Hacker "Sabu" was an FBI plant for months

Many hackers were stunned when they learned that Sabu had been arrested, given his technological skills and role as Lulz' de facto chief of security.

But details from court filings revealed something far more spectacular — he had been cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation since June 7.

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Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic by James Gilligan

From Naeem's Reviews on Goodreads:

irst and foremost: astonishing book. The theory is radical. The voice in which he delivers it is comes from the heart and from 25 years of experience as a psychoanalytic therapist in maximum security prisons. It messes with most everything we are trained to think.

The theory: violence is a the result of shame and shame about being ashamed -- meta-shame. It is a bit more nuanced than this but this is the jist of it. It reverses thereby the usual analysis that we get, for example, from those who popularize Hobbes: that violence is inherent and it is civilization that represses it. For Gilligan, civilization creates invidious comparison, creates relative deprivation, and thereby produces shame and shame for having shame. Where there is an absence of love, an absence of self-worth, and the presence of shame, there all that is needed is some mundane trigger -- a look misinterpreted, a careless word, a perceived slight -- and boom, we get violence.

Here, Gilligan is doing what Jessica Benjamin is doing in Bonds of Love (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42335... ) inverting the Hobbesian paradigm. But relative to Benjamin there is far less theory and far more exploration of cases.

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1984 v. Brave New World

From Letters of Note:

In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction.

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'People keep falling sick': How poor Indians are recruited for clinical drug trials

Tim Sandler reports for NBC:

The Indian government reports that across the country more than 1,500 people have died in clinical trials since 2008, many participating in studies for Western pharmaceutical companies. Because official documentation of the deaths is frequently incomplete or non-existent, it is unclear how many people died from the same illnesses that initially qualified them for certain drug studies.

Gulhati, the editor of the Indian medical journal, said official inquiries into drug-trial deaths are rare.

“Unlike the Western countries where there is an audit of each death during [a] clinical trial, we don't have a system like that at all,” he said. “So that is the biggest problem.”

The lack of oversight by Indian government officials, Gulhati added, has created a culture of impunity for drug research companies and the doctors who work for them.

He offered a recent example. In 2010, an Indian government investigation confirmed 10 deaths at drug trials sponsored by Western drug companies, including Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, at the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre. The facility was built to treat survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster.

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The 'Good War' Myth of World War Two - by Mark Weber

From IHR:

US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was not the only high-ranking American official to acknowledge, at least in private, that the claim of unique Allied righteousness was mere pretense. In a letter to the President, written while he was serving as the chief US prosecutor at the great Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, Jackson acknowledged that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France ]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” / 16

At the conclusion of the Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, the respected British weekly The Economist cited Soviet crimes, and then added, “Nor should the Western world console itself that the Russians alone stand condemned at the bar of the Allies' own justice.” The Economist editorial went on:

“… Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead ‘not guilty’ on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent?... The nations sitting in judgment [at Nuremberg ] have so clearly proclaimed themselves exempt from the law which they have administered.” / 17

Another popular American assumption is that this country’s enemies in World War II were all non-democratic dictatorships. In fact, on each side there were regimes that were repressive or dictatorial, as well as governments that had broad public support. Many of the countries allied with the US were headed by governments that were oppressive, dictatorial, or otherwise non-democratic. / 18 Finland , a democratic republic, was an important wartime partner of Hitler’s Germany .

In crass violation of their own solemnly proclaimed principles, the US , British and Soviet statesmen disposed of tens of millions of people with no regard for their wishes. The deceit and cynicism of the Allied leaders was perhaps most blatant in the infamous British-Soviet “percentages agreement” to divide up South Eastern Europe . At a meeting with Stalin in 1944, Churchill proposed that in Romania the Soviets should have 90 percent influence or authority, and 75 percent in Bulgaria , and that Britain should have 90 percent influence or control in Greece . In Hungary and Yugoslavia , the British leader suggested, each should have 50 percent. Churchill wrote all this out on a piece of paper, which he pushed across to Stalin, who made a check mark on it and passed it back. Churchill then said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.” “No, you keep it,” replied Stalin. / 19

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Invisible Mercedes brings James Bond technology to life

Justin Hyde , Motoramic

In a promotion for its first production fuel-cell vehicle in Germany, Mercedes-Benz turned a B-Class hatchback invisible -- at least, from a distance, using the same idea behind the invisible car in the James Bond film "Die Another Day." See if you can see it before it sees you.

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List of 118 Dead Scientists

Updated info here.