los zetas

wikipedia | Los Zetas is a powerful and violent criminal syndicate in Mexico, and is considered by the U.S. government to be the "most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico."^[7][8] The origins of Los Zetas date back to 1999, when commandos of the Mexican Army's elite forces deserted their ranks and decided to work as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, a powerful drug trafficking organization.^[9] In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away from their former employer and formed their own criminal organization.^[10][11]

 

Los Zetas are well armed and equipped, and unlike other traditional criminal organizations in Mexico, drug trafficking makes up at least 50% of their revenue, while a large portion of the income comes from other activities directed against both rival drug cartels and civilians;^[9] their brutal tactics, which include beheadings, torture and indiscriminate slaughter, show that they often prefer brutality over bribery.^[9] Los Zetas are also Mexico's largest drug cartel in terms of geographical presence, overtaking its bitter rival, the Sinaloa Cartel.^[12] Besides drug trafficking, Los Zetas operate through protection rackets, assassinations, extortion, kidnappings, and other criminal activities.^[13] The organization is based in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, directly across the border from Laredo, Texas.^[14][15]

po thang...,

oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism..,

pnas | Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.

time to terminate the warfare state...,

WaPo | With Tuesday’s election results, President Obama and Congress should take steps to end “the warfare state” instituted by the George W. Bush White House.

No one can deny that threats to U.S. security exist around the world. But the Defense Department needs continued reform to meet those varied threats and to cut the most costly elements in the core Pentagon budget that were developed for past wars.

Starting in 2003, the United States for the first time fought wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, without a tax to pay for them. Ironically, the core Defense budget during the Bush administration was supposed to include funds for such events.

The September 2001 quadrennial review, which laid the policy foundation for the Bush fiscal 2003 Pentagon budget, called for forces that could “swiftly defeat aggression in overlapping major conflicts while preserving for the president the option to call for a decisive victory in one of those conflicts — including the possibility of regime change or occupation.” That sounds a lot like foreseeing the invasion of Iraq that came 18 months later. The plan said the military also could, within the proposed budget, “Conduct a limited number of smaller-scale contingency operations.”

Still, supplemental budgets were sought for the two wars, putting the costs, now near $1.5 trillion, on a credit card.

the most devastating day...,

White people mourning Mitt Romney.
Fist tap Dale.

family business

NYTimes | They might have been the Hinterpfanns. Apart from the ancient priestly names of Cohen and Levin, Jews in Europe were called by patronymics (as ''Isaac ben Elchanan'' -- ''Isaac, son of Elchanan'') until little more than 200 years ago, when they began to acquire, often at the caprice of officials, what we think of as ''Jewish names'' like Bernstein or Rosenthal. But in the Judengasse, the squalid Frankfurt ghetto, the downtrodden inhabitants were known by their addresses. One family had lived in a house with a red shield hanging outside, ''zum roten Schild,'' before moving to another, ''zur Hinterpfann'' (''the warming pan'').

The red shield name stuck nonetheless, and Mayer Amschel Rothschild, born probably in 1744, was the first member of his family known by what would become one of the most famous names in Europe. By his death in 1812, he had risen from obscure coin dealer to international financier, establishing his sons in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, as well as in Frankfurt. And his tightknit family firm grew into what Niall Ferguson calls ''for most of the century between 1815 and 1914 . . . easily the biggest bank in the world.''

Their enthralling story has often been told before, but never in such authoritative detail. Ferguson is a young Oxford don of remarkable energy and prolificity, who has previously written a learned book on German financial history and has just published in England a long book on World War I, as well as this Rothschild history in its 1,300-page entirety. The American publishers have taken pity on their readers' wrists and split it into two volumes: ''The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848'' will be followed in the fall of 1999 by ''The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1848-1997.'' The study marks the bicentenary of Nathan Rothschild's arrival in London, where N. M. Rothschild & Sons of New Court was to become the most famous of all the branches of the great cousinage and whose archives were opened to the author.

