from the responsibility of looking into the near future and saying, "if I do THAT, will THAT come back to bite me?" All too often the question is asked, "what is the worst case scenario?" Almost as often, the answer is wrong. The Carlson Corollary says that Murphy was an optimist.

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When Did It All Change?

When Did It All Change? posted: Dec 14, 2008

This question is posted across several blogs because it applies to all the subjects of those blogs. It's All Tuna begs the answer to when did everything become Tuna and why? The Principle of Imminent Collapse has presented many examples of the principle in action, but why is it that we repeatedly fail to do anything about it? Is THAT another of the characteristics of the PIC? And the Vulnerable Geometry is only vulnerable because we construct it that way. Why?

This post seeks to elicit examples of when it all began and what evidence, albeit in retrospect, can be seen that has led us from the Before to the Now. An example of this question and answer is thus: People driving on the road today are so rude, ignorant and aggressive that they endanger everyone around them and sometimes commit murder over simple things. When did this start and what caused it to happen?

With that in mind, what is the answer to these:

When and why did it become more important to make a profit than to make a product or service that made life better for people?

When and why has sex replaced love? Songs in the 1950s and earlier were all about love and relationships. The 1960s saw some transition. The 1970s and on it is sheer sex and show.

We used to see starving children and mobilize efforts to save Biafrans. Rock stars sang and did benefit concerts. We had Farm Aid. We had Feed the Children. Now we hardly even know the place called Darfur. What has happened?

If the answers were simple, we would have solved our problems already. But identifying the causes and the time line is an essential step in getting to that goal.

Vulnerable Geometry at Blogspot

Sustainable Geometry at Blogspot

It's All Tuna! at Blogspot

Principle of Imminent Collapse at Blogspot

www.itsalltuna-blog.com

www.ThePIC-Blog.com

Democracy and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

Democracy and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

The existence of democracy itself is an improbable phenomenon in a heavily populated global civilization. Today a multitude of factions vie for recognition and participation in the global forum. Even the inventors of democracy, the Greeks and later the Romans, did not allow just anyone to cast his vote for or against a law or action of the state. Athens was full of Athenians who voted and a slave class of people who did not. One did not merely move to Athens or any of the other city-states and sign up as a voting citizen.

Then, there was a ruling class of learned and/or powerful people who constituted the intelligentsia who could plan and implement the business of the state. The blacksmith, the stone masons and the shepherds first had no interests of state nor and say in the matters of state. Slaves certainly were not valued as contributors to the running of the state. Today, we hold as self-evident that everyone should have a say in the matters of selecting representatives who will ultimately conduct the state’s business.

The plebiscite is only for the lesser offices not the decision making process that determines when and with whom we go to war, who we obliterate in bombing raids, how we reduce the enemy to a quivering mass of humble flesh. Our learned and powerful representatives meet to make a show of supporting or condemning each and every law, penalty, budget item and regulation.

Men and women stand for election and re-election to be the ones who cast their votes for and against the things that are to be for the good of the people. It is difficult however to determine what is truly good and not good for the people. A tax might allow the community to have a safe bridge to cross into the next county or state, but the very same tax might send marginal family incomes into a fatal downward spiral to insolvency. Reducing tax burdens may allow taxpayers to buy essential goods and services, but the lack of funding of healthcare leads to poorer aggregate health and higher costs later. This fiscal relationship may impact the same individual directly. Lack of spending for public transportation services for people who do not drive causes their friends and families to have to bear the cost of the transportation themselves.

In the 4th to 3rd century BC, there were no multi-national corporations that earned multi-billion dollar profits while neglecting human needs and exploiting cheap labor and the masses’ need for some commodity. Well there was salt; and salt mines; and people who were sent to the salt mines. People needed salt; wanted salt; were sometimes paid in salt. And if there were wildly profitable corporations in ancient Greece, they certainly would have felt justified in paying the campaign expenses of a Senator or Caesar or two.

Democracy has become synonymous with Capitalism in the American sense. Ironically, it has become synonymous with Communism and Marxism in South America. In the USA sense, bringing democracy to the people of a country means deposing a dictator and opening their markets to American investors.

