Acquiring My C.I.T. ("Curmudgeon in Training") Degree
The mind reels: George Tenet knew 9/11 was in the works in the summer of '01. He knew terrorists were taking flying lessons. ("Gee, Rocky, I think they must be up to something!") And yet...9/11 happened. God love Tenet, but what's the lesson? Perhaps that bureaucrats are not entrepeneurs? An entrepeneur would've found a way to translate the information he possessed into action. For my money, it's worse that he knew about 9/11 than that he (or the CIA) thought that there WMDs in Iraq. But as Hitchens wrote, "The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted 'intelligence' system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990." Perhaps the CIA should be called the "Central Anti-Intelligence Association"; as a contra-indicator they have a decent record.
This is part of a much larger picture though. The larger picture is that every profession is beginning to show canyons of incompetence. During the '70s Robert Ringer said something like job quality is declining so fast that you'll look like a star if you're merely competent. Definitely a prophet.
Take journalism, please. (Thanks Henny Youngman! We stand on the shoulders of comedic giants*.) The once respected profession is rife with bias, fraud, and ignorance - it's all there, a potent cocktail of disinformation. The journalistic ethos seems to be to search for anecdote in service of your agenda. And most journalists know nothing about religion or economics, which colors just about every single thing they write.
What else? Well...remember when Nasa could launch rockets and nothing fell off that wasn't supposed to?
Did you know that the S.A.T. had to be dumbed down to keep the scores from sliding too precipitously?
How in the world can you not have an evacuation plan for New Orleans when everybody & their brother knows they get hurricanes down there? Mind-boggling. And blaming Bush for state & local incompetence is also mind-boggling.
Is it me, or were there more CEOs like Lee Iacocca than Ken Lay back in the old days?
And did you also know that the bishops botched the priest scandal, that my job scores are inflated, and that doctors sometimes take off the wrong limb?
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* - Speaking of comedic giants, I must figure out a way to work Michael Scott's brilliant "that's what she said!" into a post.
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