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.

the real reason he wants your guns...,

topdocumentaryfilms | Christopher Greene examines the “real reason” President Obama wants your guns and while doing that he explicitly claims the following:

In many ways America seems to be making the same mistakes as Germany did prior to the outbreak of World War II. Since taking office in 2008, on the promise of hope and change, president Barak Obama has launched an aggressive assault on America’s liberty.

He has armed America’s enemies, violating his oath of office, by sending money and weapons of war to insurgents in Syria led by Al-Qaeda terrorists.

He has violated federal law by overseeing a cover-up surrounding attorney general Eric Holder’s operation “Fast and Furious”, in the running of guns to Mexican drug cartels.

He has lied to the American people by overseeing a cover-up of the September 11 Benghazi terror attack in Libya which led directly to the deaths of four American citizens.

He has bypassed Congress using executive order prior to the attack on Libya, insisting that congressional approval was not necessary.

He has signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act which includes provisions to permit the abduction and military detention without trial of all US citizens, violating “Habeas corpus” – the right to a fair trial.

And on January 16th 2013, surrounded by children, he has signed twenty three different executive orders for broader gun control in the United States.

the drone war in your backyard...,

lfb | Drones are wildly popular on the battlefield. Now they can claim victory elsewhere. The use of drones within U.S. borders — in car chases, to monitor wildfires, or for simple surveillance — is uniting political parties and people more often at odds.

Their concern: The widespread use of drones among civilians represents a deep and dangerous intrusion into American life.

“What we used to know as privacy is finished,” said John Whitehead, a constitutional scholar and president of Virginia-based Rutherford Institute. “Big Brother is here to stay.”

Both the progressive American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Rutherford Institute cheer legislative efforts to place strict limits on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. And prodded by privacy groups, state lawmakers nationwide – Republicans and Democrats alike – have launched an all-out offensive against the unmanned aerial vehicles.

In at least 13 states, lawmakers this year will examine bills to place strict limits on how government entities can deploy drones. No state has embedded such regulations into law.

Drones are already everywhere – executing search-and-rescue missions, tracking cattle rustlers, or monitoring wildfires with minimal cost and little risk of loss of life.

The Federal Aviation Administration listed 345 active drone licenses as of November 2012. Congress has directed the federal department to streamline the approval process. Starting in 2015, commercial entities – think entertainment news outlet TMZ – will have easy access to drone permits.

Analysts believe as many as 30,000 drones will populate American skies by 2020.

Canyon County, Idaho, already has one, a camera-equipped Draganflyer X-6 it bought for $33,400 with federal grant money. About a year ago, Mesa County, Colorado, used $14,000 to purchase its drone, a 4-foot-long, 9-pound plane that can maintain flight for about an hour. The Seattle Police Department spent $41,000 in August for its Draganflyer X-6.

With the booming interest in the myriad uses of UAVs comes nervous anxiety about the creep of the surveillance state.

And that’s where state lawmakers and their allies come in.

a more advanced way of dealing with problems...,

lfb | The topic of drones came up on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Advertising guru and pro-drone Donny Deutsch pushed back against a skeptical Joe Scarborough saying, “What’s the big deal? There was no due process at Waco.” It’s just a difference in technology, he said. “It’s a more advanced way of dealing with problems,” Deutsch contended with a straight face.

I guess Donny figures that the government will never consider him to be a problem. Scarborough fumbled around in response, saying something to the effect that the then attorney general (Janet Reno) thought children were in imminent danger.

Scarborough, however, rightly wondered, “I’m not sure how you save the children by burning the place down.”

Many Americans didn’t care about civil rights when Janet Reno’s ATF agents stormed the Branch Davidian compound, and they don’t seem to care now.

Many Americans seem to be either blissfully ignorant, or foursquare behind this Game of Drones. All this droning on about drones came to light because of a memo of approved drone targets leaked to The New York Times and the confirmation hearings for the CIA chief position. Obama’s selection is the droneinnator himself, John Brennan.

A year ago, a poll showed that 83% of Americans are all for using unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas, and nearly six in 10 strongly support the practice.

Maybe that doesn’t get your blood pressure up, but in the same poll, people were asked if they supported using drones to target American citizens who are suspected terrorists. Two-thirds said they supported using drones on Americans too!

That kind of result makes me think the rest of us should sleep in shifts.

how will continuing and accelerated decentralization of public schools effect already disenfranchised communities?

A Country Divided

archdruid | In the United States, for a couple of centuries now, the provision of free public education for children has been one of the central functions of government.  Until fairly recently, in most of the country, it operated in a distinctive way.  Under legal frameworks established by each state, local school districts were organized by the local residents, who also voted to tax themselves to pay the costs of building and running schools.  Each district was managed by a school board, elected by the local residents, and had extensive authority over the school district’s operations.

