As scholars who work on the centuries-old Islamic presence in Europe and the continent’s first post-Holocaust genocide against, not coincidently, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we were deeply disturbed but not surprised that an ostensibly tolerant and pluralistic Western democracy like Switzerland would vote by a margin of 57 percent to ban the religious symbol of 400,000 of its Muslim residents because they felt “threatened” by the grand total of four minarets that exist there.
The Swiss referendum was the tip of an iceberg reflecting both deep and age-old historic prejudice against a Muslim presence on the continent as well as a recent concerted ideological campaign to construct Muslims as the “other” on the part of rightwing racist movements in Europe and their fellow travelers in the neo-conservative and Southern Evangelical movements in the US. While secularism and constitutional safeguards for religious freedom are seen as hallmarks of the post-Enlightenment West, Europe and the West have traditionally been far more hostile to religious-cultural pluralism than Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu and Islamic societies, which historically viewed religious and cultural heterogeneity and pluralism as the natural order of things. This historic reality explains to a large degree why, in contrast to Europe, such religious diversity survived into the modern era in these societies, albeit not always harmoniously. Indeed, the famous thesis of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was that the very notion of “Christendom” or “the West” first emerged from the ruins of classical civilization in opposition to northern pagans and southern Muslim and Jewish infidels whose presence in Europe was actually coterminous with the spread of the Holy Roman Empire and Church in large areas of the continent.

While Paris was a collection of mud huts, Muslim Cordoba in the 10th century was the largest and grandest city in Europe with massive public baths, libraries, universities, underground sewers and even street lighting, which predated that of London by 700 years. Recent academic contributions by David Levering Lewis, Maria Rosa Menocal and Michael Hamilton Morgan have underscored how the uniquely tolerant multicultural civilization of Muslim Spain and the Levant played a central role in preserving and enhancing the philosophic and scientific legacy of Greece, Persia, India and China, directly laying the foundation of the European Renaissance itself. However, from neo- conservative ideologues such as Geert Wilders and Christopher Caldwell to Dutch and Austro-German politicians, conveniently forgetting the Ottoman origins of their tulips and kaffee kultur, the centuries-long European Muslim historic and cultural legacy has invariably been presented as transient and alien. Constructed as “aliens” in the European body politic, it is not surprising that European Muslims, Jews and Roma, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, and in our own era, the Holocaust and Bosnia, were the paramount targets of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and even genocide.

Even modern secularizing Western and southeastern European countries have been historically intolerant of mosques, minarets, synagogues and other symbolic forms of non-Christian representation. Budapest, Belgrade and Athens, which lived under Ottoman Muslim rule for centuries, like the fabled southern Spanish Muslim cities of Granada and Cordoba, did not emerge into the 20th century with a single surviving mosque.
Even though Athens is home to an estimated 200,000 Muslims, it took enormous controversy and the Olympic Games to be able to construct a single mosque. The same impediments are true of a number of European Union member states, which are obligated to maintain freedom of worship and non-discrimination. Germany is the EU member state with the largest Muslim population, boasting a minority estimated at 3 to 4 million people, but its capital city, Berlin, only has a single mosque with a clearly visible minaret that is located in the outskirts of the city next to Tempelhof Airport. While Germany has appropriately made great efforts to restore synagogues, which had been erased from the skyline in the 1930s, right-wing mobilization against the building of mosques, as in the case of Cologne, instead of being viewed as bigotry has been championed by populist politicians and the mainstream media.

Swiss referendum painfully ironic

The Swiss referendum is particularly painfully ironic since its Muslim community is to a large extent made up of secular Balkan Muslims who survived ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. A hallmark of the Serbian and subsequent Croatian campaigns was to erase all vestiges of the unique and priceless Ottoman-Islamic architectural heritage in the region, with mosques and minarets as particular targets. At the time, one of the authors, Mujeeb Khan, was involved in lobbying efforts on behalf of the Bosnian state and had written in “East European Politics and Societies” that official British and French appeasement of the Serbian genocide reflected disturbing and deep-seated historic complexes against religious and cultural minorities in Europe. The White House historian Taylor Branch in his recent book “The Clinton Tapes” confirmed this, recounting how Paris and London insisted on maintaining the arms embargo on the defenseless Bosnians. “They justified their opposition on plausible humanitarian grounds, arguing that more arms would only fuel the bloodshed, but privately, said the president, key allies objected that an independent Bosnia would be ‘unnatural’ as the only Muslim nation in Europe. He said they favored the embargo precisely because it locked in Bosnia’s disadvantage.” Branch, in conversation with Clinton continued: “When I expressed shock at such cynicism, reminiscent of the blind-eye diplomacy regarding the plight of Europe’s Jews during World War II, President Clinton only shrugged. He said President François Mitterrand of France had been especially blunt in saying that Bosnia did not belong, and that British officials also spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.”

