I read the news today, oh boy. John Lennon died and I was asleep

I missed the news that night as I fell asleep early. At five o'clock the following morning, a friend called and woke me up. She thought I'd be up anyway since I had an early class to teach. The combination of the news and my state of being barely awake threw me into an alternative, hypnotic state of reality.  I made it to class, I don't remember getting on the subway, don't recall going to the classroom, nodded to my students as they came in and asked them to just be quiet. Normally they were anyway.  It was a writing class so I told them to write for the next fifty minutes anything that they wanted and I sat there at the head of the class, containing my tears and wrote a long sappy, rambling encomium, one that I have read every anniversary.  

Jets lose the game of the Decade 45 -3

My Jets made a 32 ranked defense look like a champion. Hang your heads in shame. The problems with the game started in the first qtr with Ryan's bonehead challenge. From that point on everything went downhill. You give the best coach of the NFL in this decade (Belichek) along with an arguably best Qback of the decade (Brady) going up against "the better football team" (Ryan's words not mine) and you give them 11 days to plan and you see the result. Sanchez was the least of the problems. The offense sputtered everywhere else. The defense is lost without Jim Leonard. The Jets look like an 8 & 8 team though they'll end up 9&7. I want to burn all my Jet parapherna­lia. Patriots, I tip my hat.

Asange arrested

But Assange is only one person. There are more where he came from. The information is out of the box and will spill all over. It can't be put back. It can't be "walked" back. The outrage as a result only indicates how much it hurts and will continue to hurt. The empire seeks revenge, but it will be fruitless. They can chop heads. They can wound bodies. They can halt electronic transmissions. They can do whatever they like. But it's all over now Baby Blue.   

The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange

From the Atlantic

by  David Samuels - David Samuels is a regular contributor to The Atlantic.

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan - "a vicious antiwar type," an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes -- has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.

 

 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/the-shameful-attacks-on-julian-assange/67440/

Students being warned about WikiLeaks

University students are being warned about WikiLeaks.

An email from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, that we read in headlines, reads—I want to do it again—quote,

"Hi students,

"We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

"The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

"Regards, Office of Career Services."

Read entire interview including this e-mail @

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/3/is_wikileaks_julian_assange_a_hero

On WikiLeaks

If anything the cables show several things: 1. That American government actually does go to work   2. That the Obama Administration is a bit more responsible and uses less arm twisting than the Bush administration. 3. That U.S. diplomats can write complete sentences and have good perceptive powers not to mention are skilled at diplomacy. 4. That those of us who do follow world events are not surprised by any of the conclusions drawn. Who among us didn't think Berlusconi was a jerk or that the Mexicans can't get a handle on dealing with the drug cartels or that the Arabs are just as worried about Iran's nuclear track and above all that as of now, no one has been arrested for releasing these documents and that we do have a fairly democratic government? Unless of course secretly people are being taken out . . . but if WL survives we'll find that out eventually too. On the whole WL is important to a "free" and open society and will push journalism.

There are references to UFOs in the WikiLeaks recent published documents

Julian Assange:
Many weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant. However, as yet they have not satisfied two of our publishing rules.
1) that the documents not be self-authored;
2) that they be original.
However, it is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs