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.

Serious risk of ‘poisoning the jury’ in Charlie Kirk murder trial – former lawyer to RT

Inaccurate media reporting on the latest statements by the defense team in Charlie Kirk’s murder case shows that there is a real risk of “poisoning the jury” and affecting the trial, legal commentator and former lawyer David Freiheit has told RT.

Earlier this week, several outlets reported, citing the lawyers representing Tyler Robinson – the man accused of killing Kirk – that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) could not conclusively connect a bullet fragment recovered from Kirk’s body to a rifle found at the scene.

According to Freiheit, some of those reports, such as the one by the Daily Mail, were inaccurate. “The headline was overtly misleading,” he said, adding that the British media outlet said “it did not match, whereas in reality… the ATF or the reports [said] that they couldn’t match it based on the fragments, which is not uncommon in these types of incidents.” 

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Chinese satellite imagery of Middle East bases is helping Iran, US intelligence says

A Chinese company’s publication of AI-enhanced satellite images of US bases in the Middle East is helping Iranian forces identify targets, US intelligence believes.

The ABC has been briefed on the intelligence by a source inside US defence, who says the images are endangering lives.

Chinese geospatial artificial intelligence and software company MizarVision, which the Chinese government has a small ownership stake in, has been publishing detailed satellite images with tagging data of multiple US military sites in the lead-up to, and during, the Iran war. 

The imagery showcases an AI tool that identifies and tags military forces across vast areas, a capability that once required the resources of a national intelligence agency.

The Pentagon believes the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is using the AI-enhanced satellite imagery to help target sites, according to a source within the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the intelligence branch of the American military.

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A Progressive Plan for SCOTUS: Thwarting Trump and Packing the Court

Remember Demand Justice? Back in 2021, the progressive group pushed for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer – then age 82 – to resign so that Joe Biden could appoint his replacement rather than risk dying under a Republican president. Well, they’re back – and this time they have a plan to block President Donald Trump from appointing any more justices should vacancies arise. And they’re backed by yet another relic of the Democratic Party, former vice president and twice-failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris. And not to be left out in the cold, James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun himself, chimed in recently on the Supreme Court as well. And why not? They always come in threes, as the saying goes.

Harris, Trump, and a Plot to Control the Court

Far from giving up on politics, Kamala Harris is back on the campaign trail. This time, however, she’s rallying donors to back fundraising by Josh Orton, president of Demand Justice, to oppose “additional justices” that might be nominated by Trump this term before any vacancies appear.

“We must be clear eyed about what is at stake with the Supreme Court right now,” Harris wrote on X in a post highlighting an article from The New York Times on Demand Justice’s newest project. “We cannot allow Donald trump to hand pick one, if not two, additional justices. The nation’s highest court must be stop from becoming even more beholden to him.”

The NYT article in question reveals the “multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen.” Orton announced that “the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred.” They’re eyeing Justices Clarence Thomas (77) and Samuel Alito (76), the oldest two currently on the Court.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen this episode before, it’s because you basically have. It’s a reboot – if not a straight-up rerun – of what, for a while, appeared to be a favorite show among progressives. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a left-wing legend in the Court, passed away on September 19, 2020, at the age of 87. Her death gave President Trump his third vacancy, and he nominated Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed by the US Senate on October 26, 2020.

Come 2021, Democrats held technical majorities in both the House (222-215) and the Senate (a 50-50 split), but with Kamala Harris as tiebreaker after Inauguration Day). Biden and Harris held the White House. But there was a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to Donald Trump getting three appointments in his one term as president. And Stephen Breyer, generally considered a reliable left-wing vote, was 82 years old. If he lived as long as Ginsburg, he’d be a year into the next presidency when he passed.

The progressive group Demand Justice wasn’t willing to take that chance. They campaigned for Breyer to “do the right thing” and step down so that Biden could appoint a worthy successor. Justice Breyer resisted, for a time, but eventually he caved to the pressure, and Ketanji Brown Jackson took the bench in his place.

