Read moreConcerned about Google’s complicity with the NSA, the Indian government plans to ban the use of Gmail for official correspondence. The matter has also become a key issue in the run-up to the German federal elections in the third week of September.
Google is fast developing a reputation as a rogue company that pursues its own agenda at the expense of the rule of law. At the time of writing the Dutch data protection authority has published a ruling that outlaws Google Analytics – a decision that mirrors bans by Germany and Norway. Google has simply refused to offer a lawful contract.
Earlier this year Sweden banned public sector use of Google’s cloud services over privacy concerns, while France and Spain have ruled that the company is operating unlawfully in those countries.
It is now becoming a momentous task to document all the findings against Google by trade and privacy authorities, but the true threat posed by the company goes much further than mere transgressions of law. Google is now claiming immunity from the law itself.
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Read moreIn extreme cases, these armed groups are substituting for the state as the sole arbiter of disagreements between citizens. Many set themselves up as one of the few defenses against the onslaught of the myriad criminal organizations that plague poor, under-serviced Central American neighborhoods. Along the way, some of the larger gangs have become power brokers, managing political campaigns and getting out the vote in collusion with local and national parties. In extreme cases, they set up their own political organizations with the power to sway domestic and even international agendas.
Such is the case in El Salvador, where the most prominent parties have protected high-ranking traffickers, presumably in return for sizeable campaign contributions. The extent of this kind of corruption came to light during an infamous case in 2007, when three members of the Central American Parliament were killed, along with their bodyguard, by alleged drug traffickers as they drove from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Surprisingly, four of the suspected killers, all policemen, were captured. However, each of them was assassinated in their jail cell days later .
Throughout the region, violent gangs consort with some of the most powerful bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians. They provide start-up capital, secure contracts, finance campaigns, and keep pesky investigators at bay on behalf of their partners. It is ordinarily a symbiotic relationship and with complicity reaching the highest levels of power.
Along with being killed and extorted with reckless abandon, Central Americans are also being displaced in ever-greater numbers. In an eerie echo of the region´s civil wars during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of residents have packed up and crossed a border. A small proportion of them – more than 25,000 – recently sought asylum in neighboring countries as refugees. Yet most undocumented migrants prefer to maintain a low profile for fear of being forcefully repatriated. And while many of the displaced join the vast caravan of economic migrants to the United States, the vast majority of victims remain internally displaced, seeking sanctuary in their country of origin.
This includes Sabine Moreno , who fled from her small town to San Salvador after seven members of her family, including her grandfather, were killed by the MS-13 street gang. The MS-13 and the Barrio 18, the two most prominent gangs in the region, have created invisible borders throughout the Northern Triangle. As locals well know, if you live in one gang’s neighborhood, you simply cannot enter the rival’s area.
There are unsettling similarities in the ways violence plays out across the region. In spite of a recently brokered gang truce in 2012, Salvadorians continue leaving because of threats posed by gangs – more than 8,000 at last count. Meanwhile, ruthless drug enforcer gangs like the Zetas have contributed to the displacement of at least 6,000 Guatemalans from their homes. An estimated 230,000 people fled Mexico or were internally displaced over the past half-decade for fear of being targeted by drug cartels, maras, militias, or soldiers. Meanwhile, Costa Rica is hosting more than 20,000 refugees while Panama supports 17,000 more. Entire neighborhoods are emptied and fields are going fallow. Yet because there is no international group dedicated to monitoring the conflict, the scale of the suffering generated by displacement is still largely hidden from view.
And after all this, many of these nomadic populations continue to be persecuted after being displaced. Some of them are enslaved by criminal groups, forced to cook and clean for them in the best of circumstances, and work as prostitutes in the worst. Recruitment into the ranks of armed groups is common, mostly for youth who face dim employment prospects as they bounce from city to city. Professionals are also not immune. Criminal gangs in Mexico are kidnapping engineers and computer scientists to help them build their sophisticated communications systems that sometimes surpass the government’s.
Read moreWe experience cultural continuity with our parents’ and our children’s generations. Even when we don’t see eye to eye with our parents on political questions or we sigh in despair about our kids’ fashion sense or taste in music, we generally have a handle on what makes them tick. But a human lifetime seldom spans more than three generations, and the sliding window of one’s generation screens out that which came before and that which comes after; they lie outside our personal experience. We fool ourselves into thinking that our national culture is static and slow-moving, that we are the inheritors of a rich tradition. But if we could go back three or four generations, we would find ourselves surrounded by aliens – people for whom a North Atlantic crossing by sail was as slow and risky as a mission to Mars, people who took it for granted that some races were naturally inferior and that women were too emotionally unstable to be allowed to vote. The bedrock of our cultural tradition is actually quicksand. We reject many of our ancestors’ cherished beliefs and conveniently forget others, not realizing that, in turn, our grandchildren may do the same to ours.
Read moreImage description: This is an animation of the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights), eight days after a record-setting solar flare sent a shower of charged particles towards Earth. From Earth, this glowing ring would appear as a curtain of light shimmering across the night sky.
Image captured by NASA IMAGE satellite courtesy of NASA Space Place.
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Read moreThe takeaway from all of this is not that this is just a crazy professor spinning esoteric nonsense as an excuse to keep the human race from advancing. It is that if and when helium 3 fueled fusion power and lunar mining becomes viable, we should be prepared for another environmentalist assault on yet another new form of energy production. It is enough to make one want to leave the planet and start anew somewhere.
Summer Arctic Sea Ice Retreat: May – August 2013.
Watching the summertime dynamics of the Arctic ice cap has gained considerable attention in recent years as the size of the minimum extent has been diminishing – rapidly. On Sept.16, 2012, Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent ever recorded by satellites at 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million square kilometers). That is about half the size of the average extent from 1979 to 2010.
Sea ice extent is a measurement of the area of the Arctic Ocean where ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean surface. For additional information about the evolution of the sea ice cover, scientists also study the sea ice “area,” which discards regions of open water among ice floes and only takes into account the parts of the Arctic Ocean completely covered by ice. On Aug. 21, 2013, the Arctic sea ice area was 1.98 million square miles (5.12 million square kilometers).
This year’s melting season included a fast retreat of the sea ice during the first half of July. But low atmospheric pressures and clouds over the central Arctic kept temperatures up north cooler than average, slowing down the plunge.
With about three weeks of melting left, the summer minimum in 2013 is unlikely to be a record low, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at Goddard and coordinating lead author of the Cryosphere Observations chapter of the upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“But average temperatures in the Arctic fluctuate from one week to another, and the occurrence of a powerful storm in August, as happened in 2012, could cause the current rate of decline to change significantly,” Comiso said.
This year, the Arctic has witnessed a few summer storms, but none of them as intense as the cyclone that took place in August 2012.
“Last year’s storm went across an area of open water and mixed the smaller pieces of ice with the relatively warm water, so it melted very rapidly,” Meier said. “This year, the storms hit in an area of more consolidated ice. The storms this year were more typical summer storms; last year’s was the unusual one.”The Arctic sea ice cap has significantly thinned over the past decade and is now very vulnerable to melt, Comiso said. The multiyear ice cover, consisting of thicker sea ice that has survived at least two summers, has declined at an even faster rate than younger, thinner ice. Meier said that a thinner, seasonal ice cover might behave more erratically in the summer than multiyear ice.
“First-year ice has a thickness that is borderline: It can melt or not depending on how warm the summer temperatures are, the prevailing winds, etcetera,” Meier said. “This year’s conditions weren’t super-favorable for losing ice throughout spring and summer; last year they were. Whereas with multiyear ice, it takes unusual warm conditions to melt it, which is what we’ve seen in the most recent years.”
On the opposite side of the planet, Antarctic sea ice, which is in the midst of its yearly growing cycle, is heading toward the largest extent on record, having reached 7.45 million square miles (19.3 million square kilometers) on Aug. 21. In 2012, the extent of Antarctic sea ice for the same date was 7.08 million square miles (18.33 million square kilometers). The phenomenon, which appears counter-intuitive but reflects the differences in environment and climate between the Arctic and Antarctica, is currently the subject of many research studies. Still, the rate at which the Arctic is losing sea ice surpasses the speed at which Antarctic sea ice is expanding.
The sea ice minimum extent analysis produced at Goddard – one of many satellite-based scientific analyses of sea ice cover – is compiled from passive microwave data from NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite, which operated from late October 1978 to August 1987, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, which has been used to extend the Nimbus 7 sea ice record onwards from August 1987. The record, which began in November 1978, shows an overall downward trend of 14.1 percent per decade in the size of the minimum summer extent, a decline that accelerated after 2007.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 