Listics

Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair Columnist, played the pundit panel game on CNN tonight and told the story clearly and concisely. “It was a take down.”

While Jeff Greenfield and Mickey Kaus camped it up with shared assertions regarding bloggers and “the story,” Wolff tried to help them re-focus on the actual story: Dan Rather and CBS News were set-up by the Republicans. The truth about GWB’s character, his unfitness for office, the simple-minded self-centered behavior patterns and the odor of misspent privilege that clings to him like flies in the latrine were packaged nicely in the journo-ju jitsu that turned Dan Rather into the patsy and made GWB look like a poor little put-upon rich boy.

We’re a nation of enablers and co-dependents and Georgie is our pet addict.

I’m intepreting Wolff’s implicit message broadly, but I’m also inferring that Jeff Greenfield, who rode the train that carried Bobby Kennedy home to his final rest, agreed. And that inference is based on a flash cut of the camera to his raised eyebrow when Wolff was talking. Greenfield’s a pro, and he couldn’t openly ride that train with Wolff, but you could see it in the nuanced expression… the pros know. It was a take-down. Discrediting CBS was just the icing on the cake. The story about Bush got buried. The new story about gullible Dan smothered it.

Mission accomplished. The truth was buried even deeper than before. Now, who took Rather down, and when it comes out, who gets busted?

Reprise… just one more time: This has nothing to do with the bloggers. This has nothing to do with the documents. This is all about burying the truth so deep it can’t be excavated until after the Bush inauguration in January.

Imagine that!

It’s been pointed out to me that William Gibson actually said the thing about the “future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.” I thought it was Bruce Sterling. Wonder if someone can point me to the Gibson source-age?

Shelley Powers and Joi Ito, among others, opened a conversation regarding the relative truth to be found in Wikipedia, a compendium that relies on its readers to update and hone content. Wikipedia has few editorial policies, perhaps the guiding and most important is that those who contribute should strive to maintain a Neutral Point of View (NPOV).

Following that discussion, I happened upon a reference to Investopedia.com in a column in Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling.” Specifically Krugman offered a definition of “one-time charge” as found in Investopedia.com

I looked it up. Investopedia offers a discussion of one-time charges in an article about financial statement chicanery, but it doesn’t offer a direct reference through its own search function. How would Wikipedia handle this I wondered? It turns out that neither “one-time charge” nor “one-time event” has its own listing in Wikipedia, but the site offered me the opportunity to create one. Even so, “one time events” are discussed in the “Income” article, and the sense one gets about the use of “one time events” is that there is some controversy and that critics generally think of them as ways to fool investors. This is the line that Investopedia is pushing, but in Wikipedia it is presented in an arguably neutral way (the use of the word “supposedly” diminishes the neutrality somewhat):

Pro forma income is an estimate of how much the company would have earned without including the negative effect of exceptional “one-time events”, supposedly in order to show investors how much money the company would have made under normal circumstances if these exceptional, one-time events had not occurred. Critics charge that, in most cases, the “one-time events” are normal business events, such as an acquisition of another company or a write off of a cancelled project or division, and that pro forma reporting is an attempt to mislead investors by painting a rosy financial picture.

If you simply Google the phrase “one-time charge” the top listing is from Disinfopedia. Ourobouros takes another bite! The Disinfopedia article on one-time charges points to the original column by Krugman that I’d read in “The Great Unraveling.”

What does all this mean? Well, for one thing, triangulating the general sense of the meaning of a single accounting term through Wikipedia, Disinvopedia, and Investopedia, we see that the popular culture is biased toward an understanding put forward by Mr. Krugman. I don’t know much more about one-time charges than I knew from reading his article. All of the Wiki paths I travelled seem to be in different regions of the same layer of the onion, and in order to deepen my understanding, I’ll have to peel another layer or three.

Hip-hop Artists and Spoken Word Poets are self-organizing “Slam Bush” events across the country -already in 20+ cities- with a $5000 grand prize and trip to the finals in Miami.

Check out the video by Free Range Graphics…

You got no choice
that’s what you all been told to listen to.
These criminals in the office want to control and limit you.
All the political power is ours
but these cowards’ goals and principles is to imprison you.
Mr. President, you inherited the devilish ways of your Dad,
you the biggest terrorist there ever is.
It’s evident you’re negative
and your father was bothered before
so you used the war as a score to settle it.
World peace is said to be the planet’s plans,
so you attack the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Bin Laden you let escape and through the sand he ran.
Now he’s taping death threats on a Handi-cam.
Non-humane, Iraq, Saddam Hussein,
didn’t find weapons still went and bombed with planes.
Arms are aimed Children and moms are maimed,
C4 killing soldiers when the car’s detained.
And you still getting money from these corporations,
and how you pay them back is with these altercations.
Under no terms
you have my vote earned,
not while the sun burns,
each day the globe turns.
Problems evolving,
partial involvement could solve it
if you weren’t golfing so often
Believe me y’all, its much worse than it looks.
So let’s vote, and stop beating around the Bush!

— Wordsworth, 2024

High intensity events arrive with the force of dreams, Tom writes in today’s post in the aftermath of the hurricane. He writes of human experience and human needs. He offers a list of needs met neither by FEMA nor the massively supported media gear, trucks, satellites, etc. that beam out to us and to the world a heap of, on the one hand, terrifically optimistic and bogus information spewed from the lips of officials, and on the other, fatuous human interest stories about people in whom the cosmetically perfect reporters have no human interest…

Read Riders on the Storm…

Intense opportunity at Stanford November 5, 6, 7… the Accelerating Change conference is featuring all the people Dave Winer would like to be! Check out this paper co-authored by Lada Adamic to get my drift. Unfortunately, Dave scheduled his Blogger confab to conflict. What else is new?

Denise drags the FCC out of the bag in this coverage yesterday of Michael Powell’s “Fireside Chat.” Here’s a sample of her logging…

[Powell says] Indecency laws apply only to broadcast: not cable TV, not satellite TV, not the Internet. Government has a heightened interest in the use of broadcast spectrum because it is so scarce. The indecency statute was last modified in 1948. You might be shocked if you read it. It’s in the U.S. Criminal Code, and includes provision not just for fines, but up to two years jail time. What the courts have found is indecency is protected speech, but the goverment can regulate the time, place, and manner in which it occurs. They’ve said the statute is constitutional, and Congress (who Powell works for) acknowledges its obligation to enforce it. It’s the law. Stern and others are free to push the envelope. What’s happened in the last few years, in the year 2024 there were 111 public complaints about television. In the first three months of this year, there were 545,000. With the exponential increase in public complaints, you’ve seen an increase in FCC enforcement.