In response to these latest outrages against competence and decency, and in support of the ongoing digital reformation, our coalition – comprised of veterans and anti-war groups, a faction of the Anonymous movement, the distributed think-tank Project PM, and a loose network of journalists, media professionals, scientists, former intelligence and government officials, and related organizations – announces a stepped-up campaign of information and direct action which will culminate in a rally and press conference on the steps of New York City Hall on April 7th at 3:00 pm. This event, the Rally for Information Freedom, will be supplemented by a campaign on the part of Anonymous, Project PM, and related entities to bring attention to the dozens of significant stories that have been largely ignored due to the unfortunate dynamics by which too many media have come to operate. The New York conference – conceived by longtime resident activist, Navy veteran, and acclaimed photographer John Penley – will feature about a dozen speakers including Penley, author and Project PM founder Barrett Brown, key Anonymous activist and Chanology co-instigator Gregg Housh, former civil litigator and author/blogger Glenn Greenwald, and National Lawyer’s Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian. Messages from other figures in the pro-transparency movement will also be presented in lieu of their ability to attend.

Never in human history has mankind endured a period in which so much of the terminology employed at its end would have been unrecognizable at its beginning. The last twenty years have changed the landscape in which man operates, expanding the potential for human collaboration in such a way as to eliminate the barriers that rendered the nation-state a viable institution. As those barriers fall, so too does the primacy of the world’s governments, which in turn have increasingly found themselves unable to maintain the secrecy through which they have run a great portion human affairs with results that may be politely characterized as mixed. The various states have responded to these developments with a collective message to the effect that such secrecy is necessary if they are to continue operating without the informed consent of their respective populations, though this has generally been expressed in slightly different words. Meanwhile, several such governments have, through their specific conduct in the wake of the last year, provided a timely reminder as to why it is that many of those who truly value liberty and morality have lost faith in those same governments.

This event is part of an effort to counter the dishonesty and injustice of the states which have reacted to such emergent phenomena with censorship and persecution while also forging greater coordination among the various parties that have been fighting on behalf of the cause of informational liberty. To this end, a series of meetings both formal and otherwise will be held throughout the first week of April; further information will be relayed in a second press release in late March.

John Penley is a Vietnam era Navy vet who was put in solitary confinement in 1984 by the U.S. government for a past protest at the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Plant. A 59-year-old veteran of New York City housing, anti-war and civil rights activism, Penley is also a longtime photojournalist whose work has been pubilshed by most NYC major media outlets; his photo archive is housed at New York University’s Tamiment Library.

Barrett Brown is a writer and author as well as the founder of Project PM. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Onion, New York Press, Skeptical Inquirer, American Atheist, and other outlets. He has been active in the Anonymous movement for several years and serves as an advocate for efficient, ethical alternatives to traditional methods of governance.

Gregg Housh is an Internet activist involved with the online non-group Anonymous. His work has included coordinating global demonstrations against human rights abuses in the Church of Scientology and assisting Iranian members of the Green Movement in reaching the global media. Having built a strong sense of trust among several disparate subgroups of Anonymous, Housh now acts as a media interpreter for major online initiatives such as Operation Payback.

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator, the author of two bestselling books on the American socio-political environment, and a longtime blogger who currently writes for Salon. He now serves as one of the nation’s most formidable advocates of Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, and information freedom in general. Depending on his location on the day of the event, he’ll be speaking either in person or via relay.

Heidi Boghosian is the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association established in 1937. She is co-host of the weekly civil liberties radio program Law and Disorder on WBAI, New York and over 30 national affiliate stations. She has published several articles and reports on policing, protest, and the First Amendment.

Professor Jonathan Farley is a mathematics professor whom Seed Magazine named “one of 15 people who have shaped the global conversation on science since 1995,” with a career including stints at MIT, Vanderbilt, and Johannes Kepler University. His work has appeared in Time, The Guardian, Huffington Post, and other publications; he’s also appeared on the BBC and NPR and occasionally serves as a political advisor in addition to his anti-war activism and related pursuits.

Bill Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and defending the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bill joined CCR on sabbatical from his position as law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977. He has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years. Bill received the 2006 Camille Gravel Civil Pro Bono Award from the Federal Bar Association New Orleans Chapter. Bill received the 2006 Stanford Law School National Public Service Award and the 2006 National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman award. He has also been an active volunteer lawyer with School of the Americas Watch and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (2003) and Storms Still Raging: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice (2008). In 2003, he was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA and is the recipient of the 2004 SALT Teaching Award presented by the Society of American Law Teachers.

Vagabond Beaumont is a writer, artist and filmmaker. He’s worked in the Puerto Rican independence movement since 1997 and has organized rallies, protests and marches and created murals, pamphlets and agitprop in support of thatcause with the artist collective RICANSTRUCTION Netwerk. His work has been featured in Blu Magazine, AWOL, SALVO and Left Turn. His first feature film, MACHETERO, covers the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican independence and has screened at festivals around the world, winning awards in South Africa, Wales, England, Thailand, Ireland and New York.

Sebastian Gillen is a 21-year-old graduate of Tufts University. When he was eight years old, he was diagnosed with Stage IV Neuroblastoma, a rare form of pediatric cancer, and given two weeks to live. More than ten years later, he is still cancer-free and an active advocate for childhood cancer research. He has spoken at rallies on Capitol Hill and Greg Norman’s Shark Shootout, among other places. He thinks science is totally awesome and runs a blog at Weareinthefuture.com and administrates Project PM’s Science Journalism Program.

