drones over brooklyn

gawker | The idea of drones over New York City have inspired art projects and a rap song. Now they may be a reality too. The FAA is investigating a report from an Alitalia passenger jet of a drone spotting over Brooklyn, as he approached JFK airport in Queens. "We saw a drone, ad drone aircraft," the pilot told controllers, according to audio played on Good Morning America, below.

The FAA told CNN in a statement that it is "investigating a report... he saw a small, unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft while on final approach to Runway 31 Right... The sighting was approximately four to five miles west of the airport at an altitude of approximately 1,500 feet." No other pilots reported seeing the drone, according to CNN.

Without any more description it's impossible to tell if this might be some sort of heavy-duty unmanned aerial vehicle, or a hobbyist remote controlled gadget, which we know take to the skies occasionally around New York. In any event, the NYPD doesn't currently use drones in New York, but it's only a matter of time.

Update: The FBI has released a statement saying they'd like your help in identifying the drone operator.

On Monday, March, 4, 2013, at approximately 1:15 p.m., the pilot of Alitalia Flight #608 spotted a small, unmanned aircraft while on approach to John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Alitalia flight was roughly three miles from runway 31R when the incident occurred at an altitude of approximately 1,750 feet. The unmanned aircraft came within 200 feet of the Alitalia plane.

The FBI is investigating the incident and looking to identify and locate the aircraft and its operator. The unnamed aircraft was described as black in color and no more than three feet wide with four propellers.

Update II: a Tipster points out that Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn, just a few miles from JFK, is a favorite spot for remote-controlled plane enthusiasts to fly. It even hosts an R/C air show in the summer. Maybe the drone launched from there?

wealth inequality in america

egypt sustains severe land loss to development and desertification

egyptindependent |  Egypt is losing land faster than any country in the world, according to UN estimates announced Friday on the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought.

The Executive Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification announced that Egypt ranked first in the rate of desertification, painting a bleak picture of fast-shrinking agricultural lands, deteriorating soil fertility and low productivity due to increased land abuse.

The UN report also said Egypt loses 3.5 acres per hour of fertile Delta agricultural land as a result of urban sprawl and construction, which is a record unprecedented in the global rate of deforestation.

‫Ismail Abdel Galil, the national coordinator for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, said in press statements that the report did not include the painful reality of increasing construction on agricultural lands, which has jumped over the past three months to five acres per hour due to chaos and the lack of regulation.

He said Egypt is losing tracts of fertile lands formed by the Nile River's flooding over thousands of years that cannot be recovered, especially after the decline in land reclamation programs by the state.

Abdel Galil said the report emphasizes the growing size of the food gap and the inevitable increased reliance on food imports, which threatens Egypt's future and could put it on the brink of famine. He urged the government to take swift action to prevent such a crisis.

china losing vast tracts of arable land to desertification

SFGate | A new Chinese export has been spreading quietly across Asia and America: dust.

Violent sandstorms from China's expanding deserts have been battering Chinese cities, and their mustard-colored dust has begun reaching South Korea, Japan, and the West Coast of North America.

"People dusting off their cars in California or Calgary often don't realize the sand has come all the way from China," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., who was in Beijing recently. "There is a dustbowl developing in China that represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert of any place in the world ... and it's affecting the world."

China has always suffered from aridity. About 25 percent of its landmass is composed of deserts made famous in tales about the Silk Road, which traversed many of them.

But the situation is getting worse.

Overgrazing, along with persistent drought, indiscriminate use of ground water, and rampant logging, are eroding the edges of China's deserts, allowing them to merge and spread. Recent satellite imagery shows that the Badain Jaran Desert in north-central China is pushing southward toward the nearby Tengger Desert to form a single, larger desert overlapping both northwestern Gansu province and neighboring Inner Mongolia.

Expanding deserts swallow almost a million acres of land every year, China's Environmental Protection Agency says. Soon, 40 percent of China could turn into scrubland, creating enormous social, economic and ecological challenges, including the problem of millions of "ecological refugees."

the arab spring and climate change

americanprogress | consider the following statements:

• “A once-in-a-century winter drought in China contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices in Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer.” (Sternberg, p. 7)


• “Of the world’s major wheat-importing companies per capita, “the top nine importers are all in the Middle East; seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011.” (Sternberg, p. 12)


• “The world is entering a period of ‘agflation,’ or inflation driven by rising prices for agricultural commodities.” (Johnstone and Mazo, p. 21)


• “Drought and desertification across much of the Sahel—northern Nigeria, for example, is losing 1,350 square miles a year to desertification—have undermined agricultural and pastoral livelihoods,” contributing  to urbanization and massive flows of migrants. (Werz and Hoffman, p. 37)


• “As the region’s population continues to climb, water availability per capita is projected to plummet. … Rapid urban expansion across the Arab world increasingly risks overburdening existing infrastructure and outpacing local capacities to expand service.” (Michel and Yacoubian, p. 45)


• “We have reached the point where a regional climate event can have a global extent.” (Sternberg, p. 10)

These assertions are all essentially factual. None of them individually might be cause for alarm. Taken together, however, the phenomena they describe weave a complex web of conditions and interactions that help us understand the larger context for the Arab Awakening. Indeed, as Johnstone and Mazo argued as early as April–May 2011, in an article written just at the outset of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, it was already possible to see that climate change played a role in the complex causality of the revolts spreading across the region. They called it a “threat multiplier.” It significantly increased the interactive effects—and hence the overall impact—of political, economic, religious, demographic, and ethnic forces.