In most parts of the country, school districts weren’t subsets of city, township, or county governments, or answerable to them; they were single-purpose independent governments on a very small scale, loosely supervised by the state and much more closely watched by the local voters. On the state level, a superintendent of schools or a state board of education, elected by the state’s voters, had a modest staff to carry out the very limited duties of oversight and enforcement assigned by the state legislature.  On the federal level, a bureaucracy not much larger supervised the state boards of education, and conducted the even more limited duties assigned it by Congress.

Two results of that system deserve notice. First of all, since individual school districts were allowed to set standards, chose textbooks, and manage their own affairs, there was a great deal of diversity in American education. While reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic formed the hard backbone of the school day, and such other standards as history and geography inevitably got a look in as well, what else a given school taught was as varied as local decisions could make them. What the local schools put in the curriculum was up to the school board and, ultimately, to the voters, who could always elect a reform slate to the school board if they didn’t like what was being taught.

Second, the system as a whole gave America a level of public literacy and general education that was second to none in the industrial world, and far surpassed the poor performance of the far more lavishly funded education system the United States has today.  In a previous post, I encouraged readers to compare the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to the debates in our latest presidential contest, and to remember that most of the people who listened attentively to Lincoln and Douglas had what then counted as an eighth-grade education.  The comparison has plenty to say about the degeneration of political thinking in modern America, but it has even more to say about the extent to which the decline in public education has left voters unprepared to get past the soundbite level of thinking.

Those of my readers who want an even more cogent example are encouraged to leaf through a high school textbook from before the Second World War. You’ll find that the reading comprehension, reasoning ability, and mathematical skill expected as a matter of course from ninth-graders in 1930 is hard to find among American college graduates today.  If you have kids of high school age, spend half an hour comparing the old textbook with the one your children are using today.  You might even consider taking the time to work through a few of the assignments in the old textbook yourself.

Plenty of factors have had a role in the dumbing-down process that gave us our current failed system of education, to be sure, but I’d like to suggest that the centralization of power over the nation’s educational system in a few federal bureaucracies played a crucial role. Fist tap Dale.

misery receding deeper into the confederate abyss...,

arstechnica | Each year, state legislatures play host to a variety of bills that would interfere with science education. Most of these are variations on a boilerplate intended to get supplementary materials into classrooms criticizing evolution and climate change (or to protect teachers who do). They generally don't mention creationism, but the clear intent is to sneak religious content into the science classrooms, as evidenced by previous bills introduced by the same lawmakers. Most of them die in the legislature (although the opponents of evolution have seen two successes).

The efforts are common enough that we don't generally report on them. But every now and then a bill comes along that veers off this script. Late last month, the Missouri House started considering one that deviates in staggering ways. Instead of being quiet about its intent, it redefines science, provides a clearer definition of intelligent design than any of the idea's advocates ever have, and it mandates equal treatment of the two. In the process, it mangles things so badly that teachers would be prohibited from discussing Mendel's Laws.

Although even the Wikipedia entry for scientific theory includes definitions provided by the world's most prestigious organizations of scientists, the bill's sponsor Rick Brattin has seen fit to invent his own definition. And it's a head-scratcher: "'Scientific theory,' an inferred explanation of incompletely understood phenomena about the physical universe based on limited knowledge, whose components are data, logic, and faith-based philosophy." The faith or philosophy involved remain unspecified.

Brattin also mentions philosophy when he redefines "hypothesis" as "a scientific theory reflecting a minority of scientific opinion which may lack acceptance because it is a new idea, contains faulty logic, lacks supporting data, has significant amounts of conflicting data, or is philosophically unpopular." The reason for that becomes obvious when he turns to intelligent design, which he defines as a hypothesis. Presumably, he thinks it's only a hypothesis because it's philosophically unpopular, since his bill would ensure it ends up in the classrooms.

Intelligent design (ID) is roughly the concept that life is so complex that it requires a designer, but even its most prominent advocates have often been a bit wary about defining its arguments all that precisely. Not so with Brattin—he lists 11 concepts that are part of ID. Some of these are old-fashioned creationist claims, like the suggestion that mutations lead to "species degradation" and a lack of transitional fossils. But it also has some distinctive twists, like the claim that common features, usually used to infer evolutionary relatedness, are actually a sign of parts re-use by a designer.

23% of america is illiterate...,

not so long ago....,

A Country Divided

LL might wanna reconsider going back to cali....,

"democrat" response to kill-list memo shows party's true stripes...,

Guardian | This past week has been a strangely clarifying political moment. It was caused by two related events: the leak of the Justice Department's "white paper" justifying Obama's claimed power to execute Americans without charges, followed by John Brennan's alarming confirmation hearing (as Charles Pierce wrote: "the man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States"). I describe last week's process as "strange" because, for some reason, those events caused large numbers of people for the first time to recognize, accept and begin to confront truths that have long been readily apparent.

Illustrating this odd phenomenon was a much-discussed New York Times article on Sunday by Peter Baker which explained that these events "underscored the degree to which Mr. Obama has embraced some of Mr. Bush's approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo authorizing presidential action unfettered by outside forces." It began this way:

"If President Obama tuned in to the past week's bracing debate on Capitol Hill about terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he might have recognized the arguments his critics were making: He once made some of them himself.

"Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country's core values in the name of security."

Baker also noticed this: "Some liberals acknowledged in recent days that they were willing to accept policies they once would have deplored as long as they were in Mr. Obama's hands, not Mr. Bush's." As but one example, the article quoted Jennifer Granholm, the former Michigan governor and fervent Obama supporter, as admitting without any apparent shame that "if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms" because, she said "we trust the president". Thus did we have - while some media liberals objected - scores of progressives and conservatives uniting to overtly embrace the once-controversial Bush/Cheney premises of the War on Terror (it's a global war! the whole world is a battlefield! the president has authority to do whatever he wants to The Terrorists without interference from courts!) in order to defend the war's most radical power yet (the president's power to assassinate even his own citizens in secret, without charges, and without checks).

the man who killed Osama bin Laden is screwed...,

CNN | He's the man who rolled into a bedroom in Abbottabad, Pakistan, raised his gun and shot Osama bin Laden three times in the forehead.

Nearly two years later, the SEAL Team Six member is a secret celebrity with nothing to show for the deed; no job, no pension, no recognition outside a small circle of colleagues.

Journalist Phil Bronstein profiled the man in the March issue of Esquire, calling him only the Shooter -- a husband, father and SEAL Team Six member who happened to pull the trigger on the notorious terrorist. It's a detailed account of how the raid unfolded, and what comes after for those involved. The headline splashed across the cover reads, "The man who killed Osama bin Laden ... is screwed."

"They spent, in the case of the shooter, 16 years doing exactly what they're trained to do, which is going out on these missions, deployment after deployment, killing people on a regular basis, " said Bronstein, executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting. "They finally get to the point where they don't want to do that anymore."

Bronstein reported that the man left SEAL Team Six in September. His family's health care coverage ceased. Because he left before the 20-year mark, he gets no pension.

killing drones for fun and profit!

privat.banhof | UAVs have two alternative systems for communication.

Line of sight radio :

In the military C-Band  500 - 1000 MHz that can be jammed with simple spark-gap radio

Satellite communication :

In the Ku-Band between 10.95 - 14.5 GHz, and  the satellite can be jammed.

The Uplink-Band to the satellite is 13.75 - 14.5 GHz

The Downlink-Band from the satellite is 10.95 - 12.75 GHz

And you should jam the Uplink frequencies with a jammer directed at the satellite.

Surprisingly, the resistance can tap off the military's video feeds

As you can see in the specifications, the satellite link system uses the same civilian commercial technology as television broadcasting companies. And the surprise is that the resistance and others have tapped off the videos from the battlefield with simple commercial equipment.

But now the communication is perhaps encrypted.

If you jam the communication, then the operator becomes blind and the UAV will fly around until it crashes or the fuel is gone. But you must kill both links of communication to kill any rescue.

There are a limited number of satellite channels available which means that the satellite link becomes a bottleneck. The satellite is therefore used as a backup and jammer-rescue channel and for single special operations from far away from the target, while C-band radio is used for multiple simultaneous operations from near the targets. Every military base have their own UAVs that must be operated through the C-band radio. C-band radio is also reported to be used for take off and landing. Which means that the C-band radio is your primary target. The C-band radio is also easier to jam.

Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil

RT | As authorities intensify the manhunt for accused LAPD-killer Christopher Dorner, law enforcement agencies are doing everything under the sun to search for their suspect, apparently even deploying drones.

The specifics regarding the tools being used to track Dorner, a 33-year-old former Los Angeles Police Department officer suspected in three recent murders, is a mystery for now. But with a $1 million bounty out for his arrest and a nation at high-alert, it’s no surprise that the search for Dorner is on the way to becoming one of the most remarkable in ages. Now according to some reports, police are relying on high-tech unmanned aerial vehicles to snoop from the sky.

Britain’s Daily Express cites a senior police source in a report this week as saying that the surveillance capabilities of UAVs might be the only option for locating Dorner, who has been at large since a string of murders that began last Sunday.

“The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” the source tells the paper.

