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.

‘Completely inappropriate’: Top scientists denounce Big Pharma for implying annual Covid booster shots are crucial

More than a dozen influential infectious disease and vaccine experts say the first round of jabs may offer enough protection against Covid-19, refuting Big Pharma’s claims that regular shots will “likely” be needed.

In a report on Thursday, Reuters quotes top infectious disease and vaccine-development experts as saying that the first round of inoculation with vaccines against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants may be adequate to offer enduring protection.

The scientists also expressed concern that it’s the pharmaceutical executives rather than health specialists who are shaping public expectations around booster shots.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in April that people would “likely” need a third dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated, adding that yearly vaccinations would possibly be necessary. 

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Biden’s ICE nominee Gonzalez worked with BLM activist to push false narrative that a white man killed a black child

According to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, the Texas sheriff that has been nominated by the Biden administration to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allegedly pushed a false claim that a white man murdered a seven-year-old black girl from Houston.

Ed Gonzalez, the Harris County sheriff reportedly proceeded to push the claim even though he received a tip that the actual murders were black. Gonzalez also worked closely with Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist Shaun King to identify Jazmine Barnes’ killer. 

Gonzalez took it upon himself to amplify the family’s claim that the gunman was white even after receiving a tip that the killer was black. An attorney for the man King falsely identified as Barnes’ killer stated that King’s allegation might have contributed to his client’s suicide.

The Beacon also reported that King is a controversial figure who has already come under fire for making false allegations in racially charged incidents. 

This year, Gonzalez has proposed releasing 1,500 county jail inmates, hundreds of whom faced charges for violent crimes. That combined with his order to scale back cooperation with the federal government on deportations early in the Trump administration, will likely cause him to be more scrutinized by Republicans. 

In the incident where Gonzalez pushed the false claim and narrative that a white man murdered a young black girl in the back seat of her mother’s car on December 30, 2018, Gonzalez tweeted on the day of the shooting that the Barnes family described the gunman as a white male in his 40s.

On January 3, 2019, Gonzalez released a police sketch of a suspect matching that exact description. However, a timeline of the investigation shows that King received a tip that later that day that Barnes’ killers were black.

King allegedly said that he shared the tip “immediately” with Gonzalez and that neither of them could make sense of it. But, Gonzalez, who has been sheriff of Harris County since 2017, told a reporter that King shared the tip that eventually led to the arrest of the real killers, Eric Black Jr. and Larry Woodruffe, with him “midweek.”

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Body of KPMG executive, 55, is found in wooded area seven months after he mysteriously vanished following a workout at LA Fitness in Dallas and a stop to gas up his Porsche

The body of a 55-year-old KPMG executive has been found in woods in Texas, seven months after his disappearance. 

Alan White vanished on October 22 when he went to work out at LA Fitness in north Dallas. 

He was later seen on surveillance footage filling his Porsche Macan SUV with gas.   

Dallas Police found his car a week later but there was no sign of White. 

His body was found on Thursday less than a mile from where his car had been located in late October. 

Dallas police said that a survey crew working for Paul Quinn College found human remains in a wooded area to the northwest of the southeast Oak Cliff campus about 12:30pm on Thursday.   

The Dallas County Medical Examiner confirmed the identity on Friday. The cause of death is still undetermined, and it is unclear how long White’s remains had been there. 

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Hemp Batteries are Eight Times More Powerful than Lithium, Scientists Discover

Is there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine.

Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries.

Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material.

A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill.

They “cooked” the woody pulp and processed them into carbon nanosheets, which they used to build supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard.

Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make.

“People ask me: why hemp? I say, why not?” inventor David Mitlin tells the BBC.

“We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste.”

Mitlin, a professor of chemical engineering at Clarkson University in New York, first published a description of his team’s battery in the journal ACS Nano in 2014.

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