History Repeats.

Brandon Lee and Heath Ledger were both 28 years old at the time of their deaths, which took place during the late stages of the productions of their respective films, with their most iconic roles being that of face-painted comic book characters.

They're both tragic members of the lesser known '28 Club' which houses the likes of Roman Emperor Caligula and Avenged Sevenfold drummer Jimmy 'The Rev' Sullivan, among others.

Rest In Peace.

The Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

BBC Future

• Tim Maughan

From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.

Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia. I'm here with a group of architects and designers called the Unknown Fields Division, and this is the final stop on a three-week-long journey up the global supply chain, tracing back the route consumer goods take from China to our shops and homes, via container ships and factories.

You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs. In 2009 China produced 95% of the world's supply of these elements, and it's estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world's reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?

Element of Success

Rare earth minerals have played a key role in the transformation and explosive growth of China's world-beating economy over the last few decades. It's clear from visiting Baotou that it's had a huge, transformative impact on the city too. As the centre of this 21st Century gold-rush, Baotou feels very much like a frontier town.

Workers in a factory in Shenzhen make MP3 players. Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields.

In 1950, before rare earth mining started in earnest, the city had a population of 97,000. Today, the population is more than two-and-a-half million. There is only one reason for this huge influx of people - minerals. As a result Baotou often feels stuck somewhere between a brave new world of opportunity presented by the global capitalism that depends on it, and the fading memories of Communism that still line its Soviet era boulevards. Billboards for expensive American brands stand next to revolution-era propaganda murals, as the disinterested faces of Western supermodels gaze down on statues of Chairman Mao. At night, multicoloured lights, glass-dyed by rare earth elements, line the larger roads, turning the city into a scene from the movie Tron, while the smaller side streets are filled with drunk, vomiting refinery workers that spill from bars and barbecue joints.

Even before getting to the toxic lake, the environmental impact the rare earth industry has had on the city is painfully clear. At times it’s impossible to tell where the vast structure of the Baogang refineries complex ends and the city begins. Massive pipes erupt from the ground and run along roadways and sidewalks, arching into the air to cross roads like bridges. The streets here are wide, built to accommodate the constant stream of huge diesel-belching coal trucks that dwarf all other traffic.

A coal mine in Baotou. Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields.

After it rains they plough, unstoppable, through roads flooded with water turned black by coal dust. They line up by the sides of the road, queuing to turn into one of Baotou’s many coal-burning power stations that sit unsettlingly close to freshly built apartment towers. Everywhere you look, between the half-completed tower blocks and hastily thrown up multi-storey parking lots, is a forest of flame-tipped refinery towers and endless electricity pylons. The air is filled with a constant, ambient, smell of sulphur. It’s the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe has largely forgotten – at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must have looked and smelled like this.

Quiet Plant

One of our first visits in the city is to a processing plant that specialises mainly in producing cerium, one of the most abundant rare earth minerals. Cerium has a huge number of commercial applications, from colouring glass to making catalytic converters. The guide who shows us around the plant explains that they mainly produce cerium oxide, used to polish touchscreens on smartphones and tablets.

Inside a rare earth mineral processing plant. Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields.

As we are wandering through the factory’s hangar-like rooms, it’s impossible not to notice that something is missing. Amongst the mazes of pipes, tanks, and centrifuges, there are no people. In fact there’s no activity at all. Apart from our voices, which echo through the huge sheds, the plant is silent. It’s very obviously not operating. When asked, our guide tells us the plant is closed for maintenance – but there’s no sign of that either: no maintenance crews, no cleaning or repairs being done. When pushed further our guide gets suspicious, wonders why we are asking so many questions, and clams up. It’s a behaviour we’ll encounter a lot in Baotou – a refusal to answer questions or stray off a strictly worded script.

As we leave, one of our party who has visited the area before suggests a possible explanation: could local industry be artificially controlling market scarcity of products like cerium oxide, in order to keep rare earth prices high? We can’t know for sure that this was the case the day we visited. Yet it would not be unprecedented: in 2012, for example, the news agency Xinhua reported that China’s largest rare earth producer was suspending operations to prevent price drops.