Faith Laugier is a musician, artist, activist, and New York native who’s worked with many of the city’s human rights organizations, art & cultural non-profits and homeless centers in an effort to advance the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She believes in government that is for the people and by the people.

Barrett Brown barriticus@gmail.com (512) 560-2302

John Penley (917) 204-0857

The post Rally for North Africa, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning – April, NYC appeared first on The Faster Times.

The post Anonymous launches new effort, clarifies own nature appeared first on The Faster Times.

- Erik Kain, Secrecy and the State

There is no period in human history that matches the years between 1990 and 2010 in the degree to which the common terminology used at end would have been unrecognizable to those who lived at its beginning. Because the dynamic which has caused this to be the case does not seem to have crested, we ourselves should not expect to recognize some great portion of the terminology that will be in regular use in 2030. It is even possible that 2030 will be as different from 2010 as 2010 is from 1990, although this would quite a feat; the central dynamic by which each of several billion people may now communicate and collaborate with any of those other several billion people has already been established, and all that remains now is for more of those people to realize the implications of this and then act upon those implications, as they have already begun to do, even if the media at large is still having trouble with the former.

I will have a lot more to say in this vein presently as my main focus for the last several years has been emergent internet dynamics in general and Anonymous and Wikileaks in particular, but for now I’ll have to confine myself to providing an overview of what’s been happening over the past few days and what will be happening next.

The other day I mentioned in passing that I’ve long been in communication with a certain fellow who, along with a couple of other individuals, launched Operation Chanology in an effort to bring wider attention to the malevolence and misconduct of the Church of Scientology. This was the first global effort of its sort, and despite the successful prosecution of a small percentage of participants, it was in many ways a great success (not least of which because it’s not entirely over). This person, Gregg Housh, kept his identity secret until such time as the CoS tracked him down and began legal proceedings; having been outed anyway, he’s lately become a sort of go-to guy for those media which find themselves in need of someone who can relay a sense of what Anonymous is all about (he’s had 29 interview requests over the last 24 hours and will be appearing on CNN tomorrow), having so far this week gone on Canadian television and been interviewed for a New York Times piece on that latter organization, which became an ally of his own a while back when it agreed to host stolen church documents.

I’d already been talking to Housh more than usual over the last few days due to the death of our mutual friend Sean Carasov, who was also caught and prosecuted by the CoS. A couple days back he told me he was unhappy with the NYT interview, particularly in light of a new attack on Mastercard and Paypal by another “branch” of Anonymous with which he is not in contact.

Just for the record, Gregg and I both think that this was the result of an editing error; Somaiya was afterwards very apologetic and the online version has been fixed. I mention this not just because Housh wanted to clarify his involvement for the record, but also because it goes to the heart of the difficulties that many media outlets have had in trying to get a handle on this culture and its unstructured nature, which I’ll also have more to say about it later.

An hour ago, Housh just notified me a few minutes ago that the same small group that launched Chanology – also via a YouTube video announcement – has just now put up another one concerning the various violent threats against Wikileaks and Julian Assange as well as their intent to take action on the matter. By way of another clarification, although Housh was in the IRC channel in which this was conceived and created by his longtime partners, he was too busy doing interviews at the time to lend a hand.

A moment ago I asked Housh what this meant in terms of what we can expect from his corner of the Anonymous movement, as well as from the other makeshift “cells”.

Keep letting targets present themselves, and then attack, is what it seems to be right now.

Presumably I’ll have more to relate in the coming days.

The post The aims of Anonymous appeared first on The Faster Times.

And Robin of Berkeley lays her finger on an important point in suggesting trolls “intermix trolling with downloading internet porn.”

As a longtime troll, I can confirm this. And speaking of trolling, a very old friend of mine who’s a news producer at an affiliate back east appears to have left a couple of comments over there in the guise of Marvin Olasky, as he likes to do for reasons that would take too long to explain but which involve a series of incidents from ten years ago coupled with the fact that Olasky looks funny and has an amusing name. He actually had Stacy going for a minute there, too, but then had to go and blow his cover by writing, “In fact, if anyone wants any dirt on the dude, just axe me.” The guy really does have dirt on me, though.

Anywho, allow me to go through all of this paragraph by paragraph:

This past summer, during the uproar over the Michael Hastings Rolling Stone article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Barrett Brown wrote an article for Vanity Fair‘s Web site criticizing National Review editor Rich Lowry for his dismissive attitude toward Hastings’ article. And then something weird happened. Three weeks later, Brown posted this video “challenging” Lowry to respond:

Then he posts a video in which I do just that. So far so good.

What Brown has dramatized here is his sense of his own importance, and his frustration at the refusal of the world to recognize that importance. There is a yawning chasm of cognitive dissonance between Brown’s grandiose self-concept and the feedback he is receiving from the indifferent world.

I don’t know how to go about disproving such a thing so I’ll let it stand. But here’s when everything gets wacky:

Notice, however, that Brown speaks of “my colleague Michael Hastings,” expressing a collegiality that probably exists mainly in Brown’s mind. Brown and Hastings both had blogs at True/Slant, the now-defunct site which, despite funding from Forbes Media and Fuse Capital, flamed out in 15 months after publishing such memorable works as Rick Ungar’s “Send the Body to Glenn Beck.” But while Brown and Hastings were both True/Slant contributors, it wasn’t like they were hanging out around the office coffee machine, swapping stories.

