Atheisthought

Sand storm 1983

2011-11-05T15:09:00.006+11:00

Many people talk about the day the Mallee came to Melbourne. Everyone I know has a story about where they were when it hit. What they were doing. What the sand storm meant for them.

I am always able to stump everyone, when asked about where I was. And I see their quiet disbelieving look, cos sometimes I don't believe it myself. This was the week before the Ash Wednesday bush fires in 1983.

But I was 3,000 feet up in the air in the Channel Seven news chopper, a Bell something, (I'm not a pilot) when we ran into the big brown thumping wave of sand. It threw us around quite a bit. Over the years I have struggled with memories but I will never forget the look on the chopper pilot's face. I definitely know at at one stage, I was looking up at the ground.

As we lifted off the pad at Port Melbourne that morning, we'd heard reports of a cool change, and nothing more. I wasn't until we were over the Dandenong Ranges (about 40kms east), that the newsroom chimed in on the radio over everyone's headsets, alerting us to the approaching 'spectacle'.

The newsroom COS kept telling us to 'go to ground', and don't try to ride it. "land where ever you can!" We continued down east to get the story we started out to do. I don't think it had sunk in.

We had been filming at the bush fires down outside Moe earlier that day. That was a separate experience even of itself. We'd dropped out of the sky to a blackened farm land. A couple of stunned farmers surveyed the wreckage after the fires had been at their stock. Crowds of sheep piled up against a fence, mostly dead, some still burning. Farmers shooting those in pain. I was so glad to lift off again.

Back in flight, I think the pilot decided to heed the warning and land instead of getting above the sand cloud. In retrospect, I think it was a good decision. When we hit the edge of the dirty air, the chopper was turned over. We ended up pretty close to the ground and I think we hit the footy ground hard. We ened up ore a crash-landing than a crash. The extra little drama was the young female journo ran from the still-whizzing chopper, but towards the tail rotor, a definite wrong move. It took some very loud yells to get her back.

This was a year to the day we lost cameraman Blake Hobart, cadet journalist Nicole Best, Paul the assistant, the pilot (whose name escapes me) and another in the chopper crash in 1982. I'd been Blake's assistant for a few months in a freelance contract, but had gone to do a day on "Together Tonight" for the Ten Network for the day and another guy, also named Paul, was his assistant. No-one survived.

The inquest hadn't found the real reason for that crash, but I dont even think there was any follow up on the hard landing I was in.

My point in posting this is that I felt it was all fate. God had no hand in any of it. He couldn't have. He doesn't exist.

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary - Julian Assange

2011-03-08T21:58:00.001+11:00

http://cryptome.org/0003/assange-manne.htm

5 March 2011. Add comment to correct Ardin allegation and a response by Robert Manne 6 March 2011.

5 March 2011. A sends a PDF converted to HTML.

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary Julian Assange

The Monthly, March 2011, pp. 17-35
The Cypherpunk Revolutionary
Robert Manne on Julian Assange

[Robert Manne is a professor in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.]

ESSAY

FEWER THAN 20 YEARS AGO JULIAN ASSANGE WAS SLEEPING ROUGH. EVEN A YEAR AGO HARDLY ANYONE KNEW HIS NAME. TODAY HE IS ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN AND MOST-RESPECTED HUMAN BEINGS ON EARTH. Assange was the overwhelming winner of the popular vote for Time magazine's "Person of the Year" and Le Monde's less politically correct "Man of the Year". If Rupert Murdoch, who turns 80 this month, is the most influential Australian of the postwar era, Julian Assange, who will soon turn 40, is undoubtedly the most consequential Australian of the present time.

Murdoch's importance rests in his responsibility for injecting, through Fox News, the poison of rabid populist conservatism into the political culture of the United States; Assange's in the revolutionary threat his idea of publishing damaging documentary information sent by anonymous insiders to WikiLeaks poses to governments and corporations across the globe.

Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice, most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher. In what is called the "Researcher's Introduction", Assange begins with a cryptic quote from Oscar Wilde; "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax. Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax is Julian Assange.

Putting Khatchadourian and Dreyfus together, and adding a little detail from a blog that Assange published on the internet in 2006-07 and checking it against common sense and some material that has emerged since his rise to fame, the story of Assange's childhood and adolescence can be told in some detail. There is, however, a problem. Journalists as senior as David Leigh of the Guardian or John F Burns of the New York Times in general accept on trust many of Assange's stories about himself. They do not understand that their subject is a fabulist. By contrast, when Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Assange's lieutenant at WikiLeaks between late 2007 and September 2010, heard that Assange was writing an autobiography he tells us in Inside WikiLeaks that his "first thought" was that it should be placed "in the fiction section".

According to Assange, his mother left her Queensland home for Sydney at the age of 17, around 1970, at the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement when the settled culture of the western world was breaking up. In Dreyfus, Assange's mother is not named; in Khatchadourian, she is called "Claire". In fact she was Christine Hawkins. Assange told Dreyfus that his mother's parents were both "academics". This seems a little grandiose. Christine's father, Warren Hawkins, was the principal of the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education. Christine fell in love with a man called John Shipton in Sydney. A year or so after Julian was born, in Townsville, they parted. Assange did not meet Shipton again till he was 25.

When Julian was about one, Christine met and married a roving theatrical producer and member of what was by now called the counterculture, Brett Assange. According to what Julian told Khatchadourian, Brett was the descendant of a Chinese immigrant who had settled on Thursday Island, Ah Sang or Mr Sang. Together Brett and Christine travelled around the country, performing. He painted a vivid portrait for Khatchadourian of an idyllic life after the family settled for a time on Magnetic Island. "Most of this time was pretty Tom Sawyer. I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was down mine shafts and tunnels." To Dreyfus, Julian claimed his stepfather was a decent man but also an alcoholic. By the time he was addressing audiences worldwide, his father - he could only be referring to Brett Assange - had become idealised as a "good and generous man" who had taught him the most fundamental lesson in life: to nurture victims rather than to create them. Assange also told Dreyfus about a foundational political memory, an incident that had occurred while he was about four. His mother and a male friend had discovered evidence concerning the British atomic bomb tests that had taken place in Maralinga in greatest secrecy, which they intended to give to an Adelaide journalist. The male friend had been beaten by police to silence him. Christine had been warned that she was in danger of being charged with being "an unfit mother". She was advised to stay out of politics. For a four year old to grasp the political meaning of an encounter such as this seems a little improbable.

When Julian was eight or nine years old, Christine and Brett Assange separated and then divorced. His mother now formed a "tempestuous" relationship with an amateur musician, Keith Hamilton, with whom she had another child, a boy. To Dreyfus, Julian described Hamilton as a "manipulative and violent psychopath". A bitter battle for the custody of Julian's half-brother began. Christine's family was now once more on the move - this time not as before on a "happy-go-lucky odyssey", but hiding on both sides of the continent in permanent terror. To Khatchadourian but not Dreyfus, Julian claimed there was evidence that this man was a member of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult The Family and, rather fancifully, that he probably discovered their whereabouts from the "moles" that the cult had inside the government. Because of his itinerant life as a child, and also because his mother was suspicious of the authoritarian culture of formal schooling, Julian claimed that he was home-schooled or independently educated either by professors encountered on their travels or by following his curiosity in public libraries. He did, however, also claim to have attended "very many schools. According to Dreyfus, by the time Mendax was 15 he "had lived in a dozen different places" and had "enrolled in at least as many different schools". His lawyer in his trial of 1996, Paul Galbally, also told the court Assange had been enrolled in about 12 schools. By 2006, Assange claimed he had attended 37 different schools. Given that after his rise to fame the Northern Star reported that he had attended Lismore's Goolmangar Primary School between 1979 and [983, the story of 37 schools seems unlikely.

One of the schools Julian attended was in rural Victoria. In the blog he posted on 18 July 2006, there is an account of his and another outsider's experience at this school.

We were bright sensitive kids who didn't fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.

This unwillingness to accept the authority of a peer group considered risible was not appreciated. I was quick to anger and brutal statements such as "You 're a bunch of mindless apes out of Lord of the Flies" when faced with standover tactics were enough to ensure I got into a series of extreme fights and I wasn't sorry to leave when presented with the dental bills of my tormentors.

Eventually Julian's family settled on the outskirts of Melbourne in Emerald and then Teeoma, according to Dreyfus. Christine bought Julian a $700 computer and a modem. Assange fell in love with a 16-year-old girl, Teresa, whom he had met through a program for gifted children. He left home, moved in with and then married his girlfriend. They had a son. This was the period when the underground subculture of hacking was forming in Melbourne. Around 1988 Assange joined this subculture, under the handle Mendax. By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on the NASA computer system via the introduction of what was called the WANK worm in an attempt to sabotage the Jupiter launch of the Galileo rocket as part of an action of anti-nuclear activists. No one claimed responsibility for this attack, which is outlined in the first chapter of Underground, In an article he later published in the left-wing magazine CounterPunch, Assange would claim the WANK worm attack was "the origin of hacktivism". In a Swedish television documentary, WikiRebels, made with Assange's co-operation, there are hints he was responsible.

Mendax formed a closed group with two other hackers Trax and Prime Suspect. They called themselves the International Subversives. According to Dreyfus, their politics was fiercely anti-establishment; their motive adventure and intellectual curiosity; their strict ethic not to profit by their hacking or to harm the computers they entered. Mendax wrote a program called Sycophant. It allowed the International Subversives to conduct "massive attacks on the US military". The list of the computers they could recall finding their way into "read like a Who's Who of the American military-industrial complex". Eventually Mendax penetrated the computer system of the Canadian telecommunications corporation Nortel. It was here that his hacking was first discovered. The Australian Federal Police conducted a long investigation into the International Subversives, Operation Weather. Eventually Trax lost his nerve and began to talk. He told the police that the International Subversives had been hacking on a scale never achieved before. In October 1991 the Australian Federal Police raided Prime Suspect's and Mendax' homes. They found Assange in a state of near mental collapse. His young wife had recently left him, taking their son Daniel. Assange told Dreyfus that he had been dreaming incessantly of "police raids ... of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 a.m." When the police arrived, the incriminating disks, which he had been in the habit of hiding inside a beehive, were scattered by his computer. The evidence was removed.

Assange descended into a personal hell. He entered a psychiatric ward briefly. He tried and failed to return home to live with his mother. He frequently slept along Merri Creek in Melbourne or in Sherbrooke Forest. He told Dreyfus that 1992 was "the worst year in his life". The formal charges against Assange were not laid until July 1994. His case was not finally settled until December 1996. Although Assange had been speaking in secretive tones about the technical possibility of a massive prison sentence, in the end he received a $5000 good behaviour bond and a $2100 reparations fine. The experience of arrest and trial nonetheless scarred his soul and helped shape his politics. In his blog of 17 July 2006, Assange wrote:

If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the comraderie [sic] of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist labor camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! ... Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state far what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! ... True belief only begins with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when lead [sic] into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms "the prisoner shall now rise" and no one else in the room stands.

This is a characteristically self-dramatising passage. Solzhenitsyn was incarcerated in the Gulag Archipelago, harassed for years by the KGB and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. Assange was investigated by the AFP and received a good behaviour bond and a fine.

Before his trial, Julian Assange was extremely sensitive about his reputation. In 1994 he offered to assist the director of Dogs in Space, Richard Lowenstein, with a film he was thinking of making about hackers. Assange spoke about the 290 years he might theoretically spend in prison. He learned that Lowenstein had not kept this information confidential. He was furious. He sent Lowenstein a series of threatening emails in which he outlined details of Lowenstein's sexual life. Lowenstein protested. Had Assange no understanding of the concept of privacy? Privacy, Assange replied, is "relative". "I could monitor your keystrokes, intercept your phone and bug your residence. If I could be bothered ... As one who's has [sic] one's life monitored pretty closely, you quickly come to the realisation that trying to achieve complete privacy is impossible." If Lowenstein wanted to keep details of his life confidential he should use encrypted email. Lowenstein told Assange he had not realised that the information was confidential. "I do not doubt your reasons were not malicious. Stupidity, ignorance and lack of respect come to mind. You seem to think I have only one life. I have many."

While awaiting trial, Julian Assange began to try to reconstruct his life. One overwhelming preoccupation was the bitter struggle waged for the custody of his son, Daniel. In their struggle, Julian and Christine Assange formed a small activist group - Parent Inquiry into Child Protection. They found sources of support inside the Victorian Department of Health and Community Services. An insider provided them with a document of great value to their cause - an internal departmental manual outlining the current rules determining custody disputes. It is almost certainly from this experience that Assange became seriously interested in the political possibilities of leaks. He told Dreyfus that in his fight against government corruption in Victoria he had "acted as a conduit for leaked documents". On several occasions recently, Assange has claimed that while he registered a domain site in 1999 known as "leaks.org" he did nothing with it. This cannot be accurate. In November 1996 he sent the following enigmatic message to those on certain email lists he had created.

A few pointy heads in Canberra have been considering your moderator's continued existence. Consequentially I've been called on to justify labour and resources spent on all projects under my control, particularly those chat can't easily be quantified such as IQ, BOS, LACC, IS, LEAKS ...

All these lists were connected to an internet service provider, Suburbia Public Access Network, that Assange had taken over when its original owner, Mark Dorset, went to live in Sydney. He likened it to a "low cost power-to-the-people enabling technology". Suburbia was the vehicle for several email lists - Interesting Questions (IQ), Best of Security (BoS), Legal Aspects of Computer Crime (LACC), Inside-Source (IS) and, presumably, LEAKS - that Assange created. It was also the free site for several groups of Melbourne activists, artists and others - the Powerline Action Group; the Alternative Technology Association; the Centre for Contemporary Photography; the Australian Public Access Network Association and, strangely enough, the Private Inquiry Agents Association. It is because of the continued existence on the internet of some of the commentary he wrote for these lists in his mid twenties that we can begin to hear, for the first time, the distinctive political voice of Julian Assange. In general, it is intelligent and assured. One of Suburbia's clients had published some of the Church of Scientology's holy scriptures. The church threatened legal action against Suburbia. The client, Dave Gerard, fought back. In March 1996, Assange issued an appeal to join an anti-Scientology protest.