From a purely practical perspective, of course, this was the right decision. Thanks to the gift of hindsight, we know that Breyer – now age 87 and still going – would have left Trump yet another vacancy had he held his seat but passed at RBG’s age. And, of course, Trump’s second term isn’t over yet, and there’s no guarantee Breyer won’t pass before the next administration takes over. His replacement, however, is in her mid-fifties. There’s no reason not to believe she’ll be around – and on the Court – for the next 20 to 30 years, at least, meaning her position is most likely safe regardless of who wins in 2028.

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US Satellite Firm Blacks Out Iran War Images Per US Government Request

Planet Labs says it will “indefinitely withhold” satellite visuals of Iran and the wider Middle East war zone after a request from the U.S. government and the Trump administration. In an email to customers, the firm said it is shifting to a “managed distribution” model, releasing imagery only case-by-case for “urgent, mission-critical requirements,” or when release is deemed “in the public interest.” Planet also said it will withhold imagery dating back to March 9, and it expects the policy to remain in effect until the conflict ends.

On March 6, Planet Labs announced a mandatory 96-hour delay on new imagery collected over the Gulf states, arguing that near-real-time pictures could be exploited to “endanger allied, NATO, and civilian personnel.” That measure later expanded into a 14-day delay, described by Planet as an extension of the earlier hold. By March 30, Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations unit was reporting that independent verification had become harder as commercial providers restricted satellite imagery.

Satellite imagery matters because, unlike press briefings, it can corroborate damage, assess patterns of targeting, and check narratives that would otherwise be accepted on authority. Reporting by the Global Investigative Journalism Network describes how open-source teams used satellite imagery and videos to probe contested incidents during this war, quoting Bellingcat’s head of research warning that a “two-week delay” slows verification and reduces the certainty investigators can reach while events are still developing. It also quotes the Defense Secretary saying, “Open source is not the place to determine what did or did not happen.”

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Trans Activist, Former Green Party DEI Officer Convicted of Child Sex Crime

An English woke trans activist and sex worker who was a DEI officer for the Scottish Green Party and an organizer for Stirling Pride has been convicted of a child sex crime. Amelia Connolly, real name Thomas, also runs a Roblox group.

Read my report into this activist’s disturbing history on The Post Millennial.

After his conviction earlier this week, he took to social media to claim he didn’t do anything wrong. Sentencing is scheduled for May in Scotland.

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Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, not serious use — firm pushing AI hard to consumers and businesses tells users not to rely on it for important advice

Microsoft used to push its AI services towards its user base, especially with the launch of the Copilot+ PC, but it seems that even the company itself does not trust its creation. According to the Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use, which was updated in October last year, the AI large language model (LLM) is designed for entertainment use only, and users should not use it for important advice. While this may be a boilerplate disclaimer, it’s quite ironic given how hard the company wants people to use Copilot for business uses and has integrated it into Windows 11.

“Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended,” the document said. “Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” This isn’t limited to Copilot, too. Other AI LLMs have similar disclaimers. For example, xAI says “Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving and is probabilistic in nature; therefore, it may sometimes: a) result in Output that contains “hallucinations,” b) be offensive, c) not accurately reflect real people, places or facts, or d) be objectionable, inappropriate, or otherwise not suitable for your intended purpose.”

These may sound common sense for people familiar with how LLMs work, but, unfortunately, some people treat AI output as gospel, even those who are supposed to know better. We’ve seen this with Amazon’s services, after some AWS outages were reportedly caused by an AI coding bot after engineers let it solve an issue without oversight. The Amazon website itself has also been hit with a few “high blast radius” incidents that were linked to “Gen-AI assisted changes,” resulting in senior engineers being called up in a meeting to resolve the matter.

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Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Putting Data Centers in Space?

Data centers present sprawling engineering and political problems, with ravenous appetites for land and resources. Building them on Earth has proven problematic enough — so why is everyone suddenly talking about launching them into space?

Data centers are giant warehouses for computer chips that run continuously, with up to hundreds of thousands of processors packed closely together taking up a mammoth footprint: An Indiana data center complex run by Amazon, for example, takes up more real estate than seven football stadiums. To operate nonstop, they consume immense amounts of electricity, which in turn is converted to intense heat, requiring constant cooling with fans and pumped-in water.

