connecting*the*dots

I’m on the North side of Greensboro, watching Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War with 15 other engaged citizens. House parties like this were set up all across the nation by Free Press.

How simple was it? I received an email from my brother after he was made aware of the showing through their local action alert email newsletter.

In any event, it’s great to see so many concerned and engaged citizens — mostly strangers before tonight — coming together to ask tough questions. Actually, it’s much more hemming and hawing at the incompetence of our Fourth Estate than dialog between each other, but I’m sure that’ll come in a few minutes.

I’m furious watching this broadcast, but it’s nothing new in terms of knowledge. I’ve been blogging about this fucking mess before we invaded, while we invaded and throughout the occupation and opined about most of the concepts and players covered in this brilliant narrative by Moyers.

If you saw this documentary — or plan to catch it in the future — don’t waste your time getting mad with politicians making decisions based on self-interest and power plays. Instead, think about your personal relationship with the media, journalism and reporting and how it shapes your world view.

Kent Bye has been working on a project since the run up to war called, The Echo Chamber Project. Paraphrasing his thesis: he’s attempting to present a large number of perspectives about both the media coverage in the run up to war and interviews with professionals from a large variety of industries in a manner that can be contextualized, remixed and redistributed to the live web by world citizens.

Why is that important?

Because the current journalistic methodology of reporting and “coverage” from centralized business domains is responsible for pimping this war into fruition.

Maybe if we all have the ability to participate in a methodology that allows for easily stitching together unbundled clips of perspective, reporting, coverage, etc. and contextualize it with our own knowledge and narrative, we can make a real dent in the mainstream business as usual.

Maybe we can even replace TV as we know it today.

Kent and I rapped about a bunch of the possibilities last year. If you have some time, check out the interview.

Andy is going to post an audio file of the conversation we just had post-viewing (which was really interesting). I’ll link to it as soon as he posts it himself.

UPDATE: Andy just posted the post-viewing conversation.

(direct link to the first pod of the seven part series)

From 2000 to 2003, I lived just down the road from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, first in Park Slope and then Gowanis.

As consistently penetrating as the New York City media is, not once did I even hear a whisper about the toxic issues my former neighbors in Williamsburg have been dealing with for decades now.

Instead, I reveled in the culture. Now I’m thinking, at what cost?

Gotta love that “self-interest” angle of capitalism, eh?

UPDATE: I’m currently watching part 6 of this 7 part series. Be sure to watch it all. It’s beyond disturbing. Greensboro residents are worried about strip clubs? Try living next to Radiac Research Corporation — a nuclear storage facility, where the radiation level can be pick up from a geiger counter flipped on at the front door.

It also resides across the street from an elementary school.

Scary stuff and great reporting.

It’s time to get down and dirty with real political discussion.

Nick Reville just pinged me a few minutes ago, pointing me to a new Participatory Politics Foundation project called Open Congress.

Don’t look now folks, but we’re about to 2.0 the hell out of government.

I’ve dropped that phrase a bunch of times online, added some potential feature flavor in a comment thread and even spoke to dev friends about what it would take to build something like this, but there’s no need now; this puppy looks like it’ll grow strong legs moving forward.

And from a first glance, I really like the approach that PPF took to legislation being the primary object of focus in the domain.

The original idea for my project was to position a domain around the 535 seats within Congress and pull in information and data that contextualized the job that individuals were doing in their role serving their constituents — keeping a record of all current and future seat information.

I hoped that if we could build a rich interface for displaying information about and by representatives — voting records, financing, news events, press releases, blog posts, video, audio, etc. — then a Digg-like rating system could work with an “on the job” algorithm to rate each representative. They would then be forced to step up and be more transparent with their rationale for, say, voting against the will of their constituents on particular legislation.

I still think that approach is important, but it should be secondary if we, the people, are participating in a democratic institution.

The actual job focus of our representatives is the business of the people — the legislation that shapes our lives within a representative democracy.