What you have then is a Church based on brainwashing yuppies and other people with more money than sense ... If Nicole Kiddman [sic], Kate Cerbrano [sic], John Travolta, Burce [sic] Willis, Demi Moore and Tom Cruise want to spend their fortunes on learning that the earth is in reality the destroyed prison colony of aliens from outer space then so be it. However, money brings power and attracts the corrupt ... Their worst critic at the moment is not a personal or an organisation but a medium - the Internet. The Internet is by its very nature a censorship free zone ... The fight against' the Church is far more than the Net versus a bunch of wackos. It is about corporate suppression of the Internet and free speech. It is about intellectual property and the big and rich versus the small and smart.

At this time, to judge by the pieces he wrote that have survived, Assange's main political preoccupation seems to have been the extraordinary democratic possibilities of the information.sharing virtual communities across the globe created by the internet, and the threat to its freedom and flourishing posed by censorious states, greedy corporations and repressive laws.

Not everything Assange wrote at this time was serious. He was interested in a computer security software program developed by Dan Farmer of Silicon Graphics known as SATAN. One evening in April 1995 he composed 'The Dan Farmer Rap' for 'firewalls', a list to which he subscribed.

I'm Dan Farmer you can't fool me
The only security consultant to be an MTV,

I've got red hair - hey hands off man! don't touch the lacks of the mighty Dan. AC/DC - from the front or from behind, you can fuck my arse but you can't touch my mind.

philosophy's the trip - evil 'n' stuff, gad, we know a lot, Mike me and Muff.

A real ardent feminist - just like she tells me to be,

See me out there rooting for sexual e-qual-ity ...

I coded it all - yes the mighty Dan did it alone,

if you can't believe it, you and your note pad can fuck off home.

I'm Dan Farmer - now take that down

it's not every day you get to interview

the world's biggest security clown.

Several subscribers to 'firewalls' were appalled. One wrote: "Just reading this made me feel dirty. In 20+ years associated with this business, I don't think I've ever seen debate among professionals degraded to quite this slime-ball level. Mr Assange is an unprincipled ass ..." Assange wrote a sort of apology. "It was perhaps an error of judgment on my behalf to equate the people on this list with those who knew myself and Dan more fully. Such mistakes are ripe to happen when one is merry and full of wine in the wee hours of the morning." Nonetheless, he expressed high amusement regarding all those who had publicly condemned him while privately sending their congratulations. "You know who you are." Assange's Dan Farmer 'peccadillo' was still remembered six years later by a British computer geek, Danny O'Brien.

By 1997 Julian Assange, with his friends Suelette Dreyfus and Ralf Weinmann, had written 'Rubberhose', a piece of 'deniable cryptography' for human rights activists and troublemakers, the purpose of which was to make it impossible for torturers or their victims to know whether all the encrypted data on a computer hard drive had been revealed. It was designed to make torture to extract passwords pointless, and defection and betrayal in the face of such torture impossible. The concept was Assange's. Assange argued a convoluted and rather improbable psychological case about why Rubberhose would cause rational torturers to put away their weapons. Danny O'Brien captured the obvious objection rather well. Despite Rubberhose's deniable cryptography, "won't rational torturers just beat you up 'forever'?"

l am in no position to judge the sophistication of the Rubberhose software or the level of creativity it required. I can however assess the quality of the posting announcing its creation, which Assange sent to the firewalls list in June 1997. Assange called it "One Man's Search for a Cryptographic Mythology". His search to find a suitable name for Rubberhose takes him, in a zany and hilarious stream of consciousness, on a journey through Greek and Roman mythology, the incestuous Cerberus and the cliched Janus; to the moral pessimism of David Hume, who argued the inescapable connection between joy and despondency; to an unexplained rejection of his request for mythological advice by the Princeton History Department; to Sigmund Freud, the Medusa's Head and the castration complex; to a spoof on Zen Buddhism; to a memory of a visit to a mercenary hypnotherapist in Melbourne's Swanston Street - until, through the suggestion of a Swedish friend with an interest in ancient Sumerian mythology - "who calls himself Elk on odd days and Godflesh on even days. Don't ask why" - he finally arrives with a joyous heart at the Mesopotamian god MARUTUKKU, "Master of the Arts of Protection".

If MARUTUKKU was my exquisite cryptographic good, of wit, effusive joy, ravishing pleasure and flattering hope; then where was the counter point? The figure to its ground - the sharper evil, the madness, the melancholy, the most cruel lassitudes and disgusts and the severest disappointments. Was Hume right?

Alas, he was. Assange, "on a cold and wintry night here in Melbourne", discovers in the 4000-year-old Babylonian tablets a reference to the supposedly secret eavesdropping intelligence agency in Maryland, the National Security Agency! It is a magnificently exuberant, bravura literary performance. Assange was not merely a talented code writer and computer geek. There was in him daring, wildness and a touch of genius. For a while he signed his emails not with his customary "Proff." but "Prof. Julian Assange".

Assange was by now a committed member of the free software movement, pioneered by Richard Stallman, whose aim was to regulate communication in cyberspace by software not by law. As members of the movement put it, freedom here meant free speech rather than free beer. The movement stressed democratic, collective contribution.

Assange tended to be somewhat sceptical about the movement, on one occasion arguing that in reality usually one or two people did 80% of the work. Assange was nonetheless involved in the development of NetBSD, an open source computer operating system derived from the original Berkeley Software Distribution source code. Some of the slogans he invented to spruik its virtues can still be found on the internet. Here are three. "We put the OS in OrgaSm"; "Bits for Tits"; "More ports than a Norwegian crack whore".

By the time Assange was working on NetBSD he had been involved for several years with a movement known as the cypherpunks. It was the cypherpunks more than the free software movement who provided him with his political education. Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world's newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange's intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks.

The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Its founders were Eric Hughes, a brilliant Berkeley mathematician; Timothy C May, an already wealthy, former chief scientist at Intel who had retired at the age of 34; and John Gilmore, another already retired and wealthy computer scientist - once number five at Sun Microsystems - who had co-founded an organisation to advance the cause of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They created a small group, which met monthly in Gilmore's office at a business he had created, Cygnus. At one of the early meetings of the group, an editor at Mondo 2000, Jude Milhon, jokingly called them cypherpunks, a play on cyberpunk, the "hi-tech, low-life" science-fiction genre. The name stuck. It soon referred to a vibrant emailing list, created shortly after the first meeting, which had grown to 700 by 1994 and perhaps 2000 by 1997 with by then up to a hundred postings per day. It also referred to a distinctive subculture - eventually there were cypherpunk novels, Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, Indecent Communications; a cypherpunk porno film, Cryptic Seduction; and even a distinctive cypherpunks dress: broad-brimmed black hats. Most importantly, however, it referred to a political-ideological crusade.

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in the battle for the future of humankind - between the State and the Individual - the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the invention in the mid 1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s of a program known as PGP, 'Pretty Good Privacy'. The seminal historian of codes, David Kahn, argued that the Diffie-Hellman invention represented the most important development in cryptography since the Renaissance. Zimmerman's PGP program democratised their invention and provided individuals, free of cost, with access to public-key cryptography and thus the capacity to communicate with others in near-perfect privacy. Although George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks' foundational texts, because of the combination of public-key cryptography and PGP software, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith.

At the time the cypherpunks formed, the American government strongly opposed the free circulation of public-key cryptography. It feared that making it available would strengthen the hands of the espionage agencies of America's enemies abroad and of terrorists, organised criminals, drug dealers and pornographers at home. For the cypherpunks, the question of whether cryptography would be freely available would determine the outcome of the great battle of the age. Their most important practical task was to write software that would expand the opportunities for anonymous communication made possible by public-key cryptography. One of the key projects of the cypherpunks was 'remailers', software systems that made it impossible for governments to trace the passage from sender to receiver of encrypted email traffic. Another key project was 'digital cash', a means of disguising financial transactions from the state.

Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American parlance, libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism. The most authoritative political voice among the majority libertarian cypherpunks was Tim May, who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document, "Cyphernomicon". May called his system crypto-anarchy. He regarded crypto-anarchy as the most original contribution to political ideology of contemporary times. May thought the state to be the source of evil in history. He envisaged the future as an Ayn Rand utopia of autonomous individuals dealing with each other as they pleased. Before this future arrived, he advocated tax avoidance, insider trading, money laundering, markets for information of all kinds, including military secrets and what he called assassination markets not only for those who broke contracts or committed serious crime but also for state officials and the politicians he called "Congressrodents". He recognised that in his future world only elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt "the clueless 95%" - whom he described as "inner city breeders" and as "the unproductive, the halt and the lame" - "would suffer, but that is only just". May acknowledged that many cypherpunks would regard these ideas as extreme. He also acknowledged that, while the overwhelming majority of cypherpunks were, like him, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, some were strait-laced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even Maoists. Neither fact concerned him. The cypherpunks formed a house of many rooms. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace. Like an inverse Marxist, Tim May tended to believe that the inexorable expansion of private cryptography made the victory of crypto-anarchism inevitable. A new "balance of power between individuals and larger entities" was already emerging. He predicted with some confidence "the end of governments as we know them". Another even more extreme cypherpunk of the libertarian Right, Jim Bell, like an inverse Leninist, thought that history might need a push. In mid 1995, drawing upon May's recommendation of assassination markets, he began a series explaining his "revolutionary idea", which he called "Assassination Politics". These were perhaps the most notorious and controversial postings in the history of the cypherpunks list. Bell devised a system in which citizens could contribute towards a lottery fund for the assassination of particular government officials. The prize would go to the person who correctly predicted the date of the death. The winner would obviously be the official's murderer. However, through the use of public-key cryptography, remailers and digital cash, from the time they entered the competition to the collection of the prize no one except the murderer would be aware of their identity. Under the rubric "tax is theft" all government officials and politicians were legitimate targets of assassination. Journalists would begin to ask of politicians, "why should you not be killed?" As prudence would eventually dictate that no one take the job, the state would simply wither away. Moreover, as assassination lotteries could be extended across borders, no leader would again risk taking their people to war. Eventually, through the idea of the assassination lottery, then, not only would the era of anarchy arise across the globe, the condition of permanent peace humankind had long dreamt of would finally come to pass. Bell ended his 20,000 word series of postings with these words. "Is all this wishful thinking? I really don't know." A year or so later he was arrested on tax avoidance charges.

Julian Assange joined the cypherpunks email list in late 1995 at the time the controversy over "Assassination Politics" was raging. There were many reasons Assange was likely to be attracted to the cypherpunks. As his encounter with Richard Lowenstein had revealed, he was already interested in the connection between privacy and encrypted communication. Even before his arrest he had feared the intrusion into his life of the totalitarian surveillance state. An atmosphere of paranoia pervaded the cypherpunks list. Assange believed that he had been wrongly convicted of what he called a "victimless crime". The struggle against victimless crimes - the right to consume pornography, to communicate in cyberspace anonymously, to distribute cryptographic software freely - was at the centre of the cypherpunks' political agenda. Moreover the atmosphere of the list was freewheeling - racism, sexism, homophobia were common. Not only Tim May believed that political correctness had turned Americans into "a nation of sheep". On the cypherpunks list no one would disapprove of "The Dan Farmer rag". Yet there was probably more to it than all this. Cypherpunks saw themselves as Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe. It must have been more than a little gratifying for a self-educated antipodean computer hacker, who had not even completed high school, to converse on equal terms with professors of mathematics, whiz-kid businessmen and some of the leading computer code-writers in the world.

Julian Assange contributed to the cypherpunks list from December 1995 until June 2002. As it happens, almost all his interventions have been placed on the internet. On the basis of what historians call primary evidence, the mind and character of Julian Assange can be seen at the time of his obscurity.

The first thing that becomes dear is the brashness. Over a technical dispute, he writes: "[B]oy are you a dummy." When someone asks for assistance in compiling a public list of hackers with handles, names, email addresses, Assange responds: "Are you on this list of morons?" In a dispute over religion and intolerance one cypherpunk had written: "Because those being hatefully intolerant have the 'right' beliefs as to what the Bible says. Am I a racist if I don't also include an example from the Koran?" "No, just an illiterate", Assange replied. Following a savaging from Assange for total computer incompetence, a hapless cypherpunk pointed out that he has been writing code since the age of 14. If one thing is clear from the cypherpunks list, it is that the young Julian Assange did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly.

In his posts there is humour, although often it is sarcastic. In one of his earliest interventions Assange has read about the arrest of someone caught with diesel fuel and fertiliser. "Looks like I've just been placed into the ranks of the pyro-terrorist. Golly, Deisel [sic] fuel. Gosh, Fertilizer. Ma, other items." Some posts reflect his faith in the theory of evolution. Assange forwarded an article about the role played by the CIA in supplying crack gangs in Los Angeles. A cypherpunk responded: "I wish they'd get back to the business, but add an overt poison to the product. Clean out the shit from the cities. Long live Darwinism." "Darwinism is working as well as it ever was. You may not like it but shit is being selected for," Assange shot back. Other posts reflect his recent life experiences. Assange had helped Victoria Police break a paedophile ring in 1993. On the cypherpunks list he defended the circulation of child pornography on the internet on the grounds that it would cut the need for new production and make it easier for police to capture paedophiles. In another post he expressed deep anger at perceived injustice regarding those with whom he identifies - convicted hackers. One, Tsutomu Shimamura, had not only played a role in the hunting down of a notorious American fellow hacker, Kevin Mitnick (known personally to Assange through his research for Underground), but had even co-authored a book about it, Takedown. "This makes me ill. Tsutomu, when Mitnick cracks will you dig up his grave and rent his hands out as ash trays?" Assange also posted on the reports of violence against another hacker, Ed Cummings AKA Bernie S, imprisoned in the US. "I was shocked. I've had some dealings with the SS ... Those that abuse their power and inflict grave violence on others must be held accountable and their crimes deplored and punished in the strongest manner. Failure to do so merely creates an environment where such behaviour becomes predominant."

