“The Greatest Manmade Disaster in History”
November 25th, 2018Via: Guardian:
A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.
When the head of a production brigade dares to state the obvious – that there is no food – a leader warns him: “That’s right-deviationist thinking. You’re viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter.”
Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.
The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. Yang’s monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.
He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: “I didn’t think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn’t know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn’t know about farmers who were beaten to death.
“People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible.”
South Africa: Detective Who Exposed Elite Pedophile Ring Found Dead
November 25th, 2018Minnie said the book was, “Only the beginning,” and that he would reveal more.
Via: NeonNettle:
A former police detective-turned-investigative author has been found dead, just days after publishing a book that exposed a high-level government pedophile ring.
58-year-old Mark Minne was found with a bullet to his head on August 14, but many people are refusing to believe the “official” police version – that he committed suicide at his friend’s farm near the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Minne’s family is claiming that he would never kill himself – a point he had brought up with them – and that he feared people were after him because he was about to expose even more elite pedophilia.
The highly-respected detective authored the controversial book “The Lost Boys of Bird Island” which was published on August 5th, 2018, and exposed shocking child abuse and corruption that he had witnessed whilst working on the police force.
After leaving law enforcement, Minne devoted his post-police life to exposing the government-orchestrated child trafficking he discovered while working as a detective but was previously blocked from investigating.
Minne, along with his good friend Chris Steyn, also a former cop turned investigative journalist, authored the book together to expose high-level government officials and powerful elites who took children to Bird Island where they were abused and murdered.
Book: The Lost Boys of Bird Island by Mark Minnie
Large Riots in France Over New Fuel Taxes
November 24th, 2018Via: Daily Mail:
Huge plumes of smoke were seen on one of France’s most iconic streets today, as protesters burned large plywood sheets, chairs and other material in demonstrations against planned fuel hikes.
A water cannon and rounds of teargas were also used by riot police against thousands of French ‘Yellow Vest’ fuel protesters in Paris today as the Champs Elysee was reduced to a battlefield.
The grassroots movement is campaigning against a what is believes to be a general decline in living standards across the country, and the recent decision to raise fuel prices.
The worst violence took place on the most famous avenue in the city where a huge crowd called for President Emmanuel Macron to resign.
By 11am, clouds of tea gas covered the Champs Elysee, and especially the area close to the place de la Concorde.
Company Trying to Create 90% Efficient Solar Panel
November 24th, 2018Stories about exotic solar panels and energy storage systems come out all the time. As we all know, however, the gap between the laboratory and a product available to purchase is very large. In other words, don’t hold your breath—or delay a solar system purchase—waiting for this to happen.
That said, it’s still fun to imagine the potential of something like this.
Via: PV Magazine:
NovaSolix proposes a carbon nanotube based solar module which has the theoretical potential to reach 90% efficiency. The technology is based on a 1960s invention – the rectifying antenna (rectenna) – which is today used in radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags capture the radio waves put out by scanners and power themselves. NovaSolix aims to take that ability of converting a different portion (non-visible) of the electromagnetic spectrum, and – using carbon nanotubes tuned to the sun’s full spectrum output – collect a much broader portion of the energy in our environment.
Seaweed Could Drastically Cut Methane Emissions from Cows
November 24th, 2018Via: MIT Technology Review:
There’s growing momentum behind the seaweed approach, thanks to almost shockingly effective results in initial scientific studies. In 2014, Australian researchers found that low doses of a red algae known as Asparagopsis taxiformis virtually eliminated methane production in lab experiments. Field trials with live sheep cut emissions as much as 80%, while the UC Davis experiment, the first on live cattle, showed a 58% reduction on average when a related seaweed made up 1% of their diet.
Texas Is About to Create OPEC’s Worst Nightmare
November 24th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
The map lays out OPEC’s nightmare in graphic form.
An infestation of dots, thousands of them, represent oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico. In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices as low as $30 a barrel.
OPEC’s bad dream only deepens next year, when Permian producers expect to iron out distribution snags that will add three pipelines and as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day.
“The Permian will continue to grow and OPEC needs to learn to live with it,’’ said Mike Loya, the top executive in the Americas for Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil-trading house.
The U.S. energy surge presents OPEC with one of the biggest challenges of its 60-year history. If Saudi Arabia and its allies cut production when they gather Dec. 6 in Vienna, higher prices would allow shale to steal market share. But because the Saudis need higher crude prices to make money than U.S. producers, OPEC can’t afford to let prices fall.
Silent and Simple Ion Engine Powers a Plane with No Moving Parts
November 21st, 2018I found a video of the flight:
Via: Scientific American:
Behind a thin white veil separating his makeshift lab from joggers at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology indoor track, aerospace engineer Steven Barrett recently test-flew the first-ever airplane powered with ionic wind thrusters—electric engines that generate momentum by creating and firing off charged particles.
Quantum Computers Put Blockchain Security at Risk
November 20th, 2018Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL).
Via: Nature:
By 2025, up to 10% of global gross domestic product is likely to be stored on blockchains. A blockchain is a digital tool that uses cryptography techniques to protect information from unauthorized changes. It lies at the root of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency2. Blockchain-related products are used everywhere from finance and manufacturing to health care, in a market worth more than US$150 billion.
When information is money, data security, transparency and accountability are crucial. A blockchain is a secure digital record, or ledger. It is maintained collectively by users around the globe, rather than by one central administration. Decisions such as whether to add an entry (or block) to the ledger are based on consensus — so personal trust doesn’t come into it. Any party inside or outside the network can check the integrity of the ledger by making a simple calculation.
But within a decade, quantum computers will be able to break a blockchain’s cryptographic codes. Here we highlight how quantum technology makes blockchains vulnerable — and how it could render them more secure.
Apple and Samsung Fined for Deliberately Slowing Down Phones
November 19th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Apple and Samsung are being fined €10m and €5m respectively in Italy for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones.
An investigation launched in January by the nation’s competition authority found that certain smartphone software updates had a negative effect on the performance of the devices.
Believed to be the first ruling of its kind against smartphone manufacturers, the investigation followed accusations operating system updates for older phones slowed them down, thereby encouraging the purchase of new phones.
In a statement the antitrust watchdog said “Apple and Samsung implemented dishonest commercial practices” and that operating system updates “caused serious malfunctions and significantly reduced performance, thus accelerating phones’ substitution”.
Inside the British Army’s Secret Information Warfare Machine
November 19th, 2018Via: Wired UK:
They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare.
