Graham Hancock with catastrophist theorist Randall Carlson at Dry Falls -- a fossilised waterfall of enormous size cut by the waters of Bretz's flood and left as we see it now when the flood had run its course.
There is fierce disagreement amongst mainstream scientists - a disagreement that also divides alternative researchers - around what happened to the Earth, and to humanity, in the closing millennia of the last Ice Age between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Marked by intense cold, global floods and extinctions of animal species, this 1200-year interval is known to geologists as the Younger Dryas. Many of the leading investigators are convinced the agent of the mysterious earth changes, and of the extinctions, was a comet that the struck the North American ice cap with globally cataclysmic effects. But their "Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis" is still regarded as controversial by others who have sought, more than once in the scientific literature, to declare it "disproved" only to be confronted by compelling new evidence that further strengthens the case. In this article, Graham Hancock shows how scientists consistently suppress and marginalise new knowledge that conflicts with established positions and argues that a paradigm shift is underway - a shift that will require us to reconsider everything we've been taught about the peopling of the Americas and about the very origins of civilization.
In March 2017 the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution, those bastions of scientific orthodoxy, highlighted the remarkable achievements of two scientific rebels, one retired and the other deceased, confessing that multiple injustices had been done to both and that the "toxic" way in which they had been treated by their professional colleagues had "poisoned" scientific progress.
We will have more to say about the case of Dr Cinq-Mars in the second half of this article.
Meanwhile for National Geographic the rebel of choice in 2017 was US geologist J. Harlen Bretz, condemned to pariah status in the 1920's for daring to propose that a gigantic flood had scoured the "scabland" of America's Pacific Northwest near the end of the last Ice Age.2 It was an idea that contradicted the consensus view of scientists at the time that geological transitions were always slow and gradual - a view in which there was no place for sudden and cataclysmic earth changes.
Bretz died in 1981, soon after Cinq-Mars began his paradigm-busting excavations in the Yukon. The two men did not know one another and worked in entirely different fields. What they have in common, however, and the reason that the mainstream science press which once attacked them now sings their praises, is that both spent decades being vilified by their scientific peers but were ultimately proved right.
"No one with an eye for landforms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the '"scabland'." Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face of the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, or nearly bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everybody on the plateau knows scabland. It interrupts the wheat lands, parcelling them out into hill tracts less than 40 acres to more than 40 square miles in extent. One can neither reach them nor depart from them without crossing some part of the ramifying scabland. Aside from affording a scanty pasturage, scabland is almost without value. The popular name is an expressive metaphor. The scablands are wounds only partially healed - great wounds in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock.
The first field trip Bretz made to the scabland of eastern Washington was in 1922. By this point, as a result of his earlier work, he was fully informed about the Ice Age in all its dimensions and more aware than most other geologists that immense ice sheets up to two miles deep, had covered North America for the best part of 100,000 years until the ice melted dramatically somewhere between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago. Thus when he saw huge numbers of erratics - giant boulders that didn't belong naturally in the area but had clearly been brought in from elsewhere - he was inclined to assume that they might have travelled here in icebergs carried on some great glacial flood. This impression was strengthened when he explored Grand Coulee and Moses Coulee - gigantic channels gouged deeply in the earth - and visited the Quincy Basin at the southern end of Grand Coulee where he found the whole 600-square-mile depression filled up to a depth of 400 feet with small particles of basalt debris. He couldn't help but wonder, "where had all the debris come from, and when?"8 Again the answer that presented itself to him was a flood.
In the November-December 1923 issue of the Journal of Geology Bretz published a paper summarizing his findings. To understand the somewhat defensive tone of the paper it is necessary to keep in mind the prevailing geological doctrine of the time, the principle known as "uniformitarianism". This is the assumption that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes. Integral to it is the parallel assumption of gradualism, namely that "the present is the key to the past" and that the rate of change observable today is an accurate guide to rates of change that prevailed in the past.
Such ideas, which had acquired the status of unchallengeable truth by the 1920's, had themselves arisen from the needful - indeed essential - overthrow of the old religious belief in creationism and the notion that God whimsically intervened in the earth's history by ordaining cataclysms such as the Biblical Flood. In righteous opposition to these thoughts of supernatural creation and destruction, uniformitarianism seemed a profoundly rational response that saw only the forces of nature at work upon the earth over periods of millions, or indeed billions of years.
This colossal glacial erratic, now perched high up on the valley side above the town of Wenatchee, Washington state, was brought here in an iceberg the size of an oil tanker carried on a raging flood hundreds of feet deep.
The outcast did not give up, however. On the contrary, he doggedly continued with his research, bringing down ever more controversy on his own head in the process but believing that the facts, ultimately, would vindicate him.
It is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the flood, jostling with giant icebergs, that scattered these immense boulders across the landscape of the channeled scablands.
In summary, not a single voice was raised in support of Bretz and there was much patronizing dismissal of his "outrageous hypothesis" of a single large flood. In particular, the massed geologists homed in on what they clearly believed was the fatal flaw in the case for a sudden and overwhelming cataclysm - namely that Bretz had failed to identify a convincing source for his floodwaters.
"are generally looked on with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged. A hypothesis earnestly defended begets emotional reaction which may cloud the protagonist's view, but if such hypotheses outrage prevailing modes of thought the view of antagonists may also become fogged.
Hundreds of feet long and more than 50 feet high these strange undulations across the Camas Prairie are in fact gigantic current ripples left by receding flood waters.
And this was the problem with all the criticisms of Bretz both before and after the Washington meeting. The geological establishment did not like what he had to say, it flew in the face of their gradualist reference frame, and they regarded it as a "heresy that must be gently but firmly stamped out".31 In the final analysis, however, they could not disprove his science, only disapprove of it, which is a very different thing.
So . . . all seemed well. The evidence of a land scoured by cataclysmic deluge could not be denied. The timing had been set - perhaps not precisely, but at any rate somewhere in the last millennia of the Ice Age between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago. The source of the deluge had been tracked down to Glacial Lake Missoula. And the crunch-point of whether there had been just one gigantic flood - which Bretz's honed instincts as a field geologist had originally suggested - or multiple floods as his gradualist colleagues preferred, had been conceded with reference to the elasticity of his theory and an allowance of "several" floods.
What Bretz the catastrophist and challenger of uniformitarianism could not have known, however was that once he had invited the vampire of gradualism through the door it would not be satisfied with the compromise that he had tried to strike, but would keep on remorselessly sucking the blood out of any notion that what had happened in the Channeled Scablands had been any sort of "debacle" at all.
In this way the uniformitarian doctrine that "the present is the key to the past", and that the rate of change observable today is an accurate guide to rates of change that prevailed in the past, has quietly reasserted itself and Bretz's disturbing flood evidence has been explained away as nothing very much to worry about after all. The scholars have also rather cleverly contrived to have their cake and eat it: on the one hand giving Bretz a medal and proclaiming that they are "all catastrophists now"; on the other quietly transmuting Bretz's catastrophe into the sort of thing that one sees every summer in Alaska and British Columbia.
This is all very reassuring, of course, but suppose that Bretz's original insight was correct all along? Suppose that the "unique assemblage of erosional forms and glacial water deposits" that he invoked as evidence for his "Spokane Flood" can only be resolved "into a genetic scheme" if the time allowed for their creation be "very short, volume very large, velocity very high and erosion chiefly by plucking of the jointed basalt"? Suppose in other words that what happened in North America at the end of the Ice Age really was a single, sudden, cataclysmic flood - something unprecedented and unmatched since?
Suppose it really was a debacle?
Predictably this is not even contemplated in the March 2017 National Geographic article. To be sure, it does forthrightly condemn the scientific dogma of gradualism that for a long while only Bretz "dared to question".51 What it absolutely does not do, however, is consider the possibility that the "multiple Missoula floods" orthodoxy that is now so firmly in place could simply be another dogma, every bit as intolerant of heretics, every but as rigid and myopic in its outlook, and every bit as wrong, as that faced by Bretz himself.
Multiple Missoula Floods — the sanitised and "ideologically correct" explanation of the bizarre features of the channeled scablands — is the model that is taught in schools and universities across the world and is on on display everywhere across the region. But the evidence is mounting that this model, now so firmly in place, is just another dogma, every bit as intolerant of heretics, every bit as rigid and myopic in its outlook, and every bit as wrong as that faced by Bretz himself. New information that has entered the public domain since 2007 is likely to prove fatal to the multiple Missoula floods model and require science to do what Bretz called for from the beginning – namely to explore the truly revolutionary possibility that the channeled scablands of the Columbia Plateau witnessed the single largest flood that ever occurred on earth, that it was sudden and that it rose and fell within a few months.
This is unfortunate and should remind us that all branches of science again and again repeat the same fundamental mistakes - elevating current hypotheses to the status almost of divinely-ordained truths, coming to regard those hypotheses as unchallengeable reference frames through which reality must be viewed, and marginalising, ostracising, humiliating and seeking to destroy the professional reputations of all those who propose alternative hypotheses. None of this is new. Indeed, since Thomas Kuhn published his classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, it has been widely understood that science, in the main, does not progress through a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but rather through periodic revolutions. These "paradigm shifts" (as they are now termed) open up new approaches and new ways of understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before, and transform the nature of enquiry in any given field.
In the Kuhnian sense, therefore, we can see that the "multiple Missoula floods" model doesn't count as a true paradigm shift, any more than mealy-mouthed statements like "we are all catastrophists now" can be taken at face value. In short, as noted above, the Missoula model is best understood not as any kind of revolution but, on the contrary, as an attempt to save the gradualist paradigm from destruction by the overwhelming evidence of catastrophic flooding on the ground.
The history of science is littered with similar attempts to save old, failing paradigms from the weight of contradictory evidence. In Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, the earth was conceived of as standing at the center of the universe, with the sun and planets in orbit around it. But contradictory evidence kept emerging suggestive of another, truly revolutionary possibility that we now know to be correct - namely that the earth and the other planets orbit the sun.
Irregular and retrograde planetary motions were particularly hard to explain. For a millennium and a half, however, Ptolemaic astronomers contrived to save their hopelessly wrong geocentric paradigm from this threat with the ingenious notion of epicycles (in which it was envisaged that the planets not only orbited the earth but also moved in smaller circles as they travelled along the courses of their orbits). It was an attractive idea, and it seemed to explain a lot, but it was destined for the dustbin of history when one of the great paradigm shifts of all time unfolded in the 16th and 17th centuries as Copernican heliocentrism shifted from heresy to mainstream.
Without the strong contradictory evidence provided by Copernicus and his successors, the Ptolemaic model would probably have struggled on in one form or another for quite a bit longer. Under certain circumstances it might even have thrived. The new information, however, was fatal to it.
In just the same way, I suspect, new information that has entered the public domain since 2007 is likely to prove fatal to the "multiple Missoula floods" model and require science to do what Bretz called for from the beginning - namely to explore the truly revolutionary possibility that the channeled scablands of the Columbia Plateau witnessed the single largest flood that ever occurred on earth, that it was sudden, that it rose and fell within a few months, and that it occurred near the end of the last Ice Age.
Is it possible that something close to a conspiracy is at work in science to prevent the proper consideration and wide public uptake of catastrophist ideas?
