No Glink Oil here.

What else you got?

No Glink Oil here.

What else you got?

Government is stupid.

Having governments is also stupid, but that is not the subject here.

Government is stupid. It bears repeating.

This is necessarily so, as the employees will always be blind to anything that is outside their schooling, including instructions they receive as part of their employment.

Government has a tendency in their hiring to replicate the types of minds already dominating the organization. This is one of the reasons that government is so difficult to change. As all organizations, to greater or lesser degree, will reflect the composite, aggregate, average, of the employees, in all aspects of intelligence.

In my long consulting life, there were many occasions of interacting with government. Both local, and state governments. My work for the Federal government was rare, though not due to lack of opportunity. It was a matter of personal choice.

In one of my programming jobs for the Telco industry, and while working at a large, secure building, I had by chance come in contact with a fellow who was a Captain in the US Army in Pleiku, Vietnam, serving under my father, who, at that time, was the ‘military governor’ for the province due to the break down of the civilian authority. This was at the end stages of that war against the communist insurrectionists. It was from that war that our current 5GW strategy and tactics emerged, but that is another, longer, story going in another direction entirely.

This is about stupid government.

We all have interacted with it, and recognize that government can, is, and always will be, stupid.

Curiously, even government employees, when they are interacting with other parts of government, recognize that government is stupid. Do they ever apply that understanding to their own part of government? Hmmmm?

To continue, my work at the Telco firm placed me in the general proximate of this fellow for months. We can call him Agent Captain Baldy. His role as a Captain in my father’s command in the highlands of Vietnam was a fake. He was a CIA agent who had been given a cover as a Captain in the 101st Airborne. This was known to my father as the CIA informed him that Agent Cpt Baldy was there, but that he, my father, was not to hassle him in any way. That Baldy was doing work for the CIA, not the Army.

Decades later, I meet Agent Cpt Baldy on the stairs going into work one spring day. He recognized me as we had met in the early 1970s when he had come by the house in Washington state to see my father and I was there.

Time passes and we meet walking up into work. Over the course of a few weeks several conversations developed, including discussions about both his, and my work.

Agent Cpt Baldy was still in government. He was then the head of that division of a subsidiary of a major government sub contractor. His company handled all manner of things, legal, illegal, and black, for the government. They have their own assigned space at Groom Lake, and other, military, bases. They work primarily for the DOD. Over a decade later, this firm had to change their name as some of their staff became embroiled in the ‘Iraq War Prison Torture’ scandal. It was “that” type of company.

As my work was with the Telco OSP that owned the building, and had occasion to hire his firm, and was a security clearance covered site (meaning all employees were background checked), Agent Cpt Baldy felt reasonably comfortable talking with me.

He was a congenial lunch companion, though not a trustworthy one...the whole CIA thing meant he was a schooled, professional liar. Still, there was nothing for me to fear from the association, so we lunched frequently, and discussion was mainly concentrated on technical subjects, an area that fascinated us both.

Jumping forward, after several months, Agent Cpt Baldy was waiting for me one morning at the building stairs. He wanted to ask me to skip work that morning if possible to attend a presentation that his firm had prepared for government masters in DOD and DC.

It was intriguing, so I accepted.

The meeting was in a plush small theater room in our building, but within the several floors that Baldy’s firm leased. It had a central table on a stage in front of a projection screen. These were what we had before cell phones. The whole audience would look at the image on the large screen projected from the back of the room. It worked.

Anyway, the presentation was all about Space Aliens. It was the product of this firm’s think-tank division’s very expensive, and long research into “First Contact: Our Response”.

There were maybe twenty-five of us in the audience, and eight people around the table below the screen on the stage.

They were allowed to show us this presentation due to it being ‘out of embargo’ and being presented, or had already been, in DC that day.

It was sort of cool. There were quality graphics, not quite movie grade. There was quality, known voice actor, narration. It was snappy & really state-of-the-art for the day.

The whole of the movie, and the presentation by the panel that followed a break and a snack, was about how government should react when the Space Aliens came down to talk to them. It was over five hours long. Many pee breaks.

The discussion by the panelists was interesting, and revealing of government-think at its finest. There were plans, charts, graphs, tables, and numbers in quantity. There were assayed, weighed, compared, analyzed and statistically correlated cross table fields being brought out and displayed.

The whole effect would please government. It was a very good effort that had resulted from over three years effort with an unknown quantity of people.

At the end of the session, they allowed for questions. As I felt myself to be a back row guest, I had kept silent. At one point a questioner had mentioned an insight I had given to him during the lunch break, and I was drawn into the discussion.

I had had to leave, needing to make an appointment on time, so was reluctant to get into it, but did ask some questions as I was walking out of the theater room without expecting any answers. They were basically along these lines.

Why did you assume that First Contact would come from the Space Aliens as representatives of a government? If we had Space Exploration technology as was described by the movie, would our government be spending our citizens’ resources mounting giant expeditions into space? If so, what would motivate them?

Why assume that Space Aliens would arrive in large ships? If even 1% of 1% of the USA population had access to space exploration ships, how many would take off daily in pursuit of purely commercial interests? How many of those, if they landed on a planet with life, would involve themselves willingly with the local’s governments? Would we ask to be taken to the local’s leaders?

As noted, government is stupid and mostly blinded by their schooling and the types of minds they employ.

In my opinion, first contact is more likely to be with a “Yankee trader” pursuing technology, archaeology, or resources for personal gain, than a big, government backed, expedition.

Either way, it’s very dangerous to assume that the Space Aliens are coming here for any reason other than their own self interested motivation. With that understanding, I sure fucking hope we don’t get First Contact with Space Aliens by way of their government. It will be stupid too, and we have enough problems with our local versions.