I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book
October 10th, 2020Via: Mother Jones:
Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book is one of the most cursed documents ever compiled in this miserable, dying country. Totaling 97 pages and containing the names, numbers, and addresses of a considerable cross section of the global elite, Epstein’s personal contact book first turned up in a courtroom in 2009 after his former butler, Alfredo Rodriguez, tried to sell it to lawyers representing Epstein’s victims for $50,000. Rodriguez described the book, apparently assembled by Epstein’s employees, as the “Holy Grail.” It is annotated with cryptic marginalia—stars next to certain entries, arrows pointing toward others–and the names of at least 38 people are circled for reasons that aren’t totally clear. There are 1,571 names in all, with roughly 5,000 phone numbers and thousands of emails and home addresses. There are celebrities, princes and princesses, high-profile scientists, artists from all over the world, all alongside some of the world’s most powerful oligarchs and political leaders—people like Prince Andrew (circled), Ehud Barak (circled), Donald Trump (circled).
Google Is Giving Data to Police Based on Search Keywords
October 9th, 2020Via: cnet:
There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect.
The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed
October 9th, 2020Via: DNYUZ:
Calls and emails come in at all times of day and night. They no longer concern fun or prestige. Instead they focus on fresh water and solar panels. These were not the inquiries they had grown used to.
The island brokers are overwhelmed.
As the coronavirus pandemic has devastated countries around the world, it has upended nearly every aspect of life for everyone, including for those most insulated by money. Even the niche, ultrarich world of island commerce has been turned on its head.
“This has been the busiest two months I’ve had in 22 years of selling islands,” Chris Krolow, the chief executive of Private Islands Inc., said in July. The pace has not slowed since then, he said.
Preparations for Post Election Violence
October 9th, 2020Via: ZeroHedge:
As the country inches closer to the Nov. 03 presidential election, federal agencies, city governments, and local police forces are preparing for political and social instabilities, no matter the election outcome.
Concerns are mounting that mass protests, violent confrontations between extremist groups, and widespread property damage could be seen on election day and days after. If the outcome of the election is undecided, chaos could linger for weeks, if not months.
The prospects of civil unrest around election day have prompted a chain of US survival communities to “activate” – opening their doors for members to hunker down in bomb shelters, with an abundance of weapons and ammo, and years worth of food.
Reuters reports Fortitude Ranch doomsday camps in West Virginia and Colorado will open both facilities to members on election day because of the threat of social unrest.
Fortitude Ranch’s October newsletter suggested “looting and violence” across major US metro areas, similar to what was seen over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd, could follow the elections next month. The newsletter warned social instabilities could transform into long-term issues.
Just 59 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half the Country’s Population
October 9th, 2020Via: New York Post:
The 59 Americans whose fortunes have ballooned amid the coronavirus pandemic now have more wealth than half the nation’s population, new data show.
The poorest 50 percent of Americans, or roughly 165 million people, collectively owned about $2.08 trillion in wealth in the second quarter of 2020, according to Federal Reserve data released last week.
That’s less than the net worth of the nation’s 59 richest billionaires, who have a combined fortune of about $2.09 trillion, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index shows — a number that’s grown this year despite the COVID-19 crisis kneecapping the global economy.
Small, Unmanned Spy Boat Washed Up on Scottish Island
October 8th, 2020Via: Forbes:
Last week a small unmanned vessel washed up on the rocky Scottish Isle of Tiree, about a hundred miles from the U.K.’s nuclear submarine base at Faslane. It was identified as a Wave Glider, a type made by U.S. company Liquid Robotics, which is capable of traveling thousands of miles and is used by both the U.S. Navy and Britain’s Royal Navy as well as other government agencies and scientific researchers. The local Coast Guard have been unable to trace the owner so far, but the craft’s configuration suggests it was on a secret mission.
