90 Miles From Tyranny

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Monday, April 25, 2016

Eiffel Tower Construction Progression In The 1800's


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One of the oldest photos of the Great Sphinx, from 1880

This Is The Way To A Man's Heart...Unless He Is A Vegetarian...


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Scientists can now make lithium-ion batteries last a lifetime

Who says playing around is a waste of time?

Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that's exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.

Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.

The problem they have encountered, however, is that nanowires are also extremely fragile and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, known as "cycling." For example, in a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.

UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai solved the brittleness conundrum by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination, they said, is reliable and resistant to failure.

The findings were published today in the American Chemical Society's Energy Letters. Hard work combined with serendipity paid off in this case, according to senior author Reginald Penner.

"Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it," Penner, chair of UCI's chemistry department, said in a statement. "She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any...

Rape Trees, Dead Migrants and the Consequences of an Open Border


Many of the most caring people in the U.S. think they are helping the poor from Latin America by leaving our Southwest border wide open between ports-of-entry, but they are not. Several of the transnational criminal organizations (cartels) operating in Central America and Mexico make an estimated one-third or more of their profits from illegal immigration. Specifically, two groups below Texas, the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels, are largely fueled by the trafficking and smuggling of human beings.

The brutality of these criminal groups, from incinerating innocents in a network of ovens to their near complete control of state and local governments, is largely paid for by funds generated from illegal immigration–a shadowy economic engine that is only possible because we refuse to properly secure our border with Mexico.

Women and young girls from Central America are routinely given birth control or morning after pills by their mothers in anticipation of the likely sexual assaults that will occur on their illicit journey to the United States.

These females are often raped immediately upon making it to their first stop once they arrive in a Mexican stash house from Guatemala. They then are shipped to the U.S.-Mexico border, usually to Reynosa, Mexico, immediately south of McAllen, Texas. In the process of making it from the first stash house to the second, the women and young girls are often sexually assaulted or raped again by the smuggler–or group of smugglers–taking them between the two locations. The sexual assaults and rapes then often happen again in the second Mexican stash house of their journey.

They are then trickled into the U.S. across the porous border and brought to a third stash house in a U.S. border town, usually in or near McAllen, Texas. They are often sexually assaulted or raped again by...

IRS Can Track Your Cell Phone, but Leaves Billions in Taxes Uncollected

While the Internal Revenue Service continues to leave uncollected tax money on the table, the agency beefed up its surveillance capabilities in a move that alarms both conservative and liberal privacy advocates.

Now some complain the IRS is acting too much like Big Brother and not enough like a traditional taxman.

Since 2006, the IRS has overseen an annual tax gap—the shortfall between taxes owed and collected—of about $385 billion, government analysts say. And according to an April report, the agency has not implemented 70 of 112 actions identified by the Government Accountability Office to close that loop.

In 2009, though, the IRS purchased a “cell-site simulator,” more commonly known as Stingray technology. And since November, the agency has been trying to buy another of the devices.

Like something from a spy movie, a Stingray device mimics a cellphone tower, tricking all mobile phones in an area into revealing their location and numbers. Authorities can deploy the powerful technology to tag and track an individual’s location in real time.

More advanced versions of the devices can be used to copy information stored on a cellphone and to download...

Morning Mistress

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Girls With Guns

Obama Is Playing Rush-In Roulette With American Lives..


The Navy’s new drone warship may change naval combat

The Pentagon is about to realize its dream of having a drone warship to hunt foreign stealth submarines.

Meet the ACTUV (Antisubmarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel) — a crewless,140-ton, 132-foot-long robotic ship unveiled in Portland’s Willamette River on Thursday.

“This is a big, big, deal,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said.

“It looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey,” he added, admiring the vessel’s narrow bow.

“It’s extremely inexpensive compared to a manned system and it takes men and service women out of harms way. So why wouldn’t we want to do this?”

The ACTUV, pronounced “active,” costs $15,000 to $20,000 a day to operate, according to the Department of Defense. It was conceived in 2010 by Darpa, the Pentagon’s developmental wing responsible for testing emerging military technologies.




And those expenses are chump change compared with the operating costs of an aircraft carrier or submarine. For example, the USS George Washington, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, costs a cool $1.1 million a day to operate, the Navy told The Wall Street Journal. Staffing the ACTUV costs an estimated $684,900 a day.

“You can afford to use it in ways or think about using it in ways that would be too dangerous for a manned vessel,” Scott Littlefield, the ACTUV’s program manager, told Business Insider. “Like taking it into a minefield or taking it within range of somebody else’s weapons.”


“I don’t think we’ll ever get away from sailors on big ships,” he added, “but I could imagine a future in which we have a mixture of ...

MIT: Incandescents Now More Efficient than LEDs

The 110 Year-Old Light Bulb That's Never Been Turned Off
Researchers at the MIT are publicizing that they have fixed the incandescent lightbulb with a brilliant improvement. They have wrapped the interior filament in a crystal glass that both bounces light and contains heat. It recycles energy in a way that addresses the main complaint against Edison’s bulb: It burns far too much energy for the light that it produces.

Why is this interesting? About a decade ago, governments around the world developed a fetish for banning incandescents (through an efficiency rule) and replacing them with expensive LED technology and florescent bulbs. It happened in Europe first but eventually came to the United States. The last American factory to produce them closed in 2010, and they are ever harder to find in even the big-box hardware stores. (As with all such bans, there are exceptions for elites who desire specialty bulbs.)

The change has been seriously annoying for many consumers. It has even given rise to hoarding and...

IRS and Congress Ignore Job-Related Felonies – as Long as They Are Committed by Illegal Aliens

During a recent Senate hearing chaired by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) focused on the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) support of identity theft by illegal aliens and the IRS's total disregard for the American citizen victims of these crimes. Coats defined employment-related identity theft as occurring when someone uses another person's identity — their name or their Social Security number (SSN) — to get a job illegally.

The hearing also exposed the failure of Congress to do anything to protect American citizens from massive illegal alien job-related identity theft, leading me to think that what needs to be done is to provide the Social Security numbers of all members of Congress plus the Social Security numbers of all IRS officials and their staffs to illegal aliens so they can file their taxes without stealing the identities of average American citizens.

IRS and Congress Encourage and Tolerate Illegal Alien, Job-Related Felonies

Three key points came from the interchange between Sen. Coates and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

  1. The IRS encourages and facilitates the commission of job-related felonies, including Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury, and identity theft as long as these crimes are committed by illegal aliens and their employers.
  2. The IRS places the interests of illegal aliens ahead of those of American citizens by forbidding its employees from notifying American citizens, including millions of American children, that their Social Security numbers are being fraudulently used by illegal aliens in spite of the fact that these Americans suffer serious harm. 
  3. Congress is complicit since it has long been aware of the problem but has done nothing to protect American citizens from...

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