The Express adds that police figures on both a city-wide and federal scale have suggested drones are being deployed to search for the triple-murder suspect. In his report, journalist Mike Parker writes that Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz responded to a direct question about UAV usage by saying, “We are using all the tools at our disposal.”

Parker adds: “The use of drones was later confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed agents have been prepared for Dorner to make a dash for the Mexican border since his rampage began.”

“This agency has been at the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement. That’s all I can say at the moment,” DeSio told the paper.

In a bold affirmation from the facts ascertained by the Express, though, the paper concludes that “Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.”

$1,000,000 for war on "those entrusted to protect the public"...,

abcnews | A Northridge, Calif., home improvement store was evacuated tonight because of a possible sighting of suspected cop-killer Christopher Dorner, just hours after police announced a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

As helicopters hovered overhead and a command center was established, police searched the Lowe's store and eventually told shoppers they could leave, but could not take their cars out of the parking lot.

LAPD spokesman Gus Villanueva said the major response to the possible sighting was a precaution, but couldn't say whether Dorner was in the area.

The announcement of the $1 million reward today came as authorities in Big Bear, Calif., scaled back their search for Dorner, the disgruntled ex-cop who is suspected in three revenge killings.
"This is the largest local reward ever offered, to our knowledge," Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a news conference today. "This is an act of domestic terrorism. This is a man who has targeted those that we entrust to protect the public. His actions cannot go unanswered."

The money for the reward was pooled by businesses, government, local law enforcement leaders and individual donors, Beck said.

django dorner shining a light on LAPD....,

HuffPo | Fugitive former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner's claim in an online "manifesto" that his career was undone by racist colleagues conspiring against him comes at a time when it's widely held that the police department has evolved well beyond the troubled racial legacy of Rodney King and the O.J. Simpson trial.

Dorner, who is suspected in a string of vengeance killings, has depicted himself as a black man wronged, whose badge was unjustly taken in 2008 after he lodged a complaint against a white female supervisor.

"It is clear as day that the department retaliated toward me," Dorner said in online writings authorities have attributed to him. Racism and officer abuses, he argued, have not improved at LAPD since the King beating but have "gotten worse."

Dorner's problems at the LAPD, which ended with his dismissal, played out without public notice more than four years ago, as the department gradually emerged from federal oversight following a corruption scandal. At the time, the officer ranks were growing more diverse and then-Chief William Bratton was working hard to mend relations with long-skeptical minorities.

"This is no longer your father's LAPD," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared in 2009, after the federal clampdown was ended.

Dorner's allegations led Police Chief Charlie Beck on Saturday to order a reexamination of the disciplinary case that led to the former officer's firing. Beck said he wanted to assure the city that the department "is transparent and fair in all the things we do."

"I am aware of the ghosts of the LAPD's past, and one of my biggest concerns is that they will be resurrected by Dorner's allegations of racism," Beck said in a statement.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice said the department should review the Dorner case and his claims, while stressing that she is not defending the suspect in any way and is shocked by the attacks.

She said the 10,000-member force headquartered in a glass-walled high-rise in downtown Los Angeles has entered a new era.

Well you wake up in the mornin´ you hear the work bell ring

And they march you to the table to see the same old thing.

Ain´t no food upon the table and no pork up in the pan.

But you better not complain boy you get in trouble with the man.

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me

Let the Midnight Special shine a everlovin´ light on me.

Yonder come miss Rosie, how in the world did you know?

By the way she wears her apron, and the clothes she wore.

Umbrella on her shoulder, piece of paper in her hand;

She come to see the gov´nor, she wants to free her man.

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me,

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me,

Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me,

Let the Midnight Special shine a everlovin´ light on me.

If you´re ever in Houston, well, you better do the right;

You better not gamble, there, you better not fight, at all

Or the sheriff will grab ya and the boys will bring you down.

The next thing you know, boy, Oh! You´re prison bound.

serpico: what becomes of a cop with a conscience...,

Serpico on Serpico

wikipedia | Frank Serpico was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest child of Vincenzo and Maria Giovanna Serpico, Italian immigrants from Marigliano, in the province of Naples, Campania. At age 18, he enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed for two years in Korea. He then worked as a part-time private investigator and as a youth counselor while attending Brooklyn College.[3]

NYPD career

In September 1959, Serpico joined the New York Police Department as a probationary patrolman. He became a full patrolman on March 5, 1960. He was assigned to the 81st precinct, then worked for the Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI) for two years.[4] He was finally assigned to work plainclothes, where he uncovered widespread corruption.[3]

Serpico was a plainclothes police officer working in Brooklyn and the Bronx to expose vice racketeering. To expose those who did, Serpico risked his own life and safety.[3] In 1967 he reported credible evidence of widespread systematic police corruption. Nothing happened[5] until he met another police officer, David Durk, who helped him. Serpico believed his partners knew about secret meetings with police investigators. Finally, Serpico contributed to an April 25, 1970, New York Times front-page story on widespread corruption in the NYPD.[5] Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed a five-member panel to investigate charges of police corruption. The panel became the Knapp Commission, named after its chairman, Whitman Knapp.

