Some serious-looking stuff there, just down the road a-coming.

(Illustration found here).

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog — to the mega-scant regular readers (on average) — life has become so physically dysphoric in these waning days of 2010 AD, there’s a growing apprehension I’m watching/reading/listening to the end of an age on my laptop.

In the chaos quickly to come, from all I’ve gathered, the most-ready handling of the situation is modification/adaption or die, or live a life so miserably unattractive, it’d be like being a kind of walking dead.
And in the beginning, only the real wealthy will survive in any type description — the rest of us will have to forge — but in the end, money won’t save anybody.
The quick-evolving, near-sudden arrival of calamity will overwhelm, confuse and create even worse calamity.
I’ve come recently to realize even-more, the odd-speed in which calamity comes, and it will be this curious pace that harms the most — all kinds of shit is worse than at-first supposed, or certain elements are happening much-faster than original figured.
In barely the last 36 months much has changed — a lot of blood under the bridge since June 2007, huh?
And indeed just this past week it feels as if we’ve jumped another notch on some bad scale.

In being a news junkie — hooked bad for decades on constantly learning/being up-to-date about events and places, and people involved with those events and places — and with the awesome reach of the Internet, the total amount of happenings is literally mind-boggling, and nowadays in many ways, extremely depressing.
Even beyond continuing episodes of ugly news like climate change, peak oil, the Afghan war and the like, this week a new asshole-depression of an incident (or a series of connected incidents) poked its way into the vernacular of modern life — the WikiLeaks affair.
And how the US government, the Obama White House, the vast MSM, and all kinds of other goof-balls and assholes reacted to the whole unfolding WikiLeaks entity with its founder/front-man Julian Assange is so shit-faced depressing it can actually hurt.

As of Sunday evening, Assange is still  working to keep his operation going — even after such waffling from amazon.com and PayPal and Internet servers across the globe.
From AOL News:

The Swiss domain WikiLeaks.ch became the site’s main access point on Friday after a series of cyber attacks forced it to leave WikiLeaks.org.
But the website has had trouble staying online even since the move.
The French server for WikiLeaks.ch went offline today, forcing the domain to be redirected to another server, The AP said.
It is not clear why the French server stopped working.

And why all this shit is occurring in the first place, with a twist of irony:

Switzerland “should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law,” Donald Beyer, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, said, according to the AP.

So depressing to see the US government respond with such tripe, even after being caught in a pure lie.
Seven days ago, WikiLeaks dumped its so-called ‘Cablegate’ data on the world — cables tossed between DC and US embassies around the world, including the UN.
In one segment, the cables showed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directing US personnel to spy on and sniff around for email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers, credit card details and frequent-flyer numbers for UN personnel, including UN chief Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Obama front-man Bob Gibbs then went on TV and claimed Hillary never did such a thing, and on top of that, even considering such a thing, is so, so not real.
Gibbs blubbered: “I think that is absurd and ridiculous,” Gibbs said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” of calls for Clinton to step down. “I think Secretary of State Clinton is doing a wonderful job.”
Despite the cables with Hillary’s signature — but alas, this on Friday: The US Secretary of State personally expressed regret to Mr Ban yesterday about the embarrassing disclosure by the WikiLeaks website that US diplomats had a significant intelligence-gathering operation at the UN.
Not so ‘absurd and ridiculous,’ huh, Bob?

Depressing — a straight lie from the current White House, and not the White House of George Jr., or even a Dick Nixon, but the supposedly hope-filled, transparent Obama White House.
And how gosh-awful dispiriting is reported knowledge that anyone or anything would take seriously such a nit-wit, ass-hat like Joe Lieberman?
Or how dismal is total slimeball John Ensign?
News of WikiLeaks itself seemed during the week to outshine what was leaked — one of the most-obvious examples of shoot-the-messenger in recent times — which in turn makes idiots more ignorant, but also makes a lot of folks more sad.

Glenn Greenwald has a most-excellent (though ultimately depressing) post on the whole sordid WikiLeak affair, including the MSM’s role, which ain’t pretty.
A money bit:

It’s one thing for the Government to shield its conduct from public disclosure, but it’s another thing entirely for the U.S. media to be active participants in that concealment effort.
As The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins put it in a superb column that I can’t recommend highly enough: “The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. . . . Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets.”
But that’s just it: the media does exactly what Jenkins says is not their job, which — along with envy over WikiLeaks’ superior access to confidential information — is what accounts for so much media hostility toward that group.
As the headline of John Kampfner’s column in The Independent put it : “Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority.”

Journalism is such a piece of shit nowadays, it’s ass-crack depressing.

However, there is this nugget from an uplifting post on the WikiLeaks affair from a Foreign Policy blog (h/t to Crooks and Liars):

In a bid to stay one step ahead of the governments, companies, freelance hackers trying to shut down its operations, WikiLeaks mobilized its vast base of online support Saturday by asking its Twitter followers to create copies of its growing archive of hundreds of classified State Department cables.
By late afternoon Eastern time, more than 200 had answered the call, setting up “mirror” sites, many of them with the name “wikileaks” appended to their Web addresses.
They organized themselves organically using the Twitter hashtag #imwikileaks, in a virtual show of solidarity reminiscent of the movie V is for Vendetta.
In that 2005 film, a Guy-Fawkes masked vigilantee inspires thousands of Londoners to march on the Parliament similarly disguised — while it blows up in front of their eyes.
Presumably, many of these people believe they are facing the same sort of tyranny that V, the film’s protagonist, fought against.
…
The New Yorker’s recent profile of Julian Assange, the organization’s mysterious founder and front man, said that “a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself.”
WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, heavily encrypted “insurance” file on The Pirate Bay, a sympathetic website, which presumably contains also 250,000-plus cables and would be released into the wild if anything happens to Assange.

And to the pinnacle of depression: WikiLeaks and climate change.
From the Guardian on Friday:

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
…
Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change.
The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.

And…
WikiLeaks cables: Cancún climate talks doomed to fail, says EU president…
Also the Guardian:

The European Union’s new president, Herman Van Rompuy, has predicted “disaster” at the latest crucial round of global climate change negotiations in Mexico and voiced relief that he stayed away from the Copenhagen summit a year ago.
…
Van Rompuy said the Copenhagen climate change talks had been “an incredible disaster”. Looking forward to the current negotiations in Cancún in Mexico, the European leader predicted that these would be a disaster too.

Depressing shit, huh?