Elephants, Snakes, Blue Candles and Red Feathers

Elephant repellent can be anything you like from the whimsical to the outrageous, from crossing your fingers to an excuse for public flatulence. As long as there are no elephants in view or recalled in recent memory by the audience any action serves to repel elephants. Generally the audience is young and gullible. Snake repellent works about the same way as elephant repellent. Always looking out for an elephant you might miss the snake and get bitten, while always looking down for the snake you might get squashed instead. Looking out and listening for elephants and snakes is hard work but having a repellent is much eaiser. Elephant and snake repellent is great fun but only if it is facetious. Let's go back a few years and search Wikipedia - admittedly not the best reference source but a convenient one - for some recent elephants and snakes

World Trade Center bombing on February 26,1993 in New York City; The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19,1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996 in Atlanta; The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.; Anthrax Attacks in the United States during the Fall of 2001 following the 9/11 event; Bali Nightclub bombing on October 12, 2002; Beltway Sniper Attacks during October 2003; Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004; London bombings of the subways and buses on July 7 and 21, 2005.

Just a few of the major elephants and snakes in the last thirteen years or so. Some are solitary snakes that would have been hard to detect, some are either dens of snakes or herds of elephants, depending on your point of view, that should have been at least partially detected. Wikipedia has even more comprehensive lists and I'm sure better sources like LexisNexis and others could reveal a mountain of events that could be termed snakes or elephants in the context of risk here. There just seem to be snakes and elephants everywhere. Damn! Maybe we live in a jungle. Who knew?

Real threats, real risks if you will, require serious avoidance measures. Risk avoidance requires risk detection and assessment. Detection is the real problem and precedes assessment and avoidance. Quine and Wittgenstein are correct, no matter how much they are ignored, how the question is framed is crucial to getting an answer, a real answer. No one wants to get bitten by a snake or squashed by an elephant. But, poor detection methods, poor ways to see snakes and elephants, ways that are very high tech but have very poor discrimination, ways that generate mountains of data about all the animals in the jungle but are very poor at unambiguously finding snakes and elephants or even traces of them, ways like the NSA's data mining of communications records, are in the last analysis nothing more than snake and elephant repellent. 'Who is talking to who?' may not be the best question, especially when the question is more like 'who is everyone talking to?'

Until the NSA either publicly fails, God forbid, in the face of another catastrophic event or publicly succeeds in foiling such an event the current methods will serve only to set public opinion against responsible and productive detection work. Maybe, just maybe, Stephen Kappes return to the CIA as the second in command under General Haden will produce more real detection and less in the way of snake and elephant repellent. I wonder what General Alexander will do now at NSA, will he continue the mining?

Maybe trying not to attract snakes and elephants unnecessarily would be better than believing that the current actions have repelled all the snakes and elephants. It's been nearly a year now since any snakes or elephants caused any trouble. Let's sift and chain another terabyte of communications records this week and see if the elephants and snakes stay away, eh? I hear they're lighting the blue candles and using the red chicken feathers this month in New Orleans too. Nope, no elephants, no snakes, no storms here, not a one. Anyone got any more rum, my hurricane is getting a bit light?

More light reading on snakes and elephants, feathers and candles

The NSA is on the line -- all of them

LISTENING IN

Big Brother Is Listening

Wiretaps: How to Fix FISA

How the NSA Does "Social Network Analysis"

Blue Candles, Red Feathers

Mo rum, pleeze

KISS, bad ideas are reason enough

God bless Anthony Lane who in his recent review of The Da Vinci Code, both the book and the movie, points out the most fundamental and best reason to ignore the book, it is quite simply badly written.  And, the movie can be ignored for the same reason since in the director Howard's own words it is a faithful adaptation of the book.  All the press about the premises of the book, which are laughable at best,  immediately turned me away from any attempt to read it.  Like Lane I was able to see the movie fresh without being contaminated by the book experience, and like Lane I found the movie a complete waste of time except to have been well received as an entertaining outing by my mother-in-law, a retired librarian, who has read the book and found both lacking in merit.  I am sick to death of all the Christian hand wringing over the Brown's book and Howard's movie and amazed, if not envious, about the cottage industry that has grown up debunking the book.  Oh! Should I be so smart to write either the bad book or one of the debunkers.  Forty million copies, who knew? 

 

All of this hullabellew leads me ponder Lane's idea

Should we mind that forty million readers - or, to use the technical term, "lemmings" - have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text?

a bit more deeply as regards the blogosphere.  Brown's work, at least from what I've seen in the movie resembles nothing so much as an extended blog entry from one of the tens of thousands of blogs claiming to have the truth about everything from Hiroshima to hemorrhoids.  Bad ideas, and from what Lane says just plain bad writing also, are more than reason enough to ignore a book like Brown's.  In the same way much of the blogosphere can also be ignored.  Lemmings, perhaps like the poor, will always be with us.  Watch the lemmings carefully and quietly move quickly out of their way.  Hell hath no fury like lemmings blocked from their journey to the edge.  Oh, by the way, did I mention the mid term elections are coming up.  Lemmings anyone?