A compilation of governance
tools that
might deserve a programmer's
attention
The Revolution will be Engineered
- Assertion Processor - RSS feeds of facts that matter
- Constituents' Issues Assessment and blog archives of
comments
- Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded
individuals
- A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based
campaign
- Citizen-based (not faith-based)
programs for training,
jobs & mutual
support
- Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and
shared video archive
- of terrorism
- polling place coercion
- brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats
1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party
How do Doc and I do this? On the same day a while back, we
quite separately used the term Heart of Lightness.
Today, we're
both looking at how extreme the noises are, and he quotes the
photodude's The
View from the Fence of Centrism from last August.
We're all describing assertions but talking about them
as if they're facts. As Doc puts
it: "Yet reasonable people are quick
to label as hate all kinds of opinions that come up quite shy of the
mark."
Yesterday
he pointed out an important truth: no one's going
to be elected by hating Bush.
I'd like a neutral process to allow authors and editors and
reviewers flag and tag our assertions so we can line them up and see
them
in context.
Whenever we do the same thing over
and over, that thing is begging to be automated. One thing we all
repeat
is our
amazement
at an
article
or blog post or other assertion that reinforces or attacks our biases.
We'd like to promote the one and discredit the other, and we'd like to
string together
a
bunch of related stories (or lies) that reinforce our biases.
RSS with your Whopper?
Slate
even has a Whopper
feature that
in-house Chatterbox Timothy Noah maintains,
specializing
in the lies that political figures make.
Got a
whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry
must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous
refutation,
and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public
source. Preference
will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can
link to
online.
Whopper Archive:
Dec. 3, 2003: Joseph
Wilson
Oct. 31, 2003: G.W.
Bush
Oct. 17, 2003: Grady
Little
Sept. 16, 2003: John
Ashcroft
Sept. 5, 2003: Christy Whitman
Aug. 29, 2003: Donald
Rumsfeld
Aug. 22, 2003: Arianna
Huffington
Aug. 8, 2003: Howard
Dean
July 25, 2003: Condoleezza
Rice
July 18, 2003: President
Bush
July 10, 2003: Donald
Rumsfeld
June 27, 2003: Remembering
Strom
June 20, 2003: Billy
Bulger
May 30, 2003: Ari
Fleischer
May 23, 2003: Donald
Rumsfeld
May 19, 2003: Un-Whopper:
Ari Fleischer Tells Truth!
May 2, 2003: Peggy
Cooper Cafritz
April 17, 2003: Eason
Jordan
March 7, 2003: John
Kerry
Feb. 28, 2003: Ari
Fleischer
Feb. 14, 2003: Bill
O'Reilly
Feb. 7, 2003: Saddam
Hussein
Jan. 31, 2003: Karl
Rove
Jan. 23, 2003: Bill
Frist
Jan. 17, 2003: Naji
Sabri
Jan. 10, 2003: Rod
Paige
Without being hampered by knowing what I'm talking about,
I suggest that someone could extend RSS to allow authors, editors or
reviewers
to annotate such articles to point out the elements that strike them
as,
well, striking.
Such elements cry out to include the reserved words of
Journalism
101: who, when, where, what, why, how. It's the subelements that seem
interesting.
Who meets with whom when and what common threads are lying around
begging
to be pulled out of the sweater simultaneously? TheyRule.net does
some of the associating, but it's out of date and limited to SEC data,
with
links to assertions which 404 as often as not. A centralized site is
not
the answer, however noble the intentions.
If we're to have a way to scan and aggregate striking
assertions,
only an RSS feed will do.
The Hersh Model
Take this article
by
Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker. In it, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning
journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre lobs a fact grenade in the
direction
of NeoCon hawk Richard
Perle
and
Adnan
Kahshoggi, a Saudi-born arms dealer. The question is, are they facts or
are
they traitorous, unsubstantiated
charges by a serial
prevaricator?
Since it depends on who does the reading, the best we can say is that
its
an assertion
grenade and for
the purposes of RSS assertion feeds that's all we need to know.
Interestingly, Slate's Chatterbox
maintains an
Adnan Khashoggi dossier. Here's a report from last March, titled "Six
Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi," Part 6 - Richard Perle's new pal.:
Everybody's favorite shadowy arms dealer is back
in
the news! It is the premise of this occasional series that Adnan
Khashoggi
is connected to every shocking world event since 1960. In previous
items,
Chatterbox has linked Khashoggi to Sept. 11, Iran-Contra, the Marc Rich
pardon, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels
fiasco, the breakup of the Beatles, and Charlie Chaplin's serial
seductions
of teenage girls. (For details, see the "Six Degrees" archive,
below.) Chatterbox does not mean to suggest that Khashoggi has
committed
any crimes. But it does seem to be the case that if you make
Khashoggi's
acquaintance, the odds are that you're not a nice person.
