dirty little secrets

I’m going to reveal to you, dear reader, a secret that I have never ever told another soul. It’s a secret shared exclusively to the readers of my blog (and by default, my twitter, tumblr, and facebook readers). But first…

The whores and the gossip mongers are turning tricks again to get the inside scoop. Amazon, afraid that some of the dirt might rub off on them, have ditched Wikileaks from its servers. There will be consequences for such cowardice. Nobody likes a rat that jumps ship at the first sign of trouble.

Is Julian Assange really a modern day Robin Hood stealing from the information-rich to hand back to the poor? I don’t think so. I think he’s just another dude with an axe to grind who has found fame by becoming the U.S. Government’s cyber-enemy number of one.

People love dirty little secrets. Assange has found fame by trading in the dirty little secrets of governments and big corporations. He doesn’t steal the information. Disgruntled employees leak the information to him and he has the balls to publish it on the Internet for all to read. So I don’t see what the problem with Assange is. OK, the U.S. Government is claiming he’s putting lives at risks. But is he really? If he were hacking into secure systems and stealing the information, then yes, I’d say he was an outlaw akin to Robin Hood. But since he gets his information from malcontents, then hey, don’t shoot the messenger, find the dirty rat bastards putting the stuff in his lap and shoot them. They are the ones putting lives in danger, if indeed any lives are in danger. The U.S. Government has been known to exaggerate from time to time. Remember all the lives at stake from Iraq’s huge stockpile of WMD?!

The U.S. Government’s latest beef with Assange is the release of more than 251,000 American diplomatic cables, mostly unclassified but including many labeled “classified” or “secret”. Here’s an example:

Karl Eikenberry, the current US ambassador to Afghanistan, in a 2009 cable describes Karzai as “insecure” and a “paranoid and weak individual”.

“Indeed his inability to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state-building and his deep seated insecurity as a leader combine to make any admission of fault unlikely, in turn confounding our best efforts to find in Karzai a responsible partner,” Eikenberry said.

Eikenberry added that Karzai continually blames the US and its allies for Afghanistan’s problems rather than looking at the problems of his leadership, and that his attitude was unlikely to change.

For me the real culprits are the snivelling puppies who leak this stuff. Assange is just the delivery boy along with all the other misfits, drunkards, and failures who are mired in the low trade of journalism (or in the even lower trade of blogging, like me.)

OK, so here’s my dirty little secret that no-one else knows. I once, out of fear, squeezed a parakeet to death. I was 7 years old at the time.

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