Why the explosive Jewish success in finance during the 19th century? The simplest explanation is that, as the Jews began to emerge from the heaviest restrictions of the ancien regime, money-dealing was at first the only avenue open to them. The Rothschilds' particular rise to greatness is a complex story, but the outlines are clear enough: the coincidence of the opening of the ghetto doors, the French Revolution, the ensuing two decades of war across Europe and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in England. Thus the family progressed rapidly from coin dealing and money-changing to trading in Lancashire textiles and transmitting the funds for the Duke of Wellington's armies.

There were eminent Victorians, notably the great English financial writer Walter Bagehot, who argued that the House of Rothschild wasn't really a bank at all, in the sense of a place where one could deposit and withdraw money. The crucial Rothschild role in high finance wasn't through deposit banking but through the development of an international market for transferable, interest-paying government bonds.

The career of Mayer Amschel Rothschild saw an intimate partnership with Landgrave William IX of Hesse-Kassel, a libidinous and avaricious prince whose begetting 12 illegitimate children still left him time for speculating with a large inheritance (partly acquired a generation earlier when the Hessian Army was hired out to the highest bidder, which was to say the King of England fighting his war in America). In this relationship, Rothschild remained in some ways the junior partner, the ''Hofjude'' or court Jew of tradition.

Soon the Rothschilds were floating government bonds on a much larger scale -- and then speculating in them. They shrewdly got out of British consols in 1817, but England was the nation where the family flourished above all. They acquired opulent houses in London and the country, and in 1850 Lionel Rothschild was finally accepted as an M.P. when the parliamentary oath ''on the faith of a true Christian'' was dropped.

The family moved from Tory to Whig, but they were never democratic egalitarians, and their story isn't necessarily evidence for the comforting notion that capitalism is the midwife of freedom. There was nevertheless a political reason for their affinity with England: a constitutional country with responsible government was quite simply a better bet. Whatever else the British Government did, it was not going to repudiate its debts in the manner of Continental autocrats. And so, as Ferguson shows, from Nathan's time ''relations with the Bank of England were close and mutually beneficial.''

In this period, England was also a better bet than the United States. The Rothschilds never became big American players. They liked to lend to the government of a country before they did commercial business there, but this was difficult when the United States was a genuinely loose federation, some of whose states were ''among the least reliable'' of all borrowers in the 19th century, and especially when Andrew Jackson was conducting his war against the Bank of the United States.

occupy movement outperforming red cross in hurricane relief?

slate | In Sunset Park, a predominantly Mexican and Chinese neighborhood in South Brooklyn, St. Jacobi’s Church was one of the go-to hubs for people who wanted to donate food, clothing, and warm blankets or volunteer help other New Yorkers who were still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.  On Saturday, Ethan Murphy, one of the people heading the kitchen operation, estimated they would prepare and send out 10,000 meals to people in need. Thousands and thousands of pounds of clothes were being sorted, labeled, and distributed, and valuable supplies like heaters and generators were being loaded up in cars to be taken out to the Rockaways, Staten Island and other places in need.  However, this well-oiled operation wasn’t organized by the Red Cross, New York Cares, or some other well-established volunteer group. This massive effort was the handiwork of none other than Occupy Wall Street—the effort is known as Occupy Sandy.

The scene at St. Jacobis on Saturday was friendly, orderly chaos.  Unlike other shelters that had stopped collecting donations or were looking for volunteers with special skills such as medical training, Occupy Sandy was ready to take anyone willing to help. A wide range of people pitched in, including a few small children making peanut butter sandwiches, but most volunteers were in their 20s and 30s. A large basement rec room had become a hive of vegetable chopping and clothes bagging. They held orientations throughout the day for new volunteers. One of the orientation leaders, Ian Horst, who has been involved with a local group called Occupy Sunset Park for the past year, says he was “totally blown away by the response” and the sheer numbers of people who showed up and wanted to help. He estimated that he’d given an orientation to 200 people in the previous hour.

fist tap arnach...,

reuters | Colorado became the first state to legalize the possession and sale of marijuana for recreational use on Tuesday, setting up a possible showdown with the federal government as backers of a similar measure in Washington state declared victory.

A third measure to remove criminal penalties for personal possession and cultivation of recreational cannabis was defeated in Oregon, where significantly less money and campaign organization was devoted to the cause.

