Is Kony 2012 a propaganda campaign for our next oil war?

Joseph Kony

As Mark Twain once observed, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And the truth about Kony 2012 is slowly getting its boots on. Invisible Children founder Jason Russell has even admitted that the campaign was about evangelizing and not saving children. But could it be about oil too?

James Arnold of Tullow says there are 700m barrels of proven reserves on the Ugandan side. With likely additions from further exploration, he believes, the figure could eventually reach billions of barrels. Some speculate that, Congo included, the entire Albertine basin may yield even more than Sudan’s 6 billion barrels of proven reserves.

President Obama has already sent at least 100 combat troops to Uganda, supposedly to "capture or kill" LRA leader Joseph Kony, despite the fact that Kony isn't even in Uganda. So if Joseph Kony isn't even in Uganda, what are the US troops doing there?

It's probably also worth noting that nearby South Sudan also has large oil reserves, which could be why President Obama has given the region so much attention lately.

Obama appointed not just one but two special ambassadors to shuttle between the Khartoum government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the southern administration, rebels in the province of Darfur and the numerous other interested parties; he attended a special meeting on Sudan at the United Nations, thereby attracting many other world leaders, and delivered a strong speech. He dispatched Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) to lay out a detailed “road map” for Bashir’s regime: If it would allow the south to go peacefully, it could earn a release from sanctions, debt relief and diplomatic recognition from the United States.

Moreover, our sudden interest in central Africa could also be inspired by a desire to edge China out of the region. China has been spending billions of dollars in Uganda and neighboring countries in its effort to expand its sources of oil, especially now that Libya is out of their reach.

Happy Birthday, Charles

America's Darwin problem is only one component of America's science problem. As Kenneth Miller notes:

Significant numbers of Americans have come to regard the scientific enterprise as a special interest group that rejects mainstream American values and is not worthy of the public trust. Governor Rick Perry of Texas spoke to this view when he claimed that "There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data" to their own benefit. Why? Perry was clear about this. It's personal greed. Scientists cheat "so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects."

Unfortunately, Governor Perry is right, just not in the way his remarks imply. Scientific data is indeed being manipulated, but it is almost always done in the service of some financial interest. Andrew Wakefield, for instance, the widely discredited originator of the vaccine-autism canard, had his own treatment racket in mind when he concocted the bogus link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And pain researcher Scott Reuben faked dozens of studies to keep research grants from Pfizer rolling in. FDA "fast-tracking," agri-pharma profits and Americans' piss-poor science education have combined to create a perfect storm of scientific mistrust, which is what is at the heart of our rejection of Darwinism. If we hope to catch up with the rest of the developed world, let alone surpass it, we must take the profit motive out of science.

And when data falsification isn't the culprit, peer bullying is. A PR firm called The Bivings Group formed an army of sock puppets to impugn the reputation of a UC Berkely researcher named Ignacio Chapella who had published a paper showing that GM corn had cross-pollinated with conventional corn.

And when PBS programs FRONTLINE and NOVA teamed up to address the issue of GMOs in a program titled "Harvest of Fear," they were forced to post the following caution regarding their online opinion tally:

In late May 2004, thanks in part to the vigilance of several outside readers who phoned in, we discovered that some person or persons had tampered with this feature's tally. Specifically, on May 16-17, 1,540,016 "Yes" votes and 33,641 "No" votes were cast via just four IP addresses. (Prior to May 16, a total of roughly 124,000 votes of any kind had been cast since the feature launched in April 2001.)

Deeming the credibility of the tally to have been compromised, we made this page unavailable for several days while we decided how best to address this problem. In the end, we threw out these suspicious votes and recalculated the remaining response numbers and percentages. Then we did a more thorough scouring of votes from before May 2004.

It appears that a lesser degree of multiple voting has been going on for some time, so we have decided to temporarily remove the final vote and tallying options from this feature until we can put a more secure system in place. The feature itself remains unchanged, and we encourage you to challenge your stance on GM foods by reading it. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your readership.—The Editors

The upshot is that Americans' rejection of Darwinism and distrust of climate data and of science in general is the result of decades of educational dumbing down and the intentional scientific misconduct of researchers starving for grant money, which, increasingly, comes from corporations and not government subsidies.

And GMO defenders like David Tribe and Pamela Ronald, among others, have cleverly manipulated this phenomenon in order to portray suspicion of corporate greed as scientific ignorance, so that if you question Monsanto's or Syngenta's motives regarding the promotion of genetically modified crops, or if you make note of the many instances of pharmaceutical research fraud, you are lumped in with global warming and evolution deniers.

I kind of feel the same way towards the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex as I do towards President Obama. On the one hand, I am forced to defend the president against imbeciles who think he's a Kenyan Marxist with a fake birth certificate, but on the other hand, I'm forced to point out to his legion of defenders that he's a neoliberal stooge of the corporate feudal state. Similarly, I find myself reluctantly defending the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex against attacks from the likes of Jenny McCarthy who think vaccines cause autism or Sean Hannity, who thinks global warming is a hoax, but on the other hand, I feel compelled to expose Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Golden Rice as the scams that they are.

