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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.

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.

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

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

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

I've spent the last three days working to fix the ePubs and AZW3s of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I had just ran it through Calibre and did a quick check, noting that the table of contents didn't display anything.

It took a lot of research and learning to fix the ToC, and while doing so discovered something even worse - some of the illustrations were covering up the text. Damn!

Trying to figure out the ToC I tried several things. One was installing the Write2epub extension to Open Office.

It really sucked, especially with this book. It had some ugly sans-serif typeface, and there were huge swaths large and bolded that I never told it to do. And there was still no table of contents.

While googling and reading and finding out that e'books were mostly based on HTML5, XML and a few other things, I got a little disheartened. This was going to take forever, because I had a lot I had to learn.

I ran across Google's e'book editor "Sigil" and installed it. I have no idea if it's any good, because there's no documentation and I can't make heads or tails out of it.

So I went back to Calibre and studied it some more, educated a little but not much by the internet, and saw a long string with an "and" in it, "h1 and h2" and recognised this from HTML and the rest of the garbage from programming for thirty years. Stupid Calibre was telling it to make everything part of the table!

It took a bit of trial and error to get the right parenthesis and brackets in the right spots that the conversion wouldn't crash with an error, but I finally got a working table of contents.

Now to address the obscured text. That took quite a bit of head scratching as well.

I finally just decided to make the input make the output behave, rather than trying to tweak the output itself. What finally worked was to load the offending images in GIMP and add a white space where it was covering the text. That worked.

So if you've already downloaded one of the e'books, you should delete them and download the new version.

ePub

AZW3

I think I'll take the day off tomorrow.

https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=8941

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metamesh/meta-mesh-community-wireless-networks-for-all

Funding Canceled

Funding for this project was canceled by the project creator 1 day ago.

http://www.metamesh.org/blog/2015/08/14/ks-closure

Today we decided to halt our Kickstarter campaign. In the past few weeks, Meta Mesh and its volunteers have had to face a lot of challenges, both in the business and personal realms. We received wide support from many of those we directly asked. For that, we are terrifically grateful.

We have decided to change the direction our company is headed. In no way are we finished. In fact, this Kickstarter experience revealed a lot to us about who we want to be and how to be it.

In the upcoming months we will be expanding PittMesh, launching a webstore where pre-configured routers can be purchased, and will be building a dedicated PittMesh Working Group where people who want to contribute to building a Community Wireless Network can learn about new technology, can gain new skills, and can network with inspired people.

Definitely stay tuned to our website and our social media feeds. In fact, mere moments after closing our Kickstarter campaign something occurred which we will announce shortly that has been months in the making and we are incredibly excited about.

We’re not done. No way. As they say, it’s hard to keep a good man down. We’ll be in touch with you all again shortly.

I just uploaded the last item in "Yesterday's Tomorrows", a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction," Hugo Gernsback. In his essay, written in 1926, he describes the year 1976. Those of you who believe the guys who say the singularity is near or that death will be conquered within your lifetime should read it.

Futurists! Where in the hell is my flying car? Why are there no bases on the moon, like the futurists said in the 1960s we'd have by now? Why did no one see digital photography coming? Or phones in your pockets? Or the internet?

Gernsback sold electronic components, some of which he designed himself, yet didn't seem to understand "electricity, the mysterious fluid." He thought we'd be able to control the weather with it, and even more nonsensical things. He seemed steeped in the cult of Tesla, who had promised wireless delivery of electricity.

Coincidentally, Soylent News just mentioned a story about transplanting porcine hearts into humans, and the company's co-founder is a futurist. Of course, I left a comment about futurists.

I go into it in detail about futurism both in the book's foreword and the introduction to the Gernsback essay.

The first Republican primary debates will be "legally" available online only to Fox News cable subscribers. Assuming you don't have TV access to the debate and are bored/interested/depraved enough to want to watch live, look for and post streams in the comments. They are sure to be clamping down on livestreaming services like Periscope, but others might escape notice. Twitter real time search is a great way to find these kinds of links and generally a good source of entertainment during these sorts of live events. Here's the Fox News schedule:

• 5pm ET: First (kiddy pool candidates) Debate
• 6pm ET: Online Pre-Show
• 9pm ET: Primetime Debate
• 11pm ET: Online Post-Debate Show

Jon Stewart's last episode of the Daily Show will start at 11pm ET and will last 52 minutes.

The candidates making the cut for the main debate were Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. Seven candidates who did not qualify were invited to participate in the 5:00 PM forum; these were Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore. Because of a rule-change announced by FOX one week before the debate-invitations went out, Graham, Pataki, and Gilmore will participate at 5pm despite averaging below 1% in the five selected polls. (Former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson was excluded from the 5pm tier, along with other relatively-unknown candidates who did not meet the updated invitation-criteria of "consistently being offered to respondents in major national polls as recognized by Fox News.") The five selected polls were conducted by Fox News, Bloomberg, CBS News, Monmouth University, and Quinnipiac University.

I made this as a journal because I didn't want to subject all of Soylent to it, especially since Fox News is not making it easy to watch the debates.

Keep in mind: Republican debate drinking games are dangerous.

It turned into a beautiful thing. It's full of illustrations, plus photos of the authors and covers of the magazines the stories were printed in. It has the first use of the word "astronaut", the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is said to have ushered in the "golden age of science fiction, A.E. van Vogt's first published science fiction, a few other firsts, and five stories that are printed from cleaned up scans of the magazines. There are biographies of all the writers in the book.

I usually encourage folks to read the stories online or check a copy out from their local library, but not this time. The printed book is head and shoulders better than the electronic versions.

There are stories by Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R. Jones, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, Jerome Bixby, and a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction" Hugo Gernsback.

It will be a little while before the HTML version is available, since they're not done yet, but I'll post them as I finish them. Meanwhile, there is a PDF, an ePub, and an AZW3 posted for free download.

Yesterday's Tomorrows