Tamara and I hosted a Dean House Party last night and hung out with some terrific people. Janet Purdy told a great story, so I sent it along to the Dean Blog, courtesy of Joe Rospars:

House Party Reports

The conference call with Governor Dean, Al Gore, Tipper Gore and over 1,400 house parties across the country just ended — see the blog post below for the play-by-play and reactions. Reports are coming in from house parties across the country. See Halley’s blog for a report on hers in Boston; Britt Blaser sends the following report from New York.

I’m at a house party with Emery Davis, leader of the Orchestra to presidents from Roosevelt through Kennedy and Clinton: a man with standards.

Emery Davis, with Janet Purdy and Suzanne Frye, at a New Year for America house party

Emery is with us courtesy of Janet Purdy and Suzanne Frye, who have two great stories of their own.

Janet says: “I have a friend who is 84 and a former captain of the polo team at Yale. He told me, ‘I’ve voted Republican all my life. In 2004, I’m voting Democrat.'”

And Suzanne attended Columbia Pre-Med with Howard Dean.

A warm ‘Hello’ from our house party to all the others out there reading the blog. Keep contributing to push the bat!

Britt Blaser
New York for Dean

Musical Knights

Emery Davis is the noted leader of the Emery Davis Orchestra, a high society tradition since his father founded the Meyer Davis Orchestra in 1912. It took me until this morning to realize that Meyer and Emery are the same name after the remix. Emery is an elegant, charming gentleman who epitomizes that highest of compliments, “gentle man.”

After a few minutes of delightful conversation, I understood Emery Davis’ plan for me. I’m to devote the next year of my life to make sure he has a gig in January, ’05:

   Meyer Davis played his first Inaugural Ball for President Harding, in 1921. He played all of the parties for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When asked “what was Roosevelt’s favorite tune,” Meyer, wishing to be non political said, “Home on the Range.” When the President saw him at the next party he said” Meyer, I could Kill you! I hate that song!” The President was kidding!

    Emery played his first Inaugural Ball for President Kennedy at the Washington Armory. He has played the Inaugurals of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, at the White House for President Ford and the last two Inaugurals for President Clinton, playing the first one at the Arkansas Ball.

…Which explains the photo of him in front of the White House at emerydavisorchestras.com. It seems that George W prefers cowboy music, and besides, the Emery Davis Orchestra has never played for the Bushes and does not, I inferred, intend to in the future. So Howard Dean is Emery’s best hope for an Inaugural Ball engagement, as well as a better country.

Well, Emery, I accept your challenge! I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are leading the celebration, and Tamara and Suzanne and Janet and our other guests and I intend to do our part by dancing the night away.

Josh Koenig and Franz Hartl of MusicForAmerica represented the young end of the musical spectrum. I’d met Franz once before, when he stopped in the weekend Zephyr and Josh were here in July. He has a stunning statistic: more people download music than voted in 2000. I’m pleased that Franz is enthusiastic about my sense that the only sure way to take our country back is to instantiate a new political party, which I’ve given the working title of “The Great Centrist Party.” Josh and Franz and I will flesh this out next week before Josh returns to California.

Old Year

2003 was an amazing year for me, and most of the amazement is the result of the connections that blogging has brought about. Thank you for your attention to these rantings. In a year, we’ll have a new President and the beginning of an upgraded Economic OS.

That’s a promise.

12:00:01 AM    

Dean Science

David Isenberg is the champion of stupidity. Not in people, but in networks. He has pushed the key attribute of our blessedly stupid network–the Internet–so we’d understand that its brilliance rests on being the dim bulb of networks. Here’s what he wrote in 1997, when he worked for AT&T. When he left and they realized what he was saying, they made him take it down, but David Weinberger hosts it for our benefit:

“JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID

A new network “philosophy and architecture,” is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for “always-on” use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user’s device, not in the network. And the network would be engineered simply to “Deliver the Bits, Stupid,” not for fancy network routing or “smart” number translation.

Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.

In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it needs to go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the data where to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the boss.

Instead of fancy “intelligent” network routing translation, in a Stupid Network, intelligent end-user devices would be connected to one or more high speed access networks – always listening for relevant information, for data addressed to their owner. Sometimes a “communication” might be a few bits, perhaps a short, pager-type message. Other times, it might be longer, like email. In the event of the need for two-way voice communication, an initial message might state the identity of the “caller,” and/or inquire of the whereabouts of the owner. The intelligent end-user device could apply its knowledge of where its “owner” was, and who the caller was. Then, if it were programmed to do so, it could launch a message to its owner, telling of the call, the caller’s identity, location, and any other information. It could also forward as much information as practical.

End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the Stupid Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.

David is a scientist, biology Ph.D, specifically, who knows that scientists’ special way of thinking means that they must be more open to new ideas than the rest of us and more critical of unproven assumptions. Scientists also get it, like Plato’s mistrust of the shadows on the cave wall, that our picture of reality is always under development, like a book that’s still being written.

A while back, Dr. Isenberg decided to put his weight behind the Howard Dean campaign. If we value the characteristics of the Internet, we’ll join him. I believe he’s telling us that it’s pretty crazy for any Netizen to not be enthusiastically behind Dr. Dean, who happens to be the only Presidential candidate in memory with scientific training, let alone one who depends explicitly on the Internet for his elective hopes.