Somehow, we've got to find a way to restore integrity to the scientific community, and at the same time, we must remove the barriers of intimidation that prevent public schools from imparting scientific knowledge. Until we accomplish these two goals, we will slip further and further into a new Dark Age.

UPDATE: As the Guardian reports, the ignorati have launched a fresh assault on science: 

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education.

       [...]

The Heartland Institute – which has received funding in the past from oil companies and is a leading source of climate science skepticism – also lobbies strongly for school vouchers and other forms of "school transformation" that are broadly aimed at undermining the current public school system. The Discovery Institute – a leading voice for intelligent design – has indicated its support of exactly the same "school reform" initiatives.
If you can't shut down the science, the new science-deniers appear to be saying, you should shut down the schools. It would be a shame if they succeeded in replacing the teaching of science with indoctrination. It would be worse if they were to close the public school house doors altogether.

Well, we're fucked.

You Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Here Before?

The flags those protesters are waving represent the Libyan Republic, which was the ruling entity before Gadaffi (or however you spell it) took over 42 years ago. It made me wonder: Where did all those former Libyan flags come from? Were they lying around somewhere in Libya for the last half-century? Then I remembered an article called "The Man Who Sold the War" that ran in Rolling Stone Magazine a few years ago. That article was about a guy named John Rendon, whose PR firm, The Rendon Group, helped market the first Gulf War.

From the article:

After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American - and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

How indeed did those Kuwaitis get those flags? And how did the Libyans get theirs? Then as if on cue, Eman al-Obeidi manages to provide this war's humanitarian crisis to Western TeeVee audiences, just like good ol' Nayirah al-Sabah did back in 1990. Of course, we have since learned that Nayirah al-Sabah was the daughter of Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud bin Nasir al-Sabah, and that her testimony was written and arranged by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton. So then one wonders which PR firms are responsible for the flags and for al-Obeidi's performance.

UPDATE: Oddly enough, The New York Times spells it all out for us:

WASHINGTON — In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya’s oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country’s $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks.

If the companies did not comply, the Libyan officials warned, there would be “serious consequences” for their oil leases, according to a State Department summary of the meeting.

And Russ Baker has a quiz:

Embattled Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi: Good or bad? How about GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt?

The Right Wing Consists Entirely of Cheaters

From Thom Hartmann:

Beside screwing with EPA regulations – meddling in Wisconsin – and courting Supreme Court Justices - what else are the Koch brothers up to now? Try rewriting Wikipedia. ThinkProgress has uncovered evidence that the Koch’s employed a PR firm to act as a “sockpuppet” for them on websites.

A “sockpuppet” is Internet lingo to refer to someone who creates a fake online identity to hype up himself or herself or a company they work for on message boards or social networking sites. If a sockpuppet is found out – it usually leads to the person’s account being disabled. The Koch’s “sockpuppet” edited their several Wikipedia pages to remove any references to the Tea Party – hype up George Soros conspiracy theories – and delete any citations to progressive media outlets – essentially scrubbing the Internet of any potentially embarrassing or damning facts about the Kochs.

The Kochs have contracted with dozens of PR firms – they are BILLIONAIRES – to ensure their political agenda is kept under wraps. But thanks to some great reporting nowadays – these guys aren’t in the shadows anymore.

ThinkProgress fills us in on the details:

Last year, Koch Industries began employing New Media Strategies (NMS), an Internet PR firm that specializes in “word-of-mouth marketing” for major corporations including Coca-Cola, Burger King, AT&T, Dodge and Ford. It appears that, ever since the NMS contract was inked with Koch, an NMS employee began editing the Wikipedia page for “Charles Koch,” “David Koch,” “Political activities of the Koch family,” and “The Science of Success” (a book written by Charles). Under the moniker of “MBMAdmirer,” NMS employees edited Wikipedia articles to distance the Koch family from the Tea Party movement, to provide baseless comparisons between Koch and conspiracy theories surrounding George Soros, and to generally delete citations to liberal news outlets. After administrators flagged the MBMAdmirer account as a “sock puppet” — one of many fake accounts used to manipulate new media sites — a subsequent sock puppet investigation found that MBMAdmirer is connected to a number of dummy accounts and ones owned by NMS employees like Jeff Taylor.


But New Media Strategies isn't the only PR firm engaged in this type of deception. As George Monbiot reported in the Guardian, a PR firm called the Bivings Group specializes in "internet lobbying," which is corporate-speak for creating false consensus. And the Bivings Group wasn't content to post inaccurate Wikipedia entries; they actually sought to ruin the reputation of a scientist named Ignacio Chapela, whose research found fault with Monsanto's patented "Roundup Ready" crops. Of course, as we learned last month, thanks to the efforts of Anonymous, The Bivings Group isn't the only PR firm employed by Monsanto to game the system.