No kidding; Hastings was spending his time largely between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vermont at that point whereas I wasn’t. What’s odd about this is that I actually mention in the article to which he links, by way of full disclosure, that Hastings and I have a professional relationship (as I’ll note in a moment, McCain is unfamiliar with the concept of full disclosure). We talked on the phone several times and exchanged some number of e-mails both before and after he came out with the McChrystal piece, as Hastings is interested in Project PM and the two of us have certain shared goals in terms of media reform and have had run-ins with some of the same publications (which is another story altogether). I did radio interviews immediately after the McChrystal thing because I knew some of the back story to the article as well as Hastings’ view on journalism. In fact, he even provided the cover blurb for my upcoming book. Again, some of this is noted in the very article to which McCain himself links in the course of making the case that I am crazy because I refer to Hastings as my “colleague,” and the rest can be confirmed by Andrew Sullivan, with whom I discussed the events after he linked to my piece. So, yeah, that’s weird.

So here is Brown, staring into the camera and addressing “Rich” as if he were talking to a buddy, while referring to Hastings as his colleague, in a video recorded July 15 — three weeks after the June 23 publication of the Vanity Fair piece that Brown references, and two weeks before True/Slant’s July 29 shutdown. The timing seems significant, as if this were a cry for help.

True/Slant was a fine little outfit but it paid less than any of the other outlets for which I write, so I’m not sure why its closing, which had been announced to us months before, should be the thing to put me over the edge. As for the video, not everyone shares McCain’s rhetorically convenient assessment of whether it was worthwhile.

You might get the idea that Barrett Brown is kind of a moody loner, isolated and alienated, attempting to invent a social context for himself where none exists. And if that’s your impression of Brown, you might find it highly significant that the primary subject of Barrett Brown’s online videos is . . . Barrett Brown.

Moody loner? I guess I have to assassinate someone now in order to impress Jody Foster or Michael Hastings.

You might also find it significant thatBrown has described himself as being “raised by a New Age single mother who suggested that I was an Indigo Child with an alien soul, required that I meditate with her daily, prompted me to learn the more potentially significant quatrains of Nostradamus, and had me keep a dream journal next to my bed in order to better divine the future by way of my eternal connection to the collective unconscious.”

Oh, I haven’t even begun dishing out the dirt on my mom, who wouldn’t let me go to this one block party when I was 9 because she thought I was going to get in a fight with some kid whose name I forget. Plus I’m now absolutely certain that she threw away a lot of my best t-shirts because there were little holes in them that you wouldn’t even notice.

Sarcastic? Tongue-in-cheek?

No, dude, I’m proclaiming myself to be the Moon Child. I am here to usher in the Golden Dawn. Read all about it in my next column for Skeptical Inquirer. Seriously, though, I hate when people misuse terms like “sarcastic.” Sarcasm is saying stuff like, “Oh, yeah, R.S. McCain’s definitely not a white nationalist, he just used to write for a white nationalist publication under an assumed name.” What I was doing was providing an amusing anecdote about my relatively bizarre childhood. You’re all lucky I’m not writing southern Gothic novels. Actually, you know what? I’m going to go write one as soon as I’m done here.

With the idea of cross-checking this biographical datum, I Googled and found another piece in which Brown said he was “raised by a single mother and a series of female cats.”

Yeah, it was rough. Plus we lived with my grandma for a while.

And in that column, Brown describes discovering at age 13 — circa 1995 — how to use online chatrooms to get sex.

To be fair, I only got to third base with the girls in question and did not actually lose my virginity until I was 16. I dry-humped them, though. That’s just how I roll. Not everyone uses the internet exclusively for purposes of advancing the white race, you know. Also, what does this have to do with my cats?

It was not in that column, but in an entirely different column, in a different magazine, on a different topic, that Brown wrote:

To the extent that one uses the Internet, then, one is subjected to a different array of stimuli than if one did not use the Internet.

Now it’s starting to get personal.

Indeed – as Brown so clearly demonstrated at age 13. Given his precocious mastery of online seduction, one might be tempted to wonder what effect this “different array of stimuli” had on young Barrett’s subsequent social development. But rather than engaging in such untoward speculation, let us contemplate the influence of that “New Age single mother” of whom Brown writes. We can consult a familiar source to explain the significance of this.

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to engage in “untoward speculation.” McCain then quotes the author of a book called The Culture of Narcissism Revisited and continues to do so in a paragraph which I only skimmed because it didn’t include my name, as all paragraphs should.

At this point, the reader can be excused for asking, “So what? Where is this rambling discourse leading? What is the relationship between trolls and narcissism and New Age and Barrett Brown?” Your impatience is understandable, and now let me refer you to my March 16 essay, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?”

I haven’t read the essay in question but I imagine it’s awesome. Then McCain talks briefly about someone who is not me but who apparently exists in a “marijuana-induced fog,” so perhaps it is me after all. But probably not, because the fellow later “died at the Pentagon in what appeared to be a ‘suicide by cop’ incident.” So, McCain is comparing me to a guy who went nuts and attacked the Pentagon because my dad wasn’t around when I was a kid, my mom made me meditate, and I wrongly believe Michael Hastings to be my “colleague.” In fairness, there is more evidence of my impending murder-suicide, that being the explanatory video I posted yesterday in regards to the two internet networks that my, ahem, colleagues at Project PM are now programming. McCain helpfully provides a transcript of a portion of this in which I describe it as superior to other networks of the sort and refer in passing to Jim Hoft as an idiot.

