A funny shot of Clinton and Bush Sr. today.

I’m wondering to what degree our intelligence community was aware of or had some influence in the appointment of Iraq’s new prime minister. If US intelligence played a role, they seem to have done a poor job of covering it up. If they did not, UN Envoy Brahimi is not being very effective.

When is America going to get the clue that we’ve gotten completely out of control? I grew up around a lot of Pentecostals. Now, I grant you, they can be very frightening people. However, they aren’t going to hijack your plane. Those aren’t weapons.. they’re just “tracks” .. some testimony.

so i’ve been thinking about wikis lately, and how truth tends to percolate up better in this environment. i’m wondering if there’s a power law here or a way to support that statement logically. does the value of a particular statement or narrative tend to gain truth, to evolve intellectually, in direct correlation to the number of people who are given an opportunity to alter it? is there a way to quantify the inherent likelihood that a ‘meme’ is ‘true’ and accurate based on something as simple as the number of editors?

where t is some kind of “truth quotient”*;
where a is the number of contributors to any given narrative/piece of information/concept;
where b is the passage of time;

t = ab

*-this could represent anything from the likelihood of an actual mundane binary fact to be true/not, all the way to the likelihood that a narrative or a point of view is closest to or best represents pure, unbiased, universal truth

because it’s not just the number of editors that matters. if you had 100 people contribute to an idea over one day, i think at the end of the day you’d have a much poorer idea qualitatively than if you had 100 people contribute the same amount of time to it, but over a period of a year. ideological contributions are worth more if they’ve had more time to marinate in the cosmic stew.

i’ve noticed in places like wikipedia the bias tends to get wrung out of even the most controversial of topics as the entries continue to be modified, over time, at the hands of people across the idealogical spectrum. so the ideas are able to evolve in two ways. they first evolve by pure chronological maturity. as we get older and wiser as a species, (setting my cynicism aside for a moment) we tend to get a smidge brighter and maybe a touch more enlightened. so our ways of thinking and looking at the world (again, generally speaking) tend to improve qualitatively. we have a better people are, in this medium, asked to remove emotion and assumptions from topics existentially essential or just painfully mundane. but bertrand russell once said something about hanging question marks on all your assumptions from time to time. writing objectively - or as objectively as any human can - about a topic on which you are either very passionate or very experienced can be nearly impossible. the truth quotient is a way to turn that very difficulty into a collective asset.

this sort of gets to the nut of why i find wikis (especially as they relate to the media, current events, or even encyclopedic ones like wikipedia,) to be such fascinating intellectual petri dishes.

sorry about all that and if it seems sophomoric. i promise to just post a chick next time

True conservatives are are becoming more and more bold about their lack of support for the President. Nothing he has done has been conservative, frankly. If Bush can’t count on these so-called “loyalists”, he cannot hang on in November.

SOURCE: Matt Drudge: Bleep The Press?
CAMERA MOVED OFF POWELL DURING RUSSERT GRILLING; AIDE ATTEMPTED TO CUT OFF INTERVIEW
Sun May 16 2004 10:45:35 ET

An aide to Sec. of State Colin Powell ordered a halt to a MEET THE PRESS interview and directed a camera to shoot a palm tree during provocative questioning by host Tim Russert. As Powell was being interview by satellite from Jordan, State Department press aide Emily Miller fumed as Tim Russert went beyond the 10 minutes allotted for the NBC Sunday session. 13 minutes in to the interview, Miller attempted to pull the plug.

As Russert grilled Powell on his presentation at the UN of Iraq’s alleged WMDs — Miller moved the single remote camera off Powell. Transcript follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

The New Yorker plans to run in its 5/24 issue a breaking and explosive story by the legendary Seymour Hersh citing several high-level intelligence sources. The story claims that Rumsfeld ‘authorized the establishment of a highly secret program” involving the capture and interrogation of “high value targets.” Undersecretary of Defense Cambone had allegedly sent the message to the MI guys that “no rules apply.”

Cartoonist and activist Ted Rall’s cartoon for today was pulled from MSNBC’s site with this explanation. Rall’s piece is aggressive and possibly tacky but calls out the stupidity of the Iraq war very sharply.

The EIC and entire staff of US-funded Al-Sabah have quit.

Natalia, say hello to the blog. Blog, say hi to Natalia. Mmkay, bedtime!