Already there are qualities in Assange's postings unusual in the standard cypherpunk. One is a fascination with language. Assange acquired a software program that created anagrams. The deepest institutional enemy of the cypherpunks was the National Security Agency. Assange put the name into his computer. Among the anagrams that emerged were: "National Anti-Secrecy Guy"; "Secret Analytic Guy Union"; "Caution Laying Any Secret"; "Insane, ugly, acne atrocity"; and, Assange's apparent favourite: "National Gay Secrecy Unit". He was also interested in what he described as "tracking language drift; i.e. the relative change in word frequency on the internet as time goes by". He informed the cypherpunks that he had just discovered that in a "10 billion word corpus" the following frequency occurred:

God - 2.177,242

America - 2,178,046

Designed - 2,181,106

Five - 2,189,194

December - 2,190,028

His eccentricity would also have been obvious after a member of the 'firewalls' list forwarded his MARUTUKKU fantasia to cypherpunks.

Where did Assange stand with regard to the radical cypherpunks agenda of Tim May? This question is best answered in two parts. On the question of cryptographic freedom and hostility towards the surveillance state and its chief embodiment - the National Security Agency - Assange was, if anything, even more absolute and extreme than May. In September 1996, Esther Dyson, the chair of the lobby group for freedom in cyberspace, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as being in favour of certain extremely limited restrictions on internet anonymity. On the cypherpunks list a furious controversy, called "The Esther Dyson Fuss", broke out. Some cypherpunks defended Dyson on the ground that she had every right to argue a more nuanced position and that it was anyhow healthy for individuals to speak their mind. May vehemently disagreed. The issue was not her freedom of speech. A critical moment in the battle between freedom and surveillance had arrived. Dyson had defected to the enemy camp. Assange went further. He launched a stinging ad hominem attack.

Examining in detail Dyson's interests it appears she maintains a sizeable and longstanding interest in East European technology companies. She is also very far to the right of the political spectrum (rampant capitalist would be putting it mildly). She also speaks Russian. I'm not saying she's been working for the CIA for the past decade, but I would be very surprised if the CIA has not exerted quite significant pressure ... in order to bring her into their folds during that time period.

"At least you don't accuse me of being a Communist," Dyson responded. "For the record, I am not a tool of the CIA nor have they pressured me, but there's no reason for you to believe me." Perhaps Dyson remembered the incident. When Assange was in trouble last year she wrote a piece on the Salon website arguing that even unpleasant characters need to be defended.

A month or so after September 11 a controversy broke out on the cypherpunks list over the report of a civilised discussion about increased FBI surveillance over internet communications between Mitch Kapor, a co-founder and former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Stu Baker, an attorney who had once been employed by the National Security Agency. Some cypherpunks had some sympathy for Kapor's moderation. Even they recognised that with September 11 something major had occurred. One pointed out, in addition, that Stu Baker was "a gun for hire, not a doctrinaire blinders-on true believer for either the surveillance enthusiasts or privacy freaks". This was too much for Assange:

Stu is a well known NSA zealot. The only reason there's a bridge between Kapor and Baker is due to the cavernous ravine that lays [sic] between them. Kapor is now apparently half-way across, following Stu's silently beckoning finger, fearfully running from the sounds of angel's wings fooled into believing that they lie behind and not ahead of him.

From beginning to end Assange was, in short, a hardline member of the tendency among the cypherpunks that Tim May called the "rejectionists", an enemy or those who displayed even the slightest tendency to compromise on the question of Big Brother and the surveillance state.

On another question, however, Assange was at the opposite end of the cypherpunks spectrum from Tim May. At no stage did Assange show sympathy for the anarcho-capitalism of the cypherpunks mainstream. In October ]996, a prominent cypherpunk, Duncan Frissell, claimed that in the previous fiscal year the American government had seized more tax than any government in history. Assange pointed out that, as the US was the world's largest economy and that its GDP had grown in the previous rear, this was a ridiculous statement designed to be deceptive. In October 2001, Declan McCullagh expressed "surprise" when a "critique of laissez-faire capitalism" appeared on the cypherpunks list "of all places". Assange replied:

Declan, Declan.

Put away your straw man ... Nobel economic laureates have been telling us for years to be careful about idealised market models ... This years [sic] Nobel for Economics won by George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "for their analysis of markets with assymmetric [sic] information" is typical. You don't need a Nobel to realize that the relationship between a large employer and employee is brutally assymmetric [sic] ... To counter this sort of assymetery. [sic] Employees naturally start trying to collectivise to increase their information processing and bargaining power. That's right. UNIONS Declan. Those devious entities that first world companies and governments have had a hand in suppressing all over the third world by curtailing freedom of association, speech and other basic political rights we take for granted.

Assange was, then, an absolutist crypto-anarchist but one who leant decidedly to the Left. Mainstream cypherpunks did not defend trade unions or speak negatively of "rampant capitalists" and positively of "human rights activists". He was an electronic but not an economic libertarian.

There is also evidence that Assange was increasingly repelled by the corrosive cynicism common in cypherpunks ranks. Something in his spirit seems to have changed after his trial and the writing of his MARUTUKKU mythology. From 1997 to 2002 Julian Assange accompanied all his cypherpunks postings with this beautiful passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." On one occasion in July 1999 William H Geiger III presented standard Ayn Rand Objectivist praise of human selfishness. "Everyone is a predator out to advance their own agenda at the expence [sic] of others. Tim is just more honest than most about it." Assange replied with a defence of altruism, for Objectivists an evil.

No ... Everyone maybe self-interested. but some are self-interested in a way that is healthy (to you, or the people you care about), some in a way which is benign. and some in a manner that is pernicious. It is important to distinguish between these different behaviours and support or undermine them accordingly.

On another occasion, a cypherpunk suggested that in I the great struggle for privacy and against censorship ordinary people could not give a damn. Perhaps with Tim May's contempt for "the clueless 95%" in his mind, in March 2002, in what was one of his final cypherpunks postings, Assange responded: "The 95% of the population which comprise the flock have never been my target and neither should they be yours; it's the 2.5% at either end of the normal that I find in my sights, one to be cherished and the other to be destroyed." Already he seems to have imagined the future as a struggle to the death between autocratic elites and electronic freedom fighters. Increasingly, Assange began to mock Tim May. Many thought of May as an anti.Semite, with good reason. In November 2001, when May used a quote from a cypherpunk fellow traveller, David Friedman (Milton's son), Assange emailed: "Quoting Jews again, Tim?"

Julian Assange was a regular contributor to the cypherpunks mailing list particularly before its decline in late 1997 following a meltdown over the question of the possible moderation of the list - censorship! - and the departure of John Gilmore. The cypherpunks list clearly mattered to him deeply. Shortly before his travels in 1998, Assange asked whether anyone could send him a complete archive of the list between 1992 and the present time. While commentators have comprehensively failed to see the significance of the cypherpunks in shaping the thought of Julian Assange, this is something insiders to the movement understand. When Jeanne Whalen from the Wall Street Journal approached John Young of Cryptome in August last year, he advised her to read the Assange cypherpunk postings he had just placed on the internet, and also Tim May's "Cyphernomicon". "This background has not been explored in the WikiLeaks saga. And WikiLeaks cannot be understood without it." Likewise, in his mordant online article on WikiLeaks and Assange, the influential cyberpunk novelist and author of The Hacker Crackdown Bruce Sterling wrote: "At last - at long last - the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. "

In 2003 Julian Assange seems to have considered living a more conventional life. He went to the University of Melbourne to study mainly mathematics and physics. As a student of mathematics his results were mediocre. This can hardly be explained by lack of talent. No one worked more closely with Assange than Suelette Dreyfus. "A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ 'in excess of 170'," she wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of 12 December 2010. "I suspect this could be true." Assange claimed that he became disillusioned with the applied maths department when he discovered its members were working with defence authorities in the US on a military bulldozer adapted to desert conditions known as "The Grizzly Plough". He also claimed that visits to the ANU were thoroughly dispiriting. On one occasion he represented University of Melbourne students at a competition. "At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics motioned to us and said, 'you are the cream of Australian physics.' I looked around and thought, 'Christ Almighty I hope he's wrong.''' On another occasion he saw 900 senior physicists in Canberra proudly carrying bags with the logo of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. He described them as "snivelling fearful conformists of woefully inferior character".

Perhaps there were other reasons for dissatisfaction. By 2004 Assange had reached the elevated position of vice-president of the students' Mathematics and Statistics Society and chief organiser of their Puzzle Hunt - a quiz leading the winner to $200 of buried treasure. He described his role as "plot/script, general nonsense, Abstract(ion), Caesar Cipher, Disc, Platonic, Score, Surstro:mming". Organising a puzzle hunt was a somewhat less engrossing ambition than planning world revolution. And towards the end of his studies this was exactly what he was doing. A female friend provided the journalist Nikki Barrowclough with a vivid portrait of the atmosphere of a share house close-by the University of Melbourne that Assange lived in at this time.

There were beds everywhere, she says. There was even a bed in the kitchen. This woman slept on a mattress in Assange's room, and says she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find him still glued to his computer. He frequently forgot to eat or sleep, wrote mathematical formulas all over the walls and the doors, and used only red light bulbs in his room - on the basis that early man, if waking suddenly, would see only the gentle light of the campfire, and fall asleep again.

Between July 2006 and August 2007 - the period when WikiLeaks was being planned and actualised - Julian Assange maintained a blog at IQ.ORG, some of which he collected under the title "Selected Correspondence". The correspondence can still be found on the internet. Because of its existence, a detailed map of his mind at the age of 35 and at the moment of WikiLeaks' creation is available. Strangely enough, even though there are now some 27 million Google entries on Assange, so far as I am aware no one has offered an analysis. When Domscheit-Berg released his memoir in mid February there was excitement around the globe at his claim that Assange had boasted about fathering several children. On his blog, Assange includes a photo of a bonneted baby under the title "Those Eyes" with the caption, "All the pink ribbons in the world can't hide them." She is his new daughter. In an email of January 2007 he asks someone who is about to publish confidential email correspondence to remove at least the reference to IQ.ORG, which is "near my daughters [sic] photo". The existence of Assange's son, Daniel, is well known. However, if any journalist had read the evidence closely we would not have needed to wait for Domscheit-Berg to learn of at least one of Assange's more recent "love children".

The blog reveals a young man of unusual intellectual range, ambition and curiosity. As expected, there are references to cypherpunks and his work as a code-writer in the free software movement. Assange writes of his loathing for the " 'everything which is not permitted is denied' security types" who "make concurrent salutes to the Fuhrer, Baal and Jack Straw". He explains why as one of the committed developers of NetBSD he has refused to sign a proposed contract: "The contract as well as being an instrument of the state is written in the demeaning language of the corporate state. It should have been written in the language of the programmer world." Some entries, such as his defence of altruism, are familiar to those who have followed his postings on the cypherpunks list. Many others have the range and also eccentricity revealed in his MARUTUKKU performance. There are abstract speculations on philosophy, mathematics, neuroscience, human physiology, the law, history and sociology.

There are also very striking and revealing extracts. One is from a Buddhist text from 500 BC, Ajita Kesakamhal, in defence of materialism. "The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty chatter. With the breakup of the body, the wise and the foolish are alike annihilated, destroyed." Another is a wonderful story from the Nazi concentration camp. A Jewish inmate can save his daughter if he chooses which eye of his guard is glass. He chooses the left eye, correctly. His guard asks how he knew. '' 'I'm sorry,' trembled Moshe, 'but the left eye looks at me with a kindly gleam.' '' Assange has great interest in the history of European totalitarianism. One extract is a poem - "bad ... but elevated by its monumental context" - about the atom bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg: "Even so, we did what we believed in: / Treason, yes, but with good cause." There is also a long extract from an article about the problems besetting those possessing super-high IQs, such as the unfulfilled genius William James Sidis. It concludes with these words: "And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child, a true man born into a world filled with animals - a world filled with us." It is not difficult to understand why this article interested him.

Entries on the blog concerning women prefigure future problems. Some passages are awkward in a Mills & Boon kind of way - "a lovely girl I knew ... stood for a moment fully clothed in her shower before letting the wind and rain buffet her body as she made her tremulous approach to my door and of course I could not turn her away." Others are rather sinister, like his study of the etymology of the word 'cad'. "Caddie or cadet used to denote the passenger of a horse-coach picked up for personal profit by the driver ... So a 'cad' is a man who picks up women, profits from them and leaves them by the road side ... Such romantic etymology is enough to make a man want to don his oilskin and mount his horse with whip and smile at the ready." This coldness is striking because other passages in the correspondence are tender. Assange writes of meeting Antony, a country kid he had known since they were both 14, at a mental health centre in East Ringwood. "His smile was shaky but characteristic. His physical edges rounded off by weight gain and his imagination dulled... His limbs and jaw gently shuddered with some frequency," Assange visited him later still at a psychiatric hospital. "When I asked about the cause of his shaking, suggesting a dopamine antagonist, he said, 'No ... If you look closely you'll notice a number of people around here acting the same way. Julian... we're all doing the Mont Park shuffle.' "

What is most important about the correspondence, however, is that in it we can hear for the first time Julian Assange's distinctive political voice. As a former cypherpunk crypto-anarchist the enemy for him is, unsurprisingly, that abstraction he calls the State. "Where words have power to change, the state tries hard to trap, burn or blank them, such is its fear of their power." The state represents the principle of "mendacity". "The state does what it can get away with." True understanding requires the individual "to know the state for what it really is", Yet, unlike most of his fellow cypherpunks, by now Assange unambiguously extends his idea of the state to big business. In thinking about the US, in one blog entry, he asks: "What kinds of states arc giant corporations?" He answers in the following way. As executive power is wielded by a central committee; as there is unaccountable single-party rule; as there is no freedom of speech or association, and pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication", what then do you have in that federation of giant corporations that control the US? What else but a "United Soviet of America". Assange is a profound anti-communist. But he regards power in western society as belonging to political and economic elites offering ordinary people nothing more nourishing than a counterfeit conception of democracy and a soul-destroying consumption culture. He points out that when the American colonists waged their struggle for independence there was no talk of shopping or even democracy. Such shallow ideas could not stir the passions.

Assange's selected correspondence is addressed to a small coterie of followers. It involves a revolutionary call to arms. "If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers ... Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes." Assange seems not particularly interested in future political institutions or in economic arrangements. The revolution he speaks about is moral. He believes that individual action can re-fashion the world. The state may do "what it can get away with" but it does "what we let it get away with" and even "what we let ourselves get away with, for we, in our interactions with others, form the state". Over the whole selected correspondence there is a quotation from the German-Jewish revolutionary anarchist Gustav Landauer, beaten to death by right-wing troops after the Munich soviet experiment of 1919. "The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour. We destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another ... We are the state and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men." The question is how new institutions can be formed.

In the struggle to create a truly human society, Assange warns his interlocutors not to believe they can think globally but act locally. This is an illusion. Action must be taken on a truly global scale. He is also witheringly contemptuous of those he calls "the typical shy intellectual".

This type is often of a noble heart, wilted by fear of conflict with authority. The power of their intellect and noble instincts may lead them to a courageous position, where they see the need to take up arms, but their instinctive fear of authority then motivates them to find rationalizations to avoid conflict.

For Assange the central political virtue is courage. One of his favourite sayings is: "Courage is contagious." He attributes it to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. In fact it was coined by the evangelist Billy Graham. Assange's politics are also generational. "Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

For Assange the great moving forces in history are the need for Love and the thirst for Truth. In his final piece in the selected correspondence, Assange admits that often "outcomes are treated with more reverence than Truth".

Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises, everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight ... Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite void and choose wonder over whatever gets them through. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth ... on the Voltaires, the Galileos and Principias of truth, on the Gutenbergs, Marconis and Internets of truth, those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.

But how will the rotten edifice be smashed? On 22 November 2006 Assange provides a link to a paper. He tells his coterie of readers: "No. Don't skip to the good stuff. This is the good stuff," He is pointing them to the central theoretical breakthrough that led to WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange published this paper twice, the first time on 10 November 2006 under the title "State and Terrorist Conspiracies", the second time, in more developed form, on 3 December under the title "Conspiracy as Governance". Stripped of its inessential mathematical gobbledegook, its argument goes like this. The world is at present dominated by the conspiratorial power of authoritarian governments and big business corporations, As President Theodore Roosevelt understood, behind "ostensible governments", there exists "an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship." Authoritarian governments and corporations maintain and entrench their power through a conspiracy. For Assange the conspiracy involves the maintenance of a network of links between the conspirators, some vital, some less so. Conspiracies naturally provoke resistance. Among revolutionaries of earlier generations resistance has involved the attempt to break the links between the leaders of the conspiracy by "assassination ... killing, kidnapping, blackmailing, or otherwise marginalising or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to". Such methods are no longer appropriate. "The act of assassination - the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species evolved." The new generation of revolutionaries "must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not".

Contemporary conspiracies rely on unrestricted information flow to adapt to and control their environments. Conspirators need to be able to speak freely to each other and to disarm resistance by spreading disinformation among I the people they control, something they presently very successfully achieve. Conspirators who have control over information flow are infinitely more powerful than those who do not. Drawing on a passage from Lord Halifax in which political parties are described as "conspiracies against the rest of the nation", Assange asks his readers to imagine what would happen in the struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties in the US "if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence - let alone the computer systems that manage their subscribes [sic], donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns", He asks them to think of the conspiracy as a living organism, "a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it faIls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment". Rather than attacking the conspiracy by assassinating its leading members, he believes it can be "throttled" by cutting its information flows. "Later," he promises, "we will see how technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance."

The promise is fulfilled in a blog entry of 31 December 2006. Here he outlines finally the idea at the core of the WikiLeaks strategy.

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

There is a direct link between Assange's cypherpunks period and the theory behind WikiLeaks. As we have seen, Assange joined the cypherpunks list at the time when Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics" was being hotly discussed. There is evidence that Assange was fascinated by the idea. In January 1998 he had come upon an advertisement for a prize - "Scoop the Grim Reaper. Who Will Live? Who Will Die?" - which was to be awarded to the person who guessed on what dates certain Hollywood celebrities would die. "Anyone noticed this before?" Assange posted the advertisement on the cypherpunks list under the heading: "Jim ... Bell ... lives ... on ...in ... Hollywood". The similarity between Bell's thought and Assange's are unmistakable. Like Bell, Assange was possessed by a simple "revolutionary idea" about how to create a better world. As with Bell, the idea emerged from reflection upon the political possibilities created by untraceable anonymous communication, through the use of remailers and unbreakable public-key cryptography. The differences are also clear. Unlike with Bell, the revolution Assange imagined would be non-violent. The agent of change would not be the assassin but the whistleblower. The method would not be the bullet but the leak. "Conspiracy as Governance" can most accurately be interpreted as his answer to "Assassination Politics".

In arriving at this position, Assange had drawn together three different personal experiences. From his custody battles in the 1990s he had become interested in the political potency of leaks. From his cypherpunk days he had become interested in the political possibilities of untraceable encrypted communication. And from his involvement in the free software movement he had seen what collective democratic intellectual enterprise might achieve. In essence, his conclusion was that world politics could be transformed by staunching the flow of information among corrupt power elites by making them ever more fearful of insider leaks. He believed he could achieve this by establishing an organisation that would allow whistleblowers from all countries to pass on their information, confident that their identities would not be able to be discovered. He proposed that his organisation would then publish the information for the purpose of collective analysis so as to empower oppressed populations across the globe.

There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one.

In late 2006 Assange sought a romantic partner through OKCupid in the name of Harry Harrison. Under the heading, "What am I doing with my life?", he answered: "directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male-dominated". Under the heading, "I spend a lot of time thinking about", he answered: "Changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery". There was something distinctly Walter Mittyish about it all. Under the informal leadership of Julian Assange, a group of mainly young men, without resources and linked only by computers, now began to implement their plans for a peaceful global political revolution.

On 4 October Assange registered the domain name "WikiLeaks.org" in the US. He called it WikiLeaks because he had been immensely impressed by the success of the Wikipedia experiment, where 3 million entries had been contributed through the input of a worldwide virtual community. As he put it, WikiLeaks would be to leaks what Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia. Strangely and perhaps revealingly, it was registered under the names of two fathers, his biological one, John Shipton, and his cypherpunk political one, John Young, a New York architect who ran the intelligence leak website Cryptome, which could be seen as WikiLeaks' predecessor. Assange explained his request for assistance to Young like this:

You knew me under another name from cypherpunks days. I am involved in a project that you may have a feeling for ... The project is a mass document leaking project that requires someone with backbone to hold the .org domain registration ... We expect the domain to come under the usual political and legal pressure. The policy for .org requires that registrants names not be false or misleading. It would be an easy play to cancel the domain unless someone were willing to stand up and claim to be the registrant.

The choice of Young reveals something about Assange. For Young was undoubtedly the most militant security cypherpunk of all, who had published on his website an aerial photo of Dick Cheney's hideout bunker, a photograph of the home of Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, and the names of 276 British and some 600 Japanese intelligence agents and 2619 CIA "sources". Young was also Jim Bell's greatest champion. After Bell's arrest and imprisonment, Young nominated him for the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. Bell had, he argued in his nomination, contributed "an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability by way of a scheme for anonymous, untraceable political assassination".

[Image]

A potential WikiLeaks logo in development, 2006, as published by Cryptome. (c) Wikileaks

Serious work on the establishment of WikiLeaks began in December 2006. One of the first tasks was to decide upon a logo. Before opting for the hourglass, the WikiLeaks team thought seriously about a mole breaking through a wall above which stood three sinister authoritarian figures, arms folded. Another early task was to put together an advisory board. The first person he wanted was Daniel Ellsberg. Assange explained the purpose of WikiLeaks and why he had been approached:

We'd like your advice and we'd like you to form part of our political armor. The more armor we have, particularly in the form of men and women sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen young men and get away with it.

Here was one generation speaking to another. A month after being contacted Ellsberg replied. "Your concept is terrific and I wish you the best of luck with it." He did not agree to join the board. Two leading cypherpunks were approached - the British computer security specialist Ben Laurie and one of the cypherpunks founders,John Gilmore. Laurie became actively involved. Gilmore instead asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation he had also co-founded to help. Assange's old cypherpunk sparring partner, Danny O'Brien, now with the EFF, offered to assist. Also approached not long after were two Chinese Tiananmen Square dissidents, a member of the Tibetan Association in Washington and Australian journalist Phillip Adams. All agreed to join the board of advisers and, then, most seem never to have heard from WikiLeaks again.

What do the early internal documents reveal about the charge that WikiLeaks was an anti-American outfit posing as a freedom of information organisation? In his invitation to Gilmore, Assange had pledged that WikiLeaks "will provide a catalyst that will bring down government through stealth everywhere, not least that of the Bushists". In its first public statement, WikiLeaks argued that "misleading leaks and misinformation are already well placed in the mainstream media ... an obvious example being the lead-up to the Iraq war".

And in an email of 2 January 2007 Assange even argued that WikiLeaks could advance by several years "the total annihilation of the current US regime and any other regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone". And yet, despite these statements, the evidence surrounding WikiLeaks' foundation makes it abundantly clear that anti-Americanism was not the primary driving force. Time and again, in its internal documents, it argued that its "roots are in dissident communities" and that its "primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and central Eurasia". China is a special focus. One or more of WikiLeaks' inner coterie were Taiwanese hacking into Chinese government sources. At the time of its foundation, WikiLeaks claimed to have more than a million documents. Almost certainly almost all came from China. For this reason, WikiLeaks argued publicly that "a politically motivated legal attack on us would be seen as a grave error in western administrations". Concerning its targets, the formulation is precise. WikiLeaks has in its sights authoritarian governments, the increasingly authoritarian tendencies seen in the recent trajectory of the western democracies, and the authoritarian nature of contemporary business corporations.

What then of the charge that WikiLeaks was a revolutionary organisation pretending to be concerned merely with reformist liberal issues such as exposure of corruption, open government and freedom of information and expression? The internal WikiLeaks documents show that the answer to this question is complex. At its foundation, Assange frequently argued that WikiLeaks' true nature did indeed need to be disguised. Because "freedom of information is a respected liberal value", Assange argued, "we may get some sympathy" but it would not last. Inevitably governments would try to crush WikiLeaks. But if the mask of moderation was maintained, at least for some time, opposition would be "limp wristed". A quotation from the Book of Isaiah, he believed, might be suitable "if we were to front as a Ploughshares [peace] organisation". To John Young he wrote: "We have the collective sources, personalities and learning to be, or rather appear to be, the reclusive ubermensch of the 4th estate". The emphases are mine. He also knew that if WikiLeaks was to prosper, and also to win support from philanthropic bodies such as the Soros Foundation, the hacker-cypherpunk origin of the inner circle needed to be disguised. "We expect difficult state lashback [sic] unless WikiLeaks can be given a sanctified frame ('centre for human rights, democracy, good government and apple pie press freedom project' vs 'hackers strike again')." The key to WikiLeaks was that its true revolutionary ambitions and its moderate liberal public face would be difficult for opponents to disentangle. Open government and freedom of information were standard liberal values. However, as explained in the theory outlined in "Conspiracy as Governance", they were the values in whose name authoritarian structures would be undermined world-wide, through the drying up of information flows and a paralysing fear of insider leaks.

It was not only opponents who found it difficult to keep the public and private faces of WikiLeaks distinct. Despite those involved understanding the need for disguise, at its foundation the excitement was so palpable and the ambition so boundless that, when it was called upon to explain itself, the mask of apple pie liberal reformist moderation instantly fell away. On 3 January 2007 a small crisis arose when WikiLeaks' existence was prematurely revealed. Assange immediately put together a brilliant description of WikiLeaks for public release.

Principled leaking has changed the course of human history for the better; it can alter the course of history in the present, it can lead to a better future ... Public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions pressures them to act ethically. What official will chance a secret corrupt transaction when the public is likely to find out? ... When the risks of embarrassment through openness and honesty increase, the tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression ... Instead of a couple of academic specialists, WL will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability ... WL may become the most powerful intelligence agency on earth, an intelligence agency of the people m WL will be an anvil at which beats the hammer of the collective conscience of humanity... WL, we hope, will be a new star in the political firmament of humanity.

Julian Assange recognised that the language of what amounted to the WikiLeaks Manifesto might appear a little "overblown". He recognised that it had about it too much the flavour of "anarchy". But in general when it was written he was pleased.

John Young was not. In early January 2007 he decided that WikiLeaks was a CIA-backed fraud. "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign. Same old shit, working for the enemy ... Fuck 'em all." "We are going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly but not entirely a feint," Assange cryptically replied, Young decided now to post all the WikiLeaks correspondence between early December 2006 and early January 2007 on his website. Later, in 2010, he published Assange's contributions to the cypherpunks list between 1995 and 2002. It is because of his baseless suspicion that the mind of Julian Assange and the intellectual origins of WikiLeaks are able to be understood.

In February 2007, Julian Assange travelled to Nairobi to attend the World Social Forum, a very large gathering of mainly left-wing human rights activists and NGOs. He stayed on in Kenya for several months, involved with anti-corruption forces but also fascinated and repelled by the world of superstition he encountered:

Here, in Africa there was a two page fold out on the 'Night Runner' plague. Plague? Yes, Of people - typically old, who supposedly run around naked at night ... tapping on windows, throwing rocks on peoples [sic] roofs, snapping twigs, rustling grass, casting spells and getting lynched because it's the' right thing to do' .

