Scary news today about a foiled (we hope) terrorist plot in the United Kingdom is another reminder that we should not get too comfortable. We have been forced to remember 9/11/01 again. At the time it was hard for our minds to put together the idea of of a commercial passenger airliner with "weapon of mass destruction." Even Condoleezza Rice had trouble with the idea and said so. But there it was.People try to integrate incomprehensible facts into their minds by trying to make sense of them. One of the mind's tactics for this is synthesis. Wikipedia defines this as,
Synthesis (from the ancient Greek σύν (with) and θεσις (placing), is commonly understood to be an integration of two or more pre-existing elements which results in a new creation.photo credit: "Iron Rose" by cybersb @StockXCNNG
Unnatural combinations - The Queen of Synthesis is at it again. I am putting concepts together that should remain separate. Yesterday it was war and elections, earlier it was about "loyal opposition," and today a story is about scandal and intelligence.
This intelligence scandal is plain dumb. WaPo reporter par excellence Walter Pincus, reports that two top Counterintelligence officials are going to resign. They have been linked to the Duke Cunningham scandal in California. This one is yet another item to add to the long list of reasons why Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, too. To quote,
David A. Burtt II, director of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Defense Department's newest intelligence agency whose contracts based on congressional earmarks are under investigation by the Pentagon and federal prosecutors, told his staff yesterday that he and his deputy director will resign at the end of the month.
The best minds - Here's another one "for the books:" A summer intern working for Homeland Security also made the WaPo. Zachary Goldfarb writes a good story under this headline, "Is DHS Site Really Ready? Science Intern Thinks Not." To quote,
Emily Hesaltine was a sophomore at the University of Virginia looking for a summer internship where she could apply her engineering background to a public policy issue.The world still feels slightly insane to me this morning. Much of the news makes our heads spin because we can make no sense of it. What makes sense to me today is what I have synthesized, i.e.,
This summer, as an intern at the Federation of American Scientists, the 20-year-old did that in a big way: She analyzed the Department of Homeland Security's emergency preparedness Web site, Ready.gov, and came up with a new version of the site that the federation calls significantly improved.
The government site, which has had more than 20 million visitors since 2003, offers
advice for what to do in the case of a natural disaster or chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. But since it went up in February 2003, the site has been lampooned for what critics said were obvious or dubious suggestions.
- Since 9/11 al Qaeda has not gone away. We should have finished the job in Afghanistan.
- The overly robust counterintelligence function in the Department of Defense could have been predicted, and should have been investigated years ago by Congress. The defense department oversight function of Congress has been incredibly missing in action.
- Homeland Security is not a very smart place. It is too big and unwieldy and too bureaucratic to take good care of us. It lacks creativity and is out of touch with the its citizenry. Super-cooled Michael Chertoff has set a tone that could have predicted the department's reaction to the bright young intern in the story above.
- I have to live with the current administration's dangerous synthesis of arrogance and ineptitude, but I do not have to like it.
My current "creative post" at Southwest Blogger is a poem about going over the hill.
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