Groupon’s Andrew Mason To Charlie Rose: “We Are The ‘N Sync Of Websites”

Mason also describes Groupon’s business model as “pay-for-performance marketing” (something I’ve touched upon before):

Local businesses have never had a great way to
get customers in the door. . . . So what Groupon does is — it’s for the first time local businesses get performance-based marketing. They only pay when these customers walk in the door. We get them in the door and then it’s up to them to give them an amazing experience.


Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was on Charlie Rose last night. He refused to answer any questions about why Groupon spurned Google’s $6 billion acquisition offer, but he did reveal a few stats and his thinking on what makes Groupon successful. Groupon now boasts 40 million subscribers for its daily deals, and added 3 million last week alone. In the beginning of the year, it was adding only about 100,000 new subscribers a week.

Mason attributes Groupon’s hypergrowth to the fact that it is inherently social and its growth is accelerated by Facebook and Twitter. Deals propagate much faster than they ever could before because “the social graph . . . just allows companies to grow at a rate that is unprecedented.” He explains that Groupon’s success needs to be understood in this context:

When people call us the fastest growing company ever, I think of us as like the ‘N Sync of websites, like we have had good tunes, but we’re not The Beatles. It’s not like we’re the best thing ever. . . . I think that we’ll continue to see more companies like us who make us—who put us to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth.



You can watch the full interview here or read the full transcript below (courtesy of Charlie Rose):

TRANSCRIPT:

CHARLIE ROSE: Andrew Mason is here. He is one of the founders and

also the CEO of the website Groupon. Every day it offers deals in local

markets with deep discounts on everything from hotels to yoga to

restaurants.

Since Mason started Groupon in 2008, it has grown exponentially. It

already has 35 million subscribers in more than 300 cities globally. It’s

also created a lucrative business model that is expected to result in

hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue this year.

He has done this all without losing his sense of humor. The deals are

announced every day with quirky descriptions written by Groupon’s staff of

writers. Mason once hired a man to walk around the office in a ballerina

outfit with no explanation just to see what kind of reaction he got.

I am pleased to have Andrew Mason at the table for the first time.

Welcome.

ANDREW MASON: Thank you for having me, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: So how would you define all of that I just talked

about?

ANDREW MASON: I think part of what makes Groupon really fun for

consumers is this element of discovery, finding new things, being surprised

every morning what the deal is. And we try to remain surprising and we try

to do things, whether it’s the deal you’re getting or whether it’s the way

we’re writing about the deal or whether it’s the brand and the culture of

the company, that’s constantly surprising people, because that’s kind of

the spice of life.

CHARLIE ROSE: Give us the history of this.

ANDREW MASON: We started Groupon in November 2008, launched it in our

home town of Chicago.

CHARLIE ROSE: Two years ago.

ANDREW MASON: Two years and a month. We just switched from talking

about ourselves in terms of months where I think two years is when you do

it for a baby, when you do it for a company.

Before that, another site which is a broader application of the idea

of Groupon. It was called “The Point,” and it was a way for groups of

people to come together and organize action, whether that action is

boycotting a company or organizing a rally or fundraising or organizing

some kind of group discount.

And there was this big idea around trying to solve the world’s

unsolvable problems, but it was too abstract and complex. So we said let’s

take one application of that, group buying, and focus on that and see what

happens. So we started it as this side project.

CHARLIE ROSE: So “group buying” and “coupon” became one word.

ANDREW MASON: Yes. So the idea is every day we feature one local

business — it could be a restaurant, it could be theater tickets, it could

be a spa — and we offer a big discount — 50 percent off or more. But in

order to get that discount, a minimum number of people need to join.

So that way, the business knows they’re getting a large number of new

customers. And for that they’re willing to offer this big discount.

So we played around with the idea in Chicago for about five or six

months before we launched our second city. And then we launched a third

city and a fourth city, and before we knew it now we’re adding 30 cities a

month or so. We entered 2010 in one country. We’re now in 35 countries,

adding four more just last week. And we’re up to actually — you said 35

million, but it’s actually 40 million subscribers.

CHARLIE ROSE: There’s 40 million now, yes. And how fast are you

growing in terms of subscribers?

ANDREW MASON: We added three million last week.

CHARLIE ROSE: Three million last week. How many were you adding per

week at the beginning of this year, in 2010, in January and February of

2010?

ANDREW MASON: Maybe 100,000.

CHARLIE ROSE: And you added three million last week, three million

new subscribers. And the reason is?

ANDREW MASON: Well, it’s solving a real problem for lots of different

types of people.

CHARLIE ROSE: Especially local business.

ANDREW MASON: Yes. Local businesses have never had a great way to

get customers in the door. There is this term –

CHARLIE ROSE: They’ve never been crazy about Internet advertising.

ANDREW MASON: No, because they don’t know how to make it work. They

don’t know how to make non-Internet advertising work. They kind of do it

because they feel like they have to. But 99 out of 100 businesses that put

an ad in the paper end up feeling disappointed about it. They can’t

measure the returns, and to the degree they can they feel like it was a

disappointment.

So what Groupon does is — it’s for the first time local businesses

get performance-based marketing. They only pay when these customers walk

in the door. We get them in the door and then it’s up to them to give them

an amazing experience.

So we’ve put all these small kind of niche businesses on the map,

whether it’s a — whether it’s a helicopter club that’s offering flying

lessons, and we sell 2,500 coupons –

CHARLIE ROSE: That’s an extraordinary story. Tell the story. In

terms of the people at the helicopter club who were offering lessons, all

of a sudden they were expecting 20?

ANDREW MASON: They were expecting maybe a couple hundred or so. And

we always try and prepare them and say this could be huge. Don’t be

surprised if we sell 1,000.

CHARLIE ROSE: And how many did they get?

ANDREW MASON: We sold 2,500. And in the history of this business

that’s been around for two decades — or two-and-a-half decades –

CHARLIE ROSE: Helicopter flying lessons.

ANDREW MASON: Yes. This business had brought in a total of 5,000

customers. So in one day we increased their — we did as much as half of

what they did in the previous quarter century.

CHARLIE ROSE: And it happens because there is a thirst for value and

bargains and a sense that –

ANDREW MASON: More than that, I think. I think it’s a thirst for

life. It’s a thirst for experiences.

CHARLIE ROSE: It’s a buying experience they like?

ANDREW MASON: They like getting out of the house and flying a

helicopter or going skydiving or whatever it is.

CHARLIE ROSE: Are these things that they might not otherwise have

thought about? That they didn’t know there was this kind of bargain?

ANDREW MASON: Yes. I think — I think that’s what it is. I think

the discount is this great trick that we’re playing on people, because

we’re tricking them to get out of the house and live their lives, because

it’s there for one day.

It’s like “I’ve always wanted to go skydiving. If I’m going to do it,

I might as well do it now because it’s never going to be cheaper.” So we

finally get people to commit and get off the couch and go out and have fun.

CHARLIE ROSE: And then you split the profits 50-50?

ANDREW MASON: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Are most people happy with the results?

ANDREW MASON: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Like 90 percent or 70 percent? Or –

ANDREW MASON: We survey all the businesses we feature, and 95 percent

say they want to be featured again.

CHARLIE ROSE: There are also is this advantage. It’s an advertising

model for them, a promotional model. Even if they don’t make any money,

their company is seen in a certain light of attention.

