My daily routine these days includes going to the Wikileaks twitter feed (twitter.com/wikileaks), which took me to this story in the UK Guardian about how Saudi Arabia proposed an Arab force to invade Lebanon. The Guardian is definitely the best site on the Wikileaks, and for data in general - they have understood something about what media organizations should be doing and they are going about it, in ways that a lot of other outlets haven't.

The US Embassy cables put out by Wikileaks are not the truth. Even though I knew it, a part of me was disappointed at how ideological some of the cables were. Take #09TELAVIV1060, "Rep. Wexler discusses Iran with IDF Intelligence". The entire discussion is about the threat posed by Iran to Israel. Even among themselves, even when they think their communications are secret, they engage in fear mongering. Much of the cables are this sort of exchange of opinions.

After that disgusting display...

I was just peeking around Wikileaks's Cablegate (cablegate.wikileaks.org). This looks like the real thing folks!

Take a look at this 1989 cable on Panama for example:

http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1989/12/89PANAMA8545.html

SUBJECT: PANAMANIANS HOPE FOR A SUCCESSFUL COUP

More analysis to follow...

Also there's Haiti elections. Isabel's article should help you get started.

Manuel suggested I read Norberto Bobbio, an Italian socialist writer on democracy. So I picked up his "Which Socialism?" In it, Bobbio argues that there's no necessary connection between democracy and socialism. Contrary to what socialists would like to believe, democracy doesn't automatically happen in a socialist economy. And also, democracies don't automatically evolve towards socialism. He thinks that socialists should pay as much attention to democratic theory and practice as liberals.

Canada's weak climate change bill was killed by the Senate today (see the star article for example).

The Harper people's vision for the country isn't compatible with trying to stop climate change. This is known, and unsurprising. What is interesting to me is the procedural trick used to make this change. The Star story: "A snap vote in the Senate on Tuesday caught Liberals in the Upper House off guard, and not enough Grits showed up to save the bill from losing by a margin of 43-32."

I did a query of the Iraq War Diary for all entries on November 19, 2005 (there were 179). Among them was this entry on the Haditha massacre. It has been seriously redacted, possibly more than other entries, as it appears quite incomplete, with no explanation of how the casualties came about:

Report Key: 0A491DB1-A4BB-4983-BE25-6140DB64BF38
Date: 2005-11-19 07:30:00

See the Google Fusion Table for Fallujah 2004

I spent some time looking at Yves Engler's "Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy" and "Canada and Israel" and noticed that he cites work in a non-standard way. Dawn Paley's recent review of the Black Book, posted on the Vancouver Media Co-op, describes it this way, and I agree:

A few months ago I was blown away by Sugata Mitra's TED talk on child-driven education. Mitra's thesis is that children can teach themselves. What they need is not teachers who know how to do what they are trying to learn, but materials, problems, one another (groups), and perhaps encouragement. Mitra put computers out and watched what children did with them. Groups of children would gather around the computer and teach themselves how to use them.