Sorenson, Kennedy and the third Sachs' Reith lecture.

This is another post in a continuing series on the BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world. The MP3s are no longer legally available but the BBC has put the transcripts online.

The first lecture was rather good, though several of the comments were pompously silly. Is immortality worthwhile if it means being mocked forever?

The second lecture, in China, spent too much time managing the tender sensibilities of the host nation. This was probably politically wise, but it made for a dull speech. I was starting to get tired of the Kennedy references, but I was about to change my opinion.

The third took place in Sachs' home base - Columbia University's Earth Institute. There was no need to worry about the sensibilities of the insensate American government of course, so the material was quite a bit sharper. I was particularly impressed by Sachs discussion of fear and human nature:

... Two deep aspects of human psychology are crucial here. The first is that human beings hover between cooperation and conflict. We are actually primed psychologically, and probably genetically, to cooperate, but only conditionally so. In a situation of low fear, each of us is prone to cooperate and to share -- even with a stranger. Yet when that trust evaporates, each of us is primed to revert to conflict, lest we are bettered by the other. Game theorists call this strategy "Tit for Tat," according to which we cooperate at the outset, but retaliate when cooperation breaks down. The risk, obviously, is an accident, in which cooperation collapses, and both sides get caught in a trap in which conflict becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that all-too-real nightmare, we end up fighting because we fear that the other will fight. This fear is confirmed by fear itself. Wars occur despite the absence of any deeper causes...

In responding to a comment Sachs discussed the nightmarish indirect impact of 9/11 ...

... September 11 was an extraordinary event, clearly without being banal about it. It opened up the possibilities for much worse than we could have imagined, much worse about us. It led to an end of introspection for several years, to bellicosity, to faith in the military approach, to the idea that we could bludgeon them all - after all we are the world's sole superpower.

Future historians, I suspect, will treat 9/11 as in some ways analogous to an assassination that has a certain (in this case considerable) direct impact, but a potentially much larger indirect impact. Will America's post-9/11 psychotic break be one day seen as the beginning of the end? It is miraculously mysterious to me that we have not had another significant attack -- for that, I think, would have been a fatal blow to America's fragile psyche.

The most remarkable part of the lecture, however, was the presence of Theodore (Ted) Sorenson in the audience. Mr. Sorenson is 79 years old, but he evidently has one of those lucky minds that by virtue of brilliance and biology resist entropy. Of course he must have prepared in advance, but even so ...

... SUE LAWLEY: We have, as you mentioned, during the course of your lecture, Jeff, we have Theodore Sorensen - Ted Sorensen - sitting on the front row there, lawyer and writer who was Special Advisor and speechwriter to President Kennedy. I wonder, having heard everything you've heard this evening, sir, whether you'd care to say something?

THEODORE SORENSEN: That's very nice, thank you. It's been an extraordinary experience for me to sit here tonight and listen to such a wise and wonderful lecture, with so many references to a speech given forty-three years ago, and I'm sure if President Kennedy were alive and here tonight he would be moved and touched as I am to think that that speech of his, that basic message of his forty-three years ago is now going out through these BBC lectures all over the world. Since I know a little bit about the speech that you frequently cited, I wonder why…

SUE LAWLEY: Can I just say, did you write it?

THEODORE SORENSEN: Oh I never acknowledge that. President Kennedy was the author of all of his speeches. (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE) Or I, or what I should say in answer to that question is, 'Ask not'. (LAUGHTER) So my recommendation to you, Jeff, when you make this lecture again, is to cite two other parts of that speech. One is a passage where President Kennedy said, 'The world knows America will not start a war. This generation of Americans has seen enough of war.' Haven't heard that recently! The second was where he not only asked for a re-examination of our relations with the Soviet Union, but praised the Soviet people for the enormous contribution and sacrifice they made in World War Two, which no-one had ever done before, and the Soviets rather resented it, and it was one of the ways that he reached Khrushchev. Seems to me we live in a world where the people of Islam have been rejected and humiliated for generations, and if someone took the time to praise their contributions to civilisation over the centuries, that might help.

