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.

Central Bank Digital Currencies Would Let Governments Control What People Spend Money On: IMF Official

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could potentially allow a government to control what people spend their hard-earned cash on.

Speaking at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting on Oct. 15, Deputy Managing Director Bo Li said that a CBDC could improve “financial inclusion” through programmability.

“A CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program, to create smart contracts, to allow targeted policy functions,” Li explained. “For example, welfare payments, for example, consumption coupons, for example, food stamps.”

“By programming CBDC, that money can be precisely targeted for what kind of people can own [CBDC] and for what kind of use this money can be utilized, for example for food.”

Li, who stepped into the role of deputy managing director at the IMF on Aug. 23, 2021, added that by allowing the government to precisely target what people need, this will enable said government to “improve financial inclusion.”

However, his comments were quick to garner a reaction from experts, including Nick Anthony, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.

Anthony wrote on Twitter that the IMF executive’s comments revealed how a CBDC would “allow the government to precisely control what people can and cannot spend their money on.”

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Woman who escapes month-long captivity says other Black women killed by abductor

A 22-year-old Black woman in Missouri who escaped after a white man abducted, tortured and held her captive for weeks in a basement has said several other Black women were killed by her captor – less than a month after police dismissed community concerns about a serial killer as “completely unfounded”.

The woman, who has not been named, escaped on 7 October after about a month in captivity, still wearing a metal collar locked with a padlock that authorities had to remove.

She told Kansas City police that 39-year-old Timothy M Haslett had imprisoned her in a basement room in Excelsior Springs – a city just north-east of Kansas City – where he whipped and raped her repeatedly. She escaped while Haslett was dropping his child off at school, and she sought help from neighbours whom she told that her friends “did not make it out” and were killed by Haslett.

Around the time she went missing, several prominent community leaders raised concerns about the disappearance of multiple Black women and girls. Last month, the Kansas City Defender, a nonprofit newsroom, published a video of Bishop Tony Caldwell saying that he had received information that the missing women had all been kidnapped from Prospect Avenue in Kansas City.

The police dismissed the concerns outright as “completely unfounded”, saying in a statement that “there is no basis to support this rumor”.

In fact the survivor, who is referred to as TJ in court documents, said Haslett picked her up on Prospect Avenue in early September.

Haslett, a scruffy looking white man with dark brown hair and a greying beard, was detained and last week pleaded not guilty to charges including rape, kidnap and assault.

Excelsior Springs police are now investigating the possibility that at least two more women were similarly victimized.

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‘She wanted to choke us’: 5th grade teacher arrested after admitting to having ‘kill list’ of students and staff, police say

A fifth grade teacher has been arrested after informing one of her students that she had a “kill list” of children and colleagues, according to police.

On Wednesday, fifth grade teacher Angelica Carrasquillo-Torres reportedly told a student about a kill list she made that included students and staff at a school in East Chicago, Indiana.

“At approximately 12:45 p.m. a 5th grade student told his/her counselor that their 5th grade teacher made comments to him/her about killing herself, students, and staff at St. Stanislaus School,” East Chicago Police Department said in a statement. “The teacher further told the student that she has a list and that he/she was on the bottom of that list.”

The student involved – Portia Jones – told WLS-TV, “I’m really, like, scared and worried. She said she wanted to choke us and she wanted to kill herself.”

Jones told WBBM-TV, “She said that she wanted to kill her middle school friends, her high school friends, and half of her family.”

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Popular Athletic Clothing Brands Have High Levels of Hormone Disrupting Chemical BPA: Watchdog Group

Sports bras and athletic shirts made by some of the major global sports brands were found to contain dangerous levels of the estrogen-mimicking chemical bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, posing a considerable risk to people’s health, according to legal notices sent by the Center for Environmental Health (CEH).

BPA—an endocrine disrupting chemical that upsets the body’s functioning through blocking or mimicking hormones—is linked to developmental and health problems mostly for young children. For adults, studies have found that high levels of the chemical results in heart problems, while experts have connected BPA to obesity, diabetes, ADHD, and other ailments, with more research pending for definitive conclusions.

The CEH has sent legal notices to Athleta, PINK, Asics, The North Face, Brooks, All in Motion, Nike, and FILA regarding sports bras, and The North Face, Brooks, Mizuno, Athleta, New Balance, and Reebok for its activewear shirt collection. Testing conducted on branded clothing showed that individual wearers were exposed to 22 times the safe limit as permitted under California law.

“Studies have shown that BPA can be absorbed through skin and end up in the bloodstream after handling receipt paper for seconds or a few minutes at a time. Sports bras and athletic shirts are worn for hours at a time, and you are meant to sweat in them, so it is concerning to be finding such high levels of BPA in our clothing,” said Kaya Allan Sugerman, director of the Illegal Toxic Threats Program at CEH.

Investigations by the agency have discovered BPA in polyester-based clothing with spandex, including socks made for infants.

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United States Government Has Plans of Creating an AI that Can Expose Anonymous Writers

According to a recent announcement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) is developing a program to unmask anonymous writers. IARPA will use AI to analyze anonymous writers’ style. According to Cindy Harper of Reclaim the Net, a writer’s style “is seen as potentially being as unique as a fingerprint.” 

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA stated.

If IARPA succeeds with its venture, it believes that the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program could identify a writer’s style from multiple samples and change those patterns to increase the anonymization of the writing. 

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” declared HIATUS program manager Dr. Timothy McKinnon.

On top of that, IARPA said it will create explainability standards for the program’s AIs.

ODNI revealed that HIATUS could have several applications, which includes fighting foreign influence activities, defending writers whose work may potentially endanger them, and identifying counterintelligence risks. Per McKinnon, the program can identify if a machine generated or a human being wrote the text.

However, Harper noted that “it is not IARPA’s work to turn HIATUS into something usable. The agency’s work is only to develop the technology.” Regardless, it’s becoming clear that the ruling class has it in for anonymous writers and those who use pen names. 

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California serial killer: Police arrest man suspected in Stockton murders

Police in Stockton, California announced that a suspect has been arrested in relation to six murders and one shooting since April 2021.

Stockton Police Department Chief Stanley McFadden announced that Wesley Brownlee, 43, was arrested while he was armed and on a “mission to kill” another victim.

McFadden said that police followed Brownlee while he was driving on Saturday morning, and while watching his “patterns,” officers determined that “he was on a mission to kill” and he was “out hunting.”

When police officers made contact with Brownlee at around 2 a.m. after stopping him, they observed he was wearing a mask around his neck with dark clothing, McFadden said, adding that he was armed when taken into custody.

“We are sure we stopped another killing,” McFadden said.

Brownlee was arrested in relation to the fatal shootings of Salvador Debudey Jr., 43; Paul Yaw, 35; Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, 21; Juan Cruz, 52; and Lawrence Lopez Sr., 54, which all took place over the last three months.

Police earlier said that the suspect is being linked to several additional incidents dating back to April 2021, which include the shooting of a 46-year-old Black woman  who was unarmed on April 16, in addition to the fatal shooting of a 40-year-old Hispanic man who was also unarmed on April 10.

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Why Society Needs “Conspiracy Theories” and “Conspiracy Theorists”. It‘s No Secret that We’ve been Lied To

It seems like you can’t catch a news headline or social media post these days without coming across the terms conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist, or phrases like ‘spreading conspiracies’. One has to wonder: why are they so frequently employed?

In my most recent published work, I referenced an article from Canada’s National Post which ran with the headline ‘CBSA says it’s investigating border officer spreading COVID conspiracies online.’

The problem with these kinds of articles is that they are too often merely used as hit pieces to ridicule, degrade, and discredit any individual or group that goes against a certain narrative or disagrees with an author’s (or their publication’s partisanship or funders’) views.

Moreover, their authors very seldom make specific references or claims as to why they label their targets when using such over-used and over-abused disparaging rhetoric. When this is the case, it leads me to believe that the overall purpose of their pieces is to disparage their targets more than anything else.

Another recent example of this involves that from the article entitled ‘Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified – study’ written by Mark Townsend from The Guardian (UK). In the article, the author claimed “journalist Aaron Maté at the Grayzone is said by the report to have overtaken Beeley as the most prolific spreader of disinformation among the 28 conspiracy theorists identified.” Maté had to refute the claim made against him which also involved contacting Townsend by phone. His counter article and the phone conversation appear on his Substack page (see ‘NATO-backed network of Syria dirty war propagandists identified)’ and is definitely an interesting case on how these ploys take place.

Countless other instances could be cited, but suffice it to say that there is no shortage of them.

But what is perhaps even more laughable with this phenomenon is the fact that these authors wantonly use these terms without even knowing their true meanings and where they actually originate from.

Before looking into these, though, we must first and foremost examine the meaning of the word ‘conspiracy’ itself. Oxford defines it as:

a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal

Conspiracies have been an integral part of humanity ever since people have bonded together in groups for a better chance at survival.

Lord knows that history is riddled with an abundant supply of conspiracies and we will look at some notable examples later on.

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Dem Senator Says Mystery Joggers Gave Him ‘Eerie’ National Intelligence Tip In Early 2000s

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wrote in his recent memoir that as the Senate debated war in Iraq in 2002 he was given a tip about security information by two joggers that ended up influencing his vote on the war. 

Leahy’s claims, first published in his August 2022 memoir “The Road Taken,” were highlighted Friday by journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff, who said the senator’s claims provided “a rare glimpse into the shadowy way that the intel agencies interact with Members of Congress.”

The Vermont senator, who was skeptical of the move toward war in Iraq, said in his book that he was contacted by two runners who told him to check specific intelligence briefings while out on a walk with his wife Marcelle. 

“Two joggers trailed behind us. They stopped and asked what I thought of the intelligence briefings I’d been getting. Marcelle realized this was a conversation she would normally not be involved in and kept on walking ahead,” Leahy wrote. 

He said that he was told by the joggers to ask for “File Eight” and “File Twelve,” both files which related to intelligence on Iraq. 

“Quickly thereafter, I arranged to see File Eight and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration,” Leahy claimed. The Democrat would go on to be on of 21 senators to vote against the authorization of war in Iraq. 

He called the alleged encounter with the joggers the most “eerie” experience he had in Washington, D.C.

“It was the eeriest conversation I’d ever experienced in Washington. I felt like a sensational version of of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat — only in broad daylight,” he wrote. 

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