Has Barrett Brown slipped a cog? Is he zany, daft, wacko, loony, bonkers, Froot Loops, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?

If so, this is not a recent development.

Well, would you be surprised to learn that Barrett Brown began a July column about Sarah Palin by (a) recounting an incident in which he flipped off a female motorist, and (b) describing his gun collection?

McCain is referring to the following passage:

Tyler, Texas is in many ways the exact opposite of New York, for better or worse or both. The best coffee in Tyler is found at Jack-in-the-Box, as I finally discovered after hours of aimless marching – a practice which is frowned upon here, apparently. Traversing a cross-walk during one of many coffee-getting expeditions, I was nearly run down by a woman who really, really wanted to make a right-hand turn but whose plans were being stymied by my own entirely legitimate and fait accompli crossing-the-street agenda. After nearly hitting me, she honked and sped off. Not having a cup of coffee to throw at her car, I simply gave her the finger. This is something I never had occasion to do in four years of living in New York – the capital of Unreal America, devoid as it is of Wal-Marts, meth, and federal farm subsidies.

In the interest of full disclosure and self-indulgence, allow me to note that I myself am originally from Texas, de facto stronghold of Real America. My parents are from Texas, their parents were from Texas, and so on and so forth going back to the days when Texas was still Mexico. My mom’s family used to raise rabbits, name them, and then eat them. I own a .243 and a fifty-year-old shotgun and do so much hunting you’d think I was running for president on the 2004 Democratic ticket. My dad just bought a Blackwater-issued .45 for God knows what purpose. The less said about my extended family back in ranch country the better, as I don’t want the ATF burning them alive. In short, I am as Texan as one can be without getting shot at the Alamo, and thus I reserve the right to say mean things about my home state, which I have always regarded as being akin to a hot girlfriend who is also batshit insane.

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this passage would seem to indicate that I am indeed planning some sort of violent attack on my political enemies.

Just coincidental, I’m sure. Far be it from me to play armchair psychotherapist,

…

but speaking of psychotherapy, let’s conclude byreturning to Robin of Berkeley’s column:

This Robin of Berkley person is then quoted as saying, among other things:

Many militants are devoid of an essential ingredient of being human: empathy. While they exude endless compassion for an endangered snail, they are contemptuous of living, feeling human beings. This is why they can cavalierly imagine snuffing out Granny, a late-term fetus, or, in fact, anyone who gets in their way. . . .

It’s no coincidence that God has also been shunned, because God is the thread that weaves together the rich tapestry of life. With Judeo-Christian values missing in action, the left engages in a manic free-fall-all. They afford themselves free rein to act out their basest of impulses.

Emphasis is McCain’s.

Significant? Barrett Brown is communications director of “Enlighten the Vote,” which began its existence as the Godless Americans Political Action Committee.

So, there you go. Robert Stacy McCain has now accused me of being a psychotic militant who is likely planning to carry out ideologically-motivated killings at some point in the near future.

I mentioned earlier that McCain is unfamiliar with the concept of full disclosure. I say this because in 2002, he wrote a “news” article for The Washington Times regarding an incident in which a black mathematics professor named Jonathan Farley wrote a column for a Tennessee newspaper in which he called the Confederates “traitors,” sparking a dispute with members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The article portrayed Farley in a rather negative light while meanwhile giving the SCV entirely positive coverage, despite the fact that Farley received dozens of racist e-mails, some of which included death threats, from members of the organization, including some who lived nearby and are ex-military men who presumably have access to weapons. McCain did not see fit to mention at the time that he himself is a longtime member of the SCV. A few months afterward, he even gave a speech to the SCV in which he notes that anyone who dishonors the Confederate “heroes” must be answered firmly.

Incidentally, that and other details about McCain’s unethical practices and white nationalist history will be revealed in my upcoming book, which includes an entire chapter on him, and which he has seen because I sent him the manuscript a few months ago in case he wanted to dispute anything I said about him. For some reason, McCain forgot to mention this.

The post Palin Biographer Accuses Me of Planning Violent Political Attack appeared first on The Faster Times.

In addition to his editorial role at First Things, Mr. Carter served as Director of Research and Rapid Response to the presidential campaign of noted guitar virtuoso Mike Huckabee and director of communications for the Family Research Council, in addition to various other roles in the realms of social conservatism activism and media, and remains an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry University. He’s also the author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.

I am the founder of the distributed think-tank Project PM, a contributor to Vanity Fair and Skeptical Inquirer as well as the author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny and a forthcoming book on the mediocrity of mainstream American commentary. I also serve as director of communications of the atheist PAC Enlighten the Vote.

This debate is the teleological attractor towards which all of history has been proceeding, having itself been set in motion by transcendental forces for the purpose of bringing about this Typhoon Struggle, this Great Accounting of Man and His Works. Empires have risen and fallen merely as the grist of causality – but causality itself was merely a tool by which to bring us to the eve of this moment.

There shall be feints within feints, plans within plans, and always the hidden hand of Loki – the slow blade, the knife that thrusts as if on its own accord. Point will meet counterpoint; participant will lull participant into the complacency of certainty before making manifest all that was hidden, and these shall be spikes. Each word will be chosen as would a gem for the throne of Timur the Lame. Eyes that look upon this contest will afterwards see only through the prism of those things that will presently pass, yet always remain, indeed taking up all of space-time by virtue of their significance.The muses of rhetoric will assemble for the purpose of a contest for which they themselves have waited from the beginning of time’s forward march.

