We are not making progress in the leadership department here ...

Henry A. "Hank" Crumpton, the chief of the State Department's counterterrorism office and a key strategist in the war in Afghanistan, is leaving government in the new year.

His departure leaves another big hole at the State Department, which has been struggling to find a deputy secretary of state for six months. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is also now looking for replacements for her departing counselor and undersecretary of state for economic affairs.

We are already short on good leaders, and the ones we did have are bailing on us for greener pastures (to fund the higher education of their children, among other things).

State Dept. Losing a Top Figure In Terror War

Jeremy Rifkin is concerned about our future.

Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today's children, the wild will disappear from the face of the earth.

Our species now consumes nearly 40 percent of the net primary production on Earth -- the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis -- even though we make up only one-half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet.

This last statistic is kind of meaningless, as our agricultural efforts have dramatically increased those production levels relative to their "natural" state.

The Risks of Too Much City

Martin Kaplan writes in today's LA Times:

We've had plenty of shouting matches on the war; what we need are better leaders and more capable media.

So I guess, by Decius's First Law of Political Leadership, he is implicitly asking for things to get worse in Iraq. I don't know if I like that idea ...

But I did like this turn of phrase on the upcoming primaries:

... the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages ...

If that wasn't enough to make you see Kaplan more as a comedian than a man of nuanced policy, the article loses all sense of seriousness when we get to this:

Newt has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson.

Speaking of Scarlett, did you know she has five films on tap for 2007? Now there's a hard-working woman in show business. Do you think after that, we could get her to run as a VP in `08?

Here's his pitch for civil war in Iraq:

Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in.

I really like that last thought there, but it's incredibly difficult to achieve through the contemporary model of a "free" press forever at the mercy of fickle, demanding advertisers. If more people were willing to pay their own way for news they didn't want, but, like vegetables and fiber, knew they should have, then perhaps the products of that press would be more useful.

Echoing Kaplan, Mike wrote:

Less "balance," more "fair," meaning make a damn call.

adam wrote in reply:

I disagree completely; it is for journalists to report points of view, not judge. My ideology tells me -- my liberal bias says -- let reporters report in as balanced a manner as they can and let we the jury decide.

The issue is one not so much of the reporter as of the editor. In any newspaper of significance there is room for a variety of content, from "just the facts" basic street beat reporting, to in-depth profiles, to news analysis, to investigations, to editorials, to letters, to opinion pieces, to regular columnists, and more. Any "balanced" newspaper ought to have all of these, in the same way that a "balanced" investment portfolio will have a little of everything.

What distinguishes a great newspaper from a merely average one is two-fold: first, the quality of its content, and second, the editor's skill in selecting and organizing a small subset of the available content. The requirement for good content goes without saying; even the best editor would be hard-pressed to turn crap into a great newspaper. (Nonetheless, let it be noted that a talented editor can still make crap sell like hotcakes.) The editor's role is perhaps less widely appreciated, but I'd argue it's essential to a top quality product.

An editor, in attempting to "balance" views, relies on internal scales to do so. What is equal? Is it based on word count? How do you equate photographs?

Does Iraq need more debate?

I was a teenage angle trisector.

Isn't that a great opening line?

Foolproof | American Scientist

Martin Sheen and Kristen Bell ("Veronica Mars") are doing the voices for Arthur Square and Hex.

Based on Edwin Abott's book "Flatland", this is an animated film about geometric characters living in a two-dimensional world. When a young girl named "Hex" decides to "think outside the box" (in a world where such thought is forbidden), her life becomes in danger and it is up to her grandfather to save her life.

The film is due out in May.

If you're looking for other threads about Flatland, try these:

On Privacy

When I see the popular debate repeatedly circling around the same targets, bookending the variously weak and/or alarmist arguments with portentous excerpts from "1984", I am reminded of Flatland.

I must admit that I'm not sure what you're getting at ... I must still be thinking in 2D.

Dark matter highlights extra dimensions

... my head is still spinning a little from this and I think I'm really going to have to go back and read Flatland again to really be able to wrap my mind around (heh) it ...

The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Publisher's Weekly calls it "a math-geek classic!"

The Infinite Matrix | Rudy Rucker and Rudy Rucker, Jr. | Jenna and Me

Rudy Rucker rules!
I dig Rudy Rucker.
I second the recommendation!
I also recommend reading Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" directly.
I love Rudy Rucker.

Flatland: Next-Generation Simulation Visualization, Today

This representation of network and Internet activity brings to mind William Gibson's original vision of cyberspace in the novel Neuromancer.

A Business Proposition From the Fourth Dimension

This tribute to Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel Flatland works wonderfully.

Best Selling Science Books

How many pop-science books have you read?

Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information

This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen ...

Flatland: The Movie

From the new Counterinsurgency manual:

Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare—it is the graduate level of war.

-- Special Forces Officer in Iraq, 2005

Compare with the Matt Blaze comment from the Sunday NYT:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

So the Army observes that fighting insurgents is much harder than fighting conventional forces, and therefore they associate it with the seekers of higher education. Meanwhile, those thus associated have found it both necessary and appropriate to equate their community with terrorists as a way of signaling their general ineptitude.

So they basically agree, but for completely different reasons. As a consequence, each negates the spirit of the other's argument.

(Don't bother to reply just to point out the distinctions between insurgents and terrorists.)

The Army has just updated its counterinsurgency manual; it includes an appendix on "Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools".

FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency

The Sunday NYT features a story on the Christopher Soghoian case [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

I guess Matt Blaze hasn't had much occasion to be impressed with his charges since he left industry for academia:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

Blaze does offer a nod to the FBI, who gave the green light to his paper, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems.

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA

janelane wrote:

Bush is *not* the president we deserve.

I suspect the writer intended that sentence to provoke, and he seems to have succeeded. Your valid points about "what people deserve" notwithstanding, people look for many things in a President, and there are trade-offs all around. The contrast between Clinton and Bush made here is a case in point; some people liked Clinton because he listened, whereas other people reacted with "can't you form an opinion for yourself?" These Clinton-haters got in Bush a take-charge kind of guy who knew what he wanted and would go out and "get things done". Only later did they realize that occasionally the situation calls for a man of inaction, or at least one with a hint of hesitation, one who at least feels a moment of doubt at the crucial juncture, wondering whether it is better to shoot now or to wait and see. Such struggles tend not to trouble those with the presence of mind not to contemplate the consequences.

janelane wrote:

This editorial seems to me to be a perfect example of how out of touch NYT editors can be.

To clarify, this article is in the Sunday Magazine, not on the op-ed pages. The writer is an editor at the The Weekly Standard.

-janelane, I deserve better

Most definitely!

The classic irony on display is that the people (on all sides) seem not to know what they want, because even when they get what they asked for, the reality tends to disappoint them. Unintended consequences and all that.

After a challenging but successful engagement with Google, I would like to refer back to a bona fide Decius classic:

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?

That was part of a discussion in a thread about an op-ed by Robert Wright, Creating a New Picture of War, Pixel by Pixel.

One wonders whether, in the two and a half years since that post, we have arrived at "those times" when the people choose to act.

From a recent Paul Krugman piece, in which he cherrypicks pithy, prescient soundbites from the pre-invasion era:

Like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.

So how long will the dogs now circle the car before they decide whether to kill it, keep it, or release it?

RE: The Vanishing

When a politician makes likability a substitute for authority, his opponents make hatred a substitute for opposition.

The Vanishing