ANDREW MASON: Right. So we send out free an email the exclusive

subject of which is this business, and we do this fun write-up that people

read even if they’re not interested in buying the deal.

And in a city like Chicago that goes out to a million people, which is

larger than the circulation of “The Sun-Times” and “The Tribune” combined,

so it’s amazing exposure for these small businesses. There is this term

“the hidden gem” that we use to refer to small businesses, and I think of

it as a nice way of saying someone who is great at their craft but just

sucks as a marketer. And we want to squash that whole concept. We want to

make sure that if there is someone out there –

CHARLIE ROSE: You want to do the marketing for them? Which is it?

ANDREW MASON: We want to squash the concept of the hidden gem. If

you have a great business, if you’re great at your craft people should be

coming in there. It shouldn’t be this secret.

CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, I see. We want to expose great ideas.

ANDREW MASON: Right.

CHARLIE ROSE: Or businesses that have something to offer to you.

ANDREW MASON: Right.

CHARLIE ROSE: Competition — everybody says that one of the issues in

terms of your future is that you have already begun to see a whole class of

imitators. It is a serious form of flattery, but does it worry you?

ANDREW MASON: There has been something like 500 Groupon clones. And

it’s been very strange. The first one came around in April of 2009 or so,

and I remember seeing it and just being amazed that someone would copy what

we were doing exactly, like the layout of the site, the copyrighting we

were doing.

But getting over that, I think the proof is in the numbers. We’ve

just tried to stay focused on building a really great product for people

and now, with 500 clones, 499 of them are relevant. We still maintain a

really great lead and I think it’s because we really focus on creating

great product –

CHARLIE ROSE: But is this the lead of simply experience or is it the

lead of writing code and technology and software?

ANDREW MASON: I think — it’s all of those things. It’s having a

consistently great experience for our customers and merchants.

I think that people — at least on the Internet, because I think about

this a lot — these companies that have these huge ramps. We’re not the

first. Maybe we’ve done it a little bit faster, but that’s largely a side

effect of the world in which we live where there are these social media

channels lying Facebook and Twitter that allow ideas to propagate much

faster.

But I think about what calls these Friendsters or the MySpaces to

collapse. And it’s usually those companies losing to themselves. They

lose their sense of focus. Maybe they’re too focused on the competition or

they’re off doing interviews with Charlie Rose instead of working on

growing their business.

CHARLIE ROSE: Please, do not say that.

(LAUGHTER)

ANDREW MASON: But I think as long as we continue to look at what our

customers and our merchants want and be as fanatical about that as we were

when we started the business, then we’ll be in pretty good shape.

CHARLIE ROSE: So focus is what those that don’t excel, or those that

lose their meteoric rise, it’s focus. They forget –

ANDREW MASON: What’s important.

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s important. They forget why they got to the

place that they are?

ANDREW MASON: Maybe.

CHARLIE ROSE: So what’s the future of Groupon, other than countries

that you haven’t tapped, cities that you haven’t been to?

ANDREW MASON: Self-driving cars. We’re going to get into that.

Beyond that –

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s a self-driving car? Although I know there’s

been a little bit of talk about it, but tell us.

ANDREW MASON: That’s actually all that I know so far.

(LAUGHTER)

But I know that I want to do it.

Beyond that, we think there is really an opportunity for a company to

come along and change the way that people buy from local businesses in the

same way that sites like Amazon have changed the way people buy products.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

ANDREW MASON: And we want to try to be that company. We think we’ve

scratched the surface.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you’re the savior for small business in the world.

ANDREW MASON: We’re the savior for small businesses. For consumers,

we want to reverse this trend of spending more and more time on the

computer and help people rediscover their cities.

And as far as the company goes, I think we want to build a company

that, as we get bigger, we stay honest to the brand and the corporate

culture that made us a cool place to work and made people like us when we

were small, and hopefully create some examples of how you don’t have to be

like every other company even when you’re a big one.

CHARLIE ROSE: And so the reputation is such now that merchants, when

they hear you calling, are thrilled.

ANDREW MASON: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: And they’re lining up calling you as well.

ANDREW MASON: We have backlogs sometimes six months long in our

cities.

CHARLIE ROSE: Saying, “me, me, me”?

ANDREW MASON: Yes, businesses calling us and –

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you shape the deal?

ANDREW MASON: We work with them to shape the deal. And it’s our

biggest problem. For every business we feature, we have to pass on seven

businesses. That’s how much the demand is, because we the self-imposed

limitation of one deal a day that we think is important. And that’s what’s

led to the –

CHARLIE ROSE: Why is that so important, one deal a day? Why not one

deal an hour?

ANDREW MASON: I don’t know. Maybe one deal an hour would work too.

But the reason that we’ve stuck with this one deal a day model is the

focus. It puts the merchant in the spotlight and makes it feel really

special, and it makes a really simple yes-no decision for consumers.

I mean, I think it’s one of the things that differentiates us from the

coupon and deal sites that came before where there was just this list of

deals, and it’s overwhelming and everything feels cheap. But we can really

make these really special businesses feel special by making them the

exclusive subject of our site for a day.

CHARLIE ROSE: There is this old idea, and people have spoken to it

for a long time — somebody once asked Bill Gates at the height of

Microsoft’s popularity what did he fear most. And he said, “I don’t know,

but it’s two people somewhere in a garage working on something I’ve never

heard of.” That’s what he feared.

What is it about this? Is this the story of that — of you and Eric,

you know, that sort of cofounder and the guy who has been very successful

at backing success? Is that what it was? Was it two guys who just had an

idea, or two guys that was right? Or were you two people who were looking

for the next break?

ANDREW MASON: In terms of fear, I still am most afraid of Freddie

Kruger.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. Shaped by your childhood, were you?

ANDREW MASON: Yes. I mean, he’s still scary. But with the company,

I think what we were trying to do is find a way to create a company that

changes the world somehow.

CHARLIE ROSE: Changes the world?

ANDREW MASON: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: You really — you had that thought, let’s create

something that can change the world, rather than what might work and what

might do some — here is a good idea. If we can somehow tap into showing a

whole new set of people that small businesses can give them an experience

and a bargain, that’s not changing the world, that’s sort of saying –

that’s a business?

ANDREW MASON: Yes, let me elaborate. So when I started the point, I

was originally in grad school and I had –

CHARLIE ROSE: That had a different purpose. That was to raise money

for a social cause.

ANDREW MASON: Yes, that had a purpose. And that idea and other

things I have done in the past has almost been like a burden. You feel

compelled, you have this idea, you have the responsibility to go out and do

something with it. So I think that’s what got us started.

And then the pivot to Groupon wasn’t expected by anyone, including us.

I mean, I think we started it as a side project, and it was like, here’s

this is cool. We didn’t think we were going to start this billion dollar

business.

CHARLIE ROSE: Here is a cool thing we could do for a group of people

who are part of a social network. And rather than raising money we’ll show

them bargains.

ANDREW MASON: Right, exactly. And for — it seemed great from the

perspective of the consumer. Here is a way to find cool things to do in

Chicago.

But what took us by surprisingly the positive effect it was having on

businesses, because we didn’t come from a background where we knew a lot

about the trials and tribulations of running a brick-and-mortar business.

But it’s really hard for them to get new customers and we ended up doing

that better than anybody else in the world.

So when we got our — when we saw that, it allowed us to really dig

in. And I think that continues to be what drives us, is that we’re here to

help. We’re — I mean, remember, our DNA are people who started this

thing, who started a company because we wanted to — because we wanted to

change the world and make it better.

