WikiLeaks n' stuff

Since opinions are about a dime a dozen, and they're about a bazilion blogs, I'm going to try to put links to primary sources when I can find them. Yeah .. I know this is also a blog with an opinion,(# bazillion and one) but one does what one must. Trying to separate facts from wishful thinking is as hard on the wired as it is in the library. It's way too easy to extrapolate from consensus thought and personal comfort zones. It strikes me as odd that the one thing magazines, and to a certain extent newspapers, had in their favor was an editor, an omnibudsman, and an org that guarded against crap or at least put the cart back on the path if the horses ran wild. When the old media was faced with competition from the new media, this advantage was the first thing that got pruned. I understand commerce and the need to meet your bills, but one assumes that you plan to be in business past the next quarter. On the other hand, some CEOs seem to get huge bonuses for running their stockholder's business into the ground. That's way too sophisticated for me to understand. The first set of links is related to WikiLeaks. We'll skip the "this changes everything" meme, because it doesn't. Democracy is a leaky process (messy too) and if Congress thinks issuing 100,000 more top secret clearances will staunch the flow, it won't.(Pace: The Washington Post's recent security industry story) Journalists caught with their pants down? Insert cynical snort here. We now know the truth? Well no, we're now in possession of a firehose of information, but the professional spinmeisters are as good as ever and which of us have the time or skills to clean that particular stable. Then we come to the more mundane questions. If we misplaced $8.7 Billion in Iraq's rebuilding funds will our accounting get any better with the $37 Billion just approved for Afghanistan? In the real world, if you're working the cash register and your drawer doesn't equal your tape, you don't get to come back.

• WH Presser on Wikileaks Afghanistan Docs: They're trying to score points by sounding tough, so as to have something to show for their (lack of) efforts. The smarter ones probably realize that they're struggling for their profession's existence: the main value of newspapers and television news was their ability to get interviews and primary source material, and wikileaks showed that non-newspapers can handle it.
• War Logs: The beginning of the end of nation state secrecy. As usual, I’m less interested in the leak itself than the larger implications. The next few months will be crucial in determining the shape of the political world to come, because Wikileaks have suddenly brought radical and deep transparency to the geopolitical process, and that cloak and dagger world has always thrived on the comparative ease with which it could obscure distant truths from the sight of its electorates.
• The ChickenHawk Database
• Portal to Source Material: The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by over 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force", "friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports can also be viewed by our "severity" measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be seen.
• My War, WikiLeaked: Why the Public (and the Military) Can’t Count on Those Battle Logs. A cautionary tale.

While it's easy, albeit not very calming, to blame officials for living on planet Zod, here's a writer that dares to mention that in a democracy we're ostensibly in charge but not doing a good job of it.

• American Hypocrites: If you don't live here all the time, and I don't, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans—with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs—demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world.

The next link is about another piece of evolution's puzzle falling into place.

• Translating Stories of Life Forms Etched in Stone: The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.

Last are some examples of writing that bespeaks too high a value placed on the humanistic theories of obscure dead people. Magical thinking won't make science or the present day go away. The first one natters about the absence of free will because studies have shown that nerve activation impulses fire before conscious decision. Jeez, stop your sobbing. All that means is that most of your neural work is done somatically and the talkative fellow in your head gets a report when most of the work is done. Just because your final layer of conciousness thinks its solely in charge doesn't make it an eternal philosophical truth. As noted in Blindsight, what we like to think of as mind was the last thing to the evolutionary party.

• The Limits of the Coded World: In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making.
• Greening of American Diplomacy: Grand strategy as a “mode of consciousness” – sounds trippy! It is ironic that Hill attacks the 1960s, for it seems that grand strategy has a lot in common with hippie culture. (Hill, incidentally, is a baby boomer.) Both hippie culture and grand strategy denigrate technical knowledge or knowledge that can be written down.
• Le Corbusier and Certain Pro Se Litigants: Recently, I've been taking a peek at the writings of Le Corbusier. He's one of history's most celebrated architects, and he has had a profound influence on the modern cityscape. Definition: Pro Se

Addendum: (about an hour later) I used the phrase "obscure dead folks". This is a mispercision at best and unfair. Dead people have the ultimate disadvantage when it comes to defending their life's work against misappropriation via cut and paste. We do so love our slogans and simplifications, and don't really want to do the heavy lifting necessary to earn the scholarly authority.