(APPLAUSE) [jf - this applause went on for a decently long time]

JEFFREY SACHS: Don't you think we have the makings of another speech coming? (LAUGHTER) I think it is so astounding that President Kennedy's and your speech was not only so brilliant that it gives shivers when you read it or listen to it, but it literally worked within weeks. It did exactly what it was meant to do: it changed history. This is an astounding, astounding truth, and it's an astounding accomplishment of, of this man before us tonight. It's just amazing.

And thus I came to change my opinion of Kennedy/Sorenson's 1963 speech, an oration that Sachs feels saved modern civilization. His case is persuasive, and so I now understand Sachs weaving the speech throughout the 2007 Reith lectures.

Whatever Kennedy's many (many) flaws, he assembled an astounding group of people, and he drew upon the best parts of America in a way we cannot imagine today. We seem, by comparison, a shriveled and brittle people. We have no choice, however, but to imagine that there is a road back for this country and for the world.

There are two lectures still to go.

Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud

This morning our last modern pencil sharpener broke. We have only one that works now. It's twelve years old, I remember coming across it in the campus bookstore. Even then reliable sharpeners were hard to find, so I bought several. Only one survives. It was made in Germany. We're going to mention it in our will, it may be worth a fortune thirty years from now. By then billionaires will employ artisans to craft beautiful objets d'art that sharpen pencils, and the rest of us will be using our teeth.

We tossed the broken one in the garbage. Alas, the can was broken. Well, that's almost reasonable. One year in a house with our 3 kids would even have weakened a German garbage can. No surprise this one broke.

We can't replace it. There are no more square, tough cans that use standard cheap trash bags. There are only round cheap things that use exotic bags that will only be sold for the next six months.

Our two DVD/VCR combos limp along. One has a broken DVD player, the other a broken tape player. There's no point in replacing them -- the replacement would only last three to six months then it would break. We won't replace our crummy old toaster, because the modern modern alternatives won't last more than a few weeks.

How to explain this emergent conspiracy of globalized incompetence and occult inflation? Clearly the answer is related to Krugman and Hilton [1] and the reelection of George Bush. The American consumer is simply overwhelmed, unable to process and cope with the complexity of the new age. Consumers are repetitive and consistently making very poor choices, and the market is responding to the frailty of the consumer.

I'm hopeful that a correction is coming. It's too late for we boomers to get our heads around the new world -- we're too old and slow. We can, however, retreat into "grumpy old person" buy nothing, replace nothing stasis -- and that will give the young more leverage. It's up to their minds to absorb the new rules, and reboot the marketplace.

Go for it kiddies, we gomers are depending on you!

[1] BTW, I'm seriously starting to feel sorry for Ms. Hilton.

Scientific American demonstrates how to eliminate web traffic

I wanted to link to a SciAm article I have at home. I had some things to say that seemed interesting (to me). A win-win for SciAm and me, especially since they charge for archival access.

Problem is, every time I went to the page Camino/Firefox pegged my CPU at 100%. Scientific American was featuring a BASF (German pharmaceutical company) animated ad that kills Gecko clients (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape, etc) - at least on OS X.

I've now disabled all web advertising display using Camino 1.5's quite excellent built-in blockers. So Scientific American's blunder will disable entire classes of advertising. Perhaps the responsible ad agency should take notice too.

I wonder how many thousands of people have been locked out today (especially if this impacts Firefox/Win as well) how many have responded by enabling full ad blocking, how many won't return to the SciAm web site, how many are reconsidering the value of their SciAm subscriptions...

It takes only one blunder of this magnitude to cost a web site months of work.

I'd try sending them feedback, but of course I'm not going to bother accessing their web site now. In any event, any corporation capable of this type of mistake probably omits the feedback link. Eliminating feedback helps reduce annoying customer interactions.

This is pretty much a universal rule by the way -- any entity, whether human or corporate, that does really dumb stuff is very unlikely to allow feedback. It's pretty much two sides of the same coin.

What a waste.

Paris Hilton and Paul Krugman - together?

I have only a very vague idea of who Paris Hilton is or what she does, but even I know she's famous, rich, likes drugs and seems able to absorb punishment almost as well as Mick Jagger. So I was able to enjoy a witty, funny and vastly entertaining essay in Salon  ...

We'll always hate Paris - Clintra Wilson -Salon Life

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, Paris Hilton, for all her frailness and vulnerability, is a huge, flaming meteor that can penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, bypass all weather completely and destroy millions of lives wherever she happens to feel like plummeting...

