I used to go to an institution of higher learning. Most people called it college. But it was higher learning than high school, so the name works. I learned, in much more detail than during my lower learning activities, about great authors and their books, great thinkers and their thinks and a little bit about dinosaurs (some of which, fifteen years later, has been rethought by higher thinkers than myself).

Because I was on the arts side of the arts and sciences, I didn't have to do too much math (almost everything I took math wise was actually merely as high as high school and nothing higher) and very little science (geology and the previously mentioned dinosaurs class). Everything else was about the great arts, psychology and sociology, political science (not a "hard" science, as phallic-minded pre-med students like to say) and some poetry (which I tend to have a hard time calling a "great art," even if I wrote it).

I did like spy stories. Stories about people who lived in the shadow land between regular people and people we don't like to think about. And what you find out is that calling spying "intelligence" is somewhat of a misnomer. While spies are usually pretty good at being secret, what they find out and how they use it can be suspect a lot of the time.

Much of this intelligence is on the level of going out with a girl and trying to discern how many dates it will take to get in her pants (usually somewhere between 2-5 dates, depending on what constitutes a date and how far apart the dates occur--oh yeah, and how much they drink on the date). This is general intelligence that can be universally applied to most girls. There are anomalies, but this number is pretty reliable.

There is a wide range of time between 2-5 dates, though. This could be weeks or more than a month. Is your getting laid imminent or merely sometime in the future? Will you make it through the required waiting time before giving up? Is love at first sight involved? Do her friends like you? Do you have conflicting religious beliefs (or, similarly, birth control beliefs)? Does she have an underwear rule?

But let's get back to spies, who are highly trained at picking up information from unsuspecting people. They are also trained at making contacts--usually these contacts know the spy is something other than a freelance hairdresser working in Italy--who feed information to the spies. So the spy gets all this information (gets laid, if you like this metaphor) and then has to figure out what the good stuff is (was she faking it?).

The intelligence, you see, is really in parsing this information. Not just the act of collecting it. But there should be intelligence involved in collecting it, too.

You could be very good at getting laid, but have no concept of love. If the love isn't there, you are getting laid badly. But then, you probably don't care. It's not as if the security of the nation depends upon your actions. The metaphor breaks down on occasion.

We have a huge "intelligence" apparatus in this country. Actually, we seem to be unable to do anything in this country without it being "huge." But setting our fear of impotence and penis envy aside, with so many intelligence officers working within and without the confines of our borders, you'd think we'd know a lot about the world. And, strangely, we don't.

Intelligence failed to let us know some religious freaks were going to use our own airplanes to blow up our own buildings and people. Intelligence also failed to let us know a veteran of the first Gulf War and some of his buddies were really pissed off at the FBI because of an incident in Waco, Texas, and would blow up the FBI building in Oklahoma City. Intelligence failed to inform us that Saddam Hussein's bark was worse than his bite (talk about a man who was afraid we'd all find out about his little dick)--even though everyone kind of knew this from the first Gulf War.

Or maybe the people who make decisions based on intelligence really didn't want intelligent findings from our intelligence community. Maybe they just wanted a rubber stamp. And if they just want a rubber stamp, couldn't we cut out the middleman? It would certainly save us a lot of money, time and man power.

Which leads me to our current conundrum about intelligence: should we gather intelligence with unauthorized (not given a rubber stamp from a judge) wiretapping (listening to phone calls, reading email) of US citizens and/or people who reside within our borders?

The Prez and his supporters say this is necessary for the security of our country.

But if the intelligence we get from our intelligence operatives is either ignored or flat wrong, why should we let them spy on us? What good would it do? We might be talking about how much dog food to feed our pets with, and they might think it has something to do with uranium enrichment in Iran.

Obviously our intelligence is flawed. This has been stated by pretty much every person who is in government right now, including the Prez and his buddies.

How about we figure out a way to be more intelligent about our "intelligence," rather than giving our government the right to gather more useless information--about us this time, instead of people outside this country (who they really don't seem to be intelligent about at all)?

In other words, we should be more intelligent--or we're never gonna get laid.

Matt Worley doesn't like talking on the phone much, but he does send his fair share of email.