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.

Critical race theory is all about conformity

Proponents of critical race theory continue to frame resistance to it in the classroom as racist. In an interview with Education Week, Margaret Thornton, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, characterized opposition to critical race theory as a “whitelash” and a “racist attempt to silence educators.” She insists that in spite of these attacks, she’ll keep teaching the “truth about oppression” in the United States.

The problem with this sort of attack is that there’s a lot more to critical race theory than just teaching historical oppression such as slavery or Jim Crow. It’s this “more” that should worry parents of any race, especially parents of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Of particular concern: Critical race theory activists often reject the idea of individuality. In her blockbuster critical race theory book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo rejects the “ideolog[y] of individualism.” What does she mean by individualism? “Briefly, individualism holds that we are each unique and stand apart from others, even those within our social groups.”

The problem is that an individualistic streak is essential to being an entrepreneur. In ” Individualism: A Deeply American Philosophy ,” Patrick Carroll and Dan Sanchez pointed out that the greatest entrepreneurs in U.S. history were deeply individualistic. They were “mold-breakers.”

This individualistic mindset was perfectly captured by Steve Jobs with Apple’s 1997-2002 ” Think Different ” ad campaign. But if you’re told that it’s wrong to see yourself as “unique” or “standing apart” from your social group, what are the odds that you’re going to grow up to think differently?

The odds get even lower when you factor in how critical race theory is actually taught. If the essence of entrepreneurship is “think different,” the core of critical race theory might be described as “make sure you think like us.”

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Federal Bureaucrats Say We Can’t Reschedule Marijuana Because of How It’s Scheduled

Last week, President Joe Biden announced that he would pardon all Americans federally convicted of simple possession of marijuana. The announcement was a welcome, though limited, shift in the U.S. government’s seemingly unending war on drugs. Biden additionally called on governors to follow suit in their respective states and grant clemency to the vast majority of offenders convicted under state laws. He also encouraged Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra to review marijuana’s classification under federal law.

But that shift may be easier said than done thanks to the age-old problem of federal bureaucracy.

Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, indicating “a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.” In his announcement last week, the president noted that this puts it in the same category as heroin and a more restrictive category than fentanyl.

In 2015, the last time the government assessed marijuana’s classification, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and HHS recommended keeping it at Schedule I. The assessment included, among other factors, “the scientific literature on whether marijuana has a currently accepted medical use”—a tall order since Schedule I status makes it much more difficult to study in the first place.

The Washington Post reported today that “such an evaluation—the first initiated by a U.S. president—is made all the more difficult due to tight restrictions on research into marijuana.” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a research institute within the National Institutes of Health, told the paper, “It’s something that we constantly communicate: We really need to figure out a way of doing research with these substances.”

In other words, as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute tweeted, the government “can’t research whether marijuana should remain a ‘Schedule I’ substance bc of govt restrictions on… researching Schedule I substances.”

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Tim Ryan Took Money From Opioid Distributor Whose Executives Mocked Addicts as ‘Pillbillies’

On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, likes to tell voters about his work as co-chair of the Congressional Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus and to attack pharmaceutical companies for profiting from “getting so many millions of Americans hooked on opiates.” None of that stopped him from accepting money from a political action committee funded by an opioid distributor whose executives mocked addicts as “pillbillies,” a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance documents found.

The $1,000 donation came from AmerisourceBergen PAC in November 2019. Emails revealed in 2021 during a lawsuit against the company for its alleged role in the opioid crisis showed AmerisourceBergen’s executives expressing broad contempt for poor whites suffering from addiction, which at the time was largely fueled by pharmaceuticals such as OxyContin.

In one exchange, a senior AmerisourceBergen executive circulated a parody song containing references to “hillbilly heroin,” “a bevy of Pillbillies” and a reference to Kentucky as “OxyContinville.” Another email shared between executives joked about how crackdowns against so-called pill mills—doctors who illegally prescribe opioids to customers—in Florida will lead to a “max [sic] exodus of Pillbillies heading north.” 

The donation could prove to be a political liability for Ryan, a Democrat running in a state that has been inordinately impacted by the opioid crisis. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that opioid distributors donated at least $27,000 to Ryan’s political campaigns since 2007.

At the same time, the AP found, Ryan voted against bills meant to increase funding for anti-opioid initiatives, such as spending packages for addiction treatment. In a statement to the AP, Ryan’s campaign said one of the donors, Cardinal, is a large employer in Ohio.

The Ryan campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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FDA Withholds Autopsy Results of Those Who Died After COVID Shots

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release the autopsy results of people whose deaths were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after receiving a COVID-19 shot. The FOIA request was submitted by The Epoch Times newspaper.1

“VAERS is a centralized vaccine reaction reporting system that was among the safety provisions secured by parents of DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine injured children in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986,” explains Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). It is jointly operated by the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).2 3

According to The Epoch Times, the FDA declined to release any autopsy reports of VAERS deaths, even redacted copies, citing FOIA section (8) (A) which allows federal agencies to withhold information from the public if an agency “reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by an exemption,” with the exemption being “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

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St. Louis preparing to sue Hyundai and Kia over rampant car thefts in the city

Car thefts have skyrocketed in St. Louis in recent months, with city leadership threatening lawsuits against Kia and Hyundai for an alleged defect that makes certain makes of the cars easier to steal.

“Our drivers probably get about five of these things a day. Just Kias and Hyundais getting stolen,” tow truck driver Mark Hartmann told KMOV last week of thefts in the city. 

Auto thefts in St. Louis have doubled this year, according to KMOV. In July alone, the city averaged about 21 Kia and Hyundai theft incidents each day. That number increased to 23 thefts each day in August, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch previously reported. 

In August, St. Louis leaders threatened to sue Hyundai and Kia, demanding the car companies address a defect that allegedly makes stealing vehicles made before 2021 easier to steal. KMOV reported last week that plans to sue the carmakers over the city’s spike in auto thefts are still in the works.  

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To Save the Republic, Abolish the Black Budget

I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.

The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.

Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.

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Kamala Harris Dragged For Saying No One Should Go To Jail For Smoking Weed

Critics ripped into Vice President Kamala Harris over the weekend as video circulated of her claiming that no one should go to jail simply for smoking marijuana.

Harris’ remarks came on the heels of President Joe Biden’s Thursday pronouncement declaring mass pardons for thousands who have past federal convictions on drug charges — and flew in the face of her record as a prosecutor in California.

“And speaking of the system of justice,” Harris began. “We are also changing — y’all might have heard that this week — the federal government’s approach to marijuana.”

As the crowd cheered, Harris continued, “Because the bottom line there is nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”

San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis — who is challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her seat in Congress — called out the vice president in a tweet, saying, “Shameless. As California Attorney General Harris sent people to jail for …smoking weed.”

“The hypocrisy is staggering,” actor Matthew Marsden added.

U.S. Senate Candidate Mark Meuser (R-CA) pointed out: “Clearly, Kamala has forgotten her legacy in California.”

“REMINDER: Kamala Harris has sent at least 1,560 people to prison for marijuana-related offenses,” Steve Guest, special communications advisor to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said.

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Biden: We’re Trying To Figure Out How Putin Can Exit This War

The president of the United States made headlines the other day by just casually mentioning “Armageddon” as a possible outcome of the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” President Biden said, adding the false claim that Vladimir Putin “talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons” in this conflict.

“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” the president said in the same speech. “We are trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?”

As though the US government itself has not played a major role in both provoking and sustaining this extremely dangerous conflict.

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A Good And Righteous Proxy War Wouldn’t Need Such Cartoonish PR

Star Wars megastar Mark Hamill was recently named an ambassador for United24, the fundraising platform of the Ukrainian government, where according to The Times his attention will center on “the procurement, repair and replacement of drones as well as pilot training.”

From The Times:

“In this long and unequal fight, Ukraine needs continuous additional support. That’s why I was honoured President Zelensky asked me to become an ambassador for the Army of Drones,” Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said in a statement. “I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom and the values of the entire democratic world. Right now is the best time for everyone to come together and help Ukraine stand up in this war with the evil empire.”

In a statement thanking Hamill for his support, Zelensky said: “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this. Thank you for taking on this difficult mission of being the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds for the Army of Drones to support our defenders. It is really important!”

Hamill, 71, is among an expanding list of celebrities who have lent their support to United24, which Zelensky launched in May. The website is reported to have raised nearly $188 million in donations, including a recent $5 million contribution from the Pfizer Foundation to support Ukraine’s medical needs.

Last week Barbra Streisand announced that she would also serve as an ambassador, hailing the “capability and courage” of the Ukrainian people as an “inspiration for all those worldwide who promote democracy and fight authoritarianism”.

So for the record if you were under the impression that this proxy war could not possibly get any more Disneyfied, you were wrong.

Hamill celebrated his new position by tweeting a graphic showing a Star Wars spaceship wearing the Ukrainian flag colors, which the actor captioned in Polish because Hollywood is brain poison.

Other recent Twitter PR shenanigans for this proxy war includes the Ukrainian government account talking to its “Crimea” account in the cringiest imitation of viral brand tweets you could possibly imagine.

“hey @Crimea what’s new?” tweeted the Ukraine account in lowercase letters just like the cool kids do.

“@Ukraine getting unchained, on my way home,” the Ukrainian government’s “Crimea” account replied.

Both of these accounts would of course be run by the same person, who would have been hired specifically for their understanding of social media, internet memes, and marketing. Because this is the most phony, PR-intensive proxy war of all time.

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