Helen Keller had to go through life without seeing it, and in South Florida traffic that would be brave to the point of foolhardiness for pedestrians, bikers and others.

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South Florida traffic is so bad because drivers from all the states merge here-many of them retired, and of course vacationers from everywhere are here too, and the net affect is to go first, ignore standard stopping and signalling protocol and just get where you want to go without enough attention to semiotics. Even a motorccyclists might just take off into a turn from a start without sufficient speed in a hurry to get going and just fall over.

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Politicians have a sort of professional blindness somewhat more refined than that of Helen Keller's sort. Ms. Keller overcame here blindness while politicans and managers culture theirs to development.

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In reading the last book of Richard Feynman "What Do You Care What Other People Think" Feynman describes his time as a commissioner investigating the cause of the Challenger space shuttle blow-up. He made several interesting points about management traits. For one thing, management estimated the chance for a shuttle disaster at one in 100,000, while the better engineers of N.A.S.A. put the chances for disaster at one in 300 or even one in 200.

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It urned out that Thiokol engineers new that the O rings did not perform as needed at cold temperatures, and precursors to the shuttle disaster of fuel escaping and burning up a fuel tank were such that reasonable managers might have shut down the shuttle program a priori.

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The shuttle was designed from thee top down rather than from the bottom up wrote Feynman, and engineers had to retrofit problems with it that developed in use. The O ring failure to seel adequately made Thiokol try putting shims in---which wasn't a good idea at all.

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Hopefull N.A.S.A. will develop a plan to retire the shuttle at L-3 and L-5 or upon the moon in order not to waste the core of perfectly good orbital vehicles. Perhaps some sort of additions for low-g environments could be attached. Once the shuttle program is forever grounded it will be difficult to reallocate funds to develop external fuel tanks for a one-time relocation of the fleet to space facilties/deployment.

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Feynman wrote about the managmement bureaucracy "I had the definite impression that I had found the same game as with the seals: management reducing criteria and accepting more and more errors that wern't designed into the device, while the engineers are screaming from below, 'Help!' and 'This is a RED ALERT!'"

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American politicans in this corporatist era seem to have the same sort of political blindness that doomed the Challenger to flames in the sky. The presidential contest for 2008 isn't even encouraging especially.

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Wesley Clarke, with the name of western civilization and Clarke Gable all in one, a Rhodes scholarship and West Point graduation before distinguished military service should be a shoe in, yet he doesn't have the personal carisma even of Al Gore so far. He seems the autistic candidate on the Democratic side, while John Edwards isn't making a lot of ripples in the campaign so far.

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Does the administration in shaping its Iraq policy in the last year may have the same sort of management problems that beset the Challenger management of intentional blindness?