The Removable Feast

Write a letter to your congressman, write to your M.P. Let him or her know what you think about this!

Below we see two views on what the public world thinks about the private people: the first story explains that the world of political people is focusing on private people who don't write letters to politicians; the second, from a major Canadian newspaper claims that the MSM is doing just fine and the people are not that important at all.

According to the U.S. government, the government is getting news and views from bloggers. Story two: according to the MSM the bloggers don't know nothing much of interest. Once again, the Canadian establishment infantalises the public and dismisses them as incapable of intelligent consideration, a mere decoration of democracy and good government.

Bloggers and readers are making a new democracy under the high held noses of the intelligentsia-- now more useless and irrelevant than they have been ever before. You, dear reader, are making democracy a living and vibrant thing in itself.

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CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 19, 2006

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center's creation in November.

"We're certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer," said Mr. Jardines....

"I can't get into detail of what, but I'll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president's daily brief has gone up rather significantly," Mr. Jardines said. "There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we've been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community."

Mr. Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said.

"Have we got coups out of it? Close to it," Mr. Naquin said. "But certainly we've had more insight than we've ever had before."

The OSC uses powerful computers and software technology to "sift" the Internet for valuable intelligence....

In the past, open-source reports were used mainly by intelligence analysts.

"But now our customer base literally ranges from the president to local police departments," Mr. Naquin said. The Fairfax County police use OSC products, as do police departments in San Diego, New York and Baltimore. The center also provides support to the U.S. military.

A Defense Department official said Chinese military bloggers have become a valuable source of intelligence on Beijing's secret military buildup. For example, China built its first Yuan-class attack submarine at an underground factory that was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a photo of the submarine appeared on the Internet in 2004.

[....]

The OSC is doubling its staff and bringing in material from 32 government agencies that also produce unclassified reports, Mr. Jardines said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060418-110124-3694r.htm
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If you write a letter to your congressman or your m.p. or deputy, you might reach one secretary in some obscure department somewhere. Your letter, along with dozens of others, might go into a pile to gather dust or even a form-letter response sent back at your expense. If you write to the public, if you resonate in the world of people who vote, then the politicians must come to you to beg for your vote instead of you begging them to pay attention to you. Make the rotten bastards work for you. That's what we elect them to do. Politicians aren't leaders, they are our servants to carry out our orders. Politicians are cooks and waiters dishwashers. This banquet of democracy is ours to feast at. We choose the place and the staff, and they carry our our commands. If we don't choose the best, then we must toss them our and fill our government with better people who can do the jobs we expect them to.

We don't tell the cooks how to cook. We choose what we want, and the cooks do their professional jobs or they don't. That's the end of it. They ask us if we like it. We don't beg them to appeal to us.
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According to Ted McKeough in a special to The Star:

NEW YORK—There have been plenty of commentators arguing that blogs will lead to the demise of "old" media organizations that publish newspapers, magazines and books.

ABC News columnist Michael S. Malone predicted the end of newspapers last year when he saw "the first links embedded in blogs. There was simply nothing in the physical world that could ever hope to match the ability to leap through cyberspace from story to story, file to file, with almost infinite extension." Or as former editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com Merrill Brown put it: "The future of the news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news."

Yet despite the proliferation and popularity of blogs, the obliteration of mainstream media as we know it is just not happening. Rather than resembling a steamroller, blogs are looking like the cheese on the bread that is mainstream media; or if you prefer, the icing on the cake.

As it now stands, the reason that so many blog links go to MSM is because, currently, the MSM is the dominant gatherers of news and content. No blogger can afford, individually, to, for example, imbed a journalist with the troops in the front lines of Iraq (or as most MSM outlets do, in the green zone). An exception to this has been Steve Marshall of Guerrilla News who produced a Sundance award winning doc while doing this on his own tab.

This will change when there are more bloggers at the places where news occurs. News will be something that is reported in real time, by the participants and direct observers. And the main media for this will be blogs, in real time. And with the use of aggregators and spiders, a second after someone posts something interesting, the world will have it.

Then the MSM will become republishers. And they will die.

posted by Brian Lemon at 4:36 PM
http://canadianbluelemons.blogspot.com/2006/04/death-of-blog.html
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This editorial is based on two pieces from the MSM. Both came from blogs. You, dear reader, are becoming the media. In time we won't require the MSM for our copy. We will be the ones trained and professional and on the spot who write and publish the news. The politicians will more and more come to us for our commands.

When we meet on Thursday evenings at the Vancouver Public Library from 7-9:00 pm each week we conduct democracy in action. We by-pass the politicians and the MSM in favor of private people conducting their own public affairs. When a Canadian terrorist supporter hires on with the Canadian government it is bloggers and readers who make their opinions known on the Internet. We don't write letters to the editor of the Toronto Star. We don't write letters to our m.p.s. We blog, and the whole world knows in a moment that the Canadian government has a terrorist agitator in it's public office. We have power and we can and do use it. It's democracy.

Please join us on Thursday at 7:00 pm to discuss your views. We'll be in Vancouver, Canada. You, being elsewhere, can do the same kind of democratic agitating we do. Democracy isn't limited to Vancouver. It's for everyone. It's for you. You are democracy yourself. Exercise it. Don't sit at home reading the local paper. Don't sit in watching the news on TV. Walk to the library and meet your fellows. You're free to do that. Vote with your feet.

Join us. Meet us. We want to know your opinions. Write a letter to your blogger. Let him or her know what you think about this!

What's on the menu?