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.

NO CHARGES Despite Video Showing Cop Dump 13 Rounds Into Unarmed Child—He Got a Bonus Instead

January of this year was the 4th anniversary of Sheila and Steve Albers’ son’s death. Their 17-year-old son was gunned down by police while unarmed. As is normally the case when police kill unarmed and often innocent people, no charges were filed against Overland Park Officer Clayton Jenison who shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old boy on January 20, 2018. On top of refusing to charge the officer, police have also repeatedly refused to release records concerning the case, despite claiming they would do so three years ago.

On Friday, the Department of Justice announced that it will not pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against Jenison, claiming they could not prove all elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

Officials met privately with members of the Albers family to notify them of the decision.

The DoJ’s decision is in spite of the fact that during a civil lawsuit based on this incident, the DOJ noted that a federal district court in Kansas ruled that a reasonable jury could find that the officer involved in the shooting had indeed used unreasonable force when he fired the first two shots at Albers. As WIBW reports, the federal criminal investigation found no substantial evidence inconsistent with this conclusion.

Unfortunately, as WIBW points out, unlike in the many state jurisdictions that have statutes criminalizing killings committed with lesser mental states, like criminal negligence or recklessness, the DOJ said the federal government has no statute to criminalize a police officer’s use of unreasonable force, if willfulness cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

As we reported at the time, police were called to the home of teenager John Albers after his girlfriend said she was afraid he was going to kill himself. Police arrived and Jenison opened fire on Albers as the teen backed out of his driveway.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened their investigation into the case in September of 2020. But now we see that it went nowhere.

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IRS unmasked: Away from politics, America’s tax agency has lots of warts, and ammunition

The Internal Revenue Service has long been a political football. Democrats alleged that in the 1960s it was used by Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon to subvert civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists, while Republicans alleged a decade ago it wrongly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups.

More recently, Democrats have argued the tax agency needs $80 billion in new enforcement to end tax cheating and ease budget deficits, while Republicans say the new spending signed by President Joe Biden will only create an army of 87,000 armed agents intent on wreaking havoc on the middle and working classes.

With so much emotion, scandal and political rhetoric, it’s sometimes hard for everyday Americans to sort fact from fiction. So the team here at Just the News did a deep dive to put together a list of facts about the IRS that aren’t in dispute, from whom it audits to why it buys ammunition and arms its agents.

Over 75% of Plastic in Pacific Garbage Patch Is from Chinese and Japanese Fishermen

A Dutch non-profit group called The Ocean Cleanup released a report on September 1 that found the bulk of the plastic debris in the so-called North Pacific Garbage Patch consists of discarded fishing equipment from Japan and China. 

The garbage patch is often depicted in Western media and popular culture as refuse created by heavy industry or thrown into the ocean by careless Americans and Europeans. Much of the trash heap supposedly consists of minuscule debris known as microplastics.

The North Pacific Garbage Patch (NPGP), first discovered in 1997, was created by intersecting ocean currents between the West Coast of the United States and the Hawaiian Islands. Researchers later found small debris moving through a “subtropical convergence zone” to another garbage patch on the far side of the Pacific, east of Japan. The NPGP is estimated to cover several million square kilometers, weighing in at tens of thousands of tons.

According to research by The Ocean Cleanup published in Scientific Reports, up to 86 percent of the debris in the North Pacific Garbage Patch actually consists of “items that were abandoned, lost, or discarded by fishing vessels.”

The Ocean Cleanup began its revolutionary study in 2019, a year after a surprising survey that found almost half of the debris in the garbage patch was from discarded fishing nets. The study that began in 2019 harvested over 6,000 plastic objects from the ocean by dragging huge U-shaped nets behind research vessels. To the surprise of the researchers, the bulk of the identifiable debris they collected was “fishing and aquaculture gear,” including equipment used to harvest fish, oysters, and eel.

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The Triumph of the Official Narrative: How the TV Networks Hid the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11

This article is the second installment of a two-part research project we began in July 2020 with the article “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.”

In that article, our goal was to determine the prevalence, among television reporters on 9/11, of the hypothesis that explosions had brought down the Twin Towers. Through careful review of approximately 70 hours of news coverage on 11 different channels, we found that the explosion hypothesis was not only common among reporters but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.

Our second question, which we set aside for the present article, was to determine how, despite its prevalence, the explosion hypothesis was supplanted by the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse.

In this article, we shall concentrate not on reporters in the field, as in Part 1, but on the news anchors and their guests who were tasked with discovering and making sense of what was happening. As we trace the supplanting of the explosion hypothesis with the fire-induced collapse hypothesis, we witness the great shift toward what quickly became the Official Narrative.

We do not see our task as trying to discover whether the Official Narrative of 9/11 is true or false. In the 21 years since the attacks took place, it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt, we believe, that the Official Narrative is false.

While we support and participate in the further accumulation of evidence for this position, as well as the presentation of this evidence to the public, we believe it is also important to look into how the triumph of the Official Narrative was accomplished. If we are able to discover this, we will greatly advance our understanding of the psychological operation conducted on September 11, 2001 — and, thus, our understanding of how other psychological operations are perpetrated on the public.

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QAnon Follower Killed Wife and Shot Daughter Before Cops Shot Him Dead

A 53-year-old Michigan man who was consumed by “Stop the steal” and QAnon conspiracies allegedly shot his wife, daughter, and their dog at their suburban Detroit home early Sunday morning, killing his wife and the dog.

