☄️ A meteor breaking and burning up in the atmosphere near St Francis Bay, Eastern Cape

🇿🇦 ⚪️ — Afrikaner town Orania seeks energy independence from South African grid

🔶 As a measure to keep capital in Orania, community leaders have sought to establish energy independence.

🔶 Eskom, South Africa’s primary electricity provider, has been plagued by rolling blackouts since 2008

🔶 The city’s electricity bill is also one of the few major expenses that is a drain on local capital.

🔶 Orania has been at work to solve both of these problems by building a solar power plant and battery storage systems.

🔶 The plant is owned by the town's council, which sells the electricity generated from solar to residents at the same price as Eskom to fund future expansion.

🔶 This keeps money in the community and allows for reinvestment into projects such as community housing for newcomers.

🔶 In times of excess production, electricity is sold back to Eskom at a profit.

Oraniabeweging

Map of where each South African Huguenot family surname comes from in France and the Low countries

@saffercentral2

Source:
GA Venter, Ons Geskiedenisalbum, page 55

✝️🇿🇦 Bittereinders member Liam May will be walking from the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria to the White Cross Monument in Pietersburg - a distance of roughly 250km - for the annual cross planting ceremony on the 14th of September.

The White Cross Monument is an attempt to raise awareness around the murder of White farmers in South Africa. Each cross planted represents a White farmer's murder. Over 3000 crosses have been planted.

https://www.tg-me.com/BittereindersZA/266

🇿🇦 Violent Crime in South Africa Spawns a Booming Business -- Bloomberg

As night falls on the streets of Johannesburg’s richest district, the darkness is broken by strobe lights coming from the high-powered vehicles patrolling them. Inside are armed men looking out for anything untoward.

They aren’t from the police, army or any other officialdom, though. They’re representatives of what’s become a growth industry in South Africa: private security filling the void of a state struggling to maintain basic services.

With carjackings, armed robberies and one of the highest recorded murder rates in the world, violent crime has plagued the country for decades. But with homicides at a 20-year-high and a spate of ransom kidnappings targeting liquid businesses, those who can afford it are increasingly employing their own people while more police officers are quitting for private firms.

The ratio makes South Africa an anomaly and reflects a decline in the state’s monopoly over law enforcement, said Ziyanda Stuurman, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group in Cape Town and author of a book on policing in South Africa.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-03/south-africa-s-private-security-firms-thrive-as-murders-kidnappings-rise

https://archive.is/7CKso

Continued:

▫There are 2.7 million registered private security personnel - 5 times more than in 2017 - versus 150 thousand police personnel

▫Private security companies are tasked with everything from policing land to close-protection services.

▫Wealthy clients are willing to part with more than 100,000 rand ($5,535) a month for bodyguards, more than three times the average national salary

▫Johannesburg's Rand Water hires private security companies to protect their pipelines from illegal gold miners

“Some of these companies have got more firearms per person than the police, more firearms per person than the South African military.”

🇿🇦 Private Security Training

▫️ Outside of private security services themselves, private companies have redeveloped themselves in instances entirely to offer training to either private security companies or individuals around the world from their position in South Africa.

▫️These institutions, while demanding extravagant prices, sport better equipment and modern doctrine, while the SAPS and SANDF still wallows around in the Cold War era.

▫️The private security industry is to a large extent the saving grace of South Africans, and the government can't afford to tighten regulation or shrink the industry as it is becoming a key part of the South African economy.

@SANU

☄ From preliminary examination of the sample, which weighs less than 100g and has a pre-fragmentation diameter of less than 5cm, the researchers suspect that the meteorite is an extremely rare type of meteorite. The specimen has a dark black glassy coating (fusion crust) with a light grey interior, peppered with dark-green and light-green grains.

This meteorite is preliminarily considered to be a brecciated achondrite from the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED) group.

“Achondritic meteorites are less common than other meteorites and are analogous to some of Earth’s rocks. Achondrites are of great interest to geoscientists, as they give us a glimpse into the inner workings of other planetary bodies,” says Vonopartis. “They also demonstrate that processes that formed the rocks of Earth occur elsewhere in the solar system, and analysis of these meteorites help us better understand the formation of other rocky planets and asteroids.”

https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2024/2024-09/eastern-cape-meteorite-find-revealed.html