The recent British, French and Serbian policy reflected 19th century European efforts to solve the Ottoman “Eastern Question” by expelling the “Turks bag and baggage,” in the words of William Gladstone, from Europe in a campaign of ethnic cleansing which would claim the lives of over 200,000 Ottoman Muslims and render 5 million refugees whose descendants comprise a good portion of modern-day Turks. While almost all nations commemorate their suffering and loss, this campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing and a similar one against Muslims in the Caucasus and Crimea has hardly been discussed in the Turkish Republic due to efforts at erasing the past after the founding of the republic. At the time of the Bosnian slaughter, one of the writers, Mujeeb Khan, was the first to accurately predict that callous bigotry and indifference to the plight of highly secular and pacific European Muslims by the Western architects of “the new world order” in Iraq would catalyze militant movements across the Islamic world. He also pointed out that since the breakup of the Ottoman state, the Islamic world, unlike China and India, lacked for the first time a regional hegemon capable of preventing external invasions and undertaking industrial, technological and social development on a global scale and predicted that a democratizing Turkey would embrace her Ottoman-Islamic past and historic role of providing leadership and cohesion in the Muslim world. Such a momentous change is now, of course, under way with the election of the Justice and Development AK Party and the development of the neo-Ottoman foreign policy, which has aroused tremendous popular support throughout the Muslim world and which, along with the re-emergence of China and India, might shift the global balance of power away from the West, where it has resided since 1750.

Borrowing from the tool kit of demagogues

Sadly, the disgraceful example of bigotry and chauvinism set by Francois Mitterrand in Bosnia has been continued by the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Instead of joining his foreign minister and prominent human rights activist Bernard Kouchner in condemning the Swiss referendum, Sarkozy wrote an editorial in Le Monde expressing sympathy and called upon French minorities to practice their faith “discreetly” while “humbly” deferring to the centrality of Christian culture and history in what is ostensibly a hyper-secular and egalitarian state. The high-profile intervention was part of his recently launched “debate on national identity” meant to appeal to populist French resentment of racial and religious minorities. Borrowing from the tool kit of demagogues everywhere, Sarkozy identified a few dozen burqa-wearing women in a country of 65 million as the gravest threat confronting the nation. A few days after Sarkozy’s Le Monde essay, the main mosque in the town of Castres was vandalized with swastikas and graffiti stating “France for the French” and “Sieg Heil.” France’s leading anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, noted that such incidents and even more serious ones involving murder and injury grew out of the politically expedient appeals to racial and religious fears and intolerance by leading politicians starting with the president of the republic himself.
The legitimation of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry in the European mainstream has allowed formerly ostracized far-right Neo-Nazi and Fascist-oriented groups such as the British National Party, the Vlaams Belang of Belgium, the Liga Norda of Italy, the National Front in France and the Danish and Swiss people’s parties to present themselves as respectable political movements. They have done this by distancing themselves from traditional anti-Semitic ideology, which continues to be viewed as abhorrent and often illegal, while openly espousing anti-Muslim bigotry, which is seen as much more politically correct and often reflecting mainstream political and media opinion.

In this, they have been greatly helped by anti-Muslim American neo-conservatives allied with people such as Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz and Charles Krauthammer. During the Obama presidential campaign, the use of Muslim identity as a slur and form of innuendo was as vicious as any anti-Semitic whispering campaigns found in troubled parts of Eastern Europe. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com have documented how leading Republican politicians have long casually spewed anti-Muslim bigotry without any repercussions. Congressman Peter King of New York has stated that “there are too many mosques in this country,” and GOP representatives Sue Myrick North Carolina , John Shadegg Arizona , Paul Broun Georgia and Trent Franks Arizona have collaborated with the far-right extremist and white supremacist Dave Gaubatz in demanding that young American Muslims not be allowed to serve as interns in Congress.

An unholy alliance

In this anti-Muslim campaign, neo-conservatives have an unholy alliance with followers of Armageddon theology in many Southern Evangelical churches, including the likes of Sarah Palin, who view Muslims as the anti-Christ and feel that Jesus will not return until the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are destroyed and the Jewish Temple replete with animal sacrifices in Jerusalem rebuilt. Both the reverends Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham have demanded that Islam be banned as a violent religion while enjoying intimate ties with the highest levels of the GOP and while continuing to preach a theology of hate, itself directly linked to historical crimes against African, Native, Hispanic and Asian Americans in the US. Such views and those of European anti-Muslim bigots such as Wilders and the late Oriana Fallaci, who channeled Der Stürmer in complaining that Muslims breed like rats, have been given prominent positive coverage in neo-conservative media outlets like the Weekly Standard, The National Review, The Wall Street Journal and of course Fox News. The problem with these forms of bigotry is that they quickly spread to other ethnic, racial and religious targets as well, as witnessed by recent anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant hysteria in the US, posing ominous questions about the future of coexistence in now extremely diverse Western societies.

