Good Morning 2011

I wanted to post this picture last night, but I was actually out and about for new year's eve despite this awful head cold. Anyway, yesterday's Bad Cats calendar page sums up my dreadful feelings pretty well.

You may have noticed fewer blog posts in 2010. To me there is no mystery why: in April, I became unable to read the news -- the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico was utterly depressing. For three straight months, oil gushed from the Deepwater Horizon rig -- 205.8 million gallons of crude oil total. Then they added chemical dispersants into the water to hide the oil. The poisoning of the gulf is just one aspect of this disaster. The other big story is that, no matter how often the oil companies tell us to trust them, they don't have absolute power over nature, there are no fail-safe systems, and people in charge will often make crucial decisions that ultimately kill people in order to save money.

Don't tell me BP couldn't have predicted the catastrophe. The UK firm suffered a similar blowout on an Azerbaijan gas platform 18 months earlier. BP's little secret was revealed by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks was another big story in 2010. The whistleblower site may not be perfect, and its editor in chief, Julian Assange, has been likened to a terrorist, but don't let that overshadow the disturbing truths they have revealed. I'm coming to the realization that we need WikiLeaks now more than ever and they are now very much a part of the fourth estate... even as the media and the government would like to convince you that any real journalism is warfare.

Although I take some solace that WikiLeaks is doing the difficult and dangerous work to publish the truth, I'm very much dismayed that the 2010 U.S. electorate was grossly misinformed. Hello teabaggers! Most Economists who have estimated the effect of the health insurance reform law believe it will NOT increase the federal budget deficit over the next ten years. And notice how none of your conservative candidates gave a rat's ass about the "Ground Zero mosque" after the election was over? Now please take your misspelled signs and go home and enjoy your tax cuts.

I know I'm making 2010 seem like a real downer, but I suppose it had some bright spots too -- like health insurance reform, student loan reform, the end of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," and the economy -- it seems to be getting better.

Good morning 2011. Don't disappoint me!

Dirty Laundry

"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it." — Ron Paul.

You won't see me quoting Texas Congressman Ron Paul very often, but I agree with him here.

He is of course talking about whistleblower site WikiLeaks, their release last week of 250,000 American diplomatic cables, and the subsequent criminal investigation of the WikiLeaks editor in chief, Julian Assange.

I'm confident the world won't be ending any time soon, but most of the media is acting like Assange is some kind of real life Dr. Evil... or the new Osama bin Laden. But I tend to see Assange as a little less sinister and a little more egotistical, ambitious, and naive. He thinks he's going to crush the American government? Jon Stewart has a message for Assange:

"I think you’re underestimating how cynical Americans are about our government already. We’ve engineered coups in Chile, Iran, Guatemala, et cetera. We sold arms to Iran and then used the money to fund Central American revolutionaries. We sell weapons to our enemy’s enemy, who somehow always then becomes our enemy and forces us to defend ourselves from our own weapons. That happens a lot. In fact, you know what we call that? The number 8."

And you can count me among the cynical Americans. Out of all the leaks I've read about, I already knew some of it, strongly suspected most of it, and was mildly intrigued by a few revelations. I have no idea how these leaks will impact other countries like Russia, but I'm sure they have a lot in common with us. As Anne Applebaum on Slate put it:

"In the absence of a political culture that abhors corruption, in the absence of prosecutors who pursue it, this is just another in a long series of sensational scandals. Berlusconi parties with Putin? So what, he parties with everyone."

The most I hope for is that future politicians might think ahead, just a bit, and consider the possible blowback when all their dirty laundry and egregious acts are leaked. Maybe they'll realize that the best approach is to be honest and transparent? Maybe I'm thinking like a radical again...

These leaks could be healthy for us, or they could be used to justify more censorship, new espionage laws, and more vilification of the truth tellers.

Keeping Secrets

Over the weekend, WikiLeaks released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan. Go read them now. I'll wait.

Good. I actually only read a handful of them myself. I'm mostly relying on the MSM exegesis to tell me that insurgents are using heat-seeking missiles, our coalition forces are killing a lot of civilians, Pakistan has some dirty ties to the Afghan Taliban, the Taliban is resurgent, and war is a terrible thing.

Apparently it is debatable whether these facts are top secret or nothing new.

However, on the topic of government leaks in general, I think I learned plenty from Secrets: a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon papers by Daniel Ellsberg:

It is a commonplace that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "in a democracy," that "no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep a secret for a given amount of time diminishes the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

Maybe this is why it's good that these documents were leaked -- somebody was trying to keep them hidden from us. And the more the "experts" keep saying that these documents are too complicated for civilians to comprehend, the more determined I am to keep on reading them.

By the way, if anybody comes across the memo explaining what the hell we're doing in Afghanistan in the first place, please send me a tweet.