Fad Surfing

I'm desperately behind in my blog reading. i just found this post at Photon Courier on the question of corporate fad surfing.

Those who tend to be excessively devoted to particular intellectual systems, it seems to me, are those who concretize abstractions..who think that some conceptual model, which may be useful under particular circumstances, is actually something real and tangible. Falling under the sway of abstractions, when one doesn't really understand how abstractions work, can be dangerous. Whether a person who thinks this way is "intelligent but uncreative" or really not all that intelligent in the first place is, I guess, mainly a matter of definition.

I'll throw a couple more ideas into the stew. When i compared Clausewitz and Michael Porter I suggested that a key difference in their respective theories lay in the relative importance of "doing" versus "thinking."

Clausewitz presents descriptive theories, his aim is to help the future commander prepare himself for the challenges he will face. In contrast, Porter's work is intensely prescriptive. His Five-factor framework and generic strategies are templates waiting for the executive's implementation.
Porter's, then, implies that the key to business strategy is "knowing". The doing will almost take care of itself. Clausewitz never presumed that the science of war (which gets studied in peacetime) could ever supplant the art of war (which wins actual battles and campaigns).

Waiting for our Clausewitz

Also, this observation by John Derbyshire gives much the same diagnosis as Photon Courier:

The nature of the confirmation process ensures that in all but the most confident administrations (of which, I think, FDR's was the last), nominees to SCOTUS are controversy-free mediocrities. As Robert Bork discovered, a nominee who possesses a lively imagination, a willing pen, and a head full of interesting ideas will stand the same chance under congressional scrutiny that the beautiful Hypatia, the only great female mathematician of antiquity, stood
with the Alexandrian mob. Which is to say, he will be stripped naked and then have the flesh scraped from his living body with oyster shells.
A side effect of the justices being drawn from the lower-middle of the justicial bell curve is that, like other well-read but weak-minded folk, they are more than usually susceptible to intellectual fads.

FOX LEADS BROADCAST AND CABLE GOP CONVENTION VIEWERSHIP

From AdAge.com (may require registration)

Fox News Channel scored big on the second night of the Republican Convention, trouncing even the broadcast networks' viewership in the 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. slot.

According to the cable network's figures, Fox, part of News Corp., pulled in 5.2 million viewers, compared with NBC's 5.1 million, CBS's 4.4 million and ABC's 4.3 million.
*******
Against cable competitors, Fox News increased its lead, gaining a 2.7 rating, 5 share compared with the previous night, when the network earned a 2.5 rating and 4 share, according to Nielsen Media Research data for the hours of 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. CNN, part of Time Warner, rated 0.9 on both nights and won a 2 share Aug. 31. MSNBC, a joint venture between NBC and Miscrosoft Corp., grew its rating from 0.6 to 0.9 and a 1 share.

On the other hand, only around twenty million people watched in total.

Winning the peace

Rev. Donald Sensing takes a look at the Kerry speech to the American Legion. In particular this statement by the candidate:

And, if there’s one thing I learned from my service, I would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace.

Rev. Sensing gets to the heart of the matter:

Again, another indicator that a Kerry presidency would be paralyzed - "paralysis by analysis," we used to call it. I can't think of any war this country has fought where there was a plan to win the peace before the war was entered, not even the Revolutionary War, where the postwar politics were made up as the war went along.

And concludes:

There was never a plan to "win the peace" before American wars, so Kerry is really off the mark here.

As i noted here last November, George Marshal didn't task George Kennan with developing a plan for European reconstruction until April of 1947. (That was the genesis of the Marshall Plan). So it was two years after the war that we came up with the plan that "won the peace" with Germany.

Nit-picking free riders

In what sounds like his valedictory post Steven Den Beste writes about the weariness that has set in after years of blogging. It is not the writing itself that has worn him down, it is reading the emails that his posts generate.

I'm finding that it's quite a relief not to receive a constant flow of email griping about everything I post. No matter what I write, and no matter what I say, there are always people who either think I was wrong, or think that there were things I left out and should have included. I've been putting up with that for two years, and I guess I'd gotten used to living with a low-level throbbing headache all that time.

The attempt to "refute" an argument by finding trivial errors in the facts that are marshaled is juvenile. When it works, it blinds us to understanding the big issues at stake.

