Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) produced the first diagrams illustrating U.S. national commodity use in the mid-1970s. The most widely recognized of these charts is the U.S. energy flow chart. LLNL has also published charts depicting carbon (or carbon dioxide potential) flow and water flow at the national level as well as energy, carbon, and water flows at the international, state, municipal, and organizational (e.g., Air Force) level. Flow charts, also referred to as Sankey Diagrams, are single-page references that contain quantitative data about resource, commodity, and byproduct flows in a graphical form. These flow charts help scientists, analysts, and other decision makers to visualize the complex interrelationships involved in managing our nation’s resources.

When you can convince people racism is rampant, you ignite a flame of division and destruction that can only end with bodies on the ground and cities leveled. //

These erroneous stories aren’t flukes. Recent history shows repeatedly that corrupt media and politicians aren’t surprised or embarrassed when body cam footage or crucial details emerge that debunk their initial “reporting.”

That’s because they don’t so much report as create. They don’t get clicks and clout by uncovering and reporting what actually happened, but by feeding people and politicians’ pre-existing narratives. That’s why every lede and headline seems to be some variation of Black Lives Matter talking points.

Corrections, if issued at all, are usually stealthy and get buried instantly, and there’s no room for nuance on a protester’s poster board or in a presidential press release. Thus the narrative is set before any details emerge, and narratives are more powerful than facts in ginning up emotional responses and revolutions.

The media know this. The ruling class knows this. If they can convince enough people that America is systemically racist, they can infiltrate government schools with critical race theory — and they have.

If they can make people believe police officers are irredeemably evil, they can nationalize local law enforcement and funnel more money toward their pet social programs. If they can convince corporations that performative “antiracism” is more important than profits, they can blackmail state lawmakers into passing legislation that gives them more power — and they are. //

Make no mistake: The ruling class is absolutely inciting violence. The same crowd that insisted President Donald Trump “incited an insurrection” is the one that outrageously lies to demonstrators claiming white cops go on search-and-destroy missions against innocent black Americans. These are the people who gaslight Americans with buzzwords like “peaceful protests” while they watch their cities light up in flames.

The way to bring revolution is to provoke unrest, and the best means to do that is to convince the public that isolated instances of evil represent endemic institutional problems through inflammatory rhetoric and disproportionate attention. It’s a strategy, and it works. //

They said, “Destroying property … is not violence.” They said protests don’t need to be peaceful and called riots a “proportionate response.” They denied evidence of anarchy. They said violence works. They condemned the term “riot” as “loaded,” instead calling it “democracy.” They released a documentary claiming “Riots Built America.” And they flat-out pretended cities weren’t being ravaged, with Gov. Jay Inslee saying “That’s news to me!” when asked about the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and Rep. Jerry Nadler calling Antifa a “myth.”

It isn’t just sins of commission either. The media transgress with omission as well. That’s why you’ll hear Ma’Khia Bryant’s name infinitely more than you’ll hear Mohammad Anwar’s. His life was stolen by two black teens when they violently carjacked him in broad daylight in D.C. last month. One story can be spun to further the narrative that foments riots. One cannot.

Back in January, left-wingers in the media, on Twitter, and in the halls of Congress breathlessly reported that Trump had incited in insurrection. He was a seditionist and a fascist, they said, and he posed such a grave threat to public safety that his social media accounts were nuked from orbit, and Democrats immediately drafted articles of impeachment again. When he urged rioters at the Capitol to go home, calling for “NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind,” a ban on his Twitter prevented the message from going out.

Although the events of that day were awful, the ruling class lied about and amplified them to the point of repeated falsehoods, with The New York Times peddling a false story that rioters bludgeoned a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claiming Sen. Ted Cruz tried to have her murdered. //

The biggest lie is that the entire United States of America — with its white people, police officers, institutions, and norms — is irredeemably racist and evil to its core. The race-baiters who peddle this lie have incited more violence than Trump ever did. When you can convince people racism is rampant, and that silence about it is violence while actual physical vigilante violence is justice, you ignite a flame of division and destruction that can only end with bodies on the ground and cities leveled. //

As Shelby Steele says, “America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power.” While the ruling classes exploit tragedy to accrue more and more power, Americans become increasingly powerless as pawns in the race war, many paying with their sanity, others with their livelihoods, and even some with their lives.

If you're a web developer, you've probably had to make a user account system. The most important aspect of a user account system is how user passwords are protected. User account databases are hacked frequently, so you absolutely must do something to protect your users' passwords if your website is ever breached. The best way to protect passwords is to employ salted password hashing. This page will explain why it's done the way it is.

There are a lot of conflicting ideas and misconceptions on how to do password hashing properly, probably due to the abundance of misinformation on the web. Password hashing is one of those things that's so simple, but yet so many people get wrong. With this page, I hope to explain not only the correct way to do it, but why it should be done that way. //

To make it impossible for an attacker to create a lookup table for every possible salt, the salt must be long. A good rule of thumb is to use a salt that is the same size as the output of the hash function. For example, the output of SHA256 is 256 bits (32 bytes), so the salt should be at least 32 random bytes.

Wiley was harsh on James, but also sternly challenged him to use his platform to talk more about his own life and the odds he overcame to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time.

I’d love to hear that story, of how you became Lebron James against all odds, instead of always professing the odds are against all people.

Lebron James says “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police!” How about this sentence, instead of that… “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed.”