Bigots and chauvinists, like bullies everywhere, direct their vitriol toward those seen as weak and defenseless. Because China and India have emerged with a continental-scale hegemonic state and market structure in their historic domains of civilization, they are treated with great deference by Western statesmen and would-be hate-mongers like Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation alike, a lesson Muslims would do well to ponder in the wake of campaigns of genocide, ethnic cleansing and destruction in their historic lands.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Hi. Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, coming to you from Washington. And now joining us from Ismit, Turkey, is Sener Akturk. He's a political scientist and fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, lectures at the Department of Government, both at Harvard University. And coming from Berkeley, California, is Mujeeb Khan. He's affiliated with the doctoral program in political science at the University of California Berkeley. He wrote a chapter in the book The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy. So, Mujeeb, let's start with you. The events in Fort Hood opened up quite a debate and a volley of rhetoric about whether this was terrorism, what was the reason for the events in Fort Hood, but certainly it was an instance of a tremendous amount of rhetoric about Muslims, their role in America. Let me read something back to you that you wrote together with Sener. Talking about the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States, you say they've "been greatly helped by anti-Muslim American neoconservatives that allied with people such as Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and Charles Krauthammer. During the Obama presidential campaign, use of Muslim identity as a slur and form of innuendo was as vicious as any anti-Semitic whispering campaigns found in troubled parts of Eastern Europe." You go on to say anti-Muslim slurs are popularized "with followers of Armageddon theology in many Southern Evangelical churches, including ... Sarah Palin, who view Muslims as the anti-Christ." So, Mujeeb, talk about the events at Fort Hood. To what extent was this anti-Muslim rhetoric? To what extent was this a legitimate reaction to this attack?
MUJEEB KHAN, UC BERKELEY: Well, it's understandable that people would be very upset by what Major Hasan did at Fort Hood. But what he did was [inaudible] far from being the only incident that unleashed a sort of barrage of invective and anti-Muslim rhetoric in a very broad and general way, which we don't see when someone like Tim McVeigh carries out some kind of attack like this, or, in fact, many instances of mass shootings in the United States.

JAY: By that you mean no one was calling McVeigh a Christian terrorist, or if someone shoots an abortion doctor, they're not called Christian terrorists.

KHAN: Right. Or there's an attempt to sort of, you know, delineate that, this specific group that person might be affiliated with, or that person acting as an individual. But we never in a broad-brush away talk about the danger posed by Christians as a whole in America or white people in America or other racial or religious groups. But when it comes to Muslims, at the highest levels, you know, in the US government, people like Peter King, Representative Peter King, that made very broad-based, general statements, saying, like, there are too many mosques in this country, or that American Muslims pose some kind of threat to the United States, this kind of rhetoric is not policed. It's not. When these statements are made in our country at such high levels of office, they get away with it. And to me this is a very troubling racial and religious double-standard that we see.

JAY: Now, in your article, you point to the idea that this is a deeper, more profound ideology that begins in Europe but also has roots in terms of their view of the Apocalypse. Talk a bit about this.

KHAN: Yeah. You know, this goes back well before 9/11, in fact. I remember growing up in the United States and, you know, as someone in junior high and watching Pat Robertson interviewing Major Saad Haddad, who was head of this notorious militia in southern Lebanon, who was also involved in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila of Palestinians. And he was talking about how Islam and Muslims represent the antichrist, how the United States has to bring about the creation of greater Israel, and he was talking about end-times prophecy. And I was wondering, you know, this guy probably doesn't know any Muslims. You know, there are not that many of them in Virginia where he was based. But where does this animus come from? So it's been there. It's an ideology that goes back to the 19th century and was considered heretical, known as pre-millennial dispensationalism, popularized by a British preacher named Darby. But it caught on widely in the South and influenced Cyrus Scofield, who authored the famous Schofield Reference Bible. But as I said, this was largely seen as far out of the mainstream, in terms of Protestant theology. But with the creation of Israel in 1948, in particular the Six-Day War in 1967, there emerged this great enthusiasm and popularization of this ideology of end-times prophecy and Armageddon, and it's unfortunate. It's become quite mainstream now. It's been very influential in the Republican Party at the base level, and by people like Jerry Falwell, who created this alliance with the neoconservatives as part of the Reagan Revolution back in 1980, and it's just grown from there with John Hagee and Pat Robertson, even someone like Franklin Graham.

