Quick notes: Landmine detector, Railgun...

• Multi-spectral land mine detection technology: 16-year-old Ahmedabad boy develops drone that can destroy landmines without human risk




• Train 18 a super hit! Train 18 became the fastest Indian Railways train, hitting speeds of over 180 kmph during its trials on a section of the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani route.



• Can America Match It? China's deadly naval Railgun is out for sea trials.



• Spying concerns: EU considers proposals to exclude Chinese firms from 5G networks



• Vote banks are on sale:

US based social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are creating own vote banks in open societies like India. These platforms control, monitor & profile using AI secret algorithms. Worst of all, these vote banks are on sale for money & political leverage. INDIA IS VULNERABLE!

— Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) January 27, 2019




• New e-commerce rules: Amazon pulls numerous products from India website



• Bring back the milk man: About 91% of all plastic waste has never been recycled. “Preventing in the first place is always better than cleaning up after”.



• Church crimes: Pope says weary Church 'wounded by her own sin,' in reference to abuse



• Free e-book: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

Quick notes: Gigafactory, Oil addiction...

• 30 GWh: BHEL-led consortium may build India’s first Li-ion Gigafactory



• Costly addiction to oil: In 2019, India’s demand for crude oil will grow faster than China’s. In 2018, the rupee was Asia’s worst-performing currency as higher crude prices triggered a sharp depreciation 



• One-way-street: Chinese online retailers doing brisk business in India

Under Trump administration pressure to cut its trade surplus, India has committed to buying $5 billion worth of U.S. oil and gas yearly and $18 billion worth of US arms. Does India exert such pressure on China, whose trade surplus with India is 225% higher than India's with U.S.?

— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) January 16, 2019




• Local is key: Indian startups are taking baby steps towards a vernacular internet. . . Amazon spends record on lobbying in 2018.



• Solitude: If we lose our capacity for solitude, we risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’ by what everybody else does and believes in. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.



• Black lotus: When Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal was stumped by an Indian monk who sold his Porsche 



• Core Right agenda for a modern India:




• Shia leader: Madrasas producing IS supporters, ban them



• Post-Work: The radical idea of a world without jobs

Quick notes: Digital colonization, Autophagy...

• Breaking the Duopoly: RIL to enter e-commerce, take on Amazon and Flipkart . . . Reliance's e-commerce entry to reduce digital colonisation: Mohandas Pai 



• Jats not to support the BJP: . . Restrict Yadavs to under 10% of the quota. Only then will Jats be happy.



• Sabarimala will be the end of Marxism in India:




• Fasting diets are going mainstream: Cycles of fasting help the body eliminate and replace damaged cells with new ones through a process called autophagy (the study of which recently garnered a Nobel Prize). 



• Sleep deprivation: Inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signalling hormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger-signalling hormone, ghrelin. The result is cells becoming less responsive to insulin. It also increases our risk of cancer, heart attack, and Alzheimer’s. 



• Spy tech: Germany 'considers ban on Huawei' amid global backlash



• Ancient DNA research: Geneticists have begun using old bones to make sweeping claims about the distant past. But their revisions to the human story are making some scholars of prehistory uneasy.



• Canada wastes more than half its food: Manmohan Singh lied to parliament on this.

Quick notes: HAL on the brink, Curbing Facebook...

• Is Modi govt weakening HAL? With no payments coming in, HAL for the first time ever takes a bank loan of Rs 7.81 billion. . . . Air force holds back Rs 20,000 crore from HAL, as foreign vendors get paid. . . . Govt’s apathy is pushing HAL to the brink.



• Curbing the data lords: WhatsApp is facing pressure in India to let authorities trace and read  encrypted messages. Indian policy makers, have been looking for ways to tamp down global tech giants’ influence, examining methods China has used to protect domestic startups and take control of citizens’ data.



• East India Company returns: Govt’s tough stand on Ecommerce FDI may put a stop to Amazon’s food sales in India

Self serving, but true. Monopoly and then monopoly pricing is their goal pic.twitter.com/wqnchZFBfC

— राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) January 15, 2019




• Ganga, the wonder river: In the late 19th century, British scientists and hydrologists became intrigued by the fact that Ganga water did not go bad, even after long periods of storage, contrary to the water of other rivers in which a mounting lack of oxygen quickly promoted the growth of anaerobic bacteria. In 1896 the British physician E. Hanbury Hankin wrote in the French journal Annales de l’Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes that had a life of forty-eight hours in distilled water died within three hours in Ganga water. Dr. Hankin was able to secure corpses of cholera victims in the river and isolated samples of Ganga water with a large concentration of the bacillus E. coli. Much to his astonishment, he found that after six hours the microbes had completely disappeared. Hankin concluded that the water of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India was “energetically bactericidal” in general and particularly destructive of the cholera vibrio.



• Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings:

Quick notes: Pro-Monsanto verdict, Church's threat...

