Decius wrote:
] Jeremy says: Gold Star.
]
] I say: This link is on Free Republic. They are a bad
] reputation for being the Republican version of the Slashdot
] hordes. All power in numbers and no clue. However, the article
] is Stratfor, and hence worthy of attention. It reads a bit
] Republican, which is likely why the freepers have posted it.
] I'm not sure that it is. Stratfor likes to talk about what is
] going on and why. They don't usually talk about what might
] have been done. Its rare that they talk about what ought to be
] done.

The Gold Star is for the two paragraphs quoted, which are neither Republican nor Democrat. And while it is the problem with the CIA, it is also a more universal problem throughout government and the corporate world.

I don't care about Free Republic or the link or the reputation of their hordes. Don't click through. It's just a convenient cache/mirror. Find another one if you want or ignore it.

There are some emerging fundamental disconnects regarding the purpose of the site, of the status of an individual entry/article, and so on. The notion that an entry is a request to "click through" a particular link is one of the disconnects.

In this case, and in many others, the link is simply a convenient method of attribution. The text of the entry itself is the message. Do not click through. Go directly to the next post. Do not collect $200.

On 16 April 2004 you quoted a back-looking Stratfor article.

On 12 September 2002 you did the same.

On 20 May 2004 you did the same, in which Stratfor "offers an opinion", in your words.

On 20 March 2004 you expressed similar reservations about Stratfor "going political" on you. I didn't understand your William Safire comment at the time, and I still don't. Presumably it's not you, it's me.

As for why George Friedman isn't running for office, I'll quote you at

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid12789/blogid4068055

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do. When people are involved and committed and political leaders are honest and have clear vision; that usually happens when things are really, really fucked up. Who are the U.S. Presidents we most admire? What was going on during their presidencies?

This can also explain why Stratfor "goes political" from time to time.

RE: The Problem With the CIA

That is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence. There are many outstanding people at the agency, in both the Directorate of Intelligence and in Operations. The agency's obsession with the intelligence process crushes these people daily. Those who flourish in this environment are those who can sit through long meetings without falling asleep. The people who can peer through the darkness and see the truth are either sucked into the surreal world of modern management or shunted aside.

Gold Star.

The Problem With the CIA

Vile wrote:
] What are you recommending?

I'm recommending that you read the text I quoted. Nothing more. Whether or not you click through is of secondary importance. The idea should stand on its own, more or less independent of the article in which it appeared.

It appears that you read it, or at least looked at it long enough to reply. Mission accomplished.

RE: Protect Consumers, or Big Business?

For those of us who see questioning and constant re-evaluation as essential to progress of any kind, this is one more frightening reminder that our administration is taking us down the wrong road at ever increasing speed.

Protect Consumers, or Big Business?

Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting.

Propagation of Trust and Distrust

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems -- to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.

Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq

Those three ironclad laws create a framework for decency that few people ever display. It's no wonder Hollywood prefers simply to fear robots, as it does in "The Terminator," "The Matrix" and now "I, Robot," to name only a few examples. It's vastly easier and more thrilling than introspection.

We, Robots

This is a special issue of PNAS from April 2004, now freely available.

Here are a few papers of note:

Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration
From paragraph to graph: Latent semantic analysis for information visualization
A method for finding communities of related genes
Tracking evolving communities in large linked networks
Traffic-based feedback on the web

Mapping Knowledge Domains

Many politicians who voted to authorize the war still refuse to admit that they made a mistake. But they did. And even though this page came down against the invasion, we regret now that we didn't do more to challenge the president's assumptions.

It's hard to tell for sure if this is just a tactical political manuever or a measure of true intellectual honesty on display. (Perhaps it's both.)

To the extent it's the latter, I find it interesting that the public probably has Jayson Blair to thank for (indirectly) bringing about this new approach.

A Pause for Hindsight