CIA, Google and Wikipedia

In the past I have written extensively about Operation Mockingbird, the successful attempt by the CIA to control the mass media.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5142

The internet provides a serious threat to the success of Mockingbird. A growing number of people now get their news and information from the web. Of course, the major corporations that are under the control of the intelligence services still play an important role on the web in providing disinformation. However, as I have discovered with my website, it is possible for those who are willing to question the truth of state propaganda to become major players in the distribution of information in the modern world.

If I was running Operation Mockingbird today I would develop a strategy that would enable the secret state to regain control of the distribution of information on the web. The first thing that is important to do is to get control of the search-engines. It is via the search-engines that people obtain the information they are looking for. Over the last few years, Google has obtained an unhealthy dominance in search-engine technology. The main reason for this is that Google is trusted to provide accurate and reliable searches for information. When they first started this seemed to be the case and I was an early promoter of Google that seemed far superior to other search-engines at the time.

However, is this still true? Let us take the example of someone researching the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is claimed that since the arrival of Google search-engines can be trusted to rank websites in the order of relevance to the query. This is based on Google’s decision to place great emphasis on the number of websites linked to individual sites. Google class this as “peer-group” approval. This is a sensible approach, for example, people with an interest in the Kennedy assassination, are likely to give links to other websites that they have found useful in researching the subject.

Therefore, what happens if you type the “Assassination of John F. Kennedy” into the Google search-engine. We are told there are 73,200 relevant websites. Ranked first is Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination

Second is John McAdams’ website. It is of course one of the few assassination websites that believes the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm

3rd is my own website:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm

In 4th place is a Wikipedia clone, Answers:

http://www.answers.com/topic/john-f-kennedy-assassination

One would therefore assume that this ranking reflects the number of links these websites have. There is in fact a website that allows you to check how many websites are linked to individual pages.

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

The results are fascinating. According to Google, the following sites have these links:

Wikipedia (108)
John McAdams (286)
Spartacus (0)
Answers (57)

Therefore, according to Google, no website is linked to mine. This of course is untrue. Look for example what MSN says about the links to the respective sites:

Wikipedia (1,621)
John McAdams (3,473)
Spartacus (4,230)
Answers (3)

It is clear that Google is clearly fiddling the search-results in terms of the Assassination of JFK. The same is true for other figures involved in the assassination. For example, if you do a search of individuals involved in the investigation into the assassination you are likely to find Google takes you to John McAdams’ website.

If you type in “David Lifton” you discover that there are 22,900 relevant web pages on this subject. Ranked first is a page from John McAdams’ website. This is in fact an article by Lifton with the title: “Is Jim Garrison Out of His Mind?” This page is linked to others on McAdams website that of course an attempt to undermine Lifton’s theories on the assassination. My much more sympathetic account of Lifton’s theories is only ranked 4th.

(1) http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lifton1.htm

(4) http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKlifton.htm

One would therefore assume that there are more links to McAdams page on Lifton than mine. If you go to MarketLeap you find this is not the case.

In fact this website shows that Google does not show any links to either page. Therefore, Google must be taken something else into account. Maybe it is the links to the home page of the respective websites.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/

This is not the case. McAdams has according to Google got 264 websites linked to his home page whereas I have 6,750. This situation is reflected in other search-engines: AltaVista (744 - 30,601), Hotbot (0 - 17,433), MSN (0 - 17,321), etc.

Then you have the case of Wikipedia which is in first position. Why should it be ranked in this way? As we have already discovered, it has nothing to do with links to the relevant pages.

Maybe Google has a way of deciding what and what is not a credible resource of information? One problem is that there is no way of knowing if Wikipedia falls into that category. It is impossible to discover who wrote this page? Nor do we know who has been responsible for editing this section. John McAdams and Wikipedia are clearly getting help from someone at Google. I wonder who that could be?

Another JFK conspiracy nut notes that JFK conspiracy websites aren't ranked at the top by Google. Therefore Google must be involved in the conspiracy.

*sigh*

The phrase "JFK conspiracy nut" requires an apology. The vast majority of U.S. persons who have been polled over the last 20 years believe that JFK was assassinated by either the CIA, or organized crime, or some combination of rogue CIA elements and organized crime. The percentages are anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent, depending on what Hollywood has been doing lately.

Therefore, all of these people are wearing "tin-foil hats," according to JohnA. But if a clear majority are wearing tin-foil hats, then by JohnA's logic, they should all be pointing to JohnA and commenting, "Look at that nut JohnA -- he left his tin-foil hat at home."