This concept of a “threat multiplier” is a helpful way to think about climate change and security more broadly.

from my dinner with andre

prohibition and humanism

thehumanist | The legislation of morality is widespread; from blasphemy to gay inequality to reproductive rights, religious majorities actively persecute those with differing values through the codification of morality. And while many of these marginalized groups have seen notable public support, the public is largely silent when it comes to the marginalization of those who choose to use drugs. Just as religion often labels those with alternative sexual preferences as morally corrupt or evil, so too does religion judge those who choose to use drugs and alcohol as morally inferior.

Part of the philosophy of humanism is to stand against outdated codes of morality that persecute and make life difficult for people. Just as LGBT issues are humanist issues, so too are drug and alcohol issues. When evaluating how society treats inebriants, science and reason should be the standards by which we create policy, not ancient religious texts. Most comparative policy studies agree that drug and alcohol abuse should be regarded as a public health issue, as opposed to a criminal justice issue, and that public funds are best spent on drug treatment and prevention rather than enforcement and incarceration.

Predominant theocratic norms have so influenced society that tacit acquiescence for religious prejudice has largely replaced critical analysis when it comes to social attitudes towards drug use. Indeed, there is little opposition, even among nontheists, to laws that persecute those who choose to use drugs. However, humanism and human decency afford that individuals with varying values and beliefs should be respected, not shunned.

One example of a largely unopposed, overly harsh drug law in the United States is the Higher Education Act’s Aid Elimination Penalty, which states that any individual with a misdemeanor drug offense is to be barred from receiving federal financial aid to attend college. Because of the provision, hundreds of thousands of promising students have been forced to drop out of college because of minor, nonviolent drug offenses. The penalty was introduced in 1998 by Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), a Christian conservative whose battles included anti-abortion legislation and the prohibition of online gambling. Heavily influenced by his religion, when asked about his position on abortion, Souder responded, “the closer to the clearness of the Bible, the less ability I should have to compromise.” Ironically, this moral crusader left office in 2010 after admitting to an affair with a staffer, lamenting in his resignation speech that he had “sinned against God.”

- See more at: http://thehumanist.org/march-april-2013/prohibition-humanism/#sthash.pjJFzCvB.dpuf

While drug laws that prevent access to education have untold social costs, the financial burdens of the war on sin can be more easily calculated. In 2010 alone, the Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that this so-called war cost the U.S. federal government $15 billion, and state governments another $25 billion. Incarceration costs alone can be staggering. In 2011 the State of California spent $45,006 per inmate and approximately 31 percent of all California inmates were booked on drug offenses. To put that into perspective, the state spent $8,667 per college student in the same year. Because of the war on drugs’ mandatory minimum sentencing laws, Americans now comprise 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but 23.4 percent of its prison population.

The Obama administration has at least vocalized concerns regarding the failure of national drug policy. As stated in its recently released 2012 National Drug Control Strategy: “science has shown that drug addiction is not a moral failing but rather a disease of the brain that can be prevented and treated.” However, upon review of the actual policy, many have concluded that the only thing changed is the wording. “This strategy is nearly identical to previous national drug strategies,” stated Bill Piper, the director for national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. “While the rhetoric is new, reflecting the fact that three-quarters of Americans consider the drug war a failure, the substance of the actual policies is the same.” Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein raised similar concerns, noting that “President Obama promised to use a science-based approach to public policy. But when it comes to marijuana, he has continued the unscientific policies of George Bush, and has even gone far beyond Bush in his attacks upon medical marijuana clinics.”

Eighty-some years ago, the primary motivations for ending the alcohol prohibition were the staggering economic costs of enforcement, as well as the huge impact of lost tax revenues. A 1929 pamphlet distributed by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment estimated that the total loss of federal tax revenues was $861 million, the equivalent of $108 billion dollars today. The nation, in the midst of the Great Depression, was in desperate need of these tax revenues to implement economic stimulus programs, and so in 1932 a bipartisan effort saw the passing of the Twenty-first Amendment. Perhaps a similar appeal to reason can be made in our current time of financial uncertainty. If nothing else, perhaps religious lawmakers can be made to see that their war on sin has failed in economic terms.

Ideally, a majority of lawmakers may eventually come to realize that drug experimentation is a natural human phenomenon—that humans are instinctively attracted to mind-altering substances.

the war against human nature strengthens the fear of one’s fellow man

laphamsquarterly | So again with the war that America has been waging for the last one hundred years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20 billion a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national-security state. The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody’s privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness—anarchists and cheap Chinese labor at the turn of the twentieth century, known homosexuals and suspected Communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s; nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.