But all of that aside, democracy must spring forth on its own from its intrinsic nature, from the unified will of those people who are the “demo’ of the “cracy”. One cannot force a people to become democratic. When a people finally do decide that a voting system for representatives is what they want, it is a fragile thing indeed. Young democracies typically see a dozen or more parties and affiliations emerge to promote a candidate to tilt at the windmill of the incumbent who probably seized power in a coup and held that power for many years before being pressured to step down or is deposed by CIA backed insurgents.

A few assassinations of prominent candidates or a couple of improvised explosive devices tossed into the polling places can unset any gains toward stabilization of a new government. Everyone has his particular agenda to promote in these latter days of democracy. Just imagine even the 13 states which were the original 13 revolutionary colonies of England trying today to agree on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the whole three branches of checks and balances of the Federal government along with its expanded powers and authorities as acquired since the first continental congress. Britain would have had ample opportunity to sneak back in and re-establish colonial rule while we were bickering over who had the prettiest powdered wig and curls or the flashiest shoe buckles.

We name-call and degrade the personal attributes of they who would otherwise be wise statesmen and women. We mash together a bit of truth with a dash of lie, then fold in a whole lot of opinion then blend it all with innuendo and revisionist history, and half bake it. For all that effort we get a democracy soufflé that is fluffy, puffy and light. If we are not careful a single nudge will make it fall in on itself. We have all been busy erecting the thin scaffold of party politics in a race to get one over on the competition all the while neglecting its long term stability. No body sneeze just now.

The acid rhetoric between candidates of even the same party let alone candidates of opposing parties has eroded the stone foundations of our nation. Senators and Congress-persons cannot debate the merits of any proposed legislation without smearing the reputations of every legislator in opposition. Where is the end of this contention? Will we reach Extinction or a New Equilibrium? While legislators and their backers spit vitriol at each other, the interest on the national debt grows over $39 million.1 And that doesn’t even include the increased spending and the increases of obligation for budget items for which we have a long standing commitment.2

The American Presidents of recent administrations, along with all of their advisers, financial backers and mouthpieces have lead the nation to the precipice and will be only a nudge to send us tumbling into the morass. The Principle of Imminent Collapse postulates that it takes only The Nudge to manifests the imminent collapse. The Soviets discovered the Principle of Imminent Collapse as they kept trying to compete in the Cold War against the much larger and more sophisticated economic machine of the West. They were drawn into intractable military conflict in Afghanistan and bankrupted themselves. The Soviets put themselves in the position of immanency and the West provided the Nudge.

Today the financial sector of Western Capitalism has put itself in that very same position and little groups of dissenters plot as how to create that Nudge. There are so many possible Nudges to use. One or more in combination are so easy to employ when the tower is so flimsy and lousy with rot.

Democracy and the Western financial system are extensively intertwined. The true electorate is the businesses which buy and sell influence to create and maintain a climate which is conducive to the long term survival of enterprise life even as the atmospheric climate becomes hostile to biological life. In the Terminator movie franchise, it is the rise of sentient machines that takes over the world. Orwell wrote of Big Brother who rules the future (now the Past) of 1984. In both worlds we the people failed to heed the prime warning: Make a system as powerful and extensive as you want, but do not let it have control of its own on/off switch.

Switching off the machines and enterprises upon which we have come to depend may be painful but when they run amuck it sometimes becomes necessary. Either way we have to live with the consequences even when the clock of progress is set back too.

One significant flaw inherent in democracy is that the people can vote to do something that is totally wrong and destructive. The people can vote to stop being their “brother’s keeper” and let the less fortunate among us sink. When we allow that to happen, we have already set in motion our own decline.

1 10 mos. Fiscal 2004 Interest / Hour was $39,494,260.00 ($Mil) from http://www.geocities.com/cmcofer/interest.html

2 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military.

Expecting Collapse to Solve Our Problems

Expecting Collapse

A great many people are expecting collapse. I know a few of them personally. If you are not one yourself, you undoubtedly know a few yourself anyway. There is a danger in expecting collapse to solve your problems. The " Truth About Tobacco " campaign says it quite succinctly: "you don't always die from tobacco."

As recently as September 1, 2008 President George W. Bush did get his wish and received a more than plausible reason to stay away from the RNC in Minneapolis-St. Paul. In this case he was relieved to have a major storm event in the Gulf of Mexico to watch from The Whitehouse rather than take a chance on flying to the Convention cities and be caught off guard once again by a tricky hurricane that everyone else could see coming for five days.

