Top secret weapon for homeland security: the ‘Sno-Cone’ machine

By David McElroy · December 8, 2011

There’s been a serious breach in the secrecy of U.S. homeland security. A small newspaper in Michigan has accidentally leaked a key part of U.S. defense strategy. I’m hoping that “the terrorists” haven’t noticed yet, so let’s just keep this between you and me.

What’s the big secret? OK. Is it just us good guys listening? No dirty terrorists around? Good. Here’s the scoop. No pun intended.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is equipping counties all over the United States with Arctic Blast Sno-Cone machines. The pilot program is with 13 counties in Michigan, and that’s where the unfortunate secrecy leak happened. Here’s what those traitors at the newspaper were vile enough to report:

Montcalm County recently received a $900 Arctic Blast Sno-Cone machine.

The West Michigan Shoreline Regional Development Commission (WMSRDC) is a federal- and state-designated agency responsible for managing and administrating the homeland security program in Montcalm County and 12 other counties.

The WMSRDC recently purchased and transferred homeland security equipment to these counties — including 13 snow cone machines at a total cost of $11,700.

The machines were funded by a grant from the Michigan Homeland Security Program. The request for a snow cone machine came from another county, but all 13 counties received them.

Are you starting to get the picture here? The government is buying “snow cone machines” for counties. Yeah, right. Who would believe that one? They’re obviously secret weapons. There’s no other explanation.

Now, I can’t tell you how these weapons work. Maybe it’s been determined that because terrorists who come from the Middle East have been raised with so much sand, maybe they’re scared of ice. Or maybe there’s a top secret chemical in the ice and it will lure the unsuspecting terrorists into turning themselves in, confessing and the pledging allegiance to the American flag. Or maybe there’s really not any ice in the machines. Maybe the refrigeration unit simply cools a tiny nuclear powered laser cannon that somehow knows who’s been naughty or nice.

Even if I knew how these weapons work, I couldn’t tell you, because that would be a breach of national security. This stuff is so secret that only that one small newspaper has let it slip — and I figured the writer will be jailed and sent to Guantanamo at any moment for the offense. (It could be worse. She could have been killed by an armed drone.)

Now I know you’re wondering why I’m so confident that this is a new secret weapon, and I’ll tell you. This is either a powerful new secret weapon or the government is just wasting massive amounts of money again by buying things we don’t need (or want) and calling it national security.

Since I’m sure the government would never use national security as an excuse to spend money, it has to be a secret weapon. It just has to be.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

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