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.

Even CNN Can’t Ignore the Problems With Canada’s ‘Buyback’

The Liberal government in Canada is continuing its nationwide gun “buyback” of banned firearms, though we haven’t heard many Liberal politicians touting its success as of late. 

Instead, most of the recent headlines about the compensated confiscation effort have centered around localities refusing to participate. Most recently, the police department in Kingston, Ontario declared it won’t be involved in the federal effort, citing “concerns related to the program’s design, implementation, and potential impacts on local policing resources and public safety priorities,” identified by both the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police. 

The “buyback” is off to such a rough start that even CNN is reporting on the criticism, though its report studiously avoids calling the effort a failure. 

In January, Canada began implementing one of those reforms: a long-awaited, hotly debated program to compensate the country’s gun owners for their now-banned firearms. Yet the buyback program has suffered yearslong delays and pushback from police, provincial officials and gun owners.

In September, audio emerged of Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree, the official responsible for implementing the legislation, questioning the ability of police departments to enforce the buyback. Anandasangaree later said the recording was made without his knowledge, and said the comments were “misguided.” 

Complicating the buyback is the fact that Canada has plenty of guns, more than the program alone can collect. The federal government estimates that it has the funds to buy 136,000 firearms, but Canada has roughly 2 million registered and 10 million unregistered guns, according to a 2017 release from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group based in Switzerland.

Now, not all of those firearms have been banned by the Canadian government, at least not yet. But it is fair to say that the Liberals have been targeting the country’s legal gun owners, while the vast majority the country’s gun-involved crime is committed by individuals who’ve acquired their guns through illicit means. I doubt many violent offenders, gang members, and drug dealers are going to participate in the compensated confiscation efforts.

A number of provinces have declined to participate as well, though the Liberal government is still talking tough about collecting firearms in those locations. 

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The Atlantic Busted Fabricating Dead Kid Measles Story

Last Thursday, The Atlantic published a heart-wrenching story about an 11-month-old child who died of measles. Written in the second person from the perspective of a mother whose two unvaccinated children fell ill with the disease, the story is rich with personal detail;

“You plant her on the couch with a blanket and put Bluey on the TV while she drifts in and out of sleep…” 

“While the kids are napping, you tap a list of your daughter’s symptoms into Google and find a slew of diseases that more or less match up…”

“Her cough wracks her whole body, rounding her delicate bird shoulders. She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air.” 

Turns out, NONE OF THAT HAPPENED. The Atlantic‘s Elizabeth Bruenig simply made it up, leading to mass confusion.

As Laura Hazard Owen of NiemanLab – who initially busted Bruenig – writes:

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.

Following the publication, two journalists reached out to Owen to let her know that they were similarly confused, as there “was not an editor’s note/disclaimer on the piece at all.” 

What’s more, The Atlantic’s own spokesperson told one of the journalists: “This is based on a mother’s real account,” – after which the outlet added a disclaimer. 

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Thomas Massie, Who Loves to Talk About His ‘Principles,’ Just Made Quite the Admission to Politico

Thomas Massie gave an interview to Politico yesterday, in which the publication said he goes “toe-to-toe” with high-ranking members of the Trump administration including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

There was one passage that stood out among many conservatives, one that dealt a major blow to the claims that Massie is operating on principles. Namely, Massie’s vote was contingent on whether or not Speaker Mike Johnson would publicly praise him for releasing the Epstein files.

“One day, they needed my vote, and I offered to give them my vote if he would issue a press release thanking me for my good work on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That’s all I required to get my vote. And I think he probably went and gave somebody else a bill to pass instead of doing the public statement,” Massie told Politico.

Wow.

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Check Out How Nashville Jacked Up Property Taxes for One Local Business

Democrats love taxes. That’s no secret. In Virginia, the Democrats who run the state are pushing a massive slate of new or increased taxes on everything from gym memberships to Uber Eats. In New York, Mamdani is extorting Albany to either let him raise taxes on the rich and corporations or he’ll go after New York City homeowners and jack up their property taxes, too.

And in Nashville, the Acme Farm Store — one of the city’s landmarks — is facing closure after the city jacked up its taxes by $500,000 a year.