...Paris Hilton charges $200,000 to show up at a party for 20 minutes...

... (Just to give this price tag some sense of proportion, in 2004 the average per capita annual income in Iraq was $422. So it would take the average Iraqi over 20 years to earn one minute with Paris Hilton, or around 24 Iraqis one year to divide and share that one minute with Paris between them -- which would just be a complete waste of money unless they could use that one minute to swallow all her jewelry and handbag and shoes.)

Paris has come to embody the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness -- she's the blonde whom we punish, because we understand her crimes. We don't really understand all the crimes of the administration -- congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights.

Those are too legally complicated. While we were busy ogling Lindsay's drug binges, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Britney's shaved head, our leaders larded us with misinformation, illegally invaded another country, murdered we-don't-even-have-any-idea-how-many innocent civilians (not to mention independent journalists), stole a nation's oil, tortured enemy prisoners, quietly bankrupted our economy and our international moral standing in service to the short con of military Keynesianism, effectively built Dick Cheney his own private Praetorian Guard, and ushered in the most serious threat to American freedom in our history: the very real threat of despotism.

God, that is depressing. Hooker! Where's the hooker?

Which leads to the Krugman connection:

... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit...

...Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”...

So you see, Krugman and Hilton are together. Ok, sort of connected - by their inverse relationships to a dysfunctional media serving a disinterested populace.

Ok, so my morals are declining ...

Paul Krugman blogs on TPMCafe. Ok. Posts

Ok, so it's not a blog, but Krugman has been posting on TPM Cafe. Alas, the "posts by" page does not itself have a feed.

Take this comment, for example:

... Anyone who thinks that neoclassical economics says that everyone gains from free trade, and that you have to reject the assumptions of the field to raise concerns, obviously doesn't know anything about the subject: ever since Stolper-Samuelson 1941 we've known that trade can easily hurt large numbers of people, so the question is always an empirical one. A dozen years ago I thought the effects were small, but that was based on the numbers, not a judgment in principle. Now I've revised my views up, because the numbers are bigger...

I haven't read that anywhere else, and I pay attention to this stuff (layperson attention of course, I'm not an economist). Stolper-Samuelson, eh?

I suspect Krugman's NYT contract may limit what he can do, but this is good stuff all the same. I hope the TPM Cafe people are thinking about how to add a feed to user post history ...

Can we fix the media? Krugman on the debates

Paul Krugman is worried.

Lies, Sighs and Politics - Krugman - New York Times

.... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)...

Where I grew up, in Montreal, we had a terrific variety of pastries, and even a few places with good coffee. Mostly though, we had great pastries. I assumed the whole world was like that. Then I moved to the states. My fellow Americans, we have crummy pastries. Yes, better than 20 years ago, but still only mediocre.

Why?

Because, mostly, we don't demand anything better. Consumers don't know enough to raise their standards, so progress is very slow.

So goes the media. It's hard to know if things were better once, but on the whole the performance of the American media is frighteningly bad. It seems, however, to be at the level Americans expect.

That's what scares me. America reelected Bush/Cheney. The current crop of GOP candidates are largely Bush clones. It could happen again.

The breaking of modern physics: space with non-zero energy

I came across this older article via a blog comment. Shame that this article doesn't have a date on it (a common web page error), but I think it's probably from 2006. It's not news, but I liked the overview of what it's meant to find that empty space has non-zero energy (or equivalently, non-zero mass):

Edge: THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO: A Talk with Lawrence Krauss

.... The energy of empty space had to be precisely zero. Why? Because you've got these virtual particles that are apparently contributing huge amounts of energy, you can imagine in physics, how underlying symmetries in nature can produce exact cancellations — that happens all the time. Symmetries produce two numbers that are exactly equal and opposite because somewhere there's an underlying mathematical symmetry of equations. So that you can understand how symmetries could somehow cause an exact cancellation of the energy of empty space.

But what you couldn't understand was how to cancel a number to a hundred and twenty decimal places and leave something finite left over. You can't take two numbers that are very large and expect them to almost exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space....

... every measure we've made right now is completely consistent with a constant energy in the universe over cosmological time. And that's consistent with the cosmological constant, with vacuum energy....