We've seen what happened to J Harlen Bretz. The frosty and deeply unpleasant reception initially given to his findings, the years that he spent in academic limbo afterwards, the repeated, persistent efforts made by a host of scholars to dismiss his evidence entirely, or, failing that, to account for it by gradualist means, and then at last, years later, when all that had failed and the notion of outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula had offered itself as a solution, the realization that he had been right all along. But not right, not right under any circumstances, not right in any imaginable universe, on the issue of the single cataclysmic "debacle" that his instincts had originally led him to! If J Harlen Bretz was to be right, then it was necessary that he should be right in a politically-correct way - in other words, in a way that could be redacted by skilled uniformitarian spin-meisters to edit out any hint of a global catastrophe lurking between the lines!
Since 2007, however, hints of just such a catastrophe have returned, and with a vengeance, in the form of a new scientific theory, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which "proposes that a major cosmic impact event occurred at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) 12,800 years ago."52 The proponents of the hypothesis suggest that the agency was a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments either before or during its entry into earth's atmosphere, and suggest also that North America was the epicenter of the resulting cataclysm with several of the largest fragments of the bolide impacting directly on the North American ice cap.
The epoch which geologists call the Younger Dryas (after a species of Alpine flower that flourishes in cold conditions) has long been recognized as mysterious and tumultuous. When it began 12,800 years ago the earth had been emerging from the Ice Age for roughly 10,000 years, global temperatures were rising steadily and the ice caps were melting. Then there was a sudden dramatic return to colder conditions - nearly as cold as at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000 years ago. This short, sharp deep freeze lasted for 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago when the warming trend resumed with incredible rapidity, global temperatures shot up again and the remaining ice caps quite quickly melted away, dumping all the water they contained into the oceans and raising sea level significantly all around the world.
What set these upheavals in motion?
Ideas that challenge paradigms typically don't get official funding, so it's no surprise that Comet Research Group members have received none. This, however, has not deterred them from continuing with their research - which has been consistently of such high quality, yielding such striking results that the gradualist establishment has been unable to prevent publication in a wide range of prestigious scientific journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Geology, Quaternary International, and Nature's Scientific Reports. These in turn have led to stories in the scientific and popular press putting the information in front of a much wider audience.
The first headline that caught my eye was in the British magazine New Scientist of 22 May 2007 and asked provocatively: "DID A COMET WIPE OUT PREHISTORIC AMERICANS?"
"The Clovis people flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.
"According to results presented by a team of researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago [N.B. that date would later be revised downwards by a hundred years to 12,800 years ago], fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe.
"Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team's three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to the Clovis culture. 'The entire continent was on fire,' he says.
"Lead team member Richard Firestone, a nuclear analytical chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, says the evidence lies in a narrow 12,900-year-old carbon-rich layer of sediment found at eight well-dated Clovis-era sites and a peppering of sediment cores across North America, as well as one site in Belgium.
In other words, largely over the ice cap that covered the northern half of North America during the Ice Age - the source of all the meltwater that scarred and hacked the scablands of Washington State in "Bretz's flood" (whether or not that meltwater came exclusively from Lake Missoula or gushed forth in far larger quantities than Lake Missoula, alone, could ever have held). Bretz himself, as we've seen, was forced to abandon his own strong intuition that there had been a single, massive meltwater flood in favour of multiple flushings of limited amounts of meltwater out of Lake Missoula again and again over thousands of years.
The primary reason he embraced this theory, however, was not that he had become a convert to gradualism, but because he was never able to explain how a large enough area of the ice-cap to supply all the vast amounts of water needed for his flood could simply have melted all at once. He had proposed two possibilities - dramatic overnight global warming on the one hand, or volcanic activity under the ice cap on the other - but, as the reader will recall, he very quickly conceded there was no evidence for either. What Bretz did not consider, and could not consider - because the relevant data only began to come in quarter of a century after his death - was the possibility that the ice cap could have undergone cataclysmic melting as a result of a comet impact.
If only Bretz had known . . .
"EVIDENCE FOR AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL IMPACT 12,900 YEARS AGO THAT CONTRIBUTED TO THE MEGAFAUNAL EXTINCTIONS AND THE YOUNGER DRYAS COOLING".
Looking at the data, the implications of this new research were immediately obvious to me. What it offered, if it checked out, was an elegant and potentially revolutionary explanation both for the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas itself and for the accompanying extinctions, and perhaps for much else besides - including the cataclysmic flooding that left its scars on the channeled scablands of Washington State.
This seemed all the more plausible when I learned that Firestone, Kennett and West's proposal for their comet was that it was a conglomeration of impactors including one that might have been as much as 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) in diameter.63 Furthermore, that four-kilometer object would itself have been just one amongst multiple fragments resulting from the earlier disintegration - while still in orbit - of a giant comet up to 100 kilometers or more in diameter.64 Many of the fragments of the parent comet remained in orbit. Those that hit the earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas underwent further explosive fragmentation (accompanied by powerful airbursts that would themselves have had cataclysmic effects), as they entered the atmosphere over Canada.
Impact-related partial destabilization and/or melting of the ice-sheet! And to such an extent that it was capable of disrupting the circulation of the world's oceans for more than a thousand years! What was envisaged here, clearly, was a cataclysm - a debacle! - on a truly massive scale. But what struck me most forcefully in the paragraph quoted above was that the authors had only considered the consequences of the huge quantities of icebergs and meltwater dumped into the oceans north, west and east of the North American epicenter of their proposed comet impacts. They did not consider the effects of that gigantic icy flood on the lands lying immediately south of the ice cap - which most certainly would not have been spared.
Once again I found myself wondering how J Harlen Bretz might have reacted if information about a possible comet impact had been at his disposal during his lifetime. I cannot prove it, of course, but I think he would have been much less likely to be distracted by Lake Missoula gradualism and much more likely - now that a credible heat source had been provided - to stick to his catastrophist guns. A single, cataclysmic meltwater flood on a truly gigantic scale coming directly off the ice cap to scour the scablands begins to look very feasible indeed in the light of the case made by Firestone, West, Kennett and the large team of scientists working with them.
Meanwhile my own hypothesis of an advanced civilization of prehistoric antiquity obliterated from the face of the earth during the Younger Dryas "window", is also strengthened by their work. For if their calculations are correct the explosive power of the Younger Dryas comet would have been of the order of ten million megatons.71That makes it two million times greater in its effects than the former USSR's Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested,72 and a thousand times greater than the estimated explosive power (10,000 megatons) of all nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today.73 A global disaster of such magnitude at exactly the time I suggested in my 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods does not prove the existence of a lost civilization of the Ice Age but does at least provide us with a mechanism large enough - if such a civilization did exist - to have obliterated it almost entirely from human memory.
Since it has such important ramifications for almost everything we think we know about the safety and security of the earth's cosmic environment, and about our own past, it is reasonable to ask how solid the Younger Dryas comet impact theory really is. Since 2007, when it was first proposed, how has it stood up to scientific scrutiny and what new evidence has been brought forward in support of it?
By 2014, after seven years of publishing their data in leading scientific journals, and with such an impressive accumulation of evidence, one would have thought that the Younger Dryas impact theory should, by now, be fully accepted and that researchers would have moved on to a broader consideration of the implications of such a recent and hitherto unsuspected global cataclysm for our understanding of the history of the earth and of our own species. However, we've already seen from the example of J Harlen Bretz how scientists wedded to the uniformitarian and gradualist reference frame react with extreme negative force to catastrophist theories.
Nor was Bretz an exception. Alfred Wegener, who first proposed the notion of continental drift - plate tectonics - was similarly pilloried, as, subsequently, were Luis and Walter Alvarez (the Chicxulub, 'K-T' impact), Steven J. Gould (punctuated equilibrium), Victor Clube and Bill Napier (coherent catastrophism), and James Lovelock, Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Lynn Margulis for their contributions to geophysiology and the Gaia theory. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Richard Firestone, Allen West, James Kennett and others who have followed the evidence and stuck their necks out to suggest that a comet impact caused the Younger Dryas, have also come under sustained and bitter attack.
Indeed the triumphant crowing of critics who clearly believe they have done away, once and for all, with the heretical catastrophism of Firestone, West and Kennett, has filled the academic air several times in the past few years. On each occasion you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief as if to say "thank God; we finally got those bastards"; but then a few months later comes the devastating and absolutely convincing refutation that forces the critics back to the drawing board.
It's quite noticeable, reviewing the literature, that academics form themselves into gangs. The ringleaders in the "anti-YD-impact" camp, whose names appear frequently at the top of critical articles, include Mark Boslough, a physicist on the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories, Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at Southern Illinois University, Tyrone Daulton, a research physicist at Washington University's Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, and Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the comet theory had been greatly exaggerated.
In 2012-12103, in an effort to limit the scope for poor or misleading scholarship to be cited as though it discredits their work - when in fact it does no such thing - Jim Kennett, Richard Firestone, Allen West and a formidable group of pro-impact scientists launched "one of the most comprehensive investigations of spherules ever undertaken".93 The investigation focussed on eighteen sites across North America, Europe and the Middle East (the latter represented by Abu Hureyra in Syria), and conducted more than 700 analyses on spherules using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy for chemical analysis and scanning electron microscopy for surface microstructural characterization.
"According to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), ∼12,800 calendar years before present, North America experienced an extraterrestrial impact that triggered the Younger Dryas and devastated human populations and biotic communities on this continent and elsewhere. This supposed event is reportedly marked by multiple impact indicators, but critics have challenged this evidence, and considerable controversy now surrounds the YDIH. Proponents of the YDIH state that a key test of the hypothesis is whether those indicators are isochronous and securely dated to the Younger Dryas onset. They are not. We have examined the age basis of the supposed Younger Dryas boundary layer at the 29 sites and regions in North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East in which proponents report its occurrence. ... Only 3 of the 29 sites fall within the temporal window of the YD onset as defined by YDIH proponents. The YDIH fails the critical chronological test of an isochronous event at the YD onset..."
"We agree with Thy et al. that hut fires can produce glass, but it does not follow, therefore, that all glass comes from hut fires, as they conclude. We have analysed natural glasses supplied by one of the authors of that study, and the 12,800-year-old glass from Syria is only superficially similar. Instead it matches known cosmic impact glass, as well as high-temperature atomic bomb glass.
When the new paper by West and his colleagues is completed - scheduled for the latter half of 2017107 — I have no doubt that it will, effectively, refute the arguments of Thy et al. - just as all previous attacks have been successfully refuted. But I also have no doubt that those, who for whatever reasons of their own are philosophically opposed to the notion of a cataclysm 12,800 years ago, will publish yet more so-called "requiems" for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in the years ahead, even while the constant discovery of new evidence means that it continues to thrive and grow. Indeed the most recent salvos in the ongoing scientific war took place in late 2016 and early 2017 and fully confirmed this trend.
Thus on 19 December 2016 the Journal of Quaternary Science published two papers co-authored by Nicholas Pinter and Tyrone Daulton - who the reader will by now recognise as long-term critics and opponents of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Andrew Scott is also listed as a co-author on the first paper and as lead author on the second paper.
1. NANODIAMONDS. The Daulton et. al. paper makes it sound like there is no evidence for nanodiamonds at all, when in fact they admit to the opposite. On page 22, they write, "While there is evidence of cubic nanodiamonds in Late Pleistocene sediments, their presence does not provide evidence of an impact because they have not been linked to impact processes." The only way they can make that claim is to ignore all of the other evidence that we have such as high-temperature melted spherules and meltglass.
LONSDALEITE. We wrote in Kinzie et al. (2014) that YDB "lonsdaleite-like" particles have all the characteristics of lonsdaleite, but there are too few of them for us to confirm that. We agree with Dalton that these particles are still debatable, and we agree that we misidentified some of them, but not all.