Back in 2001, the PBS programs FRONTLINE and NOVA teamed up to address the question of genetically modified crops in a segment entitled Harvest of Fear. Their extremely balanced approach included a 12-part questionnaire designed to offer valid "for" and "against" arguments regarding the use of genetically engineered crops. Readers were encouraged to view all 12 arguments -- six "for" and six "against" -- and then cast a final vote on where they stand. However, the site administrators for the questionnaire were forced to suspend the final vote and tallying options of the questionnaire because:

"In late May 2004, thanks in part to the vigilance of several outside readers who phoned in, we discovered that some person or persons had tampered with this feature's tally. Specifically, on May 16-17, 1,540,016 'Yes' votes and 33,641 'No' votes were cast via just four IP addresses. (Prior to May 16, a total of roughly 124,000 votes of any kind had been cast since the feature launched in April 2001.)

"Deeming the credibility of the tally to have been compromised, we made this page unavailable for several days while we decided how best to address this problem. In the end, we threw out these suspicious votes and recalculated the remaining response numbers and percentages. Then we did a more thorough scouring of votes from before May 2004.

"It appears that a lesser degree of multiple voting has been going on for some time, so we have decided to temporarily remove the final vote and tallying options from this feature until we can put a more secure system in place. The feature itself remains unchanged, and we encourage you to challenge your stance on GM foods by reading it. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your readership."—The Editors

I wonder if it was The Bivings Group that was behind the fraudulent voting.

This type of online cheating has become legion. Remember last year's story about right-wingers "down voting" progressive stories on Digg.com? And who can forget this handy instructional video about how to become "digital activists."

Conservatives cannot prevail simply by stating and defending their position, so they have to cheat. It's their M.O. Sound ideologies aren't constructed with lies.

UPDATE: Please forgive the multiple fonts. Blogger's text editing is whack.

UPDATE II: The government is also getting in on the action. And if you listen to right-wing hate radio, chances are you're listening to actors.

Jared Lee Loughner is a Registered Republican? UPDATE

So don't let any teabagger jaggoffs tell you that he is a "leftist lunatic."

UPDATE: As Eric so gleefully points out in the comments, it appears as if this screen grab is a HOAX.

But I don't see how Loughner being "a diehard antiWar, antiBush, 9/11 Truther" establishes anything here. As publisher of LibertarianRepublican.net, Eric should know that one of his presumed heroes, Ron Paul, is anti-war. And the 9/11 Truth movement has adherents from all points on the political spectrum. Indeed, one of the leaders of the "Truth" movement is Alex Jones, who calls himself a libertarian but who ran for Congress as a Republican. And although Jared Loughner's politics seem difficult to discern, several news outlets are reporting at least passing affiliation with right-wing elements.

But why, one wonders, are so many on the left leaping to conclusions of teabaggery regarding young Mr. Loughner? And why are so many on the Right so hypersensitive to such conclusion-leaping? Could it be the Right's long, long history of political violence for which there is no lefty counterpart? Or could it be the gun-centric bombast that peppers so much of the Right's rhetoric?

Whatever the reasons, until the Right ditches its desperate win-at-any-cost approach to political discourse, the violence will no doubt continue.

Ah, the good ol' days

This must be what the teabaggers mean when they say they want their country back.

Robert Newman's History of Oil

As shown on Ch4 and repeated several times on More4, available at IndyBay on the web and many other places, now on Google video (not great video quality) Robert's stand-up act examines the history of the last 100 years or so but putting oil center-stage. Brilliant!

Andrew Breitbart's Racist Lizard Brain

From Digby:

"Breitbart had edited the video, of course, and he refuses to release the whole thing, naturally. But that didn't matter in this case any more than it mattered in the ACORN case. It's nothing but a play to America's racist lizard brain."

UPDATE: Monkey Muck sums up my feelings succinctly:

President Obama is a weak kneed, lily livered, scaredy cat. He's the cowardly lion who got taken in by a bunch of right wing nitwits. He tossed a decent and good public servant under the bus to avoid being made fun of by the crying Mormon and the man behind the Acorn non scandal.

And you know I'm right when one of his biggest supporters calls him out for being such a wuss.

I've said it before and unfortunately, I'll have to say it again, GROW A PAIR and stop being afraid of your own fucking shadow Obama. Stop starting from a compromised position and you won't have to give in as much. Stop being such a timid version of Jimmy Carter and start being a lion like FDR.

Radical Islam is a Neocon Invention

Just a thought

Imagine if some teevee network gave several hours per day of free support and publicity to, say, the Green Party, and the other networks and lots of newspapers, in fear of losing viewers/readers, followed that network's lead. Imagine, too, if some powerful former political insider -- Bill Moyers, say -- was able to marshall billions of corporate dollars and tons of political know-how into a non-profit activist group like FreedomWorks to help stage "grass roots" enviro rallies around the nation. Where would the "center" be then?

