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That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.

That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so thereâ(TM)s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!

That Jonathan Bushâ(TM)s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.

That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.

That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osamaâ(TM)s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.

That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.

That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations.

The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.

That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.

That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbo

That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.

That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so thereâ(TM)s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!

That Jonathan Bushâ(TM)s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.

That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.

That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osamaâ(TM)s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.

That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.

That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations.

The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.

That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.

That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbo

The CFIUS is a joke. Although Hutchinson Whampoa never acquired GC, Singapore Technologies Telemedia (ST Telemedia) [another foreign company] did... Richard Perle was hired by the GC board to lobby the transaction with the Bush administration.
Bush approved the sale of the one of the largest U.S. fiberoptics network to a foreign entity in the middle of a war.

Well, as Tech Central Station published by DCI Group (a leading lobbying group) is funded by McDonald's, I would guess that they've spent a hell of a lot of effort to create and maintain that website..

More details

Here is some info on the voting machines used in the county.

Unilect Corportation is the manufactorer of the "Patriot Voting System" (because losing votes = being patriotic).

Interactive demo of their voting system!

Verified Voting has a Voter Information Sheet on the machine.

Disinfopedia has an article about Unilect Corporation. From this article:

The President of UniLect Corporation is Jack Gerbel, who has been actively involved in the election equipment industry since 1965. His career began in elections with IBM Corporation and then as a founder, Vice-President and Board of Directors member of Computer Election Systems (CES).

Mr. Gerbel had the distinction of personally selling and installing more election systems than any other person in the U.S.

Two major accounts that he sold and successfully installed were Cook County, Illinois and the City of Chicago.

Mr. Gerbel became Vice-President of Sales for Business Records Corporation (BRC).

So, there you have it. Background info. Side note: I live in NC and this is not the same machines that were being (these are the literal words of the poll workers) "tested" in Watauga County. And although they officially said these machines were only experimental and being tested, paper ballots were often withheld upon request and their availability was NOT posted. The Republic Party in Watauga County also refused to move polling locations onto Appalachian State University's campus, proposed by the Dem Party, although 22,000 of the 25,000 residents are students.

Wikipedia is not the best place for this, since their NPOV policy basically means that those who deny that climate change is happening have a voice disporportionate to the validity of their views.

I think this project is better suited for Disinfopedia, although material can obviously be moved back and forth between these two.

I think you could use
Disinfopedia for collaboration on this topic. I created a stub there with the list of claims. Feel free to edit it to make a comprehensive document that is needed.

Products need to be delivered to government and private-sector customers "with a new level of security and risk management already built in."

The national press, including United Press International (UPI), were excluded from [the press conference], at Mr. Tenet's request, organizers said.

Thank you for your opinion, sir. We'll give it the attention it deserves.
Now where did I put that pesky trashcan?

I am however, very familiar with how large corporations do PR campaigns. It always strikes me as spooky how a large corporations sees a profit problem, hires a PR agency giving it millions of dollars, whereas the PR agency does things such as write bogus reports from "independent" institutes saying whatever the company wanted (Linux was not written by Linus Torvalds, smoking tobacco is not bad for you, whatever...), as well as a media campaign which includes commercials, the "independent" institute people going on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and if they're lucky, the major corporate news stations as well.

For example, I've been tracking Wal-Mart and the Walton family's giving in this regard. Two of the things they try to do is privatize education and create what we call "right-to-work-for-less" laws. I care more about the latter than the former, but I've been researching the former more lately. The Walton family is obsessed with privatizing education, giving massive amounts of money to efforts to do so, including giving $10,492,047.38, just in 2003, to the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation America. They've also given millions in the last year alone to a variety of such education privatziation organizations, as have the foundations of other billionaires and millionaires such as the Olins, Scaifes and so forth. One of their jobs is to "astroturf", e.g. make fake it appear that a fake grassroots campaign exists to privatize education. Many of the privatize education groups have black and Hispanic faces at the top of the organization to talk to the press. These foundations also create scholarship foundations (for private schools only) to put a humanitarian face on the effort, and the scholarship front of this massive effort draws in people like Charles Rangel, Will Smith and people like that. These people are very clever and you wouldn't believe how tens of millions of dollars from the Wal-Mart billionaires alone can change the public discourse. And of course, the Olins, Scaifes and so forth are involved with this, even Bill Gates is peripherally involved.

