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.

Stanford University Accused of Racial Engineering, Reducing Number of White Students

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is the end product of the left’s obsession with equity.

The Stanford Review reports:

Stanford’s Racial Engineering

Stanford’s enrollment rate for white students in the Class of 2026 was 22%, a drop from 40% for the Class of 2016 just ten years ago. While Stanford claims that “the University does not use quotas of any kind in its admission process,” a further exploration of Stanford’s enrollment statistics by the Review reveals that the university has seemingly taken part in racial engineering over the past several years—practically exchanging white applicants for Asian applicants while holding other racial group enrollment rates constant.

Over an eleven-year period, the data demonstrates that Stanford has decreased enrollment of its white students by approximately 15% and increased the enrollment of its Asian students by about 10%. All other racial groups, however, have remained roughly the same.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke that racial quotas were unconstitutional. Stanford claims to comply with Bakke, but the data points to a different story. Black and Hispanic enrollment rates for the Class of 2026 vary only by 0.76% and 0.44% from their enrollment rates for the Class of 2015, respectively. Whites and Asians in the Class of 2026, however, vary by 12.35% and 8.37% from their enrollment rates over a decade ago in the Class of 2015.

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Silicon Valley Bank Collapse: Here’s Who Benefited From Their Executive, PAC Donations

Only 15 U.S. banks were deemed “too big to fail” and subjected to rigorous stress testing after the Great Recession.

Friday’s closure of the nation’s 16th largest bank demonstrates the Biden administration feels all banks are too big to fail.

Silicon Valley Bank last week announced it would issue billions in new stock to bolster its finances. That news prompted venture capital funds to tell their startups to yank their money from SVB. A classic bank run ensued, which regulators stopped by seizing control of the bank and placing it into receivership.

Fox Business further reported:

Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th-largest bank, failed Friday after depositors hurried to withdraw money amid anxiety over the bank’s health. It was the second-biggest bank failure in United States history after the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008.

The bank’s California executives and political action committee have propped up a handful of politicians in recent elections, which has primarily benefited Democrat lawmakers.

Greg Becker, the bank’s president and chief executive officer, cut two maximum checks totaling $5,800 to the campaigns of New York Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner during the 2022 midterm election cycle. The two Democrat senators are the only politicians Becker financially backed directly during the most recent cycle.

Becker also gave $2,500 to the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund in May last year. The New Democrat Coalition Action Fund sent $1 million in contributions to numerous Democrat politicians during the 2022 elections.

Becker’s most recent donations came on the heels of $5,600 he donated between President Biden’s 2020 campaign and victory fund.

Jeffrey Leerink, the chief executive officer of SVB Securities, donated $1,250 to Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss during the 2022 and 2020 elections.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley Bank’s chief credit officer, Marc Cadieux, poured $250 into Biden’s campaign during the 2020 elections.

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Pentagon asks for biggest budget EVER at $842 BILLION – and it could soon hit $1 TRILLION: US wants $11B for hypersonic weapons, $29.8B for missile defense systems, 72 jets and $1.5B to defend Guam from China

The Pentagon has asked Congress for a range of advanced missiles, modern jets, state-of-the-art defense systems and more money to guard against threats from China in its biggest peacetime budget in history.

The $842 billion request includes $11billion for hypersonic weapons, $37.7 billion to modernize the nuclear arsenal and a huge investment in research and development to take on threats from adversaries including China and Russia.

$6.2 billion has been requested for a Columbia ballistic missile submarine, $28.8 billion on missile defense systems, an investment in space warfare and cash to bolster defenses in Guam and Hawaii – as Beijing bulks up its military and threatens Taiwan.

There’s almost $38 billion to buy new nuclear submarines, field the new B-21 stealth bomber and manufacture new ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles 

The huge Department of Defense blueprint would put the military’s annual budget over the $1 trillion threshold in just five years, its chief financial officer said Monday.

