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.

Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean? 

More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan… The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years…

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment…. [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters…

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste… [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don’t necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren’t high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. “None of this means the waste is harmless,” the article concludes — but it also doesn’t mean we’re about to be overrun by radioactive crabs.”

Keep reading

Drones Are Bringing The Surveillance State To Your Front Door

At the moment, the United States government has no official public count of how many drones law enforcement agencies own and fly in the U.S. There is no list from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), or any state agency accessible to the public. Various industry estimates put police drone programs in the thousands — one recently cited as high as about 6,000. Congress should not have to take its numbers from corporate executives on quarterly earnings calls about how many drones are already circling overhead and surveilling the American people. The Department of Transportation, FAA, DOJ, and the Office of Justice Programs should put the fleets on the books and brief the House and Senate.

Until recently, most drones sold to police departments were made in China, raising significant concerns about Chinese government access and influence — either directly from China or through American companies that marked them up and profited. Congress has spent years trying to stop the Chinese drone invasion of our police departments. Those efforts were necessary. They are not finished. Even if new sales slow, fleets of Chinese drones remain deployed across the nation. And there are still continued efforts to keep Chinese components, software, and supply chains in the fleet.

Not one piece of hardware or software from the People’s Republic of China belongs on a police or federal drone in the United States, or in any piece of related equipment for that matter.

Not the chip, camera, battery, flight controller, app, firmware, or cloud login.

Grant funding, FAA registration, and operational approval should not be granted to aircraft or ground systems that contain Chinese hardware or software. American first responders deserve American supply chains.

That is already the direction of federal law, and it ought to be enforced without loopholes. Section 848 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 barred the Department of Defense from operating or contracting for covered foreign unmanned aircraft systems and critical components. The American Security Drone Act of 2023 was enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. The order on funding Unmanned Aircraft Systems says no Office of Justice Programs funds may go to unmanned aircraft systems manufactured or assembled by a covered foreign entity, with only limited exceptions.

Members of Congress should not have to guess how many drones are flying overhead. Congress must investigate and coordinate with executive agencies to determine the facts: how many unmanned aircraft federal agencies and state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies already fly; fleet size by agency; their missions and payloads; and under what rules, if any, they operate. That is the level of transparency we need for government-used drones. Existing fleets should be registered within 30 days of operational deployment so we can put the brakes on unfettered overhead surveillance.

Federal tax dollars should go to real emergencies — search and rescue, wrecks, officer safety, and a barricaded suspect — not ever-present aerial patrol above American homes.

Those dollars already flow through the Office of Justice Programs, the Community Oriented Policing Services Office, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, among others. Unmanned aerial systems are an explicit priority for Fiscal Year 2026 Community Oriented Policing Services Community Policing Development. “Drone as first responder” is not a substitute for a warrant. Persistent neighborhood surveillance is a general warrant from the sky, and a microphone on a drone is an intercept. Listening should require the same legal process as a Title III wiretap under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510–2523, or the state equivalent — no fishing expeditions, audit logs, and short retention.

Weaponized drones bought with Department of Justice grant money are already banned. That ban should apply to all related funding streams unless Congress authorizes otherwise.

Keep reading

Burnham Announces ‘Ministry of Truth’ to ‘Defend Democracy’ From ‘Russia-Amplified Far-Right Narratives’

The belief that the United Kingdom is experiencing decline, the view that there are negative elements to modern life, and the feeling of unrest after terror attacks are among “far-right narratives” pushed by Russian intelligence that bear “no resemblance to reality,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared as he announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence.

The UK has more experience than most Western countries in being attacked with information warfare and will establish a new government body to disrupt “hostile state information attacks”, Andy Burnham said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, while tipping that this model could be exported to other countries to protect them from unwelcome information as well.

Though the wide-ranging speech touched on a series of issues, the lion’s share of the new British Prime Minister’s speaking time was spent explaining how narratives contrary to his view of modern Britain not only bear “no resemblance to reality”, but are engineered by foreign powers to undermine national security.

The country’s deeper experience in this sort of warfare goes back ten years, Burnham said — not naming the defeat of progressive sentiment in the Brexit referendum ten years ago in 2016, but tacitly implying this was the first battle in this shadow war against information — stating British elections had also been targeted by Russia.

Because there is “no national security” without a cohesive society to build it on, Burnham said the level of threat he intended to fight justified extraordinary reach for this new information control body, stating:

The Kremlin spends about £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information. We’re talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community, creating a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair… we are going to help our people to strengthen their resilience, because faced with their information warfare, security starts in every home.