PEAKS IN NANODIAMONDS. Daulton disputes that we have identified peaks in nanodiamonds, but frankly, that is just a nonsensical argument. While it is true that we cannot tell how many nanodiamonds are in the peaks, nevertheless, we know that there are qualitative peaks. Here's a real world example of why Daulton is wrong. Let's say that I look out the window onto a pond and I don't see any ducks. Next day, I look out and there are lots of ducks. There are too many to count, but I know that there are a lot more than zero. The next day the ducks are gone. By definition, there was a peak in ducks on the previous day. The same applies to Daulton's claim that we don't have a peak in nanodiamonds. He is simply wrong - the peak has been confirmed by independent groups, including Bement et al. in Oklahoma and in Belgium by Tian et al., who are critics of the YDB hypothesis.
NANODIAMONDS AND IMPACTS. Daulton and others keep repeating "Yes, the diamonds are there but that doesn't prove there was an impact." While that is true, technically, there is no other known way to have nanodiamonds appear in sediment except by an impact. To use the same analogy as above, if they look like ducks, they probably are.
2. The Scott et al. paper looked for wildfire evidence in just one area, the Channel Islands in California. They found lots of charcoal and carbon spherules in many strata, and they state on page 11, "Carbonaceous materials from Arlington Canyon do not require extraterrestrial input or ignition, or in some cases preclude such an event," in contradiction to their press release, which makes it seem like they have completely refuted the YDB hypothesis. Just to be clear, they're saying that they can't rule out an extraterrestrial impact. They also argue that the carbonaceous materials indicate low-temperature wildfires which, they assume, precludes extraterrestrial impacts. That assumption just shows their lack of knowledge of impact wildfires, such as those that occurred at Tunguska in 1908, where low-temperature wildfires were triggered beneath the fireball. At Tunguska, the highest temperatures were generated closest to the fireball, and temperatures dropped off exponentially with distance, meaning that at Tunguska and presumably, any other impact event, there are both high-and low-temperature fires.
In line with the ups and downs that we have documented so far, recent papers have not been confined to Daulton and Pinter's ongoing project to discredit the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, nor even to the Comet Research Group's initial response to the December 2016 papers, but have also included papers by other scientists that are highly supportive of the hypothesis.
The language is cautious and understated but the implications for critics of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis are profound. Those critics have spent years splitting hairs and picking nits in their efforts to contest the nanodiamond, microspherule, synchroneity and other evidence put forward by proponents of the hypothesis, but now, suddenly, across North America, they find themselves confronted by a widespread platinum anomaly - clear and unambiguous evidence of a cosmic impact - at the Younger Dryas boundary. If the debate around this subject were purely objective and rational, the Pt layer should, at a stroke, take all the other evidence of impact out of the "disputed" category, where Daulton, Pinter and others have tried so hard to constrain it, and move it decisively into the "accepted" category. This, in turn, would open the way - at last! - for proper consideration of the implications for the paradigms in various disciplines that will have to be revised, or completely discarded, in the light of the impact evidence. An extinction-level event just 12,800 years ago really does change everything in fields as varied as astronomy, paleo-oceanography, paleo-climatology, geology, and - of the greatest significance for our purposes here - archaeology. This becomes all the more obvious in the light of the second of the two 2017 papers, Antonio Zamora's "Model for the geomorphology of the Carolina Bays", which adds greatly to our understanding of the truly cataclysmic and earth-changing nature of the Younger Dryas impacts.
To be clear, the proponents of the hypothesis have always argued that the most plausible agent of the cataclysm was a disintegrating giant comet. According to their calculations, at least four of its largest fragments - in some cases more than a kilometer in diameter - impacted directly, with a kind of "scatter-gun" effect, at different points on the North American ice cap. The trajectory of the incoming fragments was roughly east to west and some remained aloft long enough to cross the Atlantic ocean and hit the northern European ice cap with further impacts traced eastward at least as far as Syria.
The Younger Dryas Boundary strewnfield (after Wittke et al 2013, and Kennett et.al 2014). The area enclosed within the red boundary defines the current known limits of the YDB field of cosmic-impact proxies spanning 50 million square kilometers.
Amongst the impact proponents, there has never been any doubt that North America was the epicenter of the disaster, but Antonio Zamora's paper offers an entirely new and alarming perspective on the scale of the event, implicating not just the blast and shock waves propagating from the impacts themselves, but also the ejecta thrown up into the upper atmosphere by the force of the impacts. Such ejecta, usually consisting of rock and capable of travelling on ballistic trajectories for distances of thousands of kilometers before returning to earth, are associated with all documented cosmic impacts. In the case of the Younger Dryas, however, the primary impacts in North America were on an ice-cap - still more than a mile deep 12,800 years ago115 - and thus the ejecta would have consisted not of rock but of ice.
Suggested impact site in Saginaw Bay Michigan.
Saginaw Bay is an enigmatic, now water-filled, depression in Michigan's distinctive "Mitten", separating the "hand" of the mitten, to the left, from its "thumb" to the right.
Viscous relaxation converts cavities into shallow, elliptical bays.
"Experiments of high-speed impacts on ice sheets using NASA's Ames Vertical Gun," Zamora goes on to report, "demonstrate that ice shatters when a projectile hits it. Pieces of ice are ejected radiating from the impact site in ballistic trajectories and the icy layer reduces the extent of subsurface damage124..."
"The radial orientation of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins toward a convergence point in Michigan, and the elliptical shapes of the bays with specific width-to-length ratios can be better explained by impact mechanisms than by terrestrial wind and water processes.
"Therefore, OSL can only determine the date of the terrain, but not the date of formation of the bays. If all the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins formed contemporaneously, it will be necessary to find a different way of dating them.
"All living things within 100 kilometers of the [Michigan] impact died instantly. They were either burned by the heat blast or killed by the shock wave. [In the Carolinas], 1000 kilometers from the impact zone, the blinding flash on the horizon was followed by a sky that darkened ominously as it filled with the giant ice boulders ejected by the impact. Three minutes after the flash, the dark sky advanced relentlessly, and the ground shook as the first seismic waves from the extraterrestrial impact site arrived travelling at 5 km/sec.
To this apocalyptic picture, which traces the origin of the Carolina Bays to a large fragment of the disintegrated Younger Dryas comet hitting the North American icecap over what is now Saginaw Bay and throwing out a devastating barrage of ice boulders, must be added the implications of primary impacts by other fragments of the same comet at other points across the icecap. Zamora's research does not consider these. The reader will recall, however, that the scientists of the Comet Research Group calculate there may have been as many as four such impacts. As we've also seen, it is highly plausible that at least one of these other impacts was responsible for the radical destabilization of the "Cordilleran" segment of the ice sheet above Spokane unleashing the single, cataclysmic flood that Bretz's instincts always told him had created the channeled scablands.
All of this, by any definition, amounts to a debacle - and one we desperately - and urgently — need to understand.
Concern for the future of our civilization is appropriate.
NASA, until now, has vigorously promoted the view that extinction-level impact events are exceptionally rare in the history of the earth, separated by tens of millions of years - and that therefore we don't need to worry about them. Confirmation that such an event occurred as recently as 12,800 years ago, and on such a gigantic scale, would comprehensively wreck that reassuring picture and would mandate, as a matter of urgency, a much more detailed investigation of the near-earth cosmic environment than has hitherto been undertaken.
A need for urgency, however, does not mean embracing fear or gloom and doom. The technology already exists to solve this life-threatening and civilization-threatening problem. It is just a matter of the political will and the money - admittedly no easy sell when governments prefer to focus public resources on the military and on ever more sophisticated means for human beings to murder one another, but by no means impossible.
Meanwhile, what about the origins of civilization?
"At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentations, giving short shrift to the evidence. Other researchers listened politely, then questioned his competence. The result was always the same. 'When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves was] 24,000 [years old], it was not accepted,' says William Josie, director of natural resources at the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow. In his office at the Canadian Museum of History, Cinq-Mars fumed at the wall of closed minds. Funding for his Bluefish work grew scarce. His fieldwork eventually sputtered and died.
Breaking news published in the prestigious science journal Nature and widely reported in the media in late April 2017, raises the possibility that humans were present in North America as early as 130,000 years ago. The whole story of the peopling of the Americas has been up for grabs for some time, and "Clovis First" will go down in history as one of the greatest archaeological mistakes and embarrassments ever, but this latest discovery really puts the cat amongst the pigeons. Expect a lot of opposition to it from those archaeologists who are only now reluctantly willing to accept the possibility of humans in North America 25,000 years ago!
"should go to openminded archaeologists, who were willing to investigate pre-Clovis sites seriously, and to geneticists, for bringing fresh ideas and techniques to bear on the topic. The recent finds and the shift in the debate have triggered a renaissance in ancient American archaeology. Researchers are reopening sites, reexamining specimens and searching for new sites to determine who the early pioneers were, and how and when they arrived.
What's missing from all this, despite the calls for "respect" and for researchers to consider the possibility that they might be wrong, is recognition that the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis also has a bearing on the true history of the peopling of the Americas, and contains the seeds of an even more significant paradigm shift with even more profound implications for archaeology. Since they first proposed it in 2007, the team of scientists behind the hypothesis have certainly made "bold claims" but they have also marshalled "an extraordinary case" that, with the latest evidence of a widely-distributed platinum layer at the Younger Dryas Boundary, and intriguing support from Zamora's linked glacier ice impact hypothesis, does indeed have the potential to topple the dominant gradualist model built on many previous studies. That model, at least to my eyes, is beginning to look very much like a zombie that's presently being kept alive by Nicholas Pinter, Tyrone Daulton, Todd Surovell, Andrew Scott and others whose beliefs are radically contradicted by the notion of a sudden cataclysm over North America 12,800 years ago. And in just the same way that the toxic hostility of Clovis First proponents choked off funding for what Nature now recognises as "open-minded archaeologists" and held back promising new research for decades, so too the toxic hostility and premature "requiems" directed at the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have choked off funding, held back promising new research, and failed to serve science.
It's high time for a change, indeed for a paradigm shift. When it comes I suspect it will reveal not only the true cause of the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people but also vast and previously unexplored vistas of American prehistory. Archaeologists whose responsibility it is to explore that prehistory have been in the habit of regarding cosmic impacts, supposedly only occurring at multi-million year intervals, as largely irrelevant to the 200,000-year story of anatomically modern humans. When we believed that the last big impact had been the dinosaur-killing asteroid of 65 million years ago, there was obviously little point in trying to relate cosmic accidents on such an almost unimaginable scale in any way to the much shorter time-frame of "history". But the very real possibility emerging from the Comet Research Group's work that a huge, earth-shaking, extinction-level event occurred over North America just 12,800 years ago, in our historical backyard, changes everything.
So much more than Clovis was wiped away and obliterated during the Younger Dryas cataclysm that - who knows? - perhaps even the traces of a lost global civilisation will be uncovered there.
The idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem, particularly when we remember that the Younger Dryas cataclysm was not a single event but an epoch with two pronounced nodes of disaster - the first, 12,800 years ago, accompanied by a humungous flood and abrupt, extreme global cooling, the second, 11,600 years ago, again accompanied by another humungous flood and this time by abrupt, extreme global warming.
There are several distinct and compelling curiosities about the terminal Younger Dryas event and the global warming and flooding that accompanied it.
Secondly, and rather strikingly, the Greek lawmaker Solon visited Egypt around the year 600 BC and there he was told a very remarkable story by the priests at the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta - a story that was eventually handed down to his more famous descendant Plato, who in due course shared it with the world in his Dialogues of Timaeus and Critias.
It is, of course, the story of the great lost civilization of Atlantis swallowed up by flood and earthquake in a single terrible day and night nine thousand years before Solon's visit to Egypt144 — in other words in 9,600 BC, or 11,600 years before the present. Since that date (give or take a margin of error of a few decades) coincides with Meltwater Pulse 1B and is accepted by geologists as the "official" end of the last Ice Age145 - the end of the "Pleistocene" epoch and the beginning of our current epoch, the "Holocene" - it is intriguing, to say the least, that it coincides so precisely with the date that Plato gives us for the destruction, and submergence beneath the sea, of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
As I hope I have demonstrated in this article, historians and archaeologists will go through Houdini-like contortions of reason and common-sense rather than consider the possibility that any aspect of their paradigm of prehistory might be wrong — so I am not surprised that they have never attempted to investigate at face value the Atlantis tradition of a devastating global flood 11,600 years ago.
Overview of part of the excavations at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, conducted by the German Archaeological Institute. This astonishing megalithic site dates back 11,600 years. For the full significance of Gobekli Tepe see Graham Hancock's book Magicians of the Gods.
Also striking is the fact that 9600 BC is the date established by the German Archaeological Institute for the foundation of the truly extraordinary megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. This complex of massive circles of T-shaped stone pillars matches the scale, scope and ambition of England's famous Stonehenge. The problem, however, is that Gobekli Tepe is seven thousand years older than Stonehenge, and appears to emerge suddenly out of nowhere with no background and no evidence of the gradual accumulation of the architectural skills that were required to envisage and create such a remarkable site. Adding to the mystery, 9600 BC - 11,600 years ago - is also the moment when agriculture suddenly appears in the archaelogical record in Turkey, fully formed, and again with no obvious background.149 Although it is beyond the scope of this article - I have considered the whole matter in depth in my book Magicians of the Gods - the possibility must be considered that Gobekli Tepe does not signify the sudden invention of megalithic architecture and settled agriculture by the hunter-gatherers who then populated Turkey but rather a transfer of technology from the survivors of a lost civilization who had long before mastered all the necessary skills and passed them on to the technologically less-advanced people they took refuge amongst.
While the impact of comet fragments on the North American ice cap 12,800 years ago is now strongly supported by the mass of evidence reviewed in this article as the cause of the beginning of the Younger Dryas, there is much less clarity over what caused the end of the cold interval and the renewed flooding and warming of 11,600 years ago.
Another possibility, not necessarily mutually contradictory with any of the above mechanisms, is that 11,600 years ago the earth interacted for a second time with the debris stream of the same fragmenting comet that had caused the beginning of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. This is by no means implausible since the earth still passes through that debris stream twice a year. It is the well-known Taurid meteor stream, now 30 million kilometers wide. Travelling at around 2.5 million kilometers a day on its orbital path, our planet passes through the Taurid stream for around 12 days at the end of June and again for 12 days in late October and early November. At both transits, meteorites - "shooting stars" - in huge numbers enter and are usually small enough to burn up in our atmosphere (in October/November they are often referred to as the "Halloween Fireworks").
As can be seen from the reactions of some members of "Academe" to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, this view, and what Clube and Napier call the "great illusion of cosmic security"154 that it engenders, are still powerful forces in the world today. Much more than the truth about our own past is at stake, however, for there is a chilling convergence between Clube and Napier's findings on the one hand, and the findings of Kennett, West and Firestone on the other, as to what the Younger Dryas comet really means for humanity.
To understand the implications of this convergence properly it will be necessary to review some of the discoveries made by Clube, Napier and others in the 1980's and 1990's - discoveries, remember, that are completely independent of the later work of the Kennett/West/Firestone team on the Younger Dryas impacts. To cut a long story short, as I've already indicated, the burden of these discoveries is that it is possible - indeed highly probable - that we are not yet done with the comet that changed the face of the earth 12,800 years ago. Clube and Napier's work, with important contributions also from the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and from mathematician Emilio Spedicato and astronomer Professor Chandra Wickramsinghe, obliges us to consider the chilling possibility that the Younger Dryas comet was itself only a fragment of a much larger, giant comet - once perhaps as much as 100 kilometers in diameter - which entered the inner solar system about 30,000 years ago and was captured by the sun and flung into an earth-crossing orbit.
The Taurid meteor stream, so called because its showers of "shooting stars" look to observers on the ground as though they originate in the constellation of Taurus, is the most familiar and best-known product of the ongoing fragmentation of the original giant comet.
"Shooting stars" are harmless - nothing more than tiny meteors burning up in the atmosphere - so why should we be in the least bit concerned about a meteor stream? In the case of the fifty or so distinct and separate meteor streams that have now been discovered by astronomers - the Leonids, the Perseids, the Andromedids, etc. - the answer to this question is that in most cases there is probably no danger and nothing to fear. Since most of the particles that they contain are indeed tiny, they represent no threat to the Earth.
In addition to Comet Encke, there are at least two other comets in the stream - Rudnicki, also thought to be about five kilometers in diameter, and a mysterious object named Oljiato, which has a diameter of about 1.5 kilometers.160 Initially believed to be an asteroid, this extremely dark, Earth-crossing projectile sometimes shows signs, visible in the telescope, of volatility and outgassing and most astronomers now regard it as an inert comet that is in the process of waking up.161 Comet Encke itself is known to have been inert for a long period, until it suddenly flared into life and was first seen by astronomers in 1876.162 It is now understood to alternate regularly, in extended cycles, between its inert and volatile states.
Clube and Napier's research had convinced them that an as yet undetected companion to Comet Encke is orbiting amidst clouds of harmless dust at the very heart of the Taurid meteor stream.163 They believe that this object is of exceptional size, that it is a comet, and that like Encke and Oljiato it sometimes - for very long periods - shuts itself down. This happens when pitch-like tars that seethes up continuously from its interior during episodes of outgassing become so copious that they coat the entire outer surface of the nucleus in a thick, hardening shell and seal it off completely - perhaps for millennia.164 On the outside all falls silent after the incandescent "coma" and tail have faded away and the seemingly inert object tears silently through space at a speed of tens of kilometers per second. But, at the center of the nucleus, activity continues, gradually building up pressure. Like an overheated boiler with no release valve, the comet eventually explodes from within, breaking up into fragments that can become individual comets every one of which threatens the Earth.
More research certainly needs to be done to establish the exact mechanisms, in all their complexity, that brought about the sudden termination of the Younger Dryas, but the effects on global climate are already well understood. Just as much as the events of 12,800 years ago, the events of 11,600 years ago were, as J Harlen Bretz might have put it, "a debacle".
Could it be that those events, with North America standing squarely at their epicenter, were indeed the final straw that destroyed a great advanced civilization of prehistoric antiquity?
As we've seen, all the old archaeological certainties regarding the peopling of the Americas have now been thrown out with the recognition that Clovis was very far from being "first". Perhaps the lost civilization that I have spent the last quarter of a century trying to track down had its most significant outpost, possibly even its heartland, in North America in the period BEFORE the Younger Dryas cataclysms of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago?
That, however is another story.
Indeed, it is the subject of my next book.
Comment: Loyal SOTT readers will hardly be surprised at this summary of the latest YDB research. After all, we've been covering the issue of historical comet bombardments since before the YDB impact hypothesis. But it's great to see it all collected here and brought up to date. And speaking of paradigm shifts, here's another one that is quite relevant to the topics discussed, particularly on the nature of comets and climate change: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection, by Pierre Lescaudron with Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
It seems to me that the 'colored orbs' and 'double suns' and the most recent orb with two craters are magnetic refractions of solar system bodies. Saturn producing the 'colored orbs' and the orb being Ceres. The question is how they are being displayed in our skies.
Unless the higher energy alone provided by the gas cloud we have entered is sufficient to bring the images of the solar bodies up close via an alignment, then we might consider that the photographic stream sent from the satellites --Cassini from Saturn and Ceres Dawn both from NASA--has been subject to magnetic refraction capture and subsequent display in our skies.
Just musing but this high energy magnetic capture could explain the knowledge of our planetary system and even more distant by our smarter us--the Ancients.
katesisco Well, that's a theory, But how do you account for things such as the Piri Reis map of Antartica or Egyptians hieroglyphs of airplanes to name just a few. I am absoloutely convinced there were very advanced technologies at some point in a far past on Earth. There is nothing left but old ruins such as what we see in Peru and many other places. I could go on but I'm not going to write a book here. Many have already been written and I have a few, some by Graham Hancock.
Outstanding article. Well researched and written and with any luck will prompt even the most die-hard gradualist to revisit the evidence.
"Is it possible that something close to a conspiracy is at work in science to prevent the proper consideration and wide public uptake of catastrophist ideas?"
I would have to answer a resounding Yes, and it's been going on in N.America at least since the founding of the Smithsonian Institution.
If any one person should know how exclusive science is when promoting an idea it is Charles Hoy Fort. Here is his "The Book of the Damned" in hypertext [Link] and here "The Outcast Manufacturers" in similar format [Link] both books dealing with evidence of histories long suppressed by main stream science.
Baybars I am absolutely convinced there is a conspiracy of silence. I refuse to believe all scientists of all the disciplines involving research of the past are a bunch of idiots.
demore No, not idiots, just cowards lacking a moral compass.
Very interesting article, and it highlights the conspiracy in mainstream science, which is really politics. The PTB must defend their zombie paradigm regardless of all the evidence that destroys it. Funding in science is a lever used to keep scientists in line, among other methods, like character assassination, or just assassination. Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection is a great read, as are the two books before in the series. I look forward to the fourth book in the series.
I found the Saginaw Bay impact site into the ice sheet and the resulting secondary impacts in the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Basins rather interesting. The hypothesis that a second impact occurred in the ocean to initiate a period of warming bringing the Younger Dryas to an end is also very interesting. Electrically charged comets in the solar system could also trigger CMEs and solar outbursts, bringing the ice age to an end, and with it, mass flooding. Great article!
This article needs to be forwarded to any and all. Mindblowing, if you've never read anything by Laura et al.
For starters: We re the only species who kill its (own in the name of god).
We re the only species who kill their strong and let their weak thrive.
The conspiracy exists between everyone s 'me and I' - what s out there reflects what s in here.
so the Northern continent is covered in a massive block of ice (frozen water) and then there is sudden flooding ... and the possibility of a comet did not occur even to the open minded Bretz?
HashAttack2 If the cataclism is bad enough, there are no pens or pencil or paper left for the survivors to record what happened and what's been written eventually disappears to fires, water, the need to start a fire and what not. Many scenarios possible.
With the same cabal and their minions taking control.
lysna what a bunch of nikenpoops we are eh lysna?!
I figured this article would generate several comments. Comments are good... on such an important theory.
I can attest to waters suddenly making big changes.. I saw huge boulders the size of houses get moved OVERNIGHT by a freak rainstorm that dumped a LOT of water where it drained in only one spot. Those boulders had sat there for over 30 years that I know of..
The geological evidence points more and more to this impact theory. Even here in Australia there are indigenous old folk lore about the sea levels rising etc. They have determined they are ALSO from this time frame that Mr Hancock talks about.
They have also found geological evidence that supports the indigenous folktales, and support the timeframes mentioned by Hancock for the different impact events. This was determined by studying the formations at depth by core drills, etc..by geologists.
I am very impressed with Mr Hancock and his work. He has his act together, and backs up most all aspects by accepted scientific tests and findings.
In fact, the "impact, or multiple impact theory" makes much more sense as to what is actually "out there". The level of spherical micro-rocks found in the fallout zone, to the layer of carbon all over, indicative of great fires, all support the impact theory.
Yes, the story will change slowly... but will change to reflect these newer discoveries that can't be ignored anymore.
HashAttack2 I think James mccanney showed that the tails are because they are electrically charged, not from water vapour. The part comets that passed through the sun also made the water thing look like bs.
The ice being melted and ejected as described in this article send like a very sound mechanism.
Read Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval. Then, everywhere you go in N America, you can find indisputable proofs, if you just look.
Been following GH for awhile now, but Randell Carlson though has a unique perspective on this whole situation. He has many YouTube videos, but the one with Joe Rogan is pretty enlightening.
Graham Hancock is the man. Awesome article, down to earth and accessible to people new to the field.