Fueled by the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence, Big Tech is so desperate to power its data centers that Microsoft successfully convinced the Trump administration to restart operations at the benighted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The data center surge has spawned a backlash, as communities grow skeptical about their environmental toll and ultimate utility of the machine learning systems they serve.

It’s in this climate that technologists, investors, and the world’s richest humans are now talking about bypassing Earth and its logistical hurdles by putting data centers in space. And if you take at face value the words of tech barons whose wealth in no small part relies on overstating what their companies may someday achieve, they’re not just novel but inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Jeff Bezos’s space launch firm Blue Origin has been working on an orbital data center project for over a year. Elon Musk, not known for accurate predictions, has publicly committed SpaceX to putting AI data centers in orbit. “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Fox News.

The prospect of taking a trillion-dollar industry that is already experiencing a historic boom and literally shooting it toward the moon has understandably created a frenzy within a frenzy.

But large questions remain: Is it even possible? And if it is, why bother?

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Zorin OS Says No to Mandatory Age Verification in Linux

Zorin OS has entered the broader Linux debate on age verification laws. Co-founder Artyom Zorin stated on the Zorin Forum that the distribution will not introduce mandatory age or ID checks. He emphasized that privacy and security are core values for the project and confirmed the team is monitoring new OS-level laws that may impact Linux distributions.

Zorin’s response clarifies that the project will not independently add mandatory age or identity verification. However, it notes that not all current proposals are equally invasive.

Regarding California’s law, Zorin OS states that the requirement resembles age attestation rather than strict identity verification. Users would self-declare their age or date of birth during account creation, and apps would only receive a general age bracket, such as under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 or older.

Zorin also notes that, based on its interpretation of the law, users would not need to upload photo ID, submit face scans, or share raw birth-date data with apps or government entities.

However, the project does not endorse this approach. Zorin describes California’s model as less invasive but warns it could set a concerning precedent. The statement notes that some proposals in other jurisdictions are more intrusive and raise greater privacy concerns.

That is where Zorin draws its clearest line. The project states that laws requiring full age verification through personal documents or face scans would significantly invade user privacy. If such rules were enforced, Zorin might withdraw from affected jurisdictions rather than implement them.

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Native Americans invented dice and games of chance more than 12,000 years ago, archaeological study reveals

Indigenous people in the western United States invented dice more than 12,000 years ago, offering archaeologists the world’s oldest evidence of gambling and possibly the oldest use of probability, a new study reveals. But the purpose of these games of chance was very different from modern-day gambling, as the games helped people — mostly women, evidence hints — interact with new acquaintances and redistribute goods and wealth.

“There is a deep history of dice, games of chance and gambling in Native America,” Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. “This precedes any evidence we have of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years.”

In a study published Thursday (April 2) in the journal American Antiquity, Madden looked at more than 600 sets of Native American dice from 45 prehistoric archaeological sites in the western U.S. from 13,000 to 450 years ago. He discovered that dice were present at Indigenous sites on both sides of the Rocky Mountains throughout this lengthy period.

“This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness,” Madden said. “We’re seeing really complex practices and an intellectual accomplishment here.”

To identify the prehistoric dice, Madden first turned to a century-old book called “Games of the North American Indians” by Stewart Culin, an anthropologist who gathered historic accounts of Native American games. Culin described the dice as “binary lots” where one side of the flat or curved object was marked with a specific pattern or color and the other side was blank. Tossing a binary lot and allowing it to fall at random is similar to flipping a coin, and Indigenous people would often toss multiple lots to produce mathematically complicated outcomes.

Using Culin’s descriptions, Madden searched archaeological archives for artifacts that could be dice. He found 565 “diagnostic” examples of dice and 94 “probable” examples across 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and the Rockies. But there were no dice in the eastern half of the U.S. until after the arrival of Europeans.

“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden explained. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.” That is, dice games may have been invented as a “social technology of integration,” he said, or an icebreaker for strangers who wanted to exchange goods, information or mates.

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