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.

Twitter Algorithm Reveals Tool For Government Intervention

A researcher claims to have found a tool allowing for government intervention in Twitter’s algorithm, upon Elon Musk’s decision to allow the algorithm to become open sourced to the public.

Breitbart reports that Musk honored his promise on Friday by releasing a portion of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm on the website GitHub, where computer programmers often go to share and collaborate on work dealing with open-source code.

Web developer Steven Tey then claimed to have discovered a particular mechanism within the code that allows the U.S. government to make changes to the website’s algorithm.

“When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm. In fact, @TwitterEng (Twitter Engineering) even has a class for it – ‘GovernmentRequested,” Tey tweeted, including a link to the code on GitHub.

Upon purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk vowed to increase transparency and loosen restrictions on certain speech and accounts that had been imposed by previous leadership. One of his goals was to make the algorithm open source for public viewing; he later said that “our ‘algorithm’ is overly complex & not fully understood internally,” and that “people will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!”

In addition, Tey discovered that the algorithm takes such factors into account as following-to-follower ratio when determining which users to promote; users with a low number of followers but a high amount of followed accounts would be negatively affected.

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Thousands of Hours of Jan. 6 Video Hidden, Withheld from Defendants, Court Filing Says

The U.S. Department of Justice has withheld thousands of hours of video recorded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from January 6 criminal defendants, and U.S. Capitol Police might have held back more than 1,300 hours of security video from a congressional oversight committee, a new federal court filing alleges.

Defendant William Pope contends in an update to a previous court filing that he and others charged with crimes at the Capitol that day need access to what should be more than 152,000 hours of video. That is if Capitol Police preserved it all.

“Americans have historically been skeptical of opaque government processes, and that skepticism has never been more intense than it is now regarding January 6,” Pope wrote in a 17-page court filing before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras.

“Concealment of the Capitol CCTV is fueling public speculation that there is more to January 6 than is being reported.”

Pope, who is representing himself, is seeking full access to the U.S. Department of Justice evidence database so he can use it in his defense.

Pope dissected a declaration from Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase introduced by federal prosecutors in his case. He also compared it to an earlier DiBiase declaration. In his new filing, Pope calls these documents the “dueling dubious DiBiase declarations.”

“Despite hundreds of January 6 CCTV clips now being public, Mr. DiBiase still believes other footage from those same cameras must be hidden from the American people,” Pope wrote.

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Dem-Linked Dark Money Group Is Masquerading As A Newspaper To Influence Pivotal Court Race

A Democrat-linked dark money group has used a website resembling a Wisconsin news outlet to attack the conservative candidate in the state’s current high-stakes Supreme Court election.

American Independent Media (AIM), a Washington, D.C.-registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit with ties to Democratic political operative David Brock, bought at least $90,000 in Facebook advertisements this month promoting two articles critical of former State Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly on The Wisconsin Independent, a media website labelled as an AIM “project.” Early voting is already underway in Kelly’s officially non-partisan April 4 Wisconsin State Supreme Court election contest against liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz, which will determine whether Democrats take majority control of the court for the first time in 15 years, according to NBC News.

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Drinking Tap Water Containing Lithium While Pregnant Could Raise Autism Risk For Children

Pregnant women who drink tap water containing high levels of lithium are more likely to have children with autism, a new study warns. Researchers analyzed data from Denmark and found that mothers-to-be drinking water with the highest lithium levels were almost 50 percent more likely to have autistic children.

The team from UCLA found that the higher the lithium levels in the water supply, the more likely women were to give birth to babies with autism. Study authors warn that lithium levels in water could become more widespread in the near future due to lithium battery use and disposal in landfills — which could lead to an increase in developmental disabilities such as autism.

Researchers say this is one of the first ever studies to identify naturally-occurring lithium in water as a potential risk factor for autism. The team studied data collected from Denmark over 16 years, between 1997 and 2013. They chose to use the Danish data due to the country having the lowest consumption of bottled water in Europe, meaning most of the population drinks tap water.