JAY: The ideological roots of this anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies, which are very closely aligned with anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish policies in Europe, Sener, can you talk a bit about the recent referendum in Switzerland and what it tells us about what's happening in Europe now?

SENER AKTURK, DAVIS CENTER FOR RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES: Europe doesn't have an enviable history of religious tolerance from the Middle Ages onward, through the Protestant Reformation, even, and the resurgent Islamophobia that we observe today is only the most recent new ideology of intolerance, a new form of anti-Semitism, and it actually employs many of the tropes, anti-Semitic tropes, that were once upon a time employed in discriminating against Jews.
JAY: Give us some examples.

AKTURK: One of them is this idea of some kind of secret conspiracy, some kind of secret plan that Muslims have of overtaking European countries demographically, economically, politically. This is reminiscent of the most horrible czarist Russian and Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda about Elders of Zion and global plans of Zionist control and so on and so forth. And in both cases, these anti-Semitic propaganda have been employed against a minority that is demographically really small: Muslims in Europe range from 1-4 percent of the population in most European countries; only in France the figure is about 6-7 percent. And despite this fact, despite the fact that they are economically underprivileged, they are politically almost unrepresented, they are being demonized as this constantly plotting, ever-organized menace that is about to take over Europe. Just think of France, which has a population that is sometimes claimed to be 8 percent, even 10 percent [inaudible] Muslim, and yet there is not a single Muslim representative in the French Parliament—or the recent ban on headscarves, Muslim headscarves, in French schools; or the mobilization in Germany against the construction of a large mosque in Cologne; or, for that matter, the constitutional amendment that passed in a popular referendum by 57 percent of the electorate in Switzerland, a country that takes pride in its history of religious tolerance, going back to Calvin and the Protestant Reformation again, and it's a country that takes pride in its multiculturalism, bringing together Italian speakers, German speakers, French speakers, a country with four official languages, a very wealthy country, always ranking in the top three in GDP and human development index, and this country has voted by a large margin, by 57 percent, to ban a key architectural element of Islamic religiosity. This is a development incomprehensible unless we put it in historical perspective of an embedded hostility to religious diversity. Europe, even today after the mass migrations of the postwar years, is still one of the most religiously homogenous regions of the world. Compared to the Middle East, compared to much of Asia, definitely compared to much of Africa, Europe is still, by and large, nominally Christian and it's very difficult to find very large non-Christian denomination, whether these are Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists. And this is the challenge. The issue that we tried to draw attention to in our op-ed was that this is a new ideology of intolerance, and the issue is one of accommodating religious diversity in a Europe that would like to deepen its democracy and build a multicultural society.

JAY: Please join us for the next segment of this interview on The Real News Network.

The historic roots of a newly resilient ideology Part 2

By Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com | February 21, 2010

There’s a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the ”tea party” movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be — recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America’s conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism — yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, “small government” political movement.

WASHINGTON --Rep. Ron Paul won the most support for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination in an unofficial straw poll of conservative activists attending an annual conference.

A libertarian from Texas who has railed against spending and the Federal Reserve, Paul won the Saturday contest at the Conservative Political Action Conference with 31 percent backing. He has sought the presidential nomination in the past and attracted a following among a segment of voters frustrated with Washington.

Participants cheered as their favored candidates' names were announced. Some members of the audience cheered while others booed loudly when event organizers announced Paul as the winner.

That's why I'm registered as a Republican and nothing more.

F*** BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES!

Paul spoke at the conference along with potential presidential candidates former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. Romney won second with 22 percent, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin came in third with 7 percent and Pawlenty finished with 6 percent.

Well, ISN'T THAT ODD considering what I am STARING AT on my DESK!

The February 21, 2010 edition of the Boston Sunday Globe -- a purchase I make faithfully every weekend if for no other reason then to give my fried the increasingly lackluster sports sections.

And isn't it ALSO INTERESTING the the MEDIA COVERAGE is the INVERSE?

Fewer than a quarter of the 10,000 attendees participated in the balloting, an unscientific sampling that only offers bragging rights.

Yeah, DOWNPLAY THAT POLL, you agenda-pushing PoS MSM, even though yours are even worse.

WASHINGTON - Representative Ron Paul, a Texas Republican, took the podium late yesterday afternoon to a standing-room-only crowd and raucous chants of his name.

--more--"

That is what you reported yesterday.