If what was at issue was a concern for people trapped in the jail cells of addiction, the keepers of the nation’s conscience would be better advised to address the conditions—poverty, lack of opportunity and education, racial discrimination—from which drugs provide an illusory means of escape. That they are not so advised stands as proven by their fond endorsement of the more expensive ventures into the realms of virtual reality. Our pharmaceutical industries produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs—eye opening, stupefying, mood swinging, game changing, anxiety alleviating, performance enhancing—currently at a global market-value of more than $300 billion. Add the time-honored demand for alcohol, the modernist taste for cocaine, and the uses, as both stimulant and narcotic, of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and pornography, and the annual mustering of consummations devoutly to be wished comes to the cost of more than $1.5 trillion. The taking arms against a sea of troubles is an expenditure that dwarfs the appropriation for the military defense budget.

Given the American antecedents both metaphysical and commercial—Thomas Paine drank, “and right freely”; in 1910 the federal government received 71 percent of its internal revenue from taxes paid on the sale and manufacture of alcohol—it is little wonder that the sons of liberty now lead the world in the consumption of better living through chemistry. The new and improved forms of self-invention fit the question—to be, or not to be—to any and all occasions. For the aging Wall Street speculator stepping out for an evening to squander his investment in Viagra. For the damsel in distress shopping around for a nose like the one seen advertised in a painting by Botticelli. For the distracted child depending on a therapeutic jolt of Adderall to learn to read the Constitution. For the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens. Visionary risk-takers, one and all, willing to chance what dreams may come on the way West to an all-night pharmacy. The war against human nature strengthens the fear of one’s fellow man. The red, white, and blue pills sell the hope of heaven made with artificial sweeteners.

putting the Internet of Things inside your body...,

wired | Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor has created the world’s smallest ARM-powered chip, designed to push the world of connected devices into surprising places.

Announced today, the Kinetis KL02 measures just 1.9 by 2 millimeters. It’s a full microcontroller unit (MCU), meaning the chip sports a processor, RAM, ROM, clock and I/O control unit — everything a body needs to be a basic tiny computer.

The KL02 has 32k of flash memory, 4k of RAM, a 32 bit processor, and peripherals like a 12-bit analog to digital converter and a low-power UART built into the chip. By including these extra parts, device makers can shrink down their designs, resulting in tiny boards in tiny devices.

How tiny? One application that Freescale says the chips could be used for is swallowable computers. Yes, you read that right. “We are working with our customers and partners on providing technology for their products that can be swallowed but we can’t really comment on unannounced products,” says Steve Tateosian, global product marketing manager.

The KL02 is part of Freescale’s push to make chips tailored to the Internet of Things. Between the onboard peripherals and a power-management system tuned to the chemistry of current generation batteries, the KL02 is intended to be at the heart of a network of connected objects, moving from shoes that wirelessly report your steps (a natural evolution of Nike+) to pipes that warn you when they are leaking.

There are some clues we can glean about how this chip might end up inside our digestive tracts. Freescale already works with a variety of health and wellness customers. Both the Fitbit and OmniPod insulin pump use Freescale chips. It’s not hard to imagine a new generation of devices designed to monitor your internal health or release drugs and medicine from within your body. Such tiny implements, however, also creates the possibility that discarded micro-devices could soon collect in sewers and waste treatment plants.

internet of things coming soon...,

csmonitor | A car that tells your insurance company how you're driving. A bathroom scale that lets you chart your weight on the Web. And a meter that warns your air conditioner when electricity gets more expensive.

Welcome to the next phase of the wireless revolution.

The first wave of wireless was all about getting people to talk to each other on cellphones. The second will be getting things to talk to each other, with no humans in between. So-called machine-to-machine communication is getting a lot of buzz at this year's wireless trade show. Some experts believe these connections will outgrow the traditional phone business in less than a decade.

"I see a whole set of industries, from energy to cars to health to logistics and transportation, being totally redesigned," said Vittorio Colao, the CEO of Vodafone Group PLC, in a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The British cellphone company has vast international interests, including its 45 percent ownership stake in Verizon Wireless.

Companies are promising that machine-to-machine, or M2M, technology will deliver all manner of services, from the prosaic to the world-changing. At U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.'s booth here at the show, there's a coffeepot that can be ordered to start brewing from a tablet computer, or an Internet-connected alarm clock. A former president of Costa Rica is also at the show, talking about how M2M can save massive amounts of greenhouse gases by making energy use more efficient — enough to bring mankind halfway to the goal of halting global warming.

The M2M phenomenon is part of the larger drive to create an "Internet of Things" —a global network that not only links computers, tablets and phones but that connects everything from bikes to washing machines to thermostats. Machina Research, a British firm, believes there will be 12.5 billion "smart" connected devices, excluding phones, PCs and tablets, in the world in 2020, up from 1.3 billion today.

But how does this transformation happen, and who stands to profit?

modeling social network topologies in elementary schools

Plosone | Complex networks are widely applied in disciplines as varied as economics [1], biology [2], information technology [3] and sociology [4], [5]. Further development of complex networks theory is therefore a vital research area, with recent efforts focusing on measurements [6], topologies [7], [8] and the way data is disseminated through them [9].

