Sunday, October 24, 2010

To Leak or Not to Wikileak, that is the question.

What is a little leak amongst friends?
Just the other day I took a little leak, and with a weak bladder that is a weaki-leak, right?  So what, you ask, ya gotta go, ya gotta go. And that basically was my take on things as well.  I had to go, so I went.  I didn’t try for a secret release, but then again I wasn’t trying to go public either.  Needless to say I was caught by a very smart assed little guy who ran to the owner of the house and well…, he leaked too.  My neighbor didn’t like the news.
“What in the name of everything right are you doin’ on my grass,” he slurred.
“What the hell are you upset about,” I responded, trying to make him see that my mistake landed just to the left of his property, “This is my yard, and in the name of everything usual, my dog pisses on your lawn all the time.  Why don’t you get mad at her?”
“And she craps on it too…” he added as he took out a dog biscuit and fed my dog.
Well this started a heated debate about the balance of nature.  Like when my dog leaves a small excrement of her own in someone’s yard, but eats well over half her body weight in deer poop which way is the ecological balance shifting?   Now don’t get me started on the problem of natures natural wrecking machines.  You know what I’m talking about, no matter what I plant the deer eat it, and then leave fertilizer for next year’s crop.  And now we can talk about the overpopulation problem too.  As in; there are too many deer in our neighborhood.  I mean how in the world can there be more deer in New Jersey now than when the state was first populated by Europeans?  It must have something to do with that damn state sponsored low income housing mandate.  But I wont get into that discussion right now, it’s too political. 
Anyway, just like that, the argument with my neighbor moved off of my own problem with leaking things out of my hidden vault before I could even get my fly up and onto other things that had been in all of the headlines, if anyone actually read those anymore.  In this state of current events discussion it is always advantageous to argue with a neighbor after they’ve had their aperitif(s), and my neighbor definitely had all of his.
You know the first thing that was on his mind, besides my watering his flowers (which I wasn’t, it landed on my property and later I will take my damn surveyor’s map over to his house and if he doesn’t give me some of whatever he was drinking I’ll shove the whole thing…, oh, where was I.  Yes, I remember, it was that bit about GOOGLE sending all their assets off sore to avoid taxes. Well, that neighbor of mine he starts telling me about how his investment in Google had done very well to date, in fact he may soon be moving to a house at the top of the hill, and then he lets me know that Google is doing the right thing, avoiding those stupid corporate taxes and growing their business and all I can do is try to calculate how many US companies have parked their money off shore, and then add in the number of rich people who do the same and after using some fractal geometry (kudos to Benoit Mandelbrot, he was a pioneer), I am able to recalculate the oft misinterpreted dept relationship to the GDP as it should be if those very large companies actually paid taxes. 
My neighbor wasn’t interested in lowering his taxes for some reason.  I think it is because he is trying to get his app (app is short for application, like if you are making a request for money, or approbate, if you like something, or aperitif if it is late in the afternoon) bought by Google or some other such conglomerate.
Anyway, as the dog sat in his yard looking for sticks and deer poop without having to move anymore (a full stomach will do that to a dog) the conversation/argument turned to other news, like how both the Democrats and the Republicans are already claiming victory in the latest round of elections.  Of course the elections are still over a week away so perhaps these are prognostications instead of claims?  Or, as the Druids might say, “we prophesized that one, eh?”  So does this mean that our elected officials are Druids?  Do Druids float?  We can always try that ‘witches’ trial thing from Monty Python on them now, can’t we.  On the elected officials, not the Druids, and see if they…, Sorry I digressed again. 
Another hot topic of the day was about the little Wiki guy who likes to take leaks, or is that he likes to take your leaks for you.  And on this topic my neighbor gave me an earful again for leaking on his grass because in English it is so hard to grasp the correct connotation of words with multiple uses.  And me, I just wanted to catch the little tweeter who gave me away, I’ll, I’ll take my next one a little closer to his home. 
Anyway this Wiki guy gets on TV for taking a leak and then some of those who, like my neighbor don’t like this type of activity, start to harangue, oh, the shame, the shame.  Leave him alone because he, like me, has an active bladder.
