Just thank goodness it was no worse. We have one unspecified illness—which could be concussion: you can start throwing up after a hit on the head a day ago, and that can be a lasting problem. They’re not saying. We had someone—a professional— nearly have a finger severed by her student. Whether that cut missed the tendon they’re not saying. She’s calling it minor. When 200 pounds pressing down on a blade that can cut a slash in jeans just by setting your skates on your lap hits a bare hand lying on the ice, it’s not minor. I hope they’re paying these pros plenty, because they’re taking their lives and health in their hands.
I’m all for adults learning to skate. There are ways to do it safely, and that includes not trying to do a flip jump or toe loop after one week of instruction, not going out bare-handed for a good impression on the cameras, and not trying complex pairs maneuvers that send you down in a tangle in which the pro’s first thought is protecting the student’s head from impact (Hel-mets! Please!) or in a situation where the pro goes down because of the student and the student has no clue that he’s too close to his partner with the blades.
I’m busy watching the carnage around Wikileaks…
I’m aware that you try to avoid politics on this blog, but a strange thought occurred to me.
This whole thing is like something out of a SF novel. In fact, it’s like any number of SF novels I’ve read where one brilliant and erratic genius disrupts a whole society using an innovative technology – though, of course, on a smaller scale than you generally find in novels.
If you actually read up about Julian Assange’s grand designs, it’s quite science fictiony. It even puts me in mind of books like Asimov’s Foundation series.
Here’s a summary of some of his philosophy, and a link to download a couple of his essays:
http://goo.gl/Hlo6u
I see that the Swiss bank that closed his account due to political pressure (postfinance.ch) is still offline, and has been offline for about a day, due to hacker attacks. PayPal has also been targeted.
Attempts to shut down the Wikileaks website have only led to more than 500 mirrored sites all over the world.
Governments have not yet realized that this is out of their control. They can target Assange personally and press trumped up charges (since he hasn’t actually broken any law), but the leaked information is out there and can’t be blocked or recalled. And Assange has so many tech-savvy supporters that Wikileaks will continue to operate for the forseeable future even without Assange personally. Every time governments try to clamp down, they just create more active supporters for him.
Interesting times we live in. Technology is changing the whole way human society functions, and we are just at the beginning of it.
I’d find the whole thing easier if he went after a bunch of countries and not the primarily the easy targets (aka: US). Makes it seem like we’re the only ones neck deep in it when in reality it just is how it is for most if not all governments. Nothing new really. I don’t buy all the shocked responses. Open a history book. Typically this is stuff you read about 50-100 years later so it is fresher than usual, but not unprecedented or out of character for what everyone should be used to. So I don’t really see them as some kind of scifi folk hero bringing truth to the masses. They are airing out only certain people’s dirty laundry and everyone else is gasping like they don’t do the same thing themselves. Now the stuff they did earlier had more of a justice bent which makes much more sense to me. Not this latest stuff.
and the trumped up – or not – charges have him in prison with no bail. does sound like some heroes in SF we have read, I agree …
and as for skating with the stars – is that like Strictly come dancing on ice? just saw some pictures of poor Anne Widdicombe – an older woman (British ex-politician) in bad shape and not pretty done up in a load of ridiculous costumes being very bravely towed around a dance floor by a pro partner who must be risking hernia or back injury, since he was picking her up and throwing her about as if she were as light as a fairy. she is probably in a lot better shape than she was though!
The best information I can find about the charges (in the Mail Online, strangely enough) seems to show that they they have little or no basis. In fact, the charges were thrown out by the first Swedish public prosecutor who looked at them. Subsequently they were taken up again, probably due to pressure by the Swedish government. Convenient, since he has actually broken no law in releasing the documents, and no charges have been laid against him on that account.
The story behind the charges is here:
http://goo.gl/ZlUa5
If you wanted to fictionalize about the event with wikileaks, you could even say extant charges were seized upon knowing they wouldn’t stick, all to give certain agencies the chance to go through files and premises and trace connections.
Personally I rather detest egos who don’t care if their ‘noble purpose’ gets innocent people killed or starts or exacerbates a war. The content of the leaks doesn;t actually surprise anybody who works in the field of diplomacy, where reading between the lines is an artform: it’s more theater of the absurd. Where it does play life-and-death is where a location is revealed, or a name is named, and that person may well be killed, along with his entire family, because the people who do the targeting don’t give a damn and just want to make an example. It also plays bigtime on the Street, where the politically and religiously excitable can be stirred up by those who cultivate power for power’s sake in those venues…because power can often be traded in for comfort, safety, or cash…or the thrill of it all, for the truly unhinged, among whom, if he is not on someone’s payroll, I count the perpetrator of this mess.