text:
/**
 * @file   DnsTest.cpp
 * @brief  Dns class tester.
 * @author zer0
 * @date   2017-05-03
 */

#include <gtest/gtest.h>
#include <libtbag/uvpp/Dns.hpp>
#include <libtbag/uvpp/Loop.hpp>
#include <libtbag/uvpp/Tcp.hpp>
#include <libtbag/net/Ip.hpp>

#include <iostream>

using namespace libtbag;
using namespace libtbag::uvpp;

TEST(DnsTest, DnsAddrInfo)
{
    char const * TEST_DOMAIN_NAME = "localhost";
    Loop loop;

    //addrinfo hints = {0,};
    //hints.ai_family   = AF_INET;     // AF_INET/AF_INET6/AF_UNSPEC
    //hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM; // SOCK_STREAM/SOCK_DGRAM/SOCK_RAW
    //hints.ai_flags    = AI_PASSIVE;  // Fill in my IP for me.

    DnsAddrInfo addr;
    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, addr.requestAddrInfo(loop, TEST_DOMAIN_NAME, "http"));

    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, loop.run());
    ASSERT_NE(nullptr, addr.getAddrInfo());

    ASSERT_LT(0, addr.getAddrInfo()->ai_addrlen);
    struct addrinfo const * info = addr.getAddrInfo();
    ASSERT_NE(nullptr, info);

    bool exists_ipv4 = false;
    bool exists_ipv6 = false;

    for (; info != nullptr; info = info->ai_next) {
        std::string ip = getIpName(info->ai_addr);
        std::cout << "Domain: "  << TEST_DOMAIN_NAME  << " -> " << "Ip(" << ip << "), "
                  << "Protocol(" << info->ai_protocol << "), "
                  << "Socktype(" << info->ai_socktype << "), "
                  << "Family("   << info->ai_family   << "), "
                  << "Flags("    << info->ai_flags    << ")\n";

        if (info->ai_family == AF_INET) {
            exists_ipv4 = true;
        } else if (info->ai_family == AF_INET6) {
            exists_ipv6 = true;
        }

        ASSERT_TRUE(libtbag::net::isIpv4(ip) || libtbag::net::isIpv6(ip));
        ASSERT_EQ(80, getPortNumber(info->ai_addr));
    }

    auto * ipv4_addr = addr.findFirstIPv4();
    auto * ipv6_addr = addr.findFirstIPv6();

    if (exists_ipv4) {
        ASSERT_NE(nullptr, ipv4_addr);
        std::cout << "Found first IPv4: " << getIpName(ipv4_addr) << std::endl;
    } else {
        ASSERT_EQ(nullptr, ipv4_addr);
        std::cout << "Not found IPv4.\n";
    }

    if (exists_ipv6) {
        ASSERT_NE(nullptr, ipv6_addr);
        std::cout << "Found first IPv6: " << getIpName(ipv6_addr) << std::endl;
    } else {
        ASSERT_EQ(nullptr, ipv6_addr);
        std::cout << "Not found IPv6.\n";
    }
}

