And apparently based on the so-called favorable employment report released Friday, U.S. sweet crude increased by $1.48 to end the week at $97.84 per barrel, while Brent picked up $2.51 to finish at $114.58 per barrel.
Gas-pump prices appear erratic, depending where ye be: Statewide average in California is $3.73 a gallon for regular, up 3.7 cents in a week, but meanwhile, a good friend of mine residing less than two hours south of me recently paid $4.19 a gallon — Sup with that?

(Illustration found here).

Maybe we should take the plunge already and go Eurozone — $10-a-gallon gas would force stiff-necked US peoples to alter lifestyles and move on before the whole thing becomes reality.
New fuel for old vehicles — there’s about 240.5 million cars and light trucks cruising US highways and the average age of those vehicles rose to 10.8 years last year from 10.4 in the year before, due mainly to bad times in Detroit and the economy.
Apparently from indications beyond a recession, US peoples have been easing off the private vehicle for awhile now.
Via AlterNet  two years ago:

Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15-17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.
Market saturation may be the dominant contributor to the peaking of the U.S. fleet.
The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers — nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.

Kids and cars:

Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people.
For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage.
Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.
In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars.
They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars.
Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license.
This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.
If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.

Plus these kids now are also faced with an incredible financial burden, not only with a humongous student-loan debt, but a bleak employment picture (despite Friday’s numbers) — unless one is an oil/gas person (corporations are people).

Maybe a bit of inequality right there: Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008…Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent.

Maybe venture into the ugly-oddness of fuel:

Gasoline prices are higher at the beginning of 2012 than at the beginning of any previous year ever — even at the beginning of 2008, a year when the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline reached a record $4.114 on July 7.
In its Daily Fuel Gauge Report, AAA Texas noted Friday a national average of $3.467 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline — up from $3.455 a day ago, $3.389 a week ago, $3.288 a month ago and $3.116 a year ago.
“We’re seeing the highest gasoline prices that we’ve seen,” Sarah Schimmer of AAA Texas said Friday.
“2011 was a record year, and in 2012 we’re definitely seeing higher prices.”

And all this for mobility, not only just for driving my Jeep around town, but oil/gas framed within the way-big picture of how the existence of an entire civilization depends on the black, bubbly shit — no way yesteryear can continue into the nowadays.
In reality, peak oil is actually the end of easy oil, low prices at the pump and so forth, and this peak supposedly occurred worldwide in about 2005 — so we’re already on the downside.
One interesting look at future possibilities comes from “Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse,” a collection of essays from economists, environmental scientists, a couple of architects and even a corporate lawyer on the premise of how close we are to being totally f*cked.
From a review by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall of Fleeing Vesuvius and posted Friday at DissidentVoice:

The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent.
For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse.
Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.
…
All (the essay writers) are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.
In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years.
He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible — an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it.
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further.
Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

And Ms Bramhall also reveals a brightness from the essays, not all doom-n-gloom: The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.
Inspiration needs to have already been popped — too much pie-in-the-sky without actual political reality.
One updated  sample chapter of Fleeing Vesuvius can be found at The Oil Drum.
And another review of the essay collection can be found here.

A major snag in the optimism — the above-mentioned political reality.
So says Kumi Naidoo, head of the environmental group Greenpeace, who spoke Friday at the big-wig, pow-wow Munich Security Conference, and chimed a loud alarm.
Via Raw Story:

“The moment of history we are in can be described as a boiling point or a perfect storm,” he told the assembled gathering of world leaders, ministers, top brass and defence policy experts at the annual Munich gathering.
“We are seeing a convergence of multiple crises happening at the same time. A food crisis, climate crisis, poverty crisis … and then of course the financial crisis and a demographic crisis and a global governance democratic crisis,” he added.
“The bottom line is that too many of our leaders … are sleepwalking us into a crisis of epic proportion,” he claimed.

One of those doing the sleepwalking is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s also in Munich, Germany, this weekend for the conference, but her schedule has no room for end-of-life-as-we-know-it antics fostered by environmental activists — Clinton will most-likely reminisce about “…what a key partner Europe is in the global security, economic, democracy promotion agenda that we have.”