Shooting and public interest

Serpico was shot during a drug arrest attempt on February 3, 1971, at 778 Driggs Avenue, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Four officers from Brooklyn North received a tip that a drug deal was about to take place.

Two policemen, Gary Roteman and Arthur Cesare, stayed outside, while the third, Paul Halley, stood in front of the apartment building. Serpico climbed up the fire escape, entered by the fire escape door, went downstairs, listened for the password, then followed two suspects outside.[6]

The police arrested the young suspects, found one had two bags of heroin. Halley stayed with the suspects, and Roteman told Serpico (who spoke Spanish), to make a fake purchase attempt to get the drug dealers to open the door. The police went to the third-floor landing. Serpico knocked on the door, keeping his hand on his 9mm Browning Hi-Power. The door opened a few inches, just far enough to wedge his body in. Serpico called for help, but his fellow officers ignored him.[6]

Serpico was then shot in the face with a .22 LR pistol. The bullet struck just below the eye and lodged at the top of his jaw. He fell to the floor, and began to bleed profusely. His police colleagues refused to make a "10-13", a dispatch to police headquarters indicating that an officer has been shot.[6] An elderly man who lived in the next apartment called the emergency services and reported that a man had been shot. The stranger stayed with Serpico.[6] A police car arrived. Unaware that Serpico was one of them, the officers took him to Greenpoint Hospital.

The bullet had severed an auditory nerve, leaving him deaf in one ear, and he has suffered chronic pain from bullet fragments lodged in his brain. He was visited the day after the shooting by Mayor John V. Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, and the police department harassed him with hourly bed checks. He survived and testified before the Knapp Commission.

The circumstances surrounding Serpico's shooting quickly came into question. Serpico, who was armed during the drug raid, had been shot only after briefly turning away from the suspect when he realized that the two officers who had accompanied him to the scene were not following him into the apartment, raising the question whether Serpico had actually been brought to the apartment by his colleagues to be executed.

On May 3, 1971, New York Metro Magazine published an article about Serpico titled "Portrait of an Honest Cop". On May 10, 1971, Serpico testified at the departmental trial of an NYPD lieutenant who was accused of taking bribes from gamblers.

who is the greater threat to public safety?

DailyMail | Los Angeles police have been accused of resorting to 'street justice' in the hunt for suspected killer ex-cop Christopher Dorner, after they mistakenly shot a 71-year-old woman delivering newspapers and left her truck riddled with bullets.

The victim, Emma Hernandez, said the officers did not give any warning or commands and just began firing at her blue pickup truck, according to her attorney. Her 47-year-old daughter was a passenger in the car at the time.

'Tragically, we believe this is a case of mistaken identity,' Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said about the incident.

Hernandez was shot twice in the back and was hospitalized in stable condition. Her daughter, Margie Carranza, was a passenger in the truck at the time of the shooting. She was wounded by glass from the shattered window.

The two women were distributing copies of the Los Angeles Times before the terrifying incident. They were driving an aqua blue Toyota Tacoma unlike the description of the Dorner's vehicle, a gray Nissan Titan.

When police began firing and gunshots entered through the back windshield of the truck, the terrified women just 'covered their faces and huddled down,' the attorney for the two victims told the Los Angeles Times.

The police gunfire came from officers who were protecting a department captain and his family who had been included on the fugitive's hit list.

Six LAPD officers who had fired at Hernandez's vehicle have been placed on administrative leave.

The women's lawyer, Glen Jonas, told the Times LAPD not follow protocol or the rules of engagement before they decided to exercise deadly force.

'With no warning, no command, or no instructions, LAPD opened fire on their vehicle,' Jonas said.

'This wasn't even close,' their attorney said.

'This was two petite Latina women versus a large black man, with a different vehicle, different color. The police didn't take the time to do the identification.  They didn't give  the "suspect" the opportunity to surrender. So the whole thing was just mishandled, and we expect that the city will acknowledge that and go from there.'

LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith says the department's Chief Charlie Beck met with the women in their Torrance home Saturday to apologize and tell them he had arranged for someone to donate a new pickup truck.