My point is to stress how big money can generate all this talk you hear about privatization of education, charter schools, how our schools are failing and the need for tests and so forth. I am not deeply concerned with this relative to other issues, I'm just using it as an example, and I have been following it lately. I've been more concerned with Wal-Mart and the Walton Family and other businesses very successful campaign to do away with labor laws, or create bad labor laws around the country. They passed a right-to-work-for-less law in Oklahoma a few years ago, mostly by focusing on the massive evangelical churches in Oklahoma and preying on job and unemployment fears, the law passes something like 50.1% to 49.9% on a referendum. They're pushing these laws all over the country - they're even trying in Pennsylvania which is scary, because one thinks of Pennyslvania as a union state. Anyhow big money combined with a public which is more apt to be accepting Jesus as their personal savior in evangelical churches then seeking rank-and-file run militant labor unions can lead to all sorts of wacky laws passing.

Which is why the attitude on Slashdot about global warming scares me. Admittedly I am not an expert on chemical reactions with fossil fuels. I only have seen this show before: some group with no axe to grind and is objective as one can be says there is a problem (tobacco causes cancer, whatever...). Big corporations hire lawyers, PR firms, their own "experts" blah blah blah attacking this effort. Soon they're putting commercials on TV, catch phrases and so forth. Soon I hear the same thing coming out of people's mouths at lunchtime, they're complaining about trial lawyers or so

I don't doubt that many of the people in Russia are against it. Russia hasn't exactly been the world's beacon for representative democracy lately. But just for the record, although it isn't really known who the people who are financially backing Envirotruth.org are, we do know that ExxonMobil was one of the contributors. Keep a few large grains of salt on hand while reading the site.

..from the Bush administration? "I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," Steve Vamos "I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons... I don't know anybody in any government or any intelligence agency who suggested that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons. That's fact number one. Rumsfeld http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Donal d_Rumsfeld

Exeept the Media Research Center is itself biased right. From their home page:

The Media Research Center regularly documents the national media's ongoing liberal bias -- and has since 1987. For a look at media bias in the last decade, the last year or even last night, check the MRC homepage.

To assume their viewpoint has any validity, you have to agree that the national media has a liberal bias. I think that this just illustrates that one needs to check the viewpoint of whatever you read, before assigning a relative merit value.

More on the MRC from Disinfopedia A well known left leaning informational site.

I bring you The Top Ten Media Distortions of Campaign 2004.

I suppose it's not really worth pointing out that, while the name "Center for Media Research" sounds terribly unbiased and scientific, it's just a shill group looking to discredit any media organization that dares to print something that sounds even vaguely liberal.

From their website:

"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media. Leaders of America's conservative movement have long believed that within the national news media a strident liberal bias existed that influenced the public's understanding of critical issues. On October 1, 1987, a group of young determined conservatives set out to not only prove - through sound scientific research - that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values, but also to neutralize its impact on the American political scene."

Additionally, their methods are exactly the kind of thing that the linked article complains about. They count instances of supposed bias by determining if both sides of an argument were presented.

But it's hard to blame them, really, since they are funded by groups such as The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc., the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation

source

Absolutely correct. Those are good sources on the ITAA, as are Disinfopedia's.

... while all the blogger pundits get lathered up about Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, everyone misses the minor detail that Rowe appeared before a grad jury yesterday to testify in the Valerie Plame probe.

This is just not the case. The President had access to more information than Kerry did. The Defense Dept. set up the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon for the express purpose of bolstering the case for war. See here. This information was not given to Congress, but was used within the Administration in making the case for war. So when Bush says they looked at the same information he is relying on people to not know the whole truth. You also say they came to the same conclusion. That is also not true. Kerry's conclusion was that Hussein needed to be dealt with, and that the threat of force was needed to make our position credible. This credibility would then be used to let the inspectors finish their work. But Bush had no intention of letting the inspectors finish their work. The conclusion Bush came to was that Saddam needed to be taken out and military action was the way to do it. So he deceived congress and the American people into war.

