As If It Happened Yesterday

For the life of me I can never understand why people in legislative, executive branches of state or federal government choose to ignore extreme events such as Columbine shootings, the Oklahoma attack, Gezi or Tahrir.

These extreme events are a sign of where the new middle resides. If someone is going haywire about government overreach, and plots a maniacal attack, chances are there are a lot of people uneasy about these things as well but choose (thankfully) not to take any action. That middle needs to be watched with care. No reason should be given to that middle to shift even more to the right or left.

Recent revelations about NSA PRISM program show exactly this kind of overreach. Let’s recall near history: when McVeigh did the Oklahoma attack, there was only a slight perception, a whiff of possibility that Clinton government was becoming too intrusive, centralized. Compare that with the all the hoopla that was caused by PRISM. Noone should provide such people any excuse to go postal (no pun intended -postal service being a government service and all-). And seriously.. these characters are no joke.. McVeigh got what came to him eventually, of course - and when he got the needle, the fucker didn’t even flinch.

School violence: If children are dying in places they were thought to be most safe, killed by their own peers, maybe its damn time to think about some level of gun control. You can keep your rifle to shoot that occasional stray hyena up the ass - but everyone and their grandmother knows you probably do not need an effin Uzi to do it - which strikes at the heart of the issue - kids with automatic guns.

On the other end of the spectrum (protests), but same blind attitude against the new normal, there is Morsi and his cohorts - they kept ignoring the Tahrir protest mentality which brought them to where they were. Each day and every day they should have remembered, acted as if Tahrir happened yesterday, and that it could happen again. Instead, they chose to play the Byzantian game - I rub your shoulder if you rub mine, I give you this, if you give me blah - the kind of stuff taking place behind closed doors, among players, Integrators. In the meantime they tried to expand their powerbase but forgetting all of this is taking place in the age of Internet, in age of decentralized communication, and de-facto decentralized control. The result: Tahrir II. They forgot to watch the new middle whose position was made abundantly clear by the extreme protests.

As a side note:

The explanation above is somewhat different from the Black Swan angle described by Nassim Taleb. We do not see normalcy, and once-in-a-blue-moon extremes after which things just go back to normal. We argue that the existence of a Black Swan is most likely a sign that there are a lot of gray ones, therefore all the following calculations about the normalcy assumption need to take this new color into account.