zenpundit.com

To: Anybody who has sent me a message recently using the contact form.

I just discovered that my email from Siteground has been routed into my junk folder in my main account since….well….I’m not sure how long. If you sent me something and never received a response, you have my sincere apology and please do not take it personally; in all likelihood, I never saw it at all.

I’m currently responding to what I have from the last ten days but if you sent me something before then that you’d really like me to look at, leave a note in the comments so I can get in touch with you.

Jeff Stein of Spy Talk had a fascinating interview with Dr. David Charney, a CIA psychiatrist specializing in treating professional spooks. The whole article is interesting but the following caught my eye:

….But for case officers at the tip of the CIA’s spear, he said, the problem tends to be A.D.D., Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. 
“They seem to be highly functional A.D.D.’s,” Charney said. “You might think a person with ADD can’t tie their shoelaces, but quite the opposite.” To them, “boredom equals death,” Charney says, not really joking. 

“They’re energetic, restless, people who have to physically keep moving. Lock them to a desk, and they can’t deal with it. They can’t stand to be bored…” 

But A.D.D. can be an asset, too.  “They have the ability to absorb things from 360 degrees,” Charney marvels. 

“Contrast that with people who are linear, like your book-keeper or accountant, who chug along in a channel and get things done by going from one thing to another. But A.D.D. minds tend to be very synthetic. They reach out and pull things out of the air, or through other persons who are not linked in any way. They see patterns that other people don’t see. They can gather together unusual elements and bring them together into a whole that is a brilliant synthesis of things that would be lost on other people.  

“They have a sensitivity to ambient thoughts going on that a good case officer needs to pick up, little nuances, little hues, little things said that let you know if the agent you’ve recruited is telling the truth, or which is partly the truth … which buttons to push to manage the person, how to absorb material and put it into a whole. And the good ones have that ability.”

This is classic horizontal thinking with an emphasis on connections, patterns and synthesis driven by an internal “restlessness” – the kind of persona seen in such disparate occupations as fighter pilots, inventors, physicists and artists. There has long been a comparative and to an extent correlative association of ADHD or “hyperactivity” with creativity, high levels of intelligence and depression though of course not everyone with ADHD is creative, intellectually gifted, depressed or working for an intelligence agency. The correlation though has also been noted in MRI brain scan studies of children so it would appear to have a physiological basis that might explain why the CIA needs to have its own psychiatrists for reasons beyond the stress generated by a career in intelligence work – self-selection bias in people who apply to become employees.

(Hat tip to….one of my twitteramigos….I can’t find the tweet, damn it!) 

I wanted to say “thank you” to The Watcher’s Council for having a post of mine under consideration ( I came in 2nd in their non-Council category) and to Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye for the nomination. The fine blogs that compose The Watcher’s Council are:

Watcher of Weasels
The Education Wonks
The Glittering Eye
Rhymes With Right
Joshuapundit
Soccer Dad
The Colossus of Rhodey
Bookworm Room
Cheat-Seeking Missiles
Wolf Howling
Hillbilly White Trash
The Razor
Mere Rhetoric
The Provocateur

Here ya go…..

Top Billing! Clay Shirky – Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

This post made a HUGE impact on the journalism and tech blogospheres. It’s quite good.

Fabius Maximus – A solution to 4GW – the introduction

A robust discussion of 4GW by FM, including a large number of comments on the post including those by Col. GI Wison and Dr. Chet Richards.

DNI – Watch ADM on BookTV

Boyd acolytes and military reformers Tom Christie, Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey discuss America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress which was re-issued under the prestigious brand of Stanford University Press.

ICSR – Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action (PDF)

Nick Carr – Realtime kills real space

The asocial shift of mobile social media technology.

SWJ Blog – Special Warfare – 1962

A little military history in a primary source doc

John Hagel – With Liberty and Talent for All

Hagel is always good.

That’s it!

Is it me or is it really weird that we get more media coverage about predator drone kills of Taliban chieftains in Waziristan than the President of the United States openly speculating about putting troops on  our border with Mexico?

 President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the escalating drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he was looking at possibly deploying National Guard troops to contain the violence but ruled out any immediate military move.

“We’re going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense,” Obama said during an interview with journalists for regional papers, including a McClatchy reporter.

“I don’t have a particular tipping point in mind,” he said. “I think it’s unacceptable if you’ve got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens.”

I’m afraid that we are already at that tipping point.  Perhaps the Department of Justice has better uses for scarce resources than investigating a Sheriff, at the political behest of far leftwing Congressmen, for enforcing U.S. immigration laws. Yeah, I’m sure Sheriff Joe is a media hound and something of an abrasive jerk but he’s enforcing the law and we have far greater security priorities than carrying out the ideological vendettas of New York Democrats. Like tracking down Zeta killer teams operating inside the U.S. ?

Failed State Mexico Links:

State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Full PDF Article)   Stratfor reports on Mexico, news ignored by our mainstream media

Latest Academic Mexico Trip Report    “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?”    Mexico’s Instability Is a Real Problem

Mexico – Failed State/Failed Policies?   Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state