So if you design a domain with too much of a focus on the Senators and Representatives, you just might create an even greater echo chamber for rumor mongering and feeding polarizing bloggers gallons of liquid for their pissing wars, whether they’re Democratic or Republican.

With this approach — legislation first — bloggers are given the opportunity to track what matters first and foremost. And if our representatives fumble within those processes — like a Ted Stevens with his Bridge to Nowhere — then we can hop on them like flies to shit.

What I’m hoping happens now is that other political transparency domains — like Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch and Denise Roth Barber at FollowTheMoney — ping Nick and crew, with an invite to share their data for the OpenCongress interface.

As Robert DeNiro so eloquently stated in Brazil: “We’re all in it together“

The Black Iris
The Charade

The leader never carries out the killing himself but will always get his hands dirty. So how will the execution of Saddam be seen 200 years from now?

A quarter of a million American troops invade Iraq. Hunt down its leader and set up a tribunal with all the trappings of ‘fairness’ and he is in the end found guilty for being involved in the killing of 148 Shias over two decades ago during a time when America was openly heavily funding Saddam and silent over all these killings.

Americans hand over Saddam to Iraqis to carry out the hanging. On Eid Al-Adha no less; a good PR move to make sure every Arab is at home watching on TV.

In the last 3 years the presence of a quarter million of American forces on Iraqi soil have been responsible for killing an estimated quarter of a million Iraqis.

American forces are still occupying Iraq.

What will a student of history ask himself 200 years from now? Or will history still be written by the victors at that time?

Will they ask about why so many Arabs remained silent? Will they ask whether it made sense that one leader be executed for killing 148 people while another be praised for killing a quarter of a million of those same people? Will they see ancient footage of Colin Powell at the UN displaying doctored satellite photos of now unfound WMDs? Will they understand that 200 years ago, suggesting that a leader from a ’superior’ nation be held to the same standard of accountability as everyone else in the world was unheard of? That suggesting an American is equal to an Arab is equal to a Brit is equal to an African is preposterous? Will they understand that someone like me who had no love for Saddam thought the whole situation to be preposterous?

Bush was right today: ‘a dark and painful era is over in Iraq’, but a new one, that he as a leader is directly responsible for, has already begun.

And the charade goes on and on and on… more Iraqis are being slaughtered…

So to anyone celebrating the execution of Saddam I’m forced to ask: what the fuck are you cheering for?

If you’re cheering the execution of Saddam Hussein, you damn well better be doing everything you can to voice your opinion that this war is illegal and that this administration needs to be held accountable.

Otherwise, you’re nothing but a hypocrite.

(originally uploaded by Hawk Eyes)

Don’t you just love it how he and Bush waited until the shift in power was obvious? As if Donald Rumsfeld didn’t do a terrible job over the years — particularly with the accountability of the Abu Ghraib scandal — and that only a moderate loss of power in Congress would’ve allowed him to stay on?

Later, asshole.

Just as we were getting used to how folksonomies can help us find relational information, ‘dem darn kids take it to the next level.

Long gone are the days when protesting corporate bullshit was limited to groups of people gathering on the street outside of a main office. Nowadays, you can protest by simply dropping a single word into the workings of the retail experience itself.

Check out what DefectiveByDesign is doing:

How passé is crafting a product review now that you can group multiple sucky products that share a common sucky trait with a few key strokes? Why tag your frustrations on your blog, when you can hit the fuckers where it hurts the most — in the virtual aisles and checkout lines themselves?

Excuse me while I head over to Amazon to spread my love of hating DRM.

UPDATE: Tag-daddy, Thomas Vander Wal, makes a profound statement on my flickr comment thread.

(via BoingBoing)

(originally uploaded by ConjugalVisitor)

McClatchy Washington Bureau
Rumsfeld, Ashcroft received warning of al Qaida attack before 9/11
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel’s executive director and the principal author of its report, who’s now Rice’s top adviser.

[…]

And people called Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace “crazed?” Sounds much more like it was a factual explosion.