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Senate Leaves AUMF for Secret Wars in Force

On March 29, the Senate voted to repeal two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, (AUMF’s), one passed in 1991 and another in 2002. The repeal now goes to the House. But those Authorizations are irrelevant to the present; they apply only to the Iraq war. But a third AUMF, passed in 2001, was left untouched. And that AUMF is the only one that has a bearing on the present moment, because it provides legal cover for the many US military operations, open and secret, around the world.

The 1991 and 2002 AUMF’s gave Congressional approval for two wars on Iraq, known, respectively, as Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the hundreds of thousands left dead and the millions displaced as a result of the US wars on Iraq, the Senate repeal should be filed under “too little, too late. But good PR.”

The 2001 AUMF authorizing secret wars left untouched and still in force

The AUMF of 2001, the one untouched by the Senate, is an entirely different matter. Its content and use are explained in a nutshell here:

“The authorization granted the President the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups…. Since 2001, U.S. Presidents have interpreted their authority under the AUMF to extend beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to apply to numerous other groups as well as other geographic locales. ….Today, the full list of actors the US military is fighting or believes itself authorized to fight under the 2001 AUMF is classified and therefore a secret unknown to the American public.

“The AUMF has also been cited by a wide variety of US officials as justification for continuing US military actions all over the world. (Emphasis, jw)…. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, published May 11, 2016, at that time the 2001 AUMF had been cited 37 times in connection with actions in 14 countries and on the high seas. The report stated that ‘Of the 37 occurrences, 18 were made during the Bush Administration, and 19 have been made during the Obama Administration.’ The countries that were mentioned in the report included Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.”

What does this mean for the present? Here is what Just Security tells us:

“As General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently (June, 2021) testified before the House Armed Services Committee (here at 3:10:45), no current US military operations depend on the 2002 AUMF and thus its repeal would not affect the United States ongoing wars. Repeal of the 2002 AUMF costs the Biden administration little or nothing.

“Where the rubber meets the road on AUMF reform is the 2001 AUMF, the principal statutory authority for US military operations in the war on terror. As General Milley explained, the ‘2001 AUMF is the one we need to hang on to…it is the critical one for us to continue operations.’” (Emphasis, jw)

But as noted above, those “operations” which take place “all over the world” are a secret, unknown to the American people and the world.

The New York Times was optimistic in its reporting of the Senate action, noting that the repeal might be a stepping stone to dealing with the 2001 AUMF. However, in this case the word the Times used was not “repeal” but “replace.” (Obama had once spoken of the need to “refine” it.) General Milley must have heaved a sigh of relief as he read those carefully chosen words. He will be able to “continue operations” well into the future.

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Health Secretary Levine blocked release of federal report confirming fluoride in US tap water lowers children’s IQ

To conceal harms of an apparent “well poisoning” effort, US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel “Dick” Levine tried to prevent Americans from seeing a government report demonstrating brain-damaging, intelligence-lowering effects of fluoride — forced into public water supplies for decades without informed consent — until a court ordered the report’s release.

According to Fluoride Action Network (FAN), a plaintiff in the case:

After a 6-year long systematic review of fluoride’s impact on the developing brain, a court order has led to the National Toxicology Program (NTP) making public their finalized report that was blocked by US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership and concealed from the public for the past 10 months.

The NTP reported 52 of 55 studies found decreases in child IQ associated with increase in fluoride, a remarkable 95% consistency. 

Strong evidence fluoride harms the brain

From the report’s abstract:

In adults, only two high-quality cross-sectional studies examining cognitive effects were available.

The literature in children was more extensive and was separated into studies assessing intelligence quotient (IQ) and studies assessing other cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Eight of nine high-quality studies examining other cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes reported associations with fluoride exposure.

Seventy-two studies assessed the association between fluoride exposure and IQ in children.

Nineteen of those studies were considered to be high quality; of these, 18 reported an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children.

The 18 studies, which include 3 prospective cohort studies and 15 cross-sectional studies, were conducted in 5 different countries.

Forty-six of the 53 low-quality studies in children also found evidence of an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children.

