Ugh – you’d never get ethics approval for this sort of experiment on a human child, no matter the stakes. Really drives home the fact that the Sarnothi are not human and have no legal standing in our society.
Um, you may want to double check your history. This kind of adoption integrating to society is beyond common among humans. Selkie is being treated no different then any other minority displaced by war really.
I’m sorry, but I’s having trouble understanding what part of Selkie’s situation would require ethics approval, or for that matter, why Todd is so upset.
She had many friends at the orphanage and just as many at school, almost no adult has taken issue with her appearance, she can walk around in public without fear of being insulted or ostracized, many kids were willing to stand up for her during her altercation with Truck, and the majority of those against her were angry at what she DID, not who she WAS.
All in all, Selkie has a caring family who is aware and accommodating to her needs, all the privileges that an “ordinary” human kid would have, and has a bright future ahead of her. How is her situation different than those children who do have legal standing?
Todd is upset because HIS DAUGHTER was recently PUNISHED for being ATTACKED. He is not thinking clearly. He is angry. He is not inclined to be tolerant of anything that even vaguely sounds like mistreatment of his little girl. I’m not saying he’s being perfectly rational, I’m saying he’s a dad. Parents will flip their shit when they feel their kids are threatened.
If it were a psych experiment subject to informed consent laws, then no. However, this is an experiment in government policy regarding refugees. That’s very very normal.
For a while there was a program for refugees from Eastern Europe (mostly Bosnian and Serbian and Croatians) in my Texas home town. They brought people in, gave them some limited English training, and set them up with jobs at a local grocery store. Then the government just waited to see how they did. Luckily, most thrived, but it was far from a certain thing. The government had essentially taken a group of people living in a war torn area and dying of starvation and tried to see if making them work around food all day every day helped them overcome the trauma any better than other employment.
That it was a government project/experiment was something we found out after talking to some of these people for a while. If you didn’t know, you’d just be a little surprised/frustrated that none of the employees seemed to speak good English or Spanish and not give it a second thought.
Heh, limited access top secret clearance. I think that might just be “secret” clearence (I forget the exact heiarchy of clearances, but I recall “top secret” being one of the lower ones…secret, top, super, super top, super super [yeah, really] and probably others above those too)
Hopefully Todd will be able to get his brows back under control, otherwise he’ll be a danger to anyone directly overhead 😀
Oh dear, I WILL hijack this posting board and explain in painful detail everything you never cared to know about security clearances. Up to and including their actual investigation names.
The lowest is FOUO- for official use only- and is not even counted
Confidential is in the same boat but a bit more important than FOUO.
SECRET is when the badges start coming out and people are allowed to shoot you if you twitch wrong in the wrong area.
There are levels of SECRET- or compartments of Secret which are just like different rooms next to each other with different access codes.
TOP SECRET- or what they simplify by calling Top Secret- is the highest and most compartmentalized. I say the call it Top Secret, because it’s a lot easier than saying *a bunch of random letters and numbers that can take up a whole page* And those CAN be limited access because it all depends on your need to know. That is where you get things like Galactic Secret, or Cosmic Secret or such higher. They are all just very specialized Top Secrets. Anyone who tells you different is LYING, watched too many movies, or most likely messing with you. Cuz clearances are like fight club. Rule 1: Don’t talk about them.
I am ASSUMING Tod Smith has had at least a SAC (Special Access Checks) which is a single or multiple record checks that do not constitute a complete investigation.
Seeing as Selkie is a special case and has her own Agent Handler watching over her- Tod might have gotten a NACLC- National Agency Check with Law and Credit- which he may have gotten anyway because he was getting checked out to adopt a kid (NACLC is fancy speak for a basic and detailed background investigation and not always for a clearance)
They might have went a head an had him do a full SSBI (Single Scope Background Investigation) because of the adoption- or because of Selkie. A SSBI is more or less the investigation you need to get a Top Secret or, very least, an interim Top Secret. Assuming that is what they did- all Tod would need would be adjudication for Top Secret access. Which to get you need a “need to know”. Tod does not need to know everything that’s going on concerning the war or the people involved. He just needs to know what goes on that impacts Selkie. Hence- limited access Top Secret.
TL/DR
Todd should be thanking Agent Brown for doing the adjudication for him because he saved Todd a LOT of paper work and hassle. It’s GOOD know someone that can just walk into an Adjudicator’s office and tell them “sign this!” and walk out.
P.S.
The above WAS the short and not very detailed version of it.
Also- I am not meaning to offend, it’s just one of those weeks where I will start screaming “REALITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!” And proceed to beat a dead horse into the wall. Because that would be more productive then the things I have had to deal with.
Which- oddly- have been clearance issues. 😉
And people who shall remain nameless because I do not want to be linked to their eventual vanishing who think I don’t know my job. -__-
Dude, I get the same way about reasonable reality. My girl is creating a sentient species for a d&d/tabletop campaign, and was discussing anatomy with me yesterday… Pretty sure I drove the poor thing crazy insisting on at least a little bit reality-basis 😡
Information is information, no offense over here at least.
I was also going off some 3rd hand knowledge from about a decade ago, so there’s definitely a lot I’ve either forgotten, overlooked, or just didn’t know to begin with. The compartmentalizations being one I totally blanked on (but makes the most sense too) I didn’t even qualify classified & lower as those are commonly used by private industry/individuals too, but have a pretty clear understanding to the average person.
Pretty much all clearance is limited access. Even if you get top secret access, you’ll normally only be allowed to access information related to the job you are supposed to be doing. Encryption people don’t get access to the special weapons research, weapon researchers can’t access the personnel files, etc.
In the event I have not made it clear by the post below- I deal with clearances. So, I will say- that because Tod had to go through the process of a background investigation, it is possible that he had the investigation done and just needed the “need to know” to be adjudicated.
Limited Access Top Secret is doable and does not break my brain from thinking about it. So congrats, this bit is *Reality Can Possibly Work This Way* stamp approved.
Which I thank you because for real, the week and month I’ve been having, I don’t think my brain could have handled it other wise.
*Offers you a cookie, a beer, or a joint, whichever one will make your week go a little better and hopefully clear up whatever clearance issues have been besieging you!”*
Actually, if you think about it, that level of investigation would have been done during the adoption. Even if he passed the orphanages checks, for someone like Selkie, the government would have still stepped in if everything didn’t sit right from point one.
Yes, everything shall be a closely contained tightly held secret, information only going to people who have passed a complete security clearance.
Until a certain pink hair bow sends the Sarnothi Royal Family bodyguard swat team to disrupt a PTA meeting. See five, armed to the teeth (and remember what kind of teeth they have! v^VV^v ), periwinkle blue scaly monsters holding 147 parents and educators at gunpoint in a school auditorium, while the only hostage who has the key information to make they quietly slip away again adamantly refuses to say where Selkie actually is (upstairs, sulking) because what parent would reveal the whereabouts of their child to a team of assassins, which they aren’t, but how is Todd to know.
Also, today’s comic number, 555, is the little sister of the beast.
If you open the red envelope, you jump down the rabbit hole and see how far it goes. If you open the blue envelope…wait, there’s no blue envelope.
Oh, well…
Because they know about everything and could tell other people. Selkies lack of knowledge of what she is is what made her the perfect test case. As was just clearly explained in the comic…
That’s my point, if you have toddler orphans, and you think that integration is more important than their welfare, then toss around a bunch of kids, and voila!
thing is we don’t know the ages of those other kids. And since they are referred to has ‘kids’ I’m gonna go on a limb that most are around the 5+ mark. As for toddlers and babies that would require some very specialist equipment and knowledge since they are aquatic and we don’t fully know there early stage development. Do they hatch with legs or is it more tadpole like? What infections are they prone too? ECT ECT .
Heh, if Todd were any more surprised, he’d be a McDonalds. =D
Agent Orange is right, though; being shunned, picked on, etc., *is* pretty par for the course for humanity, especially human children. Even if Selkie weren’t a sarnothi and just looked like Sophie, she’d still get crap from the other kids because of other reasons.
As someone who has gotten a clearance, I will tell you this is way way too easy for Todd. For Top Secret, he would have to complete an enormous background check and a polygraph at the very least. Agent Brown is also just handing him a folder, and it looks like he’s even *walking off.* Todd has no idea how to treat confidential material; he’d be given a briefing and everything on actually handling the material proper. Also, they’re in public, just standing around outside. To even handle basic Secret material, you have to have an isolated area where no outsiders are going to hear.