Supporters of a Colorado constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana declared victory and opponents conceded defeat after returns showed the measure garnering nearly 53 percent of the vote versus 47 percent against.

"Colorado will no longer have laws that steer people toward using alcohol, and adults will be free to use marijuana instead if that is what they prefer. And we will be better of as a society because of it," said Mason Tvert, co-director of the Colorado pro-legalization campaign.

The legalization puts the state in direct conflict with the federal government, which classifies cannabis as an illegal narcotic.

kresge auditorium november 1967

the republican id

nytimes | This patch of southern Ohio between Cincinnati and Dayton is not the up-for-grabs Ohio you’ve read so much about. This is decided country, where House Speaker John Boehner is running for re-election unopposed, where “Defeat Obama” and “Romney/Ryan” lawn signs glisten in the chilly drizzle.

At the heart of it is a university whose students, according to a poll by the campus paper, favor Romney by 49 percent to 40 percent, and tend to think, as one senior half-joked, “that Sean Hannity is the news.” This is clearly not the place to gauge the last-minute mood swings of a state that many consider decisive.

It is, however, an interesting place to ponder the governing mentality of a Romney/Ryan administration, if that is what voters deliver on Tuesday. Miami University, a pretty grid of red brick, lawns and autumn foliage, is the place where Paul Ryan’s view of the world jelled, under the tutelage of an economist he describes as his mentor. I decided to spend my last column before the election peeking through this little window into the Republican id. If Mitt Romney is our next president, many in the party hope Ryan will play the role of chief ideologist. And if Romney loses, Ryan starts the 2016 campaign for his party’s nomination near the front of the line.

Ryan’s alma mater draws mostly white, upper-middle-class students from Midwest Republican families that are attracted to Miami as a place unlikely to turn their children against them. A well-endowed business school (Ryan majored in economics and political science) and a robust frat culture (Ryan was an enthusiastic Delta Tau Delta) tend to reinforce the conservative values represented by the Republican ticket — with one important asterisk we’ll get to later. In 2008, many Miami students veered out of character, thrilled by the historic Obama campaign, but now that enthusiasm has given way to disappointment and to something few of these kids have ever experienced: economic anxiety. 

if Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of latinos, blacks, single women and highly educated urban whites...,

esquire | In case you have misplaced you magic pundit decoder ring, the latest one-word euphemism for "Where The White Folk At?" is "demographics." If the president wins, it will be because of "demographics," which increasingly means, in Republican weaselspeak, that, despite the best efforts of our governors and secretaries of state, the wrong people are voting again. Or, as they put it around Casa Romney, The Help are revolting. Your Republican party may be a tribe of a single skin tone, but it is a tribe of many codes.

As is usually the case, Politico whittled the problem right down to the nub, and then hit itself between the eyes repeatedly with the nub.

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That's what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it's possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

Bartender, a double Prestone, and make it snappy, my good man.

Apparently, only people who look like John Harris and Jim VandeHei can be said to make up a "mandate." (Remember, by the way, that this is the publication that got rid of Joe Williams for making the unremarkable statement that Willard Romney is more comfortable around white people. It is equally unremarkable to say that this also would seem to be the case with his former employers.) This is now part of the campaign dialogue. The panel with my man Chuck Todd chewed it over this morning, and only a very cynical person would suggest that this is the respectable objective-journalist parallel to the fact that the Republicans have been making things quite plain of late as to their belief that some people deserve the franchise, and that Certain People do not. Why, just yesterday, Romney was talking about how, if you voted for him, you "shouldn't expect" a check from the government. Fist tap Dale.

the permanent militarization of america

nytimes | Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned in 1953, early in his presidency. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He also knew that Congress was a big part of the problem. (In earlier drafts, he referred to the “military-industrial-Congressional” complex, but decided against alienating the legislature in his last days in office.) Today, there are just a select few in public life who are willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do — from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich — are dismissed as unrealistic.

The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true “third rail” of American politics. In this strange universe where those without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat to national security.

Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war. Almost all think it ordinary to hear of drone strikes in Yemen or Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. The recent revelation of counterterrorism bases in Africa elicits no surprise in them, nor do the military ceremonies that are now regular features at sporting events. That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.

Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at our debt, deficits and still expanding military-industrial complex. And he would certainly be critical of the “insidious penetration of our minds” by video game companies and television networks, the news media and the partisan pundits. With so little knowledge of what Eisenhower called the “lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield,” they have done as much as anyone to turn the hard work of national security into the crass business of politics and entertainment. Fist tap Arnach.

the neverending...,

mexican cartels enslave engineers to build radio network..,

wired | The Mexican military is trying to dismantle an extensive network of radio antennas built and operated by the notorious Zeta drug cartel. But the authorities haven’t had much luck shutting Radio Zeta down. Not only is much of the equipment super-easy to replace. But the cartel has also apparently found some unwilling — and alarming — assistance by kidnapping and enslaving technicians to help build it.

At least 36 engineers and technicians have been kidnapped in the past four years, according to a report from Mexican news site Animal Politico, with an English translation published by organized-crime monitoring group InSight. Worse, none of the engineers have been held for ransom — they’ve just disappeared. Among them include at least one IBM employee and several communications technicians from a firm owned by Mexico’s largest construction company. “The fact that skilled workers have been disappearing in these areas is no accident,” Felipe Gonzalez, head of Mexico’s Senate Security Committee, told the website.

“None of the systems engineers who disappeared have been found,” Gonzalez said. Unlike Colombia, where drug traffickers control large amounts of territory and can keep hostages for many years, Mexico’s drug territory is more in flux. “When they need specialists they catch them, use them, and discard them,” said the father of one kidnapped engineer.

For at least six years, Mexico’s cartels have relied in part on a sophisticated radio network to handle their communications. The Zetas hide radio antennas and signal relay stations deep inside remote and hard-to-reach terrain, connect them to solar panels, and then link the facilities to radio-receiving cellphones and Nextel devices. While the kingpins stay off the network — they use the internet to send messages — the radio network acts as a shadow communication system for the cartels’ lower-level players and lookouts, and a tool to hijack military radios.

One network spread across northeastern Mexico and dismantled last year included 167 radio antennas alone. As recently as September, Mexican marines found a 295-foot-high transmission tower in Veracruz state. And while the founding leadership of the Zetas originated in the Mexican special forces — and who might have had the know-how to set up a radio system — relatively few of the ex-commando types are still active today. Fist tap Dale.

obama was not politically produced by the black community...,

Guardian | ...but presented to it after he had made his way through the mostly white elites. His political ties to the black community are not organic but symbolic. His arrival in the political class is hailed as the progress of a community when in fact it is the advancement of an individual.

"[Obama] is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness," Angela Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me in late 2007. "It's the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That's what makes him conceivable as a presidential candidate. He's become the model of diversity in this period … a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference. The change that brings no change."

That is why criticisms of him for "not doing enough for his own people" both miss and devalue the point. The demand to close the racial gaps bequeathed by centuries of discrimination is not a sectional interest but a national one. Demands for equality and racial justice should be made to any president of whatever race or party.

Obama should do more for black people – not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama – not because they're black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and centre and if black people aren't going to apply that pressure then nobody else will.

But in fact precisely the opposite has been happening. With Obama in the White House African Americans representatives have been backpedalling. Black politicians, too, have held their fire.

"With 14% unemployment, if we had a white president we'd be marching around the White House," said the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Emmanuel Cleaver. "The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white." That's pathetic and counterproductive. These are the very people who are now showing up with empty hands and trying to galvanise the black community to go to the polls.

Their reticence is partly explained by the fear of a backlash. "If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us," Maxine Waters, a California Democrat in the House, told a largely black audience in Detroit last year. But then that's what leadership is about. Explaining to those audiences that there are large numbers of people lobbying for Obama's attention, including people with huge amounts of money and power. If the black community wants it they must demand it.

Some have spoken out. In August after a month-long round of job fairs organised by the CBC across the nation John Conyers, the longest serving black American in Congress said. "We want [Obama] to know from this day forward that we've had it. We want him to come out on our side and advocate, and not to watch and wait … We're suffering." Unfortunately it was followed by little in the way of action.