The shockwaves from historic property tax hikes in Nashville are no longer abstract. They are now threatening to erase some of the city’s most beloved and authentic landmarks.

One of the men most responsible for preserving Nashville’s past says he may be forced to walk away from it — unless City Hall intervenes.

You may not know the name Tom Morales, but you almost certainly know what he saved.

Morales helped preserve the Loveless Cafe, the historic Woolworth building and the iconic Acme Feed and Seed on Lower Broadway. Now, he says Acme — one of the last true anchors of old Nashville — is on the brink of closing because of a staggering property tax increase.

The original Acme Feed and Seed operated downtown for 56 years before closing in 1999. When Morales saw the building sitting vacant for more than a decade, he decided to bring it back — not as a theme park version of Nashville, but as the real thing.

The property taxes were $129,000 a year. They’re now north of $600,000 a year. That’s more than the company’s rent and net profits combined.

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Maryland to ‘Reap the Consequences’ of Dem Governor Wes Moore’s Political Stunt

States don’t come much bluer than Maryland. My father-in-law, who lived much of his adult life in Maryland, was heavily involved in local politics there, as a conservative Democrat – there were some then, and in Maryland, even in the ’60s and ’70s, you registered Democrat, or you were shut out of the process. He has told me on numerous occasions that there wasn’t an elected official in Maryland who had two IQ points to rub together.

Case in point: Governor Wes Moore, who on Wednesday was eviscerated by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for his action prohibiting local law enforcement from working with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Here’s how the Press Secretary responded to a question on the topic:

First of all, it’s another despicable action by Governor Wes Moore. Why would you prevent your state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal law enforcement? If you just ask them, to your point, you ask sheriffs across the country if they want to have that level of cooperation and coordination with the federal government, of course, they do. It makes their jobs easier, it keeps them out of hostile and dangerous environments, it allows them to detain illegal alien criminals who have committed heinous crimes in our country with, with, the most safe circumstances possible. So the president, of course, continues to always stand on the side of law enforcement, and this is another, just horrible and frankly political action taken by Governor Wes Moore, and unfortunately, the people of his state are going to reap the consequences of it.

Of course, it’s a political action, one taken due to the governor suffering from a nasty case of Stage V Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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This Is How Bad Public Schools Are

School districts in affluent areas are hotbeds of left-wing activism, but in general, student performance is at least acceptable. Parents ensure that their own children do well enough, and often invest heavily in supplementing public education with specialized tutoring that at least guarantees that their kids do well on standardized tests. 

Kids get a much worse education than they should, and often more than parents assume, but there is a reason many parents are unaware of the parlous state of the public education system as a whole. If you can get your kid into a good school in a prosperous area, it really isn’t that bad, except for the ideological indoctrination. 

I don’t want to oversell even the better public schools. Kids are now entering college without ever having read a book, and often with math skills that require remedial education, even at elite colleges. But parents love the fact that their kids are getting good grades and doing well on standardized tests, and will earn a credential that will likely serve them well. 

Most affluent parents seem indifferent to the left-wing ideological training their kids are being subjected to, although I detect that a backlash is building and will become strong enough to force the lefties to become more subtle in affluent areas. Or not. 

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Global Warming Claim: CO2 CAN’T Hold Heat — and Real Scientists Have Known This for Ages

President Donald Trump recently reversed the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” which had identified CO2 as a public-health threat. Global-warming alarmists consider this a step backwards. But, says a man with actual hands-on experience working with so-called greenhouse gases, it’s a step toward sanity.

In fact, writes James T. Moodey on Sunday, “Real scientists have known the truth about global warming for decades.”

What’s more, “There’s an easy test to disprove global warming,” he states at American Thinker. “I did it myself.”

Moodey then elaborates, providing some background on climate-change alarmism’s origins:

The groupthink started in 1994 as a political movement to ban fossil fuels at our country’s first climate change bureaucracy, Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). A local professor wrote a rule for them that became known as “cap and trade.” It required our factories to reduce combustion of natural gas by an average 75 percent over five years. I owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test-and-repair facility. The air quality district chose my company to test the factories’ gas-physics instruments for accuracy once per year. We witnessed the closing of over 1,200 factories because of that rule.