The truck will be donated early this week, Smith said.

wait, wasn't django's truck burnt-out at big bear mountain?

that didn't take long...,

Associated Press | Where Dorner sees himself as a warrior, others see someone much different. The 6-foot, 270-pounder is a physical hulk who — despite his size — seemed to battle deep-seated insecurities, lived with his mother and cracked under the pressures of police work. Court and police files show that Dorner once began weeping while on duty in a patrol car, awkwardly flashed his police badge on a first date and told a girlfriend he kept his emotions bottled up.

Those who study the psyches of criminals said Dorner's aggressive and self-aggrandizing rant indicates a classic case of malignant narcissist personality disorder. Some people with the disorder are extremely thin-skinned and vengeful, said Mary Ellen O'Toole, a retired FBI profiler.

They may seem insecure, she said, but in reality their rages — and even tears — are extreme reactions to real or imagined criticisms because they have such grandiose visions of themselves.

"He's putting in his manifesto that he's going to use all the training he received as an LAPD officer and as a military officer to basically hold Southern California hostage, and to be there when you least expect it," she said. "Is he deadly? Yes. Of course he has killed people."

"But is he capable of taking on some 1,000 officers looking for him? That's someone with a personality disorder," she said.

deep disillusionment...,

enidnews | The military stresses integrity. It is apparently a lesson learned well by two Vance Air Force Base students.

An Enid church is a little richer today thanks to the integrity of Lt. Andrew Baugher, a Marine student at Vance, and Ensign Chris Dorner, a Navy student pilot.

The two were driving into Enid Sunday afternoon when they spotted a bank bag in the middle of the road.

After turning around, they picked up the bag and found it contained nearly $8,000. They promptly took the bag to the Enid Police Department

The money belongs to Enid Korean Church of Grace, 724 W. Randolph, and the bag contained $7,792 in cash and checks.

“I thought it was a wallet. We turned around and found it was a bank envelope,” Baugher said. “We opened it and found plenty of cash in there.”

Baugher said the pair did not know if the money was lost or stolen, but took it to the police department.

“I thought it was a piece of cardboard,” Dorner said. “When we passed it I thought it was a large purse and turned around.”

When the two opened the envelope, they saw the checks and the church’s deposit slip.

hoisting the wicked...,

Fist tap Big Don.

they are obama's favorite weapon...,

what does it mean for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary assassination force?

guardian | The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global "war on terror". It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the "kill lists" they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.

JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more "flexibility" to expand its operations globally.

JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:

"JSoc operates with practically no accountability."

Scahill calls JSoc the president's "paramilitary". Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.

What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world?

does this mean we're not the good guys anymore?

guardian | The full extent of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme has been laid bare with the publication of a report showing there is evidence that more than a quarter of the world's governments covertly offered support.

A 213-page report compiled by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a New York-based human rights organisation, says that at least 54 countries co-operated with the global kidnap, detention and torture operation that was mounted after 9/11, many of them in Europe.

So widespread and extensive was the participation of governments across the world that it is now clear the CIA could not have operated its programme without their support, according to the OSJI.

"There is no doubt that high-ranking Bush administration officials bear responsibility for authorising human rights violations associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and the impunity that they have enjoyed to date remains a matter of significant concern," the report says.

"But responsibility for these violations does not end with the United States. Secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, designed to be conducted outside the United States under cover of secrecy, could not have been implemented without the active participation of foreign governments. These governments too must be held accountable."

twenty four facts about detroit that will shock you...,

How the ruins of Detroit are a warning for America

economicollapseblog | Once upon a time it was a symbol of everything that America was doing right, but today it has been transformed into a rotting, decaying, post-apocalyptic hellhole.  Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.  It was the greatest manufacturing city the world had ever seen, and the rest of the globe looked at Detroit with a sense of awe and wonder.  But now the city of Detroit has become a bad joke to the rest of the world.  Unemployment is rampant, 60 percent of the children are living in poverty and the city government is on the verge of bankruptcy.  They say that Detroit is just a matter of "weeks or months" away from running out of cash, and when Detroit does declare bankruptcy it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States.  But don't look down on Detroit, because the truth is that Detroit is really a metaphor for what is happening to America as a whole.  In the United States today, our manufacturing infrastructure has been gutted, poverty is absolutely exploding and we are rapidly approaching national bankruptcy.  Detroit may have gotten there first, but the rest of the country will follow soon enough.

Back during the boom years, Detroit was known for making great cars.  Today, it is known for scenes of desolation and decay.  It is full of vandalized homes, abandoned schools and empty factories.  The following description of what Detroit looks like at this point is from an article by Barry Yeoman...

It’s hard to describe the city’s physical landscape without producing what Detroiters call “ruin porn.” Brick houses with bays and turrets sit windowless or boarded up. Whole blocks, even clusters of blocks, have been bulldozed. Retail strips have been reduced to a dollar store here, a storefront church there, and a whole lot of plywood in between. Not a single chain supermarket remains.