CHARLIE ROSE: What does it say about where the Internet is today and

where social networking is today and where mobile is today? Tell me.

ANDREW MASON: I think what it says is that there is this plumbing

that’s been laid, like within the tubes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

ANDREW MASON: That’s the social graph that exists through tools like

Facebook and Twitter, and it just allows companies to grow at a rate that

is unprecedented.

And I think when people call us the fastest growing company ever, I

think of us as like the N-Sync of websites, like we have had good tunes,

but we’re not The Beatles. It’s not like we’re the best thing ever. But

our success and the amount of money we’ve made is largely because of the

environment that we’re growing companies in.

So I think that we’ll continue to see more companies like us who make

us — who put us to shame a couple years from now with their rate of

growth.

CHARLIE ROSE: What might be happening in five years?

ANDREW MASON: I mean, I think we’ll feel like we have been successful

if five years from now, you don’t have the same experience that you have

today where you walk down Main Street and 80 percent of the businesses are

empty. If we can do a better job at managing — managing supply for small

businesses so that there are more people out there and less kind of

inventory going to waste constantly, so if we can bring that same kind of

really smart inventory management that exists with — for Amazon or for

Wal-Mart to every mom-and-pop shop, then that’s an exciting thing to be

working toward.

CHARLIE ROSE: And so what does Facebook and Twitter mean to you?

ANDREW MASON: It’s a great way to — well, first of all, Groupon is

an inherently social service because the content is social. It’s

restaurants. It’s theater. It’s stuff that you do with friends.

CHARLIE ROSE: Today in New York it’s yoga lessons.

ANDREW MASON: Yoga lessons, which people do with friends. I’m sure

you do yoga with friends. And when people get that yoga deal, they send it

to somebody else and they say “Let’s both get this and let’s go together.”

So Facebook and Twitter are ways for people to spread the word on

these things that never existed before and they make it easy for companies

like us to exist.

CHARLIE ROSE: So if someone listens to this and says, man, I want to

try this, what do they do?

ANDREW MASON: “I want to try Groupon”? Go to www.Groupon.com. You

type in your email address and then you start getting the daily deal every

morning. And then if it looks like something awesome that you want to do,

you buy it. If it looks stupid, then you delete it, if it looks stupid for

like three or four days in a row, then you unsubscribe.

CHARLIE ROSE: And say Groupon is not for me.

ANDREW MASON: Yes, it’s not for you. But hopefully that won’t

happen. One of the great things about Groupon is that every day we’re

featuring businesses that have never — not only have they never run a

discount before, they’ve never advertised before, like world renowned art

museums, James Beard award-winning restaurants. We found a way to make the

coupon cool.

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me the museum story.

ANDREW MASON: We featured — the first museum we ever featured was

the Art Institute of Chicago.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

ANDREW MASON: We did half-off memberships. So normally $80.

CHARLIE ROSE: They got, like, 5,000 new members?

ANDREW MASON: Yes, 5,000 new memberships and that increased their

overall membership base by — I forget the number. It was like six, seven,

eight percent.

CHARLIE ROSE: What was the offer?

ANDREW MASON: The offer was half off a membership.

CHARLIE ROSE: And then where did you cut that off? Everybody that

wanted that got it?

ANDREW MASON: Everybody that wanted it got it.

CHARLIE ROSE: And so therefore every art organization in Chicago

wants a Groupon experience?

ANDREW MASON: We did memberships to the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago

recently and increased their membership base by 30 percent or something.

CHARLIE ROSE: So Google comes along.

ANDREW MASON: I mean, there has been a lot of stuff written in the

press about it. Unfortunately, I can’t speak to it in any way.

CHARLIE ROSE: Suppose you had made that deal. Suppose a deal like

that — what would you do? What would be the advantage for you to make a

deal like that? Not Google, not the deal that was there offered, whatever

it was, $6 billion or whatever it might have been, what would have been the

advantage?

ANDREW MASON: Here is what I can say. I think every choice we make

in the company comes down to a core of this idea we have of what Groupon

could be and the place it could play in the world and in the rest of the

21st century.

And every choice we make is which option will it make it more possible

for us to get there? So I think whatever we decide to do with the company,

the people that we hire, the deals we run, every itty-bitty choices, how do

we build this company into something that transforms the way people buy

from local businesses.

CHARLIE ROSE: So the only question you would have whether you accept

an attractive offer from someone, or you continue doing it like you are, or

whether you would go public and raise money is, which means would help us

get to where we want to be? That’s it?

ANDREW MASON: That’s it.

CHARLIE ROSE: So therefore, why did you choose to eliminate a Google-

like proposition and incline yourself toward other propositions?

ANDREW MASON: It has to do with whether or not I would beat my wife.

CHARLIE ROSE: No, it doesn’t. This is a thing you use. I know about

this tactic, so I’m prepared for it. So — you know what I’m asking.

ANDREW MASON: I know what I’m asking. You know I can’t answer.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: A boy can try, can’t he?

ANDREW MASON: It is amusing.

CHARLIE ROSE: It is amusing. But here is another take at this. Were

you influenced by decisions that Facebook had made?

(LAUGHTER)

ANDREW MASON: I can’t talk about this, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: But I don’t understand why you can’t talk about it.

ANDREW MASON: You can’t talk about all kinds of things, largely

because — for the same reason that every person you go on a date with, you

don’t bring them home to your parents right away.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: That’s a perfect answer. That’s all I’m looking for.

It’s great to have you here. Thank you very much.

ANDREW MASON: Thank you for having me.

CHARLIE ROSE: Groupon is just a great story.

ANDREW MASON: It’s great to be part of it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. Thank you.

ANDREW MASON: Thanks for having me.

The Great Holiday iPad Case Round-Up

iPads are shaping up to be a popular gift this year (despite the certainty of a sequel just around the corner), but what do you get the spouse or kid that already has one of these machines? I’m glad you asked! Because I just happen to have 10 very eligible iPad cases just waiting for your perusal.
Watch the video above for a rapid-fire (yet still lengthy) tour of all the cases, or just scroll through the brief reviews below.

Is your favorite case not listed? Hey, I can’t do ‘em all! Sound off in the comments with your own links and recommendations.

Snapstick

Snapstick was founded by Internet industry veterans and technologists who have a long track record of building high-growth technology companies

Wikileaks

Giga Pudding

Constitutional Rights - Michael Ratner

Technology Can Bridge the Gap

BLC10 - Keynote - Resnick from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

BLC10 Keynote - Harfoush from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

BLC10 Keynote - Wesch from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

Technology Can Bridge the Gap from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

classicals Rock N' Roll

Jerry Lee Lewis - The Wild One (From "Legends of Rock 'n' Roll" DVD)



Georgia on my mind - Ray Charles at the Olympia





Elvis Presley - Amazing Grace




Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (1957)





Jerry Lee Lewis - Me and Bobby McGee





elvis presley - always on my mind



elvis presley - in the ghetto



Chuck Berry - Little Queenie

Oh Happy Day! (Full version) - Choeur Gospel Célébration de Québec & Sylvie Desgroseilliers

Wikileaks and the Diplomacy of Secrecy

Wikileaks and the Diplomacy of Secrecy

Gareth Porter, Investigative Journalist and Ray McGovern, Retired CIA Analyst discuss Wikileaks



Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network, back at our live Real News Webathon. If you want to donate, the phone number is 1-888-499-6772. You can go to the Real News website and click the donate button, which is probably the fastest and easiest way to do it. Again, the phone number if you want to call--or if you want to send a check, you can also phone and get the information on where to send a check. Again, it's 1-888-499-6772. And for those of you just joining us, this is part of our $200,000 challenge. We have a generous donor who's going to match donations dollar for dollar to get us up to 200,000. And so every dollar you give us is going to be doubled. Now joining us to talk about WikiLeaks is Ray McGovern. Ray was a former CIA analyst for 27 years and briefed--he was part of the briefing process for several presidents. Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist who's been often a guest on The Real News Network, and writes also at--I'm sorry. You work with--you write with IPS, and Ray, you write at ConsortiumNews.com and often on The Real News. So, Ray, kick it off for us. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks was arrested today. So what do you know about this? And why was he arrested?

