…for Wiki-blow
WikiLeaks just released its latest treasure trove of hacked secretes, dubbed “Vault 7”. It was the first of its “Year Zero” leaks that’ll hone in on the CIA ops across the world. In this initial blast, they revealed the CIA’s deepest secrets – long assumed but now confirmed – that once you own any one of the hundreds of “smart” electronic devices that’re now ubiquitous, the agency can eavesdrop on you!
And since even tribes in deepest Amazon, Papua New Guinea or the Congo now use those devices, it means there are no secrets in the world any more. Even those Smart TV’s you have in your living room and bedroom? Yup!! They can be hacked to pick up your sweet nothings/somethings you murmur to your paramour or partner in crime! You never did read the fine print in your TV purchase from, say, Samsung, did you?
Now you may ask what this has to do with little old backwater Guyana? Well just that if we remember the first batch of WikiLeaks documents, we do know the Agency has a presence here. And with Venezuela in meltdown and us having all that oil offshore and with Exxon as the main player and their previous CEO over at the State Dept, even us being the armpit of the world and all, would still have bumped that presence upwards!
So since Wikileaks has assured all and sundry that while they started out releasing the CIA’s hacking capabilities, they’ll soon move on to release SAMPLES of those capabilities’ mining. And it’s for this reason, quite a few smart flies are shitting bricks right here in Guyana! One of them being Glenn “the Mook” Lall, who owns the Muckraker and who’ll go down in infamy for being exposed in the first WikiLeaks as snitching of some who thought he was their “friend”. The snitching, of course, was to get back his Green Card which had been taken away activities that made the consulate label him as a shady character with a “sketchy past” who consorted with the underworld.
More specifically, he was identified as a “backtracker” who was able to bypass Homeland Security’s ICE systems to get all sorts of people into the States. This, the agency would be interested in, wouldn’t they? Especially when so much of the white powder’s being shipped through Guyana now! Well, we will soon find out when the dirty linen starts coming down the pike in the coming months – courtesy of WikiLeaks!
There are all sorts of conspiracy theories also floating around about various Foreign Players getting involved once again in our affairs.
Who will the Mook snitch on this time?
…for the next Nobel winner
Dereck Walcott’s passing reminds us that the creativity the Caribbean has spawned since it became an experiment in human bondage more than three centuries ago seemed to have been depleted. And not only in literature where we produced a Naipaul along with the great Walcott who both earned Nobels. There, of course, are the incomparable trio of CLR James, Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney in the Marxist tradition and Arthur Lewis in more orthodox Economics.
They all tried to grapple with our condition which, in more ways than one, presages what the rest of the “developed” word is only now catching up with. Namely the consequences of universalising their particulars and forcing the rest of the world to greater or lesser degrees, become black faces with white masks. We are at a historic conjuncture when some successors to our great ones are presented with the opportunity to once again become world teachers.
The former third countries that are now challenging the old world order need our wisdom!
…to exhale
Signing his letter, “Professor Justice Duke Pollard”, the venerable legal luminary weighed in once again on the case which some dub “third term” but which is about “sovereignty” residing with the citizens of a Republic.
Sadly, he was more deflective than reflective.