JohnA, please cool it on this board with the anti-conspiracy slurs. The thrust of Simkin's comment was about Google's treatment of certain sites, including Wikipedia. There is serious evidence that something is afoot with Google and the intelligence community. I think the evidence that Google is just plain broken is so overwhelming that at this point it obscures any conclusions that can be made.

Wikipedia-Watch was essentially ignored by Google for nine months after the site started, and during those nine months it was doing just fine in Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. Remember, my site was not obscure by any rational standard. The December 2005 New York Times story on the Seigenthaler vandal even hot-linked to my home page from inside the article -- and this is something one rarely sees at NYT. Then last July I complained on a forum that a few prominent Google employees read, and three days later cosmetic changes were made. My home page ranked number one for the term "wikipedia watch" at last, but didn't rank for any other terms. The other pages showed up in the index, but ranked a couple hundred links deep for any terms on those pages.

Two months later I got some PageRank. Yes, every page was PageRank zero for the first 11 months of Wikipedia-Watch. At the same time, Yahoo was showing a thousand external links into the Wikipedia-Watch home page. But despite my PageRank finally appearing, any terms you'd care to use produced all sorts of junk sites on top, and my pages showed up near the bottom.

Late last month, I complained again on a different board where Google employees hang out. Three days later all my pages ranked as well as I can ever expect. In other words, they were on a par with the rankings for those pages in Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. There have been several flip-flops during December and I've had my doubts about whether my problem was solved, but now it appears that these flip-flops were due to the crazy update process. This process can take weeks, and two different indexes flip-flop on various data centers. Crazy updates like this have happened in the past on Google.

By the way, John Simkin, welcome to wikipediareview.com. I've been following Google for six years now, and have been active on boards that specialize in watching Google. For the last two or three years, the link: command on Google has been almost worthless. Normally Google employees don't comment on why Google seems broken, but the link: command is so bad on Google that even Google employees have pointed out that all they do is offer a sampling of the links they know about.

For a better count of backlinks, you have to use Yahoo. The command format is confusing for Yahoo, because you want to also exclude your internal linking and just get a count of the external linking. You can use this tool to get the number you want with less effort.

Probably the janitor - the rumor is that he goes into the offices at night and reprograms all the SEO algorithms as a prank...?

Seriously, though, there's no question that Wikipedia is getting artificially favorable rankings from Google, has been for some time, and that the decision to do it is coming from the top. Google's algorithms clearly favor sites that change constantly, but even that doesn't explain the rankings they've been getting - it has to be artificial.

Also, don't mind JohnA too much - he's a bit of a curmudgeon, to say the least! I'd have to agree with Daniel though, in that he should apologize about that, but I would think that people like Mr. Simkin working in this particular field of study are used to that sort of thing - hopefully it just "slides right off," so to speak...?

Still, even I would have to say that the JFK conspiracy theories are typically much more plausible than the 9/11 ones, or the Oklahoma City ones, or the Roswell ones, and so on. I mean, if someone came up with definitive proof that the mob hired Oswald to shoot JFK, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I'm not saying I believe that right now, but there's nothing especially implausible about it, beyond the lack of concrete documentary evidence.

The problem as I see it is that Wikipedia, as usual, is trying to have it both ways. In other words, it's an "open content" website that anyone can edit, which means that popular opinion should hold sway to a greater extent than it would be expected to elsewhere, and yet at the same time there's a group of people within the system trying to either marginalize (or censor outright) alternative interpretations and ideas about important events. And they're using the "conspiracy theory" rubric to paint the plausible reinterpretations with the same brush as the implausible ones.

It's a situation that's extremely prone to abuse, and Google isn't exactly helping by raising the stakes, as they do whenever they consistently (and artificially) rank Wikipedia pages at the top of their results. It makes WP an "attractive nuisance," and though the problem would be neatly solved by their simply applying NOFOLLOW and NOROBOTS tags (or whatever it is) to pages like the JFK and 9/11 and anti-semitism stuff, that fact is they won't - because they're literally designed to be socially and culturally irresponsible.

I am interested to know why you called me a “conspiracy nut”? What evidence do you have for this statement? Or, don’t you believe in logical debate?

It would be more constructive to address the points I made in my posting. Why do you disagree with my analysis of the Google ranking system? Why do you believe Wikipedia is ranked first when you type “assassination of John F. Kennedy” into Google? How do you account for the high-ranking of John MacAdams' website?