RAY MCGOVERN, CIA ANALYST (RET'D): Well, first of all, I have to say this trivializes the gargantuan battle that's going on here. We have David and Goliath. We have something really important that is being--is really up for grabs. We have the attempt by the powerful government of our country to stifle, to make sure that the Internet cannot be used to expose truth that it doesn't want. So what we have today is, you know, sort of of very minimal significance--except for Julian Assange [inaudible] part of this whole campaign. Going back to August, do you remember when he was--there was a public prosecutor who was going to have a warrant out? Well, all of a sudden, that same day [inaudible] no, no warrant because there's no evidence. Well, what evidence has there been since?
JAY: This is the prosecutor in Sweden?
MCGOVERN: Yeah, in Stockholm, okay? Well, that was when these women finally came forward, after having bragged of their conquest of Julian Assange, after exchanging tweets, you know, that this was really something, and after inviting him, after this alleged event, to come to a big party. Okay? So they go to the judge and say, well, you know, there was something really bad, and then--. So what happens is Julian Assange hangs around in Stockholm, tries to find out what it is, you know, for weeks, and nobody would talk to him. Then he goes abroad, and now they've got a warrant. They got a warrant, okay? And the British, you know, always standing up strong for liberty, caved as usual, and he's in prison. And, of course, the name of the game is to get him out of prison, get him extradited to Stockholm, where my former friends will extradite him to--what?--Algiers or Cairo, wherever they do the special treatment.
JAY: Oh, they'll have trouble doing that.
MCGOVERN: [inaudible]
JAY: No, they just have to put him outside in winter in Sweden. But--okay. Well, let's get back to some of the--I mean, the--I guess the issue in terms of his arrest is the attempt to close down everything to do with WikiLeaks without any--you can say, I guess, there's some kind of due process going on in terms of if there's real charges in Sweden, although it's rather dubious that anyone that wasn't Julian Assange right now would be held without bail on something like this in London. But the fact that Amazon pulls down WikiLeaks's material without any due process, just leaned on by the government, PayPal cuts down the ability to raise money, apparently, Assange's, I think, bank account was closed yesterday in Switzerland, using all these minor infractions, because clearly he's broken the rules on how diplomacy and how secrecy is supposed to work in this world. Gareth, your thoughts just on the whole process to begin with. I mean, there is one argument being made by some people who are in principle in favor of all this information having come out, but they talk about WikiLeaks as being a bit like the role an agent provocateur might play in a demonstration, that it's allowing a crackdown of access to information that might not have otherwise taken place.
GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Well, there is, of course, on the left a certain view of WikiLeaks, that it is in some sense a setup, that they're really manipulated by foreign intelligence agencies and so forth. But the reality that we're talking about here is that the political establishment in the United States is now striking back, and the premise that they are operating on is that we cannot allow people to interfere with the policymaking process and with US diplomacy. These are the magic words. I was on a program from Toronto this week, the beginning of the week--no, sorry, the middle of the week, which was based on the premise that this WikiLeaks phenomenon is a serious problem for diplomacy as an abstract process, an entity, that whether it was the United States or any other country, you would have to do something to stop this because, you know, a great power cannot function in terms of exercising diplomacy while subject to this kind of phenomenon of leaks of these diplomatic cables. And I tried to introduce the notion that the reality is that the United States is not practicing diplomacy, certainly not in the sense of conflict resolution diplomacy, in any of the conflicts that it is involved in anywhere in the world. Anywhere the United States is directly involved in the conflict or it has an interest, it doesn't practice, you know, peace diplomacy; it practices coercive diplomacy, which is not diplomacy at all; it's coercion.
JAY: One of the main issues in this three-nights program is to get viewers involved directly, 'cause we're not usually live and they don't usually get to ask questions. So we're going to go to a viewer phone call now. Joe from New York. Go ahead, Joe.
JOE, CALLER (NEW YORK): Good evening, folks.
MCGOVERN: Hi, Joe.
JAY: Hey, Joe. Joe, let me suggest something. You've got to turn the sound off on your computer, 'cause you're going to--otherwise we're going to get an echo, 'cause there's a delay in the way it goes out.
JOE: Alright. I got it down now.
JAY: Okay. Go ahead, Joe.
JOE: You're talking like you know the answers. Everything you fellas are saying is theory, just like--. How should I say this [inaudible] Mr. McGovern, the other day you ended your interview by saying everything in The New York Times was drivel.
MCGOVERN: Drivel, yeah.
JOE: That was correct, okay? And I believe this WikiLeaks, if you read my email, okay, is a diversion, okay, from the real problem that we should be discussing, the implosion of the world economy. And I believe this WikiLeaks is a means of them diverting our attention from that. So we should be concentrating on that, because the people in power are on the verge of losing control, and we have to find an alternative. And WikiLeaks hasn't released anything that we do not know. That's all I have to say.
JAY: Okay. Thanks, Joe. Well, your audio is a little broken up, but I understood your question and I'll pose it again to our guests. So Joe is saying that there's really nothing so--such great revelations in what Wikipedia [sic] came out with, and what it's actually been is a big diversion from how serious the economic crisis is right now. And I'll add some words to what he said, 'cause I know where he's going with this, I think, although he accuses us at the beginning of thinking we know everything. But anyway, Joe, I think what you're saying is that we're in such a serious moment historically right now and we're all talking about WikiLeaks, which wasn't such a big deal as what it was. So what's your take on this, Ray?
MCGOVERN: Well, I think that the thing has an inertia kind of dynamic of its own. I mean, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the ones that are calling the shots with respect to timing. So fitting that into some larger purpose that would serve the US government is a little strained in my view. It is what it is. That's the strange thing about this. I mean, the guy is the real deal, in my view, and so is his effort, and so is the fellow that gave him the--if it is Private [Bradley] Manning, he said he wanted the world to know what's going on and to discuss it before it continues.
JAY: But does it concern you a bit--and it put some doubt in my mind, although in the end I believe this is what it is, but the reason why there isn't more transparency in "diplomacy"--and I'm putting quotation marks around it, Gareth, as you said--is because most foreign policy is, for the most part, banal, narrow-minded national interest, which means the interests of the elite of each country, and it's so much just about making money and defending their commercial interests? And if they actually said that it wasn't about democracy and it wasn't about defending freedom and it wasn't about all the high-minded things, for starters, it's pretty hard to get kids to volunteer in armies to go get killed in wars, you know, because you're going to make someone else either wealthy or something. So the heart of the secrecy is that they don't want to be transparent about the motive and the agenda. That being said, not that much of that came out of these leaks. It's not like you got--that veil didn't really come down. It was kind of if the veil is here, it was, like, up here. Go ahead, Gareth.