David is inviting scientists to join him and Bob Kopp, originator of the Scientists for Dean site. Here’s his invitation on their Deanspace-based site:

Looking for Well-Known Scientists
Submitted by David Isenberg on Thu, 12/18/2003 – 12:46.
Bob Kopp and I are looking for a few well-known scientists who we can work with to write a letter to other scientists inviting them to join scientistsfordean.org. We intend to send this letter to scientists who already support Howard Dean, as well as to scientists who might not know yet that they’re for Dean.

We’d like to bring the community of scientists together who are turned off by the Bush Administration’s anti-evidence, anti-hypothesis-testing attitude and the evidence-free policies that result.

Do you know a Nobel Prize winner, or somebody who is widely acknowledged as a leader in their scientific discipline, who would lend their efforts to our work? If so, please let us know!
David S. Isenberg, Ph.D. Biology, 1977
isen@isen.com
1-888-isen-com

The plan is to attract the thought leaders from the scientific community to save science from the attacks it’s been undergoing since ideology has replaced even the pretense that we govern our society based on principles.

There’s much to be said for enlightened self-interest, which the Republicans worship and Democrats often mistrust. I think that we all should support Dean because he will protect our interests, not out of some abstract ideology. That’s what the scientists are doing, supporting science through Dean. Just as Dean the scientist would.

This brings up some thoughts from 14 months ago, inspired by a couple of other biologists, Howard Bloom and Richard Dawkings. In that post, I argued that bloggers willingly expose themselves to peer review, an essentially scientific process. I think these are themes that David Isenberg and Bob Kopp would support.

High Wire with a Neural Net

Howard Bloom’s Global Brain suggests that the blogging community is a self-organizing superorganism thinking like a neural network, promoting its central meme. The blogging meme would be something like,

The world is full of experts who will teach me most of what I need to know if I read their posts regularly. I will also get to know them better than if we worked in the same office for years. They give me insight, candor, depth and humanity available nowhere else.

But there’s something even more important going on. Bloggers (I think) are exposing their personal thinking to others’ debugging in the way that programmers do, and to an extent that only open source programmers do. That’s a big deal. Consider the thoughtful, respectful dialogue around Doc’s Blogo Culpa over just a hint of conflict of interest. Look around your office or PTA or condo board and see if regular folks in meatspace routinely expose strong opinions for which they expect, even demand, debugging. I’m not seeing it out there. Are you?

Who We Are and Aren’t

People who blog expect suggestions that range from helpful to inflammatory. We do it because our collective purpose is so important and because we believe in the scientific method. There have always been disciplined thinkers but it’s never been a widespread pursuit. Managers and leaders and parents and priests are rarely interested in a partnership seeking the best way to reach a goal. I guess you’d call it collective debugging. It’s the defining characteristic of the part of western society most worth preserving.

There’s a large and growing group of people who suppress collective debugging:

Fundamentalists

Fundamentalists are proud of their resistance to thoughtful discussion. Collaborative debugging vs. Fundamentalism is the war we’re engaged in, not America vs. Terrorism, Palestinians vs. Israelis, North Koreans vs. South or Islam vs. Everybody Else. The sooner we understand the core nature of the deeper conflict, we can start some real life-saving.

On September 15, 2001, the distinguished British scientist, Richard Dawkins wrote:

  Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

   It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

But fundamentalism lies even deeper than religion. It describes any group that relies on a single creed with no allowance for discussion of “foreign” values. The Crips gang is fundamentalist, but not religious, like the cult around the Jonestown massacre. Examples of secular fundamentalism are everywhere – supporters of the O.J. acquittal, the Ku Klux Klan, most forms of patriotism, liberalism and conservatism. The problem is that science and the scientific method have reached a critical mass and a global presence. (Of course we’re not very good at disciplined thinking. The point is that we think we should be, and we try to recognize it when it shows up).

The common thread of fundamentalism is lazy, uncritical thinking. If you defer all choices to a received text, even if current, you’re abdicating Choice – the greatest gift God gave us.

The religious right’s support for a war to “defend our way of life” is an irony you’d never put in a novel. Our way of life – democracy itself – is about being able to live your life as you want while not harming others, a bear hug of diversity.

It Takes Real Faith

Just because Copernicus won the sun-centered universe debate does not mean that society bought into his methods. Patriarchy has ruled our lives forever and has a few good generations left in it. The key to patriarchy is absolute alpha male dominance of the household dialogue monologue. TV drives a stake through patriarchy and that’s why autocratic rulers are nuking up as fast as they can. They can’t stand a world with television. And the Internet? Fuggedaboutit!

The point of accepting Copernicus’ and other scientists’ views is the greatest act of faith possible. Real Faith is when you understand just enough of another’s guesses and investigative methods to trust what they report back to the rest of us. Real faith lies in trusting your annual report to 50 million lines of code built by people you’ll never meet under conditions you’d never endure, using circuits that would not work without quantum physics. Or boarding an airliner with no clue as to what Bernoulli’s theorem is about, trusting the chain of conclusions he started.

