I keep stumbling across today's boring competition over which dag commenter can be more offensive, and Georges Monbiot and Barry Eisler have me wondering whether I am reading astroturfers or masturbators, or both.

First Monbiot, in the Guardian:

One of my fondest memories was showing Fahrenheit 451 to my stepson. After Guy Montag finds the community of living books at the end (of the film), my stepson proclaimed them heroes with the sort of ardor most kids reserve for famous athletes. He's a librarian now.

Someone at Energy Bulletin finds a prefiguration of WikiLeaks in The Shockwave Rider, a 1975 scifi novel by John Brunner.

On Fox/Mox above and as reported in The Raw Story, Ron Paul wishes that Wikileaks would smite the Fed, one of his personal Jabberwocks:

The Post Carbon Institute posts this series of videos of a talk by Richard Douthwaite, co-founder of Feasta, an Irish think tank concerned with sustainable economics. He was speaking by phone and video to a group in Michigan, about a month before last year's Copenhagen Summit climate talks, so it is like watching Max Headroom do a slide show. The first four videos are about the problem, the last two are Feasta's proposal for a cap and share system and debt-free currency to keep the poorer folk going.

With their highest viewership ever, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez were far less placid than usual for this morning's debate between Steven Aftergood and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is well-known for his legal and political blogging at Salon, while Aftergood directs a government secrecy project at the Federation of American Scientists, and posts secret documents himself with the Secrecy News project, which I've never heard of before.

I don't play now, but I have played a lot of tennis over the years, sometimes in leagues or clubs with people I didn't know well. I enjoyed playing with some of those guys so much that we arranged to play again, and became "tennis buddies." With others, I couldn't wait for the match to end.

Julian Assange is now The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Don't ask why he does what he does. Don't examine his motives.

Whether you like it or not, you're either for him or against him.

So just drink the damn beer.

UPDATE:

This evening, I was amused to see last night's Daily Show discussing Wikileaks as regards transparency vs privacy:

I chat films with Jimmy, at my office. He's always mentioning some flick I just have to see, so before Thanksgiving I asked him for a list of films I should rent. He sent this:

Repulsion
O Lucky Man!
Nil by Mouth
The Sporting Life
Elevator to the Gallows
Diabolique
Europa, Europa

BBC reports that The Ben Bernanke gave a speech to the European Central Bank defending Quantitative Easing:

Ben Bernanke hits back at Fed critics

For a little background, Energy Depletion thinker Richard Heinberg narrates 300 Years of Fossil-fueled Addiction in Five Minutes.