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.

New Jersey cops wore disguises to vandalize two vehicles owned by a man who filed complaints against them days earlier, prosecutors say

Two vengeance-seeking New Jersey police officers angry vandalized a local resident’s vehicle out of spite when he filed complaints against them, according to investigators. 

Asbury Park Police officers Stephen Martinsen, 29, and Thomas Dowling, 26, have been charged with multiple felony counts of conspiracy, criminal mischief and weapons-related offenses for illegal use of a knife, authorities announced on Wednesday.  

They could face up to 20 years in New Jersey State Prison if convicted on all charges.

Dowling has since been fired. Martinsen has been suspended without pay.

‘If these allegations are proven true, this is kind of the textbook definition of a breach in the position of trust in the authority that are given the people in law enforcement,’ Monmouth County Prosecutor Chris Swendeman told app.com.

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Blanked-Out Spots On China’s Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang’s Camps

In the summer of 2018, as it became even harder for journalists to work effectively in Xinjiang, a far-western region of China, we started to look at how we could use satellite imagery to investigate the camps where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were being detained. At the time we began, it was believed that there were around 1,200 camps in existence, while only several dozen had been found. We wanted to try to find the rest.

Our breakthrough came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satellite imagery tiles loading in the vicinity of one of the known camps while using the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps. The satellite imagery was old, but otherwise fine when zoomed out — but at a certain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp location. They disappeared as you zoomed in further, while the satellite imagery was replaced by the standard gray reference tiles, which showed features such as building outlines and roads.

At that time, Baidu only had satellite imagery at medium resolution in most parts of Xinjiang, which would be replaced by their general reference map tiles when you zoomed in closer. That wasn’t what was happening here — these light gray tiles at the camp location were a different color than the reference map tiles and lacked any drawn information, such as roads. We also knew that this wasn’t a failure to load tiles, or information that was missing from the map. Usually when a map platform can’t display a tile, it serves a standard blank tile, which is watermarked. These blank tiles are also a darker color than the tiles we had noticed over the camps.

Once we found that we could replicate the blank tile phenomenon reliably, we started to look at other camps whose locations were already known to the public to see if we could observe the same thing happening there. Spoiler: We could. Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu, appearing only at this zoom level and disappearing as you zoomed in further. One of the six camps didn’t have the blank tiles — a person who had visited the site in 2019 said it had closed, which could well have explained it. However, we later found that the blank tiles weren’t used in city centers, only toward the edge of cities and in more rural areas. (Baidu did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Having established that we could probably find internment camps in this way, we examined Baidu’s satellite tiles for the whole of Xinjiang, including the blank masking tiles, which formed a separate layer on the map. We analyzed the masked locations by comparing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub, and Planet Labs.

In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads.

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The Pentagon is training an army of bomb-sniffing cyborg locusts.

Tired: a plague of locusts

Wired: a legion of cybernetically-enhanced locusts trained by the US military to sniff bombs

That’s the new goal, according to Stars & Stripes magazine:

Navy-funded researchers have discovered that a locust’s sensitive “horns” can distinguish between the scents of TNT and other explosives — a development that one day could herald the deployment of bomb-sniffing, electronically augmented bug swarms.

The research by a team from Washington University in St. Louis, published this month in the science journal “Biosensors and Biolectronics: X,” is the first proof of concept for a system that aims to tap into the antennae and brainpower of garden-variety bugs to create an advanced bomb-detection sensor.

The work is funded by two Office of Naval Research grants totaling more than $1.1 million, and biomedical engineering professor Barani Raman believes it has the potential to produce a biorobotic sniffer that would be leaps ahead of entirely man-made “electronic noses.”

In the Washington University study, which is available to read online, the locusts were able to distinguish between the smells of common explosive chemicals such as TNT, DNT, RDX, PETN and ammonium nitrate — all in less than a second. Which is, admittedly, pretty impressive.

Insects like locusts also offer benefits over, say, bomb-sniffing dogs, in that they already tend to swarm together, and don’t require a lot of food and care. There’s also less of an ethical concern — no one cares if you attach sensors and cameras to a bug, but even military dogs still inspire a certain protective instinct in their human companions that could discourage such technological enhancements (or the experimentation required to figure out how to use them best).

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UK Govt Scientist Admits Lockdown Was A “Monumental Mistake On A Global Scale”

Infectious diseases expert and University of Edinburgh professor Mark Woolhouse acknowledged that the decision to lockdown in March was a “crude measure” that was enacted because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do.”

“Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease,” said Woolhouse, who is now calling on the government to unlock society before more damage is done.

“I never want to see national lockdown again,” he added.

“It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally.”

The professor asserts that the impact of the response to coronavirus will be worse than the virus itself.

“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by COVID-19,” said Woolhouse.

Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer at King’s College London, previously warned that there will be more excess cancer deaths over the next 5 years than the number of people who die from coronavirus in the UK due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus lockdown, which is preventing cancer victims from getting treatment.

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History of tunnels shrouded in mystery

Nestled in the hills above Robert Gray Army Airfield at West Fort Hood, past ammunition bunkers and razor-wire fences liberally decorated with warning signs, lies a relic of the country’s past and a tool to shape the military’s future.

It’s called the Fort Hood Underground Training Facility – a pair of reinforced networked tunnels with 2-foot-thick concrete walls dug nearly 1,000 feet into the hillside.

Originally built between 1947 and 1948, it was part of a network of two other tunnel complexes constructed to house the atomic bomb. Today, it’s a unique Army asset, the only true underground training facility in the country.

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