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| Europe |
| Rumsfeld wins top European award |
| 2003-12-04 |
| U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday won the prestigious "non-EU citizen of the year" award at a black-tie gala event in Brussels. Gee, I didn’t see this being covered by any US news agency. It is Rumsfeld’s second European prize in a week. Earlier he was handed the Foot in Mouth award by Britain’s Plain English Campaign for describing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as "known unkowns." Of course, the US press was all over this one. I read Rumsfeld’s quote that got him the Foot in Mouth award and it made perfect sense to me: "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know."I guess because it’s a very American way of looking at problems it went right over their heads. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #3 I bought the Rumsfeld poetry book for my father's birthday. He teaches high school english. This top non_european award is surprising to me. I don't understand how he beat out: Chretien, Castro, Mugabe, Annan and Kim Il Sun. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-12-4 7:42:01 PM |
| #2 Actually, the concept of known unknowns and unknown unknowns is realtively common in the DOD acquisition community. It's a way of assessing risks on a technical development effort. Low risk programs are where the problems are known. Medium level risk programs are those where most of the problems are known but there are one or two areas (where the research isn't completed for instance) where you know that problems will occure, but you just don't know what they are yet. The real zingers are the problems that pop up that you weren't expecting. These are the unknown unknowns. They cause cost and schedule overruns and general headaches all around - assuming the program isn't killed by them. |
| Posted by: rabidfox 2003-12-4 11:56:45 AM |
| #1 *g* I don't think that anybody said that those words of Rumsfeld were meaningless -- it's just that the way he expressed them is rather hilarious, making this another specimen of his existential poetry. http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042/ I've also liked this quote: "Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous Ought not to be characterized as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on." |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2003-12-4 11:26:46 AM |