Complex networks are a tool for modeling systems in which elements interrelate. Social networks are systems that describe phenomena in which individuals interact within a society (e.g. people, companies, etc.); nodes represent individuals and links represent the social relationships between them. Recent research has focused on the patterns of face-to-face interaction dynamics. In one study, radio frequency identification devices were used to calculate the proximity and duration of interpersonal interactions, and thus create social networks to understand community behavior and apply diffusion processes for infectious diseases and information [10]. Using the same technology, studies have been done in high schools [11] and elementary schools [12] of the mixing patterns of students in a school environment that describe social network’s temporal evolution and apply infectious disease diffusion processes to identify high-risk situations and establish vaccination strategies.

When studying data dissemination within a social system, an understanding is needed of the network topology that models the interactions produced within it. To this end, the present study objective was to evaluate the properties of friendship and enmity networks representing interactions between elementary school students and develop models that reproduce them. This will facilitate future research into problems such as scholastic performance, disease transmission and evolution of the cultural environment, among other important phenomena occurring in schools which could benefit from the formalism of complex networks [13]–[15].

We describe the methodology used to collect the data and generate the databases used in developing the networks. These data have certain characteristics that are not reproduced by classic models of complex network theory. The tests used to analyze friendship networks are described in section ‘Friendship Networks Analysis’ and implementation of the proposed model is described in section ‘Friendship Network Model’, while the enmity networks are addressed in section ‘Enmity Network Analysis’ and the proposed descriptive model in section ‘Enmity Network Model’. Promising future research emphases are proposed.

awful purdy...,

why I'm quitting facebook

cnn | We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the "big data" research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us -- from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we -- and the young, particularly -- spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

The efforts of a few thousand employees at Facebook's Menlo Park campus pale in comparison to those of the hundreds of millions of users meticulously tweaking their pages. Corporations used to have to do research to assemble our consumer profiles; now we do it for them.

The information collected about you by Facebook through my Facebook page isn't even shared with me. Thanks to my page, Facebook knows the demographics of my readership, their e-mails, what else they like, who else they know and, perhaps most significant, who they trust. And Facebook is taking pains not to share any of this, going so far as to limit the ability of third-party applications to utilize any of this data.

Given that this was the foundation for Facebook's business plan from the start, perhaps more recent developments in the company's ever-evolving user agreement shouldn't have been so disheartening. Fist tap Arnach.

the weirdest people in the world...,

psmag | again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds. Fist tap Dale.

snowed in today...,

inside job

Inside Job (2010) from THELIGHT on Vimeo.

DOCUMENTARY : 'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China. Fist tap Big Don.

former federal reserve governor and columbia economist lying for $$$?

zerohedge | Some time ago we penned a post, titled"Mishkin On Iceland: "Nothing Is F*#&ed Here Dude" which discussed the former Fed director's March 2006 analysis "Financial (IN)Stability In Iceland." Those interested in our original observations of Mishkin's horrendous analysis (of what proved to be the first bankrupt European country of the new century, but certainly not last) can find them at the original link. Yet continuing with the Duderino references, today, new shit has come to light, which once again confirms that not only is the Fed populated by the most intellectually incapable and corrupt people, but that anything coming out of Columbia University (and the Ivy League in general) is not worth the paper it is printed on. Watch the attached clip to see a former Fed director go from comfortable, to fidgety, to stuttering, to thoroughly discredited, to in dire need of diaper change, in under 2 minutes. Last but not least, here is the soundbite of the year: "You have faith in the central bank." No further comment necessary. Fist tap Big Don.

crucial crimogenic collusion...,

Bill Black: Clinton admin. thought that prosecuting big bank fraud wasn't worth the governments time and could destabilize banking system - Obama continues the policy today

the global debt-slavery confederacy requires austerity

Bill Black reports from Davos that the Global Competitiveness Report pushes countries towards even more deregulation - policies that helped trigger the crisis

the religion of austerity

Bill Black: Obama has options, including the trillion dollar coin, to refuse to negotiate under the gun but he's taken them off the table; both sides subscribe to the dogma of austerity

underground gay network! - in the vatican?!?

slate | Pope Benedict XVI is a little more than two weeks away from beginning his retirement at the Castel Gandolfo, but his final days as head of the Catholic church don't look like they're going to be quiet ones. Unsourced reports coming out of Italy suggest that the pope decided to call it quits not because of his old age but instead to avoid the fallout that could come from a secret 300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals he tapped to look into last year's leak of confidential papers stolen from his desk.

Those papers, widely known as the "VatiLeaks," raised questions of financial impropriety and corruption at the Vatican. The investigation that followed, however, may prove even more uncomfortable for church officials.

The secret dossier allegedly details a wide range of infighting among various factions in the Vatican's governing body, known as the Curia. But the headline-ready takeaway from today's report from La Repubblica concerns the existence of one faction in particular, a network of gay church officials. Just in case that weren't enough to pique international interest, the Italian newspaper also reports that some of said officials had been blackmailed by outsiders. According to the report, the pope got his first look at the dossier—"two folders hard-bound in red" with the header "pontifical secret"—on Dec. 17, and decided that same day to retire.

oh lawd....,

freep | The Italian media is reporting that Pope Benedict XVI resigned after receiving the results of an internal investigation, delivered in a 300-page, two-volume dossier, that laid bare a sordid tale of blackmail, corruption and gay sex at the Vatican.

The respected Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported Friday that the report stamped "Pontifical Secret," contained "an exact map of the mischief and the bad fish" inside the Holy See.