For the purpose of this contest I shall today discard my human form and take on the aspects of Apollo and Mithril, both of whom shall speak through me over the following days. It is our pleasure that all men will now refer to us by the following title which we take on as of this moment: Barrett Lancaster Brown Epiphanes, Avenger of Julian the Apostate, Manifest Will of Jupiter, Knight Consular of the Order of the Golden Proceeding.

The wearing of purple will henceforth be viewed as proof of treason and punishable by death, although the children of the executed will of course be provided for in a manner sufficient to their station.

The challenge has been issued and accepted; as determined by the protocols, the debate will begin by the posting of quotes chosen by each participant. Thereafter will follow at least three rounds of exchanges with one post on each side, after which the debate may be honorably put to an end by either participant – or, if both parties are in agreement, it may continue under further protocols to be determined between the two of them. The winner will transform into a bull and live for all of eternity in a field of platinum, attended by maidens with whom he shall do as he pleases.

Anyone who does not follow the entirety of this debate is expelled from the race of men. At the height of the contest, the universe will collapse into a single point, and the tragic cycle of matter-made-sentient will begin anew.

The post Debate on atheism, Christianity, and the state appeared first on The Faster Times.

Clearly it is not the science but rather the journalism that constitutes the limiting factor in the quality of science journalism. If one examines a copy of Time from the ’60s and compares it to the most recent edition, the first thing one will notice is a steep decline in thickness; upon flipping through the pages of both issues, one will notice that the earlier specimen is not only thicker but includes far more words per page than its descendant. Upon actually reading the articles on science, one will have trouble making any comparison at all because the latest Time does not have any articles on science (although it does have an article on Burger King’s new Pizza Burger, which begins with the sentence, “I just ate a pizza made out of hamburgers.”)…

If we seek to improve the state of science journalism, we have the best chance of doing so by influencing the writer rather than those who run the outlet; the latter will not be convinced to abandon the pursuit of readership and profits in service to mere science, whereas even the most mercenary of freelancers will happily accept any assistance that makes his work easier and more profitable while also making it better. More to the point, there are a great number of writers who are quite mindful of making a positive impact on public understanding who would consider any help in doing so to be similarly attractive.

As such, I’d like to announce the launch of the Science Journalism Improvement Program, the first of several efforts being undertaken by the distributed think tank Project PM since its founding earlier this year. The procedure by which we’ll be operating, which I’ll describe below, is the result of input by a group of participants, including Todd Essig, PhD, a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute and a columnist for Psychology Today, who founded an online network for mental health professionals in 1992, which itself gave rise to the first post-graduate psychoanalytic online continuing education course as well as an annual conference on the subject; and Mano Singham, director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve and adjunct professor of physics, who is the author of several books on evolution and philosophy of science, in addition to being a fellow of the American Physical Society and an active blogger.

The process by which this program operates centers around the pairing of freelance writers with scientists and science-based practitioners (such as healthcare professionals or engineers) who will assist their partners by identifying potential story ideas, providing assistance with research, and putting writers in touch with other qualified sources for background information and quotations. Participating scientists can expect several benefits: more media attention given to one’s own area of expertise; publicity for themselves, their institutions, and their sponsors; and even byline credit if the level of contribution merits such recognition.

Those with an interest in working with Project PM on this or other initiatives may contact me at barriticus@gmail.com.

The post Project PM Science Journalism Project Launches Today appeared first on The Faster Times.

It was good timing. A few days later, her husband, comedian Jamie Kilstein, announced on Twitter that the internet radio show which the two of them host and produce had already managed to pick up 82 paying members only a week after having gone the independent route (until recently, the program was associated with the online station Breakthru Radio). “Want 100 by Friday,” Kilstein added in the economical parlance of the medium; they passed the 100 mark on Wednesday.

The continuing success of Kilkenny and Kilstein’s Citizen Radio program, a consistently informative and amusing outlet featuring such regular guests as Noam Chomsky, is fortuitous for those of us who routinely argue that news can indeed survive the newspaper, and might even be better off for escaping its various conventions. As to the question of whether the necessary work of investigative journalism will survive without editors to sign off on the particulars and publishers to ensure that the results are sold, I would again point to Allison Kilkenny, who e-mailed me early this morning with a brief account of her most recent adventures at a privately-run refugee camp in Australia where a guard had attempted to confiscate her notes.

A while back, I wrote up a profile of Kilkenny and Kilstein that had been assigned by The Onion for its non-satirical and localized New York print edition – which promptly folded after a failure to turn a profit, appropriately enough. A few days before it was supposed to go to press I withdrew it and told the editor I couldn’t work for him anymore due to the changes he had suddenly proposed. This wasn’t a principled stance on my part, but rather an irritated one; he had the audacity to call me at home after I’d ignored his e-mails all morning and I am a firm believer that editors should know their place – and not simply know it, but really spend some quality time with it while they still have the chance, as they will miss it when it’s gone.

Here, then, is my unedited profile piece of Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny.

Meet the Anti-Power Couple

History is filled with couples who have been kind enough to illustrate some or another place or time or culture that happens to need illustrating. Something important is expressed by such pairings as that of Antony and Cleopatra, Sid and Nancy, and William F. Buckley and his wife, with each breeding pair giving us some clue about the respective environments in which they thrived or at least set each other on fire.

Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein are not quite akin to most power couples of the past. They are not all that powerful, for instance, and at any rate they do not seem comfortable even with the idea of power. We ought not expect anything interesting from the two of them in the way of personal exploits – no civil wars, heroin addictions, or journals of increasingly mediocre conservative commentary are likely to emerge from this marriage. They are vegans, for instance.