So what caused the downfall of one of the greatest cities on earth?

Well, here is a hint...

Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

When you are a manufacturing area, and you lose half of your manufacturing jobs over the course of a single decade, of course things are going to get really, really bad.

So just how bad have things gotten in Detroit?

yale suing former student borrowers...,

bloomberg | Needy U.S. borrowers are defaulting on almost $1 billion in federal student loans earmarked for the poor, leaving schools such as Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania with little choice except to sue their graduates.

The record defaults on federal Perkins loans may jeopardize the prospects of current students since they are part of a revolving fund that colleges give to students who show extraordinary financial hardship.

Yale, Penn and George Washington University have all sued former students over nonpayment, court records show. While no one tracks the number of lawsuits, students defaulted on $964 million in Perkins loans in the year ended June 2011, 20 percent more than five years earlier, government data show. Unlike most student loans -- distributed and collected by the federal government -- Perkins loans are administered by colleges, which use repayment money to lend to other poor students.

“If you borrow to go to school, it may not be just the government that ends up coming after you if you can’t pay,” said Deanne Loonin, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Boston. “We offer credit very easily.” If the student doesn’t benefit financially from the education, “the government or the school comes after them very aggressively.”

Perkins Pot The increase in the amount of defaulted loans among poor students comes as President Barack Obama says he wants to expand access to college for working-class families and increase funding for the Perkins program. Under his proposal, the pot for Perkins loans would increase to $8.5 billion from about $1 billion. The Education Department would service the loans instead of colleges.

Aaron Graff, a farmer’s son from Denver, graduated from George Washington in 2010 with the help of $62,500 in scholarships over two years, according to his financial-aid award letters. He defaulted on $4,000 in Perkins loans.

Graff, 30, said he hasn’t been able to find a full-time job. He earns $800 a month from teaching high-school equivalency courses and restores basements for extra money. He said he is trying to pay off other student loans first because they were co-signed by his parents.

“I live on the bare minimum,” he said. “It’s not like I’m defaulting on my student loans to live the lavish life. I’m defaulting on my loans because I really don’t have it.”

the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance...,

organelle | Julian Jaynes gives us an inspiringly provocative model of the phases of the evolution of the inward connectivity we experience as consciousness, and he builds it around the changing spacialization of the inward stage, the place we think, and how it might have evolved over even relatively short amounts of time. Though I will refer to his ideas regularly because they offer convenient and salient models, what I have to offer differs and I hope may deepen the value we may retrieve from his inspiration. His concepts orient themselves around gods, metaphor, consciousness, and unique specializations in each of these domains across time. He proposes a fascinating and enthusiastically crafted speculative ladder of ascent and its histories in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this work, he exchanges the idea of a long emergence for a model of sudden emergence in relation to crisis — one that was devastating, and unexpected — beginning perhaps 3500 years ago — or ~63 generations ago. Whether or not his timelines are accurate, many of his noticings about the relationship between metaphor and consciouness are sublime. In his models to be bicameral is to be in common or constant contact with a supersentience, and when one refers to gods, angels, or messengers — it is this supersentience which is being referred to.

Jaynes’ central thesis is that consciousness we understand and experience was the result of a variety of radical terrestrial and social upheavals — over a period of several hundred years theoretically located between 1800 to 1300 B.C. These resulted in significant general changes in what it meant to be human, and our experience of consciousness, community, self, and cognition. Prior to these changes, he posits a ’bicameral’ consciousness, where the analog self is still in its formative moments, and is largely ‘ruled’ over by a semi-hallucinatory relationship with gods — personal and public — whose wills are intoned in an inward space that will later become the analog self, and the place of ‘me’. He is positing a ladder of ascension to complex representational consciousness which is emergent from the genesis and elaboration of inward stages or space. As each step on the ladder is achieved, the previous steps are conserved in a position that is now (where it was not before) observable from ‘outside’ — in essence all of this occurs this happens in a single space, the mind.

The gods were, in his theory, biocognitive products of emerging social and neuropsychic responses to larger scales of social connectivity which emanated primarily from synthesis of complexly evolved right-brain cognition in human groups of relatively stable and organized nature. They gods were ‘present’ because they were *heard/experienced as though present nearby, or within oneself. They were apparent in consensus and intimate contact with symbols of authority or sovereignty. Visually hallucinatory communication was less common, at least by the time in question in Jaynes’ work.

*[One interpretation is that this is a matter of the neurological precursor elements of the brain momentarily adopting control of the auditory system in order to re-assemble local authority. To do this, these features would act in concert, and mimetically adopt whatever general shape was equivalent to ‘the penultimate local authority’. This might be a person in a position of mastery, such as a ruler or parent — or it could be a god. It could also be a kind of simulated personage, a conglomerate from various sources.]