Just wake ‘em later.

Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.

Daily Kos  has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.

All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.

An understanding via the LA Times:

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”

The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.

In wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and pestilence, understanding of the great scheme of things seems to be drowned in an unknown pool of mystery — unless one considers the GOP presidential race, where there’s absolutely nothing but puzzlement, but no mystery — and the wave of unprecedented problems appears to have come from nowhere, but actually have been here all along.

We live in a most-interesting age.

(Illustration found here).

And in the recent death of Kim Jong il is another mystery — how did he live as long as he did?
The answer: By being an international village-idiot man of mystery, who was fairly smart.
From Time magazine this past Wednesday:

Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002, Kim travelled to Russia to meet with then President Vladimir Putin, and he asked Pulikovsky to do him a peculiar favor.
“He told me, ‘Konstantin, when the official meeting [with Putin] is over, I want to sit down with him in private for ten minutes, with no one in the room, not even interpreters. I need to tell him something.”
That evening, the private meeting was arranged, and as Pulikovsky escorted Kim back toward the border afterward, his curiosity got to him.
“I asked him, ‘Comrade Kim, if it’s no secret, why did you need these ten minutes?’” Pulikovsky says.
“And he smiled at me and said, ‘What’s the difference? The point is for Bush to wonder what we were talking about.’
For me that was classic Kim.
He always found some way to get snagged in your thoughts, to make himself into a mystery.”

And he did indeed drive George Jr. even more crazed than he already is and helped foster the fright of a North Korea.

This week a natural mystery — a metallic ball fell out of the sky onto the plains of Africa’s Namibia, although the object has been called “man made,” what it is and exactly where it came from is…
From Australia’s ABC News:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres, the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.
It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilograms, Mr Ludik said.
The ball was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 metres wide.
Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past 20 years.

Life is getting real peculiar when big, metal balls start falling from the sky — Chicken Little don’t know shit.

“Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.
Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.
With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.”
– George Orwell, 1984 (quote found here)

(Illustration found here).

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke Monday during a panel discussion at London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism — he was announcing another WikiLeaks dump, this time the files concern private surveillance companies who have worked with various world governments to track whoever via monitoring software integrated into electronic devices.

“Who here has a BlackBerry?
Who here uses Gmail?
Well you are all screwed!” Assange exclaimed.
“The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right to countries around the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products.”

Meanwhile, just yesterday, Sen. Al Franken demanded an explanation on how the so-called ‘Carrier IQ,’ installed all new Android smartphones, really works — this hidden software  is supposedly meant to help mobile carriers monitor and diagnose problems with their devices, but in reality may transmit personal information.
In a letter to Carrier IQ President and CEO Larry Lenhart, Franken wanted more information on the capabilities of the device.
Via Raw Story:

“I am very concerned by recent reports that your company’s software—pre-installed on smartphones used by millions of Americans—is logging and may be transmitting extraordinarily sensitive information from consumers’ phones…
“I understand the need to provide usage and diagnostic information to carriers,” he continued.
“I also understand that carriers can modify Carrier IQ’s software.
But it appears that Carrier IQ’s software captures a broad swath of extremely sensitive information from users that would appear to have nothing to do with diagnostics—including who they are calling, the contents of the texts they are receiving, the contents of their searches, and the websites they visit.”
“These actions may violate federal privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Franken warned.
“This is potentially a very serious matter.”

Serious indeed.
Franken was responding to a claim from Trevor Eckhart, a 25-year-old electronics expert, that the Carrier IQ operation can be used in nefarious ways.
On Eckhart’s blog he explains how this works, and despite a lot of geek shit (non-sensible to me), he concludes:

The fact that it’s embedded into the shipped device raises very serious security and privacy concerns.
…
The CIQ application is embedded so deeply in the device that it can’t be fully removed without rebuilding the phone from source code.
This is only possible for a user with advanced skills and a FULLY unlocked device.
…
If a bad actor discovered a vulnerability or used malware, he could potentially exploit that opportunity to become a “CIQ operator,” leaving many users helpless against the extensive collection and misuse of their own information and no way to stop it.
With so much moving code across the operating system, I would say the chances of malware looking here isn’t that far-fetched.

