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.

Commerce Department Threatens to Take Ownership of Harvard Patents

The federal government is looking into Harvard University’s patent rights, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Aug. 8 letter to Harvard President Alan Garber.

The Department of Commerce is initiating a “march-in” process under the Bayh-Dole Act, a federal patent policy allowing recipients of federal funds to retain patent rights over their inventions made with federal funding.

The Act’s “march-in” rights, however, give the federal government the authority to grant licenses of such patents to third parties under certain conditions where federally funded inventions are not being adequately developed or utilized for the public good.

In the letter, Lutnick said that Harvard has “failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer and is in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents.”

As a result, the Department of Commerce is initiating a comprehensive review of the institution’s non-compliance, and will initiate the Bayh-Dole Act “march-in” process through which Harvard’s federally-funded patents could be taken over by the government.

Lutnick said that the federal government intends to license Harvard’s patents to third parties.

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NYC to shut down last migrant hotel after shelling out $170 million to crime-ridden shelter

It’s the end of an error.

New York City’s last-standing — and most notorious — migrant hotel will soon stop housing illegal border crossers, The Post has learned.

The once-four-star Row NYC hotel on Eighth Avenue in Midtown was repurposed in October 2022, so its 1,331 rooms could be used as a shelter while the Big Apple dealt with the crippling migrant crisis, but Mayor Eric Adams confirmed the city’s $5.13 million-a-month contract with the hotel won’t be renewed in April.

The deal has allowed the hotel — which is owned by Boston-based real estate titan Rockpoint Group — to already rake in more than $170 million.

It’s unclear what the future holds for the establishment, which once charged $414 to $435 per weeknight for standard rooms before becoming a shelter. Reps for the company did not return messages.

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AI Can Be Used To Develop Biological And Chemical Weapons

The greatest threat to America may be something we cannot see.

Biological and chemical weapons can spread debilitating fear and wreak havoc on populations. Unfortunately, the threat of these kinds of attacks on American soil is only rising, empowered by the unique capabilities of artificial intelligence. To prevent catastrophe, we must use AI to counter the danger that this advanced technology can unleash.

We are only one misstep away from catastrophe. The most recent close call came last month when two Chinese nationals, who received funding from their communist government to work on a noxious fungus, were caught smuggling the pathogen into the United States. The FBI arrested them just in time, as this was no ordinary fungus—instead, it was what scientists call an “agroterrorism weapon” that would have decimated America’s grain farms, sickened the U.S. population, and disrupted our nation’s food supply.

Those who lived through the fraught days immediately after 9/11 likewise remember the anthrax scare, as toxic letters were sent through the postal service, killing five people and making everyday Americans terrified to open their mailboxes. 

Every few years, some new suspect threatens our military bases, political leaders, or someone else with ricin, a deadly poison derived from the castor plant.

And just a few short years ago, millions died and the entire world was thrown into a tailspin when COVID-19—which many experts now believe originated from questionable handling and a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—crossed borders with abandon.

The rapid rise of AI is only making this problem more prevalent. In 2022—months before ChatGPT was released, bringing large language models to the masses—an AI designed to develop drugs invented 40,000 new chemical weapons in a mere six hours. In 2023, AI was used to provide a recipe for poisonous chloramine gas, which it called “Aromatic Water Mix.” AI experts and government officials have been warning for years that AI could spark the next pandemic and be an unparalleled tool in the hands of terrorists.

These facts are encouraging some to ask that AI developers give pause to the negative consequences of this powerful technology. We have enough problems with biological espionage, terrorism-by-mail, and lethal lab leaks. Why would we put potential biological and chemical weapons generators in the hands of anyone with a computer?

But responding to this threat is not so simple as pulling the plug. First, while AI has the potential to be used for evil, it also has immense power for good. The same tools that could be used to make biological weapons are also being applied to cure currently untreatable diseases. Additionally, America can’t stop others from developing AI for whatever uses they desire. COVID-19 and the recent agroterrorism fungus both came from China, and you can bet China will have no problem unleashing AI for even more destructive ends if it serves their interests, as will every other bad actor in the world.

So what else can we do?

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Man Gets ZERO Jail Time After Being Caught on Video Violently Beating Two Elderly Pro-Lifers

Earlier this year, Patrick Brice was found guilty of savagely beating two elderly pro-life activists, Mark Crosby, 73 and Dick Schaefer, 80, in May of 2023 outside a Planned Parenthood in Baltimore, Maryland. Video shows Brice kicking Crosby in the face and, as reported by the Baltimore Banner,  left him with a permanent eye injury.

On Thursday, Baltimore City Circuit Judge Yvette M. Bryant sentenced Brice to ZERO jail time and instead received one year of home detention and three years’ probation.

Video of the attack, shared by Baltimore Police, shows Brice engaged in a heated conversation with the activists before he turns and rushes Schaefer, whose back was turned, and  tackles him against a concrete planter and knocking him to the ground.

Brice then straddled the 80-year-old, who had his back to him, tackling him across a large concrete planter and knocking him to the ground.

When Crosby came to Schaefer’s aid, Brice then knocked Crosby off his feet, sending him to the pavement, straddled him, and began punching Crosby in the face.  Brice got off of the helpless victim, kicked him in the head, and walked away.

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James Cameron Warns of ‘Terminator’-Style Apocalypse if You ‘Put AI Together with Weapons Systems’

Hollywood director and filmmaker James Cameron is warning “there’s danger” of a Terminator-style apocalypse if you “put AI together with weapons systems.”

While Cameron has previously expressed that how artificial intelligence may be able to help with directing movies, he is nonetheless still worried that his The Terminator franchise potentially becoming a reality if AI gets out of control.