In the absence of that pressure Obama has felt little need to focus his attention on the problem, even rhetorically. In his first two years in office he talked about race less than any Democratic president since 1961. In all of his state of the union speeches he mentioned poverty just three times: last year's was the first since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor at all. When he did talk about it it was to preach better parenting, healthy meals and greater discipline.

At a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in September he told his former colleagues: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." Compare that to the meeting he had with bankers not long after he was elected when they thought he was going to impose serious regulation. "I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks. I'm not out there to go after you," he told them. "I'm protecting you."

This would not be the first time that the black Americans have shown great loyalty to a Democratic president who did not return the favour. Bill Clinton is still revered even though when he ran in 1992 he made a special trip back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector – a black, lobotomised inmate so mentally incapacitated that when given his last meal, he opted to save the dessert for after the execution. When in power he signed off on a welfare reform that would prove devastating to large numbers of black families, especially women. He presided over an economic boom Obama does not even have that.

an overcrowded city devoid of nature overcrowded by millions of increasingly desperate killer-apes...,

Hundreds of thousands of people in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey may not have power restored for up to 10 more days, officials warned Thursday. Meanwhile, weather forecasters said a winter storm could hit the Northeast next week Meanwhile, FEMA and the National Guard dropped off diapers and water in the Bronx, where there has been no running water or electricity, NBC New York reported. Residents there said that people had broken into a supermarket to steal water and that the streets had grown dangerous. Without electricity, there's no light, and without cell service, there's no way to call for help. The areas taking the longest, spokeswoman Sara Banda told NBCNews.com are those with overhead lines. "It's taking a bit longer," she said, noting that crews have had to deal with 100,000 downed lines.

just-in-time consumption-supply chains - intensely vulnerable to slow infrastructure repairs...,

WaPo | The slow pace of recovery from Hurricane Sandy generated frustration and anger across the New York region Friday as residents struggled with shortages of fuel, enduring power outages and a sense among those in the city’s outer boroughs that their suffering was being overlooked.

In Staten Island, where 19 people have died as a result of the storm, more than in any other New York City borough, exasperation at the lack of city, state and federal assistance mixed with bitterness and despair.

“I don’t see the Corps of Engineers,” Jim Brennan, a retired New York firefighter, said as he stepped over fragments of boat hulls and other debris blown onto his seafront lawn. “No National Guard. No Red Cross. No FEMA. No [New York Department of Environmental Protection]. No garbage trucks. American flags are flying all over this neighborhood. Where is our government?”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) canceled Sunday’s running of the New York City Marathon, yielding to critics who said it was insensitive to host a sporting event while authorities were still pulling the dead from the storm’s wreckage.

“While life in much of our city is getting back to normal, for New Yorkers that have lost loved ones, the storm left a wound that I think will never heal,” Bloomberg told reporters earlier Friday. “For those that lost homes or businesses, recovery will be long and difficult.”

hmm..., one wonders?

Fist tap Arnach.

Radioisotope Stirling Engine Powered Airship for Low Altitude Operation on Venus

nasa | The feasibility of a Stirling engine powered airship for the near surface exploration of Venus was evaluated. The heat source for the Stirling engine was limited to 10 general purpose heat source (GPHS) blocks. The baseline airship utilized hydrogen as the lifting gas and the electronics and payload were enclosed in a cooled insulated pressure vessel to maintain the internal temperature at 320 K and 1 Bar pressure. The propulsion system consisted of an electric motor driving a propeller. An analysis was set up to size the airship that could operate near the Venus surface based on the available thermal power. The atmospheric conditions on Venus were modeled and used in the analysis. The analysis was an iterative process between sizing the airship to carry a specified payload and the power required to operate the electronics, payload and cooling system as well as provide power to the propulsion system to overcome the drag on the airship. A baseline configuration was determined that could meet the power requirements and operate near the Venus surface. From this baseline design additional trades were made to see how other factors affected the design such as the internal temperature of the payload chamber and the flight altitude. In addition other lifting methods were evaluated such as an evacuated chamber, heated atmospheric gas and augmented heated lifting gas. However none of these methods proved viable.