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The department will be hosting military training in and around the city between Jan. 27 and Feb. 8.

The training includes the use of military helicopters flying after dark throughout the city.

For our entire lives, most of us have depended on highly centralized systems. Our food comes from a thousand or more miles away. Our savings is shipped into distant financial centers and invested by strangers in enterprises run by strangers. We watch highly scripted news that serves the same spin no matter how many channels we try. We bank at impersonal global banks with criminal records that would make a felon blush and have no idea where our money goes, just that the government guarantees that we will get it back.

Within this centralized system, diversification means having your financial assets deposited into a “one-stop-shop” brokerage account invested in securities representing different global industries, the idea being when one industry is doing poorly, another “countercyclical” industry would be doing well.

But suddenly, we find that we may not be able to trust these centralized systems. Suddenly, traditional portfolio theory no longer addresses our anxiety. This is because we need to shift from diversification within a centralized system to real diversification in a decentralized, possibly “out of control” world.

If you study the investment patterns of families and wealth that has survived through the generations, including through periods of lawlessness and warfare, you come to understand that for those who want to thrive in all economic and political scenarios, diversification has had a far deeper meaning than what is commonly understood in the financial markets today. For the astute strategist, it means not putting all your eggs in one basket in every important aspect of your life. Given what is happening in our world and economy, it’s time to revisit the deeper meaning of diversification.

Diversification means that our assets are invested such that an economic, political, or natural event — particularly a catastrophic event — cannot wipe us out. So, for example, we don’t invest all of our savings in a single financial institution or fund. Investors who lost their life savings in the Madoff scandal were not practicing even the most basic form of financial diversification.

Diversification also means having multiple types of assets and custodians in multiple places. Custodians (i.e., those who hold our assets for us) might be brokerage firms, banks, depositories or our own safe.

Diversification by place means locating our assets in states or countries subject to different legal and political risks. It means denominating our assets in currencies of multiple countries. It means selecting assets subject to different risks of loss due to climate change, weather conditions, social conditions and other uniquely local vicissitudes. Local investment is a great idea, but the people who lived through Katrina can tell you why having all of your eggs in one local basket may not be the best idea.

Diversification means that we don’t have all of our savings in just one type of asset. So we don’t invest in securities only — we also invest in tangibles. If possible, we buy a house without debt, or with debt that can be serviced by one family member’s income, or invest in our home to lower energy and food costs permanently. We also maintain a sufficient inventory of household goods. And it’s a good idea to invest in disaster preparedness if we live in an area that experiences earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes or  is prone to power outages.

Having all your money in one currency or one country is pretty risky – a risk many in the US tend to take. Ask your Jewish friends whose parents got out of Germany in time because they had gold coins or family and assets abroad. Gold coins may hold their value if the dollar collapses, but they can also disappear in a burglary or if you forget where you put them. Digital gold may be a great thing, but if the Internet is not reliable where you are, cold cash may be a good thing. Or if your cash is worthless, a stockpile of food, vitamins and liquor can be priceless. However, food, vitamins and liquor are only good when you are bartering with someone who wants them or is close by. Which takes us back to gold coins or digital gold or some other currencies. So you see, there is no magic bullet – just diversification.

Diversification of life risks is an integral part of all matters related to financial capital. Living things are the source of all wealth. That includes you and me.

Diversification means that we invest in our physical and mental well-being. We invest our time in understanding the toxic chemicals, drugs and other influences that increasingly contribute to poor health and cause us to need so much more funding for more drugs and medical treatments to cure what ails us. One of the greatest – and growing — threats to our financial health is physical illness. The notion that corporate stock investments will create security while one saves money eating unhealthy food is contradictory to the principles of building real wealth.

Diversification means that we invest not just in our own human capital but also in the human capital of other members of our family and those around us. In this way, we are not betting on financial assets alone to see us through. We are investing in each other because it is family, friends and communities that help see us through. An active network of mutually-supportive friends and colleagues is important. For those with sufficient capital and skills, financing the farmers and companies we depend on for our daily bread may not provide much of a return — it may, however, ensure that we have healthy, safe food.

Diversification also applies to the work we do. For most people, our labor is our most important source of financial assets. Skill diversity can mean, for example, that you have a number of skills. If one skill goes out of favor, another will give you the ability to be economically useful. If you have a business that fails, you have the ability to start a new business because you have the experience and diversity of skills to make a business run.

The ability to generate income through your own business or practice is invaluable, particularly when the economic environment makes “W-2” employment more difficult to find. If you are an employee and your company closes, if you have taken care to broaden your skill base, your skills can be valuable commodities for other, different types of employers or employers in other industries or places less affected by a downturn. Better yet, you know how to do many things for yourself, thus offsetting lost income with lower expenses. Look at those who are successful in the current environment: what most of them share is a commitment to life-long learning that translates into a multitude of personal and professional skills.