Assange claims, in an article in The Australian ( http://goo.gl/DGHCE ) that
“WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. …
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same.”
And all diplomatic cables released so far have been redacted by the New York Times and other newspapers first, and were offered to the US government for redacting months ago.
He is certainly a major egotist and I feel ambivalent about him, but I also feel very uncomfortable about the hysterical reaction against him by governments who claim to believe in freedom of speech.
As Assange points out in the article quoted above, “Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?”
About Skating With The Stars, I figured watching it would be like watching NASCAR for the crashes, except that it’d be harder to not see blood. The very concept makes me cringe a little.
I haven’t seen much of anything in the latest round of Wikileaks info — the diplomatic cables — that was surprising. It’s mostly confirmation in writing of stuff that journalists familiar with the various situations already knew, and I’m sure stuff that all the government players who care, worldwide, already know for sure. If these things are secrets, they’re mostly secrets from various nations’ populaces, who might not be happy to know how bluntly, say, Saudi Arabia actively pushes for US involvement in the Middle East rather than simply permits it, even if everybody informed already knew it.
The previous round, military stuff from the two current wars, was riskier, even if it was generally only of historical interest. Again, though, I suspect a lot of that was already known to the enemy in advance of Wikileaks letting it out.
It does show how poorly US secrets are protected, though, doesn’t it? If one disaffected soldier went to Wikileaks, how many others sold access to the Chinese, or whoever else?
Our national covert capability is either gone deeper than it’s admitted to be or pretty much a mess, dating from another such incident where a military and a president used to doing things one way met the new age of media back in the late 70’s, early 80’s, I think it was.
Of course—if you’re really good you want to look as if nothing’s there. If you’re almost good you want to be laughable. And of course you can always try having your politicians tell the absolute up front truth, which is one way of hiding your deep secrets—they’ll immediately be believed to be a subterfuge or stupid.
I think that he has no restraint on his ego, mouth, or material. This stuff is completely useless without a context, which the scattergun publication assuredly doesn’t provide; and as has been said, it is no great revelation to those who are knowledgeable or simply thoughtful. These documents are useful as background for reporters and academics but don’t do our average citizen who is far more motivated by media than being in control of it. I would certainly be more likely to ascribe good motives to Assange if he had sent it to people who could have made good use of it. I think that waht he has done is far more to the benefit of anarchists, demagogues, propagandists, and counter-espionage than any possible favorable outcome. As far as whether he has committed any crimes, I would think that possessing and transferring classified documents with intent would be classified as espionage under the laws of any country. One also might look askance at his claims of risk-taking and daring. To the best of my knowledge, he has not published any secrets from places like Russia, China, Iran or Myanmar where they play real hardball and have no difficulty passing the red-faced test on the most trumped up charges of espionage for political or business advantage. From what I’ve seen, he hasn’t matured one bit from the antisocial teenaged hacker that he was in years past.
Hear, hear, Brennan!
“Free speech” my, er, ‘fourth point of contact’! (have to keep in mind this are a family blog!) 😀 This guy is all mouth and ego. His premise appears to be that no government has the right to secrecy at any level, which is childish at best, and goes downhill rapidly from there.
Umm… Brennan? here are some facts for you:
He revealed that:
* The Russian government is highly involved with the Mafia.
* The Chinese government ordered cyber attacks on Google because a high official didn’t like what turned up when he did a search on his own name.
* The Saudi government and others in the Middle East asked the US to attack Iran, totally contrary to what they are publicly saying, and what their voters want.
* Saudi leaders in a highly puritanical state throw parties featuring drugs, alcohol and sex, and the police turn a blind eye.
* The Afghan puppet government set up by the US is totally corrupt from top to bottom.
* American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that their Afghanistan venture is doomed and that the Taliban will end up winning.
* The British government freed the Lockerbie bomber because of threats by Libya.
* Britain’s inquiry into the lies about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ used to launch the Iraq war was ‘fixed’ to protect US interests.
* The US Government has thrown away staggering amounts of taxpayers’ money, with absolutely no records or accountability to corrupt US companies providing services in Iraq and Afghanistan – hundreds of billions.
* The US was spying on diplomats in the UN, and trying to connect DNA samples, personal passwords and credit card numbers. (Why? To be able to frame and discredit any diplomat they don’t like.)
* Sweden is sharing intelligence with the US, but this being is kept secret from the Swedish parliament, who would strongly disapprove of it.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Less than 1000 out of 250,000 cables have been released.