Of course, Carrier IQ got pissed at Eckhart, fired off a cease-and-desist letter and demanded he issue an apology for calling its software a”rootkit,” but back-tracked when Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved.
The EFF is an US-based non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization.
From CNET News:

Just days later, Carrier IQ did an about face after the Electronic Frontier Foundation responded to its cease-and-desist letter, saying that Eckhart’s comments and research are protected under the Copyright Act’s fair use provision.
“Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart,” the company said in response to the EFF’s letter.
“We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.”

In dumping the surveillance logs, termed “The Spy Files,” WikiLeaks on its Web site explains:

International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world.
This industry is, in practice, unregulated.
Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers.
Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.
…
When citizens overthrew the dictatorships in Egypt and Libya this year, they uncovered listening rooms where devices from Gamma corporation of the UK, Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp of China monitored their every move online and on the phone.
…
The CIA officials have bought software that allows them to match phone signals and voice prints instantly and pinpoint the specific identity and location of individuals.
Intelligence Integration Systems, Inc., based in Massachusetts — sells a “location-based analytics” software called Geospatial Toolkit for this purpose.
Another Massachusetts company named Netezza, which bought a copy of the software, allegedly reverse engineered the code and sold a hacked version to the Central Intelligence Agency for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft.

And this is beyond just the old ‘looking over you shoulder‘ routine — be aware and be watchful, they are.

Most scientists identify as Democrats (55 percent), while 32 percent identify as independents and just 6 percent say they are Republicans.
– Pew Research, July 2009

Reality conception doesn’t require the brains of a rocket scientist, but one does need some kind of brain, and maybe a brain that’s not so flat.
Take Mitt Romney (please!), who carries an impressive foreign policy brain trust, but still lacks walking-around sense.

“Romney’s team is almost too broad, it’s soulless,” worried one GOP foreign policy expert who has informally advised the Romney campaign.
“You don’t know what direction he would go and some conservatives are worried it could be analysis paralysis.”

Before any paralysis, there’s gotta be some emotional feelings.

(Illustration found here).

A couple of weeks ago, Herman Cain blew off an interview with the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader due to the fact the talk would also be on video — a real bad piece of equipment for Cain after the Libya incident — and his campaign had installed a new rule: No video cameras in newspaper interviews.
And why? Because “videos are typically used for television, and it’s a newspaper.”
The  Union Leader responded in a blistering editorial, the final graph the kicker:

Videos these days are used by everyone, even random people on the street who record candidates with their cell phones.
The difference between television and newspaper interviews is not that cameras are present, but that newspaper interviews tend to be longer and more in depth.
The Cain campaign knows this.
It seems that Cain is fine with everyone seeing him give short, prepared answers, but not with everyone seeing him try to answer questions in which he has more than 30 or 60 seconds to respond.
He would do well to rethink that decision, for it gives the impression that he’s got something to hide.

No shit, sherlock.
Herman has a major, and disgusting, problem with women.

However, the much, way-much-bigger problem is that US politics sucks through a small straw.

Nearly 70 percent of US peoples consider the current Congressional operation the worse in 60 years — a “do-nothing Congress,” as scripted by Harry Truman in 1948 (via CNN).
The failure of the so-called “Super Committee” is a case in point — a do nothing due to the (t)he nastiness of the proposed cuts and the huge, huge ass-holeness of the GOP.

A most-excellent post yesterday at The Bonddad Blog reported the US could get going again if a lot of shit is put aside, with an emphasis on putting people back to work, pointedly on this country’s embarassing infrastructure.
The problem? Too much bullshit:

So what’s the problem?
Why is our system so fundamentally stuck?
Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear.
Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
…
The point to the above two paragraphs is simple: our political system is beyond broken and dysfunctional. I’m not quite sure where that is, but I do know it’s really bad place to be.
And that is why watching the train-wreck that is the daily news is so frustrating: solving the problem is easy, but our political system has become so dysfunctional as to prevent that from happening.

Brains infested with dry rot won’t work — the US is in a world of hurt.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says.
“But no one’s panicking.
“Yet.”

(Illustration found here).

