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.

Eighteen Years Ago, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered After Exposing CIA Drug Trafficking

On December 10, 2004, the body of journalist Gary Webb, 49, was discovered in his home near Sacramento after a moving company worker found a note posted to his front door that read: “Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.”

Webb’s death was listed as a suicide, but Webb was found with two bullet holes in the head, indicating that he was executed.[1]

In the days leading up to his death, Webb had told friends that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed by what he thought were government agents, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen breaking into and leaving his house.

In the late 1990s, Webb had written a series of stories for the San José Mercury News, which provided the basis for his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

In it, Webb detailed how the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s was sparked by two Nicaraguan émigrés, Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who sold huge amounts of cocaine to raise funds for a CIA-backed rebel army—the Contras.

Webb was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Dark Alliance” series went viral in the early days of the internet. It caused a firestorm that led to the resignation of CIA Director John Deutch after he was grilled by angry Black activists at a meeting in L.A.[2]

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FBI Reveals It Has More Information on Deceased DNC Staffer Seth Rich

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is fighting tooth and nail to withhold data from laptops of slain DNC staff member Seth Rich.

Rich may have been the conduit for Hillary Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, according to journalist Sy Hersh. The journalist said an FBI source informed him in 2017 Rich’s laptop contained evidence he leaked the emails.

The truth of that claim is germane because the Biden administration is desperately trying to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain. Assange angered U.S. government officials with many leaks of classified documents that portrayed officials in a bad light. Among the leaks were, of course, the damning emails of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Donald Trump defeated in 2016.

U.S. government officials have long maintained Russian hackers were the source of the leaked Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks. That argument would be erased like a sandcastle at the beach in a rising tide if Hersh’s report is corroborated by evidence in FBI possession.

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Newly-Passed ‘Respect for Marriage’ Act May Threaten Religious Liberty: Experts

The “Respect for Marriage” Act, after passing through the U.S. House of Representatives, is just a signature away from reaffirming the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that legalized gay marriage.

President Joe Biden is expected to sign the Act, which would codify the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that requires states to license gay marriage. If it the legislation is signed into law, it would repeal the “Defense of Marriage” Act, which banned the federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

That’s reason to celebrate for LGBT-identifying people concerned that their ability to marry needs safeguards.

However, some experts say the new federal law creates concerns for others, as it could take encroach on the freedoms of any who refuse to participate in same-sex marriages by making them vulnerable to lawsuits.

Two Republican representatives noted those concerns before the Dec. 8 vote. The bill was sent back to their chamber of Congress after the U.S. Senate changed its wording.

The new version included amendments regarding religious liberty and a section describing the importance of marriage and perspectives on it. The bill also protects interracial marriage.

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Gun Shops And Customers Claim Credit Card Firms “Restrict” Firearm Purchases

Gun rights advocates warned that a new change to the credit card industry to add a firearm and ammunition-specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) for gun stores wasn’t about tracking guns necessarily, but could lead to the denial of lawful firearms purchases by law-abiding citizens.

In September, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express all said they would adopt the MCC code to categorize sales at gun shops; months later, several social media posts of alleged gun stores and customers claim they experienced card issues.   

Twitter account “Battlecock Tactical” tweeted, “Federal Firearms License [gun shop] in a Facebook group shared this. Looks like the doomers accurately called how that new firearms merchant code would go down.” 

Battlecock Tactical’s images show what appears to be a retail POS system at an FFL that reads $913.70 transaction was “declined.” The error code on the merchant’s computer read: 

“Transaction declined: Charge declined RESTRICTED CARD Customer bank does not allow this card to be used at this type of merchant.” 

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The Constitution Has Already Been Terminated

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

If there is one point on which there should be no political parsing, no legal jockeying, and no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law.

Then again, one could well make the case that the Constitution has already been terminated after years on life support, given the extent to which the safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights—adopted 231 years ago as a means of protecting the people against government overreach and abuse—have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

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US soccer journalist Grant Wahl dies covering World Cup in Qatar, brother thinks ‘he was killed’

Influential U.S. soccer journalist Grant Wahl died in Qatar while covering the World Cup, his brother announced. He was 48.

