Posted on by lhl

I’ve been reading Imperial Hubris, by CIA analyst Anonymous, which has been simultaneously illuminating, terrifying, and blood-boiling.

…In addition, these institutions—led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—had run in Afghanistan the largest, most expensive, and most well-publicized covert action program in U.S. history to support the anti-Soviet mujahideen…

During the course of this endeavor, multiple hundreds of uniformed military personnel, intelligence officers, analysts, logisticians, military trainers, medics, geographers, imagery analysts, demolition experts, mule skinners, communication specialists, and cartographers developed strong expertise on Afghanistan. As important, they experienced an intimate acquaintance with the patient, brave, devout, brutal, and stubborn men who beat the Soviet and Afghan communists….

…Using nonexperts to devise strategy when experts were at hand would, of course, be a great disservice by the U.S. intelligence community (IC) to Americans and their elected leaders too serious to contemplate. Then again, soon after the war began the New York Times quoted unnamed “senior intelligence officials” who claimed the U.S. government did not “have the people to exploit [information about Afghanistan.” … I have found, in my career, that the IC leaks this kind of comment only when senior managers have failed to develop a cadre of substantive experts, when they want to put their “pets” in charge of programs for which they have no substantive expertise, or when they want to prepare the public for failure. As noted, the first motivation is not the case here, and our hubris ensured no thought went to possible failure. And so, it seems, substantive experts were not used and that we are paying an exorbitant price because we ignored Sun Tzu’s advice not to “demand accomplishments of those who have no talent.”

While it’s not surprising that Bush has had the unmitigated gall to be running based on his “success” in the “war on terror,” it’s disheartening to see that his campaign strategy seems to be successful. Honestly, from his blunders in the middle-east, his ridiculously deleterious tax policy, ineffectual economic planning, his attacks on education, the environment, and safety, and completely ghastly infringements on basic civil rights and freedoms, you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard.

In my estimation, that should piss off the middle class, libertarians, greens, liberals, and centrists. (I guess it doesn’t cover the fanatics, willfully ignorant, or gullibles — do they really outnumber sane people?)

Posted on by lhl

I ordered a $500 (well, $526.39) Dyson vacuum cleaner today. It has an interesting story and people seem to rave about it, so hopefully it’ll be worth it (over twice as expensive as the Hoover I was looking at, but the lack of requiring any type or replacement bags or filters is quite appealing).

(I haven’t regretted the last more-expensive than average home appliance I bought)

Posted on by lhl

I’ve been a little annoyed lately by xterm so I’ve switched to aterm. Strangely, aterm renders the 7×14 font differently than xterm. Fading is nice. I ran across a ssh/screen problem with backspace, but this solved it:

aterm*backspacekey: ^H

Posted on by lhl

Debian on Dell Servers – how many times have I looked for a Debian install CD that has megaraid/aacraid and e1000/tg3 drivers built in? Here they are [keywords: Dell PowerEdge, IBM x330, x335, ethernet drivers, netinst boot CD]. Why oh why don’t the Debian kernels come with this pre-compiled? Every single Dell and IBM rackmount I’ve ever seen uses these.