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.

Pfizer and Moderna could score $32 billion in Covid-19 vaccine sales — in 2021 alone

The imminent authorization of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in the United States is a momentous occasion for science, the economy and humanity. The milestone is also a major moneymaker for the companies that developed the vaccines.Wall Street analysts are projecting Pfizer and Moderna will generate $32 billion in Covid-19 vaccine revenue — next year alone.

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GOP candidate who pushed QAnon conspiracy theory gets arrested for child pornography

Ben Gibson, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in November, was arrested in Louisiana this Wednesday and booked on four counts of child pornography, WGNO reports.

Gibson, who was an active Airman at Barksdale Air Force Base, was a challenger in a four-way race for the U.S. House Dist. 4 Congressional seat and lost to Rep. Mike Johnson, who won re-election. Jared Kutz, 30, of Bossier City was also arrested as a result of the investigation and charged with two counts of pornography.

As Media Matters pointed out in January, Gibson has endorsed the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, using its hashtag multiple times on his Facebook campaign page and other social media accounts. The QAnon cult believes that there’s an underground network of Satanic pedophiles who are being covertly pursued by President Trump

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Here Is What Each Of The Navy’s Ship-Launched Missiles Actually Costs

Many of America’s warships set sail absolutely packed with missiles. A single Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser has 122 Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS) cells, each of which can handle one of a wide array of individual missiles, or four Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSMs). Even America’s carriers are bristling with missile-based point defenses. While the capabilities the Navy’s array of ship-launched missiles provides are fairly well known, at least conceptually, the staggering cost of each of these weapons is not. Now, just as we did with air-launched weapons and decoy flares, we aim to change that. 

The War Zone has collected the latest unit costs of these weapons to give readers a sense of just how much it is spending to arm its fleet. It should be stressed that these are the prices for just the individual weapons and the figures do not factor in any future spending on support services, modifications, upgrades, or past spending on the weapons’ development. 

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What’s Worse Than Pumpkin Spice? Cops Pulling People Over To Give Them Gift Cards

The coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot about the Christmas season. Travel plans have been cancelled. Family gatherings have been reduced in size and scope. There won’t be nearly as many dinners at fancy restaurants.

But one terrible tradition persists. Police pulling people over as though they had committed some sort of traffic infraction, then giving them a gift instead.

This week WACH, a Fox affiliate in South Carolina, reports that deputies in Richland County are turning on the lights and sirens, pulling people over, and then giving them gift cards to Outback Steakhouse rather than citations or warnings. It is presented, as usual, as an uplifting story for the holiday season. A WACH reporter joined the cops and got happy interviews from people who thought they were getting tickets. The sheriff’s department then gets to give itself the gift of a pat on the back for handing out free bloomin’ onions to people instead of disrupting their lives and saddling them with fines.

This anxiety-inducing crap should not be rewarded with fawning press coverage. The police are abusing citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Cops cannot simply pull people over with no suspicion of infractions, even to give them gifts.

Reason has criticized this behavior repeatedly. As Jacob Sullum noted back in 2016, these “supposedly heartwarming interactions are still abuses of power. If police would not have stopped drivers for these minor violations unless they had gifts to hand out, they are deliberately inconveniencing people and causing them needless anxiety for the sake of a publicity stunt.”

WACH reports that the deputies pulled people over for speeding before giving them the gift cards, which if true might suggest that the sheriff’s department is trying to avoid Fourth Amendment concerns by selecting people they would already have been stopping. But WACH’s footage also shows deputies giving a gift card to a man on horseback walking along the side of a road, so I’m not so sure about that.

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