cheese it, the cops!

and he's enjoying it immensely

so, one thing i wonder is whether the nsa is reading 'cheese it! the cops.' or, i wonder what it would take to get them really interested or induce a home search, no-fly etc. oh, edward snowden, my cousin and best friend, fedexed me all the stuff three weeks ago on thumb drives. you wouldn't believe general keith alexander's sexual habits! i'll be dripping out the details over the next few weeks, as it were. a preview: general keith alexander's specific dick is in your private ass right now. it is a felony to mention that of course, so relax and try to enjoy it. tryin to hit the keywords. jihad! actually, i think people by writing/texting/phoning/blogging/tweeting stuff like that all the time might help mess this stuff up. it should be a movement.

if you don't think that the wikileaks material has been important, you might examine this summary.

i just want to say that this reporting by priest and arkin, like the previous series is important. we really have moved toward a secret-police/everybody'sa--potential-informer type of society. to me the response to 9.11 shows that, as one might put it, we're still in the twentieth century, the era of "history" or the state. basic strategies of power have not been transformed. 'secrecy' or 'privacy' might be out-of-fashion in our zuckerbergish society; it is still the fundamental condition for the security state. that's why the wikileaks model is interesting, why it challenges the state to adapt or die, or would if the leaks got more and better.

meanwhile the obama administration shows no less enthusiasm for the whole machinery than did the bush administration. very few governments after a peaceful transition are going to dismantle to standing powers they inherit, one reason the state is a snowball.

blog of bradley manning's lawyers: "the law offices of david e. coombs."

(thanks chris bray)

rock on, john conyers! (thanks, adam.)

i note that the primary outlet for wikileaks in msm, the guardian, is down, at least from my computer. has been for a couple of hours. routine glitch or dod/cia? if the latter, i think there might be a bit of an international problem! can y'all bring it up?

rock on, michael moore. read down to the end of that piece. this is truly amazing, but they are now producing such damning facts as that julian assange has an overdue library book. 

He also appears to have absconded with a copy of a book called Introduction to Non-Classical Logic from the Melbourne University library. Notes on the library's website read: "Not returned by Julian Assange, March 2004. Despite many attempts by staff he was unable to be contacted. Still missing 2006."

i happen to have a copy of "introduction to non-classical logic" on my shelf (it's not the university of melbourne's), which is precisely where i realized that i like old-fashioned two-valued (true/false) logic, unlike hawking, for example. (non-classical logics are multi-valued logics, and intro doesn't stop with hawking's mere three: let's axiomatize a seventeen-valued logic. eat that, steve!) that julian assange would even borrow such a book, much less never bring it back (i'm thinking because it became central to his personality, like elizabeth gilbert is central to yours) puts him in the category of mykindaweirdo.

by the way, you might want to take this as an object lesson not only on freedom and the subversion of power, but on the passive voice. "he was unable to be contacted"? strikes me as unlikely, though i'm sure assange was frustrated if that was the case. and that he was unable to be contacted (comatose, maybe? hermetically sealed in an empty room?) surely does not follow from the fact that y'all were unable to contact him. perhaps you were unable to contact him because, as your sentence indicates, there is no you.

well that's kinda pricey! cheaper on kindle.



btw, i will do some kind of (mixed) review of the kindle, which i've been using for a couple of months now.

ps don't buy this book on a sudden intellectual whim! it's gonna take a few years to get to the point where the "introduction" starts. if you don't already have predicate calculus, model theory etc on board, just say no.

the only actual mainstream politician who has defended wikileaks is ron paul. but then he goes farther and starts to talk about why the cables are important, or what they actually show about how we conduct our foreign policy. i realize that ron paul is too coherent to make sense to people. but at a minimum you've got to understand that if you throw down a list of tea partiers, wingnuts, and so on, and you've got sarah palin and ron paul on that list, you have to deal with the fact that they have entirely different politics, even as they overlap a bit. at any rate, i want you to bring me someone from the actual practicing political left - a congressperson, a governor, in short, a successful politician - who would take a position like that publicly.

Assange's London attorney, Mark Stephens, told AOL News today that Swedish prosecutors told him that Assange is wanted not for allegations of rape, as previously reported, but for something called "sex by surprise," which he said involves a fine of 5,000 kronor or about $715.