…
There are a couple of unusual features about this particular Wave Glider which suggest a military rather than scientific mission. One is that is grey rather than the usual bright yellow, with no pennant to make it easier to see. There are no navigation lights, which are compulsory for any vessel sailing at night under U.K. law, or a radar reflector. Without these aids, the glider, which lies flat on the water, would be extremely difficult to spot. This would make it a navigation hazard, though in almost any collision the small unmanned craft would probably come off worse. This may explain why one of the antennas is broken and how it ended washed up on a beach. The question though is why such a vessel would be sailing covertly in ‘stealth mode.’
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UPDATE: Thurs 8th October 10:00am EST – Liquid Robotics have also responded.
“We have had several reach outs over the washed up platform and have engaged the end user to make them aware of this find. I believe they are in the process of reaching out to local authorities with further instructions on the disposal.”
This confirms that the craft is a Liquid Robotics Wave Glider rather than a clone. But the mystery remains over who was operating it, what it was doing — and why they are keeping quiet.
COVID-19 Is ‘Unrestricted Bioweapon’: Whistleblower Releases Second Paper Alleging ‘Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud’
October 8th, 2020Via: ZeroHedge:
Li-Meng Yan, A Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who worked in a WHO reference lab and fled her position at the University of Hong Kong, has published a second co-authored report, alleging that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was not only created in a Wuhan lab, it’s an “unrestricted bioweapon” which was intentionally released.
Meet the XB-1: A Prototype for a Modern Supersonic Passenger Jet
October 8th, 2020Via: Ars Technica:
Boom Supersonic will roll its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft out of its facilities in Centennial, Colorado, on Wednesday and reveal the vehicle publicly for the first time.
The rollout marks the handoff from the design, development, and build phase to testing, said Blake Scholl, Boom founder and chief executive. After undergoing a series of ground tests, the 21-meter-long aircraft will begin a flight test campaign in the third quarter of 2021 at Mojave Air and Space Port, Scholl said. “We’ll be supersonic by the end of next year,” he added.
Covid-19: Increased Use of Electronic Ankle Monitors
October 8th, 2020Via: MIT Technology Review:
As covid-19 began to spread earlier this year, it soon became clear that prisons and jails are particularly susceptible to outbreaks. In response, criminal justice systems around the world started looking for alternatives to incarceration.
Many turned to electronic ankle monitors as a solution. They used this technology to quickly relocate people from secure custody to the relative safety of their homes, and placed them under continuous electronic supervision. At the same time, courts in the US and Australia began to experiment with using ankle monitors for an entirely different purpose—enforcing quarantine orders.
The pandemic has subtly normalized the expanded use of ankle monitors around the world. This is a worrisome trend that we shouldn’t allow to go unexamined. Previous research suggests that ankle monitors do not conclusively reduce recidivism, and the technology has no history as a tool for enforcing compliance with public health orders. In fact, frequent and long-standing criticism of monitors charges that their use causes significant harm.
For example, ankle monitors can impose financial burdens on wearers, who are often required to cover the expense of wearing a monitor themselves: they pay private companies, hired by states and counties, fees in the range of $3 to $35 per day, which can amount to hundreds of dollars per month. Such fee structures have led some to refer to ankle monitors as a present-day debtor’s prison.
“World’s Fastest Electrodes” Triple the Energy Density of Lithium Batteries
October 8th, 2020As usual, with laboratory-stage “game-changing” battery news, I definitely wouldn’t try to hold my breath waiting for this, but it makes for interesting reading.
Via: New Atlas:
French company Nawa technologies says it’s already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.
Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits.
It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today’s typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they’re typically stuck on in a jumbled, “tangled spaghetti” fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.
Nawa’s vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else.
The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions – the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery – since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. “The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometers through the lithium material,” Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, “instead of micrometers with a plain electrode.”
This radically boosts the power density – the battery’s ability to deliver fast charge and discharge rates – by a factor of up to 10x, meaning that smaller batteries can put out 10 times more power, and the charging times for these batteries can be brought down just as drastically. Nawa says a five-minute charge should be able to take you from 0-80 percent given the right charging infrastructure.