Mr. Noah even maintains a Khashoggi archive:
"Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi" Archive:
Feb. 11, 2002: Part 5
Nov. 14, 2001: Part 4
July 9, 2001: Part 3
Feb. 26, 2001: More "Six Degrees
of Adnan Khashoggi"
Dec. 4, 2000: Did Adnan Khashoggi
Throw the Election to Dubya?
Hersh's Khashoogi article is long - 4,081 words. Who but a
limousine Liberal has time to read this stuff? Any Mac or
Microsoft
Word will autosummarize it for you, to any level you want. Here's what
my
Mac reports, in 644 words, plus a few experimental tags to lend a feel
for
what I think might be useful.:
During the Reagan Administration, <actor>Khashoggi</actor>
was
one of the middlemen between <associate>Oliver
North</associate>,
in the White House, and the <associate>mullahs
in Iran</associate>
in what
became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed
that he lost ten million dollars that he
had put up to obtain embargoed
weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval)
for American hostages.
...<company>Trireme’s</company>
main
business, according to a <document>two-page
letter</document>
that
one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi <documentdate>last
November</documentdate>,
is to <intention>invest
in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of
value
to homeland
security and defense</intention>.
...The letter mentioned the firm’s
government
connections prominently: “Three
of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the
U.S.
Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and
one of Trireme’s
principals, <actor>Richard
Perle</actor>,
is chairman
of that Board.” The two
other policy-board members associated with Trireme are <associate>Henry
Kissinger</associate>,
the
former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of
Trireme’s
advisory group and is not involved in its management), and <associate>Gerald
Hillman</associate>,
an investor
and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters
in
Trireme’s
New York office.
...Its members (there are around thirty of them)
may
be outside the government, but they have access to classified
information
and to senior policymakers,
and give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters
as weapons procurement.
...One board member told me that most members
are active in finance and business, and on at least one occasion a
member has left a meeting
when
a military
or an intelligence product in which he has an active interest has
come under discussion.
...If you had a story about me setting up a
company
for homeland security, and I’ve put people on the board with
whom I’m doing that business,
I’d be had”—a reference to Gerald
Hillman, who
had almost no senior policy or military experience in government
before being offered
a post on the policy board.
...In <authoritydate>August<authoritydate>,
the Saudi government was dismayed when the <authority>Washington
Post<authority>
revealed
that the Defense Policy Board had received a briefing on July
10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named Laurent Murawiec,
who depicted Saudi
Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that
the Bush Administration give the Saudi government an ultimatum to stop
backing
terrorism or face
seizure of its financial assets in the United States and its
oil
fields.
...When I asked Perle whether the Saudi
businessmen
at the lunch were being considered as possible investors in Trireme,
he
replied, <actorquote>“I
don’t
want Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor,
and our European partners said that, through investment banks, they
had had
Saudis as investors.”</actorquote>
...<associatequote>“Here
he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal,
and, on the other hand, there
were elements of the appearance of blackmail—‘If
we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi
Arabia’—as
I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”</associatequote>
As
for Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and
the assertion that its purpose was to discuss politics,
Bandar said, <associatequote>“There
has to be deniability, and a cover story—a possible
peace initiative in Iraq—is
needed.</associatequote>
...The views set forth in the memorandums were,
indeed, very different from those held by Perle, who
has said publicly
that Saddam will
leave office
only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow
hard-liners
in the Bush Administration.
...The paper said that <authorityquote>Perle
and others had attended a series of “secret
meetings” in an effort to avoid the pending war
with Iraq, and “a
scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would
personally admit that his country was attempting to
acquire weapons
of mass destruction and he
would agree to stop trying to acquire these weapons while
he awaits exile.”</authorityquote>
You get the idea. Experienced journalists could probably list
the useful tags in 15 minutes.
The only part of this to take seriously is the urge we
readers feel to pierce the veil of artifice that the media uses to
perpetuate
what Jay Rosen calls their master
narrative and that Doc calls the "vs."
story.
I want to discuss the Assertion Processor with a journalist
who actually knows how to spell RSS.
11:05:31 PM 
|
|
