It takes a person like Aaron Swartz to remind you how little you are actually doing to bring forth social, political and economic justice in this increasingly insane and sick world. I'm not exaggerating when I say his life was an inspiration. At 14 years old he helped start the RSS feed system, which so many now use to read content online. He also co-founded Reddit, and its sale to Conde Nast is what afforded him the resources to dedicate his life to the defense of a free and open internet. His most remarkable success in this regard was the creation of the organization Demand Progress, which was instrumental in defeating the internet censorship bill know as SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).

He ran afoul of the law due to his actions in the fall of 2010 when he downloaded millions of academic journal articles from the nonprofit online database JSTOR. While JSTOR could have pursued charges against Aaron for his activities, they decided against it. However, our Federal Government was not so kind. They decided to make an example of Aaron and charged him with multiple felonies. Charges that carried up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. Aaron was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment this past Friday, in an apparent suicide.

If you had asked me about Aaron Swartz three days ago I could have told you none of the above. This is despite the fact that I now spend pretty much all of my time trying to read through news and understand the true nature of the world around me. Even more pathetically, it is despite the fact that a close friend of mine had met Aaron this past summer and was trying to coordinate a time for us all to meet. Sadly, we never connected.

As part of my tribute to Aaron, I will commit myself even more fully to the cause of freedom in America. I spent the last 12 hours reading about him and I have compiled some of the most interesting excerpts from various sources below. Please take the time.

Clive Hamilton in his "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change" describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that "catastrophic climate change is virtually certain." This obliteration of "false hopes," he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth - intellectually and emotionally - and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth - as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury - as well as unrivaled military and economic power - for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

The severe drought that swept through much of the U.S. last year is continuing into 2013, threatening to cripple economic growth while forcing consumers to pay higher food prices.

"The drought will have a significant impact on prices, especially beef, pork and chicken," said Ernie Gross, an economic professor at Creighton University and who studies farming issues.

"Forecasts are for a four percent (price) increase in food this year, but I think that's on the low side if the drought continues," Gross said. "Food prices will likely be going up much more than the forecast."

Lack of rain and extremely warm temperatures - thought to be from global warming as well as natural climate changes - are blamed for the drought.

Last year's severe weather put nearly 80 percent of the continental United States in drought conditions - the worst in 50 years. Particularly hard it areas include the Midwest states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, as well as Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and many parts of Colorado and California.

Reports from insiders say system to find justice for burned homeowners was "a facade".

Last week Salon reported that 10 major banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, agreed to pay a settlement of $3.3 billion in cash to 3.8 million mortgage borrowers who were foreclosed upon in 2009 or 2010. The settlement came after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board closed down a vast project of independent reviews aimed to correctly determine how homeowners were burned and how much compensation they should receive.

The independent auditing project was deemed too costly, so instead - to the dismay of a number of commentators and homeowner advocates - the mortgage companies themselves will determine distribution of the $3.3 billion settlement sum. "It is just incomprehensible to me that they could not find a third party that has the wherewithal and independence to fairly determine what the damage is to homeowners," John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said when the settlement was announced.

Judge finds boy, now 12, accountable for second-degree murder after trial that centred on child's grasp of right and wrong.

A California judge found Monday that a boy was responsible for the second-degree murder of his white supremacist father when the defendant was just 10.

Prosecutors had argued at trial that the boy, now 12, knew what he was doing when he shot 32-year-old Jeff Hall - a regional leader of the National Socialist Movement - and the slaying was premeditated.

Defense attorney Matthew Hardy countered that his client grew up in an abusive and violent environment and learned it was acceptable to kill people who were a threat. Hardy contended the boy thought if he shot his dad, the violence would end.

The boy, who is not being identified by the Associated Press because of his age, did not testify at the trial.

}As I wrote on Jan. 11, Jackson County Kentucky Sheriff Denny Peyman has made it clear that gun laws which violate the United States Constitution or the Kentucky Constitution will not be enforced in his county.

On Jan. 12, he followed this up with a press conference in which he explained that a Sheriff's powers are predominant over the powers of federal and state agents. When he says these things he drives gun-grabbers batty because he says them with the conviction that rests on knowledge, and he has no intention of backing down.

Members of the hacktivist movement Anonymous gained access to MIT's website over the weekend and published a statement celebrating recently deceased info activist Aaron Swartz while attacking the justice system that stood to imprison him for decades.

Swartz, who co-founded both the website Reddit and the activism organization Demand Progress, passed away Friday of a reported suicide. And while he openly discussed his bouts with depression in the past, Swartz' parents and advocates alike have suggested that a serious legal fight that has dominated the activist's life in recent years played a role in his passing.

The 26-year-old Harvard fellow was slated to appear in federal court during the coming weeks because the United States says he illegally download millions of academic papers from the website JSTOR, presumably for public distribution, while logged onto the computer network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David Segal, the executive director of Demand Progress, originally equated it to "checking too many books out of the library." If convicted, however, Swartz could have been sentenced to upwards of 35 years in prison.

In a statement published shortly after his death, the family of the activist said, "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."

A former star of the British soap "EastEnders" was beaten to death and dismembered by her brother after they argued over an overflowing sink, a court heard on Monday as the murder trial opened.

Tony McCluskie, 35, denies murder but has admitted the manslaughter of his sister Gemma, whose headless and limbless torso was found in a London canal last March.

Tony McCluskie had left the bathroom taps on at the east London flat they shared and his 29-year-old sister had driven home to tell him this was the "last straw" and he had to move out, London's Old Bailey court heard.

Prosecutor Crispin Aylett said McCluskie had killed his sister after the argument on March 1, cut up her body and dumped it in the Regent's Canal in east London.

Facing new regulations that target high-calorie soda drinks, US soft-drink giant Coca-Cola will unveil a pair of television ads this week that acknowledge the calories in its products and encourage consumers to burn them off.

A two-minute video titled "Coming Together" will begin airing on national cable news networks late Monday, reminding viewers that all calories count in managing their weight, including those that come from Coca-Cola beverages.

The purpose of the ads is "to highlight some of the specifics behind the company's ongoing commitment to deliver more beverage choices, including low- and no-calorie options, and to clearly communicate the calorie content of all its products," Coca-Cola said in a news release.

A fight that started between two men at a bar turned into a brawl involving some 200 people at a Stoughton social club. All of them, children included, were there for a baby shower.

The crowd was so uncontrollable Stoughton police had to call in three additional local police departments, the state police and the sheriff's department.

Paulo Depina, Aderito Deandrade and Patrick Lopes are under arrest, along with a teenager. All of them are charged with assault and battery on a police officer.