The quote above comes from a Danger Room blog post on a computer virus that’s infested the US unmanned drone program, and although reportedly the canker hasn’t bothered flight operations at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the problem is no one knows for sure the source.

And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus.
“We think it’s benign.
“But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks.
The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread.
But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech.
That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

This throws a stick in the flywheel — drones are the future of US military adventures.
Even though officially the program doesn’t exist — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — it might be the single worst kept secret in the U.S. government.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, may as well have confirmed what most of the world already knows when he made two light-hearted references to the secret CIA drone program during a trip to Italy.
When the subject of Predator drones came up Friday during an appearance here at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Mr. Panetta said that in his old job, he had become “very familiar” with Predators.
Earlier in the day, speaking to Navy sailors in Naples, he made another crack about the effectiveness of Predators.
“Having moved from the CIA to the Pentagon, obviously I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had in the CIA, although the Predators weren’t bad,” Mr. Panetta said.

Leon is just one big belly laugh, huh?

The evolution of UAVs — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — is not all that hilarious, however, and has more than just a whiff of souless terminator about its infrastructure.
In February 2001, the machines unknowingly became self aware with the successful launch off itself of Hellfire missiles, thus, helping it evolve from a non-lethal, reconnaissance asset to an armed, highly accurate tank killer.
Or whoever.

The cowboy in George Jr. smoothed the transition — the first reported UAV-assassination use was in November 2002 with the blasting away of a SUV in the deserts of Yemen.
The SUV supposedly contained Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and some other guys — all were killed.
This, however, near the bottom of the USATODAY article reporting the incident (the link above): A Predator targeted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar at the start of the war on Afghanistan, but military lawyers could not decide whether he could be struck, officials have said. Its missiles were ultimately fired near him, but not to kill him.
Odd that, considering most-recent history.

The U.S. made nine drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007, 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009 — Obama’s first year in office — and 118 in 2010.
Through Oct. 2, 2011, a recorded 60 strikes.
Under George Jr., a drone strike every 40 days, and with Obama, way-up to one every four days.
All this bad shit by two drone operations — one through the US military, the other via the CIA.
The latter, according to a detailed New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, is the boner:

The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there.
As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare.
The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based.
It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel.
The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.

And this bit is from nearly two years ago.

So now the killing via drone in late September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki has revealed more publicly the darkness behind UAVs.
The al-Awlaki incident has opened a legal can of worms, raised all kinds of moral and ethical questions, but the concern is too late.
From Reuters:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said.
Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Glenn Greenwald has a most-interesting post on the subject here, and this note: Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list — in secret, without a shred of due process — would be a bridge too far?
And the other side of the bridge?

Unimaginable security opportunities.
Technology eventually shrinks both costs and ease of use — metro drones could eliminate the need for a lot of actual police officers, and with some modification, ID the shit out of just about anything:

A miniature airborne drone has helped archaeologists capture images for creating a 3-D model of an ancient burial mound in Russia, scientists say.
Archaeological sites are often in remote and rugged areas.
As such, it can be hard to reach and map them with the limited budgets archaeologists typically have.
Scientists are now using drones to extend their view into these hard-to-reach spots.
“There are a lot possibilities with this method,” said researcher Marijn Hendrickx, a geographer at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Ah, the possibilities…

Info/intell off a little battery-powered four-propeller “quadrocopter” could just as easily be sent to the Creech Air Force Base control room or the local FBI/Pentagon/CIA shop, which could trigger the appearance of the quad’s bigger, and much-more-violent cousins, instead of some archaeologists mapping ancient tombs.
One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the possibilities.

And these machines are already flying over the US — working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, fire fighting in Arizona and Texas, inspecting flood damage along the Mississippi River, and so forth.
Reaper drones are in training in northern New York state: Army officials say the pilots will randomly pick out targets such as buildings and vehicles to observe during the training flights.

Which brings up this from the LA Times last month: Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the unregulated use of drone aircraft “leaves the gates wide open for a dramatic increase in surveillance of American life.”
However, these machines are becoming more and more domesticated, as one guy says in the above story: “People are constantly coming up and wanting a piece of that Predator pie.”

Of course, the very name, Predator, means there’s nasty-pointed thorns in that pie.
The actual indiscriminate horror on the ground in the near-vicinity of these UAV attacks is not so sweet for any bystanders, men, women, or children.
Just this morning, Press TV reported 16 civilians were killed and 50 others injured in a drone strike in southern Somalia near the border with Kenya — US operates drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.
And whole killing operation is bullshit, especially from within the US government.

The CIA claims no civilians have been killed in drone strikes for over a year — the New York Times last August begged to differ: In a UAV strike in May which bagged a bunch of insurgents, the CIA claimed no innocents died, but a report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists reveals the strike hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, and although the militants died, so did six civilians.
Says the Times: Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.

Hard to fathom Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, huh?

Obama’s antics since in office apparently prompted this commentary from Pakistan’s The Nation:

Obama is, in short, the Rambo of drone warfare and so it is not fair to accuse him of being soft on terrorists.
This is a heavily caveated assessment, for one of the differences between Obama and Bush is that Bush developed a more coherent and systematic strategy and embedded the kinetic dimension within that larger strategy (reasonable people can debate how effective the Bush administration was in implementing that strategy).
Obama’s overall strategy is not as coherent and systematic (cf. Iraq policy, artificial and arbitrary timelines, inattention to mobilising support, etc.).
And on some of his terror policies, the incoherence does seem tied in part to what critics could consider “softness.”
But there is no doubt that Obama, as he promised during the 2008 campaign, has shown a vigour in deploying one important weapon in his arsenal: drone strikes.

Obama and change, but ‘Rambo?’

Yes, Steve Jobs is dead.
Two things there — one, life is really, really fleeting, he was only 56, and two, all the money in the world can’t make you live one minute longer.
In the long run, however, the world will not lament the guy’s passing, but all the techno-bullshit his company spewed out the last three decades, which in one way or another helped contribute to the quick-approaching end of an age.
The other side of the coin is always ugly.

Nearly buried by all the Apple-talk-news yesterday was another story which has been knocked about for weeks, and in its coming, brings to an inglorious end one of the most-crazed, unbelievable sagas in US political history.
Sara Palin ain’t running.

(Illustration found here).

Palin reflected an extreme-hideous side of Americana, which only in its loudness within an unhinged, ignorant babble caught the attention of first the easily-swayed news media and then a certain portion of the public.
Anyone with a dab of sense knows she’s never, ever been much more than trailer trash.

From Palin’s last political will and statement:

After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States.
As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision.
When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country.
My decision maintains this order.
…
I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for President where our candidates must embrace immediate action toward energy independence through domestic resource developments of conventional energy sources, along with renewables.
We must reduce tax burdens and onerous regulations that kill American industry, and our candidates must always push to minimize government to strengthen the economy and allow the private sector to create jobs.

Such is bullshit.

If one considered it, John McCain should be held greatly accountable for hoisting Palin on an unsuspecting US landscape in 2008 when he snatched the Alaskan governor up to be a partner in the presidential race — once on board, however, the shit really hit the fan.

“Our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of.”
—Sarah Palin, on her foreign policy experience, CBS News interview with Katie Couric, Sept. 25, 2008

Also in that same interview:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —
Couric: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
Couric: Can you name any of them?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

You betcha!
And because that Couric talk was such a horrifying disaster, Palin never goes anywhere now except Fox News, which by the way, has made its own news.
In a confirmation of all this crap was made by Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, who had Palin on the network not for her great brain.
Via Raw Story:

In an interview celebrating the 15th anniversary of Fox News, Ailes told The Associated Press that he hired the former Republican vice presidential candidate “because she was hot and got ratings.”
According to one Republican who is close to the Fox News chairman, Palin certainly wasn’t hired because Ailes respected her intellect.
“He thinks Palin is an idiot,” the insider told New York magazine earlier this year.
“He thinks she’s stupid.
He helped boost her up.
People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”

And Ailes himself is a sexist asshole:

In a 2008 prologue to his planned book, former Fox News executive Dan Cooper recalled that Ailes liked to “talk macho and compare the anatomies of women in the office.”
“I was too scared to make salacious comments about women in the office,” Cooper wrote.
“Like everyone, I had taken classes in workplace behavior.
Not Roger.
‘How about those bazookas on that Indian girl, or whatever the hell she is!’
Squirm squirm.
‘Pussy masala on the menu today?’”

No wonder the US is finished.

The rise of Palin allowed the rise of political lying — and the getting away with it.
I’ve always knew she was a complete phony and ignorant beyond belief, and didn’t give a shit — this is my first post on her. (And the last).
Somebody at The Daily Dish said it best yesterday: It is hard to describe the relief of this awful person finally going away.

You betcha, again.

There’s reports oil is leaking from the supposedly sealed Macondo well: Floating in a boat near the well site, Press-Register reporters watched blobs of oil rise to the surface and bloom into iridescent yellow patches. Those patches quickly expanded into rainbow sheens 4 to 5 feet across. Each expanding bloom released a pronounced and pungent petroleum smell.
That report nearly 10 days ago from the Mobile Press-Register — the slick is now getting bigger with BP in denial.

(Illustration found here).

Nearly two weeks ago, New Orleans attorney Stuart Smith blogged there was a big, bad BP fox scrambling around in the hen-house:

Oil from the Macondo Well site is fouling the Gulf anew — and BP is scrambling to contain both the crude and the PR nightmare that waits in the wings.
Reliable sources tell us that BP has hired 40 boats from Venice to Grand Isle to lay boom around the Deepwater Horizon site — located just 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.
The fleet rushed to the scene late last week and worked through the weekend to contain what was becoming a massive slick at the site of the Macondo wellhead, which was officially “killed” back in September 2010.
The truly frightening part of this development is the oil may be coming from cracks and fissures in the seafloor caused by the work BP did during its failed attempts to cap the runaway Macondo Well — and that type of leakage can’t be stopped, ever.

And then the non-proft environmental groups OnWingsOfCare and Gulf Restoration Network took a helicopter ride over the area and reported:

We found significant amounts of oil in globule form still at the Deepwater Horizon (DH) site and at the Taylor Energy site, and we saw miles-long surface rainbow sheens from two different leaking platforms between DH and the Chandeleur Islands.
Eight shrimp boats with their nets in the water were within one mile of these two leaking platforms.
In the ‘blue waters’ out toward the DH site we were puzzled by some long, wide, unnatural-looking dark-green colored stripes.
Finally, dark brownish-red subsurface plumes like what we had previously documented around Breton Island (Mar 2011) spanned miles in width and length, right up to the coastlines, beginning where the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (“MR-GO”) meets the Gulf south to Breton Sound.
With all of that, we were ecstatic also to see three sperm whales, one leatherback turtle, four whale sharks, tuna, redfish, bottlenose dolphin, and cownose rays.

The slick is now considered to be about 10 miles wide.

And BP denies is all: “None of this is true,” the British oil giant said in a statement in response to reports that it had deployed boats and containment boom to the well site. It noted the well was capped in July of last year, permanently sealed in September, and continues to be monitored.
Yeah, right — some famous last words.

The Christian Science Monitor carried a piece yesterday on the situation.
There seems to be conflict between BP and environmental groups over oil samples and whether the oil slick is coming directly from the sealed Deepwater Horizon well.
From CSM:

The disconnect between what environmental groups, media organizations, and academics are finding and the results from BP and federal authorities is causing some to say that an independent group is needed to monitor oil sheens in the region, particularly near the Macondo site.
“There’s still a ton of questions out there regarding where [the oil] is from, and it’s on the Coast Guard to figure it out and to let the public know,” says Dan Favre, communications director for the Gulf Restoration Network.

Another brick in the wall as one must remember the bullshit that spewed from BP and US officials right after the accident, especially the White House, over how bad the blow-out really was and how much oil was really leaking.
From McClatchy last October:

Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could get, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case models public, a report by the staff of the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday.
White House officials denied that they tried to suppress the information.
…
The staff paper said that underestimating the flow rates “undermined public confidence in the federal government’s response” by creating the impression that the government was either incompetent or untrustworthy.
The paper said that the loss of trust “fuels public fears.”
In a separate report, the commission’s staff concluded that despite the Coast Guard’s insistence that it was always responding to the worst case scenario, the failure to have an accurate flow rate slowed the response and lulled Obama administration officials into a false belief that the spill would be controlled easily.