By the way, I like to know who I am addressing. You can find my biography at Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simkin

I just noticed that there is nothing in Gloria Steinem's biography about her work for the CIA. This episode in her early history is very well documented, from a 1967 New York Times article on the topic, to the huge biography of John J. McCloy by Kai Bird, where Mr. Bird had access to some of the correspondence between Steinem, C.D.Jackson, and Cord Meyer.

Oh, that's right, I forgot. You can't cite this stuff because the best sources are on NameBase.org and CIA-on-Campus.org, both of which are on the Wikipedia spam blacklist that prevents linking to these sources.

Still, there are other sources out there. Looking at the history, I see comments from one anon to the effect of "removed crackpot conspiracy link," and another where the two words "CIA collaborator" were deleted. Something is going on here, me thinks.

Vast majorities and substantial minorities also believe that the earth is flat, that God created the world in seven days about 10,000 years ago, that UFOs come to Earth to experiment on us, Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, and that Jessica Simpson is a really nice girl, just misunderstood. Ah, the wisdom of crowds.

If you're concerned about Google working with the CIA why in the hell did you put Google ads on your site? Sheesh that's the easiest way to track and record people--the whole thing is set up to track and record your visitors' surfing. Google now has the IP address of everyone who has ever been to your site because you put up those ads.

Perhaps one reason your website might have a low page rank is because your html is filled with garbage. Have you ever looked at it? Go to your site and click "View > Page Source" or "View > Source." See all that <font color="Black"> stuff? They're totally unnecessary. That's also why your page takes forever to load.

Google doesn't like pages that are filled with garbage: for instance 50 font tags in a row, many other duplicates and unstarted/unclosed tags. You even have links with nothing in them in there.

Also, you don't have the meta tags that search engines use to rank your page. No keywords, no description, and no robot information. Put that information in a meta tag in the <head> of the document.

But surely you realize that this argument is full of logical holes, gomi? I mean, we can prove, with scientifically accepted methodologies and accurate quantitative measurements that Jessica Simpson is a very, very naughty girl indeed. We can't say the same when it comes to the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was "put up to it" by the mob, can we? Of course not, because he got shot to death shortly after the event, and the mob doesn't keep accurate records. The truth - if that's what it is - may never really be known, whereas with Jessica, the truth is readily apparent to those of us who have been out on hot dates with her.

Each disputed historical event has to be analyzed separately from all other disputed events... otherwise, we run the risk of allowing people to get away with all sorts of terrible things, simply by dismissing anyone who disagrees with the official version as a crackpot. It's a complex world, but dealing with those complexities is the price of justice and freedom!

Yup, that's the price, plus $19.95 per month, not including shipping and handling. All major credit cards accepted!

That's a good point - the HTML could stand to be cleaned up a bit. But let's be honest here - if that site is #3 for that phrase, I'd have to say he's doing pretty damn well indeed!

It's weird, though... I once designed a site that went right to the top of the Google rankings on a couple of key phrases, and when that happened I felt like I was some sort of megagenius. I showed this to some people, who were all terribly impressed by it, and a couple of them hired me to do their websites just on that basis alone. But for one of them, a promotional site for a portraitist, I couldn't even get the person's own name to show up on the first five Google pages, and it wasn't even a common name - it was actually rather an unusual one. I realized at that point that it was all because of incoming links. The first site had several, even though they were unrelated to the pages I did for it. The ones I did for the portraitist had practically none - it was a newly-created domain.

So nobody has to convince me as to why everyone in the world wants to put links to their websites into Wikipedia - it's a huge and near-automatic PageRank boost, assuming you can get away with it. It's practically what the whole system is based on, whether or not it's by design or intention. And that's why Wikipedia is such a huge target. And that doesn't happen on other online encyclopedias, does it?

Other online encyclopedias are more concerned about the quality of information than they are about search engine rankings. The true genius of Wikipedia is that they've realized that search engine rankings are more important than quality. And that's pretty screwed up, in my opinion.

Six days. G-d rested on the seventh.

And so shall I. Merry Christmas to All, and to all a Good Night.

And on the seventh day, the CIA shredded all the revelant documents.

Jonny

Which meant that on the eighth day, they had no source material on which to base their new "Intellipedia" website...

Anyway, it seems as though we're fairly evenly divided on the whole issue of conspiracy theories in general, so maybe we should abandon this thread in favor of a new one about potential efforts by various governmental entities to influence Wikipedia content - whether or not it's actually happening right now. In other words, this thread has become a tad divisive, and maybe we should look at these issues more in the abstract...?

