The Zookeeper

In this memetic menagerie you may have noticed that logical consistency hasn’t shown up yet. Warned you. Anyway, it might be polite if a few more signs and guideposts are added.

Your adult years are framed by education. You have a lifelong affair with it, which sometimes gets torrid when your curiosity slips the leash. For example you get a big buzz reading about science and math. Pop-wise though, your grades in college attest that you never had the want-to rigor to make it a vocation, and never heard the empirical call to arms. You find that social sciences, strategic studies, and language come more naturally to your makeup (but you balk at classifying any of that as 'science'; none of the principles in there hindcast or forecast consistently, reproducibly). Your academic promiscuity eventually leads you into a tryst with the mercurial mistress History; you are smitten, you submit to her discipline, but she’s cruel and demanding, materially all take and little give, so you press-gang yourself to honorable work and leave her on the dock for a practical education.

If the Navy discovers you’re facile with language; you’re pretty. They find out you’re clean enough for all-the-compartments clearance; they like you. They discover that you can lead, follow, and manage; they’re in love.

Vocational training is the stock and trade of the services and you’re slated to be seconded to NSA from the get-go (many masters). Eighteen months of schoolin’ later you go to work against a ‘target’; knowledge as a weapon applied through directives designed in a context of military, socio-economic, and political strategies. You pay attention and you thrive. Note: that work is hit or miss on precision and accuracy based on luck, and how well you can work the elements of the intelligence life-cycle (John Keegan’s walk-through):

• Acquisition – sigint for you, collecting mid-v los traffic is a bitch, check my cant, uh!
• Delivery – Er…can’t talk about that
• Acceptance – vetting; the data, the collection, and the operator
• Interpretation – the distillation, sometimes nothing left when you're done
• Implementation – issues of tempo, no preservatives added

So, there’s your sluice, pan, and sift; if you have a nugget that's still useful at the end of that, you win. Often it's just GIGO writ large on the world's big white board...you had your share of being critically right though, and you like the mission. Shadows to the fore...your wiring has changed permanently (again) and you see information everywhere; unintended consequences to come.

At a significant tipping point the community starts implementing full-scale digital transmission and storage of the vast information stores you use (vs. heavy dependence on venerable reel-to-reel magnetic tape systems), and you get heavily involved with that effort (changed the world a little in the process, you get a medal) ...long story short: you begin what will be a long-term career as an information technologist. This should be no great surprise considering you’ve been hobbying and tinkerin’ with computers since you were a tot, but it is. Material needs call, service ends, and you take your skills and perspective to the marketplace to see what they're worth.

Whew. Enough for now.