Maybe; Maybe; Maybe

For Several Days I have been hearing agitatedly exercised pundits farting and moaning about a number of things, which turn out to all be the same thing once the only slightly differently camouflaged outer husks have been stripped away. They are: unconnected dots, unshared information, faulty, lacking or non-existent intelligence, dueling data bases, non-communicating data bases and the human race's general and persistent inability to communicate across anything remotely resembling a divide or difference.

I couldn’t help but wonder. “How is it that the Iranian People are in the process of conducting a possibly successful revolution without any of the powerful facilities and functional capabilities that, even though we have them at our disposal, we can’t seem to stop one guy from taping some plastique to his crotch and board an airplane with intent to destroy it? How can they be possibly succeeding without any co-ordinated data bases or massive amounts of money and technology and manpower in support of their aims?”

After a little thought I remembered that they have Twitter. And with Twitter they have the capability to function like a hive of bees or a massive flock of birds,wheeling in inexplicably close order unison as they hurtle through the air. They can keep one another constantly aware of whatever it might be that one another might need to be kept aware of. Like the developing world and its adoption of cell phone technology which has allowed that developing world to leapfrog its richer land line based superiors, the Iranian Opposition has cracked the code: drop all that old bullshit and just communicate. And then act. That viewpoint, added to the facilitating power of a burst mode instant messaging system is a whole new paradigm. And it is a paradigm that looks to the future and embraces only the pragmatic and useful things that have most recently become available in the areas of keeping the most important information constantly available to everyone. They don't need data bases. They ARE the data base. They don’t need some omniscient power to connect the dots for them. They ARE the dots.

Compare that paradigm to the turf war ridden morass of paradigms extant in the United States: “this data base doesn’t talk to that data base” and “this agency doesn’t like that agency” and “we’ve got our best people working on it” and you just may be seeing something of a silhouette of what the future is going to look like. And we may not be in it. Maybe we ought to look at how Twitter facilitates rather than – as does our current mélange of systems - hinders the exchange of vital information. Maybe we need to realize that waiting to learn whatever it will be that the next bomber hides his bomb in (we’ve had shoes and underwear so far) and then making everybody getting on an airplane take that item off is not a winning strategy. It’s not even an acceptable tactic. It is a cretin attempt to look as if we are doing something when everybody is just pretty happy collecting their paychecks.

The Iranian Opposition actually gives a shit. Unlike the people in charge of our anti terror operations who are doing whatever it is that they think they are doing in support of keeping suicide bombers off of airplanes, the members of the Iranian Opposition don’t get a paycheck every two weeks no matter how they perform, no matter what they do. It doesn’t all pay the same for them. And sometimes their payment is their life.

Maybe…