Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Top MIT scientist blasts ‘climate hysteria,’ says global warming fears are driven by money… not evidence

Skepticism about climate change has resurfaced, as some experts claim the exact causes of global warming remain unclear and that the policies addressing it are motivated more by money than by science.

Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spent decades studying atmospheric science. He told the Daily Mail that the public hysteria surrounding global warming isn’t actually based on realistic data.

Climate change is the term used to describe Earth’s warming, mainly as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas.

Scientists and climate activists have warned that this extra warmth could cause more extreme storms, rising seas that flood cities, and hotter summers that make it harder to grow food worldwide – all within the next 25 years.

However, Lindzen said the financial implications of controlling the multi-trillion-dollar energy industry have been the true motivation for politicians to support flawed research that argues small temperature increases will lead to immediate disasters.

‘The fact that you have a multi-trillion dollar industry and you have an opportunity to completely overturn it had a great appeal to a lot of politicians,’ he explained. ‘They go wild on it. Another half degree and we’re doomed, and so on. The public knows this is nonsense.’ 

Lindzen explained the basic math behind what he called ‘climate alarm.’ He said the emphasis on lowering specific emissions like carbon dioxide (CO₂) simply doesn’t produce the worldwide temperature changes advocates say it will.

The scientist noted that the planet’s temperature has fluctuated significantly throughout recorded history and science still can’t definitively prove what the exact cause of both extreme warming and cooling events has been.

‘We don’t understand the glaciation that occurred in the 15th century. You know, so what was going on then? Inadequate CO₂?’ Lindzen said of the event in the Northern Hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age.

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Google boss says trillion-dollar AI investment boom has ‘elements of irrationality’

Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google’s parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC.

Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) investment had been an “extraordinary moment”, there was some “irrationality” in the current AI boom.

It comes amid fears in Silicon Valley and beyond of a bubble as the value of AI tech companies has soared in recent months and companies spend big on the burgeoning industry.

Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of the AI bubble bursting, Mr Pichai said the tech giant could weather that potential storm, but also issued a warning.

“I think no company is going to be immune, including us,” he said.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview at Google’s California headquarters, he also addressed energy needs, slowing down climate targets, UK investment, the accuracy of his AI models, and the effect of the AI revolution on jobs.

The interview comes as scrutiny on the state of the AI market has never been more intense.

Alphabet shares have doubled in value in seven months to $3.5tn (£2.7tn) as markets have grown more confident in the search giant’s ability to fend off the threat from ChatGPT owner OpenAI.

A particular focus is Alphabet’s development of specialised superchips for AI that compete with Nvidia, run by Jensen Huang, which recently reached a world first $5tn valuation.

As valuations rise, some analysts have expressed scepticism about a complicated web of $1.4tn of deals being done around OpenAI, which is expected to have revenues this year of less than one thousandth of the planned investment.

It has raised fears stock markets are heading for a repeat of the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s. This saw the values of early internet companies surge amid a wave of optimism for what was then a new technology, before the bubble burst in early 2000 and many share prices collapsed.

This led to some companies going bust, resulting in job losses. A drop in share prices can also hit the value of people’s savings including their pension funds.

In comments echoing those made by US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in 1996, warning of “irrational exuberance” in the market well ahead of the dotcom crash, Mr Pichai said the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles like this.

“We can look back at the internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound,” he said.

“I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

His comments follow a warning from Jamie Dimon, the boss of US bank JP Morgan, who told the BBC last month that investment in AI would pay off, but some of the money poured into the industry would “probably be lost”.

But Mr Pichai said Google’s unique model of owning its own “full stack” of technologies – from chips to YouTube data, to models and frontier science – meant it was in a better position to ride out any AI market turbulence.

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Energy Department loans $1B to help finance the restart of nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island

The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that it will loan $1 billion to help finance the restart of the nuclear power plant on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that is under contract to supply power to data centers for tech giant Microsoft.

The loan is in line with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, including bolstering nuclear power and artificial intelligence.

For Constellation Energy, which owns Three Mile Island’s lone functioning nuclear power reactor, the federal loan will lower its financing cost to get the mothballed plant up and running again. The 835-megawatt reactor can power the equivalent of approximately 800,000 homes, the Department of Energy said.

The reactor had been out of operation for five years when Constellation Energy announced last year that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart it under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to buy the power for its data centers.

Constellation Energy renamed the functioning unit the Crane Clean Energy Center as it works to restore equipment including the turbine, generator, main power transformer and cooling and control systems. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027.

