A full-page advertisement in the Sunday, July 27th, 2003 New York Times asks Americans to visit a new website, wedeservethetruth.com, and urges them to contact their Senators and Representatives to "get the truth" about the exaggerated and false intelligence on which the Administration's case for the Iraq war was based.

The advertisement titled "When the Nation Goes to War, The People Deserve the Truth," contains a dozen statements made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell now called into question by subsequent disclosures and by events in Iraq.

The statements include but go beyond the now discredited reference by President Bush to the uranium imports from Africa.

Similar ads are scheduled for publication on July 27, 2003 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Houston Chronicle.

The advertisement and website are sponsored by Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman, who are engaged in educational and philanthropic activities in New York, and George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC.

A copy of the advertisement may be downloaded here.

In response to public outcry over the formation of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) System in January 2003, the Bush administration tinkered with the project's name (now the Terrorist Information Awareness System) and hoped everything would be OK. Maybe this PR gesture was enough for some, but not for Ryan McKinley, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. He decided to follow the old adage: don't get mad, get even. On July 4, 2003, McKinley launched his own initiative, the Government Information Awareness (GIA) in an effort to close the widening gap between a citizen's ability to monitor his or her government and the government's ability to monitor its citizens. His suite of software tools allows users to data mine individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government and submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. Now this is approaching something more like Total Information.

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Go to google.com and enter the words "weapons of mass destruction." Then hit the "i'm feeling lucky" button. If this does't make you chuckle, then follow the link below.

I am feeling lucky!

Most likely to linger in one's thoughts is the exceptional "Swipe" by Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer -- a cautionary tale in fun clothing -- formatted as a bar from which drinks were served at the opening. To get one, you handed over your driver's license, which was "swiped" through a Web-connected scanner, and soon personal information about you was projected onto a wall, grabbed from the Internet. More effectively than any 100 consumer warnings, "Swipe" -- as in to steal, to deliver a hard blow -- makes clear your vulnerability in a digital age of record keeping. A nearby computer reveals unsettling -- but empowering -- information that anyone living in today's consumer culture should be aware of.

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Dr. Hallowell and John Ratey, an associate professor at Harvard and a psychiatrist with an expertise in attention deficit disorder, are among a growing number of physicians and sociologists who are assessing how technology affects attention span, creativity and focus. Though many people regard multitasking as a social annoyance, these two and others are asking whether it is counterproductive, and even addicting.

The pair have their own term for this condition: pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Its sufferers do not have actual A.D.D., but, influenced by technology and the pace of modern life, have developed shorter attention spans. They become frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone.

"It's like a dopamine squirt to be connected," said Dr. Ratey, who compares the sensations created by constantly being wired to those of narcotics —a hit of pleasure, stimulation and escape. "It takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure."

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There was a day When Super Mario's last level was the Final frontier, nothing mattered more than saving the earth from Space Invaders. Existence was a three dimensional world lived within comic books. It was never so good to be a teenager. These days are gone and Nintendo nes, Atari, and Commodore 64 are long forgotten. Except, maybe, for a few obscure Nerds and a handful of artists.

This show presents a selection of works emanating from that era, works that reflect and build on the particular feel of the Eighties and what experience was like then. There was a particular energy at the time, in being a teenager of that decade, that is unmistakable. This show is not about nostalgia, it is about reconnecting to the specificity of that era through the medium of art and it is about transforming that experience into something new. Game as a culture, binary as a language, pixel as an aesthetic.

Flux Factory Web Site

Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers which people would sometimes rather not share. The British government of Tony Blair just learned this lesson the hard way.

Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.

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