How do you actively promote starting a war, when most people want peace? How do you convince the peaceful majority of a nation's populace that unprovoked aggression is rational? How can you sell death and destruction, in the name of peace? This is the systematic practice of WarMarketing.

Definition: WarMarketing -- Promoting fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), by spin-doctoring known false information with the deliberate intent to justify otherwise irrational acts of aggression. The skillful productization of premeditated acts of mass-violence that is inflicted upon many innocent people, with the ulterior motive to license "officially approved" personal financial gain for a few guilty people.

Definition: WarMarketer -- One who enables a warmonger to package, position and promote the plan to stir up war. One who conceives of and evolves the deceptive re-branding of the government entity previously known as the "War Department," into the more palatable "Department of Defense."

"The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible.

But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to...

[...] In the blogosphere, there's no shortage of airtime, but there's still a shortage of attention."

An hour is the time it takes for a liter of boiling water to move one kilometer

Tim Jarrett summarizes what I said two days ago about why Google search results are often thickened with blogs, and why the situtation could quickly be corrected by full exposure of print journal archives on the Web:

In other words, if you choose not to participate on the public, freely linkable, not for pay Web, don¹t complain when others who do participate by the rules of the game are easier to find.

Dave agrees:

Anyway, Doc Searls, the happy blogger (always!) finds a glass-half-full solution. The print journalists should walk down the hall to their publishers' office and request that they make their archive publicly available so it can be indexed by the search engines. Google is just indexing what's on the Web. If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple.

A project of PRWatch.org, Disinfopedia was started in last January - almost exactly 2 years after Wikipedia, after which it is modelled. It describes itself as

"a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. We are already working on 1015 articles.

Anyone, including you, can edit any article right now. See the Disinfopedia FAQ for more background information about the project. Read the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can use and contribute to the Disinfopedia.

The content of Disinfopedia is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it is free and will remain so forever. See Disinfopedia:Copyrights for the details and open content and free content for background."

This could turn into a highly useful resource for making sense of much of what we read and hear, complementary to things like Who owns what. I'm kind of worried about the possibility of edit wars, though, should that wiki become very popular - is it possible to write neutrally or objectively about such a topic?

Proverbs for Paranoids 3: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, page 251

The sketches, of course, were beautiful. But what really struck me was the sheer breadth of this one man's talents. da Vinci wrote treatises on physics, anatomy, astronomy, warfare, art, and other topics. Without a formal education, da Vinci never mastered Latin, the language in which academic treatises were written at that time. Some scholars dismissed his work.

da Vinci replied that he was a "disciple of experience":

"[They may say] I'm a man without learning, [but] I will cite something far more worthy, quoting experience..."

In another essay, da Vinci writes that

...the subjects I am dealing with are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words, and experience is the muse of all who write well. And so, as my muse, I will cite her in every case.

500 years ago, da Vinci understood the power of experience. Academic pedigree is fine, but a direct grasp of experience is essential. Analyzing and learning from direct experience is innately more powerful than hiding behind obscure academic methods. da Vinci "got it." Maybe he was the first.

500 years later, there are still those academics whose frameworks, methods, and terminology talk *about* experience but don't help much in bringing people to an understanding of the experience itself. Remember the Italian scholars who were so concerned with da Vinci's knowledge of Latin (the "method" of the day) that they completely missed (or dismissed) his genius - and didn't help others to see it.

"The computer-networked, digital world poses enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian, can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival."

"If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character than one in which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government. Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the "authorities" to monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear."

"What happens, in a police bureaucracy, if someone releases a nanotech plague into the environment? If the police can suppress information on the structure of the nanobots, then only a handful of government bureaus and hand-picked researchers may be allowed to work on a cure. Millions could die waiting for the bureaucracy to solve the problem. On the other hand, if the molecular structure of the pest is published worldwide, anyone with the expertise could help design defensive technology."

"I have been engaging in some discussion lately about the begining of the universe, and for the first time (amazingly enough) I pushed the 'Where did it come from' question through as far as it can go. And, not surprisingly, it doesn't go anywhere. No matter how you try to explain the origin of the universe, none of the theories can account for the cause of it. What caused the big bang? Where did 'God' come from? etc.

From this, i concluded that there cannot be a begining. If there was a begining, then something must have caused that begining, and so something was there before the begining.

This doesn't answer anything, but I am yet to see another way around the causality problem (defining something as 'acausal' doesn't solve it, it just dodges it).

Now, linked to this 'where did the universe come from?' problem is, 'Where did the incredible laws, which make our universe a coherent place come from?', which is what I think underlies it all. Once the universe began, it is easy to say 'the laws guided the evolution of everything from there'....but how did the laws come to be? Why are they so perfect?"

"Another thing that emerged from our conversation was her use of the term self-evident. I mentioned that the person who had first pointed me toward the introvert article had an e-mail address of 'self@evident…', which she loved. But I said that the whole concept of something being 'self-evident' seems to me to very specific to introverts. Where an introvert sees something as obvious based on observed actions, an extrovert is more likely to want to explore it, to triangulate views from multiple sources before forming an opinion. To be valid, for me, an opinion must include input from other sources—I don’t believe any of us can be 'objective' or see a full version of what’s around us, and without asking what others see, I don’t believe I’m getting a full picture.

That's where the conversation got particularly interesting—I told her that I thought the extrovert’s desire to discuss things endlessly was the antithesis to the belief that something is 'self-evident'. She said she’d always assumed that the talk was an announcement of fully formed ideas, not a thought-forming process—that the people talking “already had their ideas, and felt a need to subject us to them.” And I replied that for me, that talk is really the only thought-forming process; the thoughts aren’t solid until they’re expressed, discussed, poked, prodded, etc. Internally, thoughts are amorphous and unformed. When 'exposed to the light' through expression, you can see if they’re solid."

"Hey great - then we can all get a taxonomy for the world and we can all argue about which words are more "right" than others, then one group can be more "right" more of the time and can start to dominate and then we can all rest happy that we all agree.

For me the whole point is that the web is just a bunch of words one can link to. We each imbue those words and the links to them with our own meanings and any collective meaning arises out of lots of people linking to the same words in the same contexts."

"I think both views are correct. We need structured and unstructured blogging that we can "just" link to."

"Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.

Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.

What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas.

...continued in Towards Structured Blogging"

"There are three things at stake. The first is, extending a monopoly to a few large organizations about what people can or cannot know and express. This is really about the control of information and it has the potential to become over time a kind of private totalitarianism. That is not an exaggeration since it has already happened in the United States. The reason that the U.S. is behaving in the completely irrational and dangerous way that it is, is because we have erected private totalitarianism and are suffering a reality distortion field that is as dangerous as the one erupted in Germany in the 1930s. But not being driven by the government, but being driven by the media. Being driven by ourselves. I fear erecting a system which highly advantages a very few corporate channels for human intellectual exchange.

Secondly, I fear that Digital Rights Management today is Political Rights Management tomorrow. That embedding these kinds of technological controls into the very architecture of computing has the capacity to become a form of political control in the not so distant future. Because you're putting at a very basic level surveillance capacity, control over what information may or may not travel, and a whole range of things in the architecture that can be very easily used to suppress dissent.

Third, I am very afraid, that by wrapping a large amount of human knowledge up into bottles that can no longer be opened except at a price, much of it will be wrapped up in crypto bottles that in a very fairly short time cannot be opened even at a price. A huge amount of human creativity will simply be lost for future generations."