Besides, it's Christmas! I've got to go have brunch and open all my gifties!

Or alternatively, we could return to the old thread about said efforts, Are there spooks everywhere?

As I pointed out to the other nut, because a majority of Americans believe a proposition is no guideline that the proposition is actually true.

See WMDs for example.



I clearly have, but there we go. A majority of people think Wikipedia is a good thing, whereas I regard Wikipedia is a pernicious assault on history, democracy, liberalism and freedom of speech. I accept that I'm in the minority, and without irony can say that the majority of people are idiots.



I'd like to see that evidence, which has yet to be provided. On the other hand, pointing to the rankings by Google on the JFK assassination as evidence of conspiracy is just nuts, and unworthy of serious consideration.

Evidence is everything, and until I see some, then I think its my right and duty to be skeptical and withhold support for an unlikely idea.

I don't suppose just avoiding the use of the word "nut," along with other connotative terms of that nature, would be too much to ask? Like I say, most people who are into that stuff are used to being disbelieved, even dismissed by many, but this is supposed to be a friendly forum in general - so the usual cliched aphorisms apply, like "don't sh*t where you live," "you catch more flies with honey," yada yada yada. Besides, "It's Christmas!"

Of course, most of the Wikipedians reading this will think I'm being ridiculously hypocritical, but Mr. Simkin clearly isn't here for "trolling" purposes, and for the most part we do tend to avoid calling each other names, at least.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but IMO there's a difference between the idea that it would be in the interests of so-called "conspirators" to lower a page's Google rank (similar to what was suggested), vs. the idea that a lower Google rank is evidence of a conspiracy (more like how you interpreted it). The former is a much more reasonable assertion than the latter, even if it vaguely implies that the latter might be the case.

Okay, maybe there was no need to state that explicitly, but it's easy to lose sight of what's really being claimed when the underlying issues are so much more controversial than those that are actually being discussed.

Somey, the word "nut" is the least perjorative term I could use. Anything else would seem more sarcastic and ironically worse than the term I use. How about "reality challenged" or "overactive imagination"?

People think I'm nuts for disbelieving things that other people take as something beyond dispute, like man-made global warming, or the prognostications of climate models to project/predict future temperatures. I've got used to the perjorative. I prefer being referred to as a "nut" rather than a "denier" (shades of Holocaust Denial) but I've been called both

Most of us are nuts as far as the Wikipedians are concerned for even writing that there are one or more fundamental flaws with Wikipedia.

I am a nut for believing (with some good evidence) that Wikipedia itself is a conspiracy, a particularly pernicious secular cult born entirely in cyberspace.

My point is that Google rankings of articles on the JFK assassination are not ipso facto evidence of any conspiracy, and frankly I think that the whole thing about JFK conspiracies turns his life into a meaningless parlor game the way the "Jack the Ripper" case has become.

I'm sure the CIA have more important fish to fry than PageRank manipulation on Google. Whatever their intentions, conspiracy nuts give greater credence and power to the CIA than they really have. I sometimes wonder if the CIA doesn't actively cultivate paranoia to achieve more political clout, and these people are unknowingly doing the CIA a big favor.

You still have not explained why you described me as a “conspiracy nut”. I asked you to supply evidence for this statement. You have failed to do this. It is clear that this was meant as a smear. The idea being that as soon as someone can be portrayed as a “conspiracy nut” they can be ignored as suppliers of reliable information. This is the tactic that has been used by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee to ban editors from Wikipedia. This includes people who quote from “conspiracy sites”. This is what happened when Pat Jaress quoted from the Spartacus website. See this thread:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8861

It is important to define our terms. My dictionary defines a conspiracy as a:

* a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act
* a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially a political plot)
* a group of conspirators banded together to achieve some harmful or illegal purpose

Wikipedia claims that a “conspiracy nut” is a pejorative term used to criticize supporters of what it calls “conspiracy theory”. This is someone who “attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event or chain of events (usually political, social, or historical events) as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance of powerful or influential people or organizations. Many conspiracy theories claim that major events in history have been dominated by conspirators who manipulate political happenings from behind the scenes.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_nut

In this sense I am not a conspiracy theorist. For example, I do not believe that 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana was the result of a conspiracy. Nor do I believe that the US faked the moon landings. However, I do believe that governments do join forces with their intelligence services to cover up illegal activities that have taken place. They usually hide behind the claim that documents need to be withheld for reasons of national security. In reality, these documents are not allowed into the public domain because they provide evidence of illegal and corrupt activities.