TEST(DnsTest, DnsNameInfo)
{
    char const * TEST_IP_NAME = "127.0.0.1";

    Loop loop;
    DnsNameInfo name;
    struct sockaddr_in addr = {0,};
    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, initAddress(TEST_IP_NAME, 0, &addr));
    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, name.requestNameInfo(loop, (sockaddr*)&addr, 0));

    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, loop.run());
    ASSERT_FALSE(name.getHost().empty()); // localhost/HostName/ETC ...
    std::cout << "Ip: " << TEST_IP_NAME << " -> Domain: " << name.getHost() << std::endl;
}

TEST(DnsTest, RemoteServer)
{
    char const * TEST_DOMAIN_NAME = "osom8979.github.io";
    Loop loop;

    DnsAddrInfo addr;
    ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, addr.requestAddrInfoWithSync(loop, TEST_DOMAIN_NAME));
    ASSERT_NE(nullptr, addr.getAddrInfo());

    ASSERT_LT(0, addr.getAddrInfo()->ai_addrlen);
    struct addrinfo * info = addr.getAddrInfo()->ai_next;
    ASSERT_NE(nullptr, info);

    std::vector<std::string> ip_list;
    for (; info != nullptr; info = info->ai_next) {
        std::string const CURRENT_IP = getIpName(info->ai_addr);
        std::cout << "Domain: " << TEST_DOMAIN_NAME << " -> Ip: " << CURRENT_IP << std::endl;

        ASSERT_TRUE(libtbag::net::isIpv4(CURRENT_IP) || libtbag::net::isIpv6(CURRENT_IP));
        ip_list.push_back(CURRENT_IP);
    }

    ASSERT_LE(1U, ip_list.size());
    for (auto & ip : ip_list) {
        DnsNameInfo name;
        if (libtbag::net::isIpv4(ip)) {
            struct sockaddr_in addr = {0,};
            ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, initAddress(ip.c_str(), 0, &addr));
            ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, name.requestNameInfoWithSync(loop, (sockaddr*)&addr, 0));
        } else if (libtbag::net::isIpv6(ip)) {
            struct sockaddr_in6 addr = {0,};
            ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, initAddress(ip.c_str(), 0, &addr));
            ASSERT_EQ(E_SUCCESS, name.requestNameInfoWithSync(loop, (sockaddr*)&addr, 0));
        }

        ASSERT_FALSE(name.getHost().empty());
        std::cout << "Ip: " << ip << " -> Domain: " << name.getHost() << std::endl;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The pretty Aggie's Cottage is a quirky three bedroom cottage perfect for families or couples. Fully renovated, the former stables have a fun sense of period charm, with shabby-chic furniture cleverly blending in with painted wood beams and high vaulted ceilings.
Entered from the pretty courtyard door, the cottage is bright and welcoming. The spacious open plan living space with original Marland brick flooring is wonderfully modern without losing any of the cottage's historical magic. The up-to-date, fully equipped kitchen has everything you will need to rustle up a meal, including electric oven with grill, ceramic hob, microwave, fridge and freezer.
A chunky stripped pine farmhouse table comfortably seats six and is neatly set to one side of the living area to provide a comfy place to eat for all the family. The lounge with soft rug covered floor has a large corner sofa, scattered with bright, funky cushions impeccably located for curling up and watching a film on the wall mounted flat screen TV, with separate DVD/CD player.
Open tread wooden stairs from the lounge area lead up to the first of Aggie's two double bedrooms. This beautiful room with sloping ceilings and beams enjoys wonderful sea views from the delightful dormer windows. A charming Victorian style bathroom featuring an original roll top cast iron bath and toilet with pull chain cistern can be found at the foot of the stairs off the living area.
Two steps up from the kitchen lead to a lovely hallway with a window overlooking the courtyard and two bedrooms, which have shared access to a large travertine-tiled shower room with toilet and wash hand basin.
The first door off the hallway leads to Aggie's pretty twin bedroom with painted antique pine bedside cabinets and matching double wardrobe.
A huge painted pine king�sized sleigh bed can be found in the Master Bedroom situated at the end of the hallway. This beautiful room is wonderfully elegant with a large glass chandelier, matching bedside cabinets, double wardrobe and chest of drawers. A cot is also located in this room for any infants staying at the cottage.
From the lounge area a partly glazed stable door opens out onto 3.5 acres of beautiful grounds with fabulous uninterrupted views of the glorious countryside and Atlantic Ocean. A small flight of steps, next to the pretty flowering rockery beside the cottage, leads to Aggie's private dining area and built-in barbeque.
On arrival you'll find a welcome pack consisting of Devon Cream Tea (for week long bookings), tea, coffee, sugar, milk and other household essentials, including tea towels, oven gloves, bin liners, liquid soaps, toilet rolls and cleaning materials for kitchen and bathrooms.
A special Festive Pack is offered for Christmas and New Year breaks with wine, chocolates or biscuits, and Christmas crackers supplied in addition to the standard welcome pack. Not to mention a real pine tree with decorations. The Festive Pack is offered to guests staying for a minimum of five nights over either Christmas or New Year.
To check the latest prices and availability for Aggie's Cottage please visit our online booking page. Alternatively, you are more than welcome to contact us by email at [email protected] or by phone on 01271 377432.


RoughCast will be bringing Twelth Night to Beccles Public Hall. Picture: RoughCast.
Shakespeare's classic comedy Twelfth Night is transposed into a 'Spaghetti Western' setting in an upcoming show by amateur theatre group RoughCast.
Beccles Public Hall will host the play, which tells the tale of shipwrecked twins, Viola and Sebastian, who wash up on the shores of Illyria.
Viola dons man's clothing and seeks employment with the island's 'head man' Duke Orsino and is sent to woo the beautiful Olivia on Duke's behalf and Olivia inconveniently falls in love with Viola in his male disguise.
The show takes place on Thursday, July 6 at 7.30pm, with doors open at 7pm. Tickets are £10 or £8 for concessions available from www.becclespublichall.com, by calling 01502 770060, or from the box office, open Monday to Friday from 10am to 3pm.


Nearly three decades ago, in 1991, Diana Gabaldon wrote the first of eight— soon to be nine—books in the Outlander series. This sweeping, time-traveling epic tells the tale of Scotland's historical and continued fight for freedom, alongside deception, redemption, love and whiskey—lots and lots of whiskey. The books garnered an immediate and fiercely loyal fan base.
During the last two decades, fans and entertainment industry professionals craved a film adaptation of the books. Ronald D. Moore, director of Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek NextGen, and Deep Space 9, heard about the book series from his wife and costume designer, Terry Dresbach, who was already an avid Outlander fan.
Moore felt Outlander would be best suited as a TV series adaptation. The first season aired in August of 2014 on Starz.
Each season covers one of the eight Outlander books in its entirety—which are complex enough on their own.
The series' first episode frames the overarching story with WWII combat nurse, Claire Randall, reuniting with her husband Frank Randall, for a second honeymoon in the Highlands of Scotland before he takes up a new professor post at Oxford. Claire was raised by her archeologist uncle and the two share an affinity for history. After milling around in the Highlands and seeing a druid-like ceremony, Claire winds up falling through time into 1743 in the middle of preparations for the Jacobite Rising of Scotland coming in 1745.
During the first 13 episodes, Claire is desperate to get back to 1945 and Frank, but she is forced to make political alignments she didn't expect—including falling in love with and marrying a red-headed Scottish warrior who would change the timeline of her life. The whole series mirrors the book's smart structure, hopping back and forth from 1945 to 1743 expertly adapted to the small screen.
Visually, Outlander is one of the most beautiful shows on television with period costumes designed and handmade with pure authenticity by Dresbach and her team. The sets are either on a soundstage in rural Scotland or outdoors in the temperamental Highlands. The hand-hewn sets believably double for weathered interiors of a clan castle, rotting and deteriorating prison cells, or airy bed lofts of a village pub. Outdoors, the scenes seem like paintings in the magical Scottish light.
The third season has started airing, and filming on the fourth has already begun, so this show isn't going anywhere anytime soon as long as the demand and network budgets hold out. Outlander is like nothing else on TV today. Offering an incredible visual vacation along with an equally gripping story, it's time to hurry and catch up on this glorious series.


