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.

Cop Charged After Mistaking Innocent Dad for Criminal, Entering His Backyard and Executing Him

As frequent readers of the Free Thought Project understand, police officers mistake innocent individuals for criminals all the time. Often times, their fear gets the best of them and these folks who have committed no crime and harmed no one, are beaten or arrested only to be exonerated down the road. One man in Idaho Falls, however, will not have a chance to be exonerated because the police who mistook him for a suspect — executed him.

On February 8, 2021, Elias Aurelio Cerdas, a 26-year-old officer who graduated from training less than a year before the shooting, entered the backyard of Joseph “Joe” Johnson, a father of four, mistook him for a criminal, and executed him.

For nearly six month, Cerdas remained on paid vacation without charges but all that changed this week and he has been indicted for manslaughter.

According to East Idaho News, Cerdas was not arrested after being charged but issued a summons for his arraignment at the Bonneville County Courthouse on Aug. 23.

According to police, shortly after midnight early that morning, a Bonneville County Sheriff’s Deputy attempted to make a traffic stop at which point the vehicle came to a stop and the driver of the vehicle fled into a residential neighborhood. The deputy involved in the pursuit told fellow officers they were looking for a man in a black shirt.

During the search, police identified the man and found that he had multiple warrants for his arrest including Felony Battery on an Officer, and two Failure to Appear Warrants with original charges of Resisting/Obstructing Arrest, and Providing False Information to Law Enforcement.

Police claim the suspect, Tanner Shoesmith, 22, had a history of violent altercations with law enforcement which appears to be a cover for the way they acted when they found and then killed Johnson.

According to police, the passenger in the vehicle that was originally pulled over never fled and stayed behind to talk to police. Police claim this passenger had received a message from the suspect, who — while on the run from the cops — took the time to message the passenger and send him his GPS coordinates.

According to police, these GPS coordinates — sent by the suspect who was running from cops, to the passenger he knew was still with the cops — showed him in the backyard of a residence on the corner of Tendoy Drive and Syringa Drive — Johnson’s backyard.

Police then surrounded this house and killed the father of four in his backyard after claiming he had on a black t-shirt and was holding a gun.

“Sometimes everyone does what they think is right and tragedies happen,” the chief said at the time.

After killing the innocent man, a brief investigation revealed that he was not the suspect and, in fact, lived in the home and had committed no crime. Moments later, down the road, a deputy reported seeing a man running and the suspect was located in the back yard of a house, hiding in a shed. The suspect, who police claim has a history of violent interactions with police, was taken into custody without incident.

Since that day, police have failed to release any more information in regard to the shooting.

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They’re Normalizing Police Robots By Calling Them “Dogs”

Hawaii police are defending their use of pandemic relief funds for a robotic “police dog” made by Boston Dynamics which scans homeless people’s eyes to see if they have a fever.

“If you’re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii’s capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don’t have a fever,” says a new report from Associated Press. “That’s just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility.”

“Acting Lt. Joseph O’Neal of the Honolulu Police Department’s community outreach unit defended the robot’s use in a media demonstration earlier this year,” AP reports. “He said it has protected officers, shelter staff and residents by scanning body temperatures between meal times at a shelter where homeless people could quarantine and get tested for COVID-19. The robot is also used to remotely interview individuals who have tested positive.”

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The Politics of Spectacle: On Eviction Moratorium, The Squad Talks the Walk

Members of Congress departed for a seven-week vacation at the same time that the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) national eviction moratorium expired on July 31. The Squad, a subset of members of the House of Representatives who espouse Bernie Sanders’ policy agenda, gathered at the Capitol building to demand that Congress come back to work and hold a vote to renew the moratorium. Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, and other Squad members slept on the Capitol steps overnight as part of the ongoing protest. Critics on social media pointed out that the rally was too little, too late while others remarked that the low attendance of the rally, comprised mainly of political surrogates, rendered the action nothing more than a photo opportunity for the Squad.

