Wikileaks - who needs it?

Now that Amazon has announced it will no longer be hosting Wikileaks documents, the first Germans are announcing in Internet forums that they have deleted their Amazon accounts.

I side with George Packer of the New Yorker on this:

If WikiLeaks... were uncovering crimes, or scandals, or systemic abuses, there would be no question about the overwhelming public interest in these latest revelations. But the WikiLeaks dump contains no My Lais, no black sites, no Abu Ghraibs.... Should no government secret remain secret? Is diplomacy possible when official views have all the privacy of social networking? Assange’s stated ambition is to embarrass the U.S. This means that his goals and those of most journalists are not the same.

Related articles

• Amazon Pulls Hosting Services For WikiLeaks (techcrunch.com)

Faveread: Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.

Banks claim that we need them because they finance our businesses, but this recent report at the New Yorker finds that most of what banks do is not financing businesses:

"In the first nine months of this year, sales and trading accounted for thirty-six per cent of Morgan Stanley’s revenues and a much higher proportion of profits. Traditional investment banking—the business of raising money for companies and advising them on deals—contributed less than fifteen per cent of the firm’s revenue. Goldman Sachs is even more reliant on trading. Between July and September of this year, trading accounted for sixty-three per cent of its revenue, and corporate finance just thirteen per cent."

Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

I am a bit frustrated with Apple's policies, but this one looks like it's going to take the cake: Jobs is apparently working with Murdoch to come up with a new digital "newspaper" specifically and exclusively for the iPad.

It's not enough that, for instance, the iPad has very limited communications, such as restricted Bluetooth access, or that the iPhone was (outside of France, where the company's policy was ruled illegal) only sold along with a specific range of data packages from a single mobile provider – and the phone does not officially support tethering.

No, the deal with Murdoch is not just a nuisance, but potentially a threat to democracy. Fox, of course, is the network that practically called the 2000 residential election between Bush and Gore. At a time when the state of Florida was saying that the election was too close to call and that discarded ballots would have to be recounted, the network announced that "Florida goes to Bush," and the other networks then repeated Fox's claim. In effect, Gore was on the defensive from that point on.

A few years later, Fox played the drum roll in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. I wrote about the matter back in 2002 in German, but even if you don't read German you will enjoy the screenshot here, which shows how Fox was claiming that the death of Saddam Hussein would somehow boost stock prices.

If this deal comes about and Apple begins to promote Murdoch's minions, I'm going to reconsider future purchases of the company's products.

U.S. welcomed some Nazis

It's not news to those of us who studied history a bit, especially US and German history, but the New York Times recently reported that the US actively recruited some high-ranking and Nazi officials after World War II to get their expertise.

It's an interesting read if you are interested in the topic.

Thanks, Hermann, for everything

Last night, the Hermann Scheer passed away at the age of 66.  It is safe to say that no one has done more for the cause of renewables worldwide than Hermann.

His death comes as a bit of a surprise. Over the past few weeks, I have been in personal contact with him because he personally decided that I was to be the translator of his new book. Ironically, I sat down to begin the translation yesterday.

Until the very end, he remained very active. Only recently, he was in the running for the head position at IRENA, the international renewables agency he was principal in founding.

His input will be sorely missed. No one was able to dissect competition issues like Hermann.  I have therefore made available an interview that my agency translated last summer of him talking about Desertec (PDF).

One of the most fascinating and perhaps least understood aspects of his history was that he actually began his career at Germany's nuclear fusion research Center in Jülich, a phase of his life that is not even mentioned at his English Wikipedia site (though it is in the German entry). I was going to investigate this at a meeting with him this summer, which was postponed until the first week of November -- and it's not going to happen now.

But thanks, Herman, for your input over the decades. With renewables taking off now, there will probably never be another single person who can play such a pivotal role.

What I don't miss about home

From the Gambit:

At least 70 of the 315 houses that Habitat for Humanity has built in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina have tested positive for corrosion problems caused by defective Chinese drywall, leaving people who were once grateful to Habitat for their homes feeling betrayed by the organization they had trusted.

Wow, Sean Wilentz is worried...

... about the Tea Party (at the New Yorker):

It appears that the extreme right wing is on the verge of securing a degree of power over Congress and the Republican Party that is unprecedented in modern American history. For defenders of national cohesion and tempered adversity in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs. 

A famous historian, he explains why the Republican party has been able to keep its own extremists in check over the past half-century -- and why it is failing to do so now. Excellent read.