Insofar as we can affect the world. let it be to utterly eliminate guilt and fear as a motivator of man and replace it cell for cell with love of one another and the passion of creation.

Assange was a true Enlightenment Man.

The next Social Forum was to be held between 27 June and 4 July in Atlanta. Assange wanted WikiLeaks volunteers to attend. Emails he sent in early June can be found on the internet. They provide the clearest evidence of his political viewpoint and strategic thinking at this time. In the first he assures his supporters that WikiLeaks' future is secure. "[T]he idea can't be stopped. It's everyone's now." Some people have apparently argued that WikiLeaks' idealism or "childlike naivety" is a weakness. He believes they are entirely wrong. "Naivety is unfailingly attractive when it adorns strength. People rush forward to defend and fight for individuals and organizations imbued with this quality." Confronted by it, "virtuous sophisticates" are "marooned". Some people are clearly worried that WikiLeaks will be captured by "the Left". Assange assures his followers they need not be concerned. In the US the problem is rather that WikiLeaks is seen as too close to the CIA and American foreign policy. In fact, "we'll take our torch to all." Some people have dearly expressed doubts about Social Forum types. Assange more than shares them. They are by and large "ineffectual pansies" who "specialize in making movies about themselves and throwing 'dialogue' parties ... with foundation money", while fantasising that "the vast array of functional cogs in brute inhumanity... would follow their lead, clapping, singing and videotaping their way up Mt. Mostly Harmless". In Africa Assange has seen human rights fighters of real backbone. He warns his followers not to expect to find such people in the US. He quotes at length from Solzhenitsyn's 1979 Harvard address about the radical decline of "civic courage" in the West especially among the "ruling and intellectual elites". Nonetheless, to advance WikiLeaks' cause, the Social Forum - the world's biggest NGO "beach party" - matters. Assange anticipates that anti-Iraq War feeling will hold it together. Although WikiLeaks has so far concentrated on "the most closed governments", he explains that it is about to publish explosive material on American "involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan". He hopes that the anti-war movement will embrace these documents so that WikiLeaks can avoid the "retributive" blast from pro-war forces. It is vital to position itself "as everyone's friend". If anyone still needs it, this despatch is proof that Assange has a biting tongue, a mordant wit and a brilliant political mind.

It is obvious that by June 2007 several members of the Left had indeed gravitated to WikiLeaks. In Assange's view, this group were thinking of publishing commentary on leaked documents in a way that allowed their political bias to show. He sent a different email to them:

OK, you guys need to keep the Progressive Commie Socialist agendas and rhetoric to yourselves or you're going to go nowhere very, very fast. Now, now, don't get your dander up: if I can pass by gross mis-characterizations of the existing world order as 'capitalism' or 'white supremacy' I you can stay calm and listen a minute.

WikiLeaks was in danger, he argued, of being positioned either as a CIA front by John Young types or as a same-old left-wing outfit "preaching to the choir". All partisanship would be lethal. WikiLeaks needed to keep itself open to whistleblowers of all stripes - even "conservative and religious types waking up to the fact that they've been taken for a ride". "What you need to strive for is the same level of objectivity and analytical disinterest as the League of Women Voters. No, even higher. Else I'll be so disheartened that I'll lower myself to government contracting work." This email is not only illuminating from the point of view of WikiLeaks' grand strategy. It is also decisive as to his true political position. Assange might have been on the left of the spectrum by anarcho-capitalist cypherpunk standards but he was by no means a standard leftist. His politics were anti-establishment but genuinely beyond Left and Right.

Between 2007 and 2010 Assange's political thinking was shaped by two key ideas. The first, as we have seen, was that all authoritarian structures - both governments and corporations - were vulnerable to insider leaks. Fear would throttle information /lows. Assange called this a "secrecy tax". Inevitably, he argued, because of this tax, governments and corporations with nothing to hide would triumph over their secretive, unjust conspiratorial competitors. This aspect of his politics amounted to a kind of political Darwinism, a belief not in the survival of the fittest but of the most transparent and most just. As an organisation that encouraged whistleblowers and published their documents, WikiLeaks was aiding and speeding up this process.

There was, however, another dimension of his politics that reflected his long association with the cypherpunks. Assange believed that, in the era of globalisation, laws determining communication were going to be harmonised. The world would either opt for a closed system akin to Chinese political secrecy and American intellectual property laws, or an open system found to some extent in Belgium and Sweden. Once more, Assange hoped that WikiLeaks was assisting a positive outcome to this struggle through its role as what he called a global publisher of last resort. If WikiLeaks could survive the attacks certain to be mounted by governments and corporations, the rights of human beings to communicate freely with each other without the intervention of governments would be entrenched. WikiLeaks was, according to this argument, the canary in the mine. Assange was taken with the famous Orwell quote. He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. The world was at a turning point. Either Big Brother would take control of the internet or an era of unprecedented freedom of communication would arrive.

Assange was by now in the habit of composing motivational emails for his volunteers. This is the message he sent them on 12 March 2008:

Mankind has successfully adapted changes as monumental as electricity and the engine. It can also adapt to a world where state sponsored violence against the communications of consenting adults is not only unlawful, but physically impossible. As knowledge flows across nations it is time to sum the great freedoms of every nation and not subtract them. It is time for the world as an international collective of communicating peoples to arise and say 'here I am'.

This might have come straight out of a cypherpunks manifesto. In the first weeks of 2010 Assange was involved in an ultimately successful political manoeuvre to turn Iceland into the world's first "data haven" with the most politically progressive anti-censorship laws on Earth. According to Domscheit-Berg, Assange's idea of a data haven came straight from the canonical cypherpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, which ranked with Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle as Assange's favourite.

There was an aspect of WikiLeaks' work that was, through 2008 and 2009, beginning to trouble Assange. Although it was a peripatetic organisation with only four permanent staff - Assange, Domscheit-Berg and two others known as " the architect" and "the technician" - WikiLeaks had proven to be an outstanding success in attracting leaks and then publishing them. By late 2009 it had published documents concerning an Islamist assassination order from Somali; massive corruption in Daniel arap Moi's Kenya; tax avoidance by the largest Swiss bank, Julius Baer; an oil spill in Peru, a nuclear accident in Iran and toxic chemical dumping by the Trafigura corporation off the Ivory Coast. Further, it had released the Guantanamo Bay operational manuals; secret film of dissent in Tibet; the emails of Sarah Palin; a suppressed report into an assassination squad operating in Kenya; American intelligence reports on the battle of Fallujah, and reports into the conditions in its jails; the CIimategate emails; the internet censorship lists from Australia; and, finally, the loans book of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. WikiLeaks had never been successfully sued, although Julius Baer had tried. None of the identities of the whistleblowers who sought to conceal them had been uncovered. WikiLeaks had won awards from the Economist, in 2008, and from Amnesty International, in 2009. Assange believed that WikiLeaks' information had determined a Kenyan election. He knew that the publication of the loans book in Iceland had riveted the nation, especially after Kaupthing had brought down an injunction against the national broadcaster's evening television news. And yet, as his internal communications make clear, he was puzzled and appalled by the world's indifference to his leaks.

Assange had once regarded WikiLeaks as the people's intelligence agency. In January 2007 he sincerely believed that when WikiLeaks published commentary on the Somalia assassination order document it would be "very closely collaboratively analysed by hundreds of Wikipedia editors" and by "thousands of refugees from the Somali, Ethiopian and Chinese expat communities". This simply had not happened. Commentary by the people on material produced by their intelligence agency never would. He had once hoped for engaged analysis from the blogosphere. What he now discovered were what he thought of as indifferent narcissists repeating the views of the mainstream media on "the issues de jour" with an additional flourish along the lines of "their pussy cat predicted it all along". Even the smaller newspapers were hopeless. They relied on press releases, ignorant commentary and theft. They never reported the vitally significant leaks without WikiLeaks intervention. Counterintuitively, only the major newspapers in the world, such as the New York Times or the Guardian, undertook any serious analysis but even they were self-censoring and their reportage dominated by the interests of powerful lobby groups. No one seemed truly interested in the vital material WikiLeaks offered or willing to do their Own work. He wrote to his volunteers:

What does it mean when only those facts about the world with economic powers behind them can be heard, when the truth lays [sic] naked before the world and no one will be the first to speak without a bribe? WikiLeaks' unreported material is only the most visible wave on an ocean of truth rotting in draws [sic] of the fourth estate, waiting for a lobby to subsidize its revelation into a profitable endeavour.

In Iraq, a junior American intelligence analyst, Private Bradley Manning - at least according to very convincing evidence yet to be tested in court - had been following WikiLeaks' activities with interest. On 25 November 2009 WikiLeaks released a document comprising 573,000 messages from September 11. As this material could only come from a National Security Agency leak, Manning was now convinced that WikiLeaks was genuine. Eventually, after sending WikiLeaks some cables concerning the American Ambassador in Iceland, he decided to download 93,000 logs from the Afghan War, 400,000 incident reports from the war in Iraq and 250,000 State Department cables, to which he and hundreds of thousands of American officials had access, and to send them to WikiLeaks. As a cover, he brought along Lady Gaga CDs and, while downloading these documents onto disc, pretended to be mouthing the words to the music. Some time after, he confessed to a convicted hacker, Adrian Lamo, what he had done. The most secure encryption and remailing systems were powerless against human, all-too-human frailty. Lamo in turn informed the FBI and American military authorities. Shortly after, Manning was arrested and taken to a military prison in West Virginia. Lamo also went with his evidence to a longstanding acquaintance, another convicted hacker, Kevin Poulsen, who worked at the magazine Wired. Poulsen published the log of some of the conversation between Manning and Lamo.

(12.15:11 PM) bradass87 hypothetical question: if you had free reign [sic] over classified networks for long periods of time ... say 8-9 months ... and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that happened in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC ... what would you do?

(12.26:09 PM) bradass87 lets just say 'someone' I know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described... and been transferring that data from the classified networks Over the 'air gap' onto a commercial network computer... sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can't stay in one country very long.

One of the items sent to WikiLeaks was a video of a coldblooded, American Apache helicopter attack on a group of Iraqis, in which up to 15 men were gunned down. Assange made the decision to concentrate the resources and the energies of WikiLeaks on publishing it under the title: "Collateral Murder". In early April 2010, he flew to Washington to launch it, with his temporary chief-of-staff in Iceland (where the video had been edited), Rop Gonggrijp, the Dutch veteran of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club. On 5 April, Assange addressed the National Press Club. His frustration with the indifference of the world was, to put it mildly, about to end.

For once, the cliche is true. What happened over the next ten months is stranger than fiction. With the release of the "Collateral Murder" footage, WikiLeaks became instantly famous. At the suggestion of a journalist at the Guardian, Nick Davies, Assange decided to publish the new material he had received from Manning anonymously in association with some of the world's best newspapers or magazines. Complex and heated negotiations between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel were now conducted. Even though these negotiations are one of the less interesting aspects of this story, already three books from the news outlets involved offering their own perspectives have been published. Assange had long regarded the western media as narcissistic. It is likely that his judgement was now confirmed.

In July the first of the Manning tranche, the Afghan War Diary, was published. Assange held back only 15,000 of the 93,000 reports. Unforgivably, those released included the names of perhaps 300 Afghans who had assisted western forces. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed that a nine-member commission had been created after the documents were released "to find out about people who were spying". Assange was unrepentant. Both in private and in public, he argued that if they were collaborators they deserved to die. Assange did, however, learn from the experience. When the Iraq War logs were released in October most names had been redacted.

By now, WikiLeaks was beginning to implode. Relations between Assange and Domseheit-Berg became increasingly tense, especially after Assange warned him, in April 2010, rather alarmingly: "If you fuck up, I'll hunt you down and kill you." Some insiders such as Birgitta Jonsdottir, the anarchist Icelandic parliamentarian, were concerned about the cavalier way in which Assange had handled the moral issue of the Afghan War Diary. Many resented what they saw as the increasingly dictatorial tendency inside WikiLeaks. Assange told the Icelandic anarchist historian Herbert Snorrason: "I don't like your tone. If it continues you're out. I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all of the rest. If you have a problem ... piss off."

On 21 August, Assange discovered that he was under investigation for sexual crime after he slept with two Swedish supporters during a triumphal visit to Stockholm, one of whom, Anna Ardin, to complicate matters, had written advice on her blog concerning seven legal [correction] kinds of revenge women might take after sexual mistreatment. Facing these charges, Assange expected total loyalty. Neither Domscheit-Berg nor Jonsdottir were willing to give him what he wanted. Domscheit-Berg was suspended from WikiLeaks; Jonsdottir quit. The "architect" followed. He and Domscheit-Berg took the WikiLeaks' submissions with them, at least temporarily, on the grounds that its sources needed far more scrupulous protection. Yet there was more to the implosion of WikiLeaks than concerns about Assange's laxity over security, or his cavalier and dictatorial behaviour. In December, Rop Gonggrijp confessed to the Chaos Computer Club: "I guess I could make up all sorts of stories about how I disagreed with people or decisions, but the truth is that [during] the period that I helped out, the possible ramifications of WikiLeaks scared the bejezuz out of me. Courage is contagious, my ass."

Assange had taken on the power of the American state without flinching. His identification with Solzhenitsyn was no longer empty. Assange decided to release the 250,000 US Department of State cables WikiLeaks still had in its possession on drip-feed so their content could be absorbed. On 28 November the first batch was published. The American vice-president, Joe Biden, called Assange a "high-tech terrorist". The rival vice-presidential candidate of 2008, Sarah Palin, thought he should be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden, a suggestion that led Assange to quip to Paris Match that at least that option assured him of a further ten years of freedom. Visa, Mastercard and Pay Pal severed connections with WikiLeaks. A global guerrilla hacker army of WikiLeaks supporters, Anonymous, mounted an instant counterattack. Assange was by now facing two legal threats - extradition to Sweden to be interviewed about his relations with Anna Ardin and Sofia Willen or extradition to the US where a secret grand jury had been established to look into whether he had committed crimes outlined in the 1917 Espionage Act or broken some other law. After a preliminary hearing in London on the Swedish extradition request, he was first imprisoned in Wandsworth jail and then placed under a form of house arrest.