Real faith is not the simplistic regurgitation of an inspiring ancient text for parables to inform our daily actions. Such texts are seductive for their simple-mindedness but not very useful for taking responsibility for your actions in a world that must include diverse views. If we condone killing those who think most differently, do we then support killing those who think a little less differently? That sounds pacifist, but it’s not.

People of Real Faith, Infiltrating From Within

There are fundamentalists everywhere. They haven’t infiltrated our democracy to tear it down from within, they’ve always been in control because they are the natives here.

We are the infiltrators with our notions of healthy diversity and a method to arrive at a truth that hasn’t been written down yet. All the hallowed texts were penned by followers of rabid iconoclasts and we are their protegés, fighting the same fight against the same kind of people: patriarchal lazy thinkers with little faith in others’ ideas and observations. They’re pissed because we’re driving a conceptual wedge between patriarchy and the young disciples they want to automate. As it has always been done.

That’s our meme and we’re sticking to it.

1:19:21 AM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part C

The Assertions of Processing Assertions

Is the Internet a great place or what? About the time I went to bed, Ben Hammersley dug into The Processes of the Assertion Processor:

Caution, this is tremendously rough thinking. Early. Before breakfast. No coffee. Onward! I’m continuing on with thoughts about Britt’s Assertion Processor idea. This is about to get a bit tricky, so bail now if you want to.

I’m having problems with this. Once you get into anything other than the very basic, the amount of marking up is actually very considerable, as any news story worth its salt will have hundreds of different assertions. Remember, the basic building block of a fact is Subject Predicate Object…

…The more assertions, triples, whatever you call them, you throw into the pot, the more connections we can find between things.

[There are people on the planet who would be dismayed that Hammersley, the most obvious expert for this problem–a working tech journalist who wrote an RSS book, is a champion of the RDF flavor of RSS. This red herring gives us a chance to expend our collective energies on internecine warfare, like Democrats, rather than to meet the challenge at hand, like…hmm.]

Ben has coded up some RSS 1.0 examples for us, based on the Seymour Hersh article I used as an example. You qualified folks should review them at his site and pick up a mug while you’re at it. We non-techies must be content with a more general view.

Putting the Hammer Down

Ben seems to be designing a comprehensive system while I had in mind a format for bread crumbs. This distinction is not evidence of a fundamental argument about the nature of knowledge aggregation! Ben and I are having fun working on this project and I’m enormously grateful for his knowledge and point of view.

By bread crumbs, of course, I’m thinking of how Hansel & Gretel found their way home. I want RSS bread crumbs to help our country find its way home. Each author or editor or reviewer tags an article, not completely, but with the elements that make it interesting and that validate its point. Like blogs, no assertion is to be trusted on its own merits, but rather by how it’s been honored by the Linkosphere. This troubles governments and big time journalism, but is the only reasonable basis for fact-based governance.

It doesn’t seem necessary to build a centralized repository tying every mention of <actor>Richard Perle</actor> in the Hersh article to all other instances of <actor>Richard Perle</actor>. I’ll leave that up to whoever hosts the Richard Perle Assertion Aggregator. Inquiring minds want to be able to find the articles in our news readers and we’ll also be hoping that someone assembles the most authoritative ones among them into a timeline.

My ignorance of the mechanics allows me to imagine that properly tagged assertions would allow a script to generate a timeline like this example, which I found at the Project for the New American Century.  Without attribution, these assertions are uncompelling, especially if you’re new to the Iran Contra scandal (and the ethical mindset that made it a scandal). As Dr. Dean says, “We can do better than this.” I want RSS feeds, not collected and served from a central database, but available for post-processing so that better timelines than this can be generated automagically. I don’t want actual magic–just a sufficiently advanced technology.

Imagine that the following contains links to the supporting information:

IRAN CONTRA SCANDAL
“October Surprise” allegation	10/80			Reagan-Bush campaign makes secret pact with Iran to delay release of the Embassy hostages until after the November election, in return for future covert arms sales.
Reagan takes oath of office.	1/20/81			Hostages held in the American Embassy in Iran released. Reagan takes oath of office.
An Israeli official suggests a deal with Iran to then-national security adviser Robert McFarlane	7/85			…saying the transfer of arms could lead to release of Americans being held hostage in Lebanon. McFarlane brings the message to President Reagan.
	8/30/85			The first planeload of U.S.-made weapons is sent from Israel to Tehran.
	9/14/85			The first American Hostage is released.
Reagan secretly signs a presidential ‘finding,’ or authorization…	12/5/85			…describing the operation with Iran as an arms-for-host ages deal.
Etc., etc., etc.

Now is that too much to ask? Does anyone else like this idea? Buehler? Buehler?

12:07:02 PM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part B

Last time, I said I hoped to discuss the Assertion Processor with a journalist who could “spell RSS.” That was disingenuous since I’d already discussed it with Ben Hammersley, war correspondent, Guardian columnist, author of the O’Reilly RSS book, Content Syndication with RSS and savior of greyhounds. Not a bad place to start.