A Fair and Balanced Tim Russert Obit

From Harper's:

A Fair and Balanced Tim Russert Obit
By Ken Silverstein
Via the Daytona Beach News-Journal:
My sympathies go to Tim Russert’s family. My father died the same way: massive heart attack in the middle of the day, in the prime of his life (he was 46, Russert was 58). Shock doesn’t begin to describe the effect on those who stay behind. Try anger, try a sense of loss that, contrary to greeting-card drivel, never fades until, I expect, one’s own final collapse. Russert wasn’t family, but it’s fair to say, as the casket-lidded lines at the end of obituaries usually do, that his survivors include the 3 million viewers who tuned in every Sunday to watch “Meet the Press,” and even the procession of politicians who’ve been squirming their way through his show since 1991. Sadly for us, television personalities can seem closer to us than family members. Russert, however, never had that effect on me.
Respect for the man aside, there’s a matter of respecting journalism when assessing Russert’s place in the trade. That respect has been lacking in the almost universally fawning tributes to Russert and the craft he represented. Journalists and politicians from the president on down have formed yet another procession of praise and prostrations worthy of, say, Diana or Elvis. But Tim Russert?…
The truth is that on any night of the week Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” does more in a two-minute segment to show in politicians’ own words how venal, dishonest, contradictory and just plain dense they can be than Russert did in his Sunday services. Russert’s master was always the political structure he grilled, but never fundamentally questioned. You always knew whose side he was on: power, not truth — and, by power, I don’t mean his own, of which he had plenty, but the powerful men and occasional women he invited to his Versailles.
I mourn his death. But I wish I could mourn the death of the journalism he represented. To the detriment of journalism and malinformed citizens, that parody lives on.

Does Somebody Feel Faint?

Susan Jacoby with Bill Moyers

Watch the clip here.