The newspaper said the findings of the nine-month investigation, headed by Spanish cardinal, Julian Herranz , with the assistance of Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi, former archbishop of Palermo, and Slovak cardinal Jozef Tomko, was delivered to the pope on Dec. 17, 2012.

"It was on that day, with those papers on his desk, that Benedict XVI took the decision he had mulled over for so long,'' the newspaper said.

La Repubblica said the panel drew upon "dozens and dozens" of interviews with bishops, cardinals and lay people. It said the pope was kept apprised of the investigation in weekly meetings from April until December. The final, bound in red leather, is being kept in a safe in the pope's Vatican quarters, the newspaper said.

A similar story was carried by Panorama, a conservative weekly.

"What's coming out is a very detailed X-ray of the Roman Curia that does not spare even the closest collaborators of the pope," respected Vatican expert Ignazio Ingrao writes in Panorama. "The pope was no stranger to the intrigues, but he probably did not know that under his pontificate there was such a complex network and such intricate chains of personal interests and unmentionable relationships."

A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, has refused to comment on the reports.

"Neither the cardinals' commission nor I will make comments to confirm or deny the things that are said about this matter. Let each one assume his or her own responsibilities. We shall not be following up on the observations that are made about this,'' Lombardi said, according to the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

In announcing his resignation Feb. 11, Benedict said that he no longer had the "strength of mind and body" to carry on. A conclave will select a new pope next month.

Lombardi has indicated that Benedict would meet with the three cardinals before stepping down Feb. 28, in one of his final private audiences.

La Repubblica reported that the pope would personally hand the confidential files to his successor, with the hope he will be ''strong, young and holy'' enough to take the necessary action.

The investigation was triggered last May when the pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and charged with having stolen and leaked papal correspondence that depicted the Vatican as a hotbed of intrigue.

The papers were published in a blockbuster book. The butler was convicted in October of aggravated theft, and later pardoned.

The three-man panel, according to La Repubblica, discovered an underground gay network whose members organized sexual meetings in several locations, including a villa outside Rome, a sauna in Rome's Cuarto Miligo distirct and even in a beauty salon inside the Vatican.

The gatherings, in turn, left them open to blackmail from people outside the Vatican, the report said, according to the newspaper.

why the attempt at secrecy?

ICH | Conspiracies against the public don’t get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change(1). While inflicting untold suffering on the world’s people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.

The two organisations – the Donors’ Trust and the Donors’ Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression that there are many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama’s cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they’re seeking to prevent the US president from trying again(2).

This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations(3), most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations(4). If this funding were not effective, it wouldn’t exist: the ultra-rich didn’t get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those which advance their interests.

A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway)(5). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free market or conservative think tanks.

Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and the Discovery Institute(6). All of them pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups “increasingly function as public-relations agencies”(7).

One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group which, like all the others, calls itself a free market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by on which its staff are not interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires’ agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC ten times(8).

Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that “we are independent of all business interests”(9). Oh yes?

why are the senate republicans out to destroy hagel?

paulcraigroberts | The answer is, first, back when Hagel was a US Senator he refused to be intimidated by the Israel Lobby and declared, “I am a US Senator, not an Israeli Senator.” In other words, Hagel did the impermissible. He said he represented US interests, not Israel’s interests. Hagel’s position implies that the interests of the two countries are not identical, which is a heresy.

The second part of the answer is that Hagel doesn’t think that it is a good idea for the US to start a war with Iran or for the US to permit Israel to do so.

But a US war with Iran is what the Israeli government and its neoconservative agents have been trying to impose on the Obama regime. Israel wants to get rid of Iran, because Iran supports Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon, thus preventing Israel from annexing that territory and its water resources, and because Iran supports Hamas, the only Palestinian organization that tries to oppose Israel’s total theft of Palestine, although Iran has never supplied Hamas with effective weapons.

The two organizations that oppose Israel’s territorial expansion, Hizbollah and Hamas, represent large numbers of Arab peoples. Nevertheless, both are declared, on Israel’s orders, to be “terrorist organizations” by the servile US Department of State, which in all reality should be called the Israeli Department of State, as it never puts US interests before Israel’s.

In other words, Hagel did not grovel. He did not say how much he loved Israel and how it would be his great honor to sacrifice all other interests to Israel’s, how he has waited his entire life for the chance to serve Israel as the US Secretary of Defense.

Hagel is not an opponent of Israel. He merely said, “First, I am an American.” His lack of craven subservience is unacceptable to the Israel Lobby, which has branded him an “anti-semite.”

Lindsay Graham, in contrast, has what it takes to be Israel’s perfect choice for US Secretary of Defense.

Graham will go out of his way to please the Israel Lobby. He will pull out all stops and behave with maximum servility to a foreign power in his effort to embarrass the President of the United States and his nominee, a war veteran and former US Senator who simply thinks that the US Congress and the executive branch should put American interests first.

Senate Majority Leader Reid has used Senate rules to keep Hagel’s nomination alive.

If Lindsay Graham succeeds in doing the Israel Lobby’s dirty work, he will have handed a defeat of the US President to the Israeli Prime Minister, who has demeaned the President of the United States for not doing Israel’s bidding and attacking Iran.

