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Homeland Security Drops Color-Coded Terror Alerts
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that the Homeland Security Department is poised to end its five-tiered, color-coded terrorism warning system, a post-Sept. 11 endeavor that has been called too vague to be useful and has been mostly ignored or mocked by the public. The domestic security advisory system was created in 2002 under then-Secretary Tom Ridge and in 2004, the department began assigning color threat levels to general targets such as aviation, financial services and mass transit. However the Department hasn't changed the alert level in four years, even after the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 and the alert level has only been elevated to red once, on Aug. 10, 2006, when British police disrupted a plot to detonate liquid explosives on airliners. Although it is unknown what, if anything, will replace the color-coded alerts, a senior Homeland Security official, who did not want to speak on the record about a decision still under review, says that 'the goal is to replace a system that communicates nothing.'" Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?
There are profound differences between men and women in world view and mode of thought. These are evident from the literature they create, the literature they consume, and the way they comport themselves over the spans of their careers.
The archetypal chick flick, Gone with the Wind, is described in its own advertising as "a searing tale of passion in a world gone mad." Essentially, it's about the feelings of the protagonist in a world that is utterly beyond the protagonist's control. If a Mills and Boon novel has a happy ending, it's provided by the intervention of a man. At no point does a woman attempt to change her world. She adapts to it, cries about it, or waits for a man to change it for her. Men, by contrast, write about almost nothing but taking control of their world, and the mechanics by which this is attempted.
Another fundamental difference is the list thing. Men teach one another the mechanism, the distilled principle, because there is less to remember and it has to be taken in context anyway. Women want a fixed context and rote instructions. If you try to teach them the principles instead, they don't listen and they get angry, saying "I don't care why, I just asked you to tell me what to do." If you give them a list of steps, it must be exhaustive like a computer program, because (also like a computer program) if context changes, breaking the procedure, or if anything has been omitted, blame is ascribed to the writer of the procedure. [Hey tech support guys, ever saw that before? A menu gets relocated so now they all need "retraining"]
A direct consequence of this intellectual inflexibility is that women do not create tools. They can be taught to use them, often very well, provided that the use of the tool can be described as lists of steps - programs!
Visit a craft shop like Spotlight. It will be crawling with women who think they are creative. In fact, all they ever do is stick glitter to boxes, or cut cloth according to a plan that was almost certainly created by a man, before stitching it together using a sewing machine, both likely invented and made for them by men. Some of them will vary the patterns, but creation ex nihilo is a behavior exhibited almost exclusively by men.
I suppose you could say that women play god using the thing between their legs, whereas men use the thing between their ears. This is probably acculturated behavior. Possibly it is an artifact, in men, of the inability to play god the easy way; certainly many of us see our creations as children of sorts.
If the above is not true, then why do women choose to date assholes while they want all nice guys to die alone? Something to think about before you idealize them.
Reserved for epic Katrina-level FEMA failures. Brownie did a heck of a job.