I believe that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was both a case of conspiracy and a cover-up. This was also the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In claimed in its final report (1979) that the Warren Commission "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President." The report was also highly critical of the Secret Service: "The Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties. The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper."
The final report concluded that the "scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy." It added that "on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKassassinationsC.htm

George Robert Blakey chief counsel and staff director to the HSCA recently issued a statement claiming: "I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee.... I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE. That the Agency would put a 'material witness' in as a 'filter' between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKblakey.htm

This is all in the public record yet unfortunately, most of the American public, are so politically illiterate, that they are unaware of what has been going on concerning its government and intelligence services and people like JohnA can describe someone like me who has attempted to report on these matters, as a “conspiracy nut”.

One has to ask if the assassination of JFK was by Lee Harvey Oswald, why are the documents seen by the HSCA not going to be released until 2017? Why is the CIA refusing to release records about George Joannides's operational activities in August 1963.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjoannides.htm

The JFK case is not the only example of the CIA being involved in covering up political assassinations. For example, here is an article by Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian last week (December 22, 2006):

Some secrets, it turns out, are too old or too big to keep - even for the Bush administration, which has made a crusade of rooting out leaks and clamping down on information on the inner workings of government.

In the new year, the CIA, FBI, state department and more than 80 other government agencies that handle state secrets will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of documents under a new policy that institutes an automatic release of material after 25 years.

Within those documents lie the most turbulent episodes of the 20th century: the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnam war, the CIA's unauthorised experiments with LSD and its internal thinking on a raft of investigations into coups and assassinations overseas, and the FBI's hunt for communist sympathisers on US soil.
The release, awaited by scholars and journalists, goes against the grain for the president, George Bush, and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has argued that the disclosure of information from the White House erodes presidential power.

The decision to release documents after 25 years was made in 1995 under President Bill Clinton, although the Bush administration managed to delay it. "I was pleasantly surprised," said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "I could have easily imagined this administration saying: 'Oh, no we can't possibly adopt an automatic declassification policy. That will only assist the terrorists'."

Until now, material could remain secret indefinitely unless researchers lodged a specific request under freedom of information regulations. But declassification does not guarantee documents will be made public. Government agencies can withhold them on privacy grounds, to protect an intelligence source, or to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation.

The FBI has been notoriously stringent about exercising that prerogative, refusing to release documents on the assassination in Washington of the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by agents of the Pinochet regime on the grounds that investigators were still pursuing leads.

Anybody who knows anything about the Orlando Letelier case knows why George Bush is protecting his father. Take a look at this page on the CIA agent who was convicted of killing Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtownleyM.htm

And I find myself in the exceedingly awkward position of believing that there is actually a conspiracy to promote the idea of man-made global warming, orchestrated by proponents of globalization who want to deny Third World nations the opportunity to industrialize.

I do not, however, believe Al Gore's claim that he is the inventor of this conspiracy.

Does this mean you don't think it was Walter Sickert?

A lot of times - maybe most of the time, in my opinion - what appear to be government "conspiracies" are really just the results of bungled efforts by those governments to cover their own screw-ups. In JFK's case, the inability of various law enforcement and intelligence agencies to figure out that an assassination attempt was about to take place, and to provide adequate protection for the President against it, might simply have become a "conspiracy after the fact" to save certain peoples' jobs after the event.

Either way, though, the important thing is to never assume that the government, even (and perhaps especially) your government, is always going to do the right thing. We often use the case of the Soviet Union and Communist China as examples of poor leadership and administration in general, which is why their are so many photoshopped images of Jimbo in front of a hammer and sickle floating around the internet. But maybe one of the best examples of what I'm talking about occurred between those two countries in 1958-1961. The Chinese, out of deference to the Soviets, decided to base their new agricultural policy on the ideas of a Soviet so-called "biologist" with virtually no formal scientific training, a guy named Trofim Lysenko. They planted seeds at 10 times the normal concentration per square foot, probably because Lysenko figured "more seeds mean bigger plants!" They attempted to exterminate the bird population because Lysenko felt the birds might eat some of the crops, or else poop on them, which would be, I dunno, icky. They even outlawed the use of fertilizer, apparently because Lysenko thought fertilizer didn't smell nice.

