I have never met anyone who sincerely wishes other people harm. I believe this experience of mine must be common to all of us. We have never met anyone who wishes to vaporise others by lobbing a megaton nuclear weapon at them.

The other day a friend asked me, “I have often heard about India being a third-world country. What exactly is the third world?” It struck me that most of us are ignorant about what that exactly means. I said to my friend that “third world” was an euphemism for “desperately poor extremely underdeveloped starving nations utterly misgoverned by unimaginably corrupt kleptocrats.”[1] And, I added, as a consequence, the third world is a world of human-created misery.

Jonathan Swift, author of the English classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726), had pithily observed that “when a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” I would be going over the top to pass Julian Assange on that genius test but seeing the army of powerful people and institutions arrayed against him, I am getting more convinced that Wikileaks has changed the world in ways that are only dimly understood today. I am careful to distinguish between the man …

Wikileaks is good for you and me. Evidently it is not good for the targeted governments. That fact lends additional weight to my claim that Wikileaks is good for you and me. Here I will try to explain why I believe that Wikileaks is good for you and me. I keep repeating “good for you and me” to underline the fact that what is good for you and me need not necessarily be good for our government, and vice versa.

I have read arguments that what Wikileaks is doing is not good. I have read them arguments but not understood them. For the love of everything sensible, I cannot for the life of me understand why information that is good for the leaders is somehow not good for the people. I can understand that dictators don’t want people to know the truth. But in democratic societies? Why?

This one has the makings of something earth-shatteringly great. Starting today, Wikileaks will post American diplomatic cables to the web. NYT says,

In the Google Age, it is hard not to take the easy way out and just google the answer to many a question which one could have otherwise enjoyed solving and learn a lot from the exercise. I hope that some gave at least a few brain cycles to figure out the puzzle mentioned in the post “The Theater of the Absurd: The War Log edition.” Here’s the follow up to that post.

The latest blockbuster play released last week at the Theater of the Absurd — also known as the “War against terrorism” — is titled “Afghan War Diary.” Starring the usual American warmongers and its usual bunch of lackeys, the play is full of intrigue, stupidity, feigned outrage, in your face finger-shaking moralizing, and little side-plots that give the critics sufficient material for their column word-quotas. Absurdity does not come in more dramatic garb.