If this is as secret as Avery’s saying, they should be in a locked facility talking about this after perhaps a year or more of bureaucracy. It took me 1.5 years just to get a secret clearance; if you have *any* issues at all, they can really drag the process out.
This is like two dudes sitting on a park bench talking about CIA plans. At least get a *room* if you’re going to break protocol.
Also, good grief, Todd, kids being bullied for being different is not at all weird. Bad, yes, weird, no. Selkie could’ve been a perfectly average human girl and someone would find something to pick on her about. You’re making it sound like Avery planned for Selkie to get bullied. Er, no.
I keep hearing Agent Brown’s voice as Harry Morgan’s character’s from Dragnet. Anyone else? It’s been spoofed in so many cartoons, it has to be a meme!
Ugh – you’d never get ethics approval for this sort of experiment on a human child, no matter the stakes. Really drives home the fact that the Sarnothi are not human and have no legal standing in our society.
Um, you may want to double check your history. This kind of adoption integrating to society is beyond common among humans. Selkie is being treated no different then any other minority displaced by war really.
I’m sorry, but I’s having trouble understanding what part of Selkie’s situation would require ethics approval, or for that matter, why Todd is so upset.
She had many friends at the orphanage and just as many at school, almost no adult has taken issue with her appearance, she can walk around in public without fear of being insulted or ostracized, many kids were willing to stand up for her during her altercation with Truck, and the majority of those against her were angry at what she DID, not who she WAS.
All in all, Selkie has a caring family who is aware and accommodating to her needs, all the privileges that an “ordinary” human kid would have, and has a bright future ahead of her. How is her situation different than those children who do have legal standing?
Todd is upset because HIS DAUGHTER was recently PUNISHED for being ATTACKED. He is not thinking clearly. He is angry. He is not inclined to be tolerant of anything that even vaguely sounds like mistreatment of his little girl. I’m not saying he’s being perfectly rational, I’m saying he’s a dad. Parents will flip their shit when they feel their kids are threatened.
If it were a psych experiment subject to informed consent laws, then no. However, this is an experiment in government policy regarding refugees. That’s very very normal.
For a while there was a program for refugees from Eastern Europe (mostly Bosnian and Serbian and Croatians) in my Texas home town. They brought people in, gave them some limited English training, and set them up with jobs at a local grocery store. Then the government just waited to see how they did. Luckily, most thrived, but it was far from a certain thing. The government had essentially taken a group of people living in a war torn area and dying of starvation and tried to see if making them work around food all day every day helped them overcome the trauma any better than other employment.
That it was a government project/experiment was something we found out after talking to some of these people for a while. If you didn’t know, you’d just be a little surprised/frustrated that none of the employees seemed to speak good English or Spanish and not give it a second thought.
But yeah.. this is pretty common in government.
Is Todd related to Biff?
Heh, limited access top secret clearance. I think that might just be “secret” clearence (I forget the exact heiarchy of clearances, but I recall “top secret” being one of the lower ones…secret, top, super, super top, super super [yeah, really] and probably others above those too)
Hopefully Todd will be able to get his brows back under control, otherwise he’ll be a danger to anyone directly overhead 😀
Oh dear, I WILL hijack this posting board and explain in painful detail everything you never cared to know about security clearances. Up to and including their actual investigation names.
The lowest is FOUO- for official use only- and is not even counted
Confidential is in the same boat but a bit more important than FOUO.
SECRET is when the badges start coming out and people are allowed to shoot you if you twitch wrong in the wrong area.
There are levels of SECRET- or compartments of Secret which are just like different rooms next to each other with different access codes.
TOP SECRET- or what they simplify by calling Top Secret- is the highest and most compartmentalized. I say the call it Top Secret, because it’s a lot easier than saying *a bunch of random letters and numbers that can take up a whole page* And those CAN be limited access because it all depends on your need to know. That is where you get things like Galactic Secret, or Cosmic Secret or such higher. They are all just very specialized Top Secrets. Anyone who tells you different is LYING, watched too many movies, or most likely messing with you. Cuz clearances are like fight club. Rule 1: Don’t talk about them.
I am ASSUMING Tod Smith has had at least a SAC (Special Access Checks) which is a single or multiple record checks that do not constitute a complete investigation.