BILL MOYERS: It's not only the reality of our finances we are running from. In her new book published just this week, one of America's most prolific and provocative free thinkers says we are in a headlong flight from reason. The book is the age of American unreason- and it couldn't be more timely. Here's an excerpt:
"It remains to be seen, as the current presidential campaign unfolds, whether Americans are willing to consider what the flight from reason has cost us as a people and whether any candidate has the will or the courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue affecting everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace."
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON offers an unsparing description of what Susan Jacoby calls "an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge".
Susan Jacoby is the program director of the Center for Inquiry in New York. Her last book FREETHINKERS: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SECULARISM was acclaimed as one of the notable books of 2004. Welcome back.
SUSAN JACOBY: Oh, it's wonderful to be back.
BILL MOYERS: How is this flight from reason, as you describe it, affecting-- playing out in our current political race?
SUSAN JACOBY: In an age of unreason you tend to get focus on very small personal facts as opposed to big issues. But even more than that, lack of knowledge and unreason affects the way candidates speak about everything.
I mean, for example, obviously the healthcare situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But if people don't know, for example, how is healthcare handled in other countries? How many people, for instance, do have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. In other words, you can say, "Oh, we don't want a program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors." Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network.
BILL MOYERS: You have a powerful section in here on what's happened to our political language. How, for example, politicians so often talk these days not about people but ab-
SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.
BILL MOYERS: --folks-
SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.
BILL MOYERS: --about the folks. What's wrong that?
SUSAN JACOBY: What's wrong with it is folks used to be a colloquialism. It was the kind of thing that you'd talk about mostly in rural areas, mostly in the south and the Midwest. People talked about folks. It was not considered suitable for public speech. If you used it in the classroom your teacher would, you know, would get after you, because it wasn't considered appropriate language.
But think about this though. Think about our political language in the past and today. Just think about The Gettysburg Address. We highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this government, of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. This is patronizing. It's talking down to people. I read all of FDR's fireside chats where he-- I could not find a single reference to folks. You know why? Because the addressing people as folks is talking down to them. It's not dignifying them. When you call people citizens you're calling them to rise-- calling on them to rise above the lowest common denominator. You really need to think about what's being said when people are called folks. It's encouraging you not to do too much. And, you know, when I--
BILL MOYERS: Not to expect anything special.
SUSAN JACOBY: Not to expect anything special. And people are terribly scared of saying, "We really need to expect more."
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned Franklin Roosevelt. You have a wonderful comparison in here.
SUSAN JACOBY: I want him back.
BILL MOYERS: You talk about how during World War Two when he would have a radio fireside chat he would ask the American people listening out there to get a map of the world and spread it out in front of them so that as he talked about the battles that were going on they would be with him in terms of the place, the geography, the strategy of what was going on. Can you imagine a president doing that today?
SUSAN JACOBY: No. No, I can't. I mean, Doris Kearns Goodwin, you know, talks about this extensively in her book, NO ORDINARY TIME. Maps sold out. You couldn't buy a map before Roosevelt's fireside chat in the February after Pearl Harbor because millions of Americans went out and bought maps. And they sat there by the radio and followed what he was talking about.
But I think, you know, one of the big mistakes today-- that's made today is it-- we're-- you talk about our political culture as if it were something separate, something different from our general culture. What I say in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON is, no, that's wrong. Our political culture is a reflection of our general culture. It is-- it is as much shaped by our general culture as it shapes our general culture. Now to return to FDR, which I'm really glad you asked about, it's been forgotten now in the mythology of World War II that even when the Nazis invaded Poland and attacked England, overwhelming majority of Americans were opposed to American involvement in--
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: --the war. The reason they came around is not just Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt spent several years trying to educate a resistant public about the stake that America had in the future of Europe. The renewal of the draft in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, in the summer of 1941, passed by one vote. Imagine what would have happened if the Army had been disbanded, if FDR had not made all those educational efforts, where we would have been six months later when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The role of the president-- everybody talks about who's equipped to be Commander in Chief, a word I hate, which presidents didn't used to use, from day one--
BILL MOYERS: And why do you hate it?
SUSAN JACOBY: Because the President's only the Commander in Chief of the Armed Force. He's not the commander in chief of us. And it's a word that presidents didn't use except in a strictly military sense in the past. What's far more important than being commander in chief is being educator in chief. And Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would not have succeeded as commanders in chief if they hadn't first succeeded as teachers in chief.
To be non-partisan about it, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are two of the biggest failures as teachers in chief of any presidents we've ever had. Bush at foreign policy obviously. It's great to bring people along with you when everybody's in favor of the war as they were in 2003 'cause there was this desire to strike back at somebody, anyone, for 9/11. So Bush just said, "Oh, yeah. Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11." And people believed it. But--
BILL MOYERS: And Clinton? What about Clinton?
SUSAN JACOBY: Everything in my view that's being written about the failure of the Clinton healthcare program in relation to Hillary Clinton's candidacy is wrong. Yes, it's true. It's that failure is usually attributed to their failure to bring the insurance industry groups to the table, all of the interest groups in advance.
No. The reason that healthcare reform was dead on arrival was that the American people hadn't been educated and prepared for any kind of change. Bill Clinton just announced his plan which had been developed kind of secretly, without much public participation. The health insurance industry jumped in with its Harry and Louise commercials. Now I'll bet everybody who is listening to this tonight remembers Harry and Louise. And nobody remembers a detail of the Clinton plan, the healthcare plan. It is the job of the president to get his message out before Harry and Louise. Bill Clinton didn't do that.
BILL MOYERS: You helped me to see something else about the importance of language. You write about the difference it makes to talk about troop and troops instead of soldier and soldiers.
SUSAN JACOBY: Very Orwellian. That's very Orwellian. Troops used to be a term reserved only as a collective noun. Like would say, "Allied troops have landed at Normandy." Troops meant a massive military operation. We never talked about a soldier who was killed in action as a troop. We don't lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop. We lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Now I think that kind of euphemistic language-- it's very important when you talk about troops it in a way takes the individuality away.
BILL MOYERS: It becomes an abstraction.