While covering Argentina’s quarterfinal win over the Netherlands on Friday, Wahl, who had run his own Substack after a long career at Sports Illustrated, collapsed at Lusail Iconic Stadium and was rushed to a nearby hospital. It’s unclear whether he died at the hospital or in transport.

His brother, Eric, believes foul play from the Qatari government may have been involved.

“My name is Eric Wahl. I live in Seattle, Washington. I am Grant Wahl’s brother. I’m gay,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram account before making the account private. “I’m the reason he wore the rainbow shirt to the World Cup. My brother was healthy. He told me he received death threats. I do not believe my brother just died. I believe he was killed. And I just beg for any help.”

Prior to the USMNT’s World Cup game against Wales, Wahl was initially not allowed into Ahmad bin Ali Stadium and detained for 30 minutes for wearing a shirt depicting a soccer ball surrounded by a rainbow. He was eventually let into the stadium.

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Rejoice! Cannabis Seeds are Legal

Ed Rosenthal is a legend in cannabis known for bucking the rules. The longtime cultivation author went up against the feds for providing marijuana to medical patients in 2003 and was ultimately sentenced to a single day in prison, time served. Rosenthal’s devoted his life promoting cannabis—he’s responsible for proliferating the classic South African landrace Durban Poison, partnered with at least 50 European seed companies for multiple books in his Big Book of Buds series, and even has a cultivar, Ed Rosenthal Super Bud, named after him—but he’s never released his own genetics. That is, until now. Back in April, the DEA quietly acknowledged that cannabis seeds are legal. Rosenthal began releasing seed packs alongside his books in May. Since then, rapper and Cookies clothing mogul Berner has also embraced the idea, offering seed packs along with his recent From Seed to Sale album release. 

The DEA’s reasoning behind the affirmation that cannabis seeds are legal in the U.S. had to do with the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp, defining and separating it from the pot we smoke as Cannabis sativa with less than .03% delta-9 THC. When questioned about the legality of seeds, tissue culture, and “other genetic material” the agency response was that marihuana (yes, they still spell it like that) seeds that contain less than .03% delta-9 THC meet the definition of hemp and are therefore, not a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act. 

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FDA Says Ivermectin Doesn’t Work Against COVID-19 But Points To Studies That Show It Does

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says a drug called ivermectin does not work against COVID-19 but links to studies that show it does, an Epoch Times review has found.

The FDA’s website states, “Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

But half of the studies to which the FDA points support using ivermectin against COVID-19, according to the review.

The papers cut against the drug agency’s repeated exhortations for people not to take ivermectin for COVID-19. In Twitter posts, public statements, and emails, FDA officials have repeatedly warned against ivermectin. Some of those statements triggered a lawsuit from doctors who say the agency’s role is to approve drugs, not to issue recommendations. The suit was dismissed this week.

Dr. Pierre Kory, who frequently prescribes ivermectin for COVID-19 and co-authored a meta-analysis that concluded the drug is effective against the illness, told The Epoch Times that the government’s position on ivermectin “is one of the most glaring examples of the corruption of modern evidence based medicine.”

“There’s one message they want everyone to understand. And that message is that ivermectin doesn’t work,” Kory said. “That’s not a scientific conclusion, that’s theirs. That’s their perverted and distorted interpretation of the data.”

The FDA’s media office did not respond to a request for comment.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, a top official at the agency who was its commissioner from January 2021 to February 2022, told The Epoch Times via email that “ivermectin has been shown to be ineffective against COVID in large randomized trials.”

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Idaho Police Warn of ‘Criminal Charges’ for Web Sleuths Engaged in ‘Harassing’ Amid ‘Misinformation’

Police urged the internet’s true crime community to tone things down Friday, nearly four weeks after the unsolved slayings of four University of Idaho students captured national attention.

“Investigators have been monitoring online activity related to this ongoing and active case and are aware of the large amount of rumors and misinformation being shared as well as harassing and threatening behavior toward potentially involved parties,” Moscow police said in a statement Friday afternoon.

They did not identify the “potentially involved parties.”

Police say Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20, were killed in a rental house on King Road just steps off campus between 3 and 4 a.m. on Nov. 13.

Closing in on a month later, police have not publicly named any suspects or persons of interest – and they released few details before Wednesday, when they asked the public for help finding the occupant or occupants of a white 2011 to 2013 Hyundai Elantra seen near the victims’ home around the time of the slayings.

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