Don’t you think that voters in all these countries are entitled to know what their governments are really doing?
“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” – Thomas Jefferson
“What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.” – John Naughton (The Guardian)
“The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. … Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” – Simon Jenkins (The Guardian)
None of that is really news to people who pay attention to politics and history. Russians involved with the mafia? Oh really? Never saw that coming. Saudi’s not happy with the instability of their region and the upper class not living by the same rules the regular people are required to follow? That’s pretty much out in the open. US gov throwing away money? Check. Chinese government ok with cyber attacks? Tell me something I don’t know. People think Afghanistan is doomed? Lockerbie bomber sham? This stuff isn’t buried that deep. Take a few political science classes, read a few books, and follow global news and you can read between the lines enough to see it.
If the masses are shocked its because most of them couldn’t tell you what countries border the US or even who Putin is. My college educated coworkers couldn’t tell you the political dynamics between N.Korea/China/Russia even for the stuff that makes it on the nightly news. Average people don’t care. Packaged like this has been and anything would be shocking to the masses though. Get the rabble rallied around these “shocking” news bits and there is where the power is. The truth is that these things weren’t really hidden that deep. The Saudi thing is ridiculously out in the open already. There just wasn’t a profit in churning it up until now as no one wanted to set off the dominoes.
What it is is a media embarrassment which is often worse than what is actually being exposed. It can be I’m not really sure what good will come from it. Will the masses suddenly start being better citizens and be more aware of what’s going on? Will the average American start to care about global politics and keeping themselves informed as they should have been doing in the first place? Have they ever? Americans don’t have a reputation of it and for the most part that is earned. They’ll get mad for a while, a few people will lose their jobs, there might be some annoying internet laws enacted, and then everything will return to normal because that’s how it has always been. If people think it started in the last decade they are quite mistaken.
As Assange says, if it’s all so trivial and well-known, then why the hysterical reaction about risking lives, etc?
If you want to know what he is really doing, then read his essays, which I linked earlier. It’s different from what everyone thinks.
In a nutshell, he doesn’t care whether the revelations are startling or not. He doesn’t care that the content may be what every informed person already suspected all along.
That’s not the point.
The point is that he believes that, by making governments paranoid about leaks and security, he limits their ability to function in underhand ways. He wants governments and organizations to become so fearful or leaks that they can’t function effectively in secret.
To Assange the contents of the leaks are secondary. His primary aim is to make unjust systems so fearful of leaks, and so distrustful of everyone, that they are not able to function effectively.
It has little to do with the contents of the leaks, except that they are true and embarrassing.
It has everything to do with creating an environment in which governments find it difficult to function effectively in secrecy.
They are angry and embarrassed. The “risking lives thing” is a gamble to make the leaks look bad and a power move of their own to get information/internet laws shoved through. Laws they probably wanted to enact anyway and will have the freedom to do now. There is a chance that people who don’t like us will do bad things in the spirit of his leaks. Granted they probably would do bad things anyway, but now they’ll have reasons that more typically sane people might sympathize with. The “bad America” bandwagon often has normal people brushing shoulders with truly dangerous people.
It is hard for me to see the end result as being nothing more than intrusive laws being enacted and governments playing it closer to their chests. They’ll still function just fine. They just won’t be as sloppy. I don’t think they made all the new-tech adjustments over the years. Now they will.
Can governments function effectively out in the open? It seems to go against its nature. You’d get eaten alive unless everyone was doing it. And you’d never be able to sit down at the table with certain countries without being dangerously blunt. Some of the pretending keeps the peace.
I’m currently familiarizing myself with an epub reader with Heavy Time, downloaded here. I support this very good idea to provide out-of print books directly by the authors – great stuff!
The whole Earth Corp reads just like where we’re heading down here currently. It’s important that people like Wikileaks and SF authors, stop that from happening.
I don’t think it’s polite to refer to other authors works here, so I won’t mention Brave New World or 1984 or The Shockwave Rider. *DUCKS*
Never a problem on this site with mentioning other authors.
Speaking of Skating with the Stars…it’s rating aren’t doing too well. 4.5 with only 1 in the 18-49 demo which is the important part. The Sing Off is even doing better. Probably for the best if people have been getting hurt. Maybe they can finish the season with a ton of ice safety emphasis and put this one out of its misery after a season. There are some things that are just dangerous on an amateur level. Making it a contest puts pressure on people too. It’s not really the environment for learning you need for the sport.