SUSAN JACOBY: It becomes an abstraction, right. Not a person, an individual soldier who is dying. And by the way, I offer a theory in this book about how this substitution happens. And it's not very Machiavellian at all. It's part of, again, part of how dumb our culture has become. I think some PR person, somehow decided that soldier could mean only a man. And they were looking for a noun that sounded more neutral. It's utterly stupid, of course. A soldier can be a man or a woman. But my guess is that some dopey PR person suggested this. And somebody in the army said, "Great." And the newspapers just went along.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But now it's used commonly.
SUSAN JACOBY: Now it's used commonly.
BILL MOYERS: So what has happened that prompted this book?
SUSAN JACOBY: In a way it was an outgrowth of FREETHINKERS, a History of American Secularism. After FREETHINKERS was published I really welcomed the opportunity to go out and speak across the country. You know, to educate people about a secular tradition which has been kind of lost and downgraded and denigrated. And I soon found, very quickly, my audiences consisted almost entirely of people who already agreed with me. And conservatives report exactly the same experience.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SUSAN JACOBY: Now, this was not always the case in our country. In the 19th century Robert Ingersoll, whom we've talked, who is known as the great agnostic, had audiences full of people who didn't agree with him. But they wanted to hear what he had to say. And they wanted to see whether the devil really has horns. And now what we have is a situation in which people go to hear people they already agree with. What's going on is not so much education as reinforcement of the opinions you already have.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, why is it we're so unwilling to give, as you say, a hearing to contradictory viewpoints? Or to imagine that we might learn something from someone who disagrees with us?
SUSAN JACOBY: Well, I think part of it is part of a larger thing that is making our culture dumber. We have, really, over the past 40 years, gotten shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans. One of the most important studies I've found, and I've put in this chapter, they call it Infantainment-- on this book. It's by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And they've found that children under six spend two hours a day watching television and video on average. But only 39 minutes a day being read to by their parents.
Well, you don't need a scientific study to know that if you're not read to by your parents, if most of your entertainment when you're in those very formative years is looking at a screen, you value what you do. And I don't see how people can learn to concentrate and read if they watch television when they're very young as opposed to having their parents read to them. The fact is when you're watching television, whether it's an infant or you or I, or staring glazedly at a video screen, you're not doing something else.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you, Susan, that half of American adults believe in ghosts? Now I take these from your book. One-third believe in astrology. Three quarters believe in angels. And four-fifths believe in miracles.
SUSAN JACOBY: I think even more important than the fact that large numbers of Americans believe in ghosts or angels, that is part of some religious beliefs. Is the flip side is of this is that over half of Americans don't believe in evolution. And these things go together. Because what they do is they place science on a par almost with folk beliefs.
And I think-- if I may inveigh against myself, ourselves, I think the American media in particular has a lot to do with it. Because one of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture the media constantly talks about truth as if it-- if it were always equidistant from two points. In other words, sometimes the truth is one-sided.
I mentioned this in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks there was a huge cover story in TIME Magazine in 2002 about the rapture and end of the world scenarios. There wasn't a singular secular person quoted in it. They discussed the rapture scenario from the book of Revelation as though it was a perfectly reasonable thing for people to believe. On the one hand, these people don't believe it. On the other it's exactly like saying-- you know, "Two plus-- two plus two, so-and-so says, 'two plus two equals five.' But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four." The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.
BILL MOYERS: You call that a kind of dumb objectivity.
SUSAN JACOBY: Yes. Dumb objectivity. Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism based on the book of Genesis to be taught in our public schools along with evolution? What does that say to you?
SUSAN JACOBY: Well, it's that evolution is just a theory, it's just another opinion. Just as some people believe that the account of the six days of creation in Genesis is literally true, some people believe we're descended form lower animals. In other words, it places belief on the same level as science subject to proof. I should say, however, that it may also mean that a lot of Americans aren't exactly sure what creationism means. Because, in fact, the most recent Gallop poll shows that only 30 percent of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. In other words, many-- most Americans believe the Bible is divinely inspired. But you can believe the Bible is divinely inspired and still believe in evolution.
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: But you can't believe that the Bible is literally true and still believe in evolution. There's a wonderful book on religious literacy by Stephen Prothero -- you know, which sites a poll that half of Americans can't name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. Well, if you can't-- but this is part of the total dumbing down of our culture. The-- one of those books apparently that the 50 percent of Americans aren't reading is also the Bible or they would know that Genesis was the first book of the Bible. It's sort of like, you know, "I don't know what Genesis is, but I believe it."
BILL MOYERS: Doesn't this say-- also say something beyond religious belief about the level of science education in our public schools?
SUSAN JACOBY: I think it says everything about the level of education in our schools. When you have, look, one out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth. But you shouldn't have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. There's been a huge failure of education.
I do agree with many cultural conservatives about this. I think that schools over the last 40 years-- instead of adding things that-- just adding things, for example. African-American history, women's history, these are all great additions, and necessary. But what they've done in addition to adding things is they really have placed less emphasis on the overall culture-- cultural things that everybody should know. People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don't.
Well, now this feeds back into our current political process. You wonder why judges and what kind of judges people will appoint why more of the American public doesn't understand it. Well, if you don't know that there are nine judges then you don't know that George W. Bush's last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, have put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court which really believes that religion should have a much more active role in public life, that's likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices before you know that we're up to a five out of nine sure votes--
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SUSAN JACOBY: --to know how really important the composition of the Supreme Court is in the next election. I think our schools are doing a bad job of teaching history and science.
BILL MOYERS: You claim that right-wing intellectuals are dangerous because they have command of the vocabulary that makes wishful thinking sound rational.
SUSAN JACOBY: Uh, first of all, there are right-wing intellectuals. But one of the great successes of the intellectual right, is that they have succeeded brilliantly during the last 20 years at pinning the intellectual label solely on liberals so that a lot of people think that to be an intellectual means that you are a liberal alone. And one of the reasons that I think that right-wing intellectuals are so dangerous is they've been so clever at doing this. They've been much more clever than liberal intellectuals have been.