In early April 2010 hardly anyone had heard of Julian Assange. By December he was one of the most famous people on Earth, with very powerful enemies and very passionate friends. A future extradition to the US was almost certain to ignite a vast Left vs Right global cultural war, a kind of 21st-century equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair. Ironically, if that broke out, his staunchest and most eloquent defenders were likely to be people such as John Pilger or Tariq Ali, whom Assange privately had once derided as followers of the "Progressive Commie Socialist" agenda, or the left-wing American film-maker Michael Moore, whom, Domseheit-Berg tells us, Assange considered "an idiot". He would also be championed by millions of "average shy intellectuals" across the western world who had watched on passively as the political and business elites and their spin-masters in the US and beyond plunged Iraq into bloody turmoil, brought chaos to the global financial markets and resisted action over the civilisational crisis of climate change.

Assange had long grasped the political significance of his compatriot, Rupert Murdoch. In "Conspiracy as Governance" he had called the disinformation the political and business elites fed the people to safeguard their power and their interests the "Fox News Effect". As the pressure on Assange mounted, Murdoch was clearly on his mind. In December, he spoke to Pilger in the New Statesman of an "insurance file" on Murdoch and News Corp his supporters would release if he came to harm and to Paris Match about Murdoch's supposed "tax havens". If a culture war was engaged over Assange's extradition to the US it would involve, strangely enough, the clash of cultural armies mobilised by the creators of Fox News and WikiLeaks, the two most influential Australians of the era.

16 February

Thanks to Robert Manne for an exemplary essay and The Monthly for paying him 2 cents an hour.

Cryptome supplements:

Cyperhpunks on Wikipedia
Assassinatin Politics by Jim Bell
wikileaks-gest.htm Wikileaks in Gestation 2001 December 25, 2010
Tim May True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy December 23, 2010 (offsite)
wikileaks-lash.htm Wikileaks CIA, Soros and Competitors Backlash December 12, 2010
siss.htm Sensitive Information Security Sources September 4, 2010
wikileaks-soros.htm George Soros OSI CIA Inquiry on Wikileaks August 10, 2010
lamo-webster.htm Adrian Lamo and Timothy Douglas Webster August 2, 2010
ja-economics.htm Julian Assange Essay on Participatory Economics August 2, 2010
ja-conspiracies.pdf Julian Assange Essays on Conspiracies July 31, 2010
assange-cpunks.htm Julian Assange Writes Online 1995-2002 May 22, 2010
cpunks-92-98.zip Cypherpunks Mail List 1992-98 May 20, 2010 (8.3MB)
wikileaks-leak2.htm Wikileaks Leak 2 January 9, 2007
wikileaks-leak.htm Wikileaks Leak January 7, 2007

A sends:

I admire the speed with which you put complete documents on your site. Here's a correction for Dr. Manne's article. He wrote: "Anna Ardin ... had written advice on her blog concerning seven legal kinds of revenge women might take after sexual mistreatment."

This is part of the misinformation campaign concerning the Swedish cases. Ardin translated, or published a translation of, an eHow article on revenge that's legal. In other words, the article talks about ways of taking revenge that are not against the law; the article is not about how to use the legal system to take revenge. Making a false allegation of rape would be illegal. The article was published in January, long before she met Assange. The article does mention a person who has cheated or dumped someone, but this is used as an example, and it appears to be worded to be gender-neutral in the first reference. The second reference is to "he," which is proper English grammar. The article also says it's better to forgive than take revenge, and not to take revenge disproportionate to the offense. Here's one of many sources on this:

http://nicholasmead.com/2010/08/21/how-to-smear-a-hero/

From: Robert Manne
To: A,
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2011 18:15:42 +1100
Subject: RE: Manne article

Dear A,

I hadn't noticed the unintended ambiguity.

I should have said lawful.

As I will when the essay is re-published.

Best, Robert Manne

Ricky Gervais being serious

2010-12-21T09:48:00.000+11:00

This is an article Gervais wrote for the Wall Street Journal. I simply love it because when an intelligent comedian is serious, they makes total sense. I couldn't put it better myself. Read on.

"Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

This, is of course a spirituality issue, religion is a different matter. As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it. (Don’t murder anyone, doesn’t get a mention till number 6.)

When confronted with anyone who holds my lack of religious faith in such contempt, I say, “It’s the way God made me.”

But what are atheists really being accused of?

The dictionary definition of God is “a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe.” Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6,000 years ago, historians have cataloged over 3700 supernatural beings, of which 2870 can be considered deities.

So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say “Oh which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra?…” If they say “Just God. I only believe in the one God,” I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869.

I used to believe in God. The Christian one that is.

I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him.

One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.

I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing on the cross.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God -– what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f— you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine.

“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is -‐ a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway." - Ricky Gervais.

2010-03-26T17:30:00.002+11:00

Sam Harris,

Atheist convention

2010-03-18T17:19:00.003+11:00

Yes I would have love to have gone to the Convention. But I had to work and bring in the wage and keep at least my half of the money coming in. So no Atheist Convention for me. By all accounts, it was a lot of very interesting people banging on about all the interesting stuff I love to bang on about. But there's one thing missing. There's no-one to disagree with.

Clearly because we are hosting the Atheist Convention....

2010-03-07T18:34:00.003+11:00

Take your pick, but be careful

2009-04-20T22:29:00.004+10:00

The religious learn about one god and believe it all. A fair percentage admonish those who believe in any other deity. Let's find another way.

Take your pick:
Agdistis or Angdistis
Ah Puch
Ahura Mazda
Alberich
Allah
Amaterasu
An
Anansi
Anat
Andvari
Anshar
Anu
Aphrodite
Apollo
Apsu
Ares
Artemis
Asclepius
Athena
Athirat
Athtart
Atlas
Baal
Ba Xian
Bacchus
Balder
Bast
Bellona
Bergelmir
Bes
Bixia Yuanjin
Bragi
Brahma
Brigit
Camaxtli
Ceres
Ceridwen
Cernunnos
Chac
Chalchiuhtlicue
Charun
Chemosh
Cheng-huang
Cybele
Dagon
Damkina (Dumkina)
Davlin
Dawn
Demeter
Diana
Di Cang
Dionysus
Ea
El
Enki
Enlil
Eos
Epona
Ereskigal
Farbauti
Fenrir
Forseti
Freya
Freyr
Frigg
Gaia
Ganesha
Ganga
Garuda
Gauri
Geb
Geong Si
Hades
Hanuman
Hathor
Hecate (Hekate)
Helios
Heng-o (Chang-o)
Hephaestus
Hera
Hermes
Hestia
Hod
Hoderi
Hoori
Horus
Hotei
Huitzilopochtli
Hsi-Wang-Mu
Hygeia
Inanna
Inti
Iris
Ishtar
Isis
Ixtab
Izanaki
Izanami
Jesus
Juno
Jupiter
Juturna
Kagutsuchi
Kartikeya
Khepri
Ki
Kingu
Kinich Ahau
Kishar
Krishna
Kukulcan
Lakshmi
Liza
Loki
Lugh
Luna
Magna Mater
Maia
Marduk
Mars
Medb
Mercury
Mimir
Minerva
Mithras
Morrigan
Mot
Mummu
Muses
Nammu
Nanna
Nanna (Norse)
Nanse
Neith
Nemesis
Nephthys
Neptune
Nergal
Ninazu
Ninhurzag
Nintu
Ninurta
Njord
Nut
Odin
Ohkuninushi
Ohyamatsumi
Orgelmir
Osiris
Ostara
Pan
Parvati
Phaethon
Phoebe
Phoebus Apollo
Pilumnus
Poseidon
Quetzalcoatl
Rama
Re
Rhea
Sabazius
Sarasvati
Selene
Shiva
Seshat
Seti (Set)
Shamash
Shapsu
Shen Yi
Shiva
Shu
Si-Wang-Mu
Sin
Sirona
Sol
Surya
Susanoh
Tawaret
Tefnut
Tezcatlipoca
Thanatos
Thor
Tiamat
Tlaloc
Tonatiuh
Toyo-Uke-Bime
Tyche
Tyr
Utu
Uzume
Venus
Vesta
Vishnu
Volturnus
Vulcan
Xipe
Xi Wang-mu
Xochipilli
Xochiquetzal
Yam
Yarikh
Yhwh
Ymir
Yu-huang
Yum Kimil
Zeus

You don't have to believe in any particular one. It is also possible to see all of these gods as renditions of the same thing. But you try going into a group of one religion and saying that. Try telling them all these gods are a product of a gene found in the brain, not actually something they can talk to, or look up to.
I've done that. The bruises have almost healed.

Moving into 2009

2009-02-01T14:02:00.002+11:00

Perhaps there is a god.

Nahhh! That's crazy talk!

Grumpy old man

2009-01-17T14:28:00.004+11:00

Well, I'm beginning to feel it. That dark rolling of smoke from behind my head. That feeling that I am further from my true thoughts than I used to be. Is this senility, am I just tired? Is it, um, that disease that starts with an 'a' that hits older people, er , umm, you know, aaa oh yes, um, alzheimers! thats it! phew!

As I approach 50, I can hardly finish sentences in front of crowds (which is part of my job). It's weird, cos I don't feel like I run out of things to say. It's just that I can't get it out.

What is most upsetting is that I even have trouble gathering up a decent conversation with my wife. On some occasions, I cannot complete a

Anyway, jokes aside, perhaps I have to admit it. I have become one of those grumpy old men.

Cheers Jim!

2008-10-25T13:20:00.003+11:00

Jim Morrisson of 'The Doors' fame once said, "I'm going to get my kicks until the whole shithouse goes up in flames!"

Well Jim, I smell smoke.

Dylan Moran thoughts

2008-10-11T08:30:00.003+11:00

"Life is very cheap right now. There's an undervaluing of the human, and of human essentials like community. There's a few things going on here: the advertisement materialist culture, the rise of technology and the information age, the demise of religion, all these secular people like you and me who are up for grabs in terms of their belief systems, individuals free-floating in this homogenised community of the world, where there is too much of everything and where the high streets look the same everywhere and everywhere is nowhere. It's kind of lonely." - Dylan Moran.

Fact v religion

2007-05-06T12:33:00.000+10:00

Recently on a unrelated chat forum, some suggested that athiests needed to prove god didn't exist, and that 'atheism' was the cause of more misery than religion.

I let them have it.

"*positions soapbox, climbs aboard*

An army runs not on its stomach, but the invading people have to have their heart and mind in it as well. Enter religion. Jur, accept it. Religion is the root of all wars. Even the mess in the Middle East. Its as beyond discussion as Climate Change.

Wholesale slaughter is certainly not being carried out, 'even today' in the name of Athiesm. Indeed, Atheism is not a driving force or a belief system, it is a lack of a belief system. Stalin didn't need religion as a tool to drive his army. He had fear on his side with a hungry, scared and desperate people under him.

I shall mention those drives that you conveniently missed. Er, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Shining Path of Peru, the Portuguese and Spanish invasion of the South American Incas, Mayans, Aztecs and other indigenous civilizations who were told 'convert or die'. Central America is home to millions of people who are followers of the Catholic faith. I put it to you that they were the only ones spared. 'Convert or die'.

Read what the Europeans did in the Indian Ocean, then to the Pacific Ocean Islanders. Religion was a weapon, touted as a salvation; perhaps you can tell me who profited in the long run. Who runs colonies? The victors of the time rewrote the history.

Similar treatment was metered out to the Australian Aborigines, the native Philippinos, Indonesians, Malays, the Karens, the Sri Lankans and Tamals, and done get me started on the subcontinent. Countless millions were killed for misguided, superstitious religious reasons, under the guise of social guidance, even between wars. Ethiopia and Sudan. Go back to King Leopold's Belgian push into the Congo, 'to save the continent from the devil'. He had almost the entire country slaughtered or enslaved.

Oh did I mention that Hitler was a confirmed Catholic. I noticed you didn't. The present US fundamentalist Christian Republicans in the USA, who not only destabilized the Middle East but are now blaming the extremist problem on the locals, is rumored to be pushing their own Armageddon bible story into reality. Their own self fulfilling prophecy.

Before anyone can say that Athiests have to prove God doesn't exist, the religious have to prove he does.

*falls off soapbox, feels better, thank you*

Cold hard facts!

2007-04-29T14:44:00.000+10:00

I love a good factual news story. I also enjoy News analysis, features, and editorial opinion from all over the English written world. As long as it is not tweaked into fiction by top-office intervention. I am a media junkie, having worked in film documentary production and TV news work for many years. The reason I moved? I became disillusioned about the media being used for honest information dissemination. As soon as I graduated in journalism, I got the hell out of news. I found the sanctuary of discovering and displaying artistic expression more fulfilling than being told we can't tell the cold hard facts of a real situation.

You wouldn't trust an tobacco industry report on the harmful effects of smoking;
You wouldn't trust an asbestos industry report on the harmful effects of asbestos;
You wouldn't trust a Uranium mining industry report on the effects of nuclear waste;
You wouldn't trust a diamond mining expert's views on the politics of Africa, I for one cannot understand why people ask for life-guidance from Christian priests who have meager understanding of a normal life in society and any political party that stops a scientist telling what he has found, is not to be trusted either.

The cold hard facts of Climate Change have been given to newsrooms for decades. I worked for Greenpeace as a volunteer when not working at TV networks. We were ignored. I wrote so many media releases and went on raids that exposed disgusting environmental destruction, but we were seen by the majority to be vandals ourselves.
The analogy of being the atheist in a crowd of theists is the same.

