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The day I met Rio’s favela master: the drug lord who championed the poor: Misha Glenny tells of his prison meetings with Nem of Rocinha, the slum crime boss who channelled some of his cocaine profits into running a welfare state for 100,000 people

After his arrest, I wrote to Nem in prison and asked if he would speak to me. He agreed. The story that emerged was fascinating: once he reached the top, Nem was, in effect, mayor, police chief and director of the chamber of commerce for a community estimated at 100,000 residents. With the receipts from the cocaine trade, he ran a business that supported nearly 1,000 people. He also channelled some of his profits into a basic welfare state. He could do this because he paid close attention to accounting and budgetary matters.

“The food baskets and the support we gave to extracurricular school activities, such as the Thai boxing or capoeira classes, were all accounted for as part of our business expenses,” he explained. “But the burials, prescription costs or if anyone who couldn’t afford it needed gas, these were all extra payments.”

In the absence of any regular police, law was maintained by 150 armed men, most in their teens and early 20s. But while the man known locally as Mestre, or master, decided over life or death, he usually opted for the former. Under his rule, homicide rates dropped by more than two-thirds.

This was part-calculation, part-intuition. Rocinha was so profitable for the cocaine trade because it is surrounded by the three richest areas of Rio – Leblon, São Conrado and Gávea. By turning Rocinha into the safest and most attractive favela in Rio, business boomed. “He was not a man of violence,” said Detective Bárbara Lomba, who led the three-strong team that patiently investigated the Rocinha drugs operation for four years. “He had a policy of avoiding confrontation wherever possible and of not facing down the police. Rather the opposite, he was in contact with them in a corrupt relationship.”

Nem’s policy paid off. Rocinha became a fixture on the tourist route; Brazil’s biggest pop stars such as Ivete Sangalo and Claudia Leitte were happy to include the favela on their tours, boosting their popularity with Brazil’s poor. Politicians including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the current incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, were keen to tour, as were members of Brazil’s national football side. Above all, the youngsters from the surrounding middle class areas went to buy coke.

Beltrame knew that he would have to “pacify” Rocinha because of its symbolic power and its location. As the World Cup and the Olympics approached the pressure grew. But by taking Nem out of the equation, Rocinha’s character has changed. The relationship between the police and residents is uneasy at best. In July 2013, a group which included the chief of Rocinha police murdered an innocent bricklayer, and the favela came close to open insurrection.

Since then the drug cartel has been edging its way back and there are sporadic shootouts with the police. Homicides remain at historic low levels but domestic violence, rape, assault and burglary have increased fourfold.

So, I was drinking coffee this morning and watching my twitter stream and somehow the thread count of sheets came up. Being as I didn't feel like fitting my feelings on the matter into 140 characters, it goes here.

High thread count sheets can suck it. I'd happily pay inverted prices to have to never sleep on them again. It is my firm belief that sheets should not feel like you're lying between two ultra-thin layers of cloud. They damned sure shouldn't end up wadding themselves into a ball just from one night's worth of sleeping between them.

Sheets should feel like you're sandwiched between two new dollar bills. Slightly rough and starched as stiff as you can manage. You should damned near be able to make a drum head out of them. As soon as they start feeling soft and showing signs of wadding up, they should be laundered and starched to within an inch of their lives again.

It took a while to get there, life gets in the way, but today I finally made it to 1000 stories edited/posted. This excludes all the stories as second editor, and the dozens of submissions i've made over the last year or so.

So please feel free to shower me with adulation for all the hard work!

I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to design book covers. It's an excellent free open source program that has three weaknesses -- its menu structure is completely illogical (but can be gotten used to), I can't find a full spectrum palette, and its text handling is so poor as to be useless.

I have a workaround for the bad text. Open a word processor that will output a PDF file, choose your typeface and size, choose the text's color and write the text. Save it as a PDF and GIMP will open it as an image in as high a resolution you need. Just make the background transparent, situate it over your graphic, and merge the layers.

Speaking of books, I made a Mars, Ho! YouTube video. Yes, there is a pussy in it.

So one of the ACs on the other site decided to do a WHOIS on the addresses the Czech traffic analysis I linked to posted and what did he find? he find the telemetry data goes to MarkMonitor the anti piracy group. If this data proves factual we now know who the REAL customer of Windows 10 is, its the *.A.A who are gonna be able to find out every single song played and video watched by windows 10 users.

I don't know about the rest of you guys but I've seen enough to tell my customers Windows 10 is toxic and to be avoided.

Cixin Liu explains it in his 'Dark Forest'. This has turned into the best book I've read in years - and I still have the third book in the trilogy to read.

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Cixin-Liu-ebook/dp/B00R13OYU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1440699211&sr=1-1&keywords=cixin+liu+dark+forest

One year in as of today and still averaging over ~10K hits of the hashtag on slow days. Dead? The gaming press and SJWs should be so lucky. Gamers, we just don't quit until we win.

sic semper umbilicus

I've become accustomed to that "only x submissions in the queue" thingy. This morning, I stumbled across a story that seems worthy of discussion here, so I looked to see how many stories are in the queue. Ooops - it's gone!

Apparently, that bit of information disappears when the queue is deemed to be "full".

https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/03/31/0829226

So, it's Women's Equality Day. Lot of you probably think about this time I'd be busting out with a sexist rant. Hate to disappoint but I'm all about equality. Actual equality though not this bullshit third-gen feminist version of equality where they think equality means special treatment for their tragic victimhood.

No, equality always has and always will mean equal treatment. Every single time. No exceptions for past mistreatment. No white-knighting up if someone with tits comes crying on your shoulder that people are mean to her just because she calls them misogynists, shitlords, tools of the patriarchy, etc...

In fact, no calling yourself a feminist period. If you do it as a woman it's saying you feel your entire gender has been victimized and should be given special treatment because it is incapable of taking care of itself. If you do it as a man you're saying an entire gender is in need of your protection.

You either treat a woman as if she's an adult and as capable of taking care of her own shit as you are, or you don't. There is no "yes, but" to it. Equal treatment or sexism, there are no other choices.

I slapped a Mars, Ho! video up on YouTube. You can see it here.No, there's no nudity.