Strewth, who's telling the truth?

Is there any source that can still be relied upon for the simple, straightforward truth?

Brasscheck TV is one useful cross-reference when trying to figure out what's really going on.

The first ingredient of civil society is the people’s right to know ...

...because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything.

I have no strong feelings about Julian Assange one way or the other but that's because I, like a lot of you, like reading somebody else's mail. Most of us get boring stuff but when you've got somebody in the US embassy calling Rudd a compulsive control freak who runs foreign policy like a chop shop, that's fun.

The purpose of a leak is to cause some embarrassment, and Assange gets a gold leaf with clusters in that category. He has managed to leave a trail of red faces around the world and none of them are going to feel bad about seeing him spend a few years in the slammer.

He has now been arrested on the basis of alleged sexual offences against two women, one of whom claims consensual sex but without the condom she asked for. The other alleges she was "deliberately molested" in a way designed to "violate her sexual integrity".

Phillip Knightley, a veteran Australian journalist based in London who broke the Kim Philby spy scandal story in the mid-1960s, suspects there has been some "grooming" by intelligence agencies to discredit Assange. "The technique they used is to take one weak part of [the subject's] personality and exaggerate it. For example, someone who is having domestic difficulties is 'bashing his wife'. They exaggerate the material to make them look even more doubtful."

"Assange was set up. One woman has fled to Israel. The other one I think has been used. The whole thing smells of a professional operation. It probably does not involve the CIA," Knightley says, "but could involve some proxy organisation like Swedish intelligence."

"What matters is that people who admire him [Assange] now wonder whether he has got ill judgment. If he shows ill judgment, that will colour people's view of the material he is releasing and his motives for doing so. But this has changed the game. People have seen how secret government operates and it will never be the same again."

Howzat?

I had lots of paints left over from previous painting jobs, so I chucked them all together, the greens, the reds, the yellows, and the blues, gave it a good stir, and I finished up with - well, a sort of green-blue-greyish fence. Nice?

Dear Mr Buffett

Click [here] for full transcript
Janet Tavakoli wrote "Dear Mr Buffett: What an Investor learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street". She is one of the top experts in the fields of structured finance and one of the most vocal critics of a system gone horribly wrong and saw disaster looming early on. She even tried to sound the alarm many times with an SEC that in retrospect looks to be on the wrong side of the subpeona issuance business.

The current multi-trillion dollar financial crisis didn’t come about due to any single act of brazen greed or stupidity, rather it was a case of many people all looking for a little extra. Pushing the boundaries at each level has a multiplier effect. Common sense and ethics went out the window as it was all mostly legal and appeared at each level to be just a little “extra” nudge.

One of the problems with securitization as elaborated by Ms. Tavakoli so adroitly is the chain of responsibility and accountability that was broken between lender and borrower. Long term responsibility was packaged up and sold in a heart beat to the next yield hungry bidder looking for a little "extra".

Like any drama involving a major loss for an entire generation, this one has many systemic failings. No single actor failed totally, many failed just enough. This multiplied into what is still unfolding as the largest economic crisis in many generations. The reality still hasn’t hit main street America. Wait 6-9 months.

Here's an extract from the book:

Rudd the dud ...

... has just opened his mouth to change feet. And guess what else came out?

He is quoted as saying the US, Canada, UK, Australia and the Dutch were doing the "hard stuff" in Afghanistan, while France and Germany were "organising folk-dancing festivals".

Organising folk festivals must be a dangerous occupation because fifty French troops and forty-five Germans have died in Afghanistan. Rudd should never have been Prime Minister and he should never have been made Foreign Minister either!

I've just emailed him at Kevin.Rudd.MP@aph.gov.au:

"Good to hear that you're still having a sense of humour à la 'France and Germany [in Afghanistan] organising folk-dancing festivals'. Why not open your mouth and change feet? I think Australia has just reached a new low in foreign relations! Wishing you a speedy return to obscurity!"

Now that I've got that off my chest, I can get on with painting the fence!