... because of this energy of empty space — which is so inexplicable that if it really is an energy of empty space, the value of that number is so ridiculous that it's driven people to think that maybe, maybe it's an accident of our environment, that physics is an environmental science — that certain fundamental constants in nature may just be accidents, and there may be many different universes, in which the laws of physics are different, and the reasons those constants have the values they have might be — in our universe — might be because we're there to observe them.

This is not intelligent design; it's the opposite of intelligent design. It's a kind of cosmic natural selection....

... Right now we're floundering. We're floundering, in a lot of different areas.

...Fundamental physics is really at kind of a crossroads. The observations have just told us that the universe is crazy, but hasn't told us what direction the universe is crazy in. The theories have been incredibly complex and elaborate, but haven't yet made any compelling inroads.

... On the largest scales, when we look out at the universe, there doesn't seem to be enough structure — not as much as inflation would predict. Now the question is, is that a statistical fluke?

... when you look at CMB [cjf: osmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales...

Space isn't what it once was. We used to think space separated things, but now we know it doesn't. If you collapse the probability wave on an electron in Kansas, then the probability wave on its entangled partner 200 billion light years away collapses at the same "time". (The catch being what is meant by time in this context.)

Physics isn't what it once was. Physicists seem a bit demoralized, and stunned. I don't blame 'em at all. This reality looks less plausible all the time.

iPhone: inferior to the (defunct) Samsung i500

I watched Apple's sensational iPhone ads with my wife last night. I drooled over the images, even though I know they're faking a theoretical optimum experience that won't be real for at least another year -- and then only with a WiFi connection.

I couldn't fool myself completely however. There was only one instance of data entry. The user's fat fingers entered a search term, which miraculously rendered without a typo (how many tries did that take?).

Emily scoffed. She ripped my aging Samsung i500 out of my hands a few months ago, and she's constantly doing stylus data entry (Graffiti One, not that Bizarro clone known as Graffiti Two/Jot) on an ultra-tough compact clamshell that fits in pocket or purse and survives recurrent abuse.

Sigh. I know she's right. As much as I want an iPhone, it will be only five times better than my loathed RAZR. It won't be half as useful as the long abandoned i500.

One day the consumer market will mature enough that the i500 will be reinvented with superior technology and a viable business model. In the meantime I'm looking forward to my iPhone, but I know it's only second best.

That is the problem of an efficient marketplace; it's too "clever" to make the kind of products space aliens like my wife and I want.

Add to the list: pufferfish and drugged eels

The list of issues with Chinese imports gets more bizarre all the time:

China rejects U.S. warning on toothpaste

...A slew of Chinese exports have recently been banned or turned away by U.S. inspectors including, wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine that has been blamed for dog and cat deaths in North America, monkfish that turned out to be toxic pufferfish, drug-laced frozen eel, and juice made with unsafe color additives...

So what was the drug in the eel?

TAPPED reviews the GOP debates

TAPPED reviews the debates. It's funny, except for the compulsion to weep.

Bush is not an exception. Bush is the norm for this group (maybe excepting Tommie Thompson). Bush is the GOP, the GOP is Bush.

The GOP is the problem. It needs 8 years in rehab before it can be allowed to touch government again.

Consumers are their own worst enemies

Coding Horror reviews current thinking about feature/function definition in software and hardware. It's a great review, but he lets consumers (ie. humans, us) off the hook too easily.

The dirty little non-secret of product development is that customers often want features that you believe they won't use, and they don't care about features you believe they'll find essential. Quite often, this is indeed how it turns out. Buyers of complex products are surprisingly poor at figuring out what's important.

Inevitably products are sub-optimal because a percentage of resources has to go towards what sells, as well as to what will produce satisfied customers.

Frustrating, but it's part of the price most of us have to pay. Call it the "judgment tax". Except, that is, Apple. Apple seems to completely disregard what consumers say they want, and instead sells what Apple thinks they really need. And consumers buy it.

How do they do that?!

Update 6/7/07: This was published in the New Yorker 5/28. Must be something in the air.

Journalism, as seen from the inside

DeLong has hoisted an anonymous comment from a practicing journalist to the front page: The Future of Journalism. This is why I like the practice of allowing anonymity in moderated comments -- it's a very well written, frank-sounding and educational comment. It's presumably common wisdom among practicing journalists, but probably little understood outside of the profession.

