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.

Biden to deploy COVID ‘response teams’ to low-vaccination towns nationwide amid Delta variant concerns

President Joe Biden’s administration is sending COVID-19 “response teams” to locations across the United States amid growing concerns surrounding the new highly transmittable Delta variant of the virus, according to a White House official, CNN reported.

Comprised of officials from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the teams will focus on communities with low vaccination rates and a prominent presence of the latest strain.

A White House official said the administration has sent out similar teams before, but none that focused specifically on the Delta variant. The teams, led by the White House coronavirus team, will be tasked with conducting a sharp increase in testing, providing therapeutics, and deploying federal workers to ramp up vaccination distribution.

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Meet the Anti-MAGA Trolls

Trolling used to be the pastime of a subculture that considered itself apolitical, and that claimed to be interested in provoking everyone. But for Michael and Sloane, the jokes are part of how they practice their politics—the only fun part, they say. Similarly, many politically minded young people have come of age with an innate understanding of how antisocial behavior online can be used to win attention for and participation in a chosen cause. “Trolling has a long and noble history, and shitposting can be useful,” says Talia Lavin, the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. She took part in an attempt to troll Trump’s “Voter Fraud Hotline,” she told me, by submitting a long video in which she described being intimidated by the sexual attractiveness of an antifa operative at her polling place.

But trolling can have especially unpredictable results when it engages with hateful rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking. It might even help spread and amplify misinformation or extremist beliefs. Some r/ParlerTrick members, for example, created memes that, per Michael, had “some racist stuff” in them, or might have stoked “unnecessary hate.” The forum has struggled with this issue, he said. “It’s a thin line. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing.”

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Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’

 Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.

Since then, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called for an end to the overuse of secret gag orders, arguing in a Washington Post opinion piece that “prosecutors too often are exploiting technology to abuse our fundamental freedoms.” Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, has said the Justice Department will abandon its practice of seizing reporter records and will formalize that stance soon.

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Franklin County Judge Including Mandatory Coronavirus Vaccine in Terms of Probation

Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye of Ohio’s Franklin County has been including mandatory coronavirus vaccines in the terms of defendants’ respective probations, attaching the stipulation to three of his recent cases.

“It occurred to me that at least some of these folks need to be encouraged not to procrastinate,” Frye said, according to the Columbus Dispatch, which said the judge openly discussed vaccination statuses with the defendants.

According to reports, none of the defendants cited religious, moral, or medical reasons for not yet getting the vaccine.

“I think it’s a reasonable condition when we’re telling people to get employed and be out in the community,” Frye added.

One of the defendants who received the condition, Cameron Stringer, “entered a guilty plea for one charge of improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, for which he was sentenced to two years of probation,” per the Dispatch. A coronavirus shot is one of several conditions of his probation, court documents show.

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Scientists unearth ‘5,000 year old PLAGUE BACTERIA’ that caused Black Death from skull of long-dead pandemic victim in Latvia

An ancient skull found by a river in modern-day Latvia may well hold clues as to how the bubonic plague wiped out tens of millions of people across Europe in what would eventually become the deadliest pandemic in human history.

Researchers from Kiel University in Germany revealed on Wednesday that a strain of the bacterium, known as Yersina pestis, dating back millenia, had been discovered in samples taken from the remains of a hunter gatherer in the Baltic nation. As part of a paper published in the Cell scientific journal, they say the man, estimated to have been in his 20s, lived around 5,000 years ago.

In a revelation that could have implications for the understanding of current and future pandemics, the academics say that this early variant was likely less infectious and deadly than the one that ravaged Eurasia thousands of years later. The Black Death, spread by rats and fleas, is estimated to have killed between 75 and 200 million people from 1347 to 1351.

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