[American Thinker] A friend in South Africa has been keeping me updated about what’s going on there. According to him, it was "a well-planned attempt at provoking a civil uprising." What’s extraordinary, though, is that, wherever armed, law-abiding citizens have been able to make a stand against the violence and anarchy, the rioters are backing down. My friend forwarded to me a round-robin letter ("the Letter") that South Africans are sharing -- and that reflects his experiences. I’ve included excerpts from the Letter in the body of this post, but you can read the whole Letter here.
The ostensible reason for the South African riots is the fact that Jacob Zuma, a former president, was finally arrested on corruption charges. However, according to the Letter, "nobody that I personally know, cares about freeing an ex-president from jail, under whose watch the country turned into a garbage dump."
The looting is comparable to what happened in American cities last year although on a much larger scale:
Skipping down a bit.
However, some regions of South Africa are completely untouched. That’s because armed citizens -- armed with guns and anything else they could find -- have drawn a line that the looters have not even tried to cross:
Presented as a First World problem, but really it’s just a different version of the courthouse burning down... at the same time as your house. Or a war — a little local war would accomplish the same thing.
[BBC] For years, we were encouraged to store our data online. But it's become increasingly clear that this won't last forever – and now the race is on to stop our memories being deleted.
How would you adjust your efforts to preserve digital data that belongs to you – emails, text messages, photos and documents – if you knew it would soon get wiped in a series of devastating electrical storms?
That’s the future catastrophe imagined by Susan Donovan, a high school teacher and science fiction writer based in New York. In her self-published story New York Hypogeographies, she describes a future in which vast amounts of data get deleted thanks to electrical disturbances in the year 2250.
In the years afterwards, archaeologists comb through ruined city apartments looking for artefacts from the past – the early 2000s.
“I was thinking about, ‘How would it change people going through an event where all of your digital stuff is just gone?’” she says.
In her story, the catastrophic data loss is not a world-ending event. But it is a hugely disruptive one. And it prompts a change in how people preserve important data. The storms bring a renaissance of printing, Donovan writes. But people are also left wondering how to store things that can’t be printed – augmented reality games, for instance.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[American Thinker] A friend in South Africa has been keeping me updated about what’s going on there. According to him, it was "a well-planned attempt at provoking a civil uprising." What’s extraordinary, though, is that, wherever armed, law-abiding citizens have been able to make a stand against the violence and anarchy, the rioters are backing down. My friend forwarded to me a round-robin letter ("the Letter") that South Africans are sharing -- and that reflects his experiences. I’ve included excerpts from the Letter in the body of this post, but you can read the whole Letter here.