The variety of opinions being forced on unsuspecting Britons by Russia was, the Prime Minister said, considerable, and conveniently aligns reasonably neatly with practically everything his Labour Party stands against.

This “industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK” by “Russian agencies” includes spreading disinformation to prey on ordinary people’s fears, he said, and amplifying “far-right narratives” by stoking “tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events”, terror attacks.

Keep reading

New Study Reveals Who’s Really Killing Trans People and Another Lib Narrative Gets Shattered

We were told that trans people face unimaginable rates of violence against them; some have even described it as genocidal. It’s fueled by transphobia, white supremacy, and everything that leftists hate. When there’s that much in a blender, things get messy, including rational thought, and facts get shredded. Reason has left this discussion, but a new study has torched the narrative of mass violence against this community, showing that trans people are murdered at lower rates than the overall population and that, when violence occurs, it’s usually a lover’s quarrel. Excuse me, “initiated partner violence” (via NY Post):

Transgender people are murdered at lower rates than the overall US population — and when they are, the killer’s primary motive is usually not bias, according to a pair of researchers. 

The findings, published by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute’s Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright earlier this year, seemingly debunk claims by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other nonprofit organizations that there is an “epidemic” of deadly violence against the trangender community driven by “transphobia” and even “white supremacy.”

“Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders,” Lundgren and Wright found.

The researchers investigated more than 300 murder cases dating back to 2015 where the victim was transgender.

“This finding is not the result of one bad year or a handful of outlier cases,” the researchers stated.

The report noted that in 2020 — the year HRC attributed the deaths of “our Black trans siblings” to “an epidemic of violence” fueled by “systems of white supremacy” — not a single white suspect was identified in the cases the Manhattan Institute researchers verified. 

Confirmed hate crimes were only found in 3.3% of cases the Manhattan Institute studied. 

“The leading identified circumstance of the murders was instead intimate partner violence,” the researchers wrote. “Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict.”

Keep reading

New Jersey Faces Lawsuit Over Knife, Baseball Bat Ban For Self-Defense

A pro-Second Amendment group led a lawsuit Monday seeking to have New Jersey’s laws barring the carrying of items like baseball bats and knives for self-defense thrown out.

The Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs and Knife Rights filed the lawsuit on behalf of four individual plaintiffs, arguing that by prohibiting the use of items other than firearms for self-defense, New Jersey was violating the Second Amendment rights of residents. The complaint said that the state has been in “panic mode” since the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller v. District of Columbia.

“New Jersey demands that its citizens be defenseless when they go about their day in public. Defenseless. Until forced to issue Permits to Carry a Handgun by the Bruen decision in 2022, New Jersey banned its citizens from carrying any weapon for self-defense,” the complaint filed Monday says. “Still today, New Jerseyans cannot carry any ordinary object for protection against violent crime, not a baseball bat, not a stick, not a knife, not a pair of scissors, not anything. If a person keeps an ordinary baseball bat in her car or if she keeps a small baton (sometimes called a kuboton) on her keychain she can find herself arrested and thrown in prison under New Jersey law.”

“The Second Amendment protects all common arms not just guns. There are many situations in which a person may prefer to defend against violent attack with something other than a firearm,” the legal filing continued. “New Jersey does not allow that. This is how a single mom using a carpet cutter to defend herself and her young daughter against a violent and potentially fatal beating found herself a convicted felon.”

In a 1990 decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court, the conviction of a single mother for carrying a carpet cutter and using it to protect herself when an ex-boyfriend was beating her was upheld.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on non-firearms being protected, issuing a unanimous ruling in Caetano v. Massachusetts that held that stun guns were protected by the Second Amendment. While the main opinion was unsigned (also known as a “per curiam” opinion), a concurrence from Associate Justice Samuel Alito went into more detail.

“A weapon is an effective means of self-defense only if one is prepared to use it, and it is presumptuous to tell Caetano she should have been ready to shoot the father of her two young children if she wanted to protect herself,” Alito wrote in a separate opinion. “Courts should not be in the business of demanding that citizens use more force for self-defense than they are comfortable wielding.”

“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was either unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to protect Jaime Caetano, so she was forced to protect herself,” Alito added. “To make matters worse, the Commonwealth chose to deploy its prosecutorial resources to prosecute and convict her of a criminal offense for arming herself with a nonlethal weapon that may well have saved her life.”

