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.

G7 Commits To “Indefinite” Military & Financial Support To Ukraine

Just as the G7 was underway for its first day of meetings on Sunday in the five-star hotel Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, Russia’s military pounded Kiev with a series of missile attacks, which President Joe Biden – who is attending in person – condemned as “more of their barbarism.”

Biden was asked by reporters whether he views the relatively rare Russian strikes on Ukraine’s capital as deliberately timed due to the summit, which he didn’t answer. Ukrainian officials say one person died and six were injured as a result of the attack.

“We have to stay together, because Putin has been counting on, from the beginning, that somehow NATO and the G-7 would splinter, but we haven’t and we’re not going to,” Biden said in remarks during a pre-summit meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

As The Guardian previews of what’s expected to be tackled between now and Tuesday, “A price cap on Russian oil, deferral of climate change commitments, a potential famine in Africa and the further supply of weapons to Ukraine are to crowd into a meeting of G7 world leaders over the next three days held against the backdrop of the biggest geopolitical crisis since 1945.” Further, CNN’s audience has been told “Putin will be watching if they fail.”

Going into the summit, the UK’s Boris Johnson urged a united front on Ukraine amid what he called a growing war “fatigue” among the Western populace. The G7 countries which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States have Ukraine and global economic fallout from the war as top of the agenda.

“Now is not the time to give up on Ukraine, they need the support and resolve of the G7 more than ever,” Johnson stated on Twitter. “The UK will continue to back Ukraine every step of the way because we know that their security is our security, and their freedom is our freedom.”

And Biden stated: “Together, the G7 will announce that we will ban the import of Russian gold, a major export that rakes in tens of billions of dollars for Russia,” he announced on Twitter.

But it was EU chief Ursula von der Leyen who pledged indefinite G7 and European support to Ukraine:

“We will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes. The negative global impact of Russia’s war will be front and center of our exchanges at the G7.”

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MIT Engineers Create ‘Robotic Lightning Bug’ That Weighs Little More than a Paperclip

In a new study published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters a team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) describes how it created a 650 mg aerial robot powered by four electroluminescent actuators (tiny “soft” motors), each able to generate distinct colors and patterns. This tiny flying bug-bot, the researchers say, “further shows the potential of achieving coordinated swarm flights without using well-calibrated indoor tracking systems.”

In the video immediately above the engineers outline how their “insect-scale” flying lightning bug robot works, noting it was inspired by the ever-whimsical firefly and its ability to use bioluminescent chemical reactions to create light.

“If you think of large-scale robots, they can communicate using a lot of different tools—Bluetooth, wireless, all those sorts of things. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think about new modes of communication. This is a major step toward flying these robots in outdoor environments where we don’t have a well-tuned, state-of-the-art motion tracking system,” Kevin Chen says in an MIT press release. Chen is the D. Reid Weedon Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and the senior author of the paper.

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Japanese UFO researchers report hundreds of encounters

The privately-owned International UFO Institute, which was established in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima in the summer of 2021, shared the results of its first year of operations on Saturday.

The institute is headed by Takeharu Mikami, the editor-in-chief of Mu magazine (which covers supernatural phenomena and occult mysteries), and operates in the city’s Iinomachi district.

The area has long been famous for alleged UFO encounters around the Senganmori mountain.

Mikami told journalists that his researchers have so far registered 452 UFO-like sightings over the past year – 125 of which are backed by photos, and 24 others by videos.

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Western Officials Admit Ukraine Is Crawling With CIA Personnel

In an article titled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say,” anonymous western officials inform us of the following through their stenographers at The New York Times:

As Russian troops press ahead with a grinding campaign to seize eastern Ukraine, the nation’s ability to resist the onslaught depends more than ever on help from the United States and its allies — including a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training, according to U.S. and European officials.

Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the massive amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials.

At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.

The revelation that the CIA and US special forces are conducting military operations in Ukraine does indeed make a lie of the Biden administration’s insistence at the start of the war that there would be no American boots on the ground in Ukraine, and the admission that NATO powers are so involved in operations against a nuclear superpower means we are closer to seeing a nuclear exchange than anyone should be comfortable with.

This news should surprise no one who knows anything about the usual behavior of the US intelligence cartel, but interestingly it contradicts something we were told by the same New York Times not three weeks ago.

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Testimony from Lois Lerner in IRS targeting scandal to be released

Judicial Watch announced today that a federal court ordered the release of testimony of Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Holly Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements. 

Both IRS officials played key roles in the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and individuals opposed to Obama policies in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.

The ruling in the U.S. District Court Southern District of Ohio Western Division unsealing the case records comes in the lawsuit (NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341)).

Lerner’s and Paz’s depositions were sealed by Judge Barrett in April 2017, after Lerner’s and Paz’s lawyers claimed the two officials were receiving threats. The court finally ordered the unsealing of the depositions four years after plaintiffs requested the depositions be unsealed and only after plaintiffs filed for a writ of mandamus to force action in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

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Where Will the Nuclear Waste Go?

“Where will the state’s nuclear waste go?” was the headline of a story bannered last month across the front page of Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant.

What, indeed, is to be done about the nuclear waste that has been produced at the two Millstone nuclear power plants which have been operating in Connecticut? (They are now the only nuclear power plants running in New England.)

And what is to be done about the nuclear waste at other nuclear power plants?

Decades ago, one scheme was to put it on rockets to be sent to the sun. But the very big problem, it was realized, is that one-in-100 rockets undergo major malfunctions on launch, mostly by blowing up.

As Forbes magazine has pointed out, because of the “possibility of launch failure” if “your payload is radioactive or hazardous and you have an explosion on launch…all of that waste will be uncontrollably distributed across Earth.”

So, scratch that idea.

Then there has been the plan to construct a “repository” for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was designated the nation’s “permanent nuclear repository” in 1987 and $15 billion was spent preparing it.

The very big problem concerning Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump: it’s in “an active earthquake zone, with 33 faults on site.”

So, that idea was scratched.

Now, Finland has built a nuclear waste site for its four nuclear power plants. “Finland wants to bury nuclear waste for 100,000 years,” was the title of an CNBC’s piece about it and how it uses “a labyrinth of underground tunnels.”

The very big problem: nuclear waste needs to be isolated from life for way more than 100,000 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2004 ordered the EPA to rewrite its Yucca Mountain regulations to acknowledge a million years of hazard, notes Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist for the organization Beyond Nuclear.

“And that’s actually a low-ball figure,” said Kamps in an interview.

Some nuclear waste stays radioactive for millions of years, Kamps points out: “Iodine-129 that is produced in reactors has a 15.7 million-year half-life.”

After a half-life, a radioactive material is half as radioactive as when it was produced. For determining a “hazardous lifetime,” a half-life is multiplied by 20.

Thus Iodine-129 remains radioactive for 314 million years.

“The design of the storage facility” for nuclear waste in Finland “has taken into account the potential impact of earthquakes and even future ice ages,” related CNBC. But not for anything close to millions of years.

So, what should be done about nuclear waste?

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Drag Queen Who Performed for Children Charged With 25 Counts of Child Pornography

A Pennsylvania drag queen was charged with 25 counts of child pornography, according to a criminal docket issued Thursday.

Brice Patric Ryschon Williams was charged with 25 counts of child pornography and 18 counts of criminal use of a communications facility. The bail is set at $100,000 and Williams is unable to post bail, according to the docket.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children submitted a tip to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General’s Child Predator Section in May 18, 2020, reporting that 76 files containing child pornography were uploaded to a Dropbox file. The Dropbox account was linked to a person named Anastasia Diamond, Williams’ stage name.

A search warrant for Williams’ home was obtained by special agent Travis Nye on June 22, 2022, and was carried out early Thursday morning.

During an interview with police that morning, “Brice denied having ever uploaded, downloaded, or sought child pornography,” according to a criminal complaint obtained Friday by the Daily Caller.

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G7 leaders unveil $600 billion infrastructure plan to tackle Chinese influence: President Biden commits $200 billion in funding for solar farms, vaccine plants and communications links around the world

The White House announced plans on Sunday to spend $200 billion on solar projects in Angola, an undersea telecommunications cable linking the Far East with France via Egypt, and nuclear power production in Romania as part of a huge G7 infrastructure plan designed to compete with China‘s massive Belt and Road initiative.

The proposals were unveiled on the first day of the G7 summit in Germany, where world leaders met to discuss the global economy and Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

In all, G7 nations will commit $600 billion to the effort over the next five years, President Joe Biden announced, calling the investment a humanitarian, economic and security concern.

Biden spoke with the rest of G7 leadership standing behind him, the Bavarian Alps visible in the distance. 

‘Developing countries often lack the central infrastructure to help navigate global shocks, like a pandemic, so they feel the impacts were acutely, and they have a harder time recovering,’ he said. ‘That’s not just humanitarian concern. It’s an economic and a security concern for all of us.’

The money will be spent in a variety of sectors, including health, climate, energy and gender equity.

‘These strategic investments are areas of critical to sustainable development, and our shared global stability, health and health security, digital connectivity, gender equality and equity, climate and energy security,’ Biden said.

He argued the investment would boost the U.S. economy and economies around the world.

‘I want to be clear this isn’t charity. It’s an investment that will deliver returns for everyone, including the American people and the people of all our nations. It will boost all of our economies. It’s a chance for us to share our positive vision for the future,’ he said. 

The White House said its $200 billion in grants and federal financing would help low income countries meet their economic and national security needs.

‘And this will only be the beginning: the United States and its G7 partners will also seek to mobilize hundreds of billions in additional capital from other like-minded partners, multilateral development banks, development finance institutions, sovereign wealth funds, and more,’ said the White House.

Biden named the idea ‘Build Back Better World’ – after his troubled domestic agenda – when he introduced it at last year’s G7 summit.

Now it is called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure.

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