He was shot dead by police officers moments later when he exited his home and began firing at the officers. While police said Sunday they don’t know what led to Igor Lanis shooting his wife, Tina, 56, and one of their daughters, Rachel, 25, another daughter who was not in the house at the time has claimed that QAnon is to blame.

“My Qdad snapped and killed my family this morning,” Rebecca Lanis, 21, wrote in a thread on the QAnon Casualties subreddit on Sunday, hours before the Detroit police and media first reported the details of the shooting.

She wrote that “growing up, my parents were extremely loving and happy people. I always had a special bond with both my parents.” But, she said, things began to change with her father a couple of years ago, after former President Donald Trump contested the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“In 2020 after Trump lost, my dad started going down the Q rabbit hole,” she wrote in the forum, which provides support to the families of those who’ve been affected by QAnon believers. “He kept reading conspiracy theories about the stolen election, Trump, vaccines, etc. It kept getting worse and he verbally snapped at us a few times. Nothing physical though. He never got physical with anybody.”

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A Simple Plastic Tool Is Undermining New Ghost Gun Rules

It’s been less than a month since new federal rules took effect attempting to rein in the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns,” a catchall term for unserialized, home-built firearms that Democratic leaders, law enforcement officials, and gun control groups say are turning up in the hands of criminals across the United States.

But barely a few weeks into the new regulatory regime, the firearms industry has already adapted and scored an early legal victory. And gun enthusiasts have created and released open-source blueprints for a simple plastic tool that offers a relatively quick, easy—and apparently legal—workaround for anyone who still wants to build an untraceable weapon.

The tool, known as a jig, is designed to help with the assembly of the exact type of Glock-style pistol frames that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) is trying to restrict. One version was posted by Ethan Middleton, a Wisconsin-based 3D-printed gun file designer known online as Middleton Made.

“It’s the biggest middle finger to the ATF,” Middleton told VICE News. “Whatever they’re going to do, we’re going to try to find a way around it.”

The new ATF rules, announced by President Joe Biden earlier this year, are largely aimed at “kit guns,” which include a pistol frame and other essential parts, including a jig and other tools for home assembly. When frames come only partially complete (“80 percent” finished, with some holes left undrilled), they are not legally considered firearms, meaning they do not require a serial number and could be purchased without a background check in most states.

The new rules say that when an unfinished frame or receiver is “distributed, or possessed with a compatible jig or template,” it can be considered a firearm under the law because it makes completing the build process faster and easier. 

As a result, some retailers have responded by selling only the pistol frame alone, while others are selling kits that include the necessary parts and tools but no frame. Jigs are a common tool and factory-made versions are available online, but prices have climbed to over $100, making the 3D-printed version an extremely low-cost alternative.

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Crypto Guy: Desperately Poor People Could Be NPCs in Video Games

Getting paid to play video games might sound like a dream to some.

But if the rise of “play-to-earn” games is anything to go by, the reality looks far more like a nightmare. Take the gamers in the developing world who found a new way of earning a living with these games — before, in many cases, getting the rug pulled out from beneath them.

Despite this litany of failure, one crypto advocate has an even more ghoulish suggestion: exploiting the wealth gap in the developing world to fill future games with human-controlled non-playable characters (NPCs).

“With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs,” Mikhai Kossar, an NFT gaming consultant, told Rest of World.

These NPCs could “just populate the world,” he said, or “maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

In short, it’s a demeaning and tragic vision — and one with precedent in the blockchain world.

Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn game that allowed gamers to collect tradeable crypto tokens by playing it, became a way to make money when hard times hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the Philippines in particular, where the average income is low, thousands of gamers found a new way of earning cash by mining in-game currency in Axie Infinity and trading it in for real-world, fiat money.

Despite games like Axie Infinity becoming victims of the crypto crash — the game’s tokens became practically worthless earlier this year, with its in-game economy collapsing like a house of cards — crypto advocates are already wondering what’s next.

And as Kossar’s comments go to show, there are visions even more twisted.

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As Sludge Pours from Mississippi Sinks, Biden Admin Seeks $13 Billion MORE for UKRAINE

According to Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, although the water treatment plant finally failed in August, the system “has been failing for decades” and nothing is being done.

“I have said on multiple occasions that it’s not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when our system would fail,” Lumumba said.

Even before it failed, the city had been on a months-long boil notice because of a warning over disease carrying bacteria in the water supply. Since 2016, officials knew about the corrosion of the system and inadequate treatment — yet nothing was done — and now sludge pours from Jackson residents’ water taps.

Lumumba estimates that it would take roughly $1 billion to get the systems back up and running in a safe capacity but they don’t have it. This is particularly perplexing to many folks who have watched a record amount of US taxpayer dollars in recent months flow outside of the United States and into Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine began in February, Biden authorized $1.3 billion followed by an additional $13.6 billion. This original $15 billion of your tax dollars that got dumped into Ukraine to arm literal Nazis in the region was offensive enough but it was just the tip of the iceberg. In May, the House passed yet another massive spending bill, authorizing another $40 billion in your tax dollars to arm Nazis and keep the country at war. And they show no signs of slowing down.

Since then, various packages of cash and weapons of mass destruction, ranging from just a few hundred million to a billion, have flowed into the arms of welcoming Ukrainian politicians and military leaders.

In late August, the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, this was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. But that wasn’t enough, apparently.

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