Founder of Black Agenda Report (BAR) Glen Ford died three days before the protest. Ford strongly opposed the politics of diversity, which privilege political representation over substantive policy demands and the popular power required to achieve them. He closely monitored the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to demonstrate that voting for elected officials who look and behave like their constituents does not necessarily equate to representation. Ford led BAR’s effort to expose how the CBC, for example, voted in large majorities to militarize U.S. police departments and enshrine their officers with protected class status under federal hate-crime legislation.

The Squad rose to prominence following Barack Obama’s two-term presidency. Obama represented the pinnacle of diversity. Obama was famously touted as a victory in the long, hard struggle of Black Americans for human rights, yet his administration greatly expanded the theater of the U.S. war machine and enacted a broad policy agenda friendly to the rich. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign emerged from the economic discontent once encapsulated by Occupy Wall Street — a protest movement that Obama’s DHS and FBI brutally repressed at the tail end of his first term. In a pivot away from protest, an increasingly left-leaning Democratic Party base placed their energy into electing “progressive” members of Congress.

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9 Crazy Examples of Waste, Unrelated Pet Projects Snuck into Massive Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill

When President Biden first unveiled his $2+ trillion proposal for an infrastructure spending package, he was widely ridiculed for stretching the meaning of the word “infrastructure” far past its breaking point. The legislation snuck in climate change policy, billions for woke diversity initiatives, massive funding for public schools, and much more under creatively deceptive guises such as “human infrastructure.” Thankfully, this package didn’t get far.

However, more feasible efforts continue from a bipartisan group of senators seeking to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure compromise package. This legislative effort does, in fairness, stay much closer to the traditionally understood definition of infrastructure with its funding for roads, bridges, and more. Yet even this supposedly moderate, reasonable bill is 2,702 pages in length, leaving ample room for lobbyists and individual politicians to slip in wasteful items and crony pet projects.

Here are nine examples of seemingly unrelated, wasteful, or otherwise dubious spending programs snuck into the thousands of pages of legislative text.

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EXPOSED: Biden’s UN Racism Inspectors Plan To ‘Restrict’ And Criminalize Free Speech

Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken recently announced that he is inviting United Nations racism inspectors to the United States to conduct a report on American society. Blinken specifically invited Fernand de Varennes, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, and Tendayi Achiume, the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism. NATIONAL FILE has obtained video footage of de Varennes calling for the criminalization of “hate speech” and pushing for censorship by saying that free expression is not absolute. de Varennes even said that “I don’t think it will take that much effort” to pass legislation in the United States holding social media companies liable for supposed hate speech. NATIONAL FILE has also compiled evidence of both Varennes and Achiume bashing President Donald Trump and his supporters, and of Achiume calling for reparations for slavery and for “Migration as Decolonization” in Western countries including the United States of America.

Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who headed a Biden project at the University of Pennsylvania that took millions of dollars in anonymous Chinese donations, recently stated: “As the President has repeatedly made clear, great nations such as ours do not hide from our shortcomings; they acknowledge them openly and strive to improve with transparency. It is in this context that the United States intends to issue a formal, standing invitation to all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human rights issues,” he continued. “As a first step, we have reached out to offer an official visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues.”

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Florida Sheriff’s Office Now Notifying People It Will Be Inflicting Its Pre-Crime Program On Them

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff’s Office has been swamped with negative press coverage centering on its predictive policing program. The Office claims it’s not “predictive policing,” but rather “intelligence-led policing.” Whatever you call it, it sucks.

The Sheriff’s Office may have some lofty goals that involve stopping crime before it starts, but the supposedly forward-looking policing program does little more than subject past offenders (along with friends, families, and acquaintances) to sustained harassment by law enforcement officers. What’s supposed to keep crime down by directing resources to possible serious criminal activity has manifested as multiple visits from officers who do little more than try to coerce people into consenting to unlawful searches and write out nuisance citations for things like missing mailbox numbers or uncut grass.

The Sheriff’s Office has since spun this off to include students at public schools, presumably to prep kids for a future of pointless harassment by law enforcement officers simply because they have the misfortune of living in Pasco County.

Thanks to some lawsuits and investigations, the Sheriff’s Office is being a bit more proactive on the notification front. According to this ongoing investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, targets of the “intelligence” program are now being informed they’ve been blacklisted by the Sheriff’s Office.