Related:

"Paul was the only speaker so far to fill the entire convention hall at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and some of his supporters were turned away"

I don't know, readers. I am astounded and astonished at this MSM lie.

I have begun to UNDERSTAND all the AGENDA-PUSHING; however, this OUTRIGHT LIE about a speech....

How can we ever trust them on anything ever again?

Answer: you can't and never could, and now they are worse than ever -- which is why their industry is dying. As brain-dead as the American people are, they don't read newspapers because they are sick of the bulls*** and the lies. And so am I .

- Can we infer network structure based on examining who mentions certain pieces of information?
- Can we identify the most powerful influencers in networks, the sites most responsible for breaking news?

Jure tells us that he’s interested in the intersection of news media, technology and the political process. Specifically, he’s fascinated by the tension between global effects of mass media and local effects carried by social structure. “How does information transmitted by the media interact with the personal influence networks that arise from people’s social networks?”

These relationships are changing in an era of participatory media. “The dichotomy between global and local influence in evaporating – blogs can have influence both in personal and global media networks.” At the same time, the speed of media reporting and discussion is getting much faster. We sometimes refer to this as the 24-hour news cycle – basically, we’re starting to see a rapid progression of stories with no pauses.

Is there still a “news cycle”, where stories break at regular daily intervals? Jure’s work on Meme Tracker started by asking “What are the basic units of the news cycle?” We might look at the emergence of stories by looking for “cascading hyperlinks to articles” – based on doing some research in this field, Jure feels like this is too “fine-grained”, and suffers from the problem that news media don’t link very often. He rejected as too “coarse-grained” either looking for named entities Obama is mentioned in the news every day – he’s not a very useful story marker and defining topics as “probabilistic term mixtures”. Looking for common sequences of words – the appearance and decay of phrases – as too noisy.

To find markers of stories that could correspond to aggregates of articles, that vary over the order of days and can be handled at terabyte scale, Jure looked for quoted phrases. Quotes are an integral part of journalistic practice, and they tend to follow iterations of the story as it evolves. They’re attributed to individuals with a specific time and location, which means they’re very useful in figuring out the starting point for a specific story.

Using data from Spinn3r collected for three months leading up to the 2008 US presidential elections, Jure collected 1 million news articles and blog posts from the 20,000 sites that are part of Google News and 1.6 million blogs that are not. The system picked up roughly 100 million documents, from which he extracted 112 million quoted phrases. As Jure’s slide puts it, he was looking for “.*”

Once the system identifies quoted phrases, it’s challenging to figure out whether one quote is a degenerate version of another. Phrases change and mutate quite a bit. Jure shows a slide of Sarah Palin’s quote, “Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country?” and dozens of partial version he found in the wild. Jure’s algorithms create a directed graph of subphrases, adding directional edges that lead from shorter quotes to longer ones, and then weigh and remove edges so that each node has a unique parent. This simplification gives single parentage to phrases, and can partition a graph into different subgraphs for different parent phrases. Spam, he tells us in response to question, is not a major concern. He did, however, have to stoplist movie and CD titles, which often appeared as quoted phrases.

A graph of the appearance of new quotes gives the opportunity to consider whether there’s a periodic structure to media. The phrase per hour count oscilates on a weekly basis – there’s less news on the weekend – but there’s no particular global data he’s been able to find. Quote flow is more or less constant.

A widely published image from his study – shown above – is a graph of the fifty largest clusters in volume terms over the three months of the study. Some of the phrases – Obama’s statement that “You can’t put lipstick on a pig” – have a huge volume in comparison to the average topic size. Based on typical clusters, Jure is looking for models to represent the shape of story attention. “The peak behaves like a delta fundtion with infinity at t=0,” which is to say, phrases are really short lived and exponential functions aren’t fast enough to model the peak.

Jure tags media sources as being either “news” or “blogs” depending on whether or not they’re reproduced by GOogle News. “News” – i.e., sites in the 20,000 reproduced by Google News – account for 44% of the stories. Based on this partition, Jure compares the peak in attention between news sites and blogs. “Peak blog intensity comes about 2.5 hours after news peak.” There are blogs that are exceptions to this rule – hotair.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com, huffingtonpost.com, digg.com are well ahead of others. These blogs are run by professional bloggers, people who have resources to follow and report stories. He posits a model – professional bloggers sometimes break stories, followed by mainstream media, then followed a couple hours later by casual bloggers. How often do bloggers lead the media? He looked for a signature that this was happening – stories that appeared in the blogosphere before it did in news media – and discovered that, in total, 3.5% of phrases migrated from blogs to media.