Second Amendment Foundation President Massad Ayoob, who has decades of experience as a law enforcement officer, firearms instructor and an expert witness in the use of force for self-defense, explained why many states tend to treat knives and other items more stringently in self-defense cases in an August interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Historically, the pistol was seen as the weapon that would be chosen by the lady or the gentleman and the knife and the club were seen as the weapons of the thug and there’s a little bit of that yet today,” Ayoob said.

Keep reading

New Report Confirms Jack Smith and Biden DOJ Coordinated to Spy on Their Political Opposition

A new report released by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan confirms Special Counsel Jack Smith coordinated with the Biden DOJ to spy on their political opposition.

Republicans released documents that revealed investigators improperly subpoenaed phone records that belonged to 44 GOP lawmakers during Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost investigation.

Jack Smith’s team also secured gag orders to prevent the GOP lawmakers from learning that Biden’s DOJ obtained their phone records.

House Republicans also released transcripts from five members of Jack Smith’s team.

Transcript from J.P. Cooney, a member of Jack Smith’s team, once again confirm coordination between the special counsel and the Biden White House.

“During your time at the Special Counsel’s Office, did you ever interact with the White House?” the GOP investigator asked JP Cooney.

“I did have some interactions with a staff member in the White House Counsel’s Office,” JP Cooney replied.

Keep reading

WI Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate Claims Beer Gardens Are Systemically Racist

Milwaukee County Executive and Wisconsin Democrat gubernatorial candidate David Crowley has attacked beer gardens in the past, claiming they are systemically racist.

In a post on X from December 2021, Crowley responded to a post from Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) about how Crowley had said, “it’s important to understand that the way we fund parks is just not sustainable.”

Crowley, who defeated socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democrat gubernatorial primary, has repeatedly increased taxes while serving as Milwaukee County Executive.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, while Crowley “takes credit for ‘the largest property tax cut’ in the county’s history,” that property tax cut “occurred after Act 12, a bipartisan state law, allowed local leaders to raise Milwaukee city and county sales taxes”:

The Democrat nominee in the Nov. 3 election for governor takes credit for “the largest property tax cut” in the county’s history.

That occurred after Act 12, a bipartisan state law, allowed local leaders to raise Milwaukee city and county sales taxes and provided local governments in Wisconsin more state aid.

The law was largely aimed at helping the Milwaukee governments avert financial crises.

Crowley signed the near-doubling of the county sales tax, to 0.9% from 0.5% after the Milwaukee County Board approved it.

“Past heavy reliance on revenues to keep the system going is not sustainable & doesn’t cover the need,” Crowley wrote in a post from 2021. “When a system’s operational budget is so heavily reliant on user revenues to survive — like Parks is — there is often a very real conflict between generating $$$ & racial equity.”

“Revenues often come from activities that those with discretionary funding can afford like golf, the marina, and beer gardens,” Crowley added. “These activities are traditionally and predominantly supported by white users. This racial inequity is born from a history of systemic racism & injustice.”

Crowley’s previous comments about beer gardens come as beer is considered to be a massive tradition in Wisconsin, with the state being reported to have 247 craft breweries as of 2025, according to the Brewers Association. The state was ranked 14th nationally.

According to Visit Milwaukee, the city is “known as the original Beer Capital of the World” and Milwaukee’s “legacy is rooted in hops, barrels and the ambition of 19th-century immigrants who built an industry and the city on beer.”

Crowley has also previously spoken at beer gardens and attended the opening of beer gardens.

Keep reading

Trump Adds $174 Million to Black Colleges, ‘Engines’

The Trump administration is directing more than $174 million in additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced on Tuesday the one-time investment at the HBCU Summit at the White House, which brought together administration leaders, university presidents, and others.

“For nearly 200 years, HBCUs have been engines of opportunity in communities, advancing critical innovations and uplifting local industries across the nation,” McMahon said.

“This new investment will help ensure these vital institutions have the resources they need to continue delivering world-class education and to prepare students for success in a rapidly evolving economy.”

The award follows a one-time investment last year, bringing the combined total to more than $612 million in new funding to the schools in fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said the institutions remain central to higher education in the United States.

“HBCUs have helped shape the story of American education, and they will undoubtedly shape the future,” Kent said.

“These institutions of higher education remain central to our nation’s higher education ecosystem, fueling workforce development, driving economic growth in their communities, and cultivating leaders across sectors including STEM, education, public service, and business,” Kent said.