And re the leaks problem: unfortunately if Assange gets his way and governments become paranoid about leaks, this will tend to promote power into the hands of fewer and fewer people who tell you less and less about the government’s actions and who have operatives who don’t report anything while designated enemies have unfortunate accidents with umbrellas…
It’s that law of unintended consequences thing. Not everything has to pass through the internet.
That argument would have been very true up to a few years ago, but now the situation has changed.
Governments and organizations will now have to think twice about keeping secret information in electronic form, and be a lot more careful with it. So the effect will be to inhibit the use of the internet/computers for any organization wanting to run any secret operations. And the larger the organization, the larger the need for communication, and so the greater the effect.
Of course, from the dawn of history up to about 20 years ago there was no internet and all secret operations were carried out without it. So it could be argued that nothing will really change.
BUT… the opponents of such operations now do have the internet, which they didn’t have before. So they have an advantage which they didn’t previously have.
In effect, it means that the use of electronic media for secret operations by large organizations is throttled, while opponents of such secret operations have free use of electronic media.
It’s the existence of the internet, outside of the control of any government or organization, and allowing free worldwide communication among individuals, that changes the situation.
This significantly shifts the balance of power in the direction away from large secretive organizations.
Some commentators have said that this is the first battle for control of the internet, and they are right.
Some samples:
From Glenn Greenwald, constitutional attorney and blogger at Salon.com,
“What’s really going on here is a war over control of the internet and whether or not the internet can actually serve what a lot of people hoped its ultimate purpose was, which was to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions. That’s what this really is about. It’s why you see Western governments, totally lawlessly, waging what can only be described as a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the bounds of any constraints, because that’s what really is at stake here.
“If they want to prosecute them, they should go to court and do it through legal means. But this extralegal persecution ought to be very alarming to every citizen in every one of these countries, because it essentially is pure authoritarianism and is designed to prevent the internet from being used as its ultimate promise, which is providing a check on unconstrained political power.”
Or from John Naughton at the Guardian,
Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice
“The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.”
The rest at http://goo.gl/Xx3F5
I think that Skating With The Stars should be renamed Carnage on Ice. Some of the falls in practice were breathtaking in the worst sense of the word. And NO HELMETS! I am kind of glad that it isn’t doing very well ratings wise. Maybe the powers that be will see the light and cancel future years. I am enjoying Dick Button’s and Johnny Wier’s comments and crits. Johnny can be such a goof at times it’s easy to forget how knowledgeable he is. I liked his comment about ‘claw hands’. Dick Button is being *very* kind. This, after all, is the man who while commenting on a national or world competition watched a young woman doing a spiral and said in that quiet voice, “Watch your fanny, dear.” I wonder what the pros *really* think of this whole circus.
A policy of absolute honesty and full disclosure all of the time is both imprudent and highly impolite for the ordinary person, organization or government. “Truth” in that sense is appropriate only for saints, prophets and philosophers; and the ranks of the martyrs, prisoners of conscience, and those cast out of academia have always had a very generous sampling of those same types. No ordinary organization can be effective over the long run without a reasonable amount of discretion and confidentiality. Ron Paul is using this issue to posture about “Truth” but I doubt that he would consent to full disclosure of every intimate moment in his own private life. After all, how many officeholders will accompany their requests for money, votes or volunteers with brutally honest assessments of the one they are addressing? Certainly not if they want to keeep their office! It is not necessarily a bad thing if someone were to use this material to research & publish a new “Pentagon Papers”, but just to dump it out there without any structure is just adding to the noise level. One does not expect candor from diplomats when they are speaking on the record, but their effectiveness on our behalf will go downhill in a hurry if they cannot speak frankly to their associates or counterparts in other countries. I just can see no public good coming from this exercise. If one is too dim or closed-minded to already be aware that this is the way things pretty much work around the world, then I doubt that one would be capable to respond appropriately to these disclosures anyhow.
Assange may have made a big splash and caused a lot of drama, but I don’t think in the long run that he’s going to rip the veil of secrecy off of every government action. This seems to be a very scattershot approach: Throw it out there and watch the fireworks. When the dust settles, will anything important really have changed? We’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath.
As far as the skating show, which I’m not watching–I can’t help but remember when a hockey player for the Buffalo Sabres was cut on his throat by another player’s skate during a game. He was bleeding very badly, and things were dicey for a few minutes. And these guys wear a lot of protection and have medical help on the spot. I wonder how well prepared they are on this new show, if something that serious should happen.
I saw that accident—he was in serious trouble: one of the problems of ‘armor’ from ancient times is the tendency of it to guide blades right to a vulnerable spot if they skid off the plate…and high-level hockey blades are also darned sharp. Plus it’s hard to put a tourniquet on the jugular.