While the meme data is useful for understanding some of the dynamics of the relationship between blogs and mainstream media, there are massive open questions about how information really spreads. Jure suggests thinking of the mediasphere as a massive hidden diffusion network. We can see when a node in this network gets “infected” with a new story, but we don’t see the edges between nodes in this graph. Could we trace the actual propogation from one source to another?

Basically, this becomes a tough graph theory problem. We can study a “cascade” of a story by watching how a quote appears over time. We can then make guesses as to whether one source infected another by building probability trees. If timestamps are closely linked – i.e., source i posts a story at 3:44 and source j at 4:12 – the probability is higher that i infected j than if the time gap is a long one. Jure tells us that we need to consider a huge set of possible graphs, each representing the probability of a particular path of infection idea spread . This problem is difficult to solve, but the matrix tree theorem can poduce a solution in cubic time O n^3 . Jure tells us his implementation can find a near-optimal solution. This looks like a map of the mediasphere clustered around topical interest – a strong cluster around US politics, one around gossip and celebrity news, and another strong technology cluster.

If we can infer structure, can we decide what to read if we want to be most up to date? We could imagine one blog that covers lots of topics, but is usually late to the party. Another might have lots of breaking news, but not be especially comprehensive. Given a budget – I only want to read five blogs, for instance – how do we choose which five I should follow to maximize comprehensiveness and timeliness. Again, this is a hard problem, specifically an NP-complete problem. But there’s an algorithm to find an approximate solution, and it’s far better than just choosing blogs at random, or selecting them by their inlinks, outlinks or volume.

From blogcascades.org, which offers information on the algorithm

The goal behind experiments like this one isn’t to assign us blog attention budgets – it’s to build a framework for tracking memes and news as they track over the web. Regular readers will know that this is an obsession of mine, and the idea behind MediaCloud, which helps explain why I was so excited Jure was coming to Berkman. There are still lots of open questions which leave Jure with more work to do:

- Which elements of the news cycle are missed by analyzing quotes, rather than other structures?
- How do we identify and analyze polarization in populations who are propogating information?
- How do memes actually spread through groups of people?

Lots of questions from the Berkman crowd:

Q: Could you make the system work running with sentences?
A: Possibly, but there’s lots of noise in the system, and things get noisier the longer time periods we try to consider. We’re currently trying to make it work with tweets, which are short and cleanly timestamped.

Q: Did you come up with a rigorous definition or description of the news cycle?
A: We found some signatures for clusters. One common pattern is a meme that starts small on day one, is sharply amplified on day two, then decays. Another reverses days one and two. And a third just spikes quickly and decays over a long time.

Memetracker is now working with Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, looking at coverage of the economic crisis, and that’s helping study of how media cycles operate.

Q: Are aggregators comprehensive in providing coverage of the mediasphere? Could we just read Google News?
A: Probably not. Our algorithm looks for news sources with little overlap – Google News has lots of overlapping news sources.

Q: So, what was the solution to reading three blogs? What three should we read?
A: Well, based on the data from 2006 – Instapundit, donsurber.blogspot.com, Science and Politics now dead, with a note poking fun at Jure’s research , Watcher of Weasels

Q: Will influentials in networks continue to have influence over time?
A: Algorithms select influencers based on past behavior. If you choose naively, it won’t work well. We might need to limit these sorts of algorithms only to larger blogs.

Q: You’re inferring an infection tree by optimizing a graph. Is there any empirical data to test whether this is what really happens?
A: We can check by using data sets where we’ve got quotes and links. If we can reconstruct the link structure just based on quotes – which we can – that’s probably a pretty good empirical test of the algorithm.

Fiery Ariz. conservative challenges John McCain
David Schwartz, Reuters, Feb 15 2010

Fiery conservative Republican J.D. Hayworth launched a bid on Monday to run for the US Senate in Arizona, unleashing the most serious challenge yet to incumbent John McCain and highlighting deep divisions in the party, analysts said. McCain, 73, has a long record of working with Democrats who control an increasingly partisan Congress, alienating conservatives who see him as a maverick not to be trusted. Hayworth, 51, a talk radio show host and former US congressman who is appealing to the party’s right-wing base in Arizona, which McCain has represented in the Senate since 1986, said:

What I am hearing from people is that they want a consistent conservative. When it comes to the US Senate, he’s just been there too long. You have to ask, what has he done in the last decade in Arizona?

A combative, blustering man, Haywood is best known in the Mexico border state for his thundering opposition to illegal immigration. Elected to the House of Representatives in the 1994 Republican landslide, he served six terms but narrowly lost in 2006 to Democrat Harry Mitchell. His campaign frames him as an alternative to McCain’s “moderate record on taxes, social issues, the border, and bailing out the banks,” and finds resonance with increasingly energized conservatives in the state. Pam Stevenson, an activist with the Tea Party, a grass-roots conservative group that hopes to make a splash in the 2010 congressional elections and beyond, said:

I admire John McCain, he’s a war hero, he did some great things, but he’s not in touch with what’s really going on. J.D. Hayworth seems to be in more with the people, what the people’s needs are, what they really want to do.

McCain was re-elected to a fourth Senate term in 2004 with nearly 77% of the vote. He carried Arizona in the 2008 general election despite some predictions that he would lose it to Obama. He had a 22% lead over Hayworth, according to a Rasmussen poll last month, although a previous poll in November put both in a virtual tie. Analysts expect a tough, personal battle leading up to the Aug 24 primary that could tear open ideological rifts within the Republican Party. Bruce Merrill, a political analyst at Arizona State University, said:

It has the potential to be a particularly vicious, muddy primary that could end up being the election that’s focused on not only in Arizona but around the country. There will be a lot of charges that McCain has sold out to special interests, that he’s not a real conservative. It could get very personal.

But it is well known that Hayworth had ties to convicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his clients, receiving money specifically, as a state congressman, Hayworth received more than $150,000 from Indian tribes once represented by Abramoff: SF Chron – RB and using Abramoff’s sports arena skyboxes. No investigation into Hayworth was ever pursued. McCain’s influence among Republicans is strong in the Senate, where he has taken leading positions on the military and foreign policy. In a Harris Poll last month, he was seen as the most influential player in the Republican Party. On his side, McCain also has more than $5m in his war chest to fund a long campaign, together with wide support among veterans, independents and conservative Democrats in Arizona. Hayworth told Reuters on Monday he needs $2m to seriously contend and has begun appealing to supporters. To secure his right flank, McCain has lined up prominent conservatives to campaign for him in Arizona, including his former running mate Sarah Palin, and Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts. He has also edged away from some of his more centrist positions such as support for campaign finance reform and closing the detention center at Guantanamo, in a bid to narrow the gap with conservatives. Mike Hellon, McCain’s deputy campaign manager, believes McCain will win re-election by a comfortable margin, but said he faces the toughest battle of his Senate career. He told Reuters:

He McCain takes every race seriously. This is probably the most energetic and credible opponent he’s had since he’s been in office. J.D. can launch all the personal attacks he wants to, but the people already have someone they know and can trust.

M.J. Rosenberg writes about Palin having been “kidnapped by neocons.” Nothing surprising there seeing that she was drafted by Kristol and company in the first place and is now being groomed in foreign policy by none other than Scheunemann . Yes, none other!

What is surprising though is this:

I don’t believe Sarah Palin will become president but if, God forbid, she does, I expect that the neocons would be disappointed.

Sure, she will mouth the lines they hand her now. But, as untutored as she is, she is no dummy. And she does not like being handled. She would likely “go rogue” on Kristol, Pipes and the Commentary company just as she did on the McCain campaign.

After all, someone — Todd, Bristol, Track or whoever — would be bound to tell her that the neocons do not exactly put American interests first. She does. She may be wrong — in fact, she’s almost always wrong — but she loves this country and that means she is unlikely to knowingly send Americans off to die to serve an ideology that has a long, bloody record of failure. [my emphasis]

I guess everybody has a redeeming feature.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley at BlackAgandaReport.com.

Source

Photographs posted to blogs after Palin’s speech to the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night captured several words scribbled seventh-grade style on her left palm: “energy,’’ “tax cuts’’ with “budget’’ crossed out in front of cuts and “lift American spirits.’’

Palin suggested that she would handle any disapproval from her use of the palmed notes as she has much other criticism: by mocking it as a controversy ginned up by what she sees as the liberal news media. Pictures of her campaigning with Governor Rick Perry of Texas on Sunday showed her palm scrawled in large letters with “Hi Mom.’’

Translation: I am not a person to be taken seriously.

And I do not, dear readers.

She reads daily e-mail briefings on domestic and foreign policy from a small group of advisers who remained loyal after her tumultuous vice presidential campaign in 2008. And though she has fashioned an image as an anti- establishment conservative, Palin also speaks regularly to a bipartisan nobility of Washington insiders who have helped enrich her financially and position her on the national political stage.

The WOMAN who would be PRESIDENT!!!!!

Under control like all the rest!

Palin is increasingly vocal and visible, with a series of events scheduled this weekend: delivering a paid speech to the Salina, Kan., Chamber of Commerce last night, headlining a national Tea Party convention in Nashville today, and appearing on behalf of the reelection campaign of Governor Rick Perry of Texas in Houston tomorrow.

