Category Archives: Almost Seven Wonders

The Almost Seven Wonders files

Die Deutschpuduen

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Since the eyes of the world are on Germany, what with this whole incredibly riveting World Cup and all, this was sent in by a reader who wondered if pudus can speak German.

die Deutschpuduen -- German pudus

If by "speak," one means look up with a mildly-quizzical expression when spoken to, and then go on about the business of chewing on leaves, then ja, ausgezeichnet.

I have about a half-dozen things I want to post, but a full day ahead.  More shortly.

PS –no, these aren’t actually pudus in the pic.  But I bet they speak German just as well.

New academic study conclusively shows why Bush is such a total dong

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OK, I’m sort of reading that into things.  But see if that’s not far from your own understanding:

New Scientist magazine just posted a thing about a study that finds that overconfident people are more likely to (a) wage war and (b) muck up the ensuing battles completely.

Say, now. . . really?

They found this result by setting up wargames with a bunch of volunteers, who had the ability to either negotiate or attack their opponents, all while wearing Clockwork Orange-style brainwave scanners* and genital strain gauges** and guys in labcoats tracked their strategies and progress.  Et voila:

"Those who expected to do best tended to do worst,

Capitalizing on tragedy, literally: it’s the Halliburton way

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Why is NASA rushing Discovery to launch despite "relatively high" risk of catastrophe?

Halliburton has the contract on replacement space shuttles


164

 

58.2%

 

Astronauts tend to vote Democratic


69

 

24.5%

 

We’re fighting them in earth orbit so we don’t have to fight them here


40

 

14.2%

 

Mohammed Atta once met with an Iraqi agent somewhere in deep space


9

 

3.2%

 

Ah, but how will Chimpy’s legion discount the large public protests of his arrival in Austria?

Take the poll (although you may have to look for it, depending on which template you’ve got up just now).

Templates! We got yer templates here!

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Still fooling around with the site, as you may have noticed.

Polls are still here, to the right, just below the big freaking ad for my upcoming book.  (Have you noticed I’ve got a new book coming up in a couple of months?  Because I have a new book coming up.  I hope I haven’t forgotten to mention that.  The new book, I mean.)

If you scroll down, there’s a template chooser on the side that lets you screw around with how the site looks.  We’ll add more original art and play with the colors later.  For now, it’s more about the general shape of things: two-column, three-column, fixed-width, wide, narrow, etc.  All of the template names are pretty much gibberish, but if there’s one you think looks best, let me know.

Thanks!

Team Chimpy acts out 1984: Ignorance Is Strength

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This morning’s NY Times review of Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine:

Within the government, [Suskind] goes on, there was frequent frustration with the White House’s hermetic decision-making style. "Voicing desire for a more traditional, transparent policy process," he writes, "prompted accusations of disloyalty," and "issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the  president’s desk, and if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his ‘instinct’ or ‘gut.’ "

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney’s nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.’s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in.  And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis’ views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president’s office and never reached the president.

Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability"  from Mr. Cheney’s point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief’s own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush