Leakage

I'm in a rather miserable mood in the past few days. Apart from having a lot to do by end of next week, I've spent too many hours in traffic jams every night. It started off about 2-3 weeks ago now and it's just been terrible. The distance I need to cover is less than 12 km but it's taking me more than 1 hour to complete that journey every night.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that, coupled with the deteriorating traffic situation, the temperature has taken a turn for the worse. The last weekend that we had good weather, we were hitting 28°C on a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago but suddenly, Monday brought about less than 5°C. Since then it has become colder and colder progressively until now, which is freezing point at night.

All of this is making me a bit fed up and rather grumpy. I guess this is pretty normal for this time of the year. Weather goes the direction of terrible and the sun rises too late and goes down too early which will get worse by the end of next week with the changing of the Daylight Savings Time again. You just don't see natural light anymore!

Still, nothing annoys me more by the massive coverage on all news channels of the latest classified documents published or "leaked" by WikiLeaks. I have no doubt that the information they have published is important, and can be important to some people who were previously not privy to this information. However, I'm not sure how useful this is for the average citizen.

The first point of note is that no Average Joe will pour through nearly 400 000 pieces of documents online. I got tired and bored reading 5 "notable" extracts on the BBC News website this morning before I even moved past the second entry - and this was sort of summarised by BBC already.

Secondly, the most amazing revelation, apparently, is that lots of civilians were killed. We know this already. The only thing we didn't know was how many civilians were killed. But do we need to know this? The fact that we already know civilians were being mowed down by US (or any one of its allies) armed forces in a very unpopular war should be enough for the public to go up-in-arms.

Of course, we also should acknowledge the fact that this kind of "war" which is basically house-to-house combat in the streets is more guerrilla than conventional combat. The natural result of this is civilian casualties, and a lot of them not because the US forces are aiming to eradicate civilians, but they just get in the way.

For me, this all looks like two children fighting in the public domain. WikiLeaks' Assange takes a whack at the US government which is then retaliated by a government sponsored smear campaign. Then some potentially unrelated incident occurs which saw Assange being publicly wanted by the Swedish authorities for rape charges. Some further accusations of governmental secret goings-on and then we have this 400k document leak.

Getting really bored now... Have you guys tried growing up yet? And maybe the world's media could drop this and stop providing fuel for this petty argument?