If you allow carpers to shoo you away from every generalization before you have time to explore it, you have no hope of coming to grips with basic questions about modern America. David Gelernter, Drawing Life

Not to mention that this sort of nit picking is the beloved tool of both tyrants and petty bureaucrats. It is an odd sort of mindset that thinks that an argument is "refuted" if any small errors are detected. In the real world, we have to use adductive reasoning, which David Hackett Fischer describes as the process "of adducing answers to specific questions, so that a satisfactory explanatory 'fit' is obtained."

SDB is not the only blogger to discover the dark side of interaction. Mindless posted this over at Asymmetrical Information:

We have a few comment-terriers who only come to put their mark on our posts. They will pick some detail of the post and scoff, or pronounce how we are not qualified, or offer that 'you obviously don't understand the statistics' or 'you obviously aren't well-versed in the subject'. One wonders why they bother, until you see that these comments are designed to make the commenter feel a little better about him/herself. One of them ridiculed Jane for not having read an essay that turned out to support her argument (guess he hadn't either). I remember another series of posts where I took the time to clarify a lot of facts to satisfy commenters' objections, and our terrier finally claimed that a rhetorical flourish I used at the end of a post invalidated all the prior detail. Sometimes they check in just to climb on top of the other commenters and assert dominance.
Given the density of Steven's posts and his willingness to contradict polite 'conventional wisdom', I suspect it is one hundred times worse for him.
Many of us post in our very limited spare time and move on to something else. It should be only a small annoyance when one returns to a nitpick (relevant or not), even if it is dripping with self-serving rhetorical condescension. Mosquitoes are small and relatively harmless, but when one whines in your ear at night it can provoke a rage, or at least make you hit yourself in the head. (straighten out your metaphors, insect or canine? - Ed.)

In his book The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge distinguishes between discussion and dialogue. Discussion (which is linguistically related to concussion and percussion) is about scoring points, winning, having our viewpoint prevail. Dialogue is a means of learning together.

Reading the comment threads on popular blogs makes it pretty clear that the goal of many commenters is scoring points, not joint learning. Even worse, as Mindless noted, just playing the game sucks up the blogger's scarce time. Which gets back to SDB's point: who wants to waste time playing a game chosen by someone else --a game that often has nothing to do with the original post.

What makes this problem especially insidious is that the playing field is sharply tilted. The blogger has to write the original post; the malicious commenter can simply snipe and snark. The blogger has to produce a steady stream of posts if they want to maintain readership; the commenter can cherry pick which blogs and which posts they snipe at. The blogger's name is attached to the site and the post-it reflects on them personally; commenters are visitors who are not tied to the site and whose words are unlikely to be traced back to them in the real world.

In short, we have a free rider problem. Not all commenters exploit this. Many actually offer thoughtful arguments, new facts, and additional insights. But it only takes a few free riders to mess everything up.

I'll go farther. In some cases, commenters are like vandals spraying graffiti on the side of someone's house.

For most people, seeing "you are a pig" painted on the garage doors is disconcerting. No one likes to be insulted. Seeing the equivalent on your website or in your email is a powerful incentive to stop posting.

Hugh Hewitt argues that lawyer/bloggers beat journalists on the Swift Boat story because of their training:

It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the "Christmas-in-Cambodia" lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists. The big advantage is in research skills, of course, and in an eye for inconsistencies which make or break cases and arguments. Lawyers turned amateur journalists are going to be much better at it than time-serving scribblers

He has a point. And no one can deny that the ranks of big bloggers is dominated by lawyers and law professors. I wonder if part of the reason is that their training and experience makes them hard-shelled and better able to ignore the insults. Their job is to present a case and make an argument. However, they are not emotionally tied to either one. In addition, in every trial one set of lawyers lose. That's just life and the successful attorneys learn to deal with it.



#ad

Remembering the baby in the bathwater

David Warsh, a former columnist with the Boston Globe, wrote a piece last year on the changing role of newspapers and the technological and demographic threats they face.

This passage is a useful counterpoint to the new tech triumphalism that has surfaced along with the Swift Boat Veterans story:

But there is nothing quite like a top-notch daily newspaper. Not only are they, as news executive Jack Fuller has described them in his book News Values, "powerful engines for discovery of truth," capable of committing dozens of thoughtful and experienced investigators to a major story on a moment's notice

While it is good to see new media challenge the blatant biases of the mainstream press, it is still true that they are not yet a substitute for a quality broadsheet daily or a newsweekly.