The background to their relationship, meanwhile, is insufferably romantic insomuch as that the two of them met when each was poor and unknown and then together became slightly less poor and moderately well-known. “She was starting as a writer and I was failing as a comic and we were both working at a book store,” Kilstein recalls. “So we quit, left our closet in NYC, and hit the road.” Their self-imposed exile worked out better than self-imposed exiles tend to do. A stand-up comedian, Kilstein now spends quite a bit of time touring internationally, while Kilkenny is among the handful of youngish political journalists to have gained a solid readership by the direct and unorthodox means of the blogosphere. Together, they host Citizen Radio, a weekly public affairs program that regularly features as guests such leftist luminaries as Noam Chomsky (who himself has made three appearances so far).

What does the accelerating success of this progressive young couple tell us about the here and now and perhaps even the little bit later? Kilstein, whose act draws heavily on politics and religion, has won particular acclaim in Europe, the denizens of which are hungry for reassurance that Americans still understand irony. “Obama’s escaped some criticism largely because our last president was so bad,” he’s keen to note in front of foreign audiences. “It’s kinda like we just got out of an abusive relationship, where our last man was so batshit crazy anything the new guy does is amazing by comparison. ‘How’s the new boyfriend?’ ‘Well, he doesn’t waterboard me.’ ‘Put a ring on that finger, girlfriend!’”

That Kilstein is far better known internationally than he is in the U.S. may probably be explained by this desire for an America that can once again evoke laughter of the intentional sort. Meanwhile, Kilkenny’s increasing prominence as a journalist and commentator is perhaps more telling, and at any rate ought to be reassuring to those worried about the degeneracy of America’s opinion-making class. In a manner that would have been impossible fifteen years ago, the 26-year-old writer managed to build her own audience by virtue of ability, a commitment to actually getting the story right, and other such novelties of modern media; she’s now a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and True/Slant along with more traditional outlets like The Nation.

That real journalists with talent are now replacing fake ones with credentials is particularly heartening if one considers how many mediocrities have risen to the top over the past decade or two. On the right, for instance, Kilkenny turns to Peggy Noonan when in need of something to ridicule (“Every column is a hysterical cry for a man to stick a penis in her and make the world right again”). On the left, she looks to Maureen Dowd when in need of a reminder regarding how vapid the commentariat has become (“All she writes is bad puns when she isn’t plagiarizing or repeating gossip”). Like her husband, Kilkenny is too nice to make such criticisms on her own and must be prompted to do so by vindictive feature writers. She’s quicker to praise those journalists who actually break important stories and provide accurate analysis – people like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now (“fearless and wonderful”) and Glenn Greenwald of Salon (“the most morally consistent journalist I’ve ever read”).

Even if she represents a restorative dynamic in American journalism, Kilkenny remains pessimistic about the uphill battle against such terrible-yet-respected commentators as Thomas Friedman and no-talent reporters like everyone. “The news,” she notes, “exists to turn a profit.” It used to, anyway.

Kilstein and Kilkenny’s Citizen Radio program is quickly gaining popularity and will soon begin recording at The PIT in front of a live audience. If the couple does indeed represent a trend, it’s a positive one, which is certainly a nice change of pace.

The post Investigative Journalism Declares Its Independence appeared first on The Faster Times.

If you’ve heard of Randy Forbes, you most likely did so in the context of some or another occasion on which the congressman took the floor of the House in order to put forth a great deal of nonsense about how the United States was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation. Days after Obama’s effort to communicate to the Muslim world one of America’s most fundamental and wholesome aspects – its encoded neutrality towards every variety of thought and conscience – Forbes took the opportunity to undermine this message and convince Muslims at home and abroad that the United States is fundamentally and institutionally opposed to their beliefs.

Aside from being harmful to the present administration’s reasonable and necessary attempts to heal the rift between our republic and a population that has largely come to see it as their enemy, Forbes’ assertions are abject nonsense and may be shown to be such with a mere five minutes of research. In 1797 the Congress unanimously passed and President John Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli, which plainly states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” In the same era, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a correspondent that he did not “find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature” and that religions are “all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.” In his own correspondence, John Adams asked, “How has it happened that millions of myths, fables, legends, and tales have been blended with Jewish and Christian fables and myths and have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed? Filled with sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?” I need not bother quoting Thomas Paine; the reluctance of our nation’s theocrats to even mention the fellow conveys more in silence than Paine himself could in thousands of words. At any rate, Forbes himself once introduced a House resolution that “the Holy Bible is God’s word.” It is reassuring that this supremely unconstitutional effort was defeated in the House; it is less reassuring that such a thing would even come up for a vote.

Forbes is, of course, up for re-election this November, and it would be an easy enough thing for anyone who prefers truth over falsehood and consistency over confusion to support any opponent merely by default. Happily, one need not do so, as the opponent in question is Wynne LeGrow, a retired doctor who has shown from the outset a willingness to place his own principles over expediency, and who may thus be expected to do so as an officeholder. At the beginning of his campaign, LeGrow made a decision that damaged his chance to win but kept his integrity in tact: he announced to voters that he is an atheist.

