State of War

I finished one of the two books I bought recently - State of War by James Risen. What a marvelous book ?! Great job, bravo.

I was rushing to finish reading this book and couldn't really keep it down, while struggling hard to remember the names and connections mentioned thro' out the book :).

Since its political thriller, I'm not going to write, what I feel about it ;) instead am leaving some excerpts here.

I strongly recommend to read this book.

State of War - James Risen

"The National Security Council(NSC) at the White House, created during the Cold War to manager the enormous military, intelligence and foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government, has been weak and dysfunctional in the Bush administration, according to many officials who have served in the administration."

"As national security advisor during Bush's first term, Condoleezza Rice had an excellent personal relationship with the president but lacked sufficient powers and authority to get crucial things done. Foreign policy was often forged by small groups in unlikely place,s including the office of the Vice President and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Rice was forced to play catch-up and to accept professional indignities, particularly at the hands of Donald Rumsfeld. Her loyalty was rewarded, however, when Bush named her Secretary of State at the start of his second term."

"In many cases, policies weren't debated at all. There never was a formal meeting of all of the president's senior advisors to debate and decide whether to invade Iraq, according to a senior administration source."

"The most fateful decision of the post invasion period – the move by American proconsul L. Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army – may have been made without President Bush's advance knowledge, according to a senior White House source. The well placed source said he is virtually certain that the president didn't know of decision before it was taken."

"The absence of effective management has been the defining characteristic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and has allowed radical decisions to take effect rapidly with minimal review."

"When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the CIA's original mission ended. The agency had been created in 1947 for a singular purpose, to wage war against Soviet Communism, and for generations of CIA officers all other issues had been secondary."

"Analysts today are looking at intelligence coming in and then writing what they think about it, but they have no depth of knowledge to determine whether the current intelligence is correct. There are very few people left in the intelligence community who even remember how to do basic research."

"Underneath the broad arc of global events, there is a secret history of the CIA and the Bush administration both before and especially after 9/11. Its is a cautionary tale, one that shows how the most covert tools of American national security policy have been misused. It involves domestic spying, abuse of power and outrageous operations. It is a tale that can only now begin to be told."

Random but interesting read

• James Cameron's 'Game Theory'
• Centrino Duo - Buy or wait
• Linus Torvolds vs. GPL3
• NASA's inspector general probed!
• Indian army's 1965 invasion of Pakistan
• Mother Teresa dies Sep/5/1997
• IRA bomb kills Lord Mountbatten

Picasa -> Blogger

Flower pot at my friend's place in Santa Barbara, CA. 

Test picasa -> hello -> blogger 

D-Link gripes.

Its been quiet an u-turn in case of my experiences with D-link after my last post.

My router acted ( and is still acting ) as weird as possible. So had been on the phone almost all the time to trouble-shoot the problem. It was quiet an harrowing experience with some rude customer-support engineers, who were practically clue-less of what was going on. Infact, one of them even hung-up on me!.

Having to decide whether to call them or not, I decided to give one last shot. The support call started all over again, right from the model number to the issues. Then as luck would've it, the support engineer decided to replace the router as it was still under the warranty. Now, that's where it stands.

But the problems are so much affecting me now, in the most crucial times. Having little time to talk my best friend, I didn't even realize that I lost my network connection.

To add more to the frustration, Yahoo messenger doesn't even recognize the lost network connection until I click on the contact to IM - WTF code they've written.

I keep thinking that I'm connected and that the contact is busy, but where in, the contact has been trying to reach me in my real ( offline ) state. Thanks to Yahoo messenger ( again ) I don't even have a trace of such black-hole message. That's really pathetic :(

I'm sure more to come on this. For now, I've to hold on to my thoughts and recommendations about D-link as I had been their strong advocate for a very long time.