Diversification is not always easy to achieve. The more resources we have, the easier it is to diversify. The fewer resources we have, the more our diversification focuses on building our human capital and community. Interestingly enough, many of the best opportunities before us are those that can happen when people who have a lot of money and people who don’t have money but have a lot of skills become allies in building greater diversification together. Isolation shrinks our options. Opportunities expand as we organize and collaborate effectively. Hence, it is critical to not assume financial capital can provide sufficient diversification alone and remain isolated from our neighbors and family.

One of my goals for the Solari Report is to explore options we have to strengthen and diversify our human and financial capital and to introduce you to leaders who are taking action to help us do so.

On our next Solari Report, during our “Movers and Shakers Interview,” we will talk with permaculturist Albert Bates (see also: http://www.thegreatchange.com, http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com) about strengthening our communities, including eco-villages and Transition Towns. Albert and I will discuss financial permaculture as well. If the need is growing to shift money out of centralized systems and reinvest in communities, there is an opportunity for those who can help us figure out how to make such investment sound, liquid and profitable. To get you thinking, check out the new video on the first Financial Permacuture Summit.

In “Let’s Go to the Movies,” we will be taking about Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s documentary The Take about the economic collapse of Argentina and how workers responded to bring the economy back to life. If you want a birds-eye tour of what can happen when your financial system and currency collapse, here it is.

In “Money & Markets” I will be reviewing recent financial events and discussing indications that more and more people are concerned about a financial coup d’etat these days.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

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Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Stewart Greenleaf said yesterday he would hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families. One option is to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund, said Mr. Greenleaf, R-Montgomery.

The hearing, which has not yet been scheduled, is at the request of Republican Sens. Lisa Baker and John Gordner, whose districts include parts of Luzerne County.

They made the request yesterday, the same day a third Luzerne County court official was arrested in the ongoing corruption probe.

Court Administrator William T. Sharkey Sr., 57, of West Hazelton, yesterday agreed to plead guilty to embezzling more than $70,000 in illegal gambling money seized by authorities between June 1998 and June 2008.

Two other county court officials were charged last week with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and former Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan are accused of taking $2.6 million for sending children to two facilities owned by Pittsburgh businessman Greg Zappala.

Judges Ciavarella and Conahan each could face prison terms of up to seven and three months, according to the terms of plea agreements they signed last week.

No charges have been filed against Mr. Zappala, who is the brother of Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. and son of former state Supreme Court Justice Stephen A. Zappala Sr.

The report, “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies,” addresses the question of how emerging neuroscience technologies and an increased understanding of the mind’s functioning will affect police and the military.

“It’s way too early to know which – if any – of these technologies is going to be practical,” study co-author Jonathan Moreno said. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve.”

The use of drugs to enhance or undermine battlefield performance features prominently in the report. While the narcolepsy drug modafinil and the attention deficit disorder drug Ritalin are already thought to be widely used by U.S. soldiers trying to stave off combat fatigue, the report says that more powerful and precisely targeted alertness drugs developed in the coming years will be even more effective. Drugs could also be used to enhance physical performance, such as by increasing physical strength or decreasing the perception of pain.

On the flip side, drugs might be used to attack the minds of opposing troops. “Drugs can be utilized to achieve abnormal, diseased, or disordered psychology,” the report says.

“How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?”

One method for utilizing such drugs, the authors suggested, might be through the use of “pharmacological landmines,” which deploy weaponized drugs when disturbed.

It’s not only on the battlefield that the military is thinking about deploying drugs. Pharmaceutical products could be used to fool advanced surveillance techniques, the report suggests, such as by using Botox injections to relax the facial muscles of agents who might be monitored by advanced lie-detecting or motivation-reading computers.

Such computer and robotic technologies are themselves of great interest to the report. The authors express optimism about the development of new neuroimaging techniques that can actually scan the motivations, plans and memories of enemy soldiers or even civilians at security checkpoints. Such technologies might also produce a new generation of more accurate lie detectors.

Expressing hope for a way to force information out of interrogated detainees without the stigma of torture, the report says, “It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects.”

One such method might involve transcranial direct current stimulation, which is the firing of electrical pulses into a detainee’s brain to disrupt their neurons and make it hard for them to lie.

Direct human-machine interfaces, or machines controlled directly by a human mind, could allow the deployment of weapons from a distance or even give a soldier entirely new ways of perceiving and processing information.

Blogging for wired.com, Brandon Keim raises questions about the ethics of such technologies.

“What happens when a soldier leaves the service?” he writes. “How might their brains be reshaped by their experience?”

Regarding the scanning of civilians with mind-reading technology, he asks, “Does this mean, for example, that travelers placed on the bloated, mistake-laden watchlist would have their minds scanned, just as their computers will be?”

Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University, a noted critic of military-sponsored social science research, said that ethical concerns will not hold the government back

Mr Brown stumbled slightly over his words at Commons question time, just a week after admitting that Britain was facing a “deep” recession.

