What you are about to hear is not science fiction or conspiracy theory but a glimpse of what is going on behind the closed doors of the United States Pentagon.

In a small auditorium labeled BC232 a man is presenting a discussion on how the military industrial complex can spread a virus and use a vaccine to extinguish what the pentagon calls undesirable human behavior. Specifically in this case religious behavior.

This is dark science my friends. With all the mandatory vaccine programs in the United States do not be deceived for a moment that something like this will not or possibly hasn't already been used on the American public.

The long-dreaded sequestration has arrived, bringing with it potentially catastrophic consequences for governmental programs designed to benefit those most in need. The NAACP estimates these across-the-board cuts will result in 100,000 fewer low-income children being prepared for school through Head Start, 17 million fewer "Meals-on-Wheels" delivered to seniors suffering from food insecurity, and 1.6 million fewer unemployed Americans served through job training, education, and employment services.

Yet, as thousands of "Israel-first" citizen lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill tomorrow as part of the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - the largest and most influential of the many groups comprising the "Israel lobby" - concern for these millions of Americans will not be on its legislative agenda. 

Instead, AIPAC will be lobbying to avert the impact of sequestration on record-breaking levels of U.S. military aid to Israel. It will also be pushing for legislation to boost the U.S.-Israel "strategic alliance" and green light an Israeli attack on Iran, measures which will both inevitably entail demands for additional U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel.

Israel stands to lose approximately $250 million of its $3.1 billion military aid package from the United States under the terms of the sequestration. The Jewish Week calls AIPAC's gambit to exempt these cuts a "very risky strategy at a time when millions of Americans will be feeling the bite of the sequestration debacle," which "could easily backfire and damage Israel far more than any cuts in its very generous grant aid program."

In thinking about drones strikes and targeted killings, it can be instructive to picture them hitting people you know, either deliberately or as collateral damage. Doing so may not even be much of a stretch, nor should it be. (It's already the case for people living in parts of Pakistan and Yemen.) Last week, I moderated a live chat on the ethics of drone warfare with Michael Walzer, the author of "Just and Unjust Wars"; Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, who has also written about just-war theory; and The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, who is a master of the subject. The discussion took some interesting turns, touching on the idea of a secret committee that the President would be asked to check with before killing an American and the question of whether China would ever assert the right to call in a drone strike on a dissident living in San Francisco. After Walzer and McMahan suggested some criteria for strikes - criminality, risk of American lives - I asked them this:

Doesn't a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime - thus committing a crime - that will provoke retribution or a break with allies - endangering Americans - fit this definition of a target?

Walzer didn't initially think that it did. The danger to Americans, he said, had "to come directly not indirectly from the target before he can be a target." McMahan had a different view:

If the release of classified information really would seriously endanger the lives of innocent people and the only way to prevent the release of the information was to kill the journalist, then the journalist would be liable to attack. But the evidential standards in such a case would be very high and would be unlikely to be satisfiable in practice.

Lord James of Blackheath, speaking in the House of Lords on February 16 2012

Warren Buffett says even though he and other top earners are paying higher taxes this year, he thinks he's still paying a lower rate than his secretary.

In 2013, capital gains for those earning more than $400,000 ($450,000 for couples) will be taxed at 20%, up from 15%. And high-income households also will pay an additional 3.8% in Medicare taxes on their investment income for the first time. The top marginal tax rate also rose for the wealthiest wage earners, but since Buffett's income is from investment gains, not wages, that's not a factor.

But part of the problem is that his secretary's tax bill also went up since a partial payroll tax holiday ended, raising what she pays for social security by 2 percentage points.

Now, just as diplomacy is yielding results, has never been a better time to ignore the lobbying of Israel's prime minister for war

"If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind ... the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close."

The above quote - from a speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a joint session of the United States Congress - is notable not only for its sense of urgency and dire threat, but also for the date on which the speech was given: 10 July 1996. That was far from the first time Netanyahu had sounded the alarm for the need to take drastic action against a purportedly imminent Iranian nuclear weapon: in a 1992 address to the Israeli Knesset, he declared, "within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb" - an assertion he repeated without irony in 1995, when, in his book Fighting Terrorism, he again predicted full Iranian nuclear weapons capability within "three to five years".

This past Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his belief that ongoing nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations were futile and represented merely an effort by Iran to "buy time" to develop a nuclear weapon. Coming from an individual with nearly 20 years of public statements consistently citing the purported imminence of such a weapon, this is a questionable statement to say the least. But given the present atmosphere of heightened tension surrounding this issue, such comments are particularly dangerous and revealing.

The present round of negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran represent the only meaningful channel left to avoid another potentially disastrous war in the Middle East - and another conflict that would be likely to draw in the United States, as well. By many accounts, the latest round of talks between the two sides this past week in Kazakhstan represented the most significant mutual softening of positions since negotiations began; they were encouraging enough at the end to be described by participants as a "turning point" in a situation that, to date, has most often been characterized by bellicose rhetoric and shared distrust.

Jared Bernstein asks Richard Kogan to explain how sequestration could affect various government functions.

The following video presents infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years - perhaps his entire life - in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth - the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings - are from now on to be charged with "aiding the enemy." All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government's use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian.

The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers are funding a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve how machines analyze our speech. Even more radical: Darpa wants to make systems so accurate, you'll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the conversations you ever have.

Analyzing speech and improving speech-to-text machines has been a hobby horse for Darpa in recent years. But this takes it a step further, in exploring the ways crowdsourcing can make it possible for our speech to be recorded and stored forever. But it's not just about better recordings of what you say. It'll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity - like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech. Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever.

University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called "Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech." The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky.