[Northern Alliance]

Thought provoking read.

[spokeshave]

"The British Navy, a force that embodies the term "legendary", was taken by surprise and humiliated by a militia in speedboats."

A small contingent of the British Navy with side arms and in rubber boats were taken prisoner by a superior force of Iranian militia in several high speed patrol boats armed with 0.50 caliber machine guns and RPG's

[neverdem]

BANG! & a J.R. Dunn ping!

[Jim Noble]

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. If you have been living in a world where outcomes are everything, you may have a very hard time understanding bureaucratic thinking or practices.

Thomas Sowell

[Jim Noble]

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

Thomas Sowell

[Leisler]

What kind of people are attracted to, and stay with bureaucratic institutions? Having attracted, and kept people who like beurocratic institutions, and the institution being in fact a bureaucracy, what nonperformance can be expected? Further, compare private bureaucracies, like General Motors, vs governmental bureaucracies like the Department of Education, or the Defense department. The private bureaucracy will be punished by the private market, the governmental goes on forever.

Take the CIA. Tenet. Deutch that loved using his CIA filled laptop to accesses Russian and mainland Chinese porn sites. Well, I sure the director had Norton. Anyways, the CIA didn’t know or not know about WMD. Didn’t have any real access or incite to Sadams Iraq. Didn’t know about Iraq invading Kuwait. (Kudos to the NSA, those useless dolts) The CIA didn’t see the Iron Curtian coming down, nor goint up in the ‘60s. The CIA thought that the East German economy was as big as West Germany. Any tourist to Berlin knew otherwise. The CIA performance in Vietnam, failure to see the Chinese coming in the Korean war. The start of the Korean war. The Bay of Pig failure....

Further, most of these bureaucracies are staffed with people directly from 20 plus years of being in educational bureaucracies. A perfect storm of garbage in, garbage out. It is too bad that we had only the choice of GW Bush. He shows the same passivity in firing people as his very nice father. I don't know if other than Rumsfield he has ever fired anybody. Well, it's nice to be liked. Meanwhile between GW's passivity and the Democrats and of course out real rulers the administrative dictatorship, we get a good tucking to everyday. But fairly, this is what Americans want. Old story.