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.

As Americans Face Starvation, Gov’t Spends $55 Billion on Smart Toilets, Lizards on Treadmills, and More

Everybody celebrates the holiday season in their own way. Each year, Senator Rand Paul invokes the spirit of the fictional grievance-airing holiday “Festivus” from Seinfeld to release an annual taxpayer waste report—and boy, is this one a doozy.

The libertarian-leaning Kentucky lawmaker’s report for 2020 finds an astounding $54.7 billion wasted by the federal government this year. (That’s not even an exhaustive figure for the federal government, nor does it account for the vast levels of waste by state and local governments.)

To put the nearly $55 billion wasted in context, Paul’s office explains that this is equivalent to wasting the taxes of more than 5.4 million Americans. It’s enough money to build a two-lane road that wraps around the entire Earth—18 times over. It’s enough money to buy every American a 40-inch flat-screen TV.

Yes, seriously.

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Biden team’s multibillion-dollar school testing plan takes shape

President-elect Joe Biden is weighing a multibillion-dollarplan for fully reopening schools that would hinge on testing all students, teachers and staff for Covid-19 at least once a week, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

The proposal under consideration calls for the federal government to cover the cost of providing tests to K-12 schools throughout the country. These could then be administered regularly by staff at each school, providing results in minutes.

The developing plan closely tracks with recent recommendations from The Rockefeller Foundation to invest billions into the creation of a K-12 testing system that would reassure teachers and students it is safe to resume in-person schooling. Biden has vowed to reopen the majority of schools within his first 100 days in office, amid growing concerns about the educational and mental health toll that months of remote learning has taken on a generation of students.

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Firms start work on ‘freedom passports’: Documents would allow people who have tested negative for Covid-19 to enter pubs, schools and workplaces

Work is being carried out to develop coronavirus freedom ‘passports’ that will allow those who have tested negative to enter pubs, schools and workplaces.

Two firms have been awarded Government contracts for exploratory work on a new app that would allow people to prove they do not have Covid.

The Department of Health said no decisions had been made on introducing the passport.

The contracts envisage a system under which people are assigned a QR code on their smartphones linking to a digital passport that includes a photo of them.

After a Covid test, this would be updated at the test centre and when people want to enter a venue they could present their QR code as proof of their negative status.

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Another Flawed Data Model From Imperial College To Blame For Latest UK Lockdown

The source behind the claim that a new COVID-19 strain in the UK is 70% more transmissible, Dr. Erik Volz of Imperial College, admits that the model that produced that statistic is flawed and that it is “too early to tell” if the strain is more easily spread.

On Saturday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced extreme new measures just before the holidays due to the emergence of a new COVID-19 variant. Per Johnson, as well as the UK’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty who also spoke at Saturday’s press conference, the new strain – nicknamed VUI-202012/01 – is around 70% more transmissible, but no evidence shows it to be any more severe or deadly than previous strains.

According to the BBC, Johnson’s assertion that the new variant “may be up to 70% more transmissible,” was based on the information discussed the day prior by the UK government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, or NERVTAG. Yet, as the BBC notes, this figureapparently comes from a single source, a 10 minute presentation delivered by Dr. Erik Volz of Imperial College given last Friday, the same day as the NERVTAG meeting.

Volz – a close colleague of the discredited Neil Ferguson – delivered the presentation to COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), a research consortium largely funded by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust and, in particular, the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The Wellcome Sanger Institute recently came under fire for “misusing” the DNA of Africans to develop a “gene chip without proper legal agreements” and an upcoming Unlimited Hangout report will detail the ties of the Wellcome Trust to the UK eugenics movement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Notably, the Wellcome-funded scientist behind that vaccine candidate, Adrian Hill, was recently quoted by the Washington Post as saying that “We’re in the bizarre position of wanting COVID to stay, at least for a little while…But cases are declining.”The UK government, Google and other powerful stakeholders are positioned to profit from sales of that particular vaccine candidate.

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COVID Hypocrisy: Policymakers Breaking Their Own Rules

Rules for thee but not for me? The interactive map below shows the continuing hypocrisy of local, state, and federal officials who violate their own coronavirus mandates, policies, or other restrictions, with 43 reported instances to date, and counting. Some officials have violated their own rules more than once. See the full list at bottom.

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NASA scientists achieve long-distance ‘quantum teleportation’ over 27 miles for the first time – paving the way for unhackable networks that transfer data faster than the speed of light

Scientists have demonstrated long-distance ‘quantum teleportation’ – the instant transfer of units of quantum information known as qubits – for the first time. 

The qubits were transferred faster than the speed of light over a distance of 27 miles, laying the foundations for a quantum internet service, which could one day revolutionise computing.

Quantum communication systems are faster and more secure than regular networks because they use photons rather than computer code, which can be hacked.  

But their development relies on cutting-edge scientific theory which transforms our understanding of how computers work. 

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