• Patent life and make farmers dependent: SJM seeks change in patent act after pro-Monsanto court verdict. . . . Judges committing massive blunders. Of all the three judgments, this one is the most distasteful.



• Christism exposed: Catholic Church threatens to expel nun for protesting against rape-accused Bishop  “Your deeds on 20th September 2018 and on the following days were of most grave external scandal and harm to the Church and the FCC. You went to the Ernakulam High Court junction and participated in the protest held by the SOS Action Council on 20-9-2018 without the permission of your superior.”



• Today's RSS is pseudo?

The old RSS did a lot for Hindus in the deep South when it was still Hindu. But that merit doesn't carry over into the present, now that its "secular-national" central leadership makes common cause w/ the enemy & humiliates its local chapter for siding with the Hindu resistance. https://t.co/VUJ9F1CZxn

— Koenraad Elst (@Koenraad_Elst) January 4, 2019




• Tejas fighter: Malaysia shows interest in India's Tejas fighter jets, may buy 30 of them  .  Really? Did IAF receive their order?



• Han tricks: Chinese e-commerce companies sending shipments as ‘gifts’ to customers in India to avoid duties. 



• BJP model: Big government, Big business

the big government push to make sure all women deliver in hospitals will make the % go even higher than 42% and cost the nation a ton of money in insurance. that's a crock because giving birth is not a disease. midwives usually competent to deliver. #AllopathsBehavingBadly

— राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) January 3, 2019




• Master Mooji: You are Silence Itself

Quick notes: U-turn on e-commerce, Unsafe nuns...

• Lobbyists win: Govt does U-turn in e-commerce policy after aggressive lobbying by MNCs: Govt clarifies that there are no restrictions on private labels being sold by e-marketplaces.  The sharp reversal of policy comes barely a week after the govt had explicitly restricted such sales. 



• Unsafe nuns of India: The Associated Press blows the lid off decades-long sexual abuse of nuns by Catholic priests in India. The nuns AP interviewed—some decades younger than their abusers—described the fear of retribution and being isolated or even expelled from their community, which forced them to avoid making official complaints. “It’s a fear of being isolated if I speak the truth. If you do that, you have to go against your own community, your own religious superiors.”



• Missionary Fraud:




• English is the albatross that's strangling India:

English is the albatross that's strangling India. It's making us think of ourselves as second hand imitations of the west. For heaven's sake, our journos talk of 'blue-eyed boy' (a freak in India!) or 'christened' (we just name kids) https://t.co/xlTRg5RHh5

— राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) January 3, 2019




• The Keto Diet, Explained: We are fueled primarily by glucose, or blood sugar, much of which we derive from carbohydrates in foods like bread, fruit, potatoes, and sweets.  If glucose levels in the blood drop to really low levels, we’d pass out and die. But, interestingly, the body can’t store much glucose — only enough to last a couple of days. So if we forgo eating carbs for a few days, we need other ways to keep going. One of those is a process called ketogenesis.  In ketogenesis, our livers start to break down fat into a usable energy source called ketones bodies, or ketones for short. “Organs like the brain that normally rely primarily on glucose for fuel can begin to use a substantial amount of ketones. So ketones can stand in for glucose as fuel for the body when there’s a glucose shortage. It’s an amazing physiological adaption to starvation that allows tissues like the brain to survive”. 



• Africans singing "Kal ho na ho":

Africans singing "Kal ho na ho" like wtf pic.twitter.com/LmJPahm8Sg

— Squint Neon (@squintneon) December 20, 2018




• Raga Shukla Bilawal:

Quick notes: Duopoly, Ghar-wapsi queen...

• The East-India duopoly: Flipkart, Amazon to team up against govt's e-commerce policy 



• Outflow of foreign funds:  Foreign Portfolio Investors withdrew a record Rs 80,919 cr from Indian markets during 2018, almost double the amount witnessed during the 2008 global recession.



• Esther Dhanraj: Ghar Wapsi queen takes on soul vultures. .  (do share this)




• You failed us:

Sri @narendramodi, this may mean your chances of winning in 2019 have evaporated too. People like me will still vote for you, but our hearts won't be in it. You failed us on Rte, textbooks, dahi handi, Diwali, Sabarimala, every Hindu cause. Back to #NehruvianStalinism. Cry, india

— राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) January 2, 2019




• This will cost you:

This silence on #Sabarimala issue will cost @narendramodi , sorry to say this openly, waiting for Courts to deliver favorable judgement will not help fix this issue.
Constitution, which is written for Christians, does not protect Dharmic society.
Wake up atleast NOW.

— रंगा - ரங்கா (@ranganaathan) January 2, 2019




• Bengal University to launch course on drone tech: The main hurdle is lack of faculty members. 



• Trans-Pacific Partnership: The world is moving forward without the US.



• Focus on “China, China, China”: Acting U.S. defense secretary Shanahan