User:Diane Farsetta/Archive

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Copying text previously posted to my user page here.

Please post messages to my user talk page. Thanks!

Hie I'm DukeKevinAryan Erm I need somone to help me debunk some Disinfo. Come to http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:James_Earl_Carter%2C_Jr.

Thanks for the suggestions... I encourage you to add what you've looked into on these subjects to Disinfo as well! -- Diane

Glad to see attention to these matters.

Re: "Haiti", looking into the links between economic sanctions which forced a shift to charcoal from kerosene, the deforestation that resulted, and the killer mudslides that resulted from *that*, has probably been under-explored.

The questions about dangerous technology also are somewhat under-explored except for a few interesting long-term problems like molecular assemblers. These technology issues need more attention:

Re: "Lobbying efforts of electronic voting companies" like Diebold, it's interesting to note that people who worked hard on "e-voting" applications, like Jason Kitcat, who was prominent in the original open source GNU e-voting system, literally turned his position around 180 degrees and became convinced that e-voting was dangerous by definition. Many other experts now agree with him, that the disconnection between the body in the community, vs. signals on a wire, is just absolutely unbridgeable. One symptom of that is the loss of control over the voting booth environment which all elections consider important. There's no control for instance on what the voter is looking at just before an Internet vote, or what rewards they might be offered for voting (it being impossible to tell what software is running alongside the "virtual ballot box" and maybe watching the vote - spyware being extremely common). None of these basic philosophical problems are ever acknowledged in the pro-technology propaganda of the voting machine vendors, not surprisingly.

Mad cow (caused by cows being ground up into cow food) and nuclear power seem also caused by pro-technology propaganda by advocates of these "safe" technologies.

You may find that older versions of some articles on questions like pro-technology propaganda have useful text on some of these questions, and, you may also find that the Deletion Log contains many essential articles that have been unrighteously deleted (and which can be undeleted by anyone working here with sysop power, which is not the same as having editorial judgement. ;-))

Good luck! - trolls

USDA

Hi. Are you by any change interested in the USDA and related subjects? I liked your work on the Venneman article. It is good to see some quality research. I have writen some bios for past Sec's of Agriculture on my site. You can bring them over if you wish. They are here.

I have only done:

  1. Edward R. Madigan
  2. Michael Espy
  3. Daniel Glickman
  4. Norman J. Coleman

All the best --Hierarchypedia 17:12, 21 Feb 2005 (EST)

coors

hi DF did you delete a new article or one that had a history?? I suspect the latter. Kind rgds -PaulR

Dear Paul,
I just checked to make sure, and the Coors Foundation article didn't have a history. (There's a safeguard that reminds you that there's a revision history if you're about to delete an article with one.)
best, Diane

mush as most americans

hi

you have just transformed the epic article into the usual american mush -- unwilling to show a bit of backbone. nb: the booklist in its reading list is prticularly telling: the choice of a pathetic list of propaganda books (Makiya, Feldman, etc.). furthermore, their own words on their stance. for you to expunge the critical comment on several issues is pathetic.

epic, ot, and several others, are stool pigeons that happen not to represent anti-war, although they vie for voicing their opinions during anti-war demos or the organization thereof.

your interpretation of "red baiting" is screwy.

sincerely

Antidotto

on EPIC

Dear Antidotto,

Regarding the Education for Peace in Iraq Center article - most of my changes were to add information, including quotes from EPIC's website and press release. All SourceWatch articles should include information from numerous sources, including the person / organization in question, as outlined here.

I also did remove a some of what I deemed irrelevant information -- including Stan Goff's claim that his critique of EPIC might be dismissed as "red-baiting." I just don't see how that belongs in an article on EPIC, especially as I have not found any mention of EPIC or others dismissing Goff because of his association with the Socialist Worker. Of course, Goff's critique of EPIC is relevant, and I kept that in the article.

To expand upon my explanation on the EPIC article's talk page, I edited the article because I felt it was presenting one side of one critique of an organization -- and that based on one person's writing and unsupported claims made about a partial characterization of EPIC's "Suggested Reading" list.

As you know, the beauty of SourceWatch is that you can continue to add to or edit the article if you disagree. However, in order to make SourceWatch a website worth reading, all contributors are asked to follow basic guidelines, including fairness and respect for other contributors.

--Diane Farsetta

bit of Glover Park data

Newshounds, a sort of blog with the slogan,

We watch Fox news so you don't have too:

had a Glover Park article today:

News Hounds: "Don't Count Us Out" -- NewsCorp's Phony "Grassroots" Org

Greg Beato, a writer at Wonkette is blogged it here

I checked S/W to see if this has been picked-up by anyone, and found your authorship on the stub. Sorry if the data is already known to you or irrelevant.

cheers --Hugh Manatee 04:10, 29 Apr 2005 (EDT)

"Fox Effect"

You may already have seen this, but thought it was more in your area than mine, which is the "Fox Effect" (from "MSNBC & CNN Imitating the Far-Right 'Fox Effect'" at PRWatch). I "collected" the article links which accompanied the main article, as well.