Some established media outlets are as useful to gather the cold hard facts of a situation, as a church is to gather scientific analysis on any given subject. I love the internet and its ability to let [almost] everyone have a voice. I read a lot of blogs about the atheist life. Makes me thankful that there are more people out there who wonder about what the cold hard facts are. We have to be able to ask the hard questions, voice our found facts, and uncover lies, deceit and evils, in power-halls and church halls.

As Carl Sagan said, "If we aren't able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be skeptical of those who are in authority, then we are up for grabs."

Podcasts

2007-04-26T19:41:00.000+10:00

One of my favorite podcasts at the moment is 'Point of Inquiry'.

I cycle to work, some 16kms each way, each day. Listening to many podcasts on my trial, not only keeps me informed, but also awake. Its a long way, and by Friday, I'm a little bit tired. MMMyeah, some days I pike it and I drive. Anyway, most days, I have a bit of dead-air to fill. I also subscribe to 'In Our Time' from BBC4, which covers immensely interesting subjects in great detail, with a panel of experts, 'The Science Show' from the Australian ABC. Now on podcast. Also ABC's 'Media Report', Rob Kaufman's 'Turn off your TV', and good old 'Vox Populi'.

Working in TV over 25 years, then newspapers, radio, and now Web, I know from bitter experience I cannot stand advertising, worse still is Radio advertising, so Podcasts are just brilliant for cutting to the meat of the program.

Australian pollies say 'Pray for rain'

2007-04-22T12:37:00.000+10:00

You simply have to roll your eyes and hang your head when the National Environment Minister has so completely run out of ideas that his only solution is to suggest to constituents to pray to a supernatural being for a reprieve.

Click to the story in The Age online.

There is a large part of me that equates someone in that position dealing a real situation by calling for a prayer to an imaginary friend, as irresponsible, immature, and more than a little scary.

It's a bit like charging along in a speeding vehicle, noticing a lot of people in the passenger seats and having it dawn on you, ... 'So, who's driving?'

It's Official: We cannot possibly be alone.

2007-03-14T22:27:00.000+11:00

The European Southern Observatory has just announced they have discovered a previously unknown globular cluster orbiting the Milky Way. Take a look at this mother!!

While this image is not in visible light, this is the most common way 21st Century, and for the most part of last century astronomers would find globular clusters. Located 30,000 light-years away, this previously unknown closely-packed group of about 100,000 stars is most likely a new globular cluster.

In our own Galaxy about 150 globular clusters are known, each containing many hundreds of thousands of stars. In contrast to their smaller and less regularly shaped siblings - open clusters - globular clusters are not concentrated in the galactic disc; rather they are spherically distributed in the galactic halo, with increasing concentration towards the centre of the Galaxy.

Star clusters provide us with unique laboratory conditions to investigate various aspects of astrophysics. They represent groups of stars with similar ages, chemical element abundances and distances. Globular clusters, in particular, are fossils in the Milky Way that provide useful information. With ages of about 10 billion years, they are among the oldest objects in our Galaxy - almost as old as the Universe itself. These massive, spherical shaped star clusters are therefore witnesses of the early, mysterious ages of the Universe.

If you're still saying 'we're the only ones', go further down and read Carl Sagan's 'Mote of Dust' passage.

Imagine

2007-03-07T09:49:00.000+11:00

I know, I know,...

But some people have not actually listened to the words, and this is timely.

John Lennon - 'Imagine.'

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

Carl Sagan

2007-03-03T15:30:00.000+11:00

What a driving force this guy was. Carl Sagan is my hero, plain and simple. Not because he was an atheist, though this is a advantage as well. I know I am not alone in these sentiments, but I'd like to dedicate this post to Carl Sagan.

Image courtesy: Reuters.

'Reflections on a Mote of Dust' Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

(Image from JPL/NASA).

'We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'

Excerpted from a commencement address Carl Sagan delivered May 11, 1996.

Comments

2007-02-11T22:52:00.000+11:00

I don't usually gather too many comments from my posts but I was so happy to have one from my fellow Aussie, BeepBeepItsMe. Here it is for the front page.

"I also think that the creation of gods stemmed from mankind trying to explain the idea of thought.

They experienced and heard thought even though they made no sound. I think that this is the basis of god belief. The consciousness of our own thoughts, which we have attributed to external supernatural sources.

When we think, it is our brain in action and our individual minds are the expression of our individual brains.

When ancient people's had a wise or a bright idea, they attributed those thoughts to a power external to themselves. Why would they do this? I suggest they did it because of a lack of knowledge concerning the functions of the brain and how it expressed itself.

I think, therefore I am. Not I think, therefore it is god speaking to me."

Minority report

2007-02-11T18:39:00.001+11:00

Minority report

I had two very interesting catchups with some friends just lately. Actually, they were old friends from an industry I used to work in. The names have been changed to protect, ... everything. One guy had gone on to start his own company, and was now finding it all a bit much. No work, and staff to pay; kids in private school etc etc, you know the call. We talked for hours and had a few drinks.

He suddenly announced that he had 'allowed Jesus Christ into his heart' and wanted to tell me about it. It was like the old guy had left and 'used car salesman' had come in, sat down in his place. But I let him go on. I had no qualms about his new belief, other than the fact I didn't share them. Thats where it got tricky. He asked me about my 'relationship with the lord', and I told him my story. "Well John, I'm an atheist", I started off. You could have wopped him with a cold trout and got a better reaction. "So, er what do you worship?" was his first question after he got off the floor.

I explained quietly that I found the whole god thing like a carry-over of the tooth fairy, santa claus, and even though I had tried in the past, I simply couldn't believe in any god-thing. It just seemed irrelevant and archaic. My tack was to be as relaxed and conciliatory in my explanation as possible. I tried to steer the conversation back to common ground but he just was not with me anymore. It was both a scary and educational situation to be in. I guess I won't be getting much work from him in the future.

The other meeting was a walk-over though. Peter was a senior cop and I caught up with him in the city after work, running into him in the street. We hadn't seen each other for ages. Since I'd seen him I'd got married, had kids, moved outside of town and built a house. Usual stuff. His marriage had crashed and burned, He'd traveled, worked in the States for a decade and was now tossing up what to do next with his life. He'd realised he was gay, and trying to see his way through the political minefield that was being in a hetero-oriented industry and a staunchly religious extended family. He knew that if he climbed out of the closet about his sexual preference, his career would falter, but to live a full life he would have to 'own up' to himself fully, and carry the label, sooner or later.

I told him I was an atheist and we laughed and laughed, and laughed, and laughed and laughed. Gathered together in a diverse community, minorities become the majority.

Not God

2007-02-03T10:41:00.000+11:00

Many times, over my 45 year or so life, I've desired an invisible friend. Someone who watched over my shoulder, guiding with whispers, bringing my good fortune and wisdoms. As anyone would, I thought the idea was pretty cool. I heard the odd hard advice come from realizing new solutions along the way, and understood, that voice, was me. Thats all.

Not God.

When I met people in far off lands who then helped me, and introduced me to others, who gave me work and a career path and even introduced me to other people; that was coincidence, networking and good fortune. Thats all.

Not God.

I thought it would be grand to be able to survive death, to stay conscious and come out the other side. I could meet all those long gone relatives and friends, kick on in some strange but glorious place where you could do anything. Hmm, rather like those places Enid Blyton wrote about in 'The Wishing Chair' and 'The Faraway Tree'. A nice dream but adults should wake up to themselves a little. It is fanciful fiction. Don't you think neurology, psychology, medical science would have a few areas of serious research into the splitting of the physical and spiritual at death if it was fact? In real life, when one dies, thats it. Thats all.

Not God.

Further thoughts

2007-02-02T21:08:00.000+11:00

Since the attention of the Western media at the moment seems to be leaning towards putting more 'anything but Bush' stories up, there is also more focus on Atheism. Careful guys. Tread very carefully.

Many bloggers have mentioned also that if we are not careful, the whole backlash will collect our honest mutterings and throw the lot out as loony hogwash. It may look like an uprising by 10% of youth, re: 'Blasphemy Challenge' and all, but be careful that the highly-sought-after audience with Fox's Rush, O'Reilly and others, as well as Nightline doesn't send the Religious Right into too much of a spin.

Remember, we're not out to kill anyone. Its clarity of thought and reason we're after. And there's not too much of that out there, as you know.

Just wait three months though. We'll be out of the news and we won't be able to do much to get anyone's attention anymore, cos we're old news.

Grand Canyon, ... ??

2007-01-21T16:37:00.000+11:00

Although I'm so pleased that the Bush administration is showing itself to be what it is, in the instance of not allowing employees of the Grand Canyon National Park to say what the age of the canyon actually is, in case 'they insult creationists, it gives Cartoonists something to have us laugh at.

But really guys, looking back, should it not ring yet another alarm bell to hose out the Administration? This is the sort of stuff that happens when you mix church and state.

All in the Mind, you know

2007-01-20T17:55:00.000+11:00

Breaking the spell: Daniel Dennett on religion.

While Richard Dawkins has popularised the prosecutors case from the defenders of religion, Daniel Dennett has also been on the press run, doing his own good work.

As the world wages war over geographical, religious and historical turf, a growing number of big-note scientists want religious faith put under the microscope. Uber-philosopher of mind and popular provocateur Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, is one of them. He joins Natasha Mitchell to discuss his latest controversial offering, Breaking the Spell.

All in the Mind

Happier New Year

2007-01-03T15:42:00.000+11:00

Actually, anything this year will be an improvement.

Too much death and destruction and wierdness of a bad kind.

No prizes to those picking Faith being the bad guy.

Lets move on...shall we?

Takes its toll

2006-12-26T21:01:00.000+11:00

Well,

I'm beginning to lose friends with this atheist thing.

One kinda flew off the handle about it just last night, on Christmas day. OK Late in the evening in a beer-infused debate about what atheism was about. He thought it was 'death-obsessed'. I tried putting him right about it, and kinda knew that even though he was not a god-fearing type, his ideas about his agnosticism and my athiesm did not have to correlate and that we could talk politics, environment, life and conspiratorial theories just like we always did, without having aligned religious agendas.

I look forward to seeing him again to make sure we're still on track.

This has panned out in the past with my father, a staunchly religious man. He has his beliefs, and I don't have mine. I always get uptight during Christmas cos all my relatives (totally wonderful people) are fairly religious and I just can't go along with it all. I just say, 'Happy Solstice', or 'Happy Pagan Festival', and I try not to exchange gifts. I'm just called 'weird', but not to my face, but my wife calls me 'Grinch', of course.

Oh Yeah!

2006-11-28T21:02:00.000+11:00

Oh I DO love a bit of press coverage. But why is it just stating the obvious?

International Herald Tribune.

Richard Shweder has written an interesting article, but it doesn't really say much.

Political threat

2006-11-25T16:40:00.000+11:00

'This on the morning of our state elections here in Victoria, AUSTRALIA. Some title mispellings are intentional. The letters are a great show of common sense and bring to the foreground, underhand measures taken during a 'democratic' first-world election campaign. I salute those who were published.

Thanks to the Letters page in The Age newspaper.(25/11)

Offensive ploy
When people all over the world are killed trying to exercise their democratic rights, refusing to vote when you're lucky enough to have that option is offensive. To refuse to vote while funding disengenuous advertisements seeking to swing other people's votes is doubly so. If the Ecxlusive Brethren believe that politicians are chosen by god, then presumably god is perfectly happy with Greens leader Bob Brown. If the god these cultists claim to venerate exists, they have no need at all to fund their homophobic crusade. The constant electioneering demonstrates a lack of faith in god's plan, surely.
Ginny Adams, Thornbury

The real threat
The extremely socially conservative policies of the Ecxlusive Brethren are much more of a threat to Victoria than the Green's policies. The control they exert over women and children and their blinkered on same sex relations, abortion and drug problems can only lead to more harm than good.
Victoria Collins, NSW

Backing for Greens
What's this? A radical Christian sect that won't let its members vote, own pets or talk to outsiders wants to influence voters and tell them the Greens are extreme? If that isn't the biggest endorsement for a vote for the Green's progressive policies, I don't know what is.
Dinesh Mathew, St Kilda

A different view
All Victorians should be aware of the extreme danger posed to our state with the grim possibility of the Christians holding the balance of power. This sect, Ecxlusive Brethren, fraudulently claims to be about eternal life, yet seeks to control the way you vote and live your life based on ancient texts. They resort to scaremongering when they feel threatened and have trouble telling the difference between lifestyle (eg; living in Queensland on a sunny beach) and being born gay. The Christians are the boring descendants of a mix of traditions that have little to do with god and a lot to do with controlling the masses.
Gregory Storer, Carnegie

The one lesson
The thought of the Ecxlusive Brethren running a political campaign against any party seems to be contradictory, yet it has funded parties, seeks to push it's warped beliefs down other's throats and backs conservatives, particularly those on the right. George W Bush became President of the US largely on the back of votes and advertisements paid for by the far right religious sects. Look at the way he has acted -- invading Iraq and Afghanistan believes god told him to, and giving large tax cuts to the wealthy while denying assistance to the poor.
John Herring, Whyalla Norrie, SA.

Parental Guidance

2006-11-25T10:46:00.000+11:00

OK here's a quandry.

I am an atheist, also a parent. My wife is 'spiritual', meaning she is kinda unsure, but 'fairly conscious of a larger power'. Our daughter is 10, up to asking questions, which I don't want to answer with my opinion, but to only encourage her own clear-thinking analysis. I want her to form her own opinion, based on the world around her. This is working, to some extent.

The school she attends is Anglican Christian, so she hears all the God stories. But she is already clear that she doesn't believe any of it. Nice work! At home, I've never heard my wife tell bible stories or anything like that, and that pleases me. But, how far should we go in negating stories she may begin to believe?

Advice please.