PORTER: And there are two points about that. There are two reasons why that is true. I think it is the case that that message has not--certainly not come out as a result of the diplomatic cables. And I think there are two reasons. One is that obviously most of the diplomacy is routine conversations about things that do not raise those issues, and certainly do not do so in a way that allows for that transparency, for on understanding of the motives behind US policy, for the most part. There are exceptions, however, of course. And those--one of the exceptions is some of the cables that have to do with Iran, specifically. This is the case that we've talked about on The Real News Network, which is the revelation that the United States was pushing this idea of Iran acquiring long-range missiles from North Korea which could menace the cities of Europe. Why? Why was this being pushed by the United States, a year ago or so, in a meeting with the Russians? Because they were trying to justify missile defense for Europe. Why missile defense for Europe? Not because Iran was threatening Europe; nobody really believes that. It was because this is really big money behind missile defense. There are huge, huge amounts of money to be made in this. And that's why there's such momentum behind it bureaucratically and politically in this country.
JAY: There was also an argument at the time that while this was said to be about Iran, a lot of people thought this was more about an encirclement of Russia. And so that--there could be other reasons for this.
PORTER: Right. But the Iran angle is--you know, clearly the only reason for it was to push missile defense in Europe, so that a lot of people in this country who are arms manufacturers can make a lot of money, and so that the bureaucrats who are pushing the programs within the military and Defense Department could have [inaudible]
JAY: Now, you did some specific work on this issue, looking at some of the leaks that were not published in The New York Times on the question of Arab regime support for--.
PORTER: Right. And--.
JAY: What did you find?
PORTER: But let me just make--the larger point here is the second reason that the message about the real motives in US policy does not become clearer because of WikiLeaks is that where there is an exception here, and where the documents do shed light on it, The New York Times has the franchise on saying what they really mean, and they tell the world--the Washington Post follows them--saying, oh, yeah, this is showing that Iran really is a menace to Europe. And therefore it's exactly the opposite message of what is in the documents.
JAY: Why? What did you find that's the opposite?
PORTER: Well, in the case of this, of course, what I found was that the Russians, who really were very well informed about this issue of the phantom missile, said, no way. I mean, we've been following this for years. There's no evidence whatsoever that this missile even exists, let alone that it's been tested.
MCGOVERN: I saw its picture.
PORTER: Exactly. I mean--.
MCGOVERN: It's a dummy.
PORTER: It's a dummy. Yeah. So, anyway, I mean, the evidence was very powerful in this document. Had it been covered, you know, accurately, honestly by The New York Times, that message should have gotten out, but it didn't.
MCGOVERN: There's another aspect here, and that is we're dealing with secret and confidential messages. There are a couple of top secret, but not very many. The real deal happens at the top secret: no diss, no dissemination, executive dissemination, and so forth, or in codeword traffic. And so you wouldn't expect to see any allusion to the objective to build permanent military bases in Afghanistan or Iraq or how much natural gas really lies in Turkmenistan.
JAY: Yeah. I mean, I don't think we saw any cables about the issue of pipelines through Pakistan and the issues of China's influence in Pakistan and these sorts of things.
MCGOVERN: But what you do see, and, you know, there are a myriad subjects--bear in mind, we've got 1 percent of the latest released now. But even so, when you talk about how it reflects on what the United States has become, we used to be real big on rule of law, right, and things like torture were beyond the pale, and we would pursue torturers. And here we have the United States leaning very hard on the government of Spain, the government of Germany, saying, look, okay, we know we tortured your citizens, but you take that to a judicial proceeding and our bilateral relationship will be seriously affected. Well, that's pretty darned blatant, you know? And the worst, of course, is that these governments, old European governments, if you want, according to Rumsfeld, they just cave, and they tolerate the interference in their judicial process and the picking judges and squashing cases. It's really--so there's a lot you can get through [inaudible] and we're only just begun, as the song says.
JAY: Right. We have another caller, Ahmed from Toronto. Go ahead. Ahmed, are you there?
AHMED, CALLER (TORONTO): Yes. Hi.
JAY: Yes. Go ahead.
AHMED: Hello?
JAY: Yes, go ahead with your question.
AHMED: Yes. My question was, what seemed before, the United States was creating wars before, since Vietnam to Korea, whatever, what have you, and even started in the Second World War, and this was all for the United States to go and to be the only superpower of the world. But now we've seen new modern wars. It's not fighting communists anymore or to be the only superpower, because the United States evidently they're only superpower in the world. So now we're seeing different wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan, which is oil and gas and Middle East governments. So [inaudible] from the escalation, the United States, of the problem between North Korea and South Korea now?
JAY: Alright, so the question's about North Korea and South Korea. I mean, this is an interesting thing.
AHMED: Yeah. Why--what's the reason behind all this escalation?
JAY: Alright. Okay. Thanks, Ahmed. We're going to cut off now, but I'm going to re-pose your question here, 'cause that may have been a little difficult to hear. So the question is about US policy in North Korea and South Korea. But if you take it back to the WikiLeaks issue, this is again something I find a little interesting, or something which is--like, when it comes to the Middle East, most of the leaks somehow help the US and Israeli position. When it comes to Korea--.
PORTER: The way they were covered. The way they were covered.
JAY: The way they were--. Exactly. Okay, the way they were covered.
PORTER: It's a key point, the key point.
JAY: Yeah, you're right. That is a key point, yes. When it comes to Korea, though, it's somewhat similar, 'cause, I mean, it's not bad, I would think, for the US position to make it clearer to the North Koreans that--at least according to these cables, that maybe China's ready to bail on them. But at any rate, talk about WikiLeaks in the Koreas.
PORTER: Well, I mean, that's the only one, as far as I know, that has really come out that has any significant, you know, substantive bearing on the question of the policies of the major players in the Korean conflict. It seems to me--I think there must be more to come in the future about this, because there has been such an absence of documentation on that issue, on that set of issues surrounding Korea, its--North Korea and its nuclear program, as well as the North-South relationship and the role of the United States in all this. And, you know, what I'm going to be looking for, frankly, from the diplomatic cables is something that helps to understand why the North Koreans since the beginning of 2010 have been so aggressive in trying to, you know, take initiatives militarily, assuming that the Cheonan sinking really was North Korean. I don't know the truth, but let's assume for the moment that that was the case.
JAY: And there is dispute about it. But--.
PORTER: There's dispute about it, and, you know, I don't claim to know the truth, but assuming for the moment that that was the case, and then you have the use of force, you know, shelling an Island enough to really rile the Americans as well as the South Koreans, it begs the question of what's going on here. And the American news media again have done the thing that they always do, which is to analyze the problem or report on the problem as--exactly the way Washington, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and the White House would want them to report on it.
JAY: That's--which is your point is that whatever the existing narrative was, WikiLeaks is playing into that narrative.
PORTER: That's right. And so what they're reporting is, well, I mean, this is just North Korea being North Korea: they're aggressive; nobody understands them; they're mysterious; we have to--you know, we now have to go to our hard posture, because otherwise we'd be rewarding the North Koreans, and so we can't have any diplomacy with the North Koreans. And the point I want to make is this, that there is only one source that I've seen that really shed some light on this, by bringing up the history of the North Korean policy with regard to the diplomacy of the conflict. What North Koreans have always wanted, of course, is a peace agreement with the United States, an end to the state of war, which has never ended since 1953, since the armistice. And the North Koreans have come back to this from time to time. In January of this year, the North Koreans again formally proposed to the United States to negotiate a peace treaty, and they said, if you negotiate a peace treaty, we will then stop our nuclear weapons program. They simply put it that way, that--. So there is a reason, there is a set of reasons for what we've seen in recent months, but it has not been apparent, you know, from the news media. And I would hope that the WikiLeaks cables would shed light on this. We'll have to see.
