The chances are very good that this will be about as lethal as the usual flu, which annually kills some 35,000 people in the US alone. Yet there is a possibility that this could be worse than usual. H1N1 occasionally provokes a "cytokine storm", in which the healthier the immune response of the victim, the more destructive is the body's natural response to the infection.
Also in the air, lots of pollen. During the recent campaign for the Special Election of the District 4 County Council seat, I remained more than a bit "under the weather", not quite getting sick but sleeping a lot more than usual. However, with the end of the campaign for me -- I got some 104 votes -- comes also the end of my usual springtime allergy season. If I get the flu on top of this, I'll just chalk it up to misadventure, assuming I survive. Yet it's fortunate that I didn't have to shake all of those hands with an active flu season on us. The nature of politics doubtless would have to change, were there a pandemic very easily transmitted by being in the same room, much less by shaking hands. In the meanwhile, as the threat from the flu is being covered in all media, less attention is being given even in local media to a rather more serious threat, that of a local emergence of potentially epidemic measles.
Love is probably in the air as well, and no doubt a bit of espionage as well. I never could tell the difference between the two, so don't ask me to differentiate between the schoolgirls and coeds whispering and giggling, or guys slapping hands and checking out the aforementioned schoolgirls and coeds, and less harmless confidences and discussions. Yet springtime is the season when all of the cloistered -- and the clandestine -- emerge from their winter lairs and fastnesses to sprawl upon the land, as it were.
Now, the chances that any schoolgirls, coeds, or divorcees will be whispering and giggling about me in any favorable way are slight indeed; probably the most complimentary thing I might overhear would have to do with me managing to lose almost 15 pounds during the campaign, so that now my paunch is slightly less unsightly. I suppose that's positive. I suppose that if I get the swine flu and sweat off another 20 pounds, that might be positive as well, in a "all's well that ends well, no matter how horrid the interim" sort of way. Then again, I could launch myself into a health-and-exercise crusade and lose 20 pounds of flabby midriff and then gain 20 pounds back, of sightly muscle, and become one of those annoyingly buff 50-year-olds that one sees gracing advertisements for men's haircolor anti-grey potions. But first I'd have to succumb to plastering my shiny pate with minoxidil. Ah vanity. Thine appeal is less than magnetic to me, but exercise sounds like a good way to deal with encroaching arteriosclerosis. In any case, having spent the last year in recovery from a broken hand and assorted other injuries, probably I need to get myself back into shape, just on general principles. But love, no doubt, will not be coming my way. I only wish I could say the same for espionage.
I'm not a spy, I should pause to point out. My general family background includes a lot of government-worker type of stuff, and my family name is well-represented in the history of military service to the US. I've worked and played in the District and environs for so long that it's been unavoidable that while traipsing along the shores of the slippery swamp that is international business and government as present in Washington, I've occasionally slipped on the shore and gotten mud between my toes, so to speak. But generally speaking, the intelligence community is the intelligence community and I try to have as little interactions with them as possible, mostly because they make me crazy. And living as we do in an age where even the teenagers are stalking each other across FaceBook and MySpace (and Twitter and who-knows what all else) and the collegiate types are ChoicePointing their potential dates and mates, I can't imagine how much crazier it gets -- nowadays -- in the intelligence community.
I grew up in a time when nobody had cellphones, and computers were huge things that filled a room or even most of a building, and when snooping on other people was generally despised, and was purely the province of cops and criminals, or spies and their hunters. Stalking was so rare that it was not even illegal; nobody had found a need to criminalize something that happened so rarely that it was considered symptomatic of severe mental illness.
If someone was stalking you, back in the day, you knew what you were dealing with, and what you were dealing with was decidedly outside the pale. If you weren't a criminal, you knew that your stalkers were burglars or worse; if you were a criminal, you knew that your stalkers were rivals or the detectives. If you were a spy... you never ever saw your stalkers, if you were competent... or if your stalkers were competent. There would be only caution and more caution, and eventually all of the puzzle pieces would come together enough to create a picture, and sooner or later people would die or end up disappeared into prison forever and ever.
But in our modern information society, compounded by both reasonable fears as well as unsupportable paranoias on subjects ranging from open-air drug markets through pedophilia through transnational terrorism, everyone's stalking everyone else, as near as I can tell. I never could tell the difference between love and espionage, and nowadays it seems that neither can anyone else.