Seeing as Selkie is a special case and has her own Agent Handler watching over her- Tod might have gotten a NACLC- National Agency Check with Law and Credit- which he may have gotten anyway because he was getting checked out to adopt a kid (NACLC is fancy speak for a basic and detailed background investigation and not always for a clearance)
They might have went a head an had him do a full SSBI (Single Scope Background Investigation) because of the adoption- or because of Selkie. A SSBI is more or less the investigation you need to get a Top Secret or, very least, an interim Top Secret. Assuming that is what they did- all Tod would need would be adjudication for Top Secret access. Which to get you need a “need to know”. Tod does not need to know everything that’s going on concerning the war or the people involved. He just needs to know what goes on that impacts Selkie. Hence- limited access Top Secret.
TL/DR
Todd should be thanking Agent Brown for doing the adjudication for him because he saved Todd a LOT of paper work and hassle. It’s GOOD know someone that can just walk into an Adjudicator’s office and tell them “sign this!” and walk out.
P.S.
The above WAS the short and not very detailed version of it.
Thanks for this, I found this information very interesting 🙂
Seconded. It’s nice to know someone in the know, and yes, I find clearance categories interesting. Don’t really know why, but I do.
Thanks, War
Oooof this all takes me back. Thankfully I never had to commit more heirarchy to memory than Classified, Secret, Top Secret. XD
Galactic and Cosmic levels are UFO-enthusiasts’ invention, though.
Also- I am not meaning to offend, it’s just one of those weeks where I will start screaming “REALITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!” And proceed to beat a dead horse into the wall. Because that would be more productive then the things I have had to deal with.
Which- oddly- have been clearance issues. 😉
And people who shall remain nameless because I do not want to be linked to their eventual vanishing who think I don’t know my job. -__-
Who also out rank me. Yet…I’m the one dealing with their paper work. That I will get to. Eventually. Once they stop being jerks. 😉
… I like the way you operate.
“Reality does not work this way”?
This comic is about a non-human little girl being adopted by a human.
Reality has been out for lunch since Strip #11.
Suspended disbelief, however, takes no lunch breaks. 😉
As long as things make logic in my head cannon, that’s all that matters.
Dude, I get the same way about reasonable reality. My girl is creating a sentient species for a d&d/tabletop campaign, and was discussing anatomy with me yesterday… Pretty sure I drove the poor thing crazy insisting on at least a little bit reality-basis 😡
Uhh that was NOT the face that (: X) makes…
Information is information, no offense over here at least.
I was also going off some 3rd hand knowledge from about a decade ago, so there’s definitely a lot I’ve either forgotten, overlooked, or just didn’t know to begin with. The compartmentalizations being one I totally blanked on (but makes the most sense too) I didn’t even qualify classified & lower as those are commonly used by private industry/individuals too, but have a pretty clear understanding to the average person.
Pretty much all clearance is limited access. Even if you get top secret access, you’ll normally only be allowed to access information related to the job you are supposed to be doing. Encryption people don’t get access to the special weapons research, weapon researchers can’t access the personnel files, etc.
Oh my god, the dialogue at the end there made me cringe really hard.
That bad, eh? 😉
In the event I have not made it clear by the post below- I deal with clearances. So, I will say- that because Tod had to go through the process of a background investigation, it is possible that he had the investigation done and just needed the “need to know” to be adjudicated.
Limited Access Top Secret is doable and does not break my brain from thinking about it. So congrats, this bit is *Reality Can Possibly Work This Way* stamp approved.
Which I thank you because for real, the week and month I’ve been having, I don’t think my brain could have handled it other wise.
*Offers you a cookie, a beer, or a joint, whichever one will make your week go a little better and hopefully clear up whatever clearance issues have been besieging you!”*
Their paper work just goes into the “these people are being jerks and need to remember their place” corner. I call it The Shredder. 😀
No, I don’t really do that….lately. >:D
Actually, if you think about it, that level of investigation would have been done during the adoption. Even if he passed the orphanages checks, for someone like Selkie, the government would have still stepped in if everything didn’t sit right from point one.
And yes, I did just realize that I’ve pretty much repeated what you just said, it only hit me after I clicked post. Go figure.
😀
Todd’s eyebrows are clearly trying to escape Earth’s gravitational pull in that last panel. Shock does strange things to eyebrows. 😉
Hmmm… do I make Wonderland jokes or try to connect this to Warehouse 13? Decisions, decisions …
Yes, everything shall be a closely contained tightly held secret, information only going to people who have passed a complete security clearance.