The result was a massive and terrible famine in which anywhere from 30 to 40 million Chinese citizens died of starvation and various malnutrition-related diseases during three years of normal rainfall and normal temperatures. Some have estimated the number as high as 100 million. (Other countries following similar Soviet-inspired agricultural policies had similar results, many also with high death tolls.) But the Chinese government never admitted that they'd done anything wrong, claiming the famine was a "series of natural disasters," and even went so far as to blame the starving victims for "hoarding food" and trying to "rob the people" by selling vital crop harvests on the black market.

As a side note, this horrific episode of Chinese history is barely covered on Wikipedia, and is only detailed in an obscure tertiary article, Three Years of Natural Disasters, the very title of which suggests a certain affinity with the official Chinese version of history, which the Communist government continues to push to this very day.

So if we're going to essentially say "I'm a nut, you're a nut, everyone's a nut-nut," then that's fine, but only until something really bad starts happening, OK?

I thought Al Gore claimed to be the inventor of the Internet.

Naaah, all he did was take the initiative in creating the internet. I myself actually invented the internet, in my parents' basement back in 1967. I was only 6, and my Dad had just given me one of those old Sears 18-in-1 electronics hobby kits for Christmas. I must have mixed up some of the wires or something, because suddenly, there it was! The freakin' internet! And then the whole thing just kinda blew up in my face!

I'll never do anything like that again, that's for sure.

I sure am glad to hear that, Somey. I thought it was my fault, and I've been feeling guilty about it lately.

It was 1959, and my 12-in-1 Allied Radio electronics kit was wearing out. I'd built everything several times, and even miniturized some circuits into little boxes the size of a fist -- even though there was a 12K5 vacuum tube in all of the circuits. I was a genius with a soldering gun.

Anyway, I moved up to my Novice-class ham license the following year, as a result of getting an Allied Radio Space-Spanner regenerative shortwave receiver for Christmas. Those regen receivers could really suck in that Morse code from cyberspace! If you hiccupped while working the fine tuning knob, you'd accidently jerk it about 200 kHz (we called it kc or kilocycles back then) out of the Novice band, so you had to be careful. Nevertheless, I made a lot of silly contacts with other Novices using that receiver, plus a primitive transmitter. It was a lot like being a teenage editor on Wikipedia, except that everyone was faultlessly polite because we were all afraid that the FCC might be listening. Yes, by golly, there were FCC rules. No encryption was permitted, for example. FCC rules were The Law -- not like Jimmy Wales and his, "Can't we all love each other and be happy Wikipedians?"

Then one day I decided to soup up the Space Spanner with a 12K5 circuit from my worn-out kit. It regenerated, and then regenerated, and then regenerated some more. The entire RF spectrum turned into the Internet -- or so I assumed, until you set me straight.

The moral of this story is, "Don't mess with Cyber Space, or someday you will find yourself telling a Wales of a story to a confused jury."

Gerald Ford died yesterday. If you do a search at Google for "Gerald Ford", Wikipedia is ranked number one. The page does not include details of the role he played in the cover-up of the assassination of JFK. I have therefore edited the page to read:

In his later years new documents emerged that suggested that Ford had played a vital role in the cover-up of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The original first draft of the Warren Commission Report stated that a bullet had entered Kennedy's "back at a point slightly above the shoulder and to the right of the spine." Ford realized that this provided a serious problem for the single bullet theory. As Michael L. Kurtz has pointed out (The JFK Assassination Debates, 2006, page 85): "If a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building nearly sixty feet higher than the limousine entered the president's back, with the president sitting in an upright position, it could hardly have exited from his throat at a point just above the Adam's apple, then abruptly change course and drive downward into Governor Connally's back."

In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released a document that revealed that Ford had altered the first draft of the report to read: "A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine." Ford had elevated the location of the wound from its true location in the back to the neck to support the single bullet theory.

It will be interesting to see how long it stays there. I have also added a link to my page on Ford that explains how Gerald Ford provided J. Edgar Hoover with information about the activities of staff members of the commission. Hoover ordered that Norman Redlich's past should be investigated.

Ford was also being blackmailed by both Hoover and Johnson (see for example page 209 of Bobby Baker's Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator, 1978)

I also include details of how he established the Rockefeller Commission in an attempt to cover-up the illegal activities of the CIA.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfordG.htm

(RECOPIED)

The revisions made by Mr. Simkin to the Gerald_Ford article lasted all of three minutes, before being removed by someone calling himself User:Graham87. I hate to sound told-ya-so-ish, but the fact is, there's no need for experimenting with this stuff - it's simply a fact that anything suggestive of an alternative interpretation of major historical events is going to get reverted on Wikipedia, MONGO or no MONGO.