Maybe it's because those that disagree often seem to have links to companies that profit by inaction on global warming, see eg here. It's harder to see who would benefit from taking a pro- position. Environmental technology companies, or something like that, but if you think they have a thousandth of the financial or political clout of the big greenhouse emitting industries (oil, coal, etc) then you're dreaming. Most of the scientists who think greenhouse is real seem to have government funding, ie at universities or other independent research organisations. (I work with some; it's all government funded here.) It's hard to see why governments would want there to be a greenhouse problem, so as far as money is concerned, the bias is surely against greenhouse. Now if you are talking ideology or group pressure to conform, arguments could be made there about the pro-greenhousers (though I don't buy them myself), but it's not about money. It's not about kindness either - it's about the evidence.

Steven J. Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a commentator on Fox News.

He has spent his life as a lobbyist for major corporations and trade organisations which have poisioning or polluting problems. He originally ran NEPI (National Environmental Policy Institute) which was founded by Republican Rep Don Ritter (who tried to get tobacco industry funding) using oil and gas industry funding. NEPI was dedicated to transforming both the EPA and the FDA, and challenging the cost of Superfund toxic cleanups by these large corporations.

NEPI was also associated with the AQSC (Air Quality Standards Coalition) which was devoted to emasculating Clean Air laws. This organisation took up the cry of "we need sound science" from the chemical industry as a way to counter claims of pollution -- and Milloy became involved in what became known as the "sound-science" movement. Its most effective ploy was to label science not beneficial to the large funding corporations as "junk" -- and Milloy was one of its most effective lobbyists because he wrote well, and used humour (PJ O'Rourke was another -- but better!)

He joined Philip Morris's specialist-science/PR company APCO & Associates in 1992, working behind the scenes on a business venture known as "Issues Watch". By this time, APCO had been taken over and become a part of the world-wide Grey Marketing organisation, and so Milloy was able to use the international organisation as a feed source for services to corporations who had international problems.

Issues Watch bulletins were only given out to paying customers, so Milloy started for APCO the "Junkscience.com" web site, which gave him an outlet to attack health and environmental activists, and scientists who published findings not supportive of his client's businesses. Like most good PR it mixes some good, general criticism of science and science-reporting, with some outright distorted and manipulative pieces.

The Junkscience web site was supposedly run by a pseudo-grassroots organisation called TASSC (The Advancement for Sound Science Coalition), which initially paid ex-Governor Curruthers of New Mexico as a front. Milloy actually ran it from the back-room, and issued the press releases. Then when Curruthers resigned, Milloy started to call himself "Director" (Bonner Cohen - another of the same ilk also working for APCO - became "President")

Initially all of this was funded by Philip Morris, as part of their contributions to the distortion of tobacco science, but later they widened out the focus and introduced even more funding by establishing a coalition -- with energy, pharmaceutical, chemical companies. TASSC's funders include 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lorillard Tobacco, Louisiana Chemical Association,National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris Companies, Procter & Gamble, Santa Fe Pacific Gold, and W.R. Grace, the asbestos and pesticide manufacturers.

TASSC was then exposed publicly as a fraud. And so Milloy established the "Citizens for the Integrity of Science" to take over the running of the Junkscience.com web site.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Steve n_J._Milloy

amazing what you find on the internets

This is an astroturfing-free zone, people. Move along, nothing to see here...

Surprised? Allawi and his fellows gave the CIA a "hint" for weapons of mass destruction in iraq. He told the CIA that Saddam could deploy chemical and biological WMDs in 45 minutes. Now, he returns to iraq to earn his reward.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iyad_ Allawi
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0529-02.ht m
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Iyad +Allawi+45+minutes+WMD+iraq&btnG=Suche&met a=

It's funny that those same blogs don't fact-check the Bush administration as much as they do the Kerry campaign. Here is an administration that has told more lies to the public (in the few press conferences that they've had; they're also very secretive) than any that I can remember (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II).

"Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and we know where they are."
"Saddam is in cahoots with al Qaeda, and could give WMD to them."
"We went to war for the freedom of the Iraqi people."
"These tax cuts are going to stimulate the economy and create many new jobs by stimulating investment."
"We've inherited a recession from Clinton."
"You don't need to know who Cheney spoke to in his secret energy policy meetings."
"We're going to whole-heartedly support fighting AIDS in third-world countries."