"We don't even know what 'sex by surprise' even means, and they haven't told us," Stephens said.

sometimes you're running through the possible jokes and you realize that it's just not necessary. happy birthday, baby!

mastercard etc have portrayed the attacks as trivial, and the msm keeps saying that actual transaction processing was never affected at all. you know, i'm not sure about this. i actually did have some trouble doing web transactions yesterday.

i hope the performance of anonymous is not too disappointing. i want to believe there's a twisted little genius among them, a malignant gates, casually preparing to vaporize global capital so that it will seem never to have existed at all. awwww you shudna fucked with us, beeches!

well i hope this is not the end for assange: one scenario now has him gulaged: extradited here and there, never quite emerging from the international legal twilight. on the other hand if he's actually a rapist...the charges are still beyond vague and puzzling. but what assange has actually done with wikileaks does not require charismatic leadership, and if there could be fifty mannings, there could be fifty assanges. this is a critical moment. states will band together to institute a global system of information control. within a few years, and even a few months, we'll have a better sense of whether they can assert authority over global information flow. if so, then the state/international system bids fair to dominate the century. if not...maybe not.

the reason that wikileaks is still worrisome is that (if this is true) all the material derives from a single source, viz. bradley manning. we need fifty of him, all over the world. imagine a comparable release from russia, from china, from iran; israel, venezuela. ok.: what we don't know about these states is monufuckinmental. (i'd especially like to see russia.) where are the people in all these bureaucracies - the everyday infohandlers - who feel a higher calling than that of their government? think about the gigantism of all these bureaucracies: all you need is a few dedicated dissidents in a population of tens or hundreds of thousands. actually i bet there are people, many people, in all these bureaucracies, who are better at concealing their filching than was manning. well of course that goes for corporations as well...

sorry for slow blogging. it's not because stuff ain't happening. this idea that assange is holding the world's governments at bay with a nuclear weapon is, as i'm sure some have remarked by now, unbelievably dr. evil. but dude. dr. evil is an anarchist! and he's so far stunningly, strikingly effective. this whole wikileaks thing was an entirely unpredictable development but looking back it is already fundamental in world politics and power relations. that is astonishing whatever happens from here. what if they remove assange and the site just keeps proliferating in endless mirrors? his strategies so far have been successful in evading removal. but of course that could be just the beginning in this mode: the micro-exposure, the exposure in every detail, of the actual operations of power. that could actually make the world hard to govern. you might think that's a bad thing. or you might...not. at any rate, the response by governments continues in its hysteria, demonstrating assange's effectiveness. holder: "The American people themselves have been put at risk."

 

one thing i will say: they need someone really good at such things to put them together visually. they need a flag, a logo, a color scheme etc that's better than they have now. wallpaper above is worse than lame, e.g.

it's interesting that it's the diplomatic stuff and not the military that swung the world into action against wikileaks. but surely if nothing else the many fascinating stories emerging vindicate the newsworthiness of the leaks: nytimes has half a dozen really good things just today. i realize that the question of whether wikileaks is journalism is important in american constitutional law, for example. but i don't exactly think of it as journalism; it's the raw material of journalism. 

got to say this: ron paul has tremendous guts.

Paul followed up with a post to his Twitter account Friday morning: "Re: WikiLeaks — In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."

i note that i can't open wikileaks this morning. oops actually it comes up at wikileaks.ch.

i wonder who is really ahead, people like assange or the hacker underground from which he comes, or these state information technology operations: 

The main WikiLeaks site, originally hosted by Bahnhof, was hit by a denial-of-service attack on Sunday that knocked it offline, hours before publishing more than 250,000 United States embassy cables.

stuxnet was a state information operation. i think maybe they're at the point of harassing wikileaks, but i guess they don't have quite the boldness or hypocrisy (or the ability?) just to bomb it out of existence. 

i have a feeling that what is now going to happen to assange and wikileaks is going to make it evident - as though the actual contents of the leaks themselves didn't make this obvious - that the united states operates as a worldwide police state. this summary of the response from a guardian opinion piece gives the flavor.

WikiLeaks' release of 250,000 United States embassy cables – shared with the Guardian and other international newspapers – was an act of terrorism, congressman Peter King declared. Sarah Palin called for its founder Julian Assange to be hunted down as an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands", while former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has demanded that whoever leaked the files should be executed for treason.

 

 

one odd thing about the charges against assange is that the detaiuls of the acts he is supposed to have committed remain murky. whom is he supposed to have raped and molested under what circumstances etc? you know it certainly reeks of cia counter-intelligence; that's just what they'd do. anyway, who's checking? the cure is to do some reporting. if anyone knows or can find out a good source on this matter, the details of the swedish indictment?, i'd appreciate it.

i like the response to wikileaks: seriously they are now invoking the apocalypse, or multiple apocalypses.

Koh wrote that publication of the documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as military initiatives and cooperation between countries to confront problems from terrorism to pandemic disease.

obviously assange and everyone else better watch their backs. i don't pretend to evaluate the charges against assange, only of course one has to be extremely suspicious of a frame. it's a small price to pay to avoid pandemics, nuclear warfare, and the deaths of countless individuals (as well as a few pairs of conjoined twins).