JAY: Ray.
MCGOVERN: You know, there's an aspect here that needs to be emphasized with respect to what you could expect to get out of these diplomatic cables. These are written by foreign service officers who want to get promoted, okay? So are you going to see something in cables from Middle Eastern countries that will reflect poorly on Israel or on our policy toward Israel or Israel's influence on us? No, you won't find that. Similarly with respect to Korea, if there's some doubt, which there is great doubt about whether the North Koreans sunk that ship earlier, are you going to find a cable that says, you know, this is rather plausible scenario here with this mine that could have gone--? You're not going to find any of that, because these people want to get promoted, and they don't want to tell any bad news to--.
JAY: David from Los Angeles writes a question over Skype to us or an email, which is: is there any proof that the US government is directly leaning on these foreign governments to crack down on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange? Any evidence of that? Or are they simply doing it for their own reasons?
MCGOVERN: Well, if you accept that Ann, whatever her last name is, the primary complaint person there,--
JAY: This is one of the two women in Sweden that has instigated these charges.
MCGOVERN: --that she's tied in with CIA front organizations, to include Luis Posada Carriles, the fellow who really downed a Cuban airliner with a sports team on it. You know, there's some reason to believe that she's got what we call a 201 file in the agency, and that when it was learned or when she was put up to going to bed with Assange, that there was a plan there where they could get him. It's--you know, it's classic. It's--they call it a honey trap, okay?
JAY: It's classic and it's possible. We don't know for sure.
MCGOVERN: Yeah. Well, we've got--.
JAY: But we don't--what do we know about her connection to--. She was in Cuba for a while.
MCGOVERN: Well, she worked with this organization, Cuban exile sort of organization. She was thrown out of Cuba. She--and she--one of the companies sort of run by who knows whom, but could be my former colleagues, was one that Posada Carriles is connected with. So she's got a record, you know, of contacts with some folks that don't always tell the truth. Let me put it that way. So we have to take this all into account. And, you know, this is so classic.
JAY: But the other thing, part of this is that the elites in either--whether it's in England or in Europe, they're all involved in the same kind of machinations. Maybe they're not the superpower, but none of them want transparent diplomacy. So they have their own reasons not for--to not like what WikiLeaks is doing. I mean, someday it could be them.
MCGOVERN: But they all keep their condoms on. I'm sorry.
JAY: Okay. JD from Toronto has joined us. JD, go ahead.
JD, CALLER (TORONTO): Oh, hi, Paul. I speak fairly [inaudible] so you may [inaudible] rephrase the question I put to you for your panel. I'm fairly technical, and I follow your show quite carefully. I'm a supporter [inaudible] donator [inaudible] I watched [Zbigniew] Brzezinski on the PBS show with Judy Woodruff on November 30, and Brzezinski said that given the materials [inaudible] materials coming out of the WikiLeaks currently, really it looked like some agency was feeding WikiLeaks those materials. And that's one question [inaudible] the panel to think about.
JAY: You said that it was Brzezinski had said that?
JD: [inaudible] with regard to--. Sorry?
JAY: I'm sorry. That was Brzezinski, you said? Zbigniew Brzezinski, you said, said this?
JD: Yes, November 30, 2010, PBS interview.
JAY: Okay. Yeah, go ahead.
JD: It's on YouTube. So the second question was with regard to ownership of [inaudible] domain names. And quite by accident, a year and a half ago I determined that The Globe and Mail's Web servers are not in Canada; they're in Chicago. As I said, I'm technically competent. So when you go to a .ca Globe and Mail website, it's going to Chicago. And there was a recent ruling in the US that suggests that the location of the server depends upon the ownership of the transactions into that server. Now, if [inaudible] in Canada, you find that they guarantee ownership of or control of Canadian transactions to .ca domain names. So that's a question I'd like, again, to put to your audience [inaudible] issue there for Canadians in going to The Globe and Mail, for example?
JAY: Well, I'll tell you what--yeah. We're going to have a really knowledgeable panel tomorrow night--I'm not sure if my guests know the server law and that kind of issue. But tomorrow night we're doing a panel about the Amazon takedown of WikiLeaks, and the three people on that panel are real experts in this area. So let me pose this question tomorrow night. Your first question about Brzezinski and the possibility that deliberately leaks [sic], let me take that up now. Is that okay?
JD: I'd like to add one more because Ray McGovern's there.
JAY: Okay. Go ahead.
MCGOVERN: Yeah.
JD: You know, again, I follow the Canadian academics and 9/11 quite carefully, and--don't smile, Paul.
JAY: Oh, no, I--not at all. I was smiling 'cause I put my hand up to Ray to just hold a second. I was not smiling at what you said. Go ahead.
JD: Okay, because, you know, there are credible people with credible credentials risking their careers speaking to this issue. And, you know, I've got, you know, a degree in science. And, you know, you can't get freefall [inaudible] World Trade Center Number Seven [inaudible] doesn't happen in freefall. So my question is more with regard to why is Fox News, and specifically Geraldo Rivera, speaking about 9/11 as an inside job? [inaudible] to speak about this.
JAY: Okay. Well, let me--let me start--okay, well, so we're going to do with question one and question three, and question two we're doing tomorrow night. Alright. So let's start with question one. Brzezinski and some others have suggested that--I didn't hear the interview, but let me pose it the way I've heard it that makes the most possible sense, not that necessarily the whole WikiLeaks dump is some maneuver or it was deliberate, though some people have said that, but more that they knew it was happening, they knew it might happen, and in the context of all that, there might be some deliberate misinformation established. And there is another piece to this, which--I'm not sure everybody's heard this point, which is that--if I'm--SIPR Network, I think it's called.
MCGOVERN: M'hm. SIPR.
JAY: SIPRNet, which was the database network all this was on, and apparently as many as 2.5 million people had access to this.
MCGOVERN: That's right.
JAY: You've got to figure, if there's going to be leaks when 2.5 million people--maybe not a leak the size of WikiLeaks, but you've got to figure, if you put out some cable, there's a good likelihood somebody's going to say something to some journalist about it or something. So what do you think about the possibility of deliberately planted information within the context of this?
MCGOVERN: Well, SIPRNet's first. Who was responsible for that?
JAY: I believe--I think it's--was the--Condoleezza Rice wasn't it?
MCGOVERN: His last name was Powell and his first name was Colin.
JAY: I--is that right?
MCGOVERN: Oh, yeah. Yeah [inaudible] right after 9/11.
JAY: Wilkerson told me it was under Rice's watch.
MCGOVERN: Yeah, well, Rice was responsible for other indignities, but this was Powell caving in. He knew better. He knows better than to put 2.5 million people on that kind of thing. But, well, getting back to Brzezinski, you know, there's this whole saying: old soldiers never die; they just fade away. Well, old national security advisers never die either, and they don't fade away; they always show up at these things. He revealed a complete ignorance with respect to the mechanics of how this happened. In answer to these questions, he was just completely at sea in terms of figure out how this could've been inserted [inaudible] He didn't realize that what Bradley Manning, if he's the guy, did was to take an empty CD and put it in there and take it out. And there's no way you can ask Bradley Manning go back to his tent and--. You know. I mean, let's--. So my caution is that, you know, PBS really ought to find somebody a little bit younger or somebody who reads this stuff. You know?
JAY: Well, what's your take, Gareth? 'Cause--.