Cable news and talk radio increase the diversity of voices and sometimes can draw attention to facts that the MSM ignores. However, neither of them are real newsgathers. They are showcases for talking heads and pundits.

Murdoch's tabloids have brought fresh perspectives to their home markets but they have their weaknesses. While the NY Post's op-ed page may be more congenial that the Times's, the papers's news coverage lacks stamina. You do not see tabloids doing long investigative efforts-they are too poor to devote those kinds of resources to a project. Moreover, their goal is sensation -- the bold headline, the arresting photo. On some matters like crime or terrorism the tabloid approach works better than the drab "nuanced" style of the Times or Chicago Tribune. But you just cannot expect a tabloid to devote three days and 16,000 words to Putin's efforts to pacify Chechnya or the use of eminent domain to build mega-stores in depressed rural counties.

Does anyone else think this is creepy?

Here are two articles that discuss the 1971 debate within the VVAW on the proposal to assassinate pro-war senators. John Kerry was a leader of the group at the time and seems to have had some knowledge of the proposal. Those who say he knew also stress that he opposed the idea.

However, if he knew, he did nothing to alert law enforcement to the threat.

By itself this is, perhaps, understandable. Nevertheless, it gets creepy when it turns out that Kerry invited the author of the assassination plot-Scott Camil-to a campaign event in Florida this year.

Add to that how blithely JFK dismissed political murder back in 1971. This is from his debate with John O'Neil on the Cavett Show.

MR. KERRY: There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw. There's just no pur- -
I realize that there would be certain political assassinations, and that might take place. And I think when you balance that against the fact that the United States has now accounted for some 18,600 people through its own Phoenix program, which is a program of assassination, and when you balance that off against the morality of the kind of bombing we've been doing in Laos and the kind of destruction wholesale of the country of Vietnam, which amounts to some 155,000 civilians a year killed, then I think to talk about four or five thousand people is lunacy in terms of the overall argument and what we're seeking in Southeast Asia.

Swift Boat Central

I've added a new section on the blogroll--Swift Boat Central. The blogs listed there have been energetic in following the story and in analyzing the news as it unfolds. Plus, they are aggressive linkers and aggregators of others's posts so they are good information hubs.

Things are quiet on that front right now. But when it heats up again they are the blogs to turn to.

Carnival of the Capitalists

Hey. Don't be French. The latest CotC is over at new dog old trick

My kind of list

Jack Sparks gives us his list of the 10 best movie westerns. Read it now because his commentary is better than anything you are going to find here this weekend.

His list does have two glaring omissions-- not even an honorable mention for Stagecoach or High Plains Drifter? hmmm might have post my own list when the chores get fininished.....

More Entries on the Brinkley Scorecard

No wonder American students continue to perform poorly when it comes to knowledge of the basic facts of American history. The professors who teach them are unconcerned with such things and themselves are often unclear on such elementary things as who was Secretary of Defense in 1968.

A couple of days ago I noted that celebrity-worshipping Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley was criticized in the Atlantic for some fairly flagrant lapses in his book "Tour of Duty." Here are several more examples.

1. Michelle Malkin has a letter from a Navy vet who nails him on a couple of mistakes that are laughable. First, a photo in the book identifies a group of Patrol Boats, River as a "Swift Boat Convoy."

2. The same writer notes that Kerry describes a mock battle put on for the benefit of SoD Mel Laird in 1968 that involved five squadrons from the Mobile Riverine Force. In fact, the MRF only had four squadrons in total. (The writer served in the MRF so he should know.) Even worse, Mel Laird did not become SoD until January 1969 and did not visit SVN in office until February. While Brinkley might be forgiven for his ignorance of the MRF OOB, the latter is just so blatant that there is no excuse for passing it on without comment.

3. This article for March discusses Kerry's resignation from the VVAW. In the text of his book, Brinkley wrote:

In a November 10 letter housed at the VVAW papers in Madison, Wisconsin, Kerry quit, politely noting he had been proud to serve in the national organization.His reason was straightforward: 'personality conflicts and differences inpolitical philosophy.' In two days, VVAW was meeting in Kansas City and he would be a noshow.

He modifies that in a footnote and admits that he could not find the letter in the archives or in Kerry's papers and, so, relied on Kerry’s word and "Andrew E. Hunt’s essential ‘The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1999).’"