Election Day - Victoria

2006-11-25T10:22:00.000+11:00

No guys, not the mid-terms.
Its the State Election here in Victoria Australia today. As far as we all here can tell from the media coverage as such, this has been one of the most 'boring' policy-free, 'steady as she goes' campaign. We all just seem to be going through the motions. Thankfully, we don't have a uncumbent or ruling party saying Jesus is their saviour, and then getting up and winning, on the strength of that.

The ruling party here is Labor, with Steve Bracks in the Seat. Ted Baillieu is the leader of the Opposition Liberal Party. For those reading in the US, the comparison is, Labor=Democrats and Liberal=Republicans. The Christian Right doesn't have as much of a stranglehold on the state Liberals as they have with the Liberals at the National level, held by John Howard who is now our Prime Minister, seemingly until hell freezes over.

The Greens have a solid chance of taking seats and influencing the running of the State, for the first time in living memory. Family First, not so much. People Power, not so much. But with a lack of policy direction, the message people may send to the two major parties by voting Green, will send the place into a spin.

By the end of the weekend, I am sure nothing much will have changed.

Personal contempt

2006-10-21T13:16:00.000+10:00

This is a personal blog, so it meanders.

The school I attended for my secondary education was full of the craziest guys [segregated, catholic ... say no more], who would gang up and bully me into a rage, til I was also throwing punches. Teenage boys can be such bastards.

Just having a think about how my atheism used to be a quiet vindicating movement, an area of my thoughts where I could go to understand the pure physics of nature, the cold hard facts of scientific research. I'm not kidding.

So I was a serious science fan. Still am. I remember in a Year 9 class, I had the opportunity to go up the front to explain, on the class blackboard, how gravity works. I illustrated what mass was, how it operated, at the subatomic scale. I then pulled back to explain, centrifugal force, how satellites orbit, then how planetary systems meld together, and back even further to galactic groups. It took the entire class time and at the end, I must have impressed the class cos they stood up and applauded.

The elated teacher, a christian brother, asked if anyone minded if he give me an A+, then made an unannounced speech. He said along the lines of "Here we see the working of our Lord. How can anyone now refute the handiwork of such an immense power'. Another round of applause. But I was just too stunned to say anything at all. I am dumbfounded why I didn't say anything at the time, but he completely destroyed my presentation. Oh, how I wish I'd asked him to explain himself in front of the class too. He knew what he did. We never spoke to each other again.

I have nothing but utter contempt for the catholic church. For many, many other reasons plus that. That was a political manouevre worthy of Bush or Nixon.

Thoughts into blogs

2006-10-14T16:18:00.000+10:00

Today I saw a switch in my thinking.

No, it wasn't a step to the weird side, it was more a shake-up for putting my thoughts down on this blog a whole lot more often. [Thanks Joe]

Personal thoughts lately have leaned towards the guidance I give my children as they grow around me. What do I teach them about this society, this world. My wife is a believer and would disown me if I hinted my thoughts to the young ones. Everything, including the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter bunny, spirits, dragons, are part of their imagination right now.

The Daily Show

2006-09-29T23:30:00.000+10:00

I love these guys. Check this one.

Merry Christmas

2006-08-31T21:28:00.000+10:00

God is just 'Santa for grown-ups'.

Need I say anything?

2006-08-24T20:14:00.000+10:00

It was a plan of mine to tap out my thoughts atheistic at least once a month. While not keeping to the timetable due to work etc, I recently spent a week in Boston, experiencing first-hand the country in a mess of another air terror alert. One theme was prominent.

Christianity v Islam. If only we all didn't have home-teams to defend all the time, we could all just get along.

What's going on!?

2006-07-25T21:54:00.000+10:00

It's the followers of one or two brands of fundamentalist crackpot religions (Christianity and Judaism) slagging off the followers of a similar late-comer. This conflict will not go until mankind has the bravery to stand tall without leaning on the coward's crutch - religion. It will not end until we recognize a brotherhood to humanity, regardless of what fairy tale you choose to believe is real. It's right wingers versus right wingers and, as usual, civilians get in the way and lose their lives.

The sadness here is with those who are blind to the certain moral equivalence. A Christian or Jewish life is not worth more than an Islamic life. Taking a life is wrong, regardless of the motives. Defense might sound like a legitimate reason, that's why the word is chosen. It's spin. Killing in self defense allows the killers (and their apologists) to sidestep the moral responsibility of their actions. Two wrongs don't make a right, terrorists committing heinous crimes shouldn't be given the encouragement of legitimate armies committing heinous crimes.

Naive? Perhaps. At least I'm not an apologist for murderers.

Here is the news

2006-06-20T22:10:00.000+10:00

Pick any day,

Go through the news bulletin, the newspaper or listen to a full news block on radio.

The majority of the conflicts in the world can be brought down people's inability to rationalise other people's RELIGION. Look at Indonesian, Pakistan and many other areas filled to bursting with expansionist Islamic fanatics. Look at the Philippines, the USA and Brazil, chock full of evangelistic Christian/Jewish control freaks. Hey guys, ever heard of the separation of church and State?

I'm a peaceful guy. I'm an atheist. And I vote.

Sam Harris

2006-05-30T21:59:00.000+10:00

An Atheist manifesto - A nice bit of work found on the 'TruthDig' web site in my regular trawls looking for the real truth behind the BS western mainstream news lately.

Link it here.

Why must I defend my disbelief?

2006-05-28T17:12:00.000+10:00

Religion seems to be the only form of belief for which there is a taboo preventing those who disagree, from questioning it.

For every other type of belief, society tends to expect the person making the claim to provide a solid rationale and evidence in support of their claim. Where religions are concerned, there seems to be more of a challenge set towards those who choose not to believe.

Whats the matter with people?

Conscious and alert. Brain, not soul.

2006-05-20T18:31:00.000+10:00

One point that has really thrown me, is a rather obvious one.

As a control, I can say, I am quite alert, thoughtful, even intelligent.
As someone once said, "I think, there I am".

The drink test
Lets see now. Here, in my hand, I have a pint of whiskey, which I am about to consume.
*an hour later* "Hmmph, I think I've forgotten what the experiment was. No, I remember now. The effect of the alcohol has messed up my thought processes. I cannot think straight, even though I might think I can."

The injury test
Lets say, for example, I have a heavy blow to the head. OK, a pretty nasty one. *Thump - crash! [sounds of me falling to the floor]. An hour later. "I lost consciousness for a sec there. It seems that I completely lost an hour."

The truck test
OK, I'm out on the freeway atm. I'll step in front of this Mack truck coming past now, and I'll .....

Test results
OK. *concerned look* How is anyone to believe the 'after-life' story, when clearly, your personality, thoughts, emotions and 'self' appear to solidly rely on the brain's health to exist. I think being dead is a tad more injurous to the operation of the mind, than a mug of whiskey, a hammer-blow or a violent nudge from a Mack truck, don't you think?

I spent the first few years of my life being told that after I die, my soul would leave my body and I would live forever. "How?", I asked. No answer. If after a great sloshy mug of whiskey, I would lose, say 20% of the full control of my consciousness for a while, and with it, some of the memory of that time?

With the blow to the head, notwithstanding the long term effects, my cognitive drive would be affected and my temper, memory and personality could also be affected, possibly forever.

As the Mack truck tears me to bits, and throws me all over the freeway, something tells me I wouldn't be in any fit state to then leave my body, fully conscious, and go onto an after-life. Not too many people have actually done the deed and come back to report it. None. Period. And yet a few billion people just believe it. Please explain, cos at the moment, its not working out for me.

Belief is individual

2006-05-20T13:09:00.000+10:00

Deciding to believe something is an organic, individual process. Deciding NOT to believe in something is just as individual. One cannot be forced to believe something is the absolute truth. If, at an early age, you toe the line into a religious belief, how can this be construed as an individual decision? Parents know best? Yes, but is it the right way? I remember voting one way for a few elections as a young adult, until I realised that ... all politics is fairly precarious.

Taking on something as major as a religious belief should only be decided as a young adult, not a child. Its like deciding what politics you espouse to, what vices you prefer, what sexuality you may find yourself prefering. Each area of thought and 'being' needs, for those reasons, to be guided and discussed with perhaps parents, but the decision of which line to take must be individual, as outside influences become political very quickly.

I know. I've been through the social filtering system which disallows young people in a catholic school to ask questions about any doubts they may have. 'It' was just never discussed, unless in the spirit of solidarity and truth of the 'lord's word'. That just didn't cut it with me.

There also wasn't a mechanism to allow us 'non-believers' at this catholic school to find out about any other student having the same doubts. Of course not. Nothing was openly discussed. It was the 70s. Don't mention it, and it'll go away. True liberal politics in action. Well look at the catholic church today.

Door to door

2006-05-20T12:49:00.000+10:00

I'm gonna get on my high-horse again now.

If theres one thing on this planet I cannot stand, its the religious freaks that come round preaching their crap door to door on a Saturday or Sunday. The mormons, Latter day Saints, the Seventh Day adventists. They tried to enlighten me one day, (and I love a religious debate), and they ended up having to cut me short and say they had other houses to go to, and they had to run along. Off they trotted.

One other time, in fact the last time, I've seen them in my street (strange, that), they arrived the day after a particular bomb went off and killed quite a few people. It was obvious that the battle between religions was behind it. (Its behind a LOT of stuff). I told them to turn around and get off my property. 'Damn cheek, going round selling religion door to door after whats happened! Go get a grip!' [etc]

Made me feel good anyway. As I say, I havent seen them lately.

Imaginary friend

2006-05-20T09:52:00.000+10:00

I know it must be great to have an imaginary friend to take with you through to adulthood. If there's one area of life I think people should take full responsibility, its adulthood. Its a bit like driving a car. Once you have the wheel and you drive at speed, you've got to know when to take the corners, when to apply the throttle and when to step on the brakes. The analogy is for religious people to take control, instead of thinking they are asking for advice from their imaginary friend.

Nobody is there to do that for you, but yourself. If a good, considered decision has been made, don't thank god, thank yourself. Don't need to pray to someone else to give thanks. Take the credit.

When addictions of any kind rear their head, some people 'turn to Jesus'. What they are doing, without knowing it, is finding some inner strength inside themselves. The search for strength has nothing to do with anything, or anyone else. If these people would learn to believe in THEMSELVES and not the crutch of religion, they would have found more self-worth and be better people.

Believing in an imaginary friend that doesn't actually answer back is a sure sign that theres nothing there. Why do so many people have trouble working that out?

Why am I an atheist?

2006-05-07T15:36:00.000+10:00

Why am I an atheist?

I know I have a lot of adult reasons, but just like the reasons other people accept religion, my indoctrination started early. We were hauled off to a catholic church every Sunday, all three kids, by my father. No sermon meant anything to me, and any explanation was way below par.
I think the Cathecism is burned into my head somewhere, as my catholic primary school is a blur. We were pulled out mysteriously, my brother and I, when something happened between my brother and a member of staff. I've not been able to get a satisfactory explanation from my parents. I'm 45.

By 11 years of age, I found I could ask questions of my father round the dinner table. And he just couldn't answer them. I love my Dad, just as much as any good son. As far as raising a convincing argument so I could even identify with HIS beliefs, this was impossible. A plea to 'have faith' just didn't cut it. I remember his saying one Sunday morning, "Right then, if you don't come to church, there won't be any pay money." Needless to say, I didn't have any more 'pay-money'.

My brother and I were enrolled in a catholic college [which I won't name for legal reasons] and this tipped the scales totally. As soon as I knew what a hypocrit was, I knew I didn't want to be one. I couldn't make myself do the sign of the cross, or recite any of the prayers, or take any joy in school church services. Some boys at school told me I had to prove there wasn't a god before they had to prove there was one.

I once got the strap for asking difficult questions of the 'brothers' during RE class. Admittedly, there were many times I goaded the RE teacher with circular arguments which made the guy's neck go red. But to this day, I'm sure they were valid queries. There were at least three other occasions that I was heavied and threatened, given short shift with sports team selections and ex-communicated from the social groups I had in earlier years, because it became known that I was not a believer. I've recently had an invitation to go a reunion at the college.
I'd rather stick pins in my eyes.

More later. Comments welcome.

What i think!

2006-05-07T14:30:00.000+10:00

Hi there,

This is to be my venting place. This may interest a whole lot of people who perhaps have no idea I am an atheist (read: free thinker). Having been allowed to post free thought, we ALL should be able to say what there needs to be said. In the next posts, there will be links to others and a link to the tremendous network of other free thinkers able to use the Internet.

Peace.

Political environment

2006-03-26T13:34:00.000+11:00

The 'environment' doesn't judge people. Humans do. Scientists and green groups have been warning that this was going to happen, for decades. But they have been dismissed by the politicians and media brokers for decades.

Now that the weather is truely turning, and the balance of icemelt and total climate change is not only inevitable, proven, but is also showing itself daily to be the case, even the politicians are becoming nervous. Do your own research on that. NASA scientists have been gagged, CSIRO scientists muted, most likely others that we don't hear about. Human civilisation has truely changed the Earth. We've been walking into this situation blindly for more than 200 years.

Like rabbits in the headlights, we shouldn't have strayed onto the road in the first place. The 'environment' is far too big to turn back to an even keel now. With the developing world [China and India] going gang-busters, and the two major Western guzzlers [USA and Australia] not even signing the Kyoto protocol, what chance is there to pull back on the reins?

Media monopolies haven't allowed this urgent message to get out for decades, as they have money in oil/construction/advertising. It is in their interest to keep political fear and consumption at it's peak. I'm saying nothing new here. Many, many people have been writing this for years but their message hasn't been acted upon. As I said, the environment doesn't think like a human. It doesn't judge, it doesn't gagg. I hope I won't be judged for saying this, but as scientists have been trying to tell us, the environment is now reacting, to hundreds of years of human interference.

My advice? Don't blame anyone. It's bigger than us all. Change the way you live your life. Looking long term, for your grand-children? Go buy a place in the mountains. Think globally and act locally. Telecommute and get used to it. But be sure, we are in for a major century of weather.

Any thoughts?