As the world approached the most recent millennium anniversary millions of the inhabitants of this Big blue Marble came to believe that the end was near. Preachers with wide exposure on the airwaves warned everyone to repent and prepare. Some people even disposed of all their worldly possessions in order to be more worthy of the Rapture when all the righteous ones would disappear and the graves would be opened as those sleeping in the certain hope of the resurrection would rise and float to heaven. For the dead, this was a reasonable pastime. For the living it was a path toward the Principle of Imminent Collapse.

If a person believes that the end of civilization, nay, the entire realm of Creation, is about to be destroyed by God, then there is no reason to take any action for self preservation or for the preservation of civilization itself. There is no reason to pay off those debts, especially the national ones. The problem arises is when the end doesn't come.

We can see the mentality of the end-time philosophy in the lack of planning by the US Government. FEMA was not anywhere near competent and ready to take any coherent action at the time of Katrina. And we had a President at the time who relies heavily on his faith to guide his decisions. It is all well and good that a parent seeks the guidance of Providence in deciding how to raise a child, but one cannot extrapolate the value of that intervention in national and global politics, because we have to realize that the other sides are praying to the same god and seeking conflicting outcomes.

Many day-trading short sellers have found themselves studying the business end of a Smith and Wesson over the miscalculation of imminent collapse of a particular stock price and hoping that the price falls soon enough and fast enough to beat the margin call.

The residents Heaven's Gate cult compound listened to their spiritual leader Marshall Applewhite and took their lives in advance of the "recycling" of the Earth and their only chance of survival was to depart while leaving their physical bodies behind. Their 1997 escape was a bit pre-mature at the very least. Even if the Earth is to be recycled, the construction schedule has been revised.

Millennium madness spurred on many such actions by less than stable people and groups. Men slay their wives and children. Women microwave their babies. Lone gunmen (boys) rampage on high school and college campuses. The idea that there is nothing to lose takes root and everything else becomes meaningless. The psychiatric imbalance is there all along, latent, imminent, waiting for the Nudge.

Individual borrowers listen to the rhetoric that says 'buy now pay later', extract the equity of your home today, and repay it if you can. And if you die first, have your insurance policy pay off the balance. Do it now, don't be left behind.

Left Behind became a best-selling book series of the tele-evangelist set. It portrays the Rapture of the Church and all of its worthy righteous brethren. Only the most sincere worshippers get to go to Heaven. And the time is now. But like Linus Van Pelt sitting in the pumpkin patch on Halloween, we are all left waiting, and waiting, for the imminent collapse to come.

Some people read into the prophecies that certain events must come to pass before the end actually comes and ushers in the new world. They look deeply into ancient texts and reinterpret what has long been believed. The Bible Code, the DaVinci Code and now the Nostradamus Code follow the 1988 certainty of the 88 Reasons Why Rosh-hash-ana 1988 Must be the Time of the Church's Rapture. A lot of people believed the telling of this lore and acted accordingly, or completely irrationally.

The ubiquitous nature of the Principle of Imminent Collapse must be resisted if we are to not be complicit in its manifestation when it was only latent before. Plans must be made. Consensus must be reached and budgets prepared. The size of the budget might be painful today since we have already wasted too many decades on indecision and wandering around in a legislative quagmire led by inept or wrong thinking Presidents but they will only become even more painful later on.

Hoping for imminent collapse can be an evil thing. The inept and negligent managing of the funding of the Social Security fund had left us with an almost unfundable entitlement. The baby boom birth rate from 1946 to 1964 created the largest population of future retirees in history. That coupled with advancements in health care that greatly extended our life expectancies means that the actual retiring population is much larger than originally calculated. Planners did extrapolate these numbers but legislators did not adopt the plans.

Then we had annual inflation rates created by borrowing and spending funds we did not have and the price of such large volume consumptions like oil quintuples in price. A lot of short term investors made a lot of profits but we were left without the funding of that huge SSI entitlement. Maybe the problem would go away if we ignored it. Maybe a miracle would be bestowed upon us and the problem would go away. Maybe 1 million people who were just ready to retire would suddenly die and not need Social Security after all. A monthly payment of $1,900 over ten years for 1 million people is $2.28 Trillion. Maybe the Rapture is a solution after all.