The loan is being issued under an existing $250 billion energy infrastructure program initially authorized by Congress in 2022. Neither the department nor Constellation released terms of the loan.

The plant, on an island in the Susquehanna River just outside Harrisburg, was the site of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, Unit 2, and left the plant with one functioning reactor, Unit 1.

In 2019, Constellation Energy’s then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it to keep it running.

The plan to restart the reactor comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to shore up the nation’s power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers.

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Newly-Leaked Emails Expose A Legitimate LGBTQ Mafia Presence At The BBC

As you may have already heard, President Trump’s threat to sue the outlet for an edited speech that was grotesquely distorted and then aired in a documentary has increased from $1 billion to $5 billion—in the wake of Trump’s threat, BBC released a statement that admitted to a “regretful” editing job, but denied any wrongdoing. However…The Telegraph kind of blew that claim up, reminding us that in 2022, the BBC also aired a similarly-edited version of the same speech on its Newsnight program:

Spliced footage of the speech, which aired in an episode in 2022, made it appear that Mr Trump was encouraging his supporters to riot.

The edit was similar to a version aired in a Panorama documentary broadcast last year.

What a doozy, because as James Zumwalt wrote today, I don’t think the BBC is going to win this one. Seems like this should be understood for a global media company, but if you create a new video product by cutting and splicing, which yields a conflation of separate remarks to push a narrative that doesn’t exist, and then you air that manufactured footage to millions(?) of people, I’d argue that’s basically the definition of libelous and defamatory action.

While the BBC swears there’s no “pattern” of wrongdoing, a new report from the New York Post suggests otherwise. According to newly-leaked emails,

Female staff at the BBC complained to editors for years that the publicly-funded British broadcaster had been hijacked by the ‘trans’ agenda, newly-leaked emails dating back to 2020 show.

In the emails, female staff complained that biologically male transgender sex offenders were being referred to in stories as women, and that articles were avoiding the use of the words ‘girls’ and ‘women’ when discussing topics such as menstruation and birth control….

Of course, this is expected for a leftwing outlet with an obvious agenda, but it gets a little worse: the company appears to have invited in a legitimate LGBTQ mafia presence:

An internal memo revealed that all trans stories were subject to ‘effective censorship’ by specialist LGBTQ reporters hired as gatekeepers at the BBC, who refused to cover gender-critical stories.

And, per the women who worked at the BBC, the LGBTQ “specialists” would bully wayward journalists, punishing dissent, and creating a “culture of fear” in the office:

The women also described a culture of fear at the BBC, where even veteran reporters didn’t dare to stray from the position on trans issues, lest they be branded ‘transphobic,’ the Times reported.

[snip]

‘Any questioning or insufficiently enthusiastic championing risked being labeled as bigoted … It felt like activism, not news,’ one BBC staffer told the Sunday Times.

The BBC was reportedly not interested in any story that was “critical” of the LGBTQ movement, no matter how newsworthy. A new exposé about “hormone blockers” being used on small children? Not to be reported on. A story about a cross-dressing man assaulting women in his prison unit? Obviously he must be called a woman.

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Lone Member of Congress to Vote Against Epstein Files Release Says it Was a ‘Principled’ Decision

Few political issues, if any, have taken a life of its own quite like the files pertaining to disgraced financier and power broker Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein — a convicted pedophile and apparent mastermind of a horrific underage sex trafficking ring — had made quite a number of powerful friends.

People naturally wanted justice after Epstein seemingly killed himself in August 2019. But people also just wanted answers.

And that includes people of all political persuasions.

According to The Hill, a bill looking to unseal the Epstein files passed almost unanimously across Democratic and Republican lines.

Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna spearheaded the bill, which passed 427-1.

That lone dissenting vote belonged to Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana.

And he explained his controversial decision on social media:

I have been a principled “NO” on this bill from the beginning. What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America. As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people – witnesses,…

“I have been a principled ‘NO’ on this bill from the beginning,” Higgins posted Tuesday. “What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America.

“As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people — witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc.”

Higgins then doubled down on his “no” vote (emphasis his).

“If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt,” Higgins posted. “Not by my vote. The Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough investigation that has already released well over 60,000 pages of documents from the Epstein case.

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Was COVID Always A CIA Plot?

According to newly released emails, the United States Intelligence Community, led by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, held regular meetings with Dr. Ralph Baric, one of America’s leading coronavirus experts, since at least 2015. 

Senator Rand Paul’s office has worked for years to obtain the documents. 