PORTER: I absolutely agree with what Ray is saying. I--he couldn't have put it better. I think this is an absolutely perfect putdown--takedown, I think, is the more correct term, of Zbigniew Brzezinski. I mean, he's said a few intelligent things in his life, but, you know, he has said a lot of things that are not intelligent, and this is perhaps the least intelligent thing, apart from his advocacy of the jihadism in Afghanistan the 1980s.
JAY: No, but I--let me put it as a way that I think might make some sense, which is, without any foreknowledge there would ever be a WikiLeaks leak, some of this stuff is written in cables thinking it might leak in some way, because you just figure 2.5 million people on this thing, something's going to get out. So if you want to put out some misinformation, it's a way to do it, make it look [inaudible]
PORTER: Well, I mean, Zbig did not come up with any specific item that he thought was a plausible candidate for that. I'm waiting for him to do that before one can take seriously [inaudible]
MCGOVERN: Yeah, I wouldn't buy that, Paul. That's just--you know, who--how many of those 2.5 million people knew that that there are 2.5 million people on there? They probably all felt, you know, that it would be a little difficult to do that, in my view.
PORTER: I mean, the real problem, of course--or not a problem, but the reality is that the White House, the Pentagon, at mid to high levels, leak diplomatic cables all the time for their own--
JAY: Well, that was actually a question that we had coming in.
PORTER: --for their own political purposes. And that's--you know, that's worth talking about. But the idea that somebody at some point slipped some, you know, material into a cable that they thought might be leaked, well, that's not very important and it's really not very significant.
JAY: Okay. In terms of what you've seen so far, and we know it's just a fraction of, I mean--what?--a quarter million cables, what has jumped out at you the most, you said, okay, I didn't know that, that's astounding, that really reveals something?
PORTER: Well, I mean, I think there--in terms of absolute numbers there's quite a few things that are worth really delving into. When we talked the first time about this, one thing that struck me was that the cable that was written from Baghdad about Iranian influence in Iraq was a substantial departure from the kind of rhetoric that has been used in the past to discuss the problem of Iranian influence there. I mean, it's usually presented as some conspiratorial thing, subversion, essentially, by Iran, whereas this cable laid it out in a way--at least 95 percent of the cable was laid out in a way that was reasonably rational; in other words, it was saying, look, Iran's influence is based on its proximity to Iraq, the cultural similarity, the affinity of the Shia in Iraq with Iran, and not the least of the problems or aspects of this, that Iranian trade is of absolutely vital importance to Iraq.
JAY: In fact stuff [David] Petraeus said when he was in front of Congress. When Petraeus was testifying in Congress, he said more or less the same thing. It was actually an interesting [inaudible]
PORTER: Well, that's not the way I recall. You know, I mean, he was talking about Iranian subversion, not Iraq.
JAY: No, no, no. We did a whole story on this. It's very interesting is that there is a portion, his first Q&A back and forth, I think it must've been, I think, with McCain, but his first Q&A, Petraeus gave an argument why it's in Iran's interest to collaborate, to have a constructive solution in Iraq, and gave very similar reasons. Then he gets pushed by McCain, and I'm not sure who the other Republican hawk were, trying to get some rhetoric out of him about Iranian killing American soldiers and all this, and then he finally gave them what they wanted.
PORTER: So maybe you're talking about later than 2007, which is what I was talking about. I was talking about his rhetoric in 2007.
JAY: Yeah, no, I'm talking--yeah, I'm talking about--well, I--yeah, this would've been about a year and a half ago.
PORTER: Alright. [inaudible]
JAY: Go ahead: what jumped out for you, something that you said, okay, that's a revelation?
MCGOVERN: Okay. On November 29, 2005, there was a bizarre press conference at the Pentagon: General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Donald Rumsfeld. What had just been discovered was that Iraqi prisoners were being tortured, okay, and some US soldiers came upon this. Question from a lady: General Pace, what are your instructions to soldiers who encounter a torture done by the Iraqis? Pace: Ma'am, our instructions are to stop it; they need to do everything in their power to stop the torture whenever they see it. Rumsfeld: Well, I don't think you mean stop it; I think you mean report it. No, ma'am, it was stop it; we need to stop it. The only time in the whole--my experience that a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has deliberately contradicted the secretary of defense, November 29, 2005. What do we know now from the WikiLeaks? We know there was a frag-o order, a fragmentary order. It was June 2004. So do your subtraction there: June 2004, November 2005. Okay? That order told American soldiers that when these prisoners get dumped into Iraqi--in prisons, if there's violence or if there's torture, as long as it's Iraqi on Iraqi, just ignore it, just report it to the Iraqi authorities who were doing the torture, okay? That is unconscionable, but it came directly from Rumsfeld. What's my point? My point is that General [Antonio] Taguba did not misspeak when he told Sy Hersh, you know, I thought I was working for the U.S. Army, but I realized I've been working for the Mafia the last couple of years. That's what it's become. And the Army has become not only completely politicized and willing to do torture and that kind of thing, but they've become sacrosanct. Why is it that nobody makes fun of General Petraeus? Look, he's got so many medals on here, ten rows of medals. That's more than Westmoreland had. He had only had nine. And they're so heavy that he falls over on his face on his desk.
PORTER: Sort of like all those Soviet generals, right?
MCGOVERN: And nobody laughs. You know, give him water and--yeah, like the Soviet generals. I mean, I think that's telling. I mean, the guy needs his medals. And--.
PORTER: And don't forget the star on his cap, right? That's the largest star of any general ever.
MCGOVERN: Oh, he does. Yeah. I thought you meant the Soviet [inaudible]
PORTER: No, Petraeus.
MCGOVERN: Now--you know, so this is really not what our founders had in mind. First of all, they spoke out against a standing army, because you have a standing army, you're going to find wars to fight. And, of course, what we have here is a very, very different army from the one I served in. And what happens when they come home? You know, what happens when they come home not having won a war? Okay? And who are they going to look to, take orders from? Well, Cheney, presumably, may not be around anymore, but Petraeus will be around. We've got the prospect of a possible Napoleon coming home, okay?
JAY: Yeah, it's--they--what happened seemed to be--in Vietnam it was oppose the policy, but also there was critique about the soldiers and the generals. Well, in these wars it was: you should oppose the policy, but don't--but support the troops. But that support the troops has turned into support the generals--
MCGOVERN: That's right.
JAY: --without any kind of criticism, and that's created this kind of nationalist envelope around the generals.
PORTER: Just bear in mind, though, that you're talking about the WikiLeaks from the War Logs. The War Logs were much richer in that sort of material.
MCGOVERN: Yeah.
PORTER: Much harder to find that in the diplomatic cables, for obvious reasons, for the reasons that you gave.
JAY: Well, this is a taste of what we're going to do more of, which we're going to do more live interviews, and viewers are going to have more chance to ask questions and get involved. After the break, Daphne Wysham's going to be joining us, and we're going to be talking about climate change policy. The issue of donations, of course, is why we're all here. So if you want to donate, please, you can do it on our website TheRealNews.com, which I assume you're on or you wouldn't be listening to what I'm saying. There's a donate button here or there. We're trying to reach our $200,000 challenge. If you're having any trouble on the website, or you just prefer, you can do it by phone, you can call 1-888-499-6772. If you want to send a check, you can phone that number and they'll give you the information on where to send the check. We'll be back in just a few minutes, and we're going to talk about climate change policy, especially what's happening in Washington now with the Republicans taking the House. Is there actually--is climate-change policy even on anyone's agenda anymore? So please join us in just a few minutes.
End of Transcript