Until a certain pink hair bow sends the Sarnothi Royal Family bodyguard swat team to disrupt a PTA meeting. See five, armed to the teeth (and remember what kind of teeth they have! v^VV^v ), periwinkle blue scaly monsters holding 147 parents and educators at gunpoint in a school auditorium, while the only hostage who has the key information to make they quietly slip away again adamantly refuses to say where Selkie actually is (upstairs, sulking) because what parent would reveal the whereabouts of their child to a team of assassins, which they aren’t, but how is Todd to know.
Also, today’s comic number, 555, is the little sister of the beast.
Also, the telephone prefix of every television family ever.
I really like how Agent Brown flicks away his cigarette butt at the same time he says “we *are* discussing human behavior, after all”.
HUMANS, man! Humans…
Them ‘brows
Dave, this is why I love you, you can poke fun at your own style 😀
If you open the red envelope, you jump down the rabbit hole and see how far it goes. If you open the blue envelope…wait, there’s no blue envelope.
Oh, well…
Before mandatory Direct Deposit the blue envelope usually contained either a Social Security or Disability check.
I recall 0 instances of discrimination based on her appearance in this comic.
posting just to make a comment about eyebrows that escaped the face they should be living on, that is all.
I can’t seem to see the comic. The picture is a broken link. 🙁
Great. Now that I posted that I couldn’t see it.. now it finally works. Pfft. Murphy’s law!
Why don’t you put other Sarnothi children in this “unique” situation, Avery?
Because they know about everything and could tell other people. Selkies lack of knowledge of what she is is what made her the perfect test case. As was just clearly explained in the comic…
Do you mean the war is making orphans exclusively of children older than 3 or 5? Because human wars don’t work that way.
No, but maybe no other kid has been put in a human orphanage, while having absolutely no recollection of anything regarding their race and origin 🙂
That’s my point, if you have toddler orphans, and you think that integration is more important than their welfare, then toss around a bunch of kids, and voila!
thing is we don’t know the ages of those other kids. And since they are referred to has ‘kids’ I’m gonna go on a limb that most are around the 5+ mark. As for toddlers and babies that would require some very specialist equipment and knowledge since they are aquatic and we don’t fully know there early stage development. Do they hatch with legs or is it more tadpole like? What infections are they prone too? ECT ECT .
Heh, if Todd were any more surprised, he’d be a McDonalds. =D
Agent Orange is right, though; being shunned, picked on, etc., *is* pretty par for the course for humanity, especially human children. Even if Selkie weren’t a sarnothi and just looked like Sophie, she’d still get crap from the other kids because of other reasons.
did anyone else notice what appears to be his eyebrows above his head that is some reality defying shock right there
the eyebrows are escaping! Quickly, catch them before they form their own society!
As someone who has gotten a clearance, I will tell you this is way way too easy for Todd. For Top Secret, he would have to complete an enormous background check and a polygraph at the very least. Agent Brown is also just handing him a folder, and it looks like he’s even *walking off.* Todd has no idea how to treat confidential material; he’d be given a briefing and everything on actually handling the material proper. Also, they’re in public, just standing around outside. To even handle basic Secret material, you have to have an isolated area where no outsiders are going to hear.
If this is as secret as Avery’s saying, they should be in a locked facility talking about this after perhaps a year or more of bureaucracy. It took me 1.5 years just to get a secret clearance; if you have *any* issues at all, they can really drag the process out.
This is like two dudes sitting on a park bench talking about CIA plans. At least get a *room* if you’re going to break protocol.
Also, good grief, Todd, kids being bullied for being different is not at all weird. Bad, yes, weird, no. Selkie could’ve been a perfectly average human girl and someone would find something to pick on her about. You’re making it sound like Avery planned for Selkie to get bullied. Er, no.
Polygraph is nonsense – it’s not even admissible in court, not even in USA.
I keep hearing Agent Brown’s voice as Harry Morgan’s character’s from Dragnet. Anyone else? It’s been spoofed in so many cartoons, it has to be a meme!
My bad, the voiceover was done by George Fenneman.
Per http://www.badge714.org/dragfaq.htm
Are those his eyebrows?