Truth is now Constitutionally protected, like religion, and everyone is allowed to have their own version. It is also protected by the media, and they will not challenge anyone's version of the truth, merely report on it. What constitutes evidence for a truth claim is also being lost - one is permitted, encouraged to invent anonymous sources to say whatever one wants said.

Blasphemers who try to separate out facts from non-facts have no place in our government, media or ultimately, our society.

As a result, all our other liberties are going down the drain.

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The Truth Shall Set You Free - but we don't want to be free, we want to be secure.

I always thought of Ludlum's fictional universe as, well, purely fictional. All those secret cabals wielding near omnipotent power - well, as omnipotent as any human organization can be imagined to be - are literary devices.

These days, I'm not so sure. For instance, there is no way to explain the WaPo as a response to market forces. (On the other hand, maybe it is angling to be acquired by Rupert Murdoch?)

Over on turcopolier, retd Col W. Patrick Lang wants the US to intervene in Iran to get a government we can negotiate with. We are faced with a difficult moral choice, he believes. If we do nothing, then we will be inevitably led to war by the Israeli lobby, the neocons and the mainstream media, and the reasonable among us will not be able to stop it. So interference is the greater kindness, in the long run, to the Iranian people.

The only way this can be true, IMO, is again, the hidden powers, that can override reason in the quest for their obscure goals.

Then look at Obama himself. Are his about-faces the normal behavior of the politician; or are there unseen forces that have him too in their grip?

From the NYT article:

James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, and his aides were concerned about the collection of “meta-data” of American e-mail messages, which show broad patterns of e-mail traffic by identifying who is e-mailing whom, current and former officials say. Lawyers at the Justice Department believed that the tracing of e-mail messages appeared to violate federal law.

The temptation for Yahoo, Google, telecoms to do the same - trace who is calling whom - is very high; it provides valuable commercial information.

For instance,

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/snazzy.index.html

or click on signature.

"Social Network Analysis for Telecom Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Management.

SNAzzy - Social Network Analysis for Business Intelligence - is primarily a telecom social network analysis project. SNAzzy analyzes the social network formed by customers of telecom operators and derives non-trivial social network intelligence about the call network. The intelligence is often in terms of global structure of the overall call network, automatically discovering communities, and analysing customer churn.

SNAzzy is also capable of analyzing any kind of social network or graph, not just Telecom networks."

http://telephonyonline.com/wireless/news/ibm-analytics-tapped-0415/

"Apr 15, 2009 9:55 AM, By Ed Gubbins

IBM’s new analytics middleware promises to predict churn before it happens – perhaps with enough time to prevent it.

IBM’s Timely Analytics for Business Intelligence (TABI) middleware makes use of the company’s Massively Scalable data-collection technology and rapidly analyzes patterns in call activity, identifying social groups and yielding information IBM says could be used to predict churn, target ad campaigns and detect fraud and abnormal activity.

Though the TABI technology is still in IBM’s labs and not yet commercially productized, some carriers are already beginning to try it out. MTN South Africa recently concluded a trial of TABI aimed at churn prediction.

Call pattern analysis can identify not only social groups among mobile subscribers but the “leaders” – or most influential members of each group. That’s important for several reasons, one of which is the fact that, according to IBM’s calculations, members of the group are more likely to churn if the leaders do and, if the leaders already use other carriers, followers are more likely to switch to the leaders’ provider.

Mobile operators already mine call data to make such predictions, but historically they have stored that data in large volumes, culling analysis of it over a one- to three-month period. However, that may be too late to prevent some customers from churning, IBM said. With TABI, IBM is promising much faster analysis – on the order of days, or even culled in response to specific events."

In his June 6, 2004 NYT column, Paul Krugman wrote:

"Part of the genius of George Bush's political operatives is their ability to persuade people (Colin Powell, Tony Blair) to betray their principles, to say and do things they will later regret, in support of a presumed shared cause. Paul O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, falls into the same category..."

Some inverted application of this formula seems to apply to Obama???

But I am transparent! sotto voce to x-rays.

Yglesias: "Inserting the strategic priorities of the West directly into the situation in a heavy-handed way would not, ultimately, have helped improve the outcome in any clear way."

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/06/how-the-berlin-wall-fell.php

or click on signature.

I imagine that the average Iranian's reaction would be similar to the average Indian's in such a situation: this is our mess, leave us to figure it out, don't interfere.

LOL!

Ayatollah Montazeri wrote: "I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,' and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

See, there is no people's body in Iran like the Congress before whom the police and army are accountable. That is why Montazeri is invoking God.

On the other hand, maybe he is aware that the Congress agrees that receiving and following orders is an excuse, and that is why he resorts to God.