It does not surprise me that there is no significant correlation between the "excellence" of a newspaper and its economic success. I think the relationship of "excellence" and economic success is surprisingly elastic, unless one subscribes to the mindless tautology of defining "excellence" as "profitable".

I think this comment is debatable though:

... Had newspapers been a little smarter, they would have realized about 1993 or so that it made no sense to put news on the Internet for free and charge exhorbitant prices for their archives; the best model would be to give away the stale stuff for free -- to give people an idea of what they missed -- and charge for what's freshest.

I would not be surprised to learn that archives are a weak source of revenue, but i don't think making them free would make them more appreciated. In the era of blogs the key concepts tend to be captured in commentary anyway. So the question of archives isn't relevant.

So really the only question is whether one can make money, in addition to advertising revenue, by charging for fresh material. I suspect the answer, outside of specialized domains, will be no. Which means there will only be a handful of newspapers left in America when this transition runs its course ...

Global climate change: start here

A starting point for knowledge acquisition:

RealClimate Start here

We've often been asked to provide a one stop link for resources that people can use to get up to speed on the issue of climate change, and so here is a first cut. Unlike our other postings, we'll amend this as we discover or are pointed to new resources. Different people have different needs and so we will group resources according to the level people start at.

See also responses to contrarian arguments. We should all be reading RealClimate. My own thoughts, for what they're worth, follow below.

The classic contrarian positions have been:

1. The earth's climate is not changing beyond the norms of the past 1000 years.
2. Warming is not substantially impacted by human greenhouse gas production.
   

I think both positions have been marginalized, though nature abhores a certainty. The current contrarian positions are:

1. The earth's climate will not warm beyond the norms of the past 150,000 years before we stop using fossil fuels or within a time frame we can make sense of (100 years).
   
2. The net effects of climate warming, from a human perspective, will not be significantly negative.
3. The costs of limiting greenhouse gas emissions are extremely high and any conceivable action at this point will have limited benefits.
4. We should focus limited resources and energies on adaptation rather than amelioration.

These remain the current rationally defensible contrarian positions. It is true that many who hold them are in retreat from less defensible positions, but that's how humans are. The fall of prior contrarian positions does not mean all are incorrect. NASA's current director probably holds to #1 and #2 for example -- even though his beliefs may be perverse they have not been proven false.

My guess is that #3 and #4 are incorrect and that #1 is probably incorrect but, even if correct, would not substantially change the discussion. I suspect we can get near universal agreement that we need to better estimate #2, which means Bush/Congress need to come up with a NASA funding and direction that supports earth surveillance as a core mission.

So from a political perspective we can probably get agreement with rational contrarians that:

1. We need to fully fund earth surveillance and climate research.
2. We need to invest mightily in technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The rational debate is now about the timing and magnitude of economic measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through changes in human behavior that may reduce simplistic measures of economic output. In other words, measures that involve perceived sacrifices.

My bias is that upside risks of warming are substantial enough, and the other (political, economic, social, etc) benefits of reducing fossil fuel use are high enough, that we should be putting carbon and gasoline taxes in place that will move the price of gasoline to the $10/gallon mark (2007 dollars) within 10 years. I suspect this will have minimal impact on our economic output and would actually increase our ability to manage economic turbulence, so it would not reduce America's "security" even when that is measured in the most simplistic terms.

I liked Al Gore before he was cool

Al Gore is fashionable nowadays. Fashionable enough that oxygen-wasters like David Brooks work themselves into a frenzy of terror imagining President Gore.

I just want to say that I liked Al Gore even when Maureen Dowd and her ilk mocked him relentlessly. Here he is explaining why he will not, not, not run for President ...

The Passion of Al Gore - Bob Herbert - New York Times

... But while leaving the door to a possible run carefully ajar, he candidly mentioned a couple of personal reasons why he is disinclined to seek the presidency again.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t really think I’m that good at politics, to tell you the truth.” He smiled. “Some people find out important things about themselves early in life. Others take a long time.”

He burst into a loud laugh as he added, “I think I’m breaking through my denial.”

I noted that he had at least been good enough to attract more votes than George W. Bush.

“Well, there was that,” he said, laughing again. “But what politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply.”