The department did not release a national breakdown of individual awards.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., released figures for her state, which she said received $21,259,618, the largest share.

Alabama is home to more historically Black colleges and universities, and historically Black community colleges, than any other state.

Among the Alabama schools, Alabama State University received $2,873,624, Alabama A&M University $2,831,147, Lawson State Community College $2,120,333, Tuskegee University $1,767,981, and Talladega College $1,516,171, according to Britt’s office.

“Alabama is home to some of the finest HBCUs and HBCCs in the nation, and the standard of excellence they produce makes these investments well-deserved,” Britt said.

The administration will also make a one-time award of more than $61 million in additional funding to Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs).

Keep reading

We Are at the Mercy of the Fed, Whose Leaders Believe that Printing Money Solves Every Other Problem

I’m sure that most of the discussions in the closed-door meetings at the Fed’s recent Jackson Hole Symposium centered on the problems of printability. They certainly won’t be part of the paper presentations or press conferences.

The US government has been spending like a teenager with an unlimited credit card that they don’t have to pay off since going off the gold standard.

The Fed doesn’t even have a monetary policy in any sense. It’s been playing games for more than a quarter century, really ever since 1971, and even earlier going back to its very beginning of the Fed. These games center on the problems of printability. The Fed prints as it pleases and it wants to please its masters.

Its mandate is not CPI inflation rate target or the Unemployment Rate target of the “natural rate of unemployment”—that is a tall tale to gain public acceptance and gain credibility for itself. They are like two warning buoys in a harbor, but not their real goals.

Their real mandate is also two-fold. It’s to serve the interests of the state, especially to facilitate budget deficits and the national debt and to serve the interests of the big banks.

The only role the working-class plays is a byproduct of the real mandates: if some families temporarily benefit from Fed activities, so be it. It especially has a political role to fool the voters around election times. That is why politicians are now so “concerned” with beef prices, diesel fuel prices, and mortgage interest rates. Their real concern is to get reelected and to stay in power.

That is where “printability” comes into play. With a central bank, the Fed, all the problems of government and society can seemingly be addressed with the Fed printing more money. New spending programs, new wars, new subsidies, welfare benefits, etc. are all made possible with a few keyboard entries on a computer at the New York Fed.

The price inflation only comes later as the money makes its way through the hands of the banks, the government, and to businesses that end up driving up resource costs. Eventually, in the end, higher prices emerge and, even later, higher wages. After that, unemployment and bankruptcy result and the cycle begins anew. The citizenry is none the wiser as few people figure out the Fed’s game as it once again “comes to the rescue!” with lower interest rates.

The biggest problem with printability is how it affects political behavior and social ideology. Do you live under a budget constraint or not? Without a budget constraint, people and politicians assume that government can solve all our problems at no cost and politicians (who are very short-term oriented) spend without constraint. They vote for everything. They go along with stupid wars and policies. They pass budgets with huge deficits. They go unconcerned with the national debt. Americans and their government are now completely dependent on keeping the monetary spigot opening ever wider.

This cycle is of a historically long duration thanks to the appearance of the covid situation and the Fed’s and the government’s $10 trillion bailout. Then, when CPI inflation skyrocketed and they had to cut back a little, they started through the back door. releasing their hoard of $2.5 trillion in Repurchase Agreements through the banks and the stock market took off.

Keep reading

OOPS: Kamala Harris Says the Quiet Part Out Loud as She Whines About Republican Efforts to Ensure Fair Elections 

Kamala Harris has made a damning admission about how her party ‘wins’ elections that could create a few headaches for her party as the midterm elections approach.

As CBS News reported, Harris spoke during a Tuesday evening NAACP forum in Detroit, Michigan, after campaigning for Muslim Marxist Abdul El-Sayed earlier in the day.

The purpose of the forum was to rally Democrats behind El-Sayed and outline the stakes of the midterm elections.

At one point, Harris whined about how the GOP and the Trump Administration have, in some cases, removed all the tools they’ve relied on to ‘win’ elections over the past half-century.

These ‘tools’ purging the voter rolls, beating the Democrats at their own game when it comes to gerrymandering, and ensuring more reasonable polling locations.

In short, Kamala Harris is ADMITTING Democrats have depended on illegal voters, shady vote counting, and rigged district lines to maintain power.

Now, they’re having to fight on more even ground.

Keep reading