As the financial gloom deepens, he told the Tory leader David Cameron today: “We should agree, as a world, on a monetary and fiscal stimulus that will take the world out of depression.”

The comment went unnoticed during rowdy question time exchanges between Mr Cameron and Mr Brown, which centred on protectionism and the Prime Minister’s use of the phrase “British jobs for British workers”. Ironically, the exchange ended with Mr Brown accusing the Tory leader of deliberately “talking Britain down”.

The company plans to launch software called Latitude on Wednesday that lets mobile phone users share their location with close contacts. Google hopes it will help people find each other while out and about and to keep track of loved ones.

“What Google Latitude does is allow you to share that location with friends and family members, and likewise be able to see friends and family members’ locations,” said Steve Lee, product manager for Google Latitude. For example, a girlfriend could use it to see if her boyfriend has arrived at a restaurant and, if not, how far away he is.

To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service. People can share their precise location, the city they’re in, or nothing at all.

“What we found in testing is that the most common scenario is a symmetrical arrangement, where both people are sharing with each other,” Lee said.

The software spotlights Google’s fixation with mapping and location technology. Location is an important part of navigating the real world, and Google clearly sees its geographic services as a way to establish a more personal connection with customers who today use Google chiefly for the virtual realm of the Internet. And of course money is involved, too: Google hopes its mapping technology will lead to location-based advertising revenue.

…

Beetles and other flying insects are masters of flight control, integrating sensory feedback from the visual system and other senses to navigate and maintain stable flight, all the while using little energy. Rather than trying to re-create these systems from scratch, Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues aim to take advantage of the beetle’s natural abilities by melding insect and machine. His group has previously created cyborg beetles, including ones that have been implanted with electronic components as pupae. But the current research, presented at the IEEE MEMS in Italy, is the first demonstration of a wireless beetle system.

The beetle’s payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals’ optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that’s controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle’s optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively.

Most previous research in controlling insect flight has focused on moths. But beetles have certain advantages. The giant flower beetle’s size–it ranges in weight from four to ten grams and is four to eight centimeters long–means that it can carry relatively heavy payloads. To be used for search-and-rescue missions, for example, the insect would need to carry a small camera and heat sensor.

In addition, the beetle’s flight can be controlled relatively simply. A single signal sent to the wing muscles triggers the action, and the beetle takes care of the rest. “That allows the normal function to control the flapping of the wings,” says Jay Keasling, who was not involved in the beetle research but who collaborates with Maharbiz. Minimal signaling conserves the battery, extending the life of the implant. Moths, on the other hand, require a stream of electrical signals in order to keep flying.

Thinking it might contain food that had been imported illegally, the agent opened the parcel. Inside, he found US$380,000 in counterfeit US$100 bills hidden among 20 bags of dried seafood.

The discovery earned Chen Mei-ling, 47, a Taiwanese woman from Kaohsiung City to a 33-month prison sentence and a US$4,300 fine last week.

It has also reawakened fears in the US that Taiwan is a center for the printing of so-called “supernotes” — forged currency that is so nearly perfect that it is almost impossible to detect.

Court papers showed that Chen arrived in San Francisco in July and stayed at the home of her former husband in Sunnyvale, California.

She has pleaded guilty to bringing US$20,000 in counterfeit US$100 bills into the US.

Within a few days she had used the forged money to buy luxury items at stores including Louis Vuitton, Coach, Foot Locker and Bath and Body Works.

Her plan had worked perfectly — until the fishy smelling parcel arrived at customs. She had posted the parcel to herself at her former husband’s address before leaving Taipei.

The customs agent took the notes to government experts who determined they were forged, whereupon Chen was arrested and charged.

Later, she admitted to having used US$3,200 in counterfeit bills at local shops.

Chen has been in custody since her arrest.

The US Secret Service, which investigates all forgery cases, as well as providing security for the president and other VIPs, determined that the fake money fell into the “supernotes” category.

“The Secret Service has led a 19-year investigation into the production and distribution of this highly deceptive family of counterfeit notes,” prosecutors said.

“First detected in 1989, the supernote is of such high quality that it often goes undetected until it reaches the Federal Reserve Bank. The Secret Service’s investigation has spanned the globe, involving more than 130 countries and resulting in more than 200 arrests,” they said.

On Aug. 20 — about a month after Chen’s arrest — Taipei police discovered what media reports described as “the most sophisticated counterfeiting factory ever found in Taiwan, with finished and semi-finished US$100 bills whose printing technology shocked the US.”

In addition to her prison sentence and fine, Chen was also ordered to pay US$3,200 in restitution to the stores where she used the fake bills and will be on probation for three years after she leaves prison.

US law enforcement sources said Taiwan has long had a reputation as a center for high-quality counterfeit money production. In recent years, however, the forgers were believed to be concentrating on the Chinese currency.