A Moving Picture Is Worth A Thousand Blogs

My Dad is a cool old-school retired cat, who wakes up obscenely early for a daily routine guaranteeing God and good-health, and he seems to stand in good-stead with both. He also reads the newspaper, watches the news, and reads news magazines to supplement his regular diet of current events. Like most of the educated and well-read he's generally well-informed, but also because of this and the generation gap, he thinks the internet is the fancy of few and full of crap.

I tried to explain to him that besides tonnes of crap, there are mainstream organizations with the same corporate hierarchy, values and credibility as his preferred mediums, plus smaller organizations and individuals who's credibility you have to judge based on the quality of what they're saying.

He said bah.

I showed him the article about John Kerry (planning on) re-entering the recount fray in Ohio, a challenge he currently sees as a neglible conspiracy theory (maybe because he doesn't see it anywhere), and I hoped that would add some credibility to the fact that there's both evidence and means for individuals to pursue it.

He said meh.

In order to explain, I quickly found the following information:

1) http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm

222,165,659 out of 325,246,100 Americans are online, or 68.3% of the population.

590,765,933 out of 6,064,901,387 people in the rest of the world are online, or 9.7%

812,931,592 out of 6,390,147,487 people in the world in total are online, or 12.7%

So, if there's a way out of this cynical darkness of half-knowledge and malnourishing soundbites, this baby's our ticket. Without the internet, where can we see for ourselves primary source evidence of what's true and false? Where can we *quickly* double-check or further research stories of interest? Where can ordinary people reach a mass audience with only truth as their agenda? Where else can the nearly 70% of Americans online in the media-blackout see their recount battle is going surprisingly well? Or happening at all? (It's a nice complement to the medias orange-in cheerleading of the Ukraine...)

2) http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122404X.shtml

A 6-minute video of a technician from Triad Systems (nice name!) admitting that he and others rigged the voting in Ohio. Basically a deputy director of elections called him out in a legal affidavit, and he decided to confess to a documentary film crew. Looking dapper in geek-going-to-a-wedding chic, the video shows him speaking sincerely, humbly and mumbly of his company-sanctioned crime.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame ("Sit down my son, we don't read most of the bills...") even wrote (the) Triad based on it, saying:

I have just reviewed a tape prepared by the documentarian Lynda Byrket of the hearing held by the Hocking County Board of Elections on December 20, and based on that tape I have more questions and concerns than ever about the conduct of your firm in connection with the Ohio presidential election and recount. In particular, I am concerned that your company has operated - either intentionally or negligently - in a manner which will thwart the recount law in Ohio by preventing validly cast ballots in the presidential election from being counted.

You have done this by preparing "cheat sheets" providing county election officials with information such that they would more easily be able to ignore valid ballots that were thrown out by the machines during the initial count.

And finally, Pa Dukes in all his bemused benevolence granted the young-teenage-punk-internet some old-school street-cred. They may even start hanging out more often.

The end.

The beginning...

BONUS:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/118865_comment.php

A video of tanks showing up to a protest on the streets of L.A., which ironically didn't play for a minute - forcing me to look at relatively uncompelling photos and text, until finally the blessed/cursed moving picture arrived, showing proof of crazy people turning La-La-Land into a low-carb Tiananmen Square...