Americans are a colonized people. Their government represents the colonizing powers: Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, the Military/Security Complex, Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Mining, and Timber interests.

when the SHTF there are guys with guns and there are guys without guns...,

shtfschool | When SHTF, there are a guys with guns, and there are guys without guns. Everything else are just labels. Names like police, army, authority, government…

You can not think in the terms that we think today, it is dangerous.

If you read between lines on this website you also come to your own conclusions how you can make chances of your survival better if your group looks like official helpers. Of course do not use this for bad things.

There is nothing deep and philosophic in this story, police force are just bunch of guys with guns who are doing their job today, some of them are good people, some of them are bad people. They all just like us gonna choose what they gonna do when SHTF but when they are in big emotional stress or fight for their survival they might not be nice guys like before. Even if they try to be good they go around and anyone they see can be a Chris Dorner and in all chaos they do not know.

Guys who were hiding in the building were common law abiding folks, and they did not realize that SHTF and that rules had changed, actually rules were gone, so what was before did not matter much. Black can be white, bad can be good, or police force can be simple gang.

Really getting this mindset is also main point of my survival course. Yes, there are my list with supplies and survival guide but with interviews I want you to see how “not natural” it was. Yes, it feels like landing on different planet when society changes like that but if you want to survive you have to be able to be almost comfortable with this.

Now do not get me wrong, I am not saying that we all need to go out and not obey the law. Nothing like that. But when SHTF it is wrong to act like law abiding citizen just because you are used to. It just doesnt make sense and you have to question everything and everyone.

I had that “advantage” or “luck” seeing all that when SHTF, also I am living in what I call “unorganized” country so I am perfectly aware that police here even in “normal” times are armed guys who also work for people who pay more.

So all of my problems I am trying to solve by myself, no real help from authorities. Maybe in your world situation is different and you should be grateful for that. I am not saying that all cops are bad, in your country most cops are probably very good. Just keep in mind people who enforce law and order are humans too and when SHTF or in major disaster that is followed by long term survival situation they are living in new world too in which old rules do not mean much.

I know it is easy for me to say this because I have been in this situation but besides all “technical” or “logistical” aspects of prepping your mind has to be ready for the day when old labels, classification and rules are not working anymore. Only then you can make critical right decisions that can make your chance to survive better.

bankers and gunmakers...,

americanbanker | Bank of America thinks it's more than just a little dangerous – it reportedly wants to discourage some gun manufacturers from even having accounts at the bank. Largely neglected by the mainstream press, two particular firearms manufacturer cases represent an emerging political climate in U.S. banking. I am not accusing anyone in the media of "bias by omission" concerning the stories of McMillan Firearms Manufacturing and American Spirit Arms, but these are fairly recent episodes with considerable consequence.

B of A justified freezing the deposits of 10-year customer American Spirit Arms for three weeks beginning Dec. 18 by saying that the deposits were held for "further review." Even though American Spirit Arms is a properly licensed firearms manufacturer which submits to regular audits by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Department of Homeland Security, Bank of America also said, "We believe you should not be selling guns and parts on the Internet." Happily, the Internet played a role in resolving the issue, as business owner Joseph Sirochman told anchorperson Megyn Kelly on Fox News' America Live.

Another disturbing episode involved McMillan Firearms Manufacturing in April 2012. In expanding a routine "account analysis" meeting to include the larger political issue of overall business purpose, Bank of America directly suggested that the firearms manufacturer take its business elsewhere. Bank of America replied to the allegations here and McMillan responded again here.

Beginning in a visible way with the 2011 full-scale banking and payments blockade against WikiLeaks, politically motivated acts by private financial institutions appear to be on the rise. Banks are beginning to use considerable discretion in deciding what constitutes an illegal act and sometimes even an immoral act. Freeze the funds first – ask questions later. After all, it's their bank, right?

Yes, private companies can choose who they elect to do business with. However, it has a chilling effect when the directives come in a soft way from regulators or from a financially-supportive government. Historically, banks exercise discretion and that discretion can escalate into subtle differences in treatment. Such as when to file a suspicious activities report or when a customer's deposits and withdrawals start to look excessively high.

Banks are increasingly in the role of enforcer and watchdog for the regulators. That is the basis of enforcement for many of the country's anti-money laundering laws and know-your-customer guidelines. The duty falls to the financial institutions and they are periodically reviewed as to their monitoring prowess. For the most part, banks do not have a choice in providing this quasi-enforcement role on behalf of the government, but it does set the stage for further encroachments into business and individual privacy. Fist tap Dale.

360 degrees of social networking

pcmag | Social-networking sites continue to hold the attention of most Internet users, especially women between 18 and 29 years old, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

About 67 percent of Internet users take advantage of Facebook, particularly those 20-something women, Pew found in a study that examined the demographics of the most popular social networks.

Twitter tends to attract African-American, urban residents ages 18 to 29, for example, while Pinterest is more often used by white women under age 50 with some college education.

Unsurprisingly, Instagram is popular with urban residents, as well as African Americans, Latinos, and women between the ages of 18 and 29.