我的學校是夢工廠：美國頂尖學府的教育革新

【採訪：李雪莉】你知道遊戲是最好的學習方式嗎？當強調感性的戲劇系遇上重視理性的資訊系，會創造出什麼教育新可能？麻省理工學院、卡內基美隆大學等美國頂尖名校，又在進行什麼樣的教育革新？

World Press Freedom Day 2010

Hosted at Australia's University of Queensland. The university's School of Journalism and Communication is organising the conference on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of May 2010. Great is Truth, And Mighty Above All Things is the wording above the main entrance to the Forgan Smith Building at The University of Queensland. These words fit well with the theme of this year's conference, which is Freedom of Information: the Right to Know.

wpfd2010 on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Glenn Lurie on Dropped Calls and iPhone Exclusives

Glenn Lurie on Dropped Calls and iPhone Exclusives
Here's the video highlights from AT&T President of Emerging Devices Glenn Lurie's interview with Walt Mossberg, who drills down on AT&T's reputation for dropped calls and what will happen once its iPhone exclusivity expires.

A Hands-On History of the Cellphone by Greg Harper

A Hands-On History of the Cellphone by Greg Harper
Gadget freak Greg Harper drops by the D: Dive Into Mobile to show off...gadgets, of course. Check out the All Things D archives for a trip down gadget memory lane.

People in Taiwan(Business, Entertainment)

EMBA高峰論壇

EMBA高峰論壇
後ECFA時代教學大挑戰
台灣EMBA教育邁入第15年，經過金融
海嘯衝擊，面臨中國熱與國際化潮流，
台灣EMBA教育將有哪些新思維？

RealNetworks Unifi's Media in the Cloud

RealNetworks Unifi's Media in the Cloud
RealNetworks is releasing and demoing live onstage its newest product-named Unifi. The cloud media service automatically catalogs your collection (a la iTunes) and lets you stream it to any device, on demand.

Dive Tech-OnLive Now More Than Just a Game

Dive Tech-OnLive Now More Than Just a Game
Way back in June, OnLive demoed its cloud-based mini gaming console in front of a packed house at D8. Today, it is attempting to level-up, announcing a new extension of the OnLive cloud service platform-one that turns just about any device into a console for their cloud system.

Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley at D: Mobile

Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley at D: Mobile
If Dodgeball was, as founder Dennis Crowley claims, the perfect storm of bad timing, then his latest venture Foursquare is a sunny day. In this video Crowley talks about the mechanics of merchant relationships, valuations and frothiness and the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare.

Google's Susan Wojcicki at D: Dive Into Mobile

Google's Susan Wojcicki at D: Dive Into Mobile
You'd have to search a long time to find someone who's been closer to the evolution of Google than Susan Wojcicki. It was in her rented garage that Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched the company, which she joined in 1999. Now, as one of only eight senior vice presidents, she runs Google's most important business units.

Video And Screenshots Of Android 3.0′s Surprise Appearance

The video of Andy Rubin’s talk at the Dive Into Mobile event is up, and you can watch the juicy bit above, where he takes out the prototype Motorola tablet and toys with it for all to see, demonstrating the new Google Maps and “accidentally” teasing video chat capability and some other things.

The pad looks bigger than 7″, the size we heard about, but I can’t swear to it. If I had to take a guess at the screen resolution, I’d go with 8-9″ at 1024×600. It looks thin and rather unadorned right now, but this likely isn’t the final industrial design, so let’s just not worry too much about that. He seemed proud that it had no buttons on it, though, so I’m guessing that’s final.

Rubin mentions toward the beginning of his Maps demo that it’s running a dual-core NVIDIA GPU. So there’s that. I wonder what the CPU is — not an ARM SoC, since the graphics wouldn’t be discrete like that. A new dual-core Atom? Or something new, something custom? He does say a “new” processor, and for that matter a “new” screen, so it could be anything, and the screen might be different from the current crop. (as commenters point out, it’s likely that this it is running a Tegra 2 and Rubin was simply not describing it well)

Here are a few screenshots from the video. Sorry they aren’t very clear, but they’re better than the blurry ones from before.


As for the price? TBD. Unless you want to buy the prototype, about which Rubin said “literally, this thing is probably like ten thousand dollars.”


******************************



The Google Map App on Android phones will soon get a major upgrade which will allow it to render map images a lot faster, incorporate 3D buildings, offer offline caching, and use the compass to orient the map. In a talk this evening at the D Mobile conference, Android chief Andy Rubin gave a sneak peak of the new app.

At the heart of the new app is a dynamic map rendering engine which draws maps as you use them, and offers smoother transitions when zooming in and out of different levels. The dynamic rendering will also make it possible to start to show 3D buildings as you zoom into the street-level view. The touch screen will allow you to tilt and rotate the map and buildings.

The new maps load faster because they require 100 times less data each. Instead of downloading the entire map image for each level, the app downloads meta data which describes the entire map at all different levels and then renders the appropriate sector on the fly. This will start to give Google Maps offline capabilities on mobile phones. It may be possible to cache a map of an entire city on the phone. And for people who use the turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps, when the new app comes out it will be able to recalculate the route even without a data connection.

The Google Maps app will also use the built-in compass on Android phones to automatically flip the orientation of the map to the person holding the phone. That orientation feature will come in handy when you are coming out of a subway station in an unfamiliar stop, or exiting a building.

Nexus S

Meaningful Work through Passion, not Genius

At the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and the upcoming "Outliers," gives two examples of hard work that later looked like genius. Bill Gates got up at 2am to program as a teenager, while the Beatles played together 1200 times, far more than most bands, before they ever got famous. Success, he believes, is the result of putting your heart and mind into something to create successful, meaningful work.







Are you doing what you were made to do?

Everyone has a passion and something that drives them. What is yours? Are you doing what you were made to do? Watch Joel Comm discuss how to find your passion and live your life to the fullest.

Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook,

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-yr.-old founder and CEO of mega-social media site Facebook, talks to Lesley Stahl about his life and his business, now worth an estimated $35 billion.

AMOLED

pesent Fri. Chinglan Chin03 December 2010

pesent Fri. on Prezi

ITI第 23期商英B班開訓式Brian老師介紹課程

RedLaser: How A Company That Nearly Died Sold To eBay – with Reddy and Powers

RedLaser: How A Company That Nearly Died Sold To eBay – with Reddy and Powers
Posted on Dec 2, 2010 - 2:59 PM PST




How could two guys whose company nearly died end up selling millions of apps and changing the way people use their mobile phones?

That’s the seemingly impossible feat that Vikas Reddy and Jeffrey Powers, founders of Occipital, achieved. They created an app called RedLaser that made the cameras on people’s mobile phones into smart barcode scanners. With their app, users can, for example, scan items in stores and see if you can buy those items cheaper online.

They sold RedLaser to eBay for an undisclosed amount and now they’re working on 360 Panorama, which offers real-time panorama creation.