Mr. Gore is passionate about the issues he is focused on — global warming, the decline of rational discourse in American public life, the damage done to the nation over the past several years. And he has contempt for the notion that such important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences or 30-second television ads, which is how presidential campaigns are conducted.

He pressed this point when he talked about Iraq.

“One of the hallmarks of a strategic catastrophe,” he said, “is that it creates a cul-de-sac from which there are no good avenues of easy departure. Taking charge of the war policy and extricating our troops as quickly as possible without making a horrible situation even worse is a little like grabbing a steering wheel in the middle of a skid.”

There is no quick and easy formula, he said. A new leader implementing a new policy on Iraq would have to get a feel for the overall situation. The objective, however, should be clear: “To get our troops out of there as soon as possible while simultaneously observing the moral duty that all of us share — including those of us who opposed this war in the first instance — to remove our troops in a way that doesn’t do further avoidable damage to the people who live there.”

I liked his comments on the strategic, moral, political, economic and social catastrophe of our Bungler in Chief -- aka the occupation of Iraq. I am easily persuaded that there's no simple exit.

Update: My wife suggests we conspire to create a romance between Brooks and Dowd, in the hopes they'll run off together and perhaps go to work for Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. A terrific win for the NYT on every front ...

Kristof reporting from the Chinese-Korean border: many things in a small place

Krugman is the better thinker and arguably the better writer, but Kristof is the better journalist. He deserves to sit at the table with those nameless Africa correspondents who occasionally illuminate the undeserving pages of The Economist. In the midst of a visit to China with his Chinese-born wife, he takes a side-trip to the North Korean border. There he reveals many aspects of a complex situation, here's one excerpt:

Escape From North Korea - New York Times

... China has also increased its punishments for its own citizens who are caught helping North Koreans. The penalty used to be a fine, but now it is jail for a year or two — or for a decade or more if someone smuggles escapees to South Korea.

“Now most Chinese don’t dare help the Koreans,” said one local official who secretly protects a safe house full of North Koreans — and who even stood guard outside as I interviewed them. “But I feel so badly for them. They’re just wretched.”

With the help of incredibly courageous conductors on the modern Underground Railroad, I visited four shelters that together house dozens of North Koreans, and residents of a fifth shelter were brought to my vehicle so that I could talk to them safely. My entire visit was conducted under very tight security to make sure I did not lead police to the safe houses.

The North Koreans I talked to described a society that is increasingly corrupt and disillusioned. One said that even with the latest crackdown, a $400 bribe to guards will win a prisoner’s immediate release. Another estimated that up to 20 percent of North Koreans in her area are disaffected enough that they listen illegally to Chinese broadcasts.

Chinese and South Korean missionaries are also beginning to evangelize secretly in North Korea, a sign of weakening government control. One Chinese Christian I talked to had made four trips into North Korea to evangelize. “If I’d been caught, I don’t think I would have been executed,” she said, “but it wouldn’t have been good.”

All the same, none of these North Koreans thought an uprising was imminent. Indeed, a surprising number of them are so steeped in propaganda that they still insist that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is a good man. “The problem is with lower officials, not with Kim Jong-il himself,” claimed one man who has arranged for smugglers to bring his entire family out to freedom in China. (For more on the North Koreans, go to my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)...

... Those three children are modern reminders of the terrors of Anne Frank. They fear with every footstep outside their door that China will arrest them and send them back to their national torture chamber...

The Anne Frank connection is arguably valid in this case. I was struck by the role of Christian (protestant) evangelism, the persistence of the "Dear Leader" mythos (shades of those who blame our governments fiascos on everyone but Bush), the inevitable* heroic figure guarding the safe house and, of course, the persistent misery of North Korea.

It will be interesting to see if Kristof is able to get a visa next time he tries to visit China.

I suppose I'll have to start reading his blog now.

* I use "inevitable" in an exasperated rather than disparaging way. It's the persistent recurrence of these heroic types, apparently thrown up by some odd mixture of genes and environment, that make it so difficult to retire humanity and try dolphins instead.

Update: Kristof's blog discussion has some superb comments and adds much more background information and complexity. That reminds me, on the way to work I heard a brief NPR snippet on a book bemoaning the destruction of the media "pillars" of society by "amateur culture". That was enough of the "pillars" for me, I hit the "source" button on my car "radio" and switched to an In Our Time podcast.