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How an ex-intel official’s prison sentence exposes the folly of the Espionage Act

The District Court of Alexandria, Virginia on Tuesday sentenced former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale to nearly four years in prison. He was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking secret documents on the Obama administration’s clandestine drone strike operations in 2014 and 2015. 

The documents, which were published in October, 2015 by The Intercept, exposed the horrific details of U.S. drone warfare in Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, as well as a rulebook on how the U.S. government adds individuals to its terror watchlists and locates them. In March, Hale pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act. 

It’s frustrating to see that the Biden administration is continuing to use the Espionage Act to crack down on whistleblowers, especially at a time when government accountability and responsible national security policies are urgently needed. For the past two decades, the so-called “War on Terror” has undermined the rule of law and provided cover for the executive branch to wage secret, unconstitutional wars with impunity. Charging those who expose this injustice as spies is not the answer — the administration must pursue meaningful accountability and an overhaul of  U.S. counterterrorism policies. 

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‘Who could devise these tortuous packages?’ Shaken Massachusetts couple speak for first time about how eBay staff tormented them with pig fetus, funeral wreath and porn for criticizing web giant on their e-commerce news site

A couple have details of a ‘depraved’ campaign of harassment they endured at the hands of eBay staff after criticizing the web giant on their e-commerce news site.   

David and Ina Steiner received live cockroaches, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, a bereavement wreath and a mask from the movie Saw that the killer wears before kidnapping, torturing and killing his victims.

David also recalled the moment he received a disturbing call from a shop in Arizona telling them they couldn’t deliver the ‘wet specimen’ they ordered. 

‘Not having any idea what a wet specimen was, I asked her. It was an embalmed pig fetus’, the shaken stalking victim told Good Morning America. 

The neighbors even received pornography addressed to David in a bid to cause the couple maximum embarrassment. 

‘Who could devise these tortuous packages? And the depravity – the messages , if you read the language – I never in a million years would have thought it was a company,’ Ina said.

The harassment started in June 2019 when a neighbor walking his dog pointed out that the Steiners’ fence had been graffitied.

It soon spiraled from the vandalism and unwanted, ‘really disturbing’ email subscriptions to eBay employees trying to place a tracking device on the car.

Prosecutors suspected the campaign was to stop the Steiners from continuing EcommerceBytes, a site dedicated to e-commerce news David and Ina have been running from their home for the past 22 years.

The site had been critical of eBay and its policies over the course of its reporting, which the Steiners say was honest and fair. 

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United Nations Greenlights Big Tech Mega-Database To Censor Americans Deemed ‘Extremists’

A Big Tech-led group is using its influence and power to broaden its shared censorship database to curb “extremist content” and collect video and images deemed white supremacist, according to Reuters. The expansion comes after the group “took on renewed urgency” after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which Democrats and tech giants continue to use as an excuse to justify suppression.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, tech oligarchs trigger-happy to deplatform political dissidents, founded the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in 2017 in what they labeled “a new collective effort to prevent the spread of terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Initially, the organization claimed to focus its efforts on rounding up content from terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and the Taliban as designated by the United Nations, but now the monopolies running GIFCT are using their oligarch power to crack down on dissidents of their elitist agenda.

Just five years after its founding, GIFCT is expanding its database to include “white supremacist” content as determined by the United Nation’s Tech Against Terrorism project and intelligence groups such as Five Eyes. According to Reuters, the database will include “attacker manifestos — often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence” as well as links and material from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other “neo-Nazi” groups that are identified and then censored or removed by social media platforms.

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Fourth police officer who responded to Capitol riot dies of suicide

A Washington, DC police officer who responded to the deadly riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 took his own life last month, making him the fourth law enforcement officer who took part in the events of that day to die by his own hand.

Officer Kyle DeFreytag helped enforce the curfew put in place after hundreds of supporters of then-President Donald Trump breached the Capitol building in an effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election results, The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) told WUSA.

DeFreytag died on July 10. He was described as a Pennsylvania native and a five-year veteran of the DC force.

The officer’s obituary said that a memorial service was held in the nation’s capital over the weekend. His family has not said his death was caused by the riot.

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