A week ago yesterday, I walked into the Intermezzo Café in Philly to see this tall, impeccably dressed Brit saying, “Yes, do bring me another quadruple shot.” Thus was I warned…

After an entertaining iChat AV video session with Doc, courtesy of Intermezzo’s wonderful free WiFi, we got down to business. (Ben and Doc had met in the real Soho (London) a couple years ago when Doc was seeking a WiFi connection. His warwalking led him to the hotspot that Ben had erected over the Petite Délice café). My question: how hard would it be to build an Assertion Processor? Ben’s answer was then about what it is in his blog post today:

It’s not really a technical issue at all. You could very easily create a markup to annotate news stories, and a database to hold the stuff and produce the links is prime RDF territory. Actually building the system, therefore, isn’t an issue (given cash). The problems that strike me are all social: how do you get people to enter stories into the thing? How do you prevent malicious insertion? What do you think?

Well, since he asked… I’m not sure it’s so much a database model as an aggregation model. And that means it shouldn’t take much cash to build the system, since you wouldn’t actually be building a system. I’m imagining a profusion of feeds that may then be arbitrarily aggregated with all the lovely chaos by which we aggregate blog feeds today. If we don’t set up a central database, we don’t have to worry about malicious insertions (ah the images Ben conjures . . . . . . Stop! This is a serious dialogue. Don’t get caught up in Hammersley’s irresponsible, ribald world view and its surrounding accretion disk! Must. Not. Yield.)

On Ben’s site, Eric Sigler commented (treating malicious insertions more seriously than I):

How do you prevent malicious insertion? You don’t. You provide a way to track who made the assertions, and then a way to squelch out people who make assertions you don’t like. But then that could allow people to squelch out others who make assertions they don’t agree with, and that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Back to the Future

Where were we? Oh yes. Isolated RSS feeds aggregated in any way that any aggregator chooses to. Mine or someone else’s. Chaos reigning. The central function is the tagging of the elements that pique your interest when you read an article and then pump your fist like a Jets fan, saying YESSS! Or conversely, the same elements that cause an opponent of the assertions to throw down the paper in disgust.

(Aside: a few months ago, chugging around the Central Park Reservoir track at my usual serene pace, I passed another middle-aged guy with earphones, even more out of shape than I. As I passed, this fellow human erupted, “Fucking Liberal Bastard!” Well. He certainly told him.)

All Assertions All the Time

They’re just assertions! This entire quest is based on the assumption that we have a right to make any assertions we want to make. We can tag the parts of our assertions with flags like <actor>, <company>, <document>, <documentdate>, etc.

We all now accept that our statements in the marketplace of ideas are subject to the scrutiny of the rest of us. And their votes. Our votes. Google has defined our future, unevenly distributed though it may be. Whether by Google or Slashdot or Scoop or Drupal, any assertion will be endorsed or rejected by our hive-mind. Some assertions will gain stature and others will be labeled as loony. Whether those judgments are “right” or not is hardly the tag-designers’ concern. What matters is that we have a means to expose the fist-pumping/infuriating elements and aggregate them in useful ways so that all of us can endorse or dismiss them according to our biases.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get so involved in the fist-pumpers and belief-violaters that we’ll recognize them for what they are–passing nuages–and consequentially start a dialogue that matters. We might even learn something from each other…

11:14:47 PM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party

How do Doc and I do this? On the same day a while back, we quite separately used the term Heart of Lightness. Today, we’re both looking at how extreme the noises are, and he quotes the photodude’s The View from the Fence of Centrism from last August.

We’re all describing assertions but talking about them as if they’re facts. As Doc puts it: “Yet reasonable people are quick to label as hate all kinds of opinions that come up quite shy of the mark.”

Yesterday he pointed out an important truth: no one’s going to be elected by hating Bush.

I’d like a neutral process to allow authors and editors and reviewers flag and tag our assertions so we can line them up and see them in context.

Whenever we do the same thing over and over, that thing is begging to be automated. One thing we all repeat is our amazement at an article or blog post or other assertion that reinforces or attacks our biases. We’d like to promote the one and discredit the other, and we’d like to string together a bunch of related stories (or lies) that reinforce our biases.

RSS with your Whopper?

Slate even has a Whopper feature that in-house Chatterbox Timothy Noah maintains, specializing in the lies that political figures make.

Got a whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
Dec. 3, 2003: Joseph Wilson
Oct. 31, 2003: G.W. Bush
Oct. 17, 2003: Grady Little
Sept. 16, 2003: John Ashcroft
Sept. 5, 2003: Christy Whitman
Aug. 29, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
Aug. 22, 2003: Arianna Huffington
Aug. 8, 2003: Howard Dean
July 25, 2003: Condoleezza Rice
July 18, 2003: President Bush
July 10, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
June 27, 2003: Remembering Strom
June 20, 2003: Billy Bulger
May 30, 2003: Ari Fleischer
May 23, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
May 19, 2003: Un-Whopper: Ari Fleischer Tells Truth!
May 2, 2003: Peggy Cooper Cafritz
April 17, 2003: Eason Jordan
March 7, 2003: John Kerry
Feb. 28, 2003: Ari Fleischer
Feb. 14, 2003: Bill O’Reilly
Feb. 7, 2003: Saddam Hussein
Jan. 31, 2003: Karl Rove
Jan. 23, 2003: Bill Frist
Jan. 17, 2003: Naji Sabri
Jan. 10, 2003: Rod Paige

Without being hampered by knowing what I’m talking about, I suggest that someone could extend RSS to allow authors, editors or reviewers to annotate such articles to point out the elements that strike them as, well, striking.