Pew attributed the popularity of social-networking sites to the simple fact that Internet users under age 50 are likely to use social media of any kind. Still, the majority of users fall into the 18- to 29-year-old urban female category. But while sex and age play a large part in determining the demographics of the Internet, Pew found little distinction between education and household income.

Once broken down by individual network, though, the numbers begin to look a little different. Twitter has 16 percent of the social media market, with 20 percent of its users living in urban areas and 26 percent identifying as African American.

Pinterest, on the other hand, depends heavily on a very white upper-class society of women ages 18 to 49. Still in its infancy compared to its social-networking siblings, Pinterest attracts only 5 percent of men, 18 percent blacks and Hispanics, 11 percent of those with less than a high school education, and 25 percent of people bringing in $50,000 or less per year — a combined number that barely surpasses the 23 percent of those earning $50,000-$75,000 who use the service.

Even Tumblr, with only about 6 percent of the total social media interest, has an intense fanbase of young bloggers, ages 18 to 28 (13 percent). The site is split evenly between male and female use, and has little variation between education and location, though the majority of users tend to make less than $30,000 or more than $75,000.

is it really?

dollarvigilante | The beginning of the end of the war between government and the individual was 1913. That was when what would become the biggest, most powerful, most murderous, most indebted government the world has ever seen (and likely will ever see, if we're lucky) sowed the seeds of its own guaranteed collapse. That was the year the latest incarnation of a US central bank was created to do what central banks do: provide the government with limitless purchasing power stolen from the productive individuals through currency supply inflation.

The end of the end, so to speak, was in 1994. That was the year the Internet gained widespread public knowledge and use. Governments have always thrived by controlling education of the young, controlling the currency and controlling information. In other words: indoctrination, inflation, misinformation, and propaganda. The governed vastly outnumber the governors so force was never enough to keep control. Sure you could make an example out of a couple of the slaves by using violence on them. But to efficiently control a bunch of humans and use them as tax cows, you have to convince them that they are better off being tax cows. After the Internet, it became impossible for the governed not to find out the truth of their condition.

I understand if when I say that government has lost the war, you might think I'm crazy. After all, things look pretty bleak. Yes, the government is out of control in the US and in many other countries. But their actions are more like death throes. Like a big, mortally wounded beast, the state is lashing out with the strength and ferocity that comes from panic. It senses death approaching. And that may make it temporarily more dangerous. But the end is in sight. All their actions are actually reactions to the fact that they're losing. They are trying to close the doors, control the flow of information and restrict the flow of capital, but people are finding ways around everything (especially people like us and the people who read publications like this).

The blatantly obvious and rather pathetic attempts at information control keep coming. Like the latest in a long string of executive orders signed by President Obama just before the recent State of the Union address. The order will expand the power of the Department of Homeland Security to "share" information with private industry. In other words, it will be easier for the government to gather information about you from the electronic media you use. And of course, there is the much-talked about "internet kill switch" that Obama and his fellow heads of state are dying to make a reality.

Even if the various states all over the world manage to find a way to shut off the Internet, they'll find out who really won if they do shut the internet down. The entire world is online now. And they all love it. Imagine if we had no email, no Facebook, no Craigslist, and that our smartphones just became plain cell phones again... I make no exaggeration when I say that there would be far more people revolting over the loss of these things than over the loss of their right to own firearms. Plus much of the world commerce is done through the internet now. The economic loss at this point would be staggering. You wonder if governments are really and truly that willing to cripple the economies they parasitize in order to maintain their last bits of control.

life in a networked age...,

globalguerillas | Here's some idle thinking for a sunny afternoon at the end of winter. 

To access it, let's make a simple assumption that economics, politics, and warfare are all a function of the dominant technological substrate.

A technological substrate is the family of related technologies that we rely upon.  In the 20th Century, we were clearly reliant on an industrial substrate.   

The challenges posed by industrial age technologies dictated the development of two management forms:  bureaucracy and markets.   Bureaucracies and markets are both decision making systems. These management forms dominated economics, politics, and warfare for centuries. 

Neither system of management is sufficient as a solution for industrial economics, politics, or warfare.    

Democracies use market decision making to determine leadership over a nation-state bureaucracy. Capitalism uses markets to determine leadership/control over corporate bureaucries.  Education uses bureaucracy to manage its institutions and a combination of markets and bureaucracy to allocate students.  The modern age was dominated by market based warfare (think: Wallenstein) but it is now firmly bureaucratic. 

Although ideologies have been built and wars have been fought over the mix of bureaucracy and markets, neither system has proven dominant.  .

This simplification is useful when we shift the technological substrate.

In the last thirty years, we've seen a shift in the technological substrate.  This new susbstrate is increasingly a family of technologies related to information networks.

As this new substrate begins to take control, we're going to need new management forms.  Both bureaucratic and market systems are proving insuffient solutions to the challenges of a networked age. 

In both cases, the emergence of a global network is eroding the efficacy of bureaucracy and markets as solutions.  How?  One reason is scale. 

A global network is too large and complex for a bureaucracy to manage.  It would be too slow, expensive, and inefficient to be of value.  Further, even if one could be built, it would be impossible to apply market dyanmics (via democratic elections) to selecting the leaders of that bureaucracy.  The diversity in the views of the 7 billion of us on this planet are too vast. 