Artificial Intelligence 07:32, 3 May 2005 (EDT)

panegyric

a citation's worth in credibility is a matter of personal estimation. i would consider any association with Alexander the Curmedgeon to be of high value.

also, excuse my curious gogling, i'd probably respond with a precipitant mutiplicity of suedoe creationism on a personal return like this, although it did offer possible origins for faint wisps of deja vu, my aging eyes have sensed in the periphery when seeing you name in print.

will peace, madwoman - --Hugh Manatee 18:07, 19 May 2005 (EDT)

Diane, I'm sure that you've been to Blogs for Bush.com but while looking for Bush+Hurricane Katrina this morning discovered that there is a lot of info there about the anti-Cindy caravan and other appearances. Thought you might like to check it out .. just have to scan through a lot of "stuff" .... Artificial Intelligence 16:38, 2 Sep 2005 (EDT)

thanks

Diane, thanks for the article. I'll leave it long enough for BB and AI to see it, and if they haven't deleted it, I will. They usually cycle through Sourcewtch early mornings (my time PST).

Also, in case you haven't the other places i've mentioned this; i just ran across an interesting doc:

Coalition Provisional Authority "Industry Day" Event Crystal City, Virginia, November 19, 2003

MS Excel spreadsheet - 222kb

Corporation names - representatives - addresses

might come in handy for researching in the future. I've dl'ed it, but i can be messy with tagging and placing documents where i find them again easily 6 months from now.

cheers - --Hugh Manatee 19:58, 1 Dec 2005 (EST)

Hi Diane, I am attempting to make some small modifications to the Monsanto pages but continue to get the message "This page cannot be displayed" when I submit. I have tried this in the past on several different computers all with the same problem. In some places there appears to be a time constraint on submitting, or is this a registration matter?

Well you're the one with the ultimate delete key I suppose, but may I beg to differ? The comments are not dealing with an exact scientific point of fact but with a general opinion on genetic engineering done slap-dash for monetary gain and in which all of the consequences were not well thought out in advance - which this company is guilty of in the opinion of many. In fact the entire movie can be viewed as a commentary on reckless G.E. The particular comments put these thoughts quite succinctly. Besides this I don't see any difference in quoting a movie making a general comment about an ongoing social issue and quoting a book or magazine article. One of the quotes on the list is a general opinion from a college paper. Should this be deleted? This prompts the question, is there some list of approved publications or types of media that we can only quote from? Are you claiming that no one in wikipedia or sourcewatch has quoted anything from a movie? BTW I agree that we wouldn't quote from a movie for point of fact. But this was not claiming to be so.

Adding my repsonse here, too:

Hello,

Regarding the Jurassic Park movie quote, I honestly don't think it belongs in the Monsanto article. If you look at the SourceWatch:About, the SourceWatch:Policy, and SourceWatch:Contributing pages, you'll note that they stress that SourceWatch is an encyclopedia and contributors are encouraged to use News style writing, so that articles will be useful to researchers, journalists, and the like.

If the article in question were on the portrayal of GMOs in popular culture, then quoting from Jurassic Park would be very appropriate. (And I of course agree with you that the movie is a critique of genetic engineering.) But, it's an article on the Monsanto company (which should be devoted to their activities, products, lobbying, PR campaigns, etc). I'm not saying that the quote doesn't have any place in SourceWatch, just that it doesn't make sense to have it on the Monsanto page.

best, Diane Farsetta 19:04, 13 Jan 2006 (EST)

Thanks for the reply. I looked at the pages you referred to and it appears that there is no specific policy on which sources one can quote from, at least that I could see, and I saw nothing on movies. I did see this comment on the SourceWatch:Policy page: "It is important to note that the particular implementation of at least some of these policies is still in a state of evolution, as SourceWatch grows and develops." It thus seems to me that the decision to remove the quote is one based on personal preference not on an actual written policy. That being the case, do I not have at least equal right to include the quote? Further, as the article's author and since there is no policy, do I not have even more right in this decision? Again, remember that the comments are obviously not dealing with a technical point of fact (I wouldn't use a fiction movie for such) but with an opinion on the subject (in a comment section) - and a well put one that many people share.

Regards

Thanks for the Channel One input Diane. We seem to be undergoing a tidal wave of folks attempting to either distance themselves from Abramoff, edit out information and edit in spin, or just plain trying to "pretty up" a very ugly picture.

In fact, every time it happens, it provides incentive to dig deeper and find out what else has not yet been uncovered, i.e. the case of Peter Roff. Eliminating the Washington Times as his "employer" and trying to "tidy up" his image just led to a deluge of less-than-flattering info on him ... sans editorializing. Artificial Intelligence 12:19, 20 Jan 2006 (EST)

Regarding the edits in U.S. military presence in Paraguay, I had checked this quote when I first saw it. The quoted sentence, "Paraguay was the only country to accept the offer." does indeed appear in the citation as quoted; it is further cited by another Dangl piece to http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/us-relations/loss.htm

Perhaps if another country (only Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela were referenced in the quotation [being a Latin America concern]), then it should be so noted, and cited, outside of the quotation.
--Maynard 21:24, 27 Jan 2006 (EST)

Dear Diane, Thanks for pointing out the oversight. I should have got into the habit of posting notes on the changes a long time back. Better late than never, I guess. Cheers! --Idrees 20:21, 12 Apr 2006 (EDT)

P.s. The Fake news story on Democracy Now was great.

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