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[ by Charles Cameron — Assange, WikiLeaks, Google Ngrams, impact assessment — and a digression ]

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Charles, duc d’Orleans

1.

Let’s start with Julian Assange; we’ll get to Charles d’Orleans later.

In the movie Julian Assange: a Modern Day Hero? Assange claims for WikiLeaks‘ massive Afghan / ISAF leak

It’s the most detailed history of any war that has been made, ever. It’s significant.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that WikiLeaks has had some impact in many areas of our complex world — but as I was watching the film the other day, I found myself wondering just how small its cumulative impact is, in comparison to that immense complexity.

2.

Assange makes various claims for WikiLeaks in the movie, but perhaps the most instructive one comes at the tail end of his statement describing the WL project as a whole:

WikiLeaks is a project of Sunshine Press; Sunshine Press is a collaboration between journalists, technical people, cyberpunks, some anti-corruption people, and some fairly famous civil rights activists, to try and get as many documents as possible out onto the internet that have never been released before that will produce positive political reform.

Let’s take Assange’s expressed hope that WL will “produce positive political reform” as the benchmark here.

Has it done that? Are there any signs that it will? What positive political reform, precisely?

Have, for instance, the Afghan WikiLeaks influenced the outcome of the war in Afghanistan?

3.

Or – to put the same question slightly differently – is or was WikiLeaks all a bit of a nine-days-wonder?

Google’s Ngram Viewer allows users to search for the frequency of uses of specific terms across a large volume of books over a specific time frame. It cannot have escaped the attention of folks at Google (or no such agency) that an Ngram-style timeline of mentions of names and terms of one sort or another in news articles from the leading news sources would be of similar interest.

A promo page on the movie notes that “WikiLeaks and Assange have been one of THE news stories of 2010” and suggests “There is a new WikiLeaks story in the media every week and the next wave involves the big banks in 2011” – not to mention “Julian Assange will remain in the news all year as his controversial sex crime charges come to a head later in 2011” – no doubt a popular selling point…

Is there a new WikiLeaks story in the media every week? I’m wondering what a Ngram of news mentions of WikiLeaks across the last two or three years would show.

4.

What’s a “nine days wonder”?

I had to use Google myself to verify that “a nine days wonder” (as opposed to “a seven days wonder”) was the phrase I should be using.

I was delighted to find that an old hero of mine – the poet Charles d’Orleans – was among the first to use it:

For this a wondir last but dayes nyne, An oold proverbe is seid.

I have always liked d’Orleans since I first ran across his poetic “confession” to God and his priest:

My ghostly father! I me confess,
First to God, and then to you,
That at a window, wot you how,
I stole a kiss of great sweetness!

To steal is sinful, to be sure, and kisses carry their own moral burden – but confession and penitence purifies the soul.

The thing is, reparation must also be made — and so it is that d’Orleans continues by vowing to God:

But I restore it shall, doubtless…

— the stolen kiss, that is.

He’s willing to give it back — always assuming that particular “window of opportunity” is still open…

5.

But I digress.  Which raises the question: is there a purpose to digression, do you suppose?

[ by Charles Cameron — an antiquarian trifle — or two ]

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As you may have noted, I am interested in the mapping of complexity — and could hardly be expected to resist the charms of this woman’s heart:

Stirred, I thought back to the map of the manly heart that my old school tried to instill in me — I was in Blucher House under Peter Willey at Wellington College, built as a memorial to the Iron Duke on the same patch of scrub land as Sandhurst and the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane…

How safe and reliable this terrain appears, I thought to myself, when contrasted with “the Open Country of Woman’s Heart” with its “internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein.”

Although upon reflection, my time at Wellington was not without its moments.

When Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell escaped from Broadmoor, we were sent out in pairs on cadet patrol… myself and a similarly equipped companion, with our .303s and some blanks — ready at a moment’s notice to shout “Halt! Who goes there?” if the dastardly killer should pop out from behind one of our rhododendrons…

A gem at Fear, Honor and Interest by Joseph Fouche:

The Really Alternative U.S. Army Reading List

Everyone, even CNASistas, is making fun of new U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey’s 26 volume attempt at a “professional reading list“. This Committee, ever eager to jump on the newest, hippest trend out of the Pentagon, is as willing to dogpile on Gen. Dempsey’s list as anyone else.

Any list that includes one, let alone two, books by the Mustache of Understanding, is instantly marked “self-parody” in the Committee’s collective INBOX and deleted. After touching any field of human inquiry, the Mustache of Understanding leaves PowerPoint in his wake and calls it wisdom. The Mustache of Understanding’s works may be of interest to future historians looking back on our age. But that sort of interest will be the same sort of forensic interest that epidemiologists summon when examining smallpox under a microscope in a cleanroom.

In the spirit of fairness to the good general, the Committee here offers up its own twenty-six books for the aspiring strategic professional…

And it is a good reading list too.

A line in there qualifies for Dave Schuler’s Imaginative Polemic collection.

[ by Charles Cameron – graphic from 2038 manifesto compared with UBL martyr graphic & US “hunting permit” ]

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I should say first off that I am grateful to Chris Anzalone aka Ibn Siqilli for his “In Pictures” series of posts of Islamist and related graphics, and especially his “martyrs” series, all which inspired my own first post on 2038 graphics a couple of days back.

It was his post on “Usama bin Laden, the Martyr, As Seen in Jihadi-Takfiri Artwork” today that gave me the idea for this post, when I noticed something familiar-but-different in one of the bin Laden graphics, and went back to check the portraits of Anders Breivik at the end of the 2083 manifesto.

Let’s call this pair of images Symbolic Analogy:

Once you start looking at the details, of course, other things pop out…

Like these two Hunting Permits:

As they say on this eHow page on How To Identify Military Insignia:

Military insignia make for good collector’s items because there are a variety of patches and badges, many with interesting, funny or bizarre imagery. If you happen to inherit some insignia, or a patch at a flea market or antique store catches your eye, identifying your treasure could take some work. Before you take your insignia for a professional appraisal, see if you can figure out what it is on your own. …

Examine your military insignia and note every detail. Figure out what the imagery is, whether you are looking at a pirate or unicorn, and whether it is a fabric patch or metal badge. Take special notice of any text or numbers on your insignia, even if you can’t understand them.

My son discovered this, his first official contribution to ZP: