A DD-notice

We have learned quite a few things from a handful of PowerPoint slides in the past two weeks.

The really surprising lesson was that even the crappiest layout can send a shockwave around the planet.

It was a short-lived victory of content over presentation, so to speak. A triumph of literacy over the Kardashians.

Another lesson was that, of the states we tracked, the UK has turned out to be the most devious.

The British government sent a so called D-notice to the media. Where D can only stand for Devious because the whole thing has nothing to do with defense. It is a wag of the finger type gag order.

Just make it a double-D notice, and we would love it.

For anybody who has ever worked in government, the operative term here being "worked", the single most effective strategy against whatever terrorists we are trying to catch is obvious.

Publish everything.

If we really dared to make all the SOPs (I just love that word), all the manuals, all the memos public,  the would be terrorists would be as confused as the guy a couple of cubes over.

If we had the guts to make Al Whatever follow the minutiae of a, say, a drone procurement project, they would do exactly what the population of the major Western countries does: whimper and give up.

TheEditor feels grateful to the secrecy aficionados around the world for the boundless opportunities for ridicule ingrained in this very secrecy.

We Westerners are an ungrateful bunch, are we not?

While we do afford some semi-royal trappings to our fearful leaders, we do not want to be -- well -- left in the dark.

So, to us normal folks, South Park and the Simpsons are more important as vehicles of democracy than the circle j's of power within that less and less transparent group of rulers.*

In the U.S., still, you can have the Prole to President success story every once in a while.

In the next German election, it's going to be another Bland to Berlin.

* j stands for justification.