One level above the lobby of The Ritz-Carlton in Uptown is 12,000 square feet of pure luxury. The spa and salon here treat you like a revered guest, even if you're just a slob who drove over from your rental in Lower Slobbovia. With a dozen treatment rooms (each with in-room shower), two VIP treatment suites for couples (if you're that lucky) plus "healing waters," dry cedar saunas and eucalyptus steam rooms, this joint is a haven of health, a sanctuary for sagging skin and strained sacroiliacs. Our picks for best treatments: the restorative facial using infusions of pure oxygen pumped right into your complexion and the Texas Eight-Hand Massage. Be sure to arrive an hour or two early to chill in the quiet relaxation room, where complimentary hot tea, Champagne, fruit and tiny cups of nuts and M&Ms are delivered by friendly but not-too-chatty staffers. Lie back and say "aaaaah."


text:
Anmol Somanchi
Srujana Bej
Mrityunjay Pandey
Vol. 52, Issue No. 7, 18 Feb, 2017
Published On : 15th Feb, 2017
Home » Journal » Vol. 52, Issue No. 7, 18 Feb, 2017 » Well done ABBA?
Well done ABBA?
Aadhaar and the Public Distribution System in Hyderabad
Anmol Somanchi (anmol.somanchi94@gmail.com) is a postgraduate student of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Srujana Bej (srujana.bej@gmail.com) is a student of law at NALSAR University, Hyderabad. Mrityunjay Pandey (mrityunjaypandey79@gmail.com) is pursuing an MPhil at the School of Economics, University of Hyderabad.
The Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication system was introduced in all Public Distribution System outlets in Hyderabad between February and March 2016. A survey of 80 households (284 persons) in November finds that despite the introduction of technology-intensive authentication and payment systems, a significant number of those vulnerable and dependent on PDS for food grains are failing to realise their right to food. It is alarming that these sophisticated systems fail even in locations where connectivity and technical know-how are relatively advanced.
The authors would like to thank Reetika Khera and Jean Drèze for their valuable comments and Apoorv Somanchi for helping with the survey.
Shoshana Amielle Magnet, in her book When Biometrics Fail (2011), argues that biometric systems around the world have largely failed to provide their intended benefits and instead often ended up perpetuating gender, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic inequalities.
Without heeding this warning, India's legislature directed the executive to leverage Aadhaar in Section 12 of the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013. Consequently, some state governments have introduced Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) in the Public Distribution System (PDS), ostensibly to enhance "efficiency." However, echoing Magnet's arguments, recent evidence suggests that linking the PDS with Aadhaar is hindering efficiency. Researchers, journalists, and an Andhra Pradesh government-commissioned study have documented the disruption of welfare programmes that often follows the introduction of ABBA (Khera 2017; Drèze 2016; Ramakumar 2016; Yadav 2016; Matharu 2015).
The NFSA confers a legal right to subsidised foodgrains on "eligible households." While eligibility is a household characteristic (ration cards are made for households, not individuals), entitlements are determined on a per capita basis.[i] The ABBA system was introduced in all PDS outlets of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) in February and March 2016. Ever since, even among individuals of an eligible household (hereafter "eligible individuals"), only those with a valid Aadhaar number can become beneficiaries of the PDS. This requires their Aadhaar number to be seeded onto the PDS database and added to the household ration card. Other individuals are omitted and hence denied entitlements.[ii]
The ABBA system in PDS outlets is built around a set of "fragile technologies" (Drèze 2016) that need to work simultaneously for successful transaction. These are:
Seeding of Aadhaar numbers: An eligible individual can become a beneficiary and access the PDS system only if her Aadhaar number is correctly seeded onto the PDS database and added to the household ration card.
Point of Sale (PoS) machines: The entire process at the PDS outlet is dependent on the PoS machine. If it malfunctions, no transaction can be made. The first step in the process requires the dealer to enter the ration card number of the beneficiary's household onto the PoS machine.
Internet connection: Successful working of the PoS machine depends on internet connectivity as verification of the ration card number and the beneficiary's biometric fingerprint is carried out over the internet.
Remote Aadhaar servers: Remote Aadhaar servers verify the ration card number and initiate fingerprint authentication.
Fingerprint recognition software: The beneficiary proves her identity by submitting to fingerprint recognition in the PoS machine. Upon verification, the PoS machine indicates that the beneficiary is genuine and that foodgrains can be distributed to her household.
The stated purpose of introducing ABBA in the PDS is to eliminate identity fraud (for example, duplicate or bogus beneficiaries) and reduce siphoning of grains by the dealers, thereby improving the delivery of welfare schemes "to the benefit of the poor." With its well-functioning connectivity, strong infrastructure, and tech-savvy government, Hyderabad offers a favourable context for ABBA. We decided to probe its workings in this seemingly best-case environment based on a household survey conducted in November 2016.
We sought to examine the following issues:
Are eligible individuals being excluded due to the introduction of ABBA?
What other issues crop up with the introduction of ABBA, barring exclusion?
A sample of 80 households ("surveyed" households) was drawn from roughly 1,300 households registered with two PDS outlets which were purposively selected for their location: one in the suburbs of Yapral and the other in Osman Gunj, less than two kilometres from the high court. We randomly selected 50 households that had successfully transacted via the ABBA system in the month of October ("successful" households) and 30 households that did not transact at the PDS in October ("no-show" households). This data was accessed from the Government of Telangana e-PDS website.
Table 1: Basic Facts
Households (HH) registered with the 2 PDS outlets of interest
Successful HH (no-show HH in brackets)
1,156 (225)
Eligible HH surveyed (individuals covered)
Successful HH surveyed (no-show HH surveyed)
Eligible individuals omitted from ration cards
Eligible individuals without Aadhaar card
No-show HH that failed transactions in October due to ABBA
Children not added to ration card (possibly due to lack of Aadhaar)
HH reporting 1 or more ABBA-related technology issue
HH reporting receipt of full entitlement at correct price prior to introduction of ABBA
Of the 80 households surveyed, 71 (89%) reported receiving full entitlements at correct prices even before the introduction of ABBA. Three of the remaining nine households reported mismatch between actual household size and the number of individuals on the ration card prior to the introduction of ABBA. The others were either unable to recall, or were newly identified eligible households. For the surveyed households at least, the PDS seemed to be working well before the introduction of ABBA.
The introduction of ABBA has, however, brought with it many complexities and problems. Although all 50 "successful" households received full entitlements at correct prices in October, eight of 30 (27%) no-show households reported failed transactions due to issues with ABBA. Further, 53 of 80 (66%) surveyed households reported glitches with one or more of the five technological components of the system (Table 1).
Exclusion Due to Aadhaar
The identification of eligible households involves two kinds of possible errors: (i) inclusion of an ineligible household on the NFSA list ("inclusion errors"), and (ii) exclusion of an eligible household from the NFSA list ("exclusion errors"). While inclusion errors increase the financial burden of the state, exclusion errors can often leave poor families vulnerable to hunger. Since the PDS was introduced to overcome chronic hunger and malnutrition, exclusion errors should be of greater concern. Though Aadhaar is technically not an eligibility criterion, ABBA is systematically leading to exclusion at two levels.
First, the lack of an Aadhaar number automatically disqualifies eligible individuals from being listed in the household ration card. Among surveyed households, 12% (34 out of 284) of eligible individuals' names were missing from the ration cards, leading to a loss for the concerned household as PDS entitlements are defined in per capita terms (in Telangana, each beneficiary is entitled to 6 kg of grains per month). While there could be other reasons for missing names, 10 out of 34 reported the lack of an Aadhaar card as the reason and we suspect that seven children's names were missing due to Aadhaar (Table 1).
More than one-fifth (21%) of sample households reported Aadhaar seeding issues. Respondents had submitted all Aadhaar documents to their respective circle offices, but they found that their names were missing from the NFSA list.
Second, beneficiaries face persistent and pervasive issues related to ABBA. Among the surveyed households, 35 (70%) "successful" and 18 (60%) "no-show" households reported issues with one or more of the five technological components of the system (Table 2). A large part of our sample reported fingerprint authentication errors, Aadhaar seeding issues, and poor connectivity (discussed below). In all these cases, Aadhaar is creating discriminatory hassles and increasing transaction costs.
Among the 30 no-show households, eight reported ABBA-related issues that led to failed transactions: five resulted from fingerprint authentication errors and the rest from Aadhaar number or seeding issues. Three households expressed disinterest in the PDS, and two provided unclear responses when asked why they did not transact.
The remaining 17 of the no-show households reported unavoidable personal reasons (for example being out of station, hospitalisation, absence of a male member whose fingerprints works, etc). Administrations may disregard these legitimate hardships as exceptional personal problems that cannot be accommodated by broad policy. Note, however, that prior to the introduction of ABBA in Hyderabad, households could collect accumulated rations for up to three months when they were unable to do so for any month. With Aadhaar leveraging, this considerate and fair approach has been discontinued. The introduction of ABBA configured PoS machines enables the District Supply Officer (DSO) to track each PDS outlets' transactions online. At the start of each month, grains are released to the respective outlets after accounting for grains leftover from the last month. For example, if a PDS outlet must receive 100 kg of rice to disburse every month, but has 5 kg left over from last month, only 95 kg are delivered to the outlet for the next month's disbursal. Even in institutions like the Indian Armed Forces, whose personnel receive rations in-kind, there is a pre-announced "mis-muster" date when rations missed from the previous month can be collected. Why deny PDS beneficiaries the same right?
Table 2: Issues Reported by Households at thr Time of Last ABBA Transaction
Issue Reported
Number of HH (% in brackets)
No-show HH
Successful HH
HH surveyed
Fingerprint authentication errors
Internet not working
PoS machine not working
Aadhaar numbers yet to be seeded
One or more ABBA technology related issue
More than 1 trip to the PDS outlet due to ABBA related errors
PoS Malfunction and Failed Fingerprint Authentication
The PoS is central to the ABBA system. While none of the no-show households reported PoS malfunction (most of them did not reach the stage of using it), eight of the successful households did. Almost 40% of the surveyed households reported persistent fingerprint authentication errors, that only specific fingers worked, or that only certain household member's fingerprints worked. Elderly persons and women engaged in domestic work or manual labour especially expressed distress over fingerprint authentication errors. Incidentally, early warnings of this issue were raised in early UIDAI documents (Committee on Biometrics–UIDAI 2009:4).
Poor Internet Connectivity
The internet is the essential infrastructure on which the ABBA rests. Despite Hyderabad's decent network facilities, 36% of successful and 13% of no-show households reported problems with internet connectivity. This implies delays in grain disbursal and having to make more than one visit to the PDS outlet. Between one-fourth and one-third "no-show" and "successful" households respectively had to make more than one trip. Internet connectivity has frustrated not just beneficiaries but also dealers. The dealer at Yapral complained of connectivity issues every day of the week after 8 pm (a time when beneficiaries could come after work). The dealer at Osman Gunj revealed having to face internet issues for an hour or two every day. Both dealers expressed displeasure over the resultant slowing down of sales.
Poor technological construction of the machines, software, and the networks has resulted in unnecessary inconvenience and anxiety.
Plight of Elderly and the Disabled
We consistently found that the introduction of the ABBA system had led to the disenfranchisement of the elderly and the disabled, as access to NFSA entitlements became contingent on their ability to access affordable transport and the effectiveness of ABBA. These dual issues impeding access have arisen because ABBA requires beneficiaries to visit the PDS outlet personally for fingerprint authentication. In the earlier set-up, the elderly and the disabled relied on family and neighbours to collect grains for them. Now, even reaching the PDS shop is no guarantee of receiving entitlements due to technical issues with fingerprint authentication.
In Yapral, K Urmila, a widow who worked as a domestic help, has not been able to access her entitlements since April 2016 after suffering from a seizure and leg injury that have left her immobile. She can neither physically access public transportation nor financially afford a private rickshaw or auto to visit the PDS outlet. Had the ABBA not been in place, she could have sent her daughter to collect her entitlements for her. Urmila is just one of many such elderly persons we met.
Ration Card Woes
Lastly, we found several instances of persons still in possession of their old ration cards. Despite completing the application procedure and receiving official communication of approval via a paper slip or SMS, they had not received their new ration card and were not getting rations. They were not aware of any grievance redressal mechanism and were left hopeless in a bureaucratic limbo. Though it is not clear whether Aadhaar had anything to do with this, this is an illustration of chronic issues in the functioning of the PDS that cannot be resolved by ABBA, and from which ABBA is diverting attention.
It has mattered little to successive governments that their Aadhaar endeavours are in clear violation of several Supreme Court orders that have ruled (even after the passage of the Aadhaar bill in Lok Sabha) that Aadhaar cannot be mandatory to access welfare services (Anand 2016).
Technocratic understanding of the efficiency of ABBA is ignorant of the multiple hardships that ABBA has created as well as aggravated. Among 80 surveyed households, 89% reported receiving full entitlements at correct prices even before the introduction of ABBA. In contrast, 10% of households are now excluded due to ABBA and two-thirds reported errors with one or more of its five technological components. If such is the state of affairs in urban, technologically sophisticated, and infrastructure-supported cities such as Hyderabad and Delhi (Shagun and Priya 2016), one can only imagine the magnitude of tragedies unleashed upon the beneficiaries in rural India. As Khera (2013) notes, while it is essential to deal with issues of duplication, less disruptive methods than Aadhaar such as food coupons, smart cards, and last-mile tracking can be used to produce the same effectiveness with far less administrative burden.
It is difficult to see how implementing Aadhaar has been to the "benefit of the poor" in Hyderabad. Although our sample may not be fully representative, the results suggest that the ABBA system is neither as efficient nor as dependable as it is made out to be, even in a seemingly best-case environment. A blind belief that technology will enhance efficiency seems to have ironically bred inefficiency.
Anand, Utkarsh (2016): "Supreme Court Reminds Govt: Aadhaar Cannot be Mandatory," Indian Express, 23 September, https://goo.gl/rcHIeb.
Committee on Biometrics–UIDAI (2009): "Biometrics Design Standards for UID Applications," Unique Identification Authority of India, New Delhi, https://goo.gl/kmgTZj.
Drèze, Jean (2016): "Dark Clouds Over the PDS," Hindu, 10 September, https://goo.gl/BSbMxu.
Khera, Reetika (2013): "Lessons from the East Godavari Pilot," Hindu, 11 April, https://goo.gl/Xj9y5w.
Khera, Reetika (2017): "On Aadhaar Success, It's All Hype–That Includes the World Bank," NDTV, 21 July, https://goo.gl/QT2ih3.
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle (2011): When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, Duke University Press.
Matharu, Sonal (2015): "AP Detects Glitches in Aadhaar-linked PDS Distribution," Governance Now, 28 September, https://goo.gl/iTKaci.
Ramakumar, R (2016): "All Pervasive Aadhaar Raises Serious Privacy Concerns," Deccan Herald, 12 March, https://goo.gl/O7UI5h.
Shagun and Priya, Aditi (2016): "Even in Delhi, Basing PDS on Aadhaar Is Denying Many the Right to Food," Wire.in, 25 October, https://goo.gl/I8xrfX.
Yadav, Anumeha (2016): "Government Presses on with Aadhaar in Ration System Despite Glitches, Delayed Food Law," Scroll.in, 25 September, https://goo.gl/xDLW1P.
[i]However, under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), the poorest of households get 35 kg of grain per month irrespective of household size.
[ii]In some other states, such as Jharkhand, the seeding of any household member's Aadhaar number ensures entitlements for the entire household.
Updated On : 17th Feb, 2017