How about this sentence? Even more idealistic. “I’m damn tired of just seeing people killed.” //

"Your skin is not your sin."

So apparently a ship, sailing under the Panamanian flag, owned by a Japanese company, operated by a German company, staffed by Indians and stuck in Egypt has no international guarantees of rights for its workers not to end up in a kind of floating solitary confinement. The world literally runs on this kind of shipping and it’s only possible because of these sailors that companies can apparently abandon if that’s how the spreadsheet shakes out. That’s fairly discouraging. Hopefully, the crew of the Ever Given can get some justice, and a flight home, soon.

The county even regulates what meets the standard of a 'bonafide meal' each group of customers is required to buy if they would like to order beer. All this, we're told, fights COVID.

In short, regardless of Chauvin’s actions, Derek Chauvin never had a chance for anything approaching a fair trial. He was tried by a jury composed of people who were well aware that the city government wanted Chauvin convicted. They were rightfully fearful for their own lives, property, and careers; if they returned anything less than guilty on all counts, their lives would never be the same…assuming that some number of jurors didn’t hide their feelings to get on the jury so they could ensure the correct verdict.

We have moved beyond the Constitutional ideal of a fair trial to something much more sinister, that is, the use of the judicial process to exact vengeance on a man not only as an oblation to the mob but as a way of moving a political narrative forward. None of us are safe because trials are no longer about guilt or innocence or justice; they are about ensuring the right outcome in the right cases. //

Mitchie
@wittywriter
The George Floyd case would've been an easy way for Republicans to bridge the gap with black voters. After all, we all saw George being murdered. But instead, the GOP let the crazy lead and found themselves on the wrong side of history AGAIN!! I give up. //

If it takes kangaroo trials to build bridges, then I’m not interested in crossing that particular canyon.

Architecture
Development
Operations

EDGE / IOT / OPEN SOURCE
The Open Book Project: An eBook Reader You Can Build Yourself
2 Feb 2020 6:00am, by David Cassel

An amateur hardware enthusiast wants to prove it’s possible for people to build their own ebook readers.

“As a society, we need an open source device for reading,” explains the project’s page on GitHub. “Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading — the Kobo, the Nook, the Kindle and even the iPad — are closed devices, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’.”

“The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves.”

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.

Malaria kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

But despite many vaccines being trialled over the years, this is the first to meet the required target. //

When trialled in 450 children in Burkina Faso, the vaccine was found to be safe, and showed "high-level efficacy" over 12 months of follow-up.

Larger trials in nearly 5,000 children between the ages of five months and three years will now be carried out across four African countries to confirm the findings. //

The trials of this malaria vaccine started in 2019, long before coronavirus appeared - and the Oxford team developed its Covid vaccine (with AstraZeneca) on the strength of its research into malaria, Prof Hill said.

A malaria vaccine has taken much longer to come to fruition because there are thousands of genes in malaria compared to around a dozen in coronavirus, and a very high immune response is needed to fight off the disease.

A prison in Malawi realised it was flushing valuable fuel down the drains – now it is using the power of poo to fuel its busy kitchens, aiding both inmates and forests. //

The prison was installed with a biogas digester, a system that converts organic matter – including human waste – into energy. Made from plastic sheets, the system has an inlet that feeds the poop and other waste into a digester, where they are submerged in water. The water creates an anaerobic environment that allows bacteria to break down the biomass into methane, which is pushed through a piping system to the gas stoves in the prison's kitchen. //

The prison's officials say that since the installation of the biogas digester the reformatory has cut its firewood consumption by around half, from 60 cubic metres a month to around 29 cubic metres. The digester has also helped to reduce the electricity bills at the prison, saving an average of MWK 310,400 (£290/$400) each month on firewood and electricity.

All of the past contributions from students and faculty are also being removed

The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel by one of its maintainers after researchers from the school apparently knowingly submitted code with security flaws.

“The implementation of these recommendations has had serious consequences for some Americans,” lawmakers wrote in a letter to the CDC director. //

The U.S. requirement that nearly all children wear masks stands out as a global outlier. Swiss children under the age of 12 are exempt from mask mandates, while children under the age of 11 in France and Great Britain also remain mask free.

I am saying that, per training, the officer did his job, and we need to start looking at each incident as its own incident.”

Keilar, as you’ll soon see in the video, did not appear to be impressed with Barkdale’s calm logic and insight. But co-host John Berman clearly was, and in the process, he made this important admission:

“I’m so glad you said that. I’m so glad you put it that way. Because we have to be able to say that, yes, things are a tragedy. Something can be tragic and not necessarily call into question the entire way that an officer responded.

And you say, look, we’ve got to look at each of these cases differently.”

Catherine Herridge
@CBS_Herridge
#Context With federal prosecutors today predicting +50O will be charged in connection with the Capitol Riots, data from last Fall shows +300 were charged for riots/civil unrest - including breakout for Portland. //

“Of 96 cases the U.S. attorney’s office in Portland filed last year charging protesters with federal crimes, including assaulting federal officers, civil disorder, and failing to obey, prosecutors have dropped 47 of them, government documents show,” per the WSJ. “Ten people have pleaded guilty to related charges and two were ordered detained pending trial. None have gone to trial.”

“The penalties levied so far against any federal defendants, most of whom were arrested in clashes around federal buildings in Portland including the courthouse, have largely consisted of community service, such as working in a food bank or encouraging people to vote,” the outlet added.

Classic material from one of the all-time radio comedy greats