“I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff,” Cameron said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Notably, Cameron’s The Terminator is set in a world where an AI defense network becomes self-aware and begins conquering humans.

The Oscar-winning Titanic and Avatar director went on to say, “Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop.”

“But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war. So I don’t know,” Cameron added.

“I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and super-intelligence,” he continued. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time.”

Cameron also surmised “Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer,” adding, “I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”

In 2023, the director said that he doubted AI — which he referred to as “a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said” — would ever come up with a story “good” enough to the point where the technology replaces human screenwriters.

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‘Defund The Police’ NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Has Already Spent $33,000 on Private Security

Like many Democrats running for office, New York City mayoral candidate Mohran Zamdani is a glaring hypocrite.

Mamdani, a self-described socialist and New York state assemblyman who won the Democratic nomination back in June, has poured tens of thousands of dollars into hiring a private security firm for his personal protection.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News show that in June and July alone, Mamdani’s team made three separate payments to Advanced Security & Investigations, each ranging from roughly $8,000 to $13,000.

In total, the campaign shelled out $33,495 over the two-month period.

The firm openly promotes itself as a “proud employer” of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers, despite Mamdani’s long-term support for defunding the police.

Back in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots across the country, Mamdani described NYPD as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.”

”NO to fake cuts – defund the police,” he wrotea the time.

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Brother of Murdered Inmate Alleges FBI Role in OKC Bombing, Waco, and Decades of Domestic Spying, “Justice Will Come From Exposing PATCON”

A newly released book and an upcoming documentary are reviving attention on one of the FBI’s most secretive and controversial domestic spy programs known as “PATCON,” which was unmasked after a 30-year FOIA fight by Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue to prove his brother was murdered while in custody by federal agents in 1995.

Trentadue has uncovered, and is litigating to uncover, a total 2 million pages of documents so far. Two of his seven federal FOIA suits are still ongoing.

Trentadue is still litigating the release of government records from 1995, where his current case involves a request made in 2015 that the FBI sat on for 8 years and refused to respond to, involving records related to federal sting operations involving Timothy McVeigh from before the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Yet his revealations to date has shown not just government lies about the Oklahoma City bombing, but also a domestic spying and criminal operations that extends into the nation’s newsrooms, courtrooms, centers of power, and more.

Despite new attention on the case and a wave of public interest in PATCON caused by the release of Margaret Roberts’ book “Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing” two weeks ago, Trentadue says he does not expect any federal agent or informant to face prosecution for his brother’s killing or for related crimes.

He’s hopeful, rather, that the documented evidence he has uncovered about FBI spying on the political right can be stopped, and that will be the most justice his family will ever find.

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Palestinian prisoners ‘electrocuted, starved, and beaten’ in Israeli jails: Detainees commission

A Palestinian rights group on Friday accused Israeli prison authorities of systematically torturing detainees with electric shocks and other forms of abuse, warning of a growing pattern of physical and psychological cruelty, Anadolu reports.

The Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said conditions in northern Israel’s Gilboa Prison have deteriorated significantly, with special units storming prisoner sections under the pretext of inspections.

During these raids, detainees are handcuffed, forcibly removed from their cells, and reportedly subjected to intense beatings and electric shocks, the commission said, citing testimony from a lawyer who recently visited the prison.

Prisoners are allegedly dragged across the wet floors of shower areas, where their soaked clothes and bodies are then targeted with stun guns to amplify the pain.

“The shocks are not only painful but calculated to break the prisoners,” the commission said. “Some have lost consciousness. Others bled from head wounds after being struck with the metal parts of the stun devices.”

The report also described scenes of humiliation, with Israeli guards allegedly laughing as bloodied detainees lay on the ground.

In addition to physical torture, the commission reported severe food deprivation, noting that prisoners are receiving minimal portions, leading to rapid weight loss.

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As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act

Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.

It’s not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines.

That has meant pressuring the nation’s biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.

Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.”

Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That’s pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use.

“A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.”

A fix, Peskoe said, is a “can of worms” that pits ratepayer classes against one another.

Some officials downplay the role of data centers in pushing up electric bills.

Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia’s Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather.

The data centers needed to accommodate the artificial intelligence boom are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said, and the Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share.

But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.

Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren’t nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant.

In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes – residential, commercial and industrial – are likely paying for data center power needs.

Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% – or $9.3 billion – of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers “paying billions more than is necessary.”

PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power.

In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies.

At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs.

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Federal court dismisses case against LA school Covid shot mandate

A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Covid-19 vaccine mandate for employees.

The case was brought in 2021 by the Health Freedom Defense Fund and   California Educators for Medical Freedom on behalf of school employees. More than 1,000 employees lost their jobs after refusing Covid shots. Plaintiffs argued the mandate violated their right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, especially since the shots did not prevent transmission.

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in an 11-judge “en banc” decision, ruled that LAUSD had the authority to require Covid vaccination in 2021. At the time, public health authorities, including the CDC, were advising that the shots would protect public health.

Several judges dissented, warning the decision comes “perilously close” to allowing the government to mandate medical treatments “so long as it asserts — even if incorrectly — that it would promote public health and safety.”

The majority opinion relied on the 1905 Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate. The dissenting judges said Jacobson applies only to vaccines that stop disease transmission, which plaintiffs argued Covid shots do not do.

LAUSD ended its employee vaccine mandate in September 2023. However, plaintiffs say they still suffer harm, including lost wages and career damage, and warn the policy could return. They are considering an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

“This ruling should terrify every American because the court is essentially saying it doesn’t matter whether or not health authorities lie, it doesn’t matter whether or not vaccines actually have a public health impact. All that matters is that someone is afraid and tells you that this is the right way to address the problem, and then you have to comply.”
— Leslie Manookian, Health Freedom Defense Fund

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