This looks interesting...

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# William said on September 18, 2004 9:56 PM:

Bill, Mike obfuscates the fact that we don't know whether planes actually flew PRIOR to Sep 13th and the lifting of the flight ban in support of the KNOWN flight of possibly material witnesses, in the form of Osama's relations.

The superficial viewer is left with the impression that the Saudi flight took place prior to the end of the ban on 9/13 and in violation of that ban.

But if you replay the documentary obsessively while shaving and flossing and getting ready for work as I have, you discover that Mike doesn't make the false claim.

I liked the film and felt that it was emotionally and morally accurate but misleading, and perhaps deliberately so, on the subject of 9/13 and the flight ban.

But whether or not Mike obfuscated, the known truth is that to fly the Saudis out was a slap in the face of people who'd endured the 9/11-9/13 flight ban.

The emotional and moral truth is that Clinton (as the film says) would have been burned at the stake as part of Satan's brood had he authorized this flight.

Furthermore, there are indications, since expunged from the record in all probability, that preparatory flights to the Saudi flights took place during the time of the flight ban.

This is one of those numerous situations where a low-level type "knows" something but is made so scared for his job, or even his physical safety, that he changes his story, and these types of epistemological incidents are becoming more and more frequent in the Bush administration, as if the USA were a banana republic, or something. They culminated last week in CBS's embarassment about the questions concerning the Bush guard service documents and the dark rumor, passed along for good or ill by NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, that Karl Rove fabricated the documents, describing a real failure to serve, to discredit all stories about Bush's failure to serve.

But in a situation where it seems we can never "know" anything about an event in which the careers of elite men are at stake, we still KNOW what we do not know and we still have feelings, communicated by Mike Moore.

One feeling is "I sent my son into the military and now he's dead, and for what I don't know". Another is "my husband got on New Jersey Transit to go to a breakfast meeting at Windows of the World and he'll no come back again. Why?"

On MIS projects, where the careers of MIS managers are at stake, one often encounters these epistemological confusions and a consequent narrowness of perspective. The result in my experience is bad software because it is created under artificially narrowed conditions of "need to know".

The software producers are then blamed for the necessary failure of the enterprise system...in the same way low-level analysts (like Ms. Colleen Rowley of the FBI) take the heat for either failing to do their jobs (they not been given the tools) or for producing the results requested, as in the case where midlevel analysts are now blamed for telling the administration what it wanted to hear abouyt Saddam Hussein's WMD.

My little book was in part inspired by the very idea that we could "know" how to write a compiler and thereby support the very sort of "business rules" I've seen people trying in vain to construct and encode in bureaucracies.

Therefore I was dismayed by Mike Moore's economy of truth, an economy which he, as part of the mass media, seems to think necessary to getting his liberal message across.

Somehow, we seem to have become a sort of PowerPoint driven society in which it is more necessary to be on topic than to tell the truth. No disrespect intended to PowerPoint, by the way: I used to work with its inventor, Bob Gaskins of Bell Northern Research. But we wake up and we focus in a world of lies.

Suppose instead we had a politician who actually told us thr truth all the time? Carter tried to: look what happened to him.

# William said on September 19, 2004 11:32 AM:

Hi Edward:

I appreciate the comments.

The Saudi thing is a huge issue and a lot bigger one than our government likes to let on. Let's face it, if no Saudis were involved on September 11, Scott Beamer alone would have kicked enough Terrorist A33 to stop it from happening. And it's like every terrrorist incident that happens nowadays might as well exclude "comprise of .....,..... , ...., and Saudi's) because it's a foregone conclusion. I'm not saying every Saudi is a terrorist or anythign of the sort - but the only things that come out of that place are oil and terrorism. When I lived in Miami some Saudi Princess beat the crap out of her maid, she even pushed her down the steps and busted the lady up pretty bad. Not a damned thing came of it. She got to fly right out of the United States too. The bad news is that was under Clinton -and the f---- up relationship we have with them is kind of like Enron's with Congress. Everyone is paid off so they can do what they want.

As far as the PowerPoint driven society - I couldn't agree with you more. I think I've launched more than a few tirades about how nuts it's getting and actually becomes painful to watch a lot of the time. The book "Bad Powerpoint" isn't nearly long enough.