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Win one of ten family passes to Storm Boy.
Based on a beloved Australian classic novel, Storm Boy is an unmissable, heart-warming film for the whole family!
Starring Jai Courtney, Trevor Jamieson, Geoffrey Rush and introducing Finn Little as 'Storm Boy'. Directed by Shawn Seet.
©2018 Screen Australia, South Australian Film Corporation and Stormy Rights Pty Limited.
Competition opens 9am Friday 21 December 2018 and closes 9am Monday 14 January 2019.
Ten individual winners will be drawn randomly at 10am Monday 14 January 2019 and notified by phone or email that day. Entry is open to South Australian Residents aged 18 yr+. One entry per person. Prize is a Storm Boy family cinema pass, valued at $60 (there are ten passes). Prizes will be posted, and recipients can only win a single prize during the promotion. All entrants will be added to the UPark email list (entrants may unsubscribe at a later time).
The Promoter's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. The Promoter is The City of Adelaide (ABN 20 903 762 572) of 25 Pirie Street Adelaide 5000 Ph: 8203 7203.


text:
Credit: Fantasia Festival
by Steven Warner• Film
The Righteous | Mark O'Brien
The Righteous, the debut feature from actor Mark O'Brien, is the type of film that practically begs to be viewed as respectable, serious-minded fare, seen in everything from its austere black-and-white photography to its thematic focus on a crisis of faith. Press materials make bold comparisons to the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Charles Laughton — audacious propaganda for even an established director, let alone a debut — setting viewers up for disappointment long before the first frame unfurls. Taken on its own merits, The Righteous should be lauded for its lofty ambitions; those expecting a modern-day classic in the vein of Diary of a Country Priest or Night of the Hunter, however, would be wise to look elsewhere (seriously, why?). In fact, the film's philosophical ruminations on guilt and spirituality more readily call to mind Paul Schrader's First Reformed, but establishing that comparison isn't all that much kind to The Righteous.
Henry Czerny stars as Frederic Mason, a former priest who, as the film opens, is dealing with the loss of his 12-year-old adopted daughter, the victim of a hit-and-run. Frederic lives in the middle of nowhere with his grieving wife, Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk), with each day proving an endurance test of pain and guilt. But into the lives of these two troubled souls enters a stranger, Aaron Smith (Mark O'Brien), a good-looking yet mysterious chap who emerges from the woods one night seeking shelter and treatment for a sprained ankle. While ultimately welcomed in by the Masons, questions of identity and intent linger, with Frederic especially troubled as revelations lead only to more suspicions. This also leads to the film's biggest stumbling block, namely that the actions of the characters make little to no sense at any given moment, jerked around by the script in the name of convenience. It would be easy to understand Aaron's presence as a balm or at least a welcome distraction for the grieving couple, his arrival nearly serendipitous as Frederic and Ethel desperately try to fill the void left by the loss of their daughter. But such an angle is never teased out, as Aaron comes across as archly sinister from his first appearance, to the point that Frederic's aid seems downright stupid. It is also rather telling that Ethel's acceptance of this stranger is brushed off with an explanation of "We talked for hours last night," as if O'Brien was desperate to paper over the gaping plot hole at the film's center.
That's not to suggest that plot mechanics are the focus of The Righteous, as O'Brien is far more interested in the effect that Aaron's appearance ultimately causes in Frederic, a man running from a mysterious and troubled past, his day of spiritual reckoning finally within reach: "Be careful what you wish for, but be certain what you pray for," a local priest solemnly intones to Frederic as he seeks spiritual guidance. Indeed, there's no shortage of questions raised by The Righteous in regards to religious atonement. Is payment for past mistakes ever truly possible? Can one sin simply cancel out another? Why is the pain we deserve — even crave — seemingly inflicted upon the innocent, loved ones caught in the crossfire of a faith crisis? It all leads to an ending that is nearly apocalyptic in what it implies regarding such questions, one likely to garner as many champions as it does detractors.
O'Brien certainly gets points for mounting a film that interrogates spirituality in a thoughtful and meaningful way, especially when the empty-headed likes of God's Not Dead clog theaters across the country, but The Righteous is the kind of film that isn't half as deep as it thinks it is, trading on empty posturing for most of its runtime, its bold ending feeling like another calculated move intended only to maximize shock value. It doesn't help that Czerny, a character actor who has appeared in various films and television projects for the past 30 years, doesn't have the dramatic chops to pull off the emotionally-nuanced performance necessary to make this material work. He scans as more testy than haunted, which becomes grating before long, but at least he looks the part of an anguished soul, which is appropriate for a film that is nothing but surface, even as it supposedly plumbs the depths of humanity. To that end, the black-and-white photography is undeniably gorgeous, but the image itself looks somehow too crisp, its digital roots impossible to disguise by O'Brien and at odds with the messy inquiries the film is built upon. Ultimately, that's The Righteous in a nutshell: a compelling forgery, and one whose aspirations for profundity are far too visible.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2021 — Dispatch 5.
Festival CapsuleMark O'Brien
by Steven Warner
Credit: BBC
Can't Get You Out of My Head | Adam Curtis
Photo: Focus Features
Everybody Knows | Asghar Farhadi
A Touch of Zen | King Hu
Credit: Paavo Hanninen
The Neutral Ground | CJ Hunt
Earthquake Bird | Wash Westmoreland
A Skin So Soft | Denis Côté


This Segway tipped over while it was powered on, and started spinning around in circles. Two guys tried to lasso it with ropes because they couldn't get close enough to grab it. One of the guys gets beat up by it as well.