Australia First to Test New Lithium Sulphur Batteries
January 6th, 2020Via: Monash University:
Imagine having access to a battery, which has the potential to power your phone for five continuous days, or enable an electric vehicle to drive more than 1000km without needing to “refuel”.
Monash University researchers are on the brink of commercialising the world’s most efficient lithium-sulphur (Li-S) battery, which could outperform current market leaders by more than four times, and power Australia and other global markets well into the future.
Your Cyberpunk Games Are Dangerous
January 6th, 2020From 2015.
Via: BoingBoing:
On January 17, 1980, FBI agents descended on a small business in Wisconsin to investigate a plot against the life of an American business executive in Beirut, Lebanon, named William Weatherby. The tip came to local law enforcement from a concerned citizen who had chanced on a written description of the conspiracy, which the police duly handed over to the FBI.
When investigators arrived at the offices of this company, TSR Hobbies, they learned that William Weatherby did not exist: he was a non-player character in a new espionage role-playing game called Top Secret, which TSR was playtesting. This was easily demonstrated to the satisfaction of all parties, and the whole incident would certainly be forgotten today—except that it inevitably became part of TSR’s promotion for Top Secret. It was a spy game so realistic that even the FBI thought it was real.
Samsung’s Upcoming AI Avatar Production System Partially Leaked
January 6th, 2020Via: Good Content Tech:
Trump Doubles Down on Threat to Attack Iran Cultural Sites
January 5th, 2020Via: AFP:
US President Donald Trump doubled down Sunday on a threat to attack Iranian cultural sites despite accusations that any such strike would amount to a war crime.
After his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, had insisted that any military action would conform to international law, Trump said he would regard cultural sites as fair game if Iran resorted to deadly force against US targets.
“They’re allowed to kill our people, they’re allowed to torture and maim our people, they’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way,” Trump told reporters.
“If they do anything there will be major retaliation.”
His comments on his return from a break in Florida followed a welter of criticism over a Tweet on Saturday night in which he said sites which were “important to… Iranian culture” were on a list of 52 potential US targets.
Tehran’s foreign minister had reacted to those initial comments by drawing parallels with the Islamic State group’s destruction of the Middle East’s cultural heritage.
Are Mysterious Drone Sightings Related to Air Force Counterdrone Program?
January 5th, 2020Via: Gazette:
The mysterious drone swarms spotted over Colorado that have vexed the governor, law enforcement and residents might not be so mysterious after all.
While no one has taken responsibility, and even the Federal Aviation Administration has claimed ignorance, the answer could be a secretive Air Force program intended to keep prying eyes away from nuclear missile silos.
Air Force Global Strike Command, which is based in Louisana, has confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises out of F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, where it is based.
The command oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks.
The Air Force isn’t claiming ownership of the drones, but neither is it denying it.
F.E. Warren didn’t respond to an emailed question Friday on whether its counterdrone effort had anything to do with the recent sightings.
How the Pentagon Was Duped by Contractors Using Shell Companies
January 5th, 2020Duped. *wink*
Missing $21 trillion? Yep, still missing.
Via: Bloomberg:
Shell companies have come under attack for obscuring illicit money flowing into real estate. But it turns out they’re also a problem for the Pentagon.
Some Defense Department suppliers have used such front companies to fraudulently win manufacturing bids, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study of Defense Department contractors.
In some cases, the shell companies helped contractors obscure that they were making U.S. military equipment abroad, the GAO said, posing a risk to national security and quality control. More often, they were used to win contracts meant for companies owned by disabled veterans or minorities, it said.
U.S. Contractors Accused of Funding Taliban Attacks Against American Troops
January 5th, 2020Via: Courthouse News:
Nearly 400 people who were either wounded while serving in the U.S. military in Afghanistan or are family members of service members who died in the conflict sued a group of companies on Friday they say helped fund attacks against Americans by making protection payments to the Taliban.
“Defendants supported the Taliban for a simple reason: Defendants were all large Western companies with lucrative businesses in post-9/11 Afghanistan, and they all paid the Taliban to refrain from attacking their business interests,” the 288-page complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Friday states. “Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.”
Relying on confidential witnesses, internal documents and publicly available information from journalists, government watchdogs and congressional hearings, the complaint alleges companies that worked in war-torn Afghanistan commonly acceded to the Taliban’s mob-style demands for payment in exchange for the guarantee that their businesses interests would not be attacked.
One unnamed American executive who worked in Afghanistan is quoted in the complaint as saying “We don’t need any security if the payments are made. Nobody f—s with us.”
The payments allegedly climbed as high as 40% of the value of the company’s project and were often facilitated through subcontractors. The subcontractors, such as private security firms that were known to pay off the Taliban, would sometimes send money through Afghanistan’s traditional money transfer network, which can be hard to trace. Other times, the companies would simply hire Taliban operatives to work as guards.
Research Credit: RP
How Long Will It Take For The U.S. To Collapse?
January 5th, 2020Via: Alt Market:
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
“Shit-Life Syndrome,” Trump Voters, and Clueless Dems
January 5th, 2020Via: Counterpunch:
For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”
Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan.
And Now… “New York Mayor Says City Bracing for Iranian Retaliation After Soleimani Killed”
January 4th, 2020Via: Reuters:
New York City security officials went on heightened alert for possible Iranian retaliation in response to a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Friday that killed Qassem Soleimani, Tehran’s most prominent military commander, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
The city is constantly vigilant against possible terrorist attacks given its history but the mayor said the threat has changed significantly given the resources that a state such as Iran has compared to non-state organizations like al Qaeda or ISIS.
“It’s just a world of difference,” de Blasio told a news conference.
“We have to assume this action puts us in a de facto state of war,” the mayor said.