Such elements cry out to include the reserved words of Journalism 101: who, when, where, what, why, how. It’s the subelements that seem interesting. Who meets with whom when and what common threads are lying around begging to be pulled out of the sweater simultaneously? TheyRule.net does some of the associating, but it’s out of date and limited to SEC data, with links to assertions which 404 as often as not. A centralized site is not the answer, however noble the intentions.

If we’re to have a way to scan and aggregate striking assertions, only an RSS feed will do.

The Hersh Model

Take this article by Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker. In it, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre lobs a fact grenade in the direction of NeoCon hawk Richard Perle and Adnan Kahshoggi, a Saudi-born arms dealer. The question is, are they facts or are they traitorous, unsubstantiated charges by a serial prevaricator? Since it depends on who does the reading, the best we can say is that its an assertion grenade and for the purposes of RSS assertion feeds that’s all we need to know.

Interestingly, Slate’s Chatterbox maintains an Adnan Khashoggi dossier. Here’s a report from last March, titled “Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi,” Part 6 – Richard Perle’s new pal.:

Everybody’s favorite shadowy arms dealer is back in the news! It is the premise of this occasional series that Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking world event since 1960. In previous items, Chatterbox has linked Khashoggi to Sept. 11, Iran-Contra, the Marc Rich pardon, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, the breakup of the Beatles, and Charlie Chaplin’s serial seductions of teenage girls. (For details, see the “Six Degrees” archive, below.) Chatterbox does not mean to suggest that Khashoggi has committed any crimes. But it does seem to be the case that if you make Khashoggi’s acquaintance, the odds are that you’re not a nice person.

Mr. Noah even maintains a Khashoggi archive:

“Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi” Archive:
Feb. 11, 2002: Part 5
Nov. 14, 2001: Part 4
July 9, 2001: Part 3
Feb. 26, 2001: More “Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi”
Dec. 4, 2000: Did Adnan Khashoggi Throw the Election to Dubya?

Hersh’s Khashoogi article is long – 4,081 words. Who but a limousine Liberal has time to read this stuff?&
#xA0; Any Mac or Microsoft Word will autosummarize it for you, to any level you want. Here’s what my Mac reports, in 644 words, plus a few experimental tags to lend a feel for what I think might be useful.:

During the Reagan Administration, <actor>Khashoggi</actor> was one of the middlemen between <associate>Oliver North</associate>, in the White House, and the <associate>mullahs in Iran</associate> in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages.

…<company>Trireme’s</company> main business, according to a <document>two-page letter</document> that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi <documentdate>last November</documentdate>, is to <intention>invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense</intention>.

…The letter mentioned the firm’s government connections prominently: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, <actor>Richard Perle</actor>, is chairman of that Board.” The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are <associate>Henry Kissinger</associate>, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme’s advisory group and is not involved in its management), and <associate>Gerald Hillman</associate>, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters in Trireme’s New York office.

…Its members (there are around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they have access to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement.

…One board member told me that most members are active in finance and business, and on at least one occasion a member has left a meeting when a military or an intelligence product in which he has an active interest has come under discussion.

…If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and I’ve put people on the board with whom I’m doing that business, I’d be had”—a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a post on the policy board.

…In <authoritydate>August<authoritydate>, the Saudi government was dismayed when the <authority>Washington Post<authority> revealed that the Defense Policy Board had received a briefing on July 10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named Laurent Murawiec, who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that the Bush Administration give the Saudi government an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its financial assets in the United States and its oil fields.

…When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, <actorquote>“I don’t want Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as investors.”</actorquote>

…<associatequote>“Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail—‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’—as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”</associatequote>

As for Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and the assertion that its purpose was to discuss politics, Bandar said, <associatequote>“There has to be deniability, and a cover story—a possible peace initiative in Iraq—is needed.</associatequote>

…The views set forth in the memorandums were, indeed, very different from those held by Perle, who has said publicly that Saddam will leave office only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow hard-liners in the Bush Administration.

…The paper said that <authorityquote>Perle and others had attended a series of “secret meetings” in an effort to avoid the pending war with Iraq, and “a scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would personally admit that his country was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction and he would agree to stop trying to acquire these weapons while he awaits exile.”</authorityquote>

You get the idea. Experienced journalists could probably list the useful tags in 15 minutes.

The only part of this to take seriously is the urge we readers feel to pierce the veil of artifice that the media uses to perpetuate what Jay Rosen calls their master narrative and that Doc calls the “vs.” story.

I want to discuss the Assertion Processor with a journalist who actually knows how to spell “RSS”.

11:05:31 PM    

It’s axiomatic that insights arrive in bunches, like lights going on in several windows at once. I felt so clever declaring yesterday that Dean’s best shot at winning the Presidency is to officially form the Great Centrist Party, the GCP, an act of chutzpah which no longer requires the irritant of owning assets to give voice to your constituents. I’d been thinking it for quite a while and circulating a white paper to that effect in Burlington.