In terms of markets, a global marketplace is too unstable.   Interlinked, and tightly coupled markets are prone to frequent and disasterous failures.  Additionally, a global marketplace is easy for insiders to corrupt and rig, as we saw with the 2008 financial melt-down.   Given instability and unmitigated corruption, markets will fail as a decision making mechanism. 

So, what's going to replace bureaucracy and markets?

We don't have digestible names for them yet.  However, let's just call them platforms and P2P systems.   Platforms are run by a few people and delivered to a great many people.  P2P systems allow ad hoc interaction between indepedent individuals. 

Both have value.  Both have problems. 

Companies like Google and Facebook run as platforms.  The core business is so automated, it could be run by a handful of people.    P2P networks are systems like BitTorrent, Wikipedia and open source software/hardware projects.

There's definitely a need for both platforms and P2P management systems.  However, both currently operate badly.  We haven't learned how to use these systems to produce meaningful results for humanity yet.  We will, but the path will likely rocky, particularly as the older approaches of markets and bureaucracy deteriorate and fights between the systems break out.

Note:  In warfare, we saw battles between a bureaucracy and open source opponents in the last decade, and open source did very well.  We saw it in Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Afghanistan etc.

the cracking foundation(s) of the american world order...,

aljazeera | Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it's not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it's been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources - the main concern of US planners - have been mostly nationalised. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism - mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach US goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated.

So in November 2007, the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, "encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments". In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining. Fist tap Arnach.

common sense collides with the compulsion to conceal and cover-up...,

WaPo | Police serve the community — any concerns about their integrity must be transparently, expeditiously and judiciously resolved. Relying on cops to police cops is neither efficient nor confidence-inspiring.

The solution? Abolish internal affairs units and outsource their work to external civilian agencies.

Police have slowly started to incorporate civilian oversight in their misconduct investigations. For example, the LAPD’s office of inspector general has oversight over the department’s internal discipline. Yet, while the inspector general’s staff receives copies of every personnel complaint filed and tracks and audits selected cases, it does not have the authority to impose discipline. Nor do most civilian review boards, which are not empowered to conduct independent investigations. This leads detractors to say that such boards are ineffectual.

Police have long resisted external oversight. Some of us say that those who aren’t in uniform do not understand the intricacies of law enforcement. Won’t civilian investigators be harsher toward officers — unsympathetic to the challenges faced by beat cops battling armed bad guys?

These self-serving arguments perpetuate archaic policies. Outsourcing misconduct investigations to civilians would directly address community concerns about the “blue wall of silence.” Officers who fear retaliation for reporting misconduct would feel more comfortable working with an external agency. In this system, complaints such as Dorner’s about the vindictiveness of superiors would all but disappear.

Using sergeants and detectives as internal affairs investigators costs police departments a lot. These supervisors are paid more and have more seniority. Assigning seasoned officers to internal affairs also depletes the number of field personnel who could prevent mistakes and misconduct by patrol officers in the first place. Outsourcing misconduct investigations would be far less expensive and would let veteran supervisors do the jobs they should be doing.

And why shouldn’t every police contact with the community — every traffic stop, every interrogation — be recorded on video? If Dorner and his partner had had a cop-cam, his claim that his partner used excessive force might have been resolved the same day. There’s just no excuse for not recording police contacts with the public. Technology has made cameras effective and affordable. Some officers already record their arrests to protect themselves against false allegations of misconduct. This should be standard operating procedure.

If even one citizen thinks that Dorner may have had a point, that’s too many. The only answer to those worried about police conspiracies is transparency. Only by opening our doors can we build trust, and truly serve and protect. Fist tap Arnach.

the execution of christopher dorner

counterpunch | If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his administration. Whether an innocent young man just trying to get home, shot in the back after being racially profiled and slurred, or a man driven to his breaking point after being fired from a similar police force that operates according to its own warped morality and overarching objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose wick has gotten shorter due to decades of looking the other way.

Just minutes before Barack Obama began his state of the union address, San Bernardino County Sheriffs, knowing full well what they were doing, burned Christopher Dorner to death. From police brutality and racism to political unaccountability, from lack of economic opportunities to the extrajudicial murder of anyone deemed an enemy of the state, Dorner’s life and death offers us a much clearer picture of the state of this union than last night’s speech or media commentary.

In the years between the murder of Oscar Grant and Dorner’s last stand, March of 2009 to be specific, we were among those observing the case of Lovelle Mixon in Oakland, a parolee who decided he was not going to return to prison, opening fire on police at a traffic stop, killing two. Police went in to execute Mixon, not expecting that he would be holding an SKS. Two more cops died as a result. The logic of Dorner’s desperation, and the chain of events that led to his ultimate death, parallels Mixon’s; proud men without hope, cornered, deciding to go out fighting.

Neither man was a self-understood revolutionary and it would be inaccurate (or perhaps too accurate a reflection of the dearth of revolutionary activity in contemporary society) to try and declare otherwise. However, the material conditions that produced Dorner, as with Mixon, are not uncommon. The meaning and the effects of their actions speak volumes about the depth of racialization, criminalization and hopelessness in Obama’s supposed “post-racial” America.