Category Archives: energy resources

January 19, 2022 · 8:06 pm

Receiving Semen with One’s Milk: A World Record in San Diego

News item in DailyNewsReported, January 2022, with this title “DNA Testing Reveals Milkman Fathered Over 800 Children Between 1951 and 1964”

Randall (Randy) Jeffries was a Milk Delivery man in the 1950’s and 60’s in Southern California. His route was in the San Diego area. Back in those days milk delivery was how we got our milk. No quick runs to the store or jaunts to the nearest Walmart. Week in and week out, Randy pounded the pavement from truck to doorstep.

Over the years he began to form relationships with his customers and in those times the vast majority of his interactions were with housewives. He was quite a handsome man back in his time and many were the customer who would request him. Frequently pies and casseroles were made for him.

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January 5, 2022 · 6:01 pm

Searching Investigations from Verite Research in 2021

A VERITE RESEARCH BULLETIN

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As we approach the end of the year, there is much to look back on and reflect upon. I am glad to share with you some of the highlights of the recent month in this Verité Bulletin.

We have long felt that democracy is not meaningful when citizens are not critically cognizant of the information in relation to public finance. This is why Verité Research strategically expanded its work on Public Finance. The platform that we built, PublicFinance.lk, is probably the pre-eminent locus for information and analysis on the state of Sri Lanka’s public finance.

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December 13, 2020 · 6:27 am

Wind-Power Takes Off in Mannar

Dr Tilak Siyambalapitiya, in The Island, 8 December 2020, where the title reads “Wind power in Mannar,now a reality”

On a windy day, way back in 2002, an engineer from the CEB, approached the Mannar island, searching for a location to set up a wind measuring system. Those were difficult times, with the ceasefire taking hold, but a flareup between the two warring sides was imminent. He precariously crossed the makeshift bridge, on the Mannar causeway, previously blown-up in the war. Moving toward Thalaimannar, the road was deserted and full of potholes, the result of years of neglect during the war. With calculations and estimates in hand, he knew Mannar would be a superior location for wind power, compared to Hambantota, where a pilot wind power plant had been fixed three years back, in 1999.

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November 8, 2020 · 8:46 am

Tamil Tiger ‘Martyrs’: Regenerating Divine Potency?

This article from my pen was probably drafted in 2004. It appeared in Studies in Conflict  & Terrorism vol. 28 in 2005 after the usual refereeing process. Some of the details and arguments have, in fact, been obliterated within my fading memory. For this reason, it was a refreshing READ for me and brought up specific details that are pertinent to any debate surrounding the motivations that induce self-immolation, jihadist killings of a suicidal nature, et cetera… The Bibilography will also aid present investigations though, of course, other writings have appeared since then on Islamic jihadists and other martyrdom operations…. Michael Roberts, 8 November 2020 … The photographs are fresh additions … and so too the highlighting within the text.

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March 31, 2020 · 6:46 am

FOR Sri Lanka: Engaging Lord Naseby and His Journeys in Sri Lanka

Michael Roberts

Since I had been introduced to the British peer Lord Michael Naseby in the surrounds of the House of Lords in March 2018,[1] I assumed that he had been born into the aristocratic upper layer of British society. Wrong. It required his book Sri Lanka for me to learn that he was from the upper middle class and had contested parliamentary seats from the late-960s on behalf of the Conservative Party in what were Labour strongholds – with his peerage being of 1990s vintage. As vitally, his early career as a marketing executive had seen him working in Pakistan and Bengal in the early 1960s before he was stationed in Sri Lanka as a marketing manager for Reckitt and Colman in the period 1963-64.

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March 13, 2020 · 6:12 pm

Port City Colombo 2014-2040 Clarified

SEE  …. LISTEN …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2e1xOcGpDc

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February 3, 2020 · 1:55 pm

The Asia Society Policy Institute in Melbourne Talks the Walk

The Asia Society Policy Institute opens its first international presence in Melbourne with the appointment of Richard Maude as a resident Senior Fellow. He will also serve as Executive Director, Policy for Asia Society Australia.

For more than 60 years, the Asia Society has sought to explain the diversity of Asia to the United States and the complexity of the United States to Asia, and to be a bridge in problem-solving within the region and between Asia and the wider world. With a solution-oriented mandate, the Asia Society Policy Institute builds on this mission by tackling major policy challenges confronting the Asia-Pacific in security, prosperity, sustainability, and the development of common norms and values for the region.

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November 26, 2019 · 8:40 am

China’s BRI is a Multi-Polar Win-Win Trading Network

Peter Koenig, in Information Clearing House where the title reads “China–The Belt and road Initiative = The Bridge that spans the world” … at https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-belt-road-initiative-bridge-spans-world/5695727

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, is based on a 2,100-year-old trade route between the Middle East and Eastern Asia, called the Silk Road. It wound its ways across the huge landmass Eurasia to the most eastern parts of China. It favored trading based on the Taoist philosophy of harmony and peaceful coexistence – trading in the original sense of the term, an exchange with “win-win” outcomes, both partners benefitting equally. Continue reading →

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September 27, 2019 · 3:02 pm

The Variation in the Diffusion of Electrical Power

SWR de Samarasinghe[1]

Thanks for sharing the very informative map — in  your piece “Dark Nights in Sri Lanka: The Incidence and Spread of Electricity.”[2] The relative deprivation of north outside the Jaffna Peninsula is striking but not surprising. Sparse population, poverty and the war are key explanatory factors. Economics plays a role to the extent that the overhead cost of supplying a single dwelling or a business in these areas will be higher than in more densely populated areas and the expected income for the CEB lower. The solution is a government subsidy for the CEB. My understanding is that such a subsidization has been government policy for a long time. The social benefits are substantial and in the long term it pays off economically as well.

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September 24, 2019 · 2:51 pm

Spreading Knowledge via Light: Anduren Eliyata That Sydney-based Charitable Enterprise

Michael Roberts

ANDUREN ELIYATA was initiated as a charitable organisation by 71-year old Chandra Fernando in Sydney in 2014 with a focus on providing solar-powered units to needy families and schoolchildren in Sri Lanka. Its successful outreach has now prompted the organisers to consider similar endeavours in Fiji.

Though nurtured near Wattala on the western coast of Sri Lanka in the mid-20th century Chandra Fernando had to study “under a bottle lamp” till he reached the age of twenty and this experience has motivated his charitable outreach. In this endeavour his guiding organisational principles were ‘simple’: “We are all volunteers.  No office.  No clerks. No Rent. No allowances. No travel expenses nor hotel accommodation in Australia when travelling Interstate. This helps us to donate more Solar Powered Lighting Packages to the poor and needy students in Sri Lanka.” – as he noted in an email to me.

Recipients in Kilinochi   ….. in Iranateevu

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