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What's in the WikiLeaks Insurance File

2010-12-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, everyone is concerned that they are about to leak the WikiLeaks Insurance File, a "poison pill" document cache that allegedly contains all kinds of damning revelations about everything from the government to major corporations and that can be unleashed if WikiLeaks is in danger of shutdown.
Here's what I assume will be inside:

What Bill Murray whispers at the end of "Lost in Translation."
Confirmation that they faked the moon landing, including outtakes from staging of the moon landing with crew visible in background, six takes in which Neil Armstrong keeps saying "One small step for mankind, one giant -- wait, no. One giant leap for man -- sorry. One giant step for leap man -- I'm sorry, I really thought I had it that time," and one shot where you can see the director's son eating a sandwich.
A full explanation of the plot of Inception that includes whether or not he's dreaming at the end.
Tell-all account of JFK assassination written by Grassy Knoll itself.
A really, really offensive joke once told by Mother Theresa.
Identity of Kaiser Soze
Coca Cola secret ingredient: dingo blood.
Non-conclusive evidence that Mel Gibson is a futuristic robot sent back in time to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth, but whose creator accidentally left his Generator of Phrases It Is Acceptable To Say on the 1835 default settings.
Proof that the government is being run by the Masons, using evidence from building designs, dollar bill imagery, and something Joe Biden said once when his mic was turned off.
A DVD of "National Treasure."
Proof that Paul is Dead.
Original version of Gettysburg Address, which is excessively long and makes a lot of steamboat jokes that don't really land.
Proof that wars in Afghanistan, Iraq are actually going really well and civilians love us there!
Synched version of Dark Side of the Moon and Wizard of Oz.
President Obama's birth certificate, which indicates that he was not only not born in the U.S., but that he was "made in Area 51 by top men."
Guide to all the secret phalluses embedded in Disney animated films.
Documentation that Piers Morgan and Tony Hayward are in fact the same person
Location of Elvis, which everyone's been keeping secret because, well, it's just sad, really, what's happened to the man.
Location of Osama bin Laden, which turns out to be that one bathroom stall at the far end of the women's room where no one goes in or comes out but you know someone's there because you can see the feet.
Victoria's Secret

By Alexandra Petri | December 7, 2010; 11:45 AM ET
Categories: Only on the Internet, Petri, That's awkward, Top Lists | Tags: oops, wikileaks Save & Share: Previous: Mulligans: Inhofe, better Boorish than Moorish

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Arrest further clouds WikiLeaks’ future

2010-12-07T10:14:00.001-08:00

Online attackers and international governments have so far failed in their many attempts to take down the WikiLeaks website. Every time an online support has been removed in one country, the site has reappeared elsewhere, “mirrored” hundreds of times over.
Supporters of the whistleblowing group are hoping that the same regeneration game can be played by the organisation as a whole, after its most prominent figure, Julian Assange, was refused bail over allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden.
Mr Assange has made himself into the personal embodiment of WikiLeaks in recent months, complete with elusive whereabouts and defiant attitude to authority.
He recently told readers of the Guardian newspaper’s website that he initially wanted the organisation “to have no face”. He decided to become its “lightning rod”, however, after that initial approach “quickly led to tremendous distracting curiosity about who [we are] and random individuals claiming to represent us”.
But with only a handful of other WikiLeaks operatives standing up in the public domain, outsiders must trust Mr Assange’s word that it is a large, distributed group.
Addressing reporters after its publication of 75,000 classified reports about the Afghan war in July, Mr Assange said that WikiLeaks had a “small team of dedicated and overworked” individuals full-time, with about 800 part-time volunteers, an extended network of 10,000 people and a “loose network” of 70,000 supporters.
None has yet made good on Mr Assange’s threat that 100,000 people would dump a fresh batch of diplomatic cables if “something happens to us”.
Mark Stephens, Mr Assange’s lawyer, told reporters outside the London courtroom on Tuesday that in spite of its leader being remanded in custody, “WikiLeaks will continue”. Offers of financial support for Mr Assange from celebrity supporters Jemima Khan, John Pilger and Ken Loach, all three of whom appeared in court on Tuesday, were the “tip of the iceberg”, he said.
“This is going to go viral,” Mr Stephens said. “Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent. Many people believe the prosecution is politically motivated.”
That support has even extended to other online hacker networks, which have struck back at companies that abandoned WikiLeaks. They have tried to crash the websites of PayPal and PostFinance, two payment processing firms that have ceased serving WikiLeaks in recent days.
In spite of this retaliation, funding mechanisms available to WikiLeaks are shrinking. On Tuesday both Visa and Mastercard said they would stop processing payments to WikiLeaks. Supporters can now only provide funds via direct bank transfers to accounts in Germany and Iceland and postal donations to a post office box in Australia.
WikiLeaks’ spokeswoman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told an event at the Frontline Club in London that WikiLeaks relies on a large network of individuals for its financial support, with none donating more than €2,000 ($2,700).
But WikiLeaks has already had to triple its operational budget for 2010, and that rapid growth has put strains on the organisation beyond the purely financial.
In an interview with Der Spiegel in September, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who quit as spokesman for WikiLeaks earlier this year, suggested that there were technical and fundamental structural problems within the organisation.
“We grew insanely fast in recent months and we urgently need to become more professional and transparent in all areas,” he told the magazine. But, he added, “this development is being blocked internally. It is no longer clear even to me who is actually making decisions and who is answerable to them.”
Mr Hrafnsson said last week that the media had exaggerated the problems within WikiLeaks. In a recent debate at City University in London, Mr Assange said there were “other reasons” behind Mr Domscheit-Berg’s departure.
But at the same event, Mr Assange was vague about the process WikiLeaks uses to select which pieces of information to publish.
He said that every effort was taken to ensure that no information that would put anyone’s life at threat was revealed, though he admitted that WikiLeaks had limited resources and was not infallible.
No wonder, then, that he and Mr Hrafnsson have repeatedly stressed the role of the other media organisations – including the New York Times and the Guardian – which have jointly analysed, redacted and published the latest leaks.
After together releasing just 301 of the 250,000 cables WikiLeaks claims to hold, those news organisations may be able to proceed with publication of the remainder without the site’s chief lightning rod.
But whether WikiLeaks could cope with a prolonged absence of the mercurial Mr Assange is as difficult to determine as the size of the organisation itself

USS Arizona

2010-12-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

Days Past: A pretty girl and a prayer for the USS Arizona

U. S. Naval Institute, 1925/Courtesy photo

Days Past is a weekly feature in the Courier, supplied by Sharlot Hall Museum volunteers, chronicling historic events in Prescott.

By JAMES F. VIVIAN Special to the Courier

This Tuesday, Dec. 7, marks the 69th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. The following article tells of the christening of the ship over 95 years ago.

Three young women graced the official platform at the launching of the USS Arizona in June 1915. Two of them, Esther Ross and Eva Behn, were Prescott girls. Ross performed the actual christening while Behn stood engagingly to her side, holding a flower bouquet.

At least that's how New York newspapers described the scene. Eva Behn claimed, in an interview in 1962, that their description was wrong. She remembered Ross as being slightly more than five feet tall and "petite." Several people, she said, doubted that Ross could fulfill her duty as the battleship's appointed sponsor, and Behn was asked to give her a boost - that is, she gripped Ross' "elbow and shoved," enabling her to develop "a hefty swing" that produced a "liberal dousing" when the bottle shattered.

The importance of this detail hangs on the word "sponsor." Did Behn mean a gentle, helpful assist, or did she intend to suggest membership in "The Society of Sponsors of the U.S. Navy," to which Ross already qualified by virtue of her designated role as sponsor?

The Society of Sponsors dates from 1908, when a group of 14 women proposed the organization for ship sponsors to President Theodore Roosevelt. He promptly endorsed the concept, signed the charter and invited the organization to join in the annual Army and Navy reception at the White House. The Navy's ship launchings, previously casual and uncertain affairs, now became scheduled events in which women participated directly and regularly. It's the program familiar to most of us today: a woman, often the wife or daughter of a president, governor, senator, ship's namesake or other dignitary, cheerfully breaks a champagne bottle in sending the vessel to sea.

The society's ranks grew with the expanding American defense fleet. Membership, according to its constitution, was automatic unless expressly refused.

In 1914, the society's fourth president argued that the launching ceremony required another feature - a Christian prayer. Other sea-faring nations for centuries had developed and shaped religious ceremonies surrounding a ship launching. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels agreed. Daniels put the proposal into early effect. The USS Oklahoma, launched just days later, and the USS Pennsylvania, three or four months under construction, became the first battleships equipped also with religious appeals. State leadership, including local clergy, carried out the reform "most enthusiastically" in each instance.

In mid-April 1915, Daniels finally fixed the launch date for the USS Arizona for June 19. This was the signal Arizonans had been waiting for. Plans needed to be made for the train trip to New York City by the entourage from Arizona. In May, Gov. George W. P. Hunt sent an invitation to the Reverend Julius W. Atwood, the Episcopal Bishop of Arizona, to provide the prayer for the christening ceremony.

In the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June 19, the battleship towered impressively above the raised timber platform, its railings draped in bunting and pennants. On the platform were Daniels, Hunt, their wives, Ross and her mother and the two "maids of honor." Rear Admiral N.R. Usher quieted the surrounding crowd at half-past noon and introduced the Reverend Atwood, who delivered a five-paragraph invocation composed for the occasion, followed by a public recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Then Ross christened the ship, saying that the privilege of naming the "greatest warship in the world for the greatest state in the Union" was the "proudest moment" in her life.

The New York press noted only one oddity in the ceremony: Ross used two bottles, not the usual one, in christening the ship - a champagne bottle and another filled with water taken from the spillway of the newly completed Roosevelt Dam. No one observed that Ross had needed a partner to accomplish her task, as Eva Behn suggested later.

The Arizona Labor Journal, besides deploring the cost to build and maintain the battleship against the wages of the country's average-paid workers, wondered openly about the "irreverent" use of religion to praise "an instrument... of hatred, strife, oppression and wrong." But later it decided that Bishop Atwood's prayer had actually taken the opportunity to remind the military of their higher purpose: advancing the "principles of peace, love, and justice."

"I am getting used to seeing pretty young women christen the giant fighters such as the Arizona," Daniels said on his way to the grand luncheon after the ceremony. "I like the practice," he added, and "will continue to rely" on the Society of Sponsors.

For more photos and other Days Past articles, go to Sharlot.org/library&archives/history/dayspast. The public is encouraged to submit articles for Days Past consideration. Contact Scott Anderson at Sharlot Hall Museum Archives at 445-3122 for information.

'Facebook Cartoon Profile Pic' For Child Abuse

2010-12-06T03:21:00.000-08:00

A campaign stared on Facebook asking people to make Facebook cartoon profile pic, to fight against child abuse. This campaign which started as a game from Greece, on mid of November, took up a more serious turn on December 6th and was famous all across the globe. Mark Zuckerberg, also confirmed the introduction of the campaign make 'Facebook cartoon profile pic'. The campaign has got nearly 90,000 fans in just one day.
The big question is who started this campaign? No non-profit organisation has taken up the responsibility and thus, the good news is that no money is funneled into legitimate organisation. Some websites have claimed British charity NSPCC to be the one to introduce it but they however deny it. NSPCC has posted on Twitter, ‘Although the NSPCC did not originate the childhood cartoon Facebook campaign, we welcome the attention it has brought to the work we do.
Another big question is how does make 'Facebook cartoon profile pic' help to fight against child abuse? Blogger Shayne House said: ‘Facebook cartoon profile pic does not really support the NSPCC unless it inspires or encourages you or someone else to volunteer or donate, which hopefully it will. Did it inspire you? It inspired me to write about it and make a donation.’

Insiders have revealed that this campaign seems to have a lot of influence from across the world and their sole aim of 'Facebook cartoon profile pic' was to urge every user of Facebook to remove their profile pic and replace it with a cartoon. How it will help the cause to fight against child abuse still needs to be seen.