He may by now be one of the most well known whistleblowers of all time. He generates fear and anger in many powerful people, and publicly makes enemies of those who probably would have no compunctions about ordering his assassination.

He leaks and threatens to leak classified and secret information unreported to and withheld from the American public about US Government and military conduct and actions but known quite well to the victims of those actions in other countries that now has the Pentagon and the US Government “gunning” for him.

His bio at TED.com describes him this way:

You could say Australian-born Julian Assange has swapped his long-time interest in network security flaws for the far-more-suspect flaws of even bigger targets: governments and corporations. Since his early 20s, he has been using network technology to prod and probe the vulnerable edges of administrative systems, but though he was a computing hobbyist first (in 1991 he was the target of hacking charges after he accessed the computers of an Australian telecom), he’s now taken off his “white hat” and launched a career as one of the world’s most visible human-rights activists.

He calls himself “editor in chief.” He travels the globe as its spokesperson. Yet Assange’s part in WikiLeaks is clearly dicier than that: he’s become the face of a creature that, simply, many powerful organizations would rather see the world rid of. His Wikipedia entry says he is “constantly on the move,” and some speculate  that his role in publishing decrypted US military video has put him in personal danger. A controversial figure, pundits debate whether his work is reckless and does more harm than good. Amnesty International recognized him with an International Media Award in 2009.

Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote Strobe, the first free and open-source port scanner, and contributed to the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.

“WikiLeaks has had more scoops in three years than the Washington Post has had in 30.”

— Clay Shirky

Assange recently talked with TED’s Chris Anderson during TEDGlobal 2010 about how the WikiLeaks site operates, about what it has accomplished, and about what drives him.

The interview includes graphic clips of the US airstrike in Baghdad, taken from the “Collateral Murder” video WikiLeaks released earlier this year of the murder of two Reuters journalists and about a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad by a rogue US Military command structure that runs all the way to the Commander in Chief’s office in the White House and an Apache Helicopter gunship crew who have yet to face any justice or sanction for their crimes.

Full transcript follows…

Washington’s Blog thursday…

…numerous industry experts have warned that there is no upside to temporarily capping the well as part of the well integrity test, and that it might actually cause the well to blow out.  

Admiral Thad Allen previously said that the test will be considered a success if pressure in the well stays at 8,000 psi or higher for 48 hours.   So we won’t know for a couple of days whether the test has succeeded.

As AP correctly notes:

Now begins a waiting period to see if the cap can hold the oil without  blowing a new leak in the well. Engineers will monitor pressure readings  incrementally for up to 48 hours before reopening the cap while they  decide what to do.

Interestingly, as CNN’s Situation Room noted a couple of minutes ago, the cap might soon be re-opened, and closed again only during hurricanes:  

Admiral Thad Allen releasing a statement to us just a  short while ago…

He cautions “This isn’t over”…

Very interesting here. He talks about the cap as a temporary  measure to be used for hurricanes…

“It remains likely that we will return to the containment  process… until the relief well is completed”

So it looks like the plan is to go back to releasing the oil  and letting it pump up to the surface.

 (hat tip FloridaOilSpillLaw).

So is the well integrity test a meaningless PR stunt, which is delaying completion of the relief wells, and failing to bring us any closer to permanently killing the oil gusher?

So… you get up and go to work everyday, if you even have a job, and you’re teetering constantly on the edge of financial catastrophe. The bills are overdue, you’re nervous about answering the phone, and you inspect the sidewalks and alleys everyday for soft spots in case you might end up living on them one day?

Then you get to work, if you even have a job, and you spend all day pissed off at the unfairness of it all and wondering why the brainless conforming moron in the next cubicle takes home four times what you do on payday while operating on three brain cells, asking how high everytime the boss says jump, and performing rote repetitive tasks all day long that a hampster could do faster?

The answer is simple, obviously. You think too much! You’re too effing smart for your own good!

theRSAorg | 01 April 2010 This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. www.theRSA.org

Dan Pink’s full 41 minute talk “Drive” is here.

RawStory today:

A U.S. district judge in Boston, Massachusetts declared Thursday in two separate rulings that a nation-wide ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional because it prohibits individual states from defining what marriage is and is not.

In one decision, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, according to a breaking Associated Press report, “said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.”

Obama administration attorneys had argued that in administering federal benefits, the federal government has the right to require marriages are between a man and a woman. That case is Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, which was litigated by attorneys for the Boston-based rights group Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD).

In another decision also issued Thursday, Judge Tauro noted that the Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996 during the Clinton administration, violated protections inherent to the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.

“The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment,” he ruled, according to the AP. “For that reason, the statute is invalid.”

That ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who contended that legally married gay couples in Massachusetts had been unjustly denied federal benefits.

Laura Flanders interviewed Chris Hedges on Grit TV in July 2009:

According to a New York Times Special Edition almost two full f’ing years ago, and while you weren’t looking because you were distracted by the dazzling light of the 2008 Presidential election campaign, both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had been finally brought to an end shortly after the November 2008 Presidential Election and before Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, and all US troops in both countries returned home immediately.

Across the country and around the world thousands took to the streets to celebrate the culmination of years of progressive pressuring of the Bush administration and Congress, but the rest of the media and most blogs never reported this because they were too busy shining you.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has publicly apologized on behalf of the Bush administration and admitted that the administration simply lied through it’s teeth to justify the initial invasion, that she and Mr. Bush had known well before the invasion that Saddam Hussein lacked weapons of mass destruction, and that the hundreds of thousands of US Troops in the country in fact never did face instant obliteration.

“It was all complete and utter bullshit” Rice said tearfully, as she begged a weary nation for forgiveness, while she was led away in handcuffs by four burly officers.

George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, was indicted on charges of high treason, took it like a man, and didn’t even stamp his foot, or curl his lip.

In other news that you were never told about at the time because all the big blogs were busy blowing smoke up your ass to generate the massive advertising revenue that has always been their real raison d’etre, the controversial USA PATRIOT Act was repealed by Congress by a vote of 99-1 in the Senate and 520 to 18 in the House, Congress voted to nationalize the entire oil industry and place ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, British Petroleum, and other major oil companies under public stewardship to fund addressing climate change worldwide.