It's so funny that I could cry.

Why was no thought given to liberating anybody before 9/11?

There was: Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. This did not call for the direct involvement of the U.S. military, but for U.S. support for an Iraqi-led rebellion from within. Look at the Democrat party right now, after 9/11, in their opposition to and hate for our current president. How do you think they'd be reacting if 9/11 had never happened? How would they have reacted had we gone into Afghanistan pre-9/11?

You speak of overextending oneself; why, in the midst of trying to track down a world-wide terrorist organization, would you suddenly decide to 'liberate' Iraq?

We pretty much destroyed whatever part of Al-Queda we could in Afghanistan. Whatever is left is hiding in caves that we're trying to track down now with the help of Pakistan. Where were the survivors of Al-Queda likely to go? Iraq was among the nations where they might try to flee. Combine that with the fact that we were already in a quasi-war with Iraq. We had a no-fly zone over most of the country, we (Clinton) bombed them to disrupt potential weapons programs, there were vast economic sanctions against them that were starting to break down (look at the Oil-for-food scandal), and they were led by a genocidal maniac that was determined to build or acquire WMD.

The people of Iraq desperately needed to be liberated, but Hussein was also a major security threat to the U.S. and Iraq's neighbors. Remember it only took a few planes and a handful of hijackers on 9/11. Iraq didn't need WMD to inflict major damage on us or its neighbors.

To me it has always meant School of the Americas. I thought the article was about corporate funded mercinaries.

Because all sources of news are "more or less biased" does that mean that all sources of news are equally biased?

Everything, everything you even see with your own eyes biased one way or the other. So, does that mean that we just should throw out everything?

No, it does not. Some sources of information are more reliable that others. A Nobel Prize winner and a political mouthpiece at Tech Central Station are both "biased" in some way or other to some degree or other. Now, would you trust them both equally on a subject, like, say, climate change? I certainly hope you would not.

The Heritage Foundation is just one particular source of sponsored information.

Read the Heritage Foundation as one data point, then look also over here at EPI for an alternative viewpoint that suggests the official poverty line has stagnated so that people below are much worse off than people below the poverty line 30-40 years ago.

In the same way, the minimum wage stagnation.

The harsh reality is that global wage competition means the rest of the world gets to catch up while wages in the developing world stay stagnant or decline in real terms.

Currently, it's more important to own appreciating assets, stock, real estate, etc., than to work for wages, which are taxed much more heavily.

What's more important than banning polling just before an election is banning Push Polling completely!

Though I agree that this article is rather lame, Bush is *not* simply trying to defend his ability to write executive orders or his war-declaration powers (which are in fact hotly debated). His administration has a clear policy of silence on matters where it should be open. One o the most obnoxious examples of this is in Cheney's refusal to hand over the conversations on energy policy with the Enron folks. The Bush Administration claims it has executive privilege on those documents, no matter their impropriety or content.

Slashdot is all about "open source" and its cultural and economic ramifications. It's time we start demanding that more things in our lives be open, starting with our political processes. There are very few things anyone in the political sphere should be able to keep secret, and they *all* relate to national security. Even then, numerous reports indicate that information is classified far too often under the guise of national security.

When it comes to finances, political contributions, or ties with corporations that have knowingly screwed over millions and millions of people, there should be no secrets. Once you are a politician I think you should have to divulge, for public scrutiny, all of your and your spouse's finances for the past several years. If you don't want to do that, don't become a politician. The public has a right to know if your financial ties to any organization are going to unfairly influence your decision-making, as they appear to in this administration (single-bid Halliburton contracts, Enron energy policy, etc).

Governments need to be open to protect the masses against their tyranny. There is no small amount of irony in the Bush Administration expecting us to open all of our lives and finances up in the guise of national security (through the PATRIOT Act) and then turning around and claiming it can keep the energy policy information secret.

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo, Disinfopedia, dKosopedia, Infoshop Open Wiki, and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo, Disinfopedia, dKosopedia, Infoshop Open Wiki, and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

The employers have their heads together figuring out how to screw over IT workers, I think IT workers getting together to protect our interests is a good idea as well. You can take your pick of which group, Washtech, Techs United, the Programmers Guild and so forth. The CWA in New York has meetings were people come together and discuss things. The important thing is programmers and admins get together with each other and find a way to protect our interests, just as the owners do in the ITAA and such organizations. These organizations are already out there so check them out.

Q: Is IP Property?

That's the short answer. The long answer is that while many people would like you to believe in "intellectual property", it has no support in nature or law. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are very different things, and are only in existence because we as a society (of the people), through the government (by the people), have decided that it is beneficial to society (for the people) to encourage people to create by giving them financial incentive to do so. There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There is copyright, patent and trademarks. Lumping them all together is not only foolhardy, but short sighted and misleading.

See the Disinfopedia article and the Wikipedia article for more details.

Commission on Presidential Debates

I found this a few months ago and I think it's an awesome little history of how the debates were wrestled from the control of the League of Women's voters. Please read this before complaining about third party candidates entering the debates.

There are more brief histories on Wikipedia and Disinfopedia. If you are at a university with access to bigger encyclopedia that cost money I suggest you poke through the history of the debates on one of those.

The overall lesson you'll learn is that the United States Commission on Presidential Debates is completely unfair to everyone but the two big parties... and how many of us completely agree with either or those?

For those of you who don't like Bush, check here and notice that all the midwestern states that support him are also the larger supporters of Nader. All those complaints that Nader is taking points from Kerry are self-defeating. Those complaints are just causing the conservatives who don't like Bush to vote for him anyway since they really don't like Kerry and they don't believe there's anyone else available since the other options get downplayed so heavily.

America needs debate reform, and that's a requirement before we'll get more parties.

--Matthew

However, it doesn't take much to stumble upon well researched information concerning the Swift Boat Veterans themselves, nor the actual photocopies of the citations for John Kerry. I present the following URLs for you to make up your own mind, and I welcome any other URLs:

FactCheck.org
Disinformation.org
Washington Post
Swift Boats Eriposte"
... there are so many more I can't even count, just Google for yourself.

I must admit, I find it amazing that people continue to attack Kerry's role in Vietnam, while seemingly at the same time perfectly able to ignore the ample facts that George W. Bush didn't make it anywhere near Vietnam, and Vice President Dick Cheney managed to skirt the war entirely. Those are indisuputable facts.

Disinfopedia

They're pretty good, or as I have heard. They link their stuff to sources so you can check it out yourself. Some people say they have a liberal bias since they released a book called "Banana Republicans" which is not flattering to the party in question.

I have to admit though, it's difficult to find good non-biased political info on the net. Maybe the best thing would be to just read both sides instead and in that way make up your mind. It's tougher than just getting from one source, but I think it's the only good way right now...

Novices might say "anyone can edit", but it's not that simple - Jimbo Wales, who runs Wikipedia (and is an Ayn Rand fanatic) chose who the administrators are. They're people like Ed Poor, a Moonie who does nothing but change every article to a very right wing point of view when he's not removing any negative information about the Moonies.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the US State Department's web page, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the history of Colombia article.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wiki's out there such as InfoshopWiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wiki's like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

Anyhow, I think this is just something I learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of InfoshopWiki.

"One of the major contributors to Indymedia is the Tides Foundation."

I've seen that meme around on right wing sites for a while, it is false. There was a one time $5k grant from Tides to the DC branch of the IMC several years ago. That's it.

Tides publishes their grantees list in their annual reports. Feel free to go look this up.

Here.

Remind us of what? Bush blows away Reagan's records. And another key distinction was that Reagan's deficit had an economy of growth. Bush is blowing all the money doing dirty work for guys like this who trick him into dowing whatever they want. .

I think your selfserving attitude is best illustrated by your misinterpretation of my words:

'and talks about tinfoil when spewing shibboleths about other people's politics, especially when they're wrong about both.

"OMG YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT POLITICS!" that is some arguement you have there. Weak like most standard liberal democrats.'