One of Baotou’s other main exports is neodymium, another rare earth with a variety of applications. Again it is used to dye glass, especially for making lasers, but perhaps its most important use is in making powerful yet lightweight magnets. Neodymium magnets are used in consumer electronics items such as in-ear headphones, cellphone microphones, and computer hard-drives. At the other end of the scale they are a vital component in large equipment that requires powerful magnetic fields, such as wind farm turbines and the motors that power the new generation of electric cars. We’re shown around a neodymium magnet factory by a guide who seems more open than our friend at the cerium plant. We’re even given some magnets to play with. But again, when our questions stray too far from applications and to production and associated environmental costs, the answers are less forthcoming, and pretty soon the visit is over.

The refinement of rare earth minerals, like that done in this factory, can cause toxic byproducts. Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields.

The intriguing thing about both neodymium and cerium is that while they’re called rare earth minerals, they're actually fairly common. Neodymium is no rarer than copper or nickel and quite evenly distributed throughout the world’s crust. While China produces 90% of the global market’s neodymium, only 30% of the world’s deposits are located there. Arguably, what makes it, and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products. For example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and dissolving them in sulphuric and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount of poisonous waste as a byproduct. It could be argued that China’s dominance of the rare earth market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to take an environmental hit that other nations shy away from.

Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields.

And there’s no better place to understand China’s true sacrifice than the shores of Baotou toxic lake. Apparently created by damming a river and flooding what was once farm land, the lake is a “tailings pond”: a dumping ground for waste byproducts. It takes just 20 minutes to reach the lake by car from the centre of the city, passing through abandoned countryside dominated by the industrial architecture on the horizon. Earlier reports claim the lake is guarded by the military, but we see no sign. We pass a shack that was presumably a guard hut at one point but it’s abandoned now; whoever was here left in a hurry, leaving their bedding, cooking stove, and instant noodle packets behind when they did.

Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields.

We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.

You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me.

Unknown Fields has an unusual plan for the stuff. “We are using this radioactive clay to make a series of ceramic vessels modelled on traditional Ming vases,” Young explains, “each proportioned based on the amount of toxic waste produced by the rare earth minerals used in a particular tech gadget.” The idea is to illustrate the impact our consumer goods have on the environment, even when that environment might be unseen and thousands of miles away.

After seeing the impact of rare earth mining myself, it’s impossible to view the gadgets I use everyday in the same way. As I watched Apple announce their smart watch recently, a thought crossed my mind: once we made watches with minerals mined from the Earth and treated them like precious heirlooms; now we use even rarer minerals and we'll want to update them yearly. Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone. But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon.                      

Remember when we stopped normalizing child abuse? Now theres all these progressive caring people who are standing in solidarity with eachother over the terrible way our nation has been run into the ground by a selfish generation of hate mongering simpletons who simply resort to violence against their own children because it's the easy answer.

GOD stands for government over democracy.
The Bible and religion was created to control the masses.
Bible thumpers are the sheep.

"Ode to Mangoes"

By Ryan


Oh Mangoes

Smells so good in my nose,

Juice flows down my hands to my elbows,

It gets all over my clothes,

Where will it go next? Nobody knows.

It continues to flow down to my toes!

We will probably need the hose,

I suppose.


Oh Mangoes

The Robins are looking, and so are the Crows,

Probably wondering what I'm doing with those.

I'm really enjoying them and it certainly shows.

I can no longer smell the rose,

Only these magnificent mangoes.

That's how it goes,

I suppose.

The darkness at the heart of bad times lies not just in the hardship but in the questions we are forced to ask ourselves.

In the early avalanche of World War II, as the Nazis were sweeping through Europe like a hot blade, Winston Churchill was quietly tormented by uncertainty as to whether he should negotiate a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler.

Churchill risked everything and made what is perhaps the 20th century’s most courageous decision but it wasn’t a moral choice, it was a pragmatic one.

Churchill didn’t refuse to do a deal just because Hitler was evil but because he knew he couldn’t be trusted.

What followed was perhaps the only truly worthy war in human history.

But just because the good guys won doesn’t mean they won just because they were good.

Floyd’s daylight murder has triggered an international wave of solidarity and brought to the fore once again the brute force behind the regular racist behaviour of US police officers. Picture: Al Bello/Getty Images/AFP.Source:AFP

It was the forces of Joseph Stalin – Hitler’s old ally – who ended up storming Berlin and the USA may never have entered the war at all had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbour.

Yet in the three-quarters of a century since, the new international order has been predicated on the assumption that human beings are decent and rational and that good will prevail.

This is the great myth of the baby boomer generation and all those that followed: That the world is an inherently stable place and its default position is peace.

Even a passing glance at the grand sweep of global history or the post-war world outside Western Europe, North America and our own island continent shows how dangerously wrong this assumption is.

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In other words, the last 75 years of peace enjoyed by the West is far from the norm. On the contrary, it is so unprecedented in history and unique in geopolitics it borders on the miraculous.

This is a fact that only the most bong-addled arts student could forget, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that this seems to be the demographic most reckless when it comes to tearing down the social and political institutions that have enabled it to be so.

It is easy to call for revolution when you have never experienced one.

Which brings us to the anarchy in the US today, sparked by the unforgivable killing of George Floyd but clearly fuelled by much deeper issues.

George Floyd’s death stoked the fires of revolution in a nation already ravaged by poverty and disease. Picture: Supplied.Source:AFP

America’s history has been steeped in slavery, racism and injustice, a truth as self-evident as any of those outlined in its founding document, however it is also a nation that strives to meet lofty ideals of liberty and democracy – despite so often falling short.

Yes, it is the country that produced Robert Lee and the KKK but it is also the country that produced Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

It created a system that allowed segregation but also the system that dismantled it.

It created an economy that exploited slaves but also an army that liberated them.

In short, America is deeply flawed – as all nations are – but it is a nation that needs improving not demolishing. And history has always shown that when nation states are torn down it is those at the bottom, not the top, who suffer the most.

And at least in a democracy, bad government can be changed. The problem with revolution is it may produce the last government you will ever get.

And the problem with the anti-Trump movement is that it has been so obsessed with revolution or “resistance” or whatever it is called that it has failed to produce a sure-fire credible candidate to beat him at the next election.

Widely criticised for his inaction, President Donald Trump still remains the surest bet come next election. Picture: AP/Patrick Semansky.Source:AP

How else can one explain the embarrassing flame-out of the Democratic primaries, in which two geriatric dinosaurs evoked images of Venezuela and dementia, while a younger greener generation parroted policies that could have been cut and pasted from a first year student union debate?

If Trump truly is the dumbest and most dangerous President in US history then why can’t the Democrats find anyone who is un-backable to win?

Trump this week vowed to send in the army to any rogue states that “refused” to protect their citizens from rioters – a position that does not appear to have any constitutional authority and, if actually carried out, would amount to something resembling a new civil war.

Yet even after this, even with the nation’s cities literally on fire, and even after the spectacular clusterf**k of the coronavirus crisis leaving tens of thousands dead, Trump is still close to even money for the election in November – probably because his chief opponent often struggles to complete a full sentence.

Indeed, it took until the end of this week for Biden to finally edge ahead of Trump in the betting markets for the first time.

This is what happens when you condemn democratic institutions instead of harnessing them. It’s what happens when you fight on the streets instead of at the ballot box.

Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden speaks about unrest across the country, describing George Floyd’s death a wake-up call for the nation. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP.Source:AFP

The good news is there is a pantheon of demonstrators who have behaved with incredible bravery, decency and restraint.

These are the true heroes of this movement. The incredibly principled protesters who saved a rogue truck driver from being bashed by their comrades even after he ploughed into a sit-in.

The kind and courageous young black man who walked up to a phalanx of riot police to deliver them a slab of water bottles as they stood in the searing sun.

Yet their noble actions are too-often overshadowed by over-privileged brats, so many of whom are clearly not black nor familiar with true struggle.

How else to explain the images of thugs smashing up a Muslim family store, looters stealing cheesecake and wine or a black woman asking a white protester to please not spray-paint a Black Lives Matter tag on her wall?

And, were all this not enough, there is also the grieving family of George Floyd himself begging for the violence to stop.

This disorder and destruction doesn’t just hurt poor communities, it also plays perfectly into Trump’s hands. He is the ultimate law and order leader, someone who deals exclusively in simplistic notions of black and white, us and them.

Having radicals run riot through America’s major cities doesn’t undermine him, it fuels him.