Now apparently WikiLeaks was established way, way back in 2006 by a guy named Julian Assange, "a male with a near genius IQ" say some.  According to a major newspaper that seems to have a penchant for listing a bit to one side of the political view and reports its news that way as well, this male Assange redefined "whistle-blowing” as he gathered up all the whistles in the neighborhood and then published his own map which details how to find a whistle.  In doing this he gathered up everyone’s stuff, hid them beyond the reach of parents and others determined to retrieve them, then releases the map instantly, and globally, to watch the return on his investment pour in (read: advertisement and ‘charitable’ donations).
Now, now, Mr. Genius IQ, do you know “War is Hell” (I wish I had made that one up).  That phrase unfortunately is very, very true.  And if this male near genius IQ had paid attention in school he would have learned this.  If he cared about the information he is disseminating it might serve him well to actually read his history books.  War is hell, always has been, and it has been going on for quite a while.  Does Mr. Assange know that recent problems in the Middle East aren’t really recent, and to put a time frame into play well, the dawn of recorded history would be needed?  Can he please leak that information?  But, if one takes a more focused view of turbulent times then the time frame in question encompasses the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.  But he must have known this, everyone does.  And in the same manner, if one reads a report on battlefield casualties, well, everyone knows that you have to add a multiplier or two because, well here we go again; War is Hell.
If Mr. Assange wanted to do something really New and really Different then he would steal the whistles from all sides conducting the argument du jour.  If a man likes to leak as much as Mr. Assange says he does, then let us see him leak that tidy bit of Balanced reporting.  Oh, there is an article or two from his latest stolen pile which tells that yes, the other side is causing some problems as well, but lets face it, he really is just leaking on one side of the situation without putting the geopolitics into perspective.  Can Mr. Assange tap into the data bases of, say…, Iran, or China, or heck maybe one or more of those countries in South Asia that likes to leak on their neighbors as they stool on their populace?  Wouldn’t that be a real nice thing?  After all WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organization with a goal of bringing important news and information to the public.  Now, if they only leak on one side of the story what makes them different from an organization with a particular political twist?  Let us see if the near genius IQ guy has male cajones and gets info from ALL sources.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  And different?  Yes it would be different, one might even say unique, and very interesting, and one would probably have to be a genius to do that.  Now, if he spent his time trying to figure a way to bring education to the suppressed masses in these countries, well that would be nice too, and genius.
 Wiki-leakies tell everyone that they provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to the company journalists.  But why have we not heard of any news that one skilled in art (read: able to discern information from input data without needing a tell all book) didn’t already know, like from other sides of the conflicts that aren’t occidental in origin?  Or better yet, an explanation of the last season of LOST.  Did they die in the crash in season one, or die after the bomb goes off at the end of season five?   
But again, I digress, the blame really is on the intelligence communities who have no trouble finding where the male Assange lives, but still cannot find that bin Laden guy.

“Don’t worry,” says Jim Gaffigan, “there is a bunny.”

Saverio Monachino's writing style has been termed by some as 'Kurt Vonnegut meets Mark Twain'.  Saverio describes it as 'comic fiction noir'. Regardless of the terms used, his attempt is to use humor to open the door to serious discussion about very important human issues.  You can find Saverio Monachino on www.comicfictionnoir.com.


Saverio buried a bunch of key words in this particular blog like the title of his book; By Any Means.  He also threw in a bunch of other key words like thriller, murder, mystery, traumatic brain injury, comic, Canada, detective, author, artist, philosophical, writer, intrigue, fiction books, human condition, see if you can find them.  If you can’t don’t worry, in today’s age of ‘linking’, no document is complete until you follow the links.  Try it.

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