They've made it look like liberals are the only-- are the, quote, elites. And-- but they're just, you know, people-- people who get huge salaries from business-financed, right-wing foundations. They're not the elites? Of course, they're the elites. I don't have-- I object to their ideas. I don't object to them. But the liberal intellectual community is really caught asleep at the switch by these people. And one of the points I make in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, which is why I think I'm going to get killed from both the right and the left is anti-rationalism in America is not the province of either the right or the left.
It's the province of both. For example, when you will talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq war-- it doesn't matter that it hasn't worked out to them. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, how it got started on false pretenses and so on, it doesn't matter to them.
BILL MOYERS: That's making wishful thinking--
SUSAN JACOBY: Yeah. The--
BILL MOYERS: --rational.
SUSAN JACOBY: They make wishful thinking sound rational. It's the same thing now when we're hearing that the, quote, surge is working. Well, the surge is working as long as we have those troops there. But when anybody says to me in the right-wing intellectuals that the surge is working-- it's working. There are fewer people being killed in suicide bombings every day because we have a lot more young soldiers there in harm's way than there were six months ago. How many people were killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad before America entered the war? I believe the answer is none. So what they're doing is comparing, you know, apples and oranges. The left-- on the other hand-- to be intellectual is not necessarily to be rational. And there are many-- there are many anti-rational intellectuals.
BILL MOYERS: And you're pretty hard on some of them. You say they won't acknowledge the political sig-- talking about liberal intellectuals-- won't acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance. Quote, "Liberals have tended to define the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years. And to see an outraged citizenry ready to throw the bums out as the solution." And what you say is that that's the cheap and wrong way out. Right?
SUSAN JACOBY: It's the cheap way out and the wrong way out for this reason. And we've heard it over and over in the primaries from candidates who supported the war and changed their minds. "We were lied to," they said. If we'd known then what we know now we wouldn't have done it. And they say to the public, "You were lied to." But the deeper conversation we need to be having is why were Americans so willing to be lied to, not only average citizens, but politicians. And certainly when you have legislators, many of whom didn't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, and you have a geographic Roper poll that I quote in my new book-- they polled Americans between ages 18 and 25. Only 23 percent of college-educated young people could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel, four countries of ultimate importance-
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: --to American policy on the map, a map, by the way, that h-- it had the letter-- country's lettered on it. So in other words, it wasn't a blank map. It meant they didn't really know where the Middle East was either. So 23 percent of the college-educated and only six percent of high school graduates. Well, I would say that if only 23 percent of people with some college can find those countries on a map that is nothing to be bragging about. And that has to have something to do with why as a country -- we have such shallow political discussions.
BILL MOYERS: You say left of center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in-
SUSAN JACOBY: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: --Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory. The ignorance and erosion of historical memory that makes serious deceptions possible and plausible. Talk about the power and importance of memory.
SUSAN JACOBY: Memory. Well, first of all-- one of the things that we don't remember is what our Constitution actually says. One of the things we don't remember is right now, even as we sit here, the Bush administration is trying to claim that it has the right, without Congressional approval, to make permanent agreements for military-- in our military involvement in Iraq. Constitution says these things need to be ratified by Congress as were the treaties that you and I grew up with, the NATO treaty, for example. It was ratified by Congress. If we don't know what our Constitution says about the separation of powers then it really-- it really certainly affects the way we decide all kinds of public issues.
BILL MOYERS: Remember George Orwell talked about memory being about important knowledge like that being flushed down the memory hole?
SUSAN JACOBY: The memory hole. The--
BILL MOYERS: Because when that happens then the people in power can rule without any reference to the past. Any standard, any remembrance.
SUSAN JACOBY: For example, what the right-wing says about judges is-- our unelected judges are overstepping their powers. They talk as if judges-- judges have no right to interpret the Constitution. But that is what the unelected federal judiciary exactly was set up to do. It says so in the Constitution. But if you don't know how could-- oh, we-- yeah, we don't-- be-- in other words, people confuse the fact that they may not like certain judicial decisions with the right of judges to interpret the Constitution, indeed the duty of judges under our Constitution to interpret the Constitution. Now it's used commonly.
BILL MOYERS: When you wonder, as you do in the book, if any candidate has the will or courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue I find it hard to imagine a politician going very far, getting very far by telling his or her constituents--
SUSAN JACOBY: They're dopes.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You're ignorant. By ignorant you mean lack of knowledge, unaware.
SUSAN JACOBY: Lack of knowledge, right.
BILL MOYERS: You don't mean stupid, which means--
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: --unintelligent.
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: Or dimwitted.
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: But I can't imagine a politician succeeded by saying, "We're an ignorant culture and an ignorant people."
SUSAN JACOBY: No. But I can imagine a politician succeeding by saying, "We as a people have not lived up to our obligation to learn what we ought to learn to make informed decisions." I can imagine candidates saying, "And we in the Congress have been guilty of that too." Because it's not just the public that's ignorant. We get the government we deserve.
In other words, you wouldn't say to people, "You're a dope." You would say, "We have got to do better in-- about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy." We can't learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can't learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themself on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other, from books. And we all need to do a lot more of that.
You know, what I don't see on the campaign trail-- if universal healthcare were one of my priorities as a candidate, first thing I'd be doing, I'd be having sessions all over the country with three groups of people, nurses, doctors, and patients. You don't need to know what the insurance industry thinks. Because you know what they think. They're going to oppose anything that they think will place any limits on medical spending and their ability to charge you higher health insurance premiums. But I'd be sitting down in unscripted sessions with people so that when-- if I was elected I could take that knowledge with me into the White House. So I could get my message across before Harry and Louise. That's what being an educator means.
And I think a candidate could say that to people. Not, "You're dopes." But, "We all need to know a lot more than we know." We've become satisfied with too little. We've become satisfied with the lowest common denominator. It is not good enough when 23 percent of our young people who have had some college, only 23 percent of them can find these countries on a map. We all need to be able to learn how to find these countries on a map.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, published by coincidence or providence on Darwin's birthday, right?
SUSAN JACOBY: 199th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
BILL MOYERS: Susan Jacoby, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.
SUSAN JACOBY: It was my pleasure.
© 2007 Public Affairs Television. All Rights Reserved.