There are probably a great many atheists and agnostics in Congress at any given moment, and most of those probably managed to attain such an office only by keeping their religious opinions secret; polls routinely show that atheists are mistrusted more than any other group, including Muslims. Pete Stark of California is a rare exception, having been up front about his atheism from the very beginning and having since proved his integrity and competence to those who believe that atheists are inherently devoid of both. If LeGrow wins this race – and he has a very good chance, as the district is not particularly conservative and in fact went for Obama in 2008 – it will demonstrate to the nation and the world that Stark is not a fluke, that good candidates can indeed be elected in this country without sharing any of the religious beliefs held by most of their constituents.

Of course, LeGrow’s atheism has become central to Forbes’ efforts to dissuade voters from supporting him. Nonetheless, LeGrow has managed to win over many of those whom the attacks were meant to persuade. As LeGrow’s campaign manager Antonio Elias wrote to me earlier this week:

Within our own support base we have had only two instances of “dissent” due to the articles. One was an 87-year-old African American minister and staunch Democrat in Chesapeake who was quoted in the paper as saying “I could not vote for a man who doesn’t believe in some power higher than his”. Wynne phoned and then met with the Reverend. By the end of the meeting he was totally on our side and said “we have to get this man elected!”

Clearly, there are a great many voters in Virginia’s 4th district who could be brought around to support LeGrow if only they were to be exposed to his message and his stance on those issues that will have a direct impact on their families in the coming years. And the district in question is among those in which one’s donation will go farther than most in purchasing ad space and otherwise getting that message across.

This race is among the most important and potentially symbolic of the 2010 elections. Rarely has the contrast been more stark than it is here, where a competent contender is challenging a ten-year incumbent who himself is partly responsible for the policies that have left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, that have cost well over a trillion dollars, that have damaged our credibility in the eyes of both our own citizens and those of the world, and otherwise deployed any number of amoral and destructive means in pursuit of no identifiable end – and who has responded largely by reminding voters that his challenger does not share their particular religion. If LeGrow loses, the race will have served as another vindication of the degenerate tactics on which the Republican Party has largely come to rely in seeking power; if he wins, it will serve as proof to both America and the world that such tactics have run their course, and that Americans will occasionally choose a man who has demonstrated competence and integrity even to his personal detriment over another man who has demonstrated neither over the course of ten disastrous years.

If you’d like to have a hand in winning what has developed into a proxy battle between the clear values of the Constitution and the muddled proclamations of our nation’s theocrats, join LeGrow’s e-mail list, volunteer to assist with his phone banking efforts, or make a financial contribution.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be interviewing Dr. LeGrow by phone, after which I’ll provide a transcript for those who’d like to learn more about the candidate and what he hopes to do if elected.

The post Atheist Congressional Candidate Takes on Theocratic Incumbent appeared first on The Faster Times.

Rick Sanchez is Out at CNN

It is a fine thing to see Rick Sanchez stripped of his CNN program and otherwise thrown out of the community of “respectable” pundits; it would have been an ever finer thing to have seen this happen as a result of the inane and mediocre manner in which he has gone about doing a job that, done well, could have had some positive impact on the public understanding. The confused array of assertions that Sanchez lately made to radio host is merely a symptom of a more general degree of incompetence that has long been evident to any reasonable person who has seen him in action. But CNN is disinclined to reward competence or punish incompetence. From a business standpoint, this is just as well; the network’s target demographic is largely incapable of distinguishing between the two anyway.

At any rate, every scandal that falls into the realm of the political, or is least pushed there, prompts an immediate rhetorical battle over the respective situations of liberalism and conservatism. Such an argument is not necessarily unreasonable; a scandal and its aftermath may very well bring with it some accurate lesson. But in practice, such debates tend to consist of equal parts anecdotal evidence and ideological adulteration and serve only to reinforce some convenient conclusion, which in these cases almost always involve one’s own faction being unfairly singled out for punishment while opposing factions go unpunished for the same behavior.

A good and amusing example taken from the Sanchez affair comes to us from Hugh Hewitt, who has long been helpful in providing timely examples of foolish phenomena. When the Sanchez story broke, Hewitt weighed in with the following prediction:

Laura Schlesinger quit under enormous pressure for using the n word even in a context in which it was not linked to racist beliefs, but Rick, who is clearly seeing racist conspiracies everywhere, will probably get to stay at CNN after an apology –perhaps tearful– and an explanation. And every Jew in America and abroad will know they can trust him to fairly report the news about Israel.

This is a classic example of our topical phenomenon in action. Laura Schlesinger, a conservative, was harshly punished for an allegedly lesser trespass against American racial etiquette than that perpetrated by Sanchez, who is a liberal and thus will no doubt be punished less, and the lesson is that conservatives are treated unfairly by the media or the establishment or what have you. It follows that to the extent one hears about conservative misdeeds, it is only because they are magnified by the anti-conservative dynamics of the establishment, which itself is liberal; to the extent that one hears of liberal misdeed, meanwhile, it is only because the establishment cannot muffle all of its relatively plentiful wrongdoing. This belief – which is held and routinely expressed by the majority of movement conservative commentators I have followed over the years – is popular because it provides effective cover for the conservative movement as a whole. Of course, there exists the alternative possibility that this belief is possible because it is known by its adherents to be true, and I would take such a possibility seriously if any of those adherents had only begun the adhering in question after having considered some degree of evidence that goes beyond a handful of anecdotes.

