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Friday, November 29, 2002 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."
- - Henry Kissinger
RHINO HERE:
On Wednesday, shrub signed legislation to finally create a commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. Does anyone else find it not just sleazy that he named Henry Kissinger to lead the panel, but even blatant. Like thumbing his nose at everyone who's been calling for such an investigation, including the families of many people killed in the WTC. At the signing, shrub says, "Dr. Kissinger will bring broad experience, clear thinking and careful judgment to this important task. Mr. Secretary, thank you for returning to the service of your nation." The NY Times article on this...
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html
...reads, "Kissinger, one of the best known American diplomats of the 20th century, was Secretary of State to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for cease-fire negotiations during the Vietnam war. Kissinger also made a determined peacemaking effort in the Middle East and made repeated trips to the region."
What I mean by thumbing his nose at us is that shrub, his daddy and everyone else who's been paying attention for the last 3 decades knows that Kissinger has been a shadowy character, involved in overthrowing unco-operative governments, assassinating political leaders and generally manipulating world events as it pleases him and his cronies. And shrub and them know we know.
Kissinger has been under investigation for orchestrating covert US support for the Chilean government of Agosto Pinochet; infamous for kidnapping, torture and the murder of thousands of Chilean citizens in the early 1970's. Just one of many examples of his foreign diplomacy in behalf of democracy. Others? His involvement in the war in Indochina, mass murder in Bangladesh, planned assassinations in Santiago, Nicosia and Washington DC, and genocide in East Timor. For more on all this read the short but powerful book, "The Trial Of Henry Kissinger" by Christopher Hitches
If anyone thought the U.S. citizenry would ever find out what really happened in the events leading up to the 9/11 tragedy, Kissinger's appointment to lead the investigation is nothing but an assurance we'll never find out. I urge you to call your Senators and Congresspeople and insist they call for a real investigation. Join me in doing that on Monday.
Speaking of good books, there's a cool website called allconsuming.net which tracks thousands of blogs, monitoring them for mentions of books. When a mention is made, it gets posted along with any other mentions to show what books are being talked about the most in the "blogosphere".
Very cool - check it out.
http://www.allconsuming.net
And speaking of "blogosphere", below the line is an excerpt from a somewhat dated, but still very fascinating and relevant article about how bloggers and journalists are now interrelating to effect not only how, but also what news gets out to the public.
9:20:28 AM 
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by John Hiler, Micro Content News, Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Trying to understand the complex relationship between bloggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo. I've taken a few stabs at it already, and learned a lot along the way. Lesson One: Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power. Lesson Two: Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges. Lesson Three: Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capital-J Journalists. Still no matter what I did, the weblog/journalism relationship seemed to defy reduction. No metaphor seemed complex enough to capture the subtleties of their interactions. I greatly enjoyed one set of metaphors from fellow metablogger Doctor Weevil:
blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep
bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants
But surely bloggers are more than just ticks and dung beetles feeding off of their journalist hosts! True, the majority of links in weblogs are to articles written by journalists... but I've seen too many articles by journalists pulled straight from weblogs, Blogdex, and Metafilter to buy fully into the Bloggers/Parasite metaphor.
SEARCHING FOR A METAPHOR
Were Bloggers parasites feasting off their Journalist hosts? Or were Bloggers creating a new form of grassroots journalism, one that threatened the extinction of Journalism as we know it? Then one day it hit me: parasites & hosts, grassroots & extinction... they were all biological metaphors. All of a sudden, it all made sense! The truth is, Bloggers and Journalists are both parasitic organisms. In biology, we have a term for relationship that seems mutually parasitic: symbiosis, when both organisms benefit from working together. In many ways, bloggers and journalists are in a mutually symbiotic relationship, working together to report, filter and break the news.
INTRODUCING THE BLOGOSPHERE
Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed the Blogosphere. The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system...
THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IS POSTED AT:
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogosphere.htm
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law ( http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ).
All copyrights belong to original publisher.
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9:15:49 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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