Daily Dose of Dust
Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
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Thursday, July 15, 2004
MM blog now has more hits than my decade old car has meters Here are Michael Moore's extensive factczeching notes on Fahrenheit 911
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Nudist colony gives you a newfound appreciation for intelligence
The intelligence failure over Iraq will take a prominent place in the history of notable intelligence breakdowns.
These range, if you want to go back far enough, from the wooden horse in Troy to, in modern times, Stalin's refusal to believe that Germany would invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and the British belief that they would have warning of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
Intelligence also failed to warn against - let alone stop - the two sudden and daring strikes against the US, at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on 11 September 2001.
Intelligence failures can be put into a number of categories:
Overestimation
Underestimation
Over-confidence
Complacency
Ignorance
Failure to join the dots
This is the failure to make connections between bits of intelligence to make a coherent whole.
The key intelligence failure was that the Trojans ignored a warning.
The trouble is that lessons are not always learned, which is why the list of intelligence failures grows longer.
• A short look at the long history of intelligence failures: Turning the tables on intelligent conpersons [Trotskyism and Centrism: Don't let a series on the politics of opportunism on the left rattle you(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7)]
• · Dirty party talk: Tis the season of the free buffet, and the diplomats, self-important journalists (ahem) and cuddly cultural icons are out in full force
• · · See Also Who's Got the Wrong Values Now? Order of the British Empire
• · · · Operation Buy Candidate a Drink: Politicians have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want: How come this fact does not surprise me to even the slightest degree?
• · · · · See Also Federal Park Police Chief fired after talking to reporter
• · · · · · · See Also Transparent grab for power or genuine threat?