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December 6 2010

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Wikileaks publishes large cache of US neo-Nazi group's emails. Anyway, Wikileaks has published them all, and you can browse through chronologically, or by author, or download the whole lot of 'em for fun weekend reading. Yeah, there's a lot of what you'd expect in here. The one funny light spot was finding utterly banal spam for Bing.com, and "back-to-school specials" and ancestry.com promotions mixed in with the more sobering stuff like this: This email is not a calling for a putsch, revolution, or violence of any type, those types of actions will not be necessary; nonetheless, certain events will naturally occur and will need to be taken advantage of by all of us. (...)

Gentlemen, for too long only one race has made gains in their freedom and survival. The brave armchair generals calling for Julian Assange’s criminalization. US military threatens soldiers not to read Wikileaks | Raw Story. By Monday, December 6, 2010 12:52 EDT The US military in Iraq is warning soldiers not to access the documents released by WikiLeaks, informing them it could result in their computers being “sanitized.” An anonymous tipster told Gawker that “the Army’s unclassified, NIPRNET network in Iraq has blocked every major news website because of the Wikileaks issue.”

The US military denied the accusation, but said it is warning troops that it is illegal to access classified materials on an unclassified network. “[U.S. forces in Iraq have] not blocked any news websites from being read,” a spokesperson for US forces in Iraq said. “This page simply warns the user that the website they are about to view may contain classified documents and that such documents should not be viewed, downloaded, or distributed on NIPR computers. Despite the fact that the documents released by WikiLeaks are easily available on the Internet, the information is still considered classified.

Assange to meet with British police. Updated Tue 7 Dec 2010, 12:08pm AEDT WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is preparing to meet police in Britain in the next 24 hours to discuss sexual assault charges laid against him by Swedish police. This morning Mr Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told the ABC a fresh warrant for her client's arrest had reached Scotland Yard. Sweden wants to question Mr Assange in connection with allegations of sexual assault, but he and his lawyers say they will fight any extradition because they fear he will be handed over to US authorities. "The arrest warrant has been communicated today and I can confirm that we were contacted by the police and are in the process of arranging a meeting to deal with this matter," Ms Robinson said.

"I'm not in a position to confirm anything about that meeting just yet. Mr Assange has not been charged and Ms Robinson says he will fight the accusations. But she says her client's ability to fight the charges have been hampered by the freezing of his bank account. So, Why is WikiLeaks a Good Thing Again? Long-term scarring of hysteresis on employment. Imagine having a fever so bad that it permanently raised your body temperature. Now think of the current unemployment crisis, with new numbers being announced today of a steady 9.6 percent unemployment rate, functioning at the same way.

Thinking in terms of "natural" is very, well, natural to us. Some think we are hard-wired for it. And it is a useful concept in many ways. Our body has a natural body temperature. This type of thinking piggybacks onto our thinking about unemployment. But what if it doesn't? The economy right now is performing an experiment in this very thing, and the results are not promising. It starts by reproducing this chart from "Long-Term Earnings Losses due to Mass Layoffs During the 1982 Recession," a 2009 paper by von Wachter, Till, Jae Song and Joyce Manchester. And this summary of some of the ill effects of hysteresis and unemployment: Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney continue to look at other measures of the 1982 recession by location.