But that historian directly contradicts Brinkley:

But in an interview with the Sun, the "essential" historian Mr. Brinkley relied on as his source, ndrew E. Hunt, said "I never stated that there was a letter of resignation, or even implied in my book that I saw one. I never could find one in the archives in Wisconsin. I don’t know how Brinkley got the idea that I had. I never could figure out when Kerry resigned." When asked about Mr. Brinkley’s statement that Mr. Kerry didn’t have a copy of the resignation letter either, Mr. Hunt said, "I don’t know about that. I never could get an interview with Senator Kerry. But I never saw anyone who saves things the way Kerry does."

Moreover, John Fund reports that Kerry was still acting as a representative of the VVAW months after he supposedly resigned from the organization.

The way things are looking, the last casualty of Vietnam will not be John Kerry’s presidential aspirations; it will be Douglas Brinkley’s professional reputation.

"Battle in the Clouds"

The Belmont Club plumbs the deeper meaning of the the Kerry/SBVT press coverage.

The undercard in the Kerry vs Swiftvets bout is Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet, two distinctly different fights, but both over information. The first is really the struggle over the way Vietnam will be remembered by posterity; whether its amanuensis will be John Kerry for the antiwar movement or those who felt betrayed by them. The victor in that struggle will get to inscribe the authoritative account of that mythical conflict in Southeast Asia: not in its events, but in its meaning. The fight will be as bitter as men for whom only memory remains can be bitter. But the undercard holds a fascination of its own. The reigning champion, the Mainstream Media, has been forced against all odds to accept the challenge of an upstart over the coverage of the Swiftvets controversy.

He also gets to the heart of the problem of conventional journalism:

It is not just raw information or pixels pushed onto a screen, but a system of semantic entities: an series of information objects, containing properties and methods containing embedded logic, set loose on society. The power of the Mainstream Media lay in the fact that they controlled the generation of news objects; how they arose, what they did, how they ran their course. They were the news object foundry; able to make them "type safe"; define what they could do, and what they could not. And that power was enormous.

I wrote this a year ago, but i think it has some relevance to the full-throated defense of John Kerry we see from the MSM

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.

If this is true, the press faces a serious problem: while defeatism is an occupational hazard, they must maintain credibility with the public in order to have prestige as well as attention. (Nobody wants to be like the Star or Enquirer.) That is why John Kerry-- the anti-war war hero-- was a godsend to Vietnam-era journalists. By confirming all the horror stories he validated the accuracy of the basic MSM account of Vietnam. He was made to order for Halberstam, Hersh, et.al.

Today's journalistic establishment is not so much committed to Kerry as they are to the myth of the heroic Vietnam truth-telling journalists. Vietnam and Watergate are the great myths of the guild. By revisiting Vietnam the SBVT are raising questions the guild views as closed. To wit: the war was unwinnable and unworthy of being won, brave reporters exposed government duplicity, the people saw that they had been lied to and turned back to the path of righteousness.

There are other ways to frame the war, however. That the war was difficult but worthy, that the soldiers and officers were neither pitiful victims nor war criminals, that the key battleground was US public opinion not the Central Highlands, that the press was the unwitting abettor of the enemy in that battle. Not surprising, the press does not like this narrative much at all and prefers to treat it as taboo.

Carnival of the Capitalists

The latest CotC is over at The Mobile Technology Weblog. As per usual, it's a great round-up of the latest econ and business posts from around the blogosphere.

And, hey, since the business of America is business, if you don't check it out, you might as well be French or something.

Competitor Intelligence in Business: Some Thoughts on Its Potential and Its Problems

Over the last two decades business journalists and consultants have produced a good-sized stream of books and articles on competitor intelligence in corporations. This is always seen as a critical function that will grow in importance. In his 1996 book (Competitive Intelligence) Larry Kahaner of Business Week declared that "turning raw information and data into actionable intelligence is fast becoming the most critical management tool of cutting edge business leaders." Peter Drucker in 1998 proclaimed that the phase for the information revolution was to finally deliver useful information about customers and competitors to senior executives.

Despite these pronouncements, CI has a worse than mixed record inside of corporations. In 1999 the president of the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals noted that 90% of new corporate CI groups are shutdown or abandoned after three years.

The gap between perceived need/proclaimed value and the frequent demise of CI initiatives is a yawning chasm. No single factor is the cause. Rather a host of forces drag down the performance and perceived value of the CI function. These range from micro-factors involving specific mistakes in implementation to systemic weaknesses in management training to macro-forces that undermine the relevance of CI in many marketplaces. I'll start with the micro-factors here and discuss the other two categories in later posts.