Obviously I hadn’t been thinking about it as long as Everett Ehrlich, who had researched the idea’s resonance with the Nobel Prize-winning work of Ronald Coase and published his conclusions yesterday in the Washington Post. Coase won the 1991 Nobel for Economics by noticing that the cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations. As Ehrlich puts it,

It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn’t so different from designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles.

But the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn’t surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the “trick” of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase’s theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

Well. Ehrlich’s article inspired responses from Slashdot, Cory Doctorow, Clay Shirky and John Robb, so I’m emboldened by that reaction to follow through on my threat to list the specific, technically trivial web apps that will, I think, guarantee a sweeping change in the nature of democratic governance.

My shorthand for those scaling issues is that an organization is stressed to the extent of its conversation opportunities. When the press, regulators, lawyers, vendors and customers are hounding you for feedback, you are trapped in a conversational black hole that means you can’t get the goods out the door.

But in the case of a campaign, the “goods” are conversations that result in sympathetic voter’s hands on voting levers, ballots and (shudder) touch screens. Dean’s people are not just the campaign’s voters; they are the national staff. They are the ones operating in the campaign’s novel permission-free zone. As far as I can tell from close up and personal, there’s no limit to what role you can play in the campaign, as long as you provide an end-to-end solution and don’t call on the paid staff for resources of time, attention or money.

Essentially, Joe Trippi’s mantra is, “Talk among yourselves and everything will work out.”

A conversation about our core American values and the explicit pledges we’re willing to make to each other will have the force of a new national political party, and there’s nothing the Rs and Ds can do about it. The Dems are screaming helplessly today. The trick is to make the Republicans join them in their impotent wailing in about 6 months.

Is there anything more American than turning the tables on those fat ass bad asses? In a campaign full of inspiration, the most inspiring truism I’ve heard came, as usual, from a blog comment: “Dean’s the messenger, but WE are the message.”

Do We Have the Stones to Design Democracy?

The change depends only on technology, and pretty trivial tech at that. If my premise is correct, this new political tipping point will inspire so many new conversations about governance and the role of individuals governing themselves that the promise of the Golden Age of Greece will be realized soon.

All we need is the stones to do it. The G[r]eeks voted with little round white and black stones–white for aye and black for nay, an eminently auditable voting system. Everyone could see the result when the top was taken off the clay pot, and each voter retained a receipt in the form of the opposite-color stone left in his hand. From a geek perspective, it’s all engineering.

Jay Rosen stopped by for lunch yesterday and he amplified what I had not learned well enough from his web site–that blog software so trumps the press mentality that we really are at the beginning of the end of the dominance of the master narrative that dominates the press: what Doc calls the “vs.” story: sports and conflict as the universal metaphor for life. Jay, a decidedly tech-averse guy, is so taken by Moveable Type that he anthropomorphizes the little widgets on its interface as speaking to him. “Use me,” he hears them calling.

The Revolution will be Engineered

I had a pleasant visit with Tim Bray at XML 2003 in Philly on Tuesday. Anyone who’s read Tim’s blog knows that he’s a polymath with broad and deep interests. In describing some of our challenges, he smiled coyly and disclaimed, “I’m just an engineer.” I laughed out loud. That’s like saying Howard Dean is an internist. True but less filling. Tim, like so many other systems designers, looks at the world’s most assertive democracy and wonders who designed its OS?

I’m an engineer at heart also, and so I assert that the sole difference between tipping point 1 and tipping point 4 is engineering and chutzpah. If you build it, they will come, but “it” includes a great User Experience.

Let’s start with some imagination: imagine that Dick Morris knows what he’s talking about in his Chris Lydon interview–that Howard Dean is dead meat because the Republicans have 40 times the email addresses as Howard Dean, and that Republicans are intrinsically more connected, through church, school and boosterism, than Democrats. If that’s so, we need to modify the tipping point options from yesterday.

Limiting Our Options

I was disingenuous when I suggested yesterday that I thought Dean has four options:

1. Win the nomination and lose the election (the current smart money)
2. Squeak by Rove et. al. and barely win the election
3. Craft robust coattails using the Boswell strategy to eke out a majority in Congress
4. Design and instantiate a virtual Great Centrist Party, the GCP, as Ehrlich describes,
   not merely a great tent but an immense echo chamber where the illusion of the press-inspired conservative-liberal polarity gives way to agreement on the specific issues that unite us:
   1. fair play
   2. financial responsibility
   3. love of family and friends
   4. reverence for our shared spirituality
   5. modest public behavior home and abroad
   6. freedom to be privately reserved or outrageous
   7. the right, as Greta Garbo pleaded, to be left alone
   8. the primacy of human beings over corporate persons
   9. mistrust of bureaucracy and its seductive handmaiden, unearned rewards

Alan Kay taught us that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Recognizing that we’re forging a new political party anyway, and knowing that it’s easier to build our GCP than to win over the DNC, I say we pump enough fuel into this beast to get us to the destination and hold for the weather delay.