This latest foray “Outside’’ Alaskan slang for the “Lower 48’’ culminates a week in which she achieved a typical run of multimedia ubiquity: She e-mailed a high-profile endorsement of Dr. Rand Paul in a Republican Senate primary in Kentucky.

Isn't that like damning with false praise?

She called - via Facebook - for the resignation of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for using the term “retarded,’’ and announced - via a column in USA Today - that she would attend a Tea Party gathering next month in Searchlight, Nev., the hometown of the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

Yeah, on that one I'M WITH YA, babe!!!!

Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a possible presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, or a lucrative career as a roving media entity - or all of the above.

Palin represents a new breed of unelected public official operating in an environment in which politics, news media, and celebrity sometimes seem to fuse.

Yeah, into a BIG SHINY LOG we call a "newspaper."

Whether she ever runs for anything else, Palin has already achieved the status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income, and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

“Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,’’ said one of her Washington-based advisers, the lawyer Robert Barnett who negotiated, among other things, Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speakers’ Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, “Going Rogue,’’ which has already earned her upward of eight figures .

Be careful: MEDIA will TEAR YOU DOWN, EAT YOU UP, and SPIT YOU OUT as fast as they built you up!

Beyond what her Fox-watchers and Facebookers can see, Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation....

Translation: She IS running for PRESIDENT in 2012!

A Palin-Paul ticket?

Not likely, but the thought of her on top....

:-

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They are waiting for you, sweet cheeks.

"Tea party groups aim to form PAC

NASHVILLE - Organizers of the National Tea Party Convention said yesterday that participants would form a political action committee....

Oh, so it is a CONTROLLED OPPOSITION OUTFIT now, huh?

Organizers were energized and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who was expected to address the group tomorrow night.

Show us your tits!

I'm sorry, readers; I'm just being playful this morning with her.

I'm not a "Bagger!"

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For what is really going on at the Tea Party, go to the ground source.

The controversy over Emanuel’s remark continued to dog the sometimes foul-mouthed senior Obama adviser despite his private apology to Tim Shriver, Special Olympics chief executive, shortly after the comment was made public last week in a Wall Street Journal story.

In a statement after yesterday’s meeting at the White House, Shriver and five other disability rights advocates said Emanuel had “sincerely apologized’’ for the comment.

They said he would work with them to help pass legislation to remove the word from federal law.

An Emanuel aide declined to comment after the meeting.

The Journal had reported that Emanuel used the phrase “[expletive] retarded’’ during a meeting with liberal activists in August.

No CONTEXT, Zionist MSM? WTF?!!

The controversy ballooned after Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, called on President Obama to fire his chief of staff. In a statement on her Facebook page, she asked, “Are you capable of decency, Rahm Emanuel?’’

Short answer: no

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WASHINGTON - A national movement to purge the word “retarded’’ from lawbooks and medical terminology is nearing success, gaining support this week from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who apologized to advocates for the disabled for using the term during a private meeting last summer....

In Virginia and 47 other states, politicians have acted to remove the words from the names of their human services agencies. This spring, Congress plans to consider a bill that would replace the words in all federal education, health, and labor laws.

This is what they are working on down there?

Related: What is Your State Legislature Doing Today?

Mass. House OK’s driving safety bill

Pffft!

We are paying them for that?

The change came after a decade of debate among social workers, psychologists, and educators....

It took THAT LONG, huh?

Some advocates argue that the long campaign to change the term has been a waste of time because the lexicon of insults will probably expand to include any new terms and because it has distracted from more pressing needs such as employment assistance.

Yeah, I'd say so!

But for a new generation of people with intellectual disabilities, who are better educated and better organized, changing the language is priority number one.

I stand corrected; maybe the term isn't that far off.

Pffft!

And their recent legislative successes are signaling their effectiveness as a political force.

Great, ANOTHER DIVISIVE SPECIAL INTEREST getting its legs.

Leadership opportunities have come slowly to people with intellectual disabilities. Campaigns against forced sterilization or institutionalization or exclusion from public schools have been led by family members or the professionals who work with them.

Yeah, and we FED them URANIUM in their CEREAL MILK without telling them so we could experiment on them. Somehow the elite eugenics are vague in the recap.

The nature of a disability that has historically been diagnosed for those with IQ test scores below 70 or 75 makes it harder to give speeches or debate issues. But an increasing number of people with intellectual disabilities are taking the microphone and setting up picket lines to stand up for themselves, following examples set by blacks, women, and other groups.

Yeah, it's okay if you are for an agenda-pushing cause otherwise, it rarely makes the paper .

Try being antiwar and see how far you get in the war-promoting papers.

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