In the case of this anecdote, of course, the hypothesis as applied by Hewitt did not produce a successful prediction, as a hypothesis must if it is to graduate to a theory from the lesser state of something that is believed in out of convenience by a large number of intellectually dishonest degenerates. Sanchez did not escape punishment by virtue of being something of a liberal, and in fact was as punished to the fullest extent that his medium could punish him. Laura Schlesinger, meanwhile, was not punished by her medium at all as far as is known, but rather stepped down herself a few days after the incident in order to “regain [her] First Amendment rights,” which of course had never been abridged in the first place. One could argue that the two cases constitute a useful comparison insomuch as that the two engaged in different sorts of scandalous behavior, but one would have to take that up with Hewitt, who was the one to make the comparison to begin with.

Hewitt, then, decided in advance that the anti-conservative phenomenon in which he believes very strongly would cause Sanchez to go without real punishment. When it turned out that Sanchez was in fact going to be punished in as harsh a manner as possible, Hewitt, being intellectually dishonest, did not revisit his earlier prediction to consider the possibility that the premise on which it had been made was itself flawed, as events had shown it to be; rather, he added an update to his post in which he attacks CNN for not having yet aired any further information on the firing other than that which was provided in the press release.

It will hardly be news to those observant people who’ve had occasion to observe Hewitt that the fellow has made himself look foolish, or that the longtime law professor has accidentally damaged his own case in the rush to make it to others. But the particular meme that he and many others have successfully been pushing needs to be discredited. In the farce surrounding Christine O’Donnell, coverage of the candidate’s numerous and often bizarre misdeeds has been hailed as evidence that she is a potentially tremendous conservative statesman of whom the liberal media is terribly afraid, rather than indicating a clear pattern of dishonesty and incompetence. For the most part, the people who are taken in by this failed hypothesis will vote for terrible candidates no matter what and need not concern those of us who would prefer competent representation from both parties; but there is almost certainly some degree of overlap, which is to say that there are many Americans who are being tricked into supporting horrid politicians over less horrid ones because they honestly believe that things which might otherwise disincline them from voting for the former are somehow the concoctions of a media that actively supports the latter. Little can be done about those who believe nonsense because it makes them feel better; there is much work that can and should be done to change the minds of those who believe nonsense because they honestly think it to be the case.

The post Rick Sanchez and the Media/Establishment Victimization Complex appeared first on The Faster Times.

“He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out,” writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign policy novice who didn’t understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it — and then decided it was all a mistake.

Krauthammer’s charitableness in allowing for the possibility that Obama is a “foreign policy novice” rather than merely a fool who disagrees with Krauthammer about the wisdom of the present Afghanistan conflict is very sweet. It also seems to be predicated on the idea that Krauthammer himself is something greater than a foreign policy novice, as well as a reliable observer of Obama’s thinking in general and his plans for Afghanistan in particular. The problem is that neither of these things are true; having gone through his output from 1998 until the present day in the course of researching the state of American punditry for my upcoming book, I will even go so far as to say that they are, in fact, rather false.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, Krauthammer’s record of predictions in the realm of foreign policy is so horrid that it would probably surprise even many of his detractors. He spent much of 1999 explaining how Clinton’s Kosovo policy would lead to a disastrous regional war along with an “irredentist” Kosovo bent on territorial conquest. Two years later, he announced that a small uprising among ethnic Albanians in Macedonia had vindicated his prediction, but then lost interest when the conflict ended with a few dozen dead. And though at that time he saw fit to refer to NATO’s continued presence in the region as a “quagmire” with parallels to Vietnam, he spent the next few years mocking anyone who applied similar characterizations to Afghanistan and Iraq. When the Iraq surge was proposed, he was among the few prominent conservatives to predict that it would fail; a year later he claimed it be a success without mentioning his previous claims that it would be a failure and promptly went about attacking others for their own opposition to the measure.

If Krauthammer had since displayed some measure of predictive competence to match his inexplicable confidence, we might decide that perhaps there is some good reason why he is one of the nation’s most influential columnists rather than just some guy. For instance, if he had lately made some prediction regarding Afghanistan, Obama, and troop levels that had turned out to be correct or at least partly so, it would be reasonable for us to pay respectful attention to any further predictions that Krauthammer cares to make on the same matter. Contrarily, if Krauthammer had lately made a prediction on this same subject that turned out to be exactly wrong, we might just as reasonably disregard his opinion and we might even go so far as to wonder why it is that The Washington Post distributes his output as if it were something worthy of merit rather than the ramblings of some incompetent fraud.

In December of 2009, Krauthammer made one of his regular appearances on Fox News, where he made a prediction regarding the Obama, Afghanistan, and the 30,000 troops in question:

Chris Wallace: “Best guess: Will the president end up giving McChrystal the troops he wants, or will he change the war strategy?”

Charles Krauthammer: “I think he doesn’t and McChrystal resigns.”

Of course, Obama did end up giving the troops to McChrystal, who did not resign in honorable and Krauthammer-vindicating protest but rather stayed on until such time as he was forced to resign after having made no fundamental progress with the troops he’d ordered and after having also undermined the civilian leadership in front of author and journalist Michael Hastings.

And thus it is that Krauthammer, despite having been wrong about every major U.S. military matter of the past twelve years, and despite having more recently predicted the exact opposite development than what actually occurred in the matter of Obama, Afghanistan, and the troop buildup, has once again weighed in on Obama, Afghanistan, and the troop buildup, and The Washington Post and some untold number of other publications has once again published the result, and this dynamic will continue well into the future unless some other dynamic arises to counter it. If you would be inclined to assist in causing such a dynamic to come about, I would invite you to contact me at barriticus@gmail.com for information about Project PM.

The post Why, Exactly, Does Anyone Listen to Charles Krauthammer? appeared first on The Faster Times.