And that in a nutshell is why British taxpayers have been saddled for 65 years with an expensive, but fundamentally useless weapons system.
His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or "punditry," as he put it, famously describing it as "fundamentally useless".
This is called homeopathy and the only thing I will say in its defence is that, though fundamentally useless, no one has ever been as interested in me whingeing on as the ruddy-faced women who diagnosed my hay fever not as a reaction to pollen or even pollution, but as repressed grief about my mother's death.
In White Noise, Don DeLillo's anxiety-ridden narrator Jack Gladney is tormented by the concept of masculinity and how he measures up: "What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet – fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes?" And what if, instead of a broken faucet it is a broken mind?
There's a USB port on the box which is fundamentally useless – apparently it's only for engineers to use when fixing the box, so you can't use it to play other content – photos, films etc; nor can it be used to plug in a Wi-Fi dongle.
After what Newsom called "the debacle" of Obama's Healthcare.gov roll-out, he says that we now know how fundamentally useless government is when it comes to what he calls the "procurement" of technology.