It’s the largest request since the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the mid-2000s, when the weight of hundreds of thousands of troops deployed in those overseas conflicts ballooned overseas war spending.

There could be the largest pay raise for troops in more than 20 years, as the Pentagon faces problems with recruitment across all branches.  

The budget could surge again to meet the higher cost of weapons and parts, but also to answer the vulnerabilities that the Ukraine war has exposed in the U.S. defense industrial base, and the strategic threat the U.S. sees from China´s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal, its hypersonic capabilities and its gains in space.

Even if it only grows to account for inflation, ‘the budget will hit a trillion dollars,’ probably before the next five years, Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord told a press briefing.  

‘Maybe that´s going to be a psychological, big watershed moment for many of us, or some of us, but it is inevitable.’

While the number seems astronomically high, it is only about 3 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. For comparison, during the Second World War the country was spending about one-third of its GDP on defense, McCord said.

The budget request is part of an overall $6.8 trillion spending proposal rolled out by Biden last week, which Republicans say they’ll reject. 

But it’s not clear how they’ll act on the Pentagon proposal.

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Biden to sign executive order to require background checks on more gun sales

President Biden is expected to announce an executive order on Tuesday that would expand background checks to more firearm sales by expanding the statutory definition of a firearms dealer, the White House said.

Biden is set to sign the order during a trip to Monterey Park, California, where he will meet with families and the community impacted by the mass shooting that killed 11 and injured nine others in January. The White House said the executive order will bring the U.S. “as close to universal background checks as possible” without additional legislation.

Under the executive order, Biden is also directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to develop and implement a plan to prevent former federally licensed firearms dealers, whose licenses have been revoked or surrendered, from continuing to engage in the business of dealing in firearms.

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Six War Mongering Think Tanks and the Military Contractors that Fund Them

From producing reports and analysis for U.S. policy-makers, to enlisting representatives to write op-eds in corporate media, to providing talking heads for corporate media to interview and give quotes, think tanks play a fundamental role in shaping both U.S. foreign policy and public perception around that foreign policy. Leaders at top think tanks like the Atlantic Council and Hudson Institute have even been called upon to set focus priorities for the House Intelligence Committee. However, one look at the funding sources of the most influential think tanks reveals whose interests they really serve: that of the U.S. military and its defense contractors.

This ecosystem of overlapping networks of government institutions, think tanks, and defense contractors is where U.S. foreign policy is derived, and a revolving door exists among these three sectors. For example, before Biden-appointed head of the Pentagon Lloyd Austin took his current position, he sat on the Board of Directors at Raytheon.

Before Austin’s appointment, current defense policy advisor Michèle Flournoy was also in the running for the position. Flournoy sat on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, another major Pentagon defense contractor. These same defense contractors also work together with think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies to organize conferences attended by national security officials. On top of all this, since the end of the Cold War, intelligence analysis by the CIA and NSA has increasingly been contracted out to these same defense companies like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, among others — a major conflict of interest. In other words, these corporations are in the position to produce intelligence reports which raise the alarm on U.S. “enemy” nations so they can sell more military equipment!

And of course these are the same defense companies that donate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to think tanks. Given all this, is it any wonder the U.S. government is simultaneously flooding billions of dollars of weaponry into an unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine while escalating a Cold War into a potential military confrontation with China?

The funding to these policy institutes steers the U.S. foreign policy agenda. To give you a scope of how these contributions determine national security priorities, listed below are six of some of the most influential foreign policy think tanks, along with how much in contributions they’ve received from “defense” companies in the last year.

All funding information for these policy institutes was gathered from the most recent annual report that was available online. Also note that this list is compiled from those that make this information publicly available — many think tanks, such as the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, do not release donation sources publicly.

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The U.S. Intelligence Community is Doing Group Think on Steroids.

The line dividing consensus from group think is narrow and not well defined. There are four principal agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) who actually produce raw intelligence — the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Why is this important? The USIC is on the record supporting the analytical conclusion that Russia is in trouble, Putin is on the ropes and Ukraine can expel Russia from Ukrainian territory as long as it gets the necessary support. How can so many people with advanced degrees from top flight universities be so blind and so deluded? The answer is simple — the USIC is a collection of gargantuan bureaucracies that do not encourage or promote thinking out of the box. Any analyst inclined to engage in counter intuitive or counter narrative analysis is not just ignored. He or she will be punished and, in some cases, fired or shuffled off to dead end jobs.

Let me take you inside the process I experienced as an analyst. I would arrive at my desk in the Central America Branch of the Middle America Caribbean Division of the Office of Africa and Latin American Affairs (ALA) around 7am and had to quickly read a 6 inch stack of paper containing the latest intelligence in order to identify any issues that would merit producing an article for the National Intelligence Daily or the Presidential Daily Brief. (Can you smell the bureaucracy?)

The intelligence I perused consisted of messages from State Department and Embassies overseas, intercepted voice and electronic communications courtesy of the NSA, DIA human intelligence reports and CIA human intelligence reports. Let’s say that after my review I knitted together several pieces of intelligence showing that the Central American leaders were working in secret to produce a peace plan that ran counter to the policy of the President of the United States regarding Nicaragua. I would go to the morning Branch meeting, brief my colleagues and Branch Chief on the story and would get the green light to produce an analytical piece explaining the particulars of the Central American plan.

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10,000 Dutch Farmers Protest Govt’s Crippling Nitrogen Emissions Target In The Hague

Thousands of Dutch farmers protested on Saturday against the government’s policies to reduce nitrogen emissions, warning they will put farms out of business and affect food production.

Hundreds of tractors from across the Netherlands could be seen driving to the event in The Hague ahead of regional elections this week, and more than 10,000 farmers were in attendance, according to the Reuters news agency.

Protesters accused the Dutch government of forcing farmers off of privately owned land in order to appease Brussels, and carried banners reading “No farmers, no food” and “There is no nitrogen ‘problem.’”

Tens of thousands of people turned up for the Dutch farmers protest.

Stand for freedom. pic.twitter.com/lAUW1QuqhV

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) March 11, 2023

“We are fighting against a corrupt and unjust government,” Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a prominent campaigner in defense of the farmers, told attendees. She spoke of a government that “drives our farmers from their land” and which has “turned on its own population.”

“For centuries, our farmers have produced food for millions of people worldwide. And instead of what those liars in The Hague claim, they have done so in a responsible and sustainable way.”

🇳🇱Our farmers are fighting against the worst kind of injustice: a government that has turned on its own people.

The government created a lie to rob our farmers of their land. But we won’t let it happen. Our #DutchFarmers are an example to the world.

My speech with 🇬🇧 subtitles. pic.twitter.com/QYiFbkR2zM

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) March 11, 2023

“But our cabinet doesn’t care about nature. They have simply created a lie to steal our farmers’ land,” she added.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s administration has vowed to take radical action to meet its ambitious target of halving the country’s nitrogen emissions by 2030, and has identified the country’s large agriculture sector as being the main culprit due to its large livestock count and use of fertilizers.

Last year, the government announced plans to reduce livestock numbers by a third, while farmers have also been told their land could be subject to compulsory buyouts.

Agricultural workers have staged several demonstrations against the government policy, blocking motorways and supermarket distribution centers in mass protests last year.

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CDC, FDA Respond to Florida Surgeon General’s COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Alert

U.S. health authorities have responded to the warning from Florida’s surgeon general about a spike in reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.

Drs. Rochelle Walensky and Robert Califf claimed in the response that Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general, was misleading the public by focusing on the increase in adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

“The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading, and could be harmful to the American public,” Walensky and Califf said in the missive.

Walensky heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Califf heads of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The CDC and FDA co-manage VAERS, which accepts reports from anybody but which is primarily used by healthcare workers.

The COVID-19 vaccines were given emergency authorization in late 2020. Under the emergency authorizations, vaccine companies and healthcare workers are required to report certain adverse events through VAERS, “so more reports should be expected,” Walensky and Califf said.