What's needed are cogent arguments as to why this is bad, given that in many cases it actually isn't necessarily bad. Also, there's simply no point in trying to edit anything controversial into an article about someone famous who just died - that's another fact of Wikilife, I'm afraid! I'd say you have to wait at least 6 months.

I like this theory.

The first search engine that I remember was Gopher, back before there were proper graphical web pages. The government wasn't involved in that. Then there was Yahoo, which structured everything and people had to register to get their web pages listed. Some people hinted there was government involvement, but it seemed pretty silly to take it seriously. Yahoo proved their innocence once and for all when similar search engines like Excite and Lycos turned up and did the same thing. And then came the meta search engines, like Dogpile, which of course were quite free of intervention.

We all felt safe that search engines were safe, and then along came Google.

When Google first appeared on the market, we didn't need Google. We had enough search engines, we could find what we wanted easily. There were specified search engines, there were meta search engines, it was all fine. Nobody asked to have ultra fast search engines. Nobody asked to have caches of old web sites after they'd been deleted. Nobody asked to have image searches. Nobody asked to have things listed without asking. Nobody asked for the laws relating to privacy being violated.

Yet Google appeared, unwanted though it was, and suddenly became extremely popular from the instant it was created. Why? Was it perhaps because it was plastered all over every advertisement on TV and in every newspaper? Was it perhaps because governments were talking about it in official sessions? Was it because Oprah Winfrey and every other talk show host talked about it?

Google had money behind it, lots of it, yet we are led to believe that like Yahoo it started off by two college students. It might have, but these 2 had millions of dollars behind them, and government assistance. Google could not have done what they did without US government assistance, and without millions of dollars to help them. Indeed, my recollection from Oprah's story on it was that they had US military assistance, and it was no secret. But that's just a memory.

Google did something which Yahoo and Gopher never did. While Gopher and Yahoo for a time were the only serious search engines, like Google is today, they didn't ever get the ability to avoid privacy laws. Laws were effectively changed for Google. Nobody petitioned for them to be changed, they just ignored them and got away with it. There was no protest to say "Let Google break the law and get away with it". Nor was any court prepared to take them down over it.

But why would the CIA or the US government want to have a search engine which came up with more meaningless junk than any previous search engine ever had, and invaded people's privacy, with old journal posts or Newsgroup posts appearing years after they were deleted? To spy on people sure, but was that all? It seemed a bit minor, a bit petty.

The idea that the CIA was using it for something bigger, to then create an information database, a Wikipedia, makes a bit more sense. That CIA made Google so as to prepare the internet to be taken over by Wikipedia.

We know that the CIA uses Wikipedia, that much is obvious (they use Google too). We know that they are in there trying to manipulate articles. But how effective are they? Is Wikipedia complying with this? Or are they just unable to stop it?

What would be stopping the US government from calling Jimbo and demanding for him to cooperate with the CIA, or else he'd be framed as a terrorist? They could easily do it, and he'd have no choice in the matter.

Or is Jimbo doing it a bit more maliciously than that? Is he more than just innocent to what is going on? Is he more than an innocent victim?

We all know that Wikipedia claims that nobody owns any articles, yet people do. How many people have edited articles, and tried to fix huge mistakes, only to be told that they were not allowed to? Every major long-term article is owned by someone or other. How hard would it be for the CIA to get involved in this?

Look at all of the articles that would relate to matters of interest for CIA. All of the major murders and assassinations, political issues, wars and conspiracies. See how woefully inaccurate Wikipedia is compared to any other source on these topics.

We saw what Slim Virgin did to the Lockerbie Bombing article, and we saw what they did to the Port Arthur massacre article and the JFK assassination, to Hitler and to the George W. Bush article. We saw what they did to anything to do with the Iraq war. These are all matters of interest to the CIA. They have a vested interest to keep a certain version of the truth out there.

Disinformation isn't a simple matter of the government telling you something that is a lie. If they simply did that, then we'd all search for the truth, find it, and say "Ha". Nor is disinformation simply a matter of hiding the truth. We are too smart for that.

Disinformation is when the government pushes a ridiculous conspiracy theory, and leads breadcrumbs so that we will slowly start to see it make sense, and ignore everything else to push towards that. Then when we find out that it was wrong, we fall back on the official story, and ignore the actual story, which was neither of them. This is what disinformation is.

It does make a lot of sense.

What about Conspiracy Nation? How does this source qualify?

http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8425/ST-CIA.HTM

Interesting, this source says the following,


The Public Eye is a spawn of the original CounterSpy magazine according to Chip Berlet. Berlet recently said,


after the collapse of the USSR. Can you help us out on any of this, Mr. Brandt?

