Decision Making

The following passage is from today’s The New York Times article
(perhaps needing password) summing up the
9/11 commission hearings of the last few days:

Whatever the missteps of the government in the
months and years before the attacks, there was always a lonely chorus of
experts, mostly at lower levels of the intelligence community, warning that the
worst could really happen, even if they did not know how, where or
when.

It may be that whatever ideology of the persons doing the
governing, rather than the volume of the information, it is the distance between
the person informed and the decision-maker that is the critical weakness. A
failure of hierarchy.

Men’s Clothing

stylish

Across from this view on Brock is this one – a men’s shop in an asymmetrical high contrast 1885 brick building. I don’t buy clothes at men’s shops. They exude things I can’t pull off – style, tailoring, funny swirly design sweaters for $165.00. I also have 37 inch arms that none of these shops can fully cover – “it’ll look great if you roll up the sleeves”. I am a LL Bean seconds-shop kind of guy. Too bad. You imagine that in some of these olders shops there are spittoons in the change rooms, boxing magazine subscriptions, supplies of subdued colognes named like “Bermuda Gentleman”.

Some new favourites

Having little to really talk about lately, maybe you would like to check out some new sites I am enjoying:

The New Strobe Web

wowwawawawooooooawooo

Does this uuuuugly site look like a bad
1977 Frampton guitar solo to you? Maybe it will be fixed by the time you see it.
It is strobing.

I love Flash so much. Not because of the same reasons Peter does – I don’t care if
something doesn’t get google indexed as by far the biggest part of the web
isn’t. I love it so much because it is cold fusion, because it is an utter
failure for anything other than pong replicators, I love it because people pay
money for it, put it up in incubators. Flash front pages are like fat men in
clown outfits blocking your way to the store you want to enter. They shout and
jump around telling you how great the store is but they keep you from getting
there.

This site adds that thrill of possible seizure from exposure to strobe.

How Not to Lie

I find this story as reported in today’s Toronto Star interesting:

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Clark told CBS’
Lesley Stahl, “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other
people, shut the door, and said, `I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’

“Now he never said, `Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in
absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that
said Iraq did this.

“I said, `Mr. President. … We have been looking at this. … There’s no
connection.’

“He came back at me and said, `Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a
connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back
with that answer.

“We wrote a report.” Clarke continued, “We got together all the FBI experts,
all the CIA experts. … And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced
by the national security adviser or deputy. (It was) sent back saying, `Wrong
answer. Do it again.’

If you are going to lie, I would think it
is not a good idea to fill the lie up with a whole bunch of other people whose
jobs depend on not supporting your lie. It is so utterly contrary to the authorized,
evangelized version of the workings of the White House yet so in line with
what another
high official in the government has recently written…and another resonably
placed observer as well.

Keeping in mind that neither I nor any of you reading this have any knowledge
about what happened and form our opinions out of belief, advertised material and
how much sleep we got last night, isn’t it kind of weird to think that morons
might actually be in charge of what used to be called the phone to Moscow, the
suitcase with the codes.