When "Failure is Not an Option"

When "Failure is Not an Option"

This declaration has two contexts. The one where is it a motivational motto for military men to take the hill and for football players to break through the defense and make the touchdown, it is a truly inspiring war cry. The phrase has a nobler genesis with Gene Franz, Mission Director for the Apollo moon missions in the 1960s after Jim Lovell issued his understated but undying words, "Houston, we have a problem." But the other context leads to the Principle of Imminent Collapse. Where failure is declared to not be an option, there is and need to bury the truth about a manifest failure and to sequester the bearer of the bad news. In the Roman times, the messenger of bad news was killed, not because the recipient was angry, but because he did not want that bad news being leaked to the troops or enemy. The messenger might have become aware of the nature of his message and passed it along out of the chain of command that is essential in a military context.

Many corporate leaders have picked up on the value of those immortal words but diminish them by their invocation for less than worthy circumstances. All too often, a zealous manager or executive uses "failure is not an option" as a shield to protect his turf and to advertise that his enterprise is doing everything possible to succeed. He is trying to convince himself and his contemporaries and detractors alike that everything was being done to succeed.

A colleague, Joyce Callahan, approached me one day with a sign that she had made up on her computer that said, "If Failure is Not an Option… How Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?" It was then that I understood the imminent collapse context of that famous phrase. No body wants to admit a mistake. Mistakes make us look bad and makes the people around us look bad. Many times, we don't get the opportunity to remain in a job after a particularly unpopular decision or action that resulted in a huge embarrassment or public outrage. Refer to Marv Alpert on page 102.

Unless a person is so incorrigible that he refuses to learn from mistakes, the best person to fill a position is one who has already been through the mill on a particular situation. I would trust a person who got caught up in a mistake not to do it again over one who had never experienced that situation. Dishonest people are yet another aspect of that scenario. Trying to decide which type a particular person is, is the essential task at hand.

The human heart is one of those organs that benefits from small incomplete blood flow blockages. After a series of not lethal blockages, the circulation paths become redundant thereby saving the person from a much more serious heart attack later in life. The younger a person is when the first heart attack happens, the more likely that person is to die from that attack. Count those initial partial blockages as "mistakes" and one can see that we can "learn" from them.

But when failure is not an option in the second context, one cannot admit to the failure and therefore gains no beneficial results from it. Resources must be diverted to covering up the failure and assuring that the news doesn't get out. Deceit becomes institutionalized. Stress levels increase. Productivity wanes.

Commanding results and declaring failure to not be an option is the hallmark of an enterprise in crisis. It is one about to meet at a crossroad with the Principle of Imminent Collapse. When the Apollo mission was in jeopardy and Gene Kranz announced that failure was not an option, he also marshaled every available resource and set them to the task of solving the problem. The mission was no longer to get to the Moon, but to get home safely.

In my travels to numerous cities to meet with public transportation managers and operations, I hear a lot of comments from drivers and mechanics, dispatchers and supervisors, that relate to this concept of failure not being an option. In one focus group of bus drivers, they related the scenario that when they already had a standing room only crowd on the bus and there was a customer waiting to board who is sitting in a wheelchair, they are regularly told by the radio dispatcher to get that person on the bus even if they have to get everyone off first to accomplish that boarding. Failure is declared not an option. This is crisis mode. There is no Plan B. Not having a Plan B also leads to the Principle of Imminent Collapse.

Bus drivers are regularly instructed to use the bus that is assigned to them irrespective of whether that vehicle is appropriate to the route, works correctly, or will ultimately be able to complete the run without a breakdown. Crisis mode. Get the vehicle out there now and solve the breakdown later. Failure to make a full schedule rollout is not an option.

Many years ago the Soviet method of industrial production was explained to me as such. Theirs was a command economy. A Central Committee directive said that the People need a production level of 1,000 refrigerators per month from a particular plant, and failure was not an option. Heads could literally roll if 1,000 units did not ship each month. So a truck breaks down while delivering compressors to the plant and only 900 compressors actually get delivered that month. The measure of performance is the commanded shipment of 1,000 refrigerators, so 1,000 units are actually shipped. Failure was averted. But what of the 100 compressor deficit? 900 refrigerators are shipped that actually work and 100 that don't. They get "fixed" in the post-sale period after the customer calls that the refrigerator is broken already. No failures. At least none that anyone is willing to talk about. This leads to the periodic after-market remedies that must be performed every time a truck load of compressors doesn't arrive on time. No one is ever held accountable for the delivery of compressors, because no one ever lets the Central Committee know about it; because failures don't happen.