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.

Eyes turn to Hillary Clinton, not Trump in the Russiagate scandal

So there you have it. 

Russiagate, the collective delusion that Donald Trump was secretly a Russian agent aided and abetted by the Kremlin, the topic of uncountable inches of Washington Post and New York Times copy and the entire primetime lineup of MSNBC, was a dirty trick by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not just part of it. All of it. One of the most diabolical, successful misinformation campaigns ever concocted. 

We already knew that the Steele dossier was garbage. Christopher Steele was paid indirectly by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt, which he did by turning to other Clinton operatives, laundering every outlandish rumor about Trump he could find into an “investigative” document. 

He shopped it to the FBI, which couldn’t verify his sources or any of his stories, but the agency dragged out the investigation to cast maximum suspicion on the new president. In the meantime, Steele found willing accomplices in the media to push his propaganda. The dupes at BuzzFeed even decided to print the whole pack of lies, with the flimsy rationale of “Well, why not?” 

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Quantum leap: Has next-gen computing moved from hype to hope?

Australian scientists believe they have taken a key step towards building a silicon quantum computer – a device that could take quantum computing from hype to mainstream.

Silicon quantum computers marry quantum technology with the same element – silicon – used in existing computer chips, so can hopefully be easily mass-produced. Australia leads the world in the technology, which competes with at least eight other types of quantum computer.

But despite a decade of hype and billions of dollars in investment, quantum computing in general remains a long way off fulfilling its full promise, experts admit. At this stage, there are few uses for such a computer and scientists remain a long way from building a device that could calculate serious equations.

The Australian-led study, published on the front cover of leading journal Nature in January, shows silicon quantum computers can now be operated with better than 99 per cent accuracy.

“This has long been understood as the next big step you needed to take,” says Professor Andrea Morello of the University of NSW, who led the work.

Being 99 per cent-plus accurate seems a small achievement for a computer, but it’s a big deal in quantum because it is considered the threshold at which you could scale quantum processors into an actual computer, he says.

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The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property

The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.

But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.

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Canadian Media STILL Pushing Crackpot Theory That Truckers Are Russian Agents

As the Canadian freedom convoy rolls on and continues to influence other protesters around the globe, Canadian media continues to push outright disinformation by suggesting that the Russian government is behind the movement.

When the convoy first came to prominence at the end of January, state broadcaster the Canadian Broadcasting Company began spreading completely unfounded claims that “Russian actors” were present among the Canadian truckers holding up major cities including Ottawa and Toronto, as well as border crossings.

The tenuous reasoning behind the theory is that Canada has expressed support for Ukraine during the country’s ongoing tensions with Russia.

Rather than admit that working class truckers are sick of enforced restrictions and vaccine mandates threatening their livelihoods, CBC floated the crackpot idea that Vladimir Putin is secretly behind the protests.

CBC continues to push the conspiracy theory, with correspondent Harry Forestell filing the following report Friday giving airtime to ‘New Brunswick cybersecurity expert’ David Shipley, who is adamant that the Russians are behind everything.

Shipley proclaimed “Who would have reason right now to cause as much chaos in Canada as possible? Well, at the top of that list is Russia.”

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Trudeau To Unleash Never-Before-Used ‘Emergency Powers Act’ To Counter Protests As US-Canada Bridge Reopens

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has learned that Prime Minister Trudeau “will inform the provinces he will invoke the Emergencies Act to give the government extra powers to deal with the protests across the country. But in a meeting with the Liberal caucus, the PM said there were no plans to deploy the military.” 

The move follows a meeting Sunday of the federal cabinet and its Incident Response Group (IRG).

Trudeau tweeted late Sunday that the IRG discussed “further actions the government can take to help end the blockades and occupations.”

Earlier that day, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair told CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live that the federal government has discussed invoking special emergency powers to deal with ongoing protests in Ottawa.

Blair described the attitude around invoking the Emergencies Act as “appropriate caution” rather than “reticence.”

As CBC concludes, the law gives the federal government carte blanche to cope with a crisis, including the ability to enact emergency powers that allow it to prohibit travel within a specified area or remove personal property, while imposing fines or jail time on people contravening new orders.

This is basically the ability to unleash ‘selective’ martial law on Canadians.

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Questions Being Raised About the Severe Head Trauma in Bob Saget’s Death

Bob Saget’s death in January was a very tragic thing, especially for someone who was still relatively young, was beloved by so many people, and who had contributed so much to the entertainment industry.

But now, there are folks raising questions about the serious head trauma he suffered.

His death was attributed to head trauma in an autopsy report released on Thursday, and it was assessed to be an accident, i.e. maybe he fell and then went to sleep, and then died.

Now, the description of the head trauma is much more extensive than initially suggested, according to the NY Times. He had multiple fractures in multiple areas on his head, both the front and the back.

Some neurosurgeons said that it would be unusual for a typical fall to cause Mr. Saget’s set of fractures — to the back, the right side, and the front of his skull. Those doctors said that the injuries appeared more reminiscent of ones suffered by people who fall from a considerable height or get thrown from their seat in a car crash.

The autopsy, though, found no injuries to other parts of Mr. Saget’s body, as would be expected in a lengthier fall. The medical examiner ruled that the death was accidental. The local sheriff’s office had previously said there were no signs of foul play.

“This is significant trauma,” said Dr. Gavin Britz, the chair in neurosurgery at Houston Methodist. “This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”

Dr. Britz noted that the autopsy described fractures to particularly thick parts of the skull, as well as to bones in the roof of the eye socket. “If you fracture your orbit,” he said, referring to those eye bones, “you have significant pain.”

While I don’t often have a lot of respect for Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he is a neurosurgeon and his description here of the injuries is accurate.

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