This latest incident in the tragic history of the Deepwater Horizon could be bad.

And the rolling continues.

This particular aftershock was also shallow, only 3.1 miles deep and authorities said no major problems have been reported off the fifth tremor following Tuesday’s big one.
And one local resident via The Baltimore Sun:

“I felt the first heavy tremor about 1:10 and over the last hour I have felt several minor tremors,” Little Italy resident Joseph Watchinsky wrote on Facebook.
“This house is 200 yrs old and has ridgid construction shakes with the smallest tremor and my Jack Russle is acting creepy, or creepier then usual so I’ll be sleeping with one eye open tonight.”

One eye open, huh?

Although in yesterday’s post I kind of poked fun at folks on the East Coast about earthquakes, but in reality one never really feels comfortable even with us weirdos out here in quake-country California — and I do appreciate the apprehension and tension they are experiencing right now.
Once there’s an earthquake, there’s no relaxing for awhile.

And being ready ain’t easy.
In the wake of Tuesday’s shaker, Washington, DC, experienced a taste of what could have happened, but didn’t and revealed disaster preparedness is not easy, either.
From the Washington Post this morning:

Traffic was snarled for miles in downtown Washington as employers released workers early at the same time thousands of commuters tried to drive home or cram onto buses and trains already overloaded and slowed by speed restrictions because of the quake.
“Not that yesterday was chaos, but definitely, it was not as smooth as it could have been,” said Justin Thorp, 27, a marketing manager who works downtown and who escaped the congestion with a bicycle he found through a bike-sharing program.
…
A 2006 federal government report criticized the Washington region’s emergency response plan as “not sufficient” for a catastrophic incident.
The most recent response plan, dated 2008, calls for the city to erect shelters and says it may be preferable for people to stay put instead of trying to evacuate.
“Human beings have a propensity to take flight rather than just to stay where they are, which is a prudent decision in a lot of situations,” D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said Wednesday.

And Tuesday’s quake was not a biggie as biggies go.

In that Boy Scout-be prepared mode, it was disclosed this week that the federal government held a simulated earthquake/disaster test last May for the central part of the US in which 100,000 Midwesterners were killed instantly, and forced more than 7 million people out of their homes — it was an exercise in horror.
And although results off the test — titled National Level Exercise 11 — won’t be released to the general public, according to what happened government officials worry that state and federal authorities won’t be able to handle the “cascading failures” that follow such an event.
The test was patterned after an actual horror story: The December 1811-February 1812 series of earthquakes, three of 7.5 magnitude or better — it caused damage for 50,000 square miles.
According to the USGS:

The earthquakes caused the ground to rise and fall == bending the trees until their branches intertwined and opening deep cracks in the ground.
Deep seated landslides occurred along the steeper bluffs and hillslides; large areas of land were uplifted permanently; and still larger areas sank and were covered with water that erupted through fissures or craterlets.
Huge waves on the Mississippi River overwhelmed many boats and washed others high onto the shore.
High banks caved and collapsed into the river; sand bars and points of islands gave way; whole islands disappeared.

Not too many US peoples were living in those regions near two hundred years ago, but now — 15 million people are there now along with 15 nuclear plants.
The test last May went unnoticed, but Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog has the story.
The money snip:

During NLE 11, more than 9,000 National Guardsmen were dispatched to 50 sites around Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee for mock disaster relief.
They were joined by workers from the Food and Drug Administration, state agencies, and charity groups like the American Red Cross. I
It was a truly massive undertaking — especially considering there were all-too-real tornadoes assaulting the region at the same time.
Still, it was only a fraction of what would be required, if there’s an actual catastrophe along the New Madrid fault line. Carwille estimated that 42,000 search and rescue personnel would be required, in the event of a real quake.
Those responders would be severely inhibited in the aid they could provide, noted Stockton, the Pentagon official.
“Electric power would go out, not for days, but for weeks and months in the four state region,” he said. “Municipal water systems, they all run on electricity, don’t they? Well, people are gonna get thirsty.
You need water for firefighting, don’t you?
Second, all gasoline pumps run on electric power.
Same with diesel fuel.
So in terms of road mobility, of getting the relief forces in, and evacuating people out — no gasoline?
The cascading failures go on and on.”