The chaos that reigns on American streets at the moment plays right into the narrative President Donald Trump has been writing all along. Picture: Patrick Semansky/APSource:AP

It gives succour to his supporters’ world view that there are criminals everywhere who need to be crushed and the liberal left is dominated by dangerous crazies who seek to destroy the American way of life.

And even more damaging to the left’s election chances, it risks enlivening a silent and largely apolitical middle-class that might be uncomfortable with Trump but far more troubled by the fear of an angry mob storming through their neighbourhoods throwing rocks at their windows.

Most people would vote for Genghis Khan if they thought that was what it would take to protect their family. They wouldn’t be proud of it, they wouldn’t talk about it, they’d just quietly do it.

It’s not like we haven’t seen it happen before.

The case that the protests help Trump is simple – voters see chaos and gravitate toward a strongman over a warm, fuzzy liberal. But it’s hard to run as a law-and-order candidate when your presidency has seen repeated chaos, violence, and disorder. Picture: Evan Vucci/APSource:AP

And this is the great tragedy of this movement. The family of George Floyd and all other victims of police brutality should be deeply aggrieved and America’s law enforcement should be held to account.

People have every right and reason to be angry. But the descent into violence only cripples this cause. It compounds the crime, it reinforces right-wing prejudice and it starts a war that can only be won by either more violence or more oppression.

These are sad and sorrowful days and we will have to ask hard questions at the end of them.

They must be answered first and foremost by the authorities sending black people to the jail cell and the grave but they must also be answered by the hypocrites hurting those they claim to heal.

The COVID19 hoax did not work to bring down our great President and now this...the black lives matter race hoax...REALLY ...what else do the disgraceful powers that control this world with their puppets in the media have planned for us in next 5 months? Is it possible that so many of our fellow American citizens could really be this ignorant?

When I was a young child I vividly remember during church services a sermon that described how there would come a time where many people would not recognize good from evil or truth from blatant lies..I remember thinking to myself how could this ever happen? It seemed impossible from the paradigm that I existed in.

Well here we are...in the past 3 months I have watched not only OUR country's economy but the entire world economy brought to ruins for no other reason than multitudes of men and women have allowed themselves to be controlled by deceit and fear. The corrupt world powers and their brainwashing arms of the media have proven the ability to program the masses.

Now only weeks after the COVID programming many of the same lemmings have allowed the media to convince them that the amazing men and women that put their lives on the line every day to protect us are bad but some disgraceful drug addict felon is a hero being paraded around the country. Can this really be happening???
There is absolutely no dispute that George Floyd was a disgraceful career criminal , thief , drug addict , drug dealer and ex-con who served 5 yrs in prison for armed robbery on a pregnant woman , and spent his last days passing around fake 20's to store owners in Minnesota .Our new media hero "Gentle George " had two types of heart disease due to the tremendous amount of illegal drugs he was taking daily. In his autopsy he tested positive for marijuana, Fentanyl , Amphetamine , morphine , methamphetamine , and several others .. When officer Chauvin responded to a 911 call that someone was passing counterfeit 20s the store owner pointed out Floyd , who was sitting in a car across the street . When officer Chauvin confronted Floyd , and asked him to get out of the car , Floyd refused and was not cooperating with the officer , a 20 year public servant , who was unlucky enough to be the one having to deal with this drug addicted criminal, a true disgrace to our human race that represents all that is wrong with our society. Floyd continued to resist the officers orders during this incident as one would expect from a mindless drug addict. Now the media, Hollywood and many of our disgraceful politicians want you to be outraged that this career criminal drug abusing thug suffered the consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
Unfortunately the liberal mindset that has been instilled in so many of our young generation has taught them to take no personal responsibility for their actions They have been taught that if they do not succeed than they must be a victim. These lost souls without any direction or sense of purpose are so easily manipulated to blame others for their lack of self worth.
It is these lost souls with little to no self worth who are the
"protesters" that we see looting our stores, burning down our cities, defaming our national monuments and disgracing the great men and women that built this country.. but I suppose now they finally found a purpose.

As we will likely be facing tough times ahead, I can only pray that these lost souls find a true purpose beyond the blame and deceit that is testing if not ruining the strong fabric of once our great country.