UPDATE: I just came across this article from Sunday's WaPo:

The Dumbing Of America

Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
by Susan Jacoby Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the

White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by

Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the

National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August,

University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be.

Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that

Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced

Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the

National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Who Writes the "News?"

Via: Independent:

So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationary cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?
Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.
But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own “psyop” element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department’s campaign of “public diplomacy” which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.
In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two “black propaganda specialists” from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through “editors and writers who work with us from time to time”.
In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6 lied to him.

[H/T: Cryptogon]

Spun

With Edwards & Kucinich out and Paul fading, it might be a good idea to take another look at this.

Declare This An Emergency

PWNED! Diebold Propagandists Exposed

From Wired [H/T: Cryptogon]

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland 08.14.07 2:00 AM


CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
Share Your Sleuthing!
Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

UPDATE: Radar O'Reilly describes FOX News' Wiki-tweaking efforts here. [H/T: Wege]

Lou Dobbs: Asshat

[H/T: Mark]

Economix
Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago.
The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes” producer came across a 2005 news report from Mr. Dobbs’s CNN program on contagious diseases. In the report, one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the previous three years, far more than in the past.
When Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned the report and told him that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it.
“Well, I can tell you this,” he replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”
With that Orwellian chestnut, Mr. Dobbs escalated the leprosy dispute into a full-scale media brouhaha. The next night, back on his own program, the same CNN correspondent who had done the earlier report, Christine Romans, repeated the 7,000 number, and Mr. Dobbs added that, if anything, it was probably an underestimate. A week later, the Southern Poverty Law Center — the civil rights group that has long been critical of Mr. Dobbs — took out advertisements in The New York Times and USA Today demanding that CNN run a correction.
Finally, Mr. Dobbs played host to two top officials from the law center on his program, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” where he called their accusations outrageous and they called him wrong, unfair and “one of the most popular people on the white supremacist Web sites.”
We’ll get to the merits of the charges and countercharges shortly, but first it’s worth considering why, beyond entertainment value, all this matters. Over the last few years, Lou Dobbs has transformed himself into arguably this country’s foremost populist. It’s an odd role, given that he spent the 1980s and ’90s buttering up chief executives on CNN, but he’s now playing it very successfully. He has become a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans.
The audience for his program has grown 72 percent since 2003, and CBS — yes, the same network that broadcasts “60 Minutes” — just hired him as a commentator on “The Early Show.” Many elites, as Mr. Dobbs likes to call them, despise him, but others see him as a hero. His latest book, “War on the Middle Class,” was a best seller and received a sympathetic review in this newspaper. Mario Cuomo has said Mr. Dobbs is “addicted to economic truth.”
Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.
That’s where leprosy comes in.
“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” Mr. Dobbs said on his April 14, 2005, program. From there, he introduced his original report that mentioned leprosy, the flesh-destroying disease — technically known as Hansen’s disease — that has inspired fear for centuries.
According to a woman CNN identified as a medical lawyer named Dr. Madeleine Cosman, leprosy was on the march. As Ms. Romans, the CNN correspondent, relayed: “There were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”
“Incredible,” Mr. Dobbs replied.
Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Romans engaged in a nearly identical conversation a few weeks ago, when he was defending himself the night after the “60 Minutes” segment. “Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy,” she said, again attributing the number to Ms. Cosman.
To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.
The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137.
“It is not a public health problem — that’s the bottom line,” Mr. Krahenbuhl told me. “You’ve got a country of 300 million people. This is not something for the public to get alarmed about.” Much about the disease remains unknown, but researchers think people get it through prolonged close contact with someone who already has it.
What about the increase over the last six years, to 137 cases from 76? Is that significant?
“No,” Mr. Krahenbuhl said. It could be a statistical fluctuation, or it could be a result of better data collection in recent years. In any event, the 137 reported cases last year were fewer than in any year from 1975 to 1996.
So Mr. Dobbs was flat-out wrong. And when I spoke to him yesterday, he admitted as much, sort of. I read him Ms. Romans’s comment — the one with the word “suddenly” in it — and he replied, “I think that is wrong.” He then went on to say that as far as he was concerned, he had corrected the mistake by later broadcasting another report, on the same night as his on-air confrontation with the Southern Poverty Law Center officials. This report mentioned that leprosy had peaked in 1983.
Of course, he has never acknowledged on the air that his program presented false information twice. Instead, he lambasted the officials from the law center for saying he had. Even yesterday, he spent much of our conversation emphasizing that there really were 7,000 cases in the leprosy registry, the government’s 30-year database. Mr. Dobbs is trying to have it both ways.
I have been somewhat taken aback about how shameless he has been during the whole dispute, so I spent some time reading transcripts from old episodes of “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” The way he handled leprosy, it turns out, is not all that unusual.
For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.
Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”
When I asked Mr. Dobbs about this yesterday, he said, “You’ve raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive.”
The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans.
There is no denying that this country’s immigration system is broken. But it defies belief — and a whole lot of economic research — to suggest that the problems of the middle class stem from illegal immigrants. Those immigrants, remember, are largely non-English speakers without a high school diploma. They have probably hurt the wages of native-born high school dropouts and made everyone else better off.
More to the point, if Mr. Dobbs’s arguments were really so good, don’t you think he would be able to stick to the facts? And if CNN were serious about being “the most trusted name in news,” as it claims to be, don’t you think it would be big enough to issue an actual correction?
E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com