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.

It’s Not Okay For Grown Adults To Say The Ukraine Invasion Was “Unprovoked”

On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.

“Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said. “It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

“Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.”

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Man Behind US Navy’s Largest Corruption Case Hires a U-Haul, Cuts Ankle Tag, and Flees

His unassailable charm was said to have penetrated the U.S. Navy better than the Soviets ever could, as he gained unprecedented access to classified military information through a massive bribery network. Now, Leonard Glenn Francis has pulled off yet another daring feat, successfully escaping house arrest just weeks before he’s set to be sentenced for masterminding the Navy’s largest-ever corruption scandal. 

Widely known as “Fat Leonard” for his 350-pound, 6-foot-three stature, Malaysian businessman Francis cut his GPS monitoring ankle bracelet off on Sunday and fled his San Diego home, where he’s been under house arrest since 2018. 

Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Omar Castillo told reporters on Monday that police arrived at Francis’ home concerned about his health after being notified of a problem with his bracelet, only to find nobody home.

“As of now, multiple leads are being investigated,” Castillo said, adding that Francis’ neighbors had seen U-Haul moving trucks at his house in the days before his escape. None notified police of his brazen and slow-paced escape, though it’s not clear whether they knew who resided at the property.

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UFO in Texas? Mysterious lights caught on camera in Round Rock

Did people in Central Texas see some UFOs in the sky?

That’s what many people are wondering after several videos captured some mysterious lights in the evening on September 1.

Video shared to FOX 7 Austin caught the lights in the Round Rock area of Brushy Creek.

Emily White, who spoke to FOX 7 Austin’s Rudy Koski, says, “It was mesmerizing, honestly. It was so silent because if it was one light, then I would have maybe thought, ‘Oh, a helicopter, a plane, something like that.’ But like there was so many of them together.”

When asked if she thought it was a close encounter, White said, “I’ll be honest, kind of. I don’t know if I believe in all that, but, I don’t know. Maybe, I hear a lot of it in like America that that kind of things happens. I think it’s just because of like it didn’t make any noise at all, which I just thought was really odd. But, yeah, definitely, definitely felt like it was like the alien invasion or something on the way.”

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The Historic Collapse of Journalism

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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Swiss Face Up to 3 Years in Prison For Violating Heating Rules

People in Switzerland who violate the country’s new heating rules which forbid setting the temperature above 19°C (66.2F) in the colder months will face up to three years in prison.

Yes, really.

Under the new rules, buildings that use gas heating systems are restricted to 19°C, while hot water can only be heated up to 60°C and radiant heaters are banned entirely.

It will also be forbidden to heat swimming polls and saunas.

Depending on the severity of the violation and the individual’s economic situation, fines will range from 30 to 3,000 Swiss francs ($30 to $3,050), while people could also be imprisoned for up to three years.

Utility companies and larger businesses would face even more severe penalties for breaking the energy rationing rules.

Despite the brazenly authoritarian restrictions, Economy Minister Guy Parmelin asserted, “We are not a police state,” although he acknowledged police would perform “spot checks” to try to catch violators.

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Eric Adams increases restrictions on New Yorkers’ right to buy firearms

New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has pledged to enact door-to-door investigations, including knocking on the doors of applicant’s neighbors, before issuing gun permits to Big Apple residents.

As part of New York’s new gun safety law, NYPD officers will knock on neighbors’ doors as part of the background check investigation requirements of potential gun permit holders.

According to the New York Post, during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning Adams said, “It is really about using the good, old-fashioned methods of doing an investigation.”

Adams continued, “When I became a police officer, people knocked on my neighbor’s doors and interviewed them and asked what type of person am I.”

Following the US Supreme Court’s decision overturning a 1913 state law mandating individuals to show “proper cause” for carrying firearms in the state, New York officials added extra requirements for individuals seeking concealed carry weapons permits that went into effect on September 1.

Adams, a former police captain, added, “And I think those are the same skills that’s going to be used to look at not only social media but also knocking our neighbors’ doors, speaking to people, finding out who this individual is that we are about to allow to carry a firearm in our city.”

As part of the background checks, applicants will be subjected to an in-person interview, as well as be required to provide four character references, a list of former and current social media accounts spanning three years, and disclose the names of their spouse or any other adults living in their home.

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