Jaynes portrays the connective aspect of the bicameral mind as a psychoemotional communications network which was uniquely implemented across a variety of cultures, while sharing a general and obvious template of organization and function. The connective nature of bicameral voices was a source of unification, identity, authorization, and real communication. People from a given community or place, under the authority of their shared bicamerally experienced god(s) and messengers, could cognitively sense what the relationship of another person, people, animal, or experience was to their god. Thus the local god(s) functioned as much as lexicons as they did as authorities — for it was only in relation to the god-holophore-characters that experience or information could be made sense of at all. I generally agree with his thesis that before we were ourselves, we were like the experiential agents of a god or gods still deeply enmeshed in learning and establishing themselves and their collective sentience potentials. When ripe, these would be exemplified in the human cogniscia of specific locales and societies.

The social networks of the periods in Jaynes’ focus (and perhaps many of our own) were spiral-ring networks organized around a central hub. This hub, in general, led to god, god’s messenger, or the domain of gods. Near the hub, there were often ‘special servants’ of various sorts. Simultaneously, many individuals appear to have had personal gods, or something of a analgous nature, such as the guardian angel metaphor we are still familiar with in the modern moment.

anonymous spanks banksters...,

WaPo | Anonymous is continuing its protest of federal computer crime law. Members claiming to be part of the hacking collective Sunday posted the names and contact information of over 4,000 banking executives to the government Web site of the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center. The file is no longer available on the government Web site, which was inaccessible as of Tuesday morning.

The file was posted to the Web site Sunday night and publicized through a Twitter account associated with an Anonymous initiative called “OpLastResort,” a report from ZDNet said. The information in the file includes professional and personal contact information for bank presidents, chief operating officers and others, and log-in information. A quick check of several of the officials’ names shows they are currently employed at the banks listed in the file, indicating that the information is fairly recent. Some of the data in the file may have come from Federal Reserve computers.

The Federal Reserve acknowledged the attack in a Tuesday statement. “The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product. The exposure was fixed shortly after discovery. It is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” spokesman Jim Strader said.

The Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center did not respond to requests for comment.

reinventing the world order? umm, no....,

tweetping

dailyreckoning | Most people today use technologies without a clue to the larger picture of what is really happening to the structure of the world because of them. People are staring at the trees and not noticing the gigantic, growing, and ever expanding forest, much less considering the meaning of it all.

This is an attempt to provide a larger look, starting with one of the most beautiful images on the entire Web. It comes from Tweetping.net. This site lights up a tiny pixel for every public communication sent through Twitter.

What you see serves as a proxy for the growth of global communication networks far more complex and voluminous than most people imagine. The reach extends far beyond that of any regime in the world. By comparison, the control that government has over the planet, as egregious and ghastly as it is, is miniscule.

This puts into perspective the $3 million that the Eurocrats are spending to skew upcoming elections in favor of centralized solutions and put down Euroskeptics. It cannot be done. Governments think they can control this, but they can’t.

Twitter was born in 2006, but its present form was built by users themselves. The developers made the infrastructure and let it happen. It is not only about just telling your friends what you had for lunch. It serves its users — each of whom has exactly as much power as any other — as a portal to the entire digital universe.

six israeli security chiefs stun the world...,

amanpour | Six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secretive internal security service, have spoken out as a group for the first time and are making stunning revelations.

The men who were responsible for keeping Israel safe from terrorists now say they are afraid for Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state.

Israeli film director Dror Moreh managed to get them all to sit down for his new documentary: “The Gatekeepers.” It is the story of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, as told by the people at the crossroads of some of the most crucial moments in the security history of the country.

“If there is someone who understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s those guys,” the director told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Against the backdrop of the currently frozen peace process, all six argue – to varying degrees – that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is bad for the state of Israel.

The oldest amongst the former chiefs, Avraham Shalom, says Israel lost touch with how to coexist with the Palestinians as far back as the aftermath of the Six Day War of 1967, with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, when the country started doubling down on terrorism.

“We forgot about the Palestinian issue,” Shalom says in the film.

A major impediment to a meaningful strategy, they say, are the Jewish extremists inside Israel – people like the Jewish Israeli who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, or the 1980 plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine in Jerusalem.

A central theme of the documentary is the idea that Israel has incredible tactics, but lacks long-term strategy. That is to say, the security apparatus is able to pacify terrorists, but if operations do not support a move toward a peace settlement, then they are meaningless.

Moreh said he was shocked to hear Avraham Shalom, Austrian-born and a refugee of the Nazis, compare the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories to Germany’s occupation of Europe.