You are wrong about *my* politics. I'm not a Democrat, or Republican, or member of any other political party. I'm probably not "liberal" either, according to whatever buzzword definition you're implicitly using. I'm mainly libertarian, although "free" might better describe my politics. But I'm an experienced American adult, and I understand that our large complex country requires stable structures for management. So I'm an avowed defender of our Constitution, and much of the laws under it, with some significant patches for a more equitable political process within the current structure.

Considering my stance, and your rhetoric, we probably have a lot of common interests in political change. We also both distrust the media, especially when reporting politics.

We have some important disagreements. I don't buy the Republican spin on Clarke's credibility, that he's pumping his book. Clarke started working for the government in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Kissinger) in 1973, and was appointed to the NSC by Bush Sr. Clinton inherited him, and appointed him to the new position for coordinating security, infrastructure and counterterrorism work in the government. Bush had him running the situation room in the White House during 9/11/2001. This guy is an expert, a complete bipartisan insider, who could just as easily have written his book in 2002 about Bush as the essential Terror War leader. No one has convincingly challenged his assertions. And his successor, Rand Beers, quit a few days later, making the same complaints that Clarke claimed when he couldn't do his job under Bush.

Credible evidence that the CIA has at least contradicted itself on claims of Hussein antiamerican terrorism removes it from consideration - without that odd note, Putin's claim is unsubstantiated. Of course Russia and France defended Hussein and his Ba'ath government: those countries' corporations were owed billions for oil collaboration, now in question after the regime change. But now they're bargaining with the new devil: the motley crew of Americans and Chalabists who will determine how to deal with that inherited debt. So of course they're playing as nice as they can with Bush, now guarding the hoard, while appearing to be as opposed as possible for their own corporate constituents. They're all walking a greedy, amoral razor's edge, just like global politicians do as they rise to, and stay at, the top of their industry.

It's worth it for me to think through these complex issues for a Slashdot audience, even if you, Anonymous (AKA JavaLord?) Coward, can't understand the reasoning, of stand to hear the facts. That's why comments like "go kill yourself" don't dissuade me from posting a sensible reply. Like "oh, New Jersey".

Some info about US & Plan Condor

Needs of the few etc. etc.

what's next? push polling???

Enterprise Linux users would be called up by SCO employees and asked:
"Would you be more likely or less likely to install Linux as a Server OS if you knew Linux has copied source code from SCO?"

Sure, everybody knows that the Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom, except for those old crooks Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, who kept remindinding us some stupid gulag stuff and the like...
Americans tend to associate human rights with political freedom. This is not necessarily natural for people in other cultures. Soviet people were free in many respects, even though political dissent was not tolerated.

We're talking about a country that had censorship, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary system whatsowever... Jesus Christ, in Moscow in the old times they transported homeless people 100km from the city center as not to spoil the view. What kind of propaganda were you fed on?
Censorship? As in "Janet Jackson"? There was censorship in the USSR, there is censorship in the USA. Your TV is notorious for refusing to air controversial ads (anti-consumerism and stuff). Not to mention the fact that your media can be blinded by patriotism very easily. There was freedom of speech in the USSR. It had limits though, as political opposition was usually not permitted. But in the US you have freedom of speech, in specially designated Freedom speech zones, no less. The judiciary system in the Soviet Union was generally ok (not the best), it's just that the laws did not permit certain things, most notably political opposition. And homeless people were not transported anywhere, because generally there were no homeless people. Seriously. Living conditions weren't necessarily great for all 200 million people, but there were no slums and no people living in a cardboard box. I remember that prostitutes and criminals were moved out of Moscow during 1980 Olympic games, but how is that different from any other country (such as Greece)?

If you think that there is no government oppression in Russia, go look up 'Chechenya' and 'Yukos'. Or, find and read the story about how recently Russian government cracked down on vets for using anaesthetics to operate on dogs (they locked them up for 'possession of large quantities of drugs'). Those bastards made vets operate on dogs without anaesthetics.
Modern Russia is different from the Soviet Union (the example about Akademgorodok was from the Soviet times), in many (pretty much all, to tell the truth) respects it is much worse. Your second example is just random craziness, though, not government oppression. The government couldn't care less about drugs, or dogs, or people...

Reported abuses of the Act?
How ridiculous , bunky !