I hate having to deal with the intelligence community in any way, but sadly the sort of work I do tends to mostly be done within the intelligence culture. Even mid-sized corporations that need my level of expertise in server adminstration or build-out tend to have significant intelligence-culture presences, if only for due-diligence in the Human Resources department, doing background and credit checks on potential employees. And as almost any potential employer has their HR department, this means that the intelligence culture is ubiquitous throughout almost all of society. That means that everyone everywhere knows, or thinks they know, almost everything about almost anyone or everyone anywhere.
It's one thing to have almost unlimited access to the records of almost anyone, but for about a hundred dollars you can get that sort of information about almost anyone. Even the best intelligence services use this sort of Open Source and Commercial Sources information brokering as a basis for their operations.
Why keep staff on hand, or expend the resources to maintain your own information systems, when you can simply pay to be told what you want to know?
Why indeed. Well, first, there's the question of how much you can trust Open Source or Commercial Sources. In an age when Identity Theft is a real concern, it's as much of a concern that the same hackers who can get access to detailed information can as easily alter or insert comparable information. Sometimes there's a definite commercial motive, such as competition for contracts with government agencies or major corporations, in which insider information or the ability to discredit the competition can provide extreme leverage in the competition.
In politics, the ability to feed discrediting information about your opponents or their supporters -- to commonly-accessed information brokers -- can become a deciding factor in a campaign.
"Feeding the media" is a well-known and commonplace tradition. Though most people see this through the window of press-conferences or photo-opportunities, there are other modes such as general press-releases, "press kits", and even public-relations people developing cozy relationships with various reporters or editors of media believed to be influential on the outcomes of campaigns. Yet the general public may not be aware of how techniques which used to be reserved to national intelligence services are increasingly being deployed into the intergrade zones of commerce, media, and politics. Feeding the media has also grown evil roots into "feeding the choicepoint" or the highly-related technique of Google-Bombing.
Despite the occasional hilariousness of googlebombing, comparable activities in ChoicePoint-bombing are probably just as legal and just as impossible to remedy, due to the policies of both informational resources, as summarized by Google:
We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.
More or less, they feel that they provide such spotless service on the vast majority of their legitimate queries by their legitimate users regarding legitimate subjects, that they refuse to take any action to correct intentionally deposited misinformation.
But I digress.
The difference between "the intelligence community" and "intelligence culture" is pretty much the difference between trained professionals operating in a highly regulated and securely controlled set of systems, and a bunch of skilled hobbyists pretending to professionalism. Another analogy might be to the comparison and differences between professional NASCAR drivers on the track at a scheduled event, and skilled street racers staging an impromptu tag-team rally around the Beltway.
The intelligence community generally doesn't infiltrate the meetings of Narcotics Anonymous, with the exception of those poor DEA agents who have succumbed to one of the professional hazards of deep-cover work and have become addicts. The "intelligence culture" doesn't just infiltrate the meetings of Narcotics Anonymous, they usurp control of Alcoholics Anonymous and turn it into their own sex factory and child-abuse cult.
When Kristen was 17 and drinking out of control, her psychologist referred her to an Alcoholics Anonymous group that specialized in helping the youngest drinkers. In the Midtown Group, members and outsiders agree, young people could find new friends, constant fellowship, daily meetings, summer-long beach parties, and a charismatic leader who would steer them through sobriety.
But according to more than a dozen young people who structured their lives around the group, the unusual adaptation of AA that Michael Quinones created from his home in Bethesda became a confusing blend of comfort and crisis. They described a rigidly insular world of group homes and socializing, in which older men had sex with teenage girls, ties to family and friends were severed or strained, and the most vulnerable of alcoholics, some suffering from emotional problems, were encouraged to stop taking prescribed medications.
Kristen, now 26, said that for eight years, she was "passed along" from one middle-aged male leader of Midtown to another. She said her sponsor urged her to have sex with Quinones -- widely known as Mike Q. -- as a way to solidify her sobriety and spiritual revival. Kristen, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used in keeping with AA traditions, also recalled helping to persuade other teenage girls to sleep with older men in the group.
[ ... ] (Seeking Recovery, Finding Confusion: AA Group Leads Members Away From Traditions, Fisher, Mark, the Washington Post page A01, July 22, 2007, downloaded 2009 April 30)
Some would suggest that this was more of a Cult than of Intelligence Culture, but the line dividing one from the other is diffuse indeed if it can be said to exist at all.
Intelligence Culture, I don't suppose I need to point out, doesn't always have the best interests of either the individuals, or of society at large, at the top of its list of priorities.
More to come?