Ahh, good Old Jimmy Carter. I'll never forget sitting in the car in the Miami Heat when it was just short of 100 degrees waiting to get gas for an hour and a half and had to have the windows open because we had a gas guzzler and didn't want to waste gas while waiting in the line. I remember listening to many of my friends parents, many of who made it over here the hard way, talk about how much Castro loved having Carter as president and even wrote a lot of pretty nice stuff about him in papers and I remember hearing all of this stuff about the cold war (the Cuban Missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs were still fairly big topics in the late 70's in many circles down there) and thinking "If we're such a superpower, how come Iran is bullying us around like that?" - [I was still wearing underoos at that point so my outlook was pretty simplistic]. To that end, I think Carter tried to mask sheer incompetence and failed policy to 'honesty'. Actually, Carter is probably one of my more favorite presedints to bitch about (the only one for that matter) because waiting in that heat really pissed me off, and that lasted long enough for me to go to Grad school and then I really started to dislike his policies. Looks like either way the election turns out I'll have someone else to bitch about too because Bush won't shut up about Terrorism (yet can't bring himself to say the words "Saudi Arabia" and "Terrorism" in the same sentence unless he's denying the link) and Kerry will probably have Chirac and Anan as Secs of Defense and State. [Please don't take any of this too seriously Sunday is just usually my day to get caught up on the goings on of the world which invariably makes me want to complain about politics).

So what's it like in China right now?

# William said on September 19, 2004 7:19 PM:

China is crowded and dirty, of course. I run in the smog and down to the Pearl River estuary which smells like poo.

On the upside, the people including my coworkers are great, hard working folks.

The homes in Beijing seem to be chilling with regards to Taiwan and Hong Kong.

But, the place is no longer recognizably "socialist".

Our generation, in my view, missed out on a contributory form of real, bottom-up socialism in which we'd treat working for the good of the whole as an oppostunity AND we wouldn't be slapped around by a Castro or Mao for having our own views. It appears to me that all actual socialist countries turned into corporations where people had to toe the mark, but in a corporation you can leave.

I've completed three Outward Bound expeditions. Outward Bound is what I'm thinking about, a situation of mutual respect where we look to the leader, the OB instructor, because he genuinely knows more than we do.

But today, kids watch Survivor which is about the gradual elimination of competition until a final "winner" remains. This is a prescription for disaster.

# William said on September 19, 2004 10:47 PM:

It's funny you mention Survivor. I don't watch TV so I've never actually seen it but I had a coworker who lived his life through TV and talked about how 'cool' survivor was that I could practically recite it to you. Say that you and me were stranded somewhere. Unless you were trying to kill me or there simply wasn't enough resources for both of us to live, it would be in my best interest to help you and vice versa. If I was there alone, I'd almost surely die. Two people could fend off a wild animal a lot better. One person could sleep while the other held guard. All of that stuff. It would be insanity to try to off the other guy. But Survivor makes it seem like life is a zero sum game like this which it isn't. I read a book called Co-opetition which was based on Game Theory that made the whole case that having competitors can be very good for you. That's why everyone Jewelry store in South Beach makes a lot of money - because people from all over the world go there to shop. They wouldn't otherwise if all the shops weren't there. Or take the Flats in Cleveland or the Strip in Pittsburgh or Collins ave in Miami. Tons of clubs competing with each other. And all of them might as well have a printing press in the back to print money with they make so much of it. Kill all the competition and you'd have a lot of broke people.... I couldn't agree with you more.

# William said on September 20, 2004 2:55 PM:

Ed, you might be interested in reading House of Bush / House of Saud and Hatred's Kingdom. HoB/HoS goes into the Saudi flights out, as well as the relationship between the Bush and Saud royal family (going back 30 years). HK goes into their support of terrorism. Personally, I hated both books and threw them across the room several times (because they made me so mad). I lived in Saudi and Iran when I was younger.

You might also be interested in reading Trust Us, We're Experts. Which gets into the use of phony science for marketing, or at least confusing the issues enough that John Q Public doesn't know which way is up. Smoking good? bad? 100 years of phony science makes probably half the US think it is not bad. How many years before folks finally 'fess up and admit the climate is changing? I bet - too dang many.

There are a couple of things we seem to be failing/getting worse at:
determining the difference between true and false,
determining the difference between information and propaganda,
determining what is important and what is not.