OK. So these sources say Steinem worked for CIA since 1957. In fact, her magizine and project was funded by CIA. This makes logically perfect sense. And Venona investigations, to a degree explains much.

It was peace time, or at least hostilities in the Korean War were at an impasse. The Cold War was on, and CIA was created to counter Soviet espionage and subversion. One thing Venona investigations revealed was an exstensive indoctrination effort going back to the 1920s and 30s. Many college age youth made lifetime committments to a cause while in college. CIA wanted to offer an alternative ideological cause to seduce people away from Marxism, and they created many, of which Feminism is just one such cause.

But I've of a mind that CIA really was as useless as a third boob -- at least til 1963, or for much of its first 17 years of existence. And this is largely connected to the Kim Philby affair.

I guess he's trying to raise the ranking (which he didn't have, due to the lack of metawords).

In any event, the tracking and recording thing is a done deal. Authorities such as the CIA et al. are able to track visitors anyways. Why fuss about the details. Really.


They've essentially been defrocked, and more or less subsumed under the the FBI which is now the premiere counterintel agency under NCIX aegis.

I have the impression the FBI sort of tells the CIA what to do in 'some' areas of international work.

Complete switcheroo from thirty years ago.

Okay, so I find myself reading Blissy2u's (what? he's still around?) idea that Goggle is the CIA's way of preparing for WP to take over the internet. Then I see that's 2006. Another seriously necrotic thread, Herbert Westinized by DL.

Mods? We're in need of closure, here. Thread-cryonics just keeps the crazy freezer-burn zombs alive. Free Ted Williams.

The only closure needed is your following of me around. I saw someone reading this thread, which I'd never read before. I read it - and commented on it. Why the call for censorship?

Why don't you quit with your following my posts around and whining like a little girl™, Milton?

It's unbecoming.

Unless you don a pretty hat with flowers, and a pretty kerchief to spot at your tears.

So I don't have to waste my time reading somebody's years-old out-of-touch and out-of-date paranoid rants. Start a new thread, taking a bite out of any previous post you like.

As for "following you around," you're starting to sound like Slimey. I merely read the View New Posts like most everyone else does. I don't expect them to be comments on threads long dead but still not buried.

But feel free to ignore me. The mods do as they please. Necro-thread resurrection is its own punishment, too.

I'm with Milton on this one. Zombies bad.

Milton, as usual, has a good point, and DL, as usual, hurls insults in response.

Mods do as they will, I guess.

Let me explain to you, One.

This isn't like Wikipedia, where people have debates in the same way about opinions. You wanted to have a "Wikipedia Talk Page" discussion about whether Wikipedia is a police state. I don't care to. At all. Ever. I made an ironical comment about someone mentioning the phrase. You wanted to debate it. I don't care to. Ever.

You kept it up, so I mocked you, because i was irritated. I've a bit of a short temper of late, and that has nothing to do with you. But your response was bothersome.

Wikipedia Review is not like Wikipedia - in the topic debating sense.

Frankly, most people here do find Wikipedia to be a bit of a police state, in one way or another. If you want to discuss that topic: "Is Wikipedia a Police State" - then why don't you make a topic. Maybe I'd made an input, but here, you don't get into back-and-forth discussions like on Wikipedia. That's what you wanted from me.

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but really, I didn't feel like debating with you.

I think you might be a lot younger than me. Just a guess. I'm probably older and lately crankier.

In the future, it might be wise to just say that. No one's forcing you to stand by your passing comments. Perhaps dusting off insults from middle school isn't the best way to interact with people. Just a suggestion.

Just like the suggestion Milton Roe made here. Consider it.

Young man. I suspect that I'm twice your age.

I advise that you LISTEN, and respond to what people say to you.

Possibly I've been hanging around persons with lots to do, highly educated, and not much tolerance for bs, but when you meet people like that, and you irk them over and over again when they respond with a disinterest, as I did, you might want to LISTEN.

Because being 'short' is how people respond - when you don't listen, and keep on.

Your first response to me. It just screams out maturity. I listen. I sure as hell try.

How many threads have you necro'd over complaints?

How many Wikipedia Review topic pages have you hijacked in order to get some dyadic interaction, aka "contact"?

I count two.

I altered my words, as I felt I was too harsh. You are a young person, and not aware of how completely irritating you are. Perhaps that was wrong. Whatever.