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Department of So-Called Homeland Security
Thursday, 2004 December 2 - 11:28 pm
So, what's the difference between orange and yellow again?

You've probably heard by now that Tom Ridge has resigned as the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Yawn.

The media consensus is that his biggest contribution was the five-color coded alert scheme that we now use. Ridge himself said that he spent months working on it. Months. I can only imagine how long he spent on the Saran-wrap-and-duct-tape thing.

Since the color coded scheme has been introduced, we've only used yellow and orange. This reminds me somewhat of when I worked at Nortel, and we had a scheme where bugs in the software would get prioritized from one (highest priority) to five (lowest priority). As the list of bugs grew, the pointy-haired managers decided that we should stop working on any bugs that were priority four or five. So the testers and engineers started using a scale from one to three instead, abandoning levels four and five because they were irrelevant. When the managers eventually figured this out, they issued a decree that we'd only work on bugs that were priority one or two.

Maybe you can guess what happened: we stopped using priority three also.

What exactly is the point of the five-color system? We will never say we're "green", because a Republican administration cannot govern effectively without striking fear into the hearts of its citizens. But we'll never say we're "red" either, because that would indicate we had some sort of gap in our defenses, and as we surely must know by now, AMERICA IS NEVER WEAK (with Bush in office).

So we just have "yellow" meaning "keep buying them Hummers but don't forget that Bush is keeping you safe", and we have "orange" meaning "hey, just in case you forgot, Bush is the only thing keeping you from HORRIBLE AND PAINFUL DEATH".

When they raise the alert level from yellow to orange, my reaction is to drink more liquor. But then again, that's pretty much my reaction to everything anyway.


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Posted by Ken in: politics

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