The New York Times reminds us today that Joe Trippi’s plan is more likely to be grand than timid. Joe’s vision, plus the military’s axiom that hope is not a plan, suggests we’d better go for the gusto and assume there are just two options, 1 or 4:

Dick Morris points out in his Lydon interview (.mp3) that it doesn’t matter who builds the tools of democracy: politicians will go where the voters go because that’s their food supply: visibility into the hearts and minds of voters could inspire a politician to practice Bikram yoga three times a week, if that’s what the constituents demand. If we want the democracy we think we were promised, we merely need to build it. Here are the pieces I can think of, your list will be better:

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

And a few other means, obvious to others, that are obvious to the citizens as we wake up, shake off our accumulated drowsiness and get it that we are the message.

I’ll flesh out my list next week, but why wait? As Joe Trippi might put it, Code among yourselves.

6:18:24 PM    

Malcolm Gladwell lifted the phrase “tipping point” from epidemiology and ensconced it in the cultural lexicon:

If you talk to the people who study epidemics–epidemiologists–you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world. They don’t share the assumptions the rest of us have about how and why change happens. The word “Tipping Point”, for example, comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped in the mid 1990’s, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted. When I heard that phrase for the first time I remember thinking–wow. What if everything has a Tipping Point? Wouldn’t it be cool to try and look for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other nonmedical areas?

Gladwell’s 1996 Tipping Point explained his, well, point by showing the similarity in the mechanisms behind the drop in NYC crime, sales of Hush Puppy shoes, contagious yawns and Paul Revere’s ride.

Morris Less

Dick Morris is another visionary and Bill Clinton’s indispensable political guide until he was forced out of the White House by his own Clintonesque scandal, got religion, went on Fox News and started vote.com. As you’d expect from a Clinton confidante, he understands the detailed history of what works and fails in Presidential politics. In the current Chris Lydon interview, Morris tells us that the Internet is bigger than we have imagined in politics as in everything else, and that the Dean campaign has changed politics forever by routing around the cynical mechanisms the DNC designed into the primary system this cycle…

…and that Howard Dean is dead meat.

Listen to the interview and come back for more revealing insights and colorful graphics. Now.

Go.

---

Later…

You can hear the shock and dread in Lydon’s dulcet tones as Dick Morris tells him that Karl Rove and the Republicans have been gathering 20-30 million email addresses while Dean’s grabbed a half million or so. Lydon’s summary:

“The essence of the Internet,” he said, “is not that it provides a new set of eyes and ears, but that it gives the voters a mouth, which they’ve never had in the media. The impact of that is absolutely historic.” 

But Morris makes it a mighty Republican tool in 2004, especially in the hands of Karl Rove, a direct-mail master. With email, Rove simply saves the postage. ”Let’s remember,” Morris observed, “that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.” The vast right-wing conspiracy which grew up outside the mainstream media is savvy now about spontaneous on-line community building. Not all the grassroots on the right are Astroturf. ”The Republican base is seething with activity,” Morris said. ”Also, c’mon, you can’t think of any community that is better connected, and better wired to itself, than the religious community. There are all kinds of prayer groups around the country, and the fact is that people who attend church regularly vote Republican by 2 to 1, and those who don’t vote Democratic by 2 to 1. The gay marriage issue is going to accentuate that divide. So I think this kind of viral bottom-up growth (which is what the Internet is all about) will be as much Republican as Democratic.”

… and that it will be a battle of the extremists the presumptive Dean “liberals” vs. the real rightists.

We Deaniacs, according to Dick Morris, are living in a naive echo chamber where bad news is unwelcome and our breathless enthusiasms insulate us from the harsh realities of the political marketplace.

He’s saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question.

That doesn’t mean that old-time politics will carry the day because the Internet is irrelevant, but that the new tools are agnostic and that the Republicans understand them as well as or better than the Deaniacs. When Chris asks him how he responds to people who don’t get it, who don’t know what a blog is, he turns Rosenesque:

How do you think Bill Clinton survived impeachment but blogs and MoveOn and all of that? Where did the anti-globalization get its strength from? Certainly not the mainstream media. Where did the right wing get its strength from and the anti-Clinton stuff? Where is the Dean candidacy from?

If you just read the New York Times and the Washington Post, you get blind-sided by all of this stuff. It’s the new age in which everybody is the publisher of a newspaper, and they can circulate it to anyone who’s interested in reading it. And that period of freedom – that free exchange of ideas, unmediated by who has the station license or who can afford paper and ink, is the essence of the Internet era.

Pointing the Way

So Morris agrees that this election cycle is a tipping point and that some sort of smart mob has formed around the Dean campaign and that there’s an analogous Second Superpower waging peace around the globe. But we’re still not giving up and letting the force take us where it will. But what are people fighting for? Let’s look at our available tipping points:

My work for the next year is to take the Green Line, and anything else will be a sorry disappointment, since it may be the only way to win the presidency. This is far more possible than it seems, if the Dean revolution does what it would in any earlier age, which is to form a new political party with a broader political spectrum. Thanks to the Internet, we don’t have to go to all the trouble to form an actual party, with offices and budget and staff and cronies and a cigar box. What we can do is form a virtual party and give a hat and a kazoo to every American who’ll hold still.