The Danger Room title for the post included ‘Fukushima on the Mississippi‘ — implying a disaster beyond comprehension.

(Illustration found here).

The US military’s use of unmanned drones in the vast war on terrorists appears to be extremely similar to a Mafia operation, complete with the mob’s ‘rub out’ analogy, and like the Mafia, planning those attacks from thousands of miles away is so-near comparable to murder.
An interview last February in Newsweek with John A. Rizzo, former CIA acting general counsel, who on occasion in fact described the process of what he did as ‘murder’ and indicated the whole thing might be illegal:

“It’s basically a hit list,” he said. Then he pointed a finger at my forehead and pretended to pull a trigger.
“The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.”

Rizzo, now retired, says there was a battery of lawyers always present — there were roughly 10 of them — who would write a cable asserting an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued, often running up to five pages.
Everything was on the straight and narrow, all legal:

When NEWSWEEK asked the administration for comment, a U.S. official who declined to be identified addressing such a sensitive subject said: “These CT [counterterrorism] operations are conducted in strict accordance with American law and are governed by legal guidance provided by the Department of Justice.”

Beyond the ethical and moral concerns, what’s the legal rules?
Not some more of that John Yoo bullshit, I hope.
Yet, not so fast, there Perry Mason.
Right now, an arrest warrant is being sought in the UK for Rizzo in connection with those legal drone attacks.
From Aljazeera English on Sunday:

“There has clearly been a crime committed here,” Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights lawyer who is leading the effort to seek a warrant for Rizzo, told Al Jazeera.
“The issue here is whether the United States is willing to flaunt international law.
“One of the purposes of doing this is because there is no sense in the United States of how catastrophic this whole process is.”
US government lawyers argue that drone strikes are conducted on a “solid legal basis,” however, Stafford Smith said there has to be a war going on in order for any of these strikes to be legal.
“Outside a combat zone the US has no possible, plausible legal basis to conduct these drone strikes. They think they can get away with it.
This process is meant to make sure that they can’t,” Stafford Smith said.
“I challenge anyone to go to the families of those innocent victims in the [Afghanistan-Pakistan] border regions and say: ‘It’s legal to bomb your homes and kill your children.’
It is not, obviously.”

And in that respect, what happens to those under those drone attacks?
In answer comes from a piece in the UK’s The Guardian also on Sunday about Pakistani Noor Behram, who photographs and documents the aftermath of the drones, not only in the killing and maiming, but the impact on local society.
Couple of noteworthy snippets:

Sometimes arriving on the scene just minutes after the explosion, he first has to put his camera aside and start digging through the debris to see if there are any survivors.
It’s dangerous, unpleasant work.
The drones frequently hit the same place again, a few minutes after the first strike, so looking for the injured is risky.
There are other dangers too: militants and locals are suspicious of anyone with a camera.
After all, it is a local network of spies working for the CIA that are directing the drone strikes.
But Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important — and unreported — truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit.
The world’s media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike.
But reporters don’t go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials.
Noor Behram believes you have to go to the spot to figure out whether those killed were really extremists or ordinary people living in Waziristan.
And he’s in no doubt.
“For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said.
“I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed.
I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”
…
According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population.
“There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike.
You can’t find bodies.
So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America.
They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
“The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed.
Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack.
The Americans think it is working, but the damage they’re doing is far greater.”

A horror complacent US peoples either aren’t aware of, or just don’t give a shit.

And President Obama has further expanded the drone wars beyond what even George Jr. had commissioned — 118 in 2010 and reportedly 45 so far this year, with the operation widening further still in Somalia and Yemen.
And the future?
In some insane words from Slate: To top it off, we put the former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, in charge of the military. And we put our top general, David Petraeus, in charge of the CIA. The CIA and the drones are the team of the future. They’re the new face of a faceless war.

Drone on, Garth.