When you look at how many (most?) firms do CI, you find that the activity has only a shoe-string budget, a low spot on the org chart, and is carried out by inexperienced and junior people. I personally have seen multi-billion dollar divisions of very large companies place their CI activities in the hands of an intern or a secretary.

All of this suggests that the commitment to CI does not run very deep. Hence, it is not surprising that the initiatives wither on the vine.

One reason for the lack of commitment is that the impetus to launch these sorts of CI initiatives does not come from senior management. Rather, it comes from the sales force. They have the most interest in competitor actions and they, as a group, are information-poor compared to finance or operations.

An effort started under these conditions has no choice but to go after the low-hanging fruit-- collecting news clippings, brochures, advertisements, etc. The result is a CI initiative that concentrates on tactical information and does little strategic analysis.

This sort of CI work rarely has the chance to impress senior management or to become integral to the strategic planning process. Nor is it likely to hold on to the best analysts. Turnover and stagnant/shrinking budgets combine to choke off the CI effort after two or three years.

Part Two

Part Three

Wow! Now the Press is interested in the Swift Boat Vets

But only to undercut them. (HT: Instapundit).

No surprise. Modern, elite journalism has a view point on Vietnam (see here) and Kerry's story fits that narrative. The SBVT and bloggers are threatening their "holiest of holies."

Hugh Hewitt is hoping that Douglas Brinkley will clear up the matter based on his research in Kerry's papers. This is a frail reed to lean on. As this Slate profile makes clear, Brinkley is a celebrity worshiper desperately in search of a JFK to play Schlesinger to.

These letters to the Atlantic (in response to an excerpt of Brinkley's book) show that:

1. He did not do as much research on Vietnam as he pretends. (He misstated the theme of The Ugly American suggesting that he never read the book he so carefully cites.)

2. He does not know much about combat.

3. Kerry's journals and letters were carefully contrived yet Brinkley's BS meter never went off.

All this helps explain why the Kerry campaign is choosing to tough it out rather than admit that maybe some exaggerations were made:

The press has been running interference for their guy for over thirty years on this issue. Why should they think the game is up now?

Here is what Guenter Lewy wrote about the Winter Soldier hearing that brought Kerry to national attention:

The refusal [of the witnesses] to give substantiating factual information in support of their atrocity allegations created a situation in which the accusers continued to reap generous publicity for their sensational charges while the Army in most cases could neither investigate nor refute them.

America in Vietnam, page 319

It is not surprising that the mainstream press has ignored the Cambodia lies and evolving cover-up. They have been uninterested in this sort of story for over three decades. The deafening silence at the Times, the LAT and the Chicago Tribune is just elite journalists doing what now comes naturally after years of practice.

"Hiya, Mr. Dunnaghy"

For those of us of a certain age, this will bring back some memories.

John Kerry: Life has its privileges

From a comment over at Captain's Quarters:

One thing that I find particularly offensive about Kerry, and I'm ashamed as an ex-officer to admit I only realized it last night: in the heroic action he arrogated to himself, the one in which Peck and Alston were wounded, the boat was actually saved by the actions of an enlisted man who took the helm and steered the boat out of the ambush. Let's be very clear about this. John Forbes Kerry, a commissioned officer in the United States Navy who wants to be commander-in-chief, stole the credit for the heroism of an enlisted man .

From Powerline

recall his embarrassing attempt to throw out the first pitch in a Yankees-Red Sox game, where he threw like a girl from half-way to the pitchers' mound--I kid you not--bounced the ball in the dirt, and then blamed the National Guardsman who was trying to catch the errant pitch, claiming that he had eased up and lobbed the ball on purpose because the battle-hardened veteran, just back from the war, was so nervous. An eerie echo of Kerry cursing the Secret Service man who supposedly knocked Kerry--who never falls--down while snowboarding.

And from Snopes.com, in an entry where they are trying desperately not to see any trend of this sort:

For example, humorist Dave Barry (a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose work is carried by more than 500 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad) concluded a 2003 article about potential presidential candidates with the following observation:
In conclusion, I want to extend my sincere best wishes to all of my opponents, Republican and Democrat, and to state that, in the unlikely event I am not elected, I will support whoever is, even if it is Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it's time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.
This paragraph from an August 2004 Weekly Standard article echoes both the previous stories:
Granted staggering wealth on the basis of marriage, Kerry seems to believe he deserves it, and perhaps always has. Such, at least, is the popular perception among the voters who know him best. "One of the surest ways to get the phones ringing on any Massachusetts talk-radio show is to ask people to call in and tell their John Kerry stories," says Howie Carr, the Boston Herald columnist and radio host. "The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: The junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives. The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: 'Do you know who I am?'"

Intelligence in War

John Keegan's recent work, Intelligence in War is a remarkably good book-- wise, readable, and timely.

As a military historian he brings a sense of perspective to the realm of intelligence:

There is no such thing as the golden secret, the piece of 'pure intelligence', which will resolve all doubt and guide a general or admiral to an infallible solution of his operational problems. Not only is all intelligence less than completely accurate; its value is altered by the unrolling of events.

***

It has become part of the conventional wisdom that intelligence is the necessary key to success in military operations. A wise opinion would be that intelligence, while necessary, is not a sufficient means to victory. Decision in war is always the result of a fight, and in combat willpower always counts for more than foreknowledge.

Understanding this is critical to the war on terror. Since 9/11 we have acted as though good intelligence alone is all we need to defeat al Qaeda. But we define "good intelligence" as that "which resolves all doubt" and will produce "infallible solutions." In short, we are looking for a chimera.

Keegan also has some perceptive things to say about the practical realities of HUMINT in general and the obstacles we face in penetrating al Qaeda in particular.

Human intelligence may suffer from different limitations: including, first, practical difficulty in communicating with base at effective speed; and, second, inability to convince base of the importance of the information sent.
****
The ability to communicate, quickly and securely, is at the heart of real-time intelligence practice. It is rarely enjoyed by the agent, that man of mystery who figures so centrally in the fictional literature of espionage. Real agents are at their most vulnerable when they attempt.... to reach their spymasters. The biographies of real agents are ultimately almost always a story of betrayal by communications failure. A high proportion of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents in France during the Second World War were discovered by German radio counter-intelligence; the same was true of those operating in Belgium.

It was one thing to get an agent into a cave in Afghanistan or a village in the Philippines. It is even harder to get his messages out in a timely fashion without blowing his cover.
The British has some success with undercover work against the IRA and other Irish terrorists. But Keegan points out that these were comparatively soft targets (!) compared to al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists.

Undercover work within the terrorist groups of Northern Ireland... has equipped British security and specialist police bodies to understand how such undercover operations are best conducted, but the practice is always more difficult than theory and will prove particularly so with religious fanatics. Even ideological terrorists, such as the extreme nationalists of the Irish republican tradition, are sometimes susceptible to temptation or threat; republican fund-raising by blackmail and extortion has drawn the movement into crime, with corrupting effect, while its 'military' ethos excludes the taking of risks that threaten the lives of "volunteers." Muslim puritans, by contrast, seem resistant to financial temptations, have demonstrated their readiness to commit suicide in furtherance of their violent aims, are committed to a code of total silence under interrogation and are bound by ties of brotherhood which have religious
strength.

Conquest's Law

Historian Robert Conquest observed that "everyone is conservative about what he knows best." There is a lot of truth in that statement.

From this it must follow that revolutionaries don't know what they are talking about.

In a business context Conquest's Law suggests that those who promote the Next New Thing-- be they consultants, IT salesmen, journalists, or would-be gurus-- fall into one of two categories:

1. Ignorant, naive amateurs whose knowledge of the subject is superficial but whose enthusiasm is genuine.

2. Cynical hucksters who know better but hope their audience does not.

As for the executives who fall prey to the charlatans and enthusiasts, this passage by Andre Maurois often fits:

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

What are those guys covering?

Hundreds of journalists in Washington, and no one has time to follow-up on "a Californian-trained biologist" who "spent several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up in Afghanistan" and who "provided housing for at least two of the 9-11 hijackers in his Kuala Lumpur condominium."

See here.

But to give them some benefit of the doubt, the 9-11 Commission wasn't all that interested in seeing if the dots connected either. These references are pretty disjointed for so serious a matter.

New Jersey

OTB responds to a silly attempt to make McGreevey the victim. James keeps the focus on the main issue.

McGreevey's crime is not that he is homosexual or even that he is a lying bastard who ruined the lives of his family in order to gratify his sexual desires and advance his political career. Rather, his offense was criminal abuse of his office to appoint his illicit lover, a non-citizen not even remotely qualified for the job, to a high government post. As director of homeland security, no less.