We were skeptical of the rule’s assumptions, so we tested carbon dioxide. It cools twenty degrees in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming). It does not cause any warming.

Of course, this may or may not be definitive. After all, a given researcher could always be missing something. But the scientific establishment wasn’t interested in finding out.

That is, Moodey brought his findings to a 2014 Heartland Institute conference. He was rebuffed — even by those on “his side.” As he relates:

I offered to build the test bench for a respected professor, who said to me, “We believe that carbon dioxide causes warming; we just don’t know exactly how or how much.” I walked away thinking, “That is the most unscientific statement I have ever heard.”

Moodey says he then realized that tackling all of academia was fruitless. He was astounded at the “groupthink.”

What he encountered, too, was something late author Michael Crichton warned of: “consensus” (pseudo)science. As Crichton put it in a 2003 Caltech speech:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he … has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Crichton later added that talk of consensus is a red flag. It “is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough,” he explained. “Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”

Not anyone, that is, except global-warming alarmists.

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Texas Sues Drone Maker Anzu Over Alleged Ties to CCP

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing drone-maker Anzu Robotics, alleging that the U.S.-based company misled consumers and concealed its ties with the Chinese communist regime.

Paxton announced the lawsuit on Feb. 19, accusing the Texas-based startup of rebranding products sourced from Chinese drone giant Da Jiang Innovations, commonly known as DJI.

Founded in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in 2006, DJI has been flagged by U.S. regulators as a security risk because of its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The U.S. Commerce Department added DJI to its export control list in 2020 for aiding the CCP’s human rights abuses. The Treasury banned U.S.-based individuals from trading DJI shares the following year because of similar concerns. The Pentagon blacklisted DJI as a Chinese military company in 2022, noting that the Chinese regime requires all Chinese companies to allow it to use them as part of its military-civil fusion strategy.

In the lawsuit, Paxton accused Anzu of making false and misleading representations to Texans about its business relationship with DJI, data-sharing practices, and software development.

Anzu markets itself as an American-owned, made-in-Malaysia alternative, but much of its drone technology is licensed from DJI, which receives payments for every drone that Anzu orders, the complaint alleges.

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Spanish Court Orders NordVPN and Proton VPN to Block Piracy Streams

Spain’s soccer league has found a new target in its fight against pirate streams: the VPNs people use to protect their privacy online.

A court in Córdoba has ordered NordVPN and Proton VPN to block specific IP addresses broadcasting illegal LaLiga matches, requiring both companies to alter their “internal systems” to make those addresses “inaccessible from Spain.”

The ruling was issued without notifying either provider. Neither could challenge it before it took effect. The court says it cannot be appealed at all.

LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital brought the case to Commercial Court No. 1 of Córdoba, framing the measures as “precautionary” and taken in “defense of [LaLiga] clubs’ audiovisual rights.”

The court’s theory of liability is that VPNs are “contributing” to piracy simply by doing what VPNs do, letting users change their IP address and location. The order also notes that VPNs “acknowledge and advertise” their effectiveness at evading internet restrictions. Offering a privacy tool that works, in other words, is now evidence of wrongdoing.

Both companies found out about the ruling the same way everyone else did. NordVPN and Proton have said that they have received no notice of this.

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Trump Directs USDA to Make More Glyphosate, Signals Liability Protection for Pesticide Makers

President Donald Trump late Wednesday signed an executive order intended to boost domestic production of glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in June 2018, is facing tens of thousands of lawsuits from people alleging Roundup caused them to develop cancer.

Trump’s order also grants legal immunity to domestic manufacturers of products containing glyphosate when manufacturers are ordered, under the Defense Production Act of 1950, to produce the products.

The Defense Production Act is used in national emergencies to compel the production of materials or supplies necessary for national security.

Bayer is the only company producing glyphosate in the U.S. However, U.S. farmers also import the chemical from China, Reuters reported.

The executive order also applies to elemental phosphorus, used in weapons production, electronics and batteries. Elemental phosphorus is also used to make glyphosate.

Trump said elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides are scarce materials critical to national defense, and that inadequate domestic production poses an imminent threat to military readiness and food security.

“Glyphosate-based herbicides are a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy,” he said.

The order directs U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to create rules for increasing the supply of phosphorus and glyphosate.

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