If we succeed in forming the GCP–Great Centrist Party, we can reduce the Rs and Ds to mere labels
, as irrelevant to politics as your hair color. I’d like to see those tired allegiances useful for one thing: keeping congresscritters from all sitting on one side of the room. As Dick Morris says, the politicians will follow the voters, who are their food supply. He describes how true democracy is on the cusp and how he imagines politicians will interact in a seemingly 1 to 1 way with voters, but his is a technical contrivance, a parlor trick of indexed sound bites.

It’s the Community, Stupid!

What people want is to reach out to their neighbors and have an agreeable conversation. A real connection with a human trumps Morris’ vision of mechanical intermediation by his own Internet startup, vote.com. His analysis is spot on, but his vision is a business plan. I’m searching for the web applications that, like meetup.com, connect me with you so we can find agreement on the issues that matter and discover how trivial are the things that seem to divide us.

The Revolution will be Engineered

Tomorrow I’ll suggest some web applications so the experts can have some specifics to dismiss out of hand.

9:08:20 AM    

Today brings news of technology that’s unexpectedly heartwarming.

David Pogue sings iChat video’s praises today following a heartwarming trans-Atlantic session with his family a couple of weeks ago when he was Lonely in London:

“There’s a lot of junk in technology, a lot of hassle and frustration, a lot of disappointment. But this moment was like a TV commercial. It was an emotional, powerful, simple, perfect example of how technology can change a moment, solve a problem, and despite the gulf of time and distance, bring you face to face with the people you love.”

And Doc published a photo gallery of an iSight tour of Dean HQ that Halley and I gave him yesterday. We just walked around the halls, introducing Doc to all the people we ran into. Doc calls it PiPhone – Picture-in-Picture Phone. One of the heartwarmers of the walk around was running into Campaign Manager Joe Trippi, who distributed copies of the Cluetrain Manifesto to the staff as a guide to the campaign’s manifesto destiny. Joe was genuinely delighted to “meet” Doc, who invited him out to the Bay area to keynote a conference. Joe’s amazing wife, Kathi Lash, the campaign’s designated sparkplug and Regional Field Desk, was right there with Joe, literally backing him up as usual.

Max Headroom Meets Kathi and Joe

And Samantha Shapiro published the New York Times Magazine article she started researching last September. It’s such an intimate look at the campaign staff that Zack and Clay felt exposed and, frankly, uncomfortable. but it’s a masterful story, full of humanity and the voice of authentic people doing important work based on heart and belief. Though there’s heartbreak in their story, it’s mostly heartwarming.

Heartcore Media

It’s an aspect of the campaign that we don’t associate with our preconceptions of hardcore power politics, where fat cats in smoke-filled rooms decide which of them will be offered to the public and how much money will be invested in their packaging and coronation.

There’s a different kind of power in politics now, unwelcome in Washington. Peer power is, literally, the power to peer into the hearts of real people taking unexpected actions for improbable candidates. These Internet media allow us to drill past dull or phony appearances into the heart of lightness. Blogs and comments and RSS feeds and video calls and all the rest give us X-Ray vision into the heart of what matters.

Plato would be delighted.

8:02:44 PM    

An interesting question is whether any government employees at any level believe they are rulers rather than mere employees.

The next question is whether We the People are willing to put up with those kind of employees.

Or should we ask such questions of people who decide, globally, who dies to advance our national interest?

Or whether the mainstream press should report such things?

The next question is whether we believe that there are people in our government who are capable of killing others to protect their political interests. Our presence in Iraq suggests the answer. The administration’s willingness to withdraw hastily before the election is another answer.

Or whether the press would kill such a delicious story to protect publishers’ interests.

The following article wonders how a State Department intelligence expert in the bureau involved with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction does the following:

1. Falls head down into a 20-foot deep window well…
2. Although he has no authorized access to a windowed area or the roof…
3. Without his suit coat or shoes…
4. While his wife is waiting for him in the parking garage…
5. Reported by a former US Naval officer and intelligence analyst.

---

MYSTERY SURROUNDS DEATH

OF STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL

by Wayne Madsen
(special to From The Wilderness)

© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

November 20, 2003 (FTW), WASHINGTON — In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal’s death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media.

Interestingly, the FOX report states that State Department officials confirmed Kokal’s death to The Washington Post yet the Post – according to an archive search – has published nothing at all about Kokal’s death. A subsequent search revealed that the Post had made a short three-paragraph entry the death in the Metro section on November 7,  2003. However, the Post entry stated that Kokal did not work in intelligence and the story does not show up in the archives.

Kokal’s INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived in Arlington, Virginia.

However, a colleague of Kokal’s told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over “problems” with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself out in such a manner so that he would “land on his head.” At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks.

State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser. Kokal’s former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former intelligence agents with the CIA or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.

INR and other State Department officials report that a “chill” has set in at the State Department following Kokal’s defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal.

(Wayne Madsen, a frequent FTW contributor, is a former US Naval officer and intelligence analyst who is currently an author, freelance writer and commentator in Washington, D.C.)

12:51:33 PM