Yet Levine didn’t want you to see the report.

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MSNBC Talking Head Says “Guns Are Our New Moloch”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid ran a segment last week in the wake of the Nashville Christian School shooting by a transgender individual, during which a transgender activist and a leftist preacher blamed “White Christian nationalism” for the shooting, claimed that “guns are our new Moloch,” and that Americans having reservations or questions about transgenderism is “anti-Christ.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Reid’s guests were transgender activist Charlotte Clymer and Jim Wallis, a former ‘spiritual advisor’ to Barack Obama, and head of the Center for Faith and Justice at Georgetown.

Clymer claimed that “children are only unsafe at drag shows when a shooter shows up to kill them,” and then accused conservatives of “cynically weaponiz[ing] this and exploit[ing] these children’s deaths.”

Wallis proclaimed that “White Christian nationalism, which is behind all this, is literally a biblical heresy.” and then compared gun owners to the ancient God Moloch, the same one that is worshipped in the form of a creepy giant owl by the Bohemian Grove elites.

“There was an ancient God called Moloch. Leviticus talks about Moloch, who was a God that children were sacrificed to in flames. And the Bible is very tough on Moloch. Guns are our new Moloch. Guns are the Moloch. We’re sacrificing our children to Moloch, when we could do easy common sense things about guns,” Wallis declared.

He continued, “Politicians could do something, if they wanted to. What’s behind that is, they are worshiping a false God, and they are literally sacrificing all our children.”

Insane.

“This is anti-Gospel, anti-Christ,” Wallis asserted, urging “We have got to confront it theologically, and not just politically.”

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WSJ Reporter Arrested in Russia Sought Classified Information From Government Official

The Wall Street Journal reporter who was recently arrested in Russia for espionage sought classified information from a Russian government official in the period of time leading up to his arrest.

American-born Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union due to rumors that Jewish citizens would be exiled to Siberia, formerly worked for The New York Times and The Moscow Times. He was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on March 29th, prompting a massive outcry from American corporate media publications, which have accused Russia of waging war on the free press.

Despite the narrative being presented to the American People and the wider NATO world, Gershkovich wasn’t arrested for merely reporting the news, but for attempting to gain classified information regarding “military enterprises” from a Russian government official – something that Russia claims he was doing on behalf of the US government.

According to a Russian legislator who Gerschkovich was trying to extract information from under the guise of conducting an interview, the Wall Street Journal reporter was looking for details on the “military-industrial complex of Yekaterinburg,” and was even trying to gain information on the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company that’s conducting military operations in Ukraine, perhaps most notably in the besieged Donbass city of Bakhmut.

“What the employee of the American publication The Wall Street Journal was doing in Yekaterinburg had nothing to do with journalism,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote in a statement defending the arrest that was published on her Telegram channel.

“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the status of a ‘foreign correspondent’, a journalist visa, and accreditation have been used by foreign nationals in our country to cover up activities that are not journalism. This is not the first famous Western individual who has been caught red-handed,” Zakharova explained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) echoed Zakharova’s claims in a public statement of its own, reporting that an investigation had “established that Gershkovich, acting as an agent for the American side, collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

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New Jersey factory imports cocaine plant that flavors Coca-Cola thanks to DEA arrangement

Guess you really can’t beat the real thing.

Coca-Cola gets its iconic taste thanks in part to a chemical processing factory in a sleepy New Jersey neighborhood that has the country’s only license to import the plant used to make cocaine.

The Maywood-based facility, now managed by the Stepan Company, has been processing coca leaves for the soft-drink giant for more than a century and had its license to import them renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency earlier this year.

The coca leaves are used to create a “decocainized” ingredient for the soda and the leftover byproduct is sold to the opioid manufacturing company Mallinckrodt, which uses the powder to make a numbing agent for dentists, DailyMail reported.

It is unclear how much coca leaves the Stepan Company imports annually, although the New York Times reported in 1988 that it brought in between 56 and 588 metric tons of coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia each year, citing DEA figures.

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