<grrr>

"[TechCentral Station] doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street..."

It's not that know nothing about budgets or money, it's that I wanted to know where you got your "facts." As it turns out, you were spewing more stupid bullshit.

But I am glad that you finally cited your source.

Because you happened to cite them, you can now read this nice little piece about what you're citing.

If the IRS didn't want to go after someone like Greenpeace (when someone claims they had good reason to) and the people backing this research won't disclose who gives them money.... Where does this lead you?

The PIW is a front, plain and simple.

Hmmm.

Smear campaign?

Sorry dude, it's all legal and it's not even unethical.

You're grasping at straws at this point.

*sniff* *sniff* Anyone else smell astroturf?

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm sure you'll be interested to know that McNamara's views on Iraq are actually on the record in a well-known Canadian paper, the Globe and Mail. He was asked about and confirmed the G&M interview when he gave a speech UC Berkeley. Salon.com picked up the story, and of course sites like disinfopedia.org, bushwatch.com, etc., mentioned and/or linked to the G&M interview - but the mainstream press was suspiciously quiet about it even though no one refutes that the interview or subsequent comments at Berkeley took place.

The U.S.'s own weapons inspectors don't agree with you and insisted that not only could no WMD be found, but that all evidence indicated that no WMD had existed in the first place. Our weapons inspectors are highly trained professionals, quite capable of detecting the traces of WMD storage, their means of production, and evidence of the presence of materials required to support weapons programs in general. The inspectors also enjoyed the benefits of an impending threat of U.S. military action should any doors be closed to them. If you are also a trained weapons inspector with similar resources and access to Iraq, or if you have an informed analysis to offer on the weapons inspectors' findings, I would be interested to hear what you have to say on the matter. However, I suspect you are not an expert on the logistical intricacies of producing and transporting WMD while "hiding" their chemical, biological or radioactive indicators "somewhere in the desert", so I'll stick with the official conclusions if you don't mind.

You refer to the actions of a "Head of State", meaning Saddam Hussein, as justification for the war on Iraq. Specifically, which actions are you talking about? Any and all claims made by the Bush administration that Iraq posed a threat (immediate or otherwise) to the United States have been thoroughly debunked by subsequent uncovering and investigation of the facts. There were no WMD. There were no significant Iraqi ties to Al-Queda (Our "friend" Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, not only tolerates their presence but promotes their extreme religious views in the national education system and refuses to disrupt their funding). If there remains any justifaction for spending further U.S. blood and treasure on this tragic misadventure, please let me in on the secret. I would like to believe that our boys (one of whom is my recently enlisted nephew) are not dying in vain.

Regarding the nature of documentaries: Moore's films are unusual in the sense that, unlike many documentaries, they are mostly outright position pieces. However, that fact does not weaken nor even speak to the content of the film. The term "documentary", as a film genre, means nothing more than "non-fiction", as opposed to fiction or drama. After all, people refer to Errol Morris' films as documentaries without being challenged on that choice of label. Yet Morris' films are hardly of the classic, journalistic, "objective" style. In fact, he employs many of the same cinematic techniques used in main-stream Hollywood pictures but, because his subjects are real people and events rather than actors and fictional screenplays, the result is easily accepted as "documentary", just as Moore's films are. To call something "propoganda" (not that you used the term, this is merely a "preemptive strike", you understand), you have to address its content and show it be in large part untrue. If you can provide some kind of precedent or professional opinion which supports your narrow definition of "documentary" as a work that must provide a counterpoint in addition to a point, I invite you to do so.

You link to an article on typepad.com which claims that John Kerry lied to get one of his three Purple Hearts and that some of his old "buddies" from Vietnam, the Swift Boat Vets for Truth think he's unfit to be President. The SBVFT was formed in May, 2004 and "leadership and guidance were provided by Republican activists and presidential friends from Texas -- notably Houston attorney John E. O'Neill and corporate media consultant Merrie Spaeth", according to Joe Conason of Salon.com. Dr. Louis Letson is the sole source for the Purple Heart story, but he was not the attending physician for the wound in question, according to the Navy's medical records. These are the only sources mentioned in the typepad.com article and both have been thoroughly discredited.