Baric has been accused of engineering the Covid-19 virus in his lab at the University of North Carolina, but he has never had to testify about his role in the pandemic despite his well-documented collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

The newly released emails reveal that the CIA hoped to discuss “Coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation with Baric” and that Baric held quarterly meetings with members of the Intelligence Community. 

These emails are just the latest additions to the suspicious amalgamation of facts implicating the US Intelligence Community’s role in the origins of the pandemic, as discussed in The Covid Response at Five Years.

A very brief overview of the timeline suggests that the CIA and the Intelligence Community are implicated in the creation of the virus, a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and censorship to evade any public scrutiny for their role in the pandemic. 

  • 2015: The Intelligence Community held quarterly meetings with Dr. Ralph Baric and discussed “possible human adaptation” to coronavirus evolution. 
  • 2019-2020: The CIA had a spy working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing “both offensive and defensive work” with pathogens, according to Seymour Hersh. That asset reports in early 2020 that there was a laboratory accident that resulted in the infection of a researcher. 
  • March 18, 2020: The Department of Homeland Security replaced Health and Human Services as the lead Federal Agency responding to Covid, as explained in depth in Debbie Lerman’s The Deep State Goes Viral. 
  • Spring 2020: The CIA offered bribes to scientists to bury their findings refuting the “proximal origin” theory advanced by Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to a whistleblower. The House Oversight Committee explains: “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Then, however, the “six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
  • 2020: Dr. Fauci began holding secret meetings at CIA headquarters “without a record of entry” in order to “influence its Covid-19 origins investigation,” according to a whistleblower. “He knew what was going on…He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community,” the whistleblower told Congress.”
  • 2021: Scientists in the Department of Defense compiled significant evidence suggesting Covid emerged from a lab leak, but President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, banned them from presenting their evidence or participating in a discussion on the origins of the virus.
  • 2021: CISA, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, implemented a program known as “switchboarding,” where officials dictated to Big Tech platforms what content is permissible or prohibited speech. 
  • 2022: The Department of Homeland Security announced it will establish a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Ministry of Truth is only discontinued when the absurdity of its chief censor, Nina Jankowicz, receives sufficient blowback from the public.

What exactly was the play here?

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Be Ready For The Next Epstein Revelation To Fall Flat

So much about this ridiculous “Release the Epstein files!” saga feels like the Russia-Collusion affair, most notably the fact that everyone invested in it is being taken for a ride. And once again, Democrat leaders and the dying news media are having fun with it, while the rest of us are throwing up.

A reality check is desperately needed. All indications are that Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved side piece Ghislaine Maxwell used a vast fortune, of largely unknown origin, to both buy access to powerful men and to perpetuate some kind of sex business involving a lot of underage women. That’s a tragic scandal with real victims, even as it’s treated by the media and much of the public as an entertaining tabloid series. (Though I’ll confess my sympathy for the victims parading in front of the Capitol building, giving hour-long press conferences where they do little more than call each other brave is quickly fading.)

Even so, President Trump put his support behind a bill to force his own Justice Department to release more or all information it has on Epstein, who killed himself in prison six years ago. The House passed the bill on Tuesday. If passed by the Senate in coming days, what will surely follow is the unmistakable thud of Democrat hopes and dreams falling from 5,000 feet flat.

How many times do we have to go through this? We just did it for the 1 billionth time last week when House Democrats dribbled out some cherry-picked email correspondence by Epstein. (Republicans subsequently revealed the full tranche of documents.) Epstein said that Trump — what? Is “borderline insane” and “dirty”? God knows we’ve never heard a member of the New York elite say that about the president.

Epstein also said of Trump in one email to writer Michael Wolff, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked [G]hislaine to stop.” What that means is anyone’s guess, but at worst, it seems to indicate Trump was opposed to whatever he knew about “the girls.” Trump has said he banned Epstein from one of his club resorts because he knew that Epstein was recruiting women who worked there, an account backed by the case of Virginia Giuffre, who described being trafficked by Epstein and who committed suicide earlier this year. (Giuffre stated she did not see Trump at Epstein’s home or on the island and that she did not witness him “partake in any sex with us.”)

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Chinese Firm Bought Insurer For CIA Agents As Part Of Trillion Dollar Spending Spree

For years, Washington assumed that China’s outbound investment flowed mainly into developing economies hungry for infrastructure money. But as scrutiny tightens across the West, it’s becoming clear that Beijing’s financial reach extended far deeper into wealthy nations – and far earlier – than most policymakers realized.

One early warning came in 2016, when Jeff Stein, a veteran journalist covering U.S. intelligence agencies, received an unusual tip: Wright USA, a small insurer that specialized in providing liability coverage for FBI and CIA personnel, had quietly been acquired the year before by Fosun Group, a Chinese conglomerate with reported ties to Beijing’s leadership. “Someone with direct knowledge called me up and said, ‘Do you know that the insurance company that insures intelligence personnel is owned by the Chinese?’” Stein recalls. “I was astonished.”

The concern was immediate and obvious. Wright USA held personal information on some of the most sensitive employees in the federal government. The question in Washington became not what the Chinese buyer intended, but who might ultimately gain access to the data. Newly released records reviewed by the BBC indicate that Chinese state banks helped finance the acquisition, routing a $1.2 billion loan through the Cayman Islands to enable Fosun’s purchase.

Though the deal violated no U.S. laws, it triggered alarm. Stein’s story in Newsweek soon prompted a rare inquiry by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Treasury-led interagency panel responsible for policing foreign ownership risks. Within months, Wright USA was sold back to American owners. Neither Fosun nor Starr Wright USA, its new parent, responded to requests for comment.

High-level intelligence officials say the episode was among the cases that pushed the first Trump administration in 2018 to significantly tighten U.S. investment screening – part of a broader shift as the U.S. began rethinking a two-decade-old presumption that Chinese capital posed few national-security risks.

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Texas governor declares Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday declared one of the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy groups in the U.S. a “foreign terrorist organization” under a proclamation that he said allows the state to try shutting them down.

He also designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations “a transnational criminal organization” and said it would not be allowed to buy land in the state. The proclamation also included the Muslim Brotherhood.

Neither the CAIR nor the Muslim Brotherhood are designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.

CAIR told Abbott in a letter that his announcement had no basis “in law or fact.” The group accused his office of stoking “anti-Muslim hysteria.”

“You do not have the authority to unilaterally declare any Americans or American institutions terrorist groups, nor is there any basis to level this smear against our organization,” wrote Robert S. McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director.

Months ago, Texas Republicans moved aggressively to try to stop a Muslim-centered planned community around one of the state’s largest mosques near Dallas. Abbott and other GOP state officials launched investigations into the development tied to the East Plano Islamic Center, saying the group is trying to create a Muslim-exclusive community that would impose Islamic law.

EPIC City representatives called the attacks about Islamic law and other assertions misleading, dangerous and without merit. Earlier this year, the Justice Department closed a federal civil rights investigation into the planned community without filing any charges or lawsuits.

In his proclamation, Abbott cited a law he signed this year that he said prohibits “foreign adversaries” from purchasing or acquiring land. The Republican author of that bill praised the governor’s declaration.

“Today proves exactly why that law was needed,” Republican state Rep. Cole Hefner posted on X.

The Muslim Brotherhood was established in Egypt nearly a century ago and has branches across the world. Its leaders say it renounced violence decades ago and seeks to set up Islamic rule through elections and other peaceful means. Critics, including autocratic governments across the Mideast region, view it as a threat.

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Pennsylvania School District Using AI-Enabled Wi-Fi To Search Students For Firearms

A Pennsylvania school district is using artificial intelligence to keep guns off its campuses. But civil liberties advocates have warned that the technology could lead to mass surveillance and violation of constitutional rights.

The Chartiers Valley School District in Allegheny County has implemented AI that harnesses the district’s Wi-Fi signals to determine whether people are carrying weapons as they enter the schools.

The technology, called Wi-AI, was developed by CurvePoint of Pittsburgh. CurvePoint grew out of AI research at Carnegie Mellon University.

According to the company, Wi-AI uses “spatial intelligence” to find weapons such as guns before they enter a school.

The AI system analyzes a space and detects where potential weapons are located by interpreting “how Wi-Fi signals reflect off people and objects.”

Once a possible weapon is found, security personnel, school administrators, or others can go to the location to determine whether there is actually a threat.

It is now in use at Chartiers Valley School District high school, middle school, and primary school campuses. CurvePoint CEO Skip Smith said that in a recent test, the system found a pistol hidden in a backpack. He said the technology has a 95 percent success rate, failing only 4 percent of its searches.

Smith said the Wi-AI does not carry the same privacy concerns of other security systems because it does not rely on facial recognition or biometric data.

“We don’t know it’s you,“ Smith told The Epoch Times. ”We have no biometric information about you. Our system just sees a big bag of salt water.”

Darren Mariano, president of the Chartiers Valley Board of School Directors, said the district is excited to be the first in the country to adopt the technology.

“The safety of our students and staff is always our top priority,” he said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be the first district in the nation to implement this groundbreaking technology.”

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