Comments Posted By andy
Displaying 171 To 180 Of 258 Comments
THE DEMONS ARE STIRRING...THE CANDLE IS GUTTERING
Did tom just invoke SLOT as evidence against evolution?
Wow, this truly is like watching Dumb and Dumberer and Dumbererest and, uh, More Most Dumbereresterest.
C'mon, tom, admit it: you're one of us. This tomfoolery has gone too far; people might really begin to believe you're this nuts!
Comment Posted By andy On 13.08.2006 @ 20:39
plunge - You have remarkable patience.
Comment Posted By andy On 13.08.2006 @ 10:47
you’re a typical darwiniac jackazz…
If the other choice is being a creationist nitwit, well, then guilty as charged!
couldn’t answer my question now, could you?
Your question is meaningless. It's akin to asking why we don't find the Krebs cycle in asphalt.
What is required for evolution that living things have that, say, a computer or steel does not?
If nothing else, you have confirmed the worries of both Rick Moran and PZ Myers: regardless of the root cause, science education is in trouble.
typical wacko if you wonder who is stupid, look in the mirror.
I don't mean to sound all Quantum Leap, but I look just like you!
Comment Posted By andy On 12.08.2006 @ 21:42
again, DARWINIACS have no answers, just try to silence the critics..
Um, genius, my insinuating that you are stupid is in no way silencing you, no more than pointing out that Michael Moore is obese would be silencing the moonbats.
Rather, let's call it "stating the obvious."
I still hold out some hope that you're actually one of us just trying to make creationists look even sillier than they usually do, but I admit that my hope is waning.
Comment Posted By andy On 12.08.2006 @ 21:03
Everyone, I stand corrected: they can be that stupid.
Comment Posted By andy On 12.08.2006 @ 20:25
Surely, tom in #6 is doing his best portrayal of a crazy, religious, anti-evolution whackjob just for our amusement. He had me fooled until he got to the part about computers and steel not evolving. I mean, really, no one can be THAT stupid.
Err... can they?
Comment Posted By andy On 12.08.2006 @ 19:59
Change in Government is always slow, cumbersome and expensive. The intelligence system is no different. The political considerations on systems acquisition is one area that has been a huge hindrance to the IC but isn't widely reported. Congress is influenced by a strong defense contractor lobby and even procurement agencies like the NRO to purchase expensive systems over inexpensive ones. The amount of wasted money in the IC is huge. Agencies like the NRO, supported by the defense industry, advocate for expensive space-based capabilities when the same requirement could be met with much less expensive airborne or ground systems. The NRO is black hole for defense money. It's over 15 years since the first gulf war and lessons learned have still not been implemented.
Another issue is the changing nature of intelligence. During the cold war, it took relatively few intelligence assets to meet our requirements. Finding Soviet missile sites, armored divisions, etc. was pretty easy. The Soviet beaurocratic system made our technical exploitation through sigint easy as well.
Today, the picture is much different. Intelligence is THE focus. In all cases, unlike the cold war, the problem is not destroying forces and the enemy, it's finding them. This is a fundamental change in intelligence that we are still trying to meet with many legacy systems and capabilities. In the 80's, it too few intelligence resources to find a Soviet armored division. The problem was having enough firepower to defeat the threat. Today the situation is reversed. We need huge intelligence resources to find and fix targets. Take Zarqawi - the firepower required to take him out was 1 plane and two bombs, but the intelligence required to find and fix that target was monumental. Reversing the entire way we plan and fight adversaries has been a daunting challenge that is still ongoing.
So that's the larger issue we face. Change is coming, but it's very slow given our nimble adversaries and dealing with our own funding restrictions and beaurocratic BS.
There certainly are a few in the CIA who play politics. I think that most of them have "retired" at this point though. The majority of people in the CIA are patriotic red-blooded Americans who don't like the leaks any better than we do.
Anyway, hope that's enlightening, back to work for me now.
Comment Posted By Andy On 21.07.2006 @ 12:41
Rick,
You're making a wrong judgment based on incomplete and inaccurate information. First, you make many assumptions:
-The CIA is responsible for tracking and reporting this kind of information. No other agencies are to blame.
-The CIA “missed†a HB military capability because all CIA employees are “too busy playing politics.â€
-The CIA has had all these failures through history – that proves they’re inept because there aren’t any successes in the news, so they obvious can’t do anything right.Come on Rick, you’re smarter than that. Broad-brush generalizations don’t suit you.
Tracking the movement of small numbers of relatively small weapons is almost impossible. It’s made even harder because we don’t have an official presence in Iran. Most people forget that an embassy with a diplomatic staff, a CIA station, a DATT and others provide a huge amount of both classified and open source intelligence and information. Running HUMINT operations without a station in country is much more difficult. I’m not arguing that we need to recognize Tehran and re-forge diplomatic relations, but you need to understand that no embassy or official presence in a country does place significant limits on our collection abilities.
Tracking weapon shipments that pretty much fit in a standard cargo container is no easy task. The Iranians are aware of our capabilities after watch us and the Iraqi’s for so long that they are very good at hiding stuff. Finally, I won’t go into the issues of collecting on Hezbollah, but they, like most terrorist organizations, excel at counter-intelligence and internal security.
So blame politics at the CIA all you want. The fact is, it’s not like the movies where we have an all-seeing-eye and can monitor everything on the planet 24/7. Our collection capabilities are limited in many ways, and what resources we do have must be prioritized. There are a lot of threats out there to monitor and we can’t devote resources to everything.
I’m not saying all this as an excuse, but if you do a little research, you’ll easily find out why anticipating events like the ones you mentioned is so difficult. There has been a ton of study on this problem going back decades and there still are no easy solutions. Most of the research is unclassified and published if you want to look into it.
Comment Posted By Andy On 20.07.2006 @ 19:55
MISSILE TESTS PROVE KIM IS "RONERY" AGAIN
Rick,
The 1998 test was a TD-1, not a TD-2.
Also, I would be very wary of attributing motives or what amounts to making guesses on North Korean internal politics and political and military leadership views and objectives. It's simply impossible to know for sure what is going on inside the regime, especially in the upper echelons. We thought we knew Saddam's calculus in the decade before the Iraq war - it turns out we were pretty much completely wrong in our estimates of how his regime viewed the world, what their priorities were, what they viewed as their primary threats, etc. We can't afford to make similar mistakes with North Korea and make assumptions on their motivations.
Comment Posted By Andy On 5.07.2006 @ 14:38
'THE RICK MORAN SHOW" DELAYED UNTIL 7/10
I hope you have a good radio voice!
Comment Posted By Andy On 5.07.2006 @ 14:02
