I will start with the big one which is 9/11. Obviously there is a lot of speculation about who did it and why, but I will just mention one basic fact.
To start with, the first plane crashed into the world trade center at 8:46 am. The fourth plane crashed near the capital city at 10:03 am, over an hour later. One such attack should be enough to put all air defenses at maximum alert, and scramble interceptors. These systems are designed to intercept stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles, so they wont have any problem to track and destroy civilian airliners. Instead it seems that the military was completely asleep. There is simply no explanation for that, except so-called “conspiracy theories”.
I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.
That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.
So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.
I will start with the big one which is 9/11. Obviously there is a lot of speculation about who did it and why, but I will just mention one basic fact.
To start with, the first plane crashed into the world trade center at 8:46 am. The fourth plane crashed near the capital city at 10:03 am, over an hour later. One such attack should be enough to put all air defenses at maximum alert, and scramble interceptors. These systems are designed to intercept stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles, so they wont have any problem to track and destroy civilian airliners. Instead it seems that the military was completely asleep. There is simply no explanation for that, except so-called “conspiracy theories”.
I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.
That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.
So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.