“Most reports do not represent adverse events caused by the vaccine and instead represent a preexisting condition that preceded vaccination or an underlying medical condition that precipitated the event,” they said.

They did not cite any studies or other research to support the claim.

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The DOJ Says Marijuana Use, Which Biden Thinks Should Not Be a Crime, Nullifies the Second Amendment

President Joe Biden thinks it is unfair that people convicted of simple marijuana possession face lingering consequences for doing something that he says should not be treated as a crime. Biden cited those burdens last October, when he announced a mass pardon of low-level federal marijuana offenders, which he said would help “thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession” and “who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result.” Yet the Biden administration, which recently began accepting applications for pardon certificates aimed at ameliorating those consequences after dragging its feet for five months, is actively defending another blatantly unjust disability associated with cannabis consumption: the loss of Second Amendment rights.

Under federal law, it is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance” to possess firearms. The ban applies to all cannabis consumers, even if they live in one of the 37 states that have legalized medical or recreational use. That disability, a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled last month, is not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the constitutional test established by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The Justice Department recently filed a notice indicating that it intends to appeal the decision against the gun ban for marijuana users.

The Biden administration’s defense of the ban relies on empirically and historically dubious assertions about the sort of people who deserve to exercise the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Among other things, the Justice Department argues that “the people” covered by the Second Amendment do not include Americans who break the law, no matter how trivial the offense. It also argues that marijuana users are ipso facto untrustworthy and unvirtuous, which it says makes them ineligible for gun rights.

According to the Biden administration, the original understanding of the right to arms included exceptions broad enough to encompass people who consume any intoxicant that legislators might one day decide to prohibit. It says the law criminalizing gun possession by cannabis consumers is analogous to laws targeting “intoxicated” people who carry guns in public places.

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21 South Carolina GOP Lawmakers Propose Death Penalty for Women Who Have Abortions

MEMBERS OF THE South Carolina State House are considering a bill that would make a woman who has an abortion in the state eligible for the death penalty. 

The “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023” would amend the state’s code of laws, redefining “person” to include a fertilized egg at the point of conception, affording that zygote “equal protection under the homicide laws of the state” — up to and including the ultimate punishment: death.  

The bill was authored by Rep. Rob Harris, a registered nurse and member of the Freedom Caucus; it has attracted 21 co-sponsors to date. (Two former co-sponsors — Rep. Matt Leber and Rep. Kathy Landing — asked to have their names removed as sponsors of the bill. Leber and Landing could not be reached for comment.)  

Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican who represents South Carolina in the U.S. House, took to the floor on Friday to call attention to the bill, which she sees as part of a “deeply disturbing” trend. (Multiple Texas lawmakers have floated the idea of executing women who have abortions in the past. Those bills, proposed before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, failed.)

“To see this debate go to the dark places, the dark edges, where it has gone on both sides of the aisle, has been deeply disturbing to me as a woman, as a female legislator, as a mom, and as a victim of rape. I was raped as a teenager at the age of 16,” Mace said. “This debate ought to be a bipartisan debate where we balance the rights of women and we balance the right to life. But we aren’t having that conversation here in D.C. We aren’t having that conversation at home. We aren’t having that conversation with fellow state lawmakers.” 

Asked about exceptions for victims of rape, which Mace raised in her remarks on the floor, Harris told Rolling Stone, “There are other bills with exceptions, but will do little or nothing to save the lives of pre-born children.” He went on list exceptions the bill does contain, including: “a ‘duress’ defense for women who are pressured/threatened to have an abortion” and “medical care to save the mother’s life… The functional language in that scenario is whether the baby’s life is forfeited ‘unintentionally’ or ‘intentionally’.” (Asked if he saw any irony between being a member of the so-called “Freedom Caucus” while proposing such harsh restrictions on reproductive freedoms, Harris responded simply: “Murder of the pre-born is harsh.”)

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