Chicken the way you want it [thanks, abby]

“What bothers some First Amendment advocates is that the media is not fighting back.

‘That’s the most depressing and tragic aspect to this,’ said Paul Levinson, chairman of the department of communications and media studies at Fordham University. ‘The media, rather than standing up for the First Amendment, are giving into the people who want to trample all over it.'” —Washington Post

Hindsight Bias: “The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is ‘to provide a `full and complete accounting’ of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future.’

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the ‘black swan.’

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, founder of a risk research and trading firm and author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, New York Times op-ed

Essentially, Taleb argues that things inevitably happen when you least expect them, that a dire event will always have more specificity than could have been anticipated, that negligence in not preventing an event has to be seen in comparison to “the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy — including those events that did not take place but could have”. I cautioned essentially the same thing — about the need to avoid “20/20 hindsight” — several weeks ago when the groundswell of “Bush knew!” criticism first mounted. But Taleb’s defense of the administration two weeks later appears more disingenuous, an attempt to deflect attention from the specific evidence emerging in the interim.

The Independent runs their words then and now in parallel.

Powell Calls U.S. Casualties ‘Disquieting’:

“Powell served as the administration’s point man while President Bush spent the second straight day out of public view on his ranch in Crawford, Tex… Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies’ Home Journal.”

Here is the extraordinary crux of the matter:

“This is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.” —Washington Post

Two Ex-CIA Analysts Blast Bush Administration on 9/11

Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA who was one of Vice President George Bush daily briefer says Rice’s testimony and the events surrounding it have ‘the very strong odor of the most accomplished PR machine in White House history.’ Former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman says the staff studies of the commission, which were released the same day as Richard Clarke’s testimony and were largely ignored, ‘make it clear that there was reduced urgency within the Bush administration’ on 9/11.

Two FBI Whistleblowers Accuse Bureau of Ignoring Warnings Before 9/11

We speak with FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who accused FBI headquarters in 2002 of hampering the investigation into alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds who was hired shortly after 9/11 to translate intelligence related to the attacks and says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11, 2001. Rowley reveals one of her fellow FBI agents contacted FBI HQ before Sept. 11 and said Moussaoui was the type that might try to fly a plane into the World Trade Center.

9/11 Widow Blames White House for Mishandling 9/11 Threat and Hampering Investigation

Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband Richard in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, criticizes the Bush administration for mishandling intelligence prior to 9/11 and hampering the 9/11 investigation. —Democracy Now!

The trusted oracle of our youth is taken apart and its inner workings revealed. “We’re all familiar with its sage advice. But how is such

wisdom generated? Are you ready for the truth?” This may be too disturbing for FmH readers with enough nostalgia or faith. Others, read on. [I filched this link from somewhere and would love to give props, but I have forgotten where I saw it. Sorry.]

More on the privacy concerns over Gmail. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s main worry is that we have to rely on trusting the benificence of the Google people’s commitment to not abusing the info-mining capabilities they will have on anyone using Gmail. One of the EFF’s points is that Google could link the data it derives from your email to your Google search history…unless you frequently delete the Google ‘cookie’ on your machine. While Google doesn’t plan to do anything with that potentiality, they would probably comply with subpoenas to do so in the case of law enforcement investigations. Does it take a privacy extremist to be worried about that aspect of the issue? If your answer is that a law-abiding citizen ought to have nothing to worry about on that account, you are living in an April Fool’s world. Google is essentially handing the Ashcroft Justice Dept. the surveillance capability they have been seeking all along with Carnivore, and none are immune to its abuses. I repeat: use this boondoggle at your own risk, law-abiding or not.

Reporters told to erase audio recordings of Scalia speech to high school students in Hattiesberg, Mississippi. Last year, Supreme Court Justice Scalia barred television and radio coverage at an Ohio ceremony giving him an award for support of free speech. Now, as he lovingly described the protections the Constitution affords to all citizens, a federal marshal forced an AP reporter in the front row to erase her recording of Scalia’s remarks, with no prior warning. And since when are there federal marshals protecting the right of the citizenry to be informed at Supreme Court justices’ speeches? —Court TV

…that the widely-blinked (including by FmH) story about the health benefits of nosepicking is a fake.

“As Condoleezza Rice’s testimony at the 9/11 hearings becomes fodder for media pundits and begins to slide down the cavernous memory-hole of American mass consciousness, the one significant development that will emerge is the commission’s focus on the August 6 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). The memo is still classified, but information has been leaking out to the public about its contents since May 2002 when The New York Post screamed ‘Bush Knew’ from its garish front page. To date, it stands as the single most damning particle of evidence that President Bush had intelligence on potential internal threats by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Rice tried to fend off the implication that they had forewarning by framing the briefing as being based on ‘historical’ data. And stating that it did not contain any ‘new threat information.’

But the Democratic panelists would not let that stand. It started with Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who drew first blood. Then came Bob Kerrey, who unilaterally declassified part of that memo and made Rice’s previous statements look something close to perjury.,,

The August 6 memo now represents the public’s sole opportunity to guage the level of prior warning the administration had before the 9/11 attacks. President Bush fought against Rice’s testimony and caved after a public outcry. Let’s see what happens as the 9/11 widows hit the circuit and present their case for full disclosure.” —Guerilla News Network

Online voter registration: “Last election, over 100 million eligible voters didn’t show up to ‘X the Box.’ And the presidency was decided by only 537 votes…”