Irreverent. Irrelevant.

President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.  And, if it is a nod to America’s rejection of the type of leadership from the past eight years, then he deserves it.  Maybe not yet…but that is for another post.  I am changing the subject.

Let us revisit Orwell’s 1984…”whoever controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” Here they are speaking about the events in history, and our recollection of it.  Oh, and manipulation of it.  My interest came from two stories that caught my attention today.

I have been loosely following CERN’s work on the Hadron Collider since AirForceStepDad stated “I just know they opened up some kind of hole-in-time…” when it broke.  Don’t mind him–he took the pills during Desert Storm.  So I was dismayed that a researcher in the facility was arrested. First, there was conflicting information on the French physicist working in the vicinity of the Large Hadron Collider had been arrested with links to Al-Qaeda. He was in contact with the organization, and although he had not begun preparing for any specific action, he had expressed an interest in carrying out attacks. My info discrepancy came from the actual number of individuals arrested, from NPR and the BBC coverage of it.  Hate to ignore blogs, but I was looking for traditional media on this one, because a few originally led me to believe that he was actually working ON THE LHC. Which terrified me.  But he was not, and in fact he was working on the Beauty Quark with independent researchers (also neat subject matter…and anti-matter), and so was not actually working with CERN on figuring out the origins of the universe (and I guess the Higgs Boson – Thanks wikipedia!). For their part, CERN did make sure that they knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the electrical failure from last year was exactly that.  Even still, the thought of terrorist activities so close to the only gigantic particle accelerator is not all that comforting. The physicist was unnamed in reports.

This led me to a blurb that I know I heard somewhere…Iranian Atomic Scientist missing, or kidnapped?  I searched for a bit, but wasn’t able to find anything until I ran across Al Jazeera’s information. Apparently, Shahram Amiri is  missing, and was purportedly working on Tehran’s nuclear program.  From what I read however, there is speculation on whether he defected or was kidnapped.  Al Jazeera indicated that many media outlets believe he defected to the west, while his family dismisses that notion.  So then, Iran goes and holds Saudi Arabia (there they are!!!) responsible for not protecting Amiri when he disappeared from their country.  Here’s a thought: If you want to play the “Big Boy Totalitarian Country” game, you don’t let your important people leave the country.  I think that is the third rule down the list. 

While the Iranian foreign minister claims that they have proof of American interference, but U.S. officials have said that they don’t have any information on Amiri. He went missing before the secret site at Qom was revealed, by about three months, so it is safe to guess that he is safe. But…ummm….unless he is here, and quite secure in the United States, I think we should be a little more concerned.

Which brings me to my important point. Once I found the article on Al Jazeera, and had his name, then I found all sorts of articles about his disappearance, with the headline that most often included “nuke scientist” (Is that considered proper?).  These were all within the last week.  What concerned me about Iran was that there was no report of his disappearance, and if he had ended up with really vicious people, we wouldn’t have known until a few days ago–if at all.  More disturbing is that if his disappearance was reported…it’s getting harder to use a search engine to find news from a specific day, specific event, or for events over a year ago. 

I, like many people rely on digital news.  What is beginning to happen is, without the help of a blogger’s link, sometimes you cannot search and find information about what happened if it was too obscure, or if it was too long ago.  Obviously, there was no report of his disappearance.  I also tried searching for information reported when the LHC malfunctioned last year, and consistently came up with the physicist’s arrest.  I gave up and went to CERN’s  site for the date of the incident, then was able to find news in a search.  In searching for this information, I realized how easy it is to manipulate information over time.  I have heard numerous people screaming “1984!!!” without realizing just what that would mean. The true danger from 1984-style media control does not lie within the United States, simply because there are so many “citizen journalists”.  There are, however, repressed societies that can foster misinformation and virtually change the past  before their very eyes (although a more subtle approach would probably be preferable).