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.

Google triggers criminal probe after dad takes photos of his toddler, naked, for doctor

Google triggered a criminal investigation and locked a man out of his accounts after flagging photos he sent to his son’s pediatrician as potential child pornography, according to the New York Times.

The tech company initially flagged the images when they were automatically uploaded to Google servers from the father’s phone, according to the NYT. After a nearly year-long investigation of everything in his Google account, including search history, location history, messages and photos, police determined he hadn’t committed a crime.

The father, referred to only as Mark by the NYT, had taken photos of his young son, naked, at the request of a doctor over concerns about his infected penis, according to the NYT. Google quickly locked him out of his account after scanning the photos, and he lost emails, contacts and personal photos and had to get a new phone number after losing access to his Google Fi account.

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Woke New York Gov. Signs Bill to Scrap ‘Gendered Language’

If you didn’t think the state of New York could get any more woke, think again. In the land of radical liberal policies, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is taking it a step further. 

Earlier this week, Hochul signed a bill that would ban the word “salesman” and replace it with “salesperson” as well as replace words such as “his” and “her” with the woke pronoun “they” and “them.” 

Senate Bill 536, or the Salesman Law, was proposed to change forms of “gendered language” so that they would be more “inclusive” among everyone. 

“This legislation amends Real Property Tax Law Article 12-a to change the word salesman to salesperson… further this legislation removes gendered language from the Article by removing references to ‘his or her’ in favor of ‘their,’ changes ‘himself’ to ‘themselves,’ as well as appropriate changes to variations of these words,” according to the bill. 

Welcome to Democrat-controlled New York, where passing a law to better suit liberals who get offended by a word is more important than spending the time to fix the city’s crime problem. 

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Classified 1990 UFO photograph has surfaced 32 years on

A photo taken by two men who spotted a strange object above Scotland in 1990 has finally been published.On August 4th of that year, two young chefs had been walking in the Cairngorms National Park near Perth when they spotted a strange diamond-shaped object in the sky nearby.

Terrified, the men hid behind some bushes to observe the mysterious craft.

A short time later, they heard the sound of an RAF jet approaching. The plane seemed to change course and circle the UFO for a time before returning to its original course.

Keen to take a photograph, one of the men aimed their camera at the sky and took a few snaps.

A few seconds later, the object flew upwards into the heavens and was gone.Convinced that they had seen a UFO, the men passed their best photograph along to a local newspaper, however it was promptly handed over to the Ministry of Defense and was never published.

The image would stay classified, in fact, for over 30 years until it turned out that retired RAF officer Craig Lindsay had broken protocol by stashing a copy of it inside his desk.

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Los Angeles Public Health Offers Free COVID-19 Testing for Pets After City Records Zero Pet Cases

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is giving free COVID-19 tests to animals that are thought to have the virus even though there have been no COVID positives among tested animals.

Los Angeles health officials announced the program on Saturday, citing new funding for free COVID-19 testing for pets from the CDC.

“Veterinary Public Health has received funding from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to support surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in animals in Los Angeles County,” a statement on LA Public Health read.

“SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.  This project will help us to learn more about COVID-19 from a One Health perspective, meaning that we can learn more about the significance of COVID-19 in human, animal, and environmental relationships.

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Steven Spielberg’s private jet has burned $116,000 worth of jet fuel in two months

A private jet belonging to Steven Spielberg has burned more than $116,000 worth of jet fuel since June despite the famous Hollywood director’s past warnings about global warming, according to a flight tracking database.

Spielberg’s plane, a Gulfstream G650, has burned at least $116,159 worth of jet fuel over the course of 16 trips spanning nearly 17,000 miles since June 23, according to flight tracking data from ADS-B Exchange and compiled by the database Celebrity Jets. The figures are likely an underestimate since the database didn’t calculate fuel and distance metrics of at least three trips made by Spielberg’s jet.

However, Spielberg has previously stated that global warming “terrified” him and ripped people who “go blithely through life” without caring about their impact on the environment.

“I’m terrified of [global warming],” Spielberg remarked during a 2018 interview for his film Ready Player One. “Global warming is a scientific reality. It’s not a political trick. It’s a true piece of real, measurable, quantifiable science.”

“People have to come around to believing that this is — we are going to have to have a kind of confrontation with destiny unless we do something about it today,” Spielberg said.

He added that “everybody has to be held responsible” for their role in climate change.

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Drama school tells students to report “microaggressions” on QR code system

Britain’s oldest drama school Lamda encouraged students to report microaggressions through QR codes placed around the school. The anonymous reporting system has been trialed and could be fully launched in the fall.

The QR codes at Lamda allowed students to access official complaint forms to report microaggressions they have experienced or observed at the campus. The complaints are logged and monitored to determine if “patterns are emerging.”

Critics have described the system as “totalitarian surveillance,” adding that it raises concerns of “culture denunciation.”

Brain Harris of Free Speech Union, said there are growing concerns about institutions of higher education launching systems that allow “sousveillance,” surveillance conducted by people in the group being surveilled.

“This can include procedures that facilitate students telling tales on one another – even by encouraging the disclosure of private social media messages – as well as the sort of “sousveillance” reported at Lamda,” Harris said, according to The Telegraph.

“Sousveillance is particularly insidious, as it makes teaching staff beholden at any given moment to the most hyper-sensitive (or vexatious) student in the seminar room. It openly cultivates a culture of fear-induced blandness.

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Russia releases video of suspected Moscow car bomber

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has made public a video of Ukrainian national Natalya Vovk, identified as the prime suspect in Saturday’s car bombing that killed journalist Darya Dugina in Moscow. The footage published Monday shows Vovk and her teenage daughter entering Russia, inside the building where Dugina lived, and leaving the country in haste. 

Vovk, 43, was named by the FSB on Monday as the prime suspect in the assassination of Dugina. The Ukrainian national arrived in Russia on July 23, using Donetsk People’s Republic license plates to avoid scrutiny. While in Moscow, she swapped the plates on her Mini Cooper to those of Kazakhstan, a friendly former Soviet republic. On Sunday, after the bombing, Vovk drove to Estonia with Ukrainian plates, the FSB said.

Photos of the different license plates were included as part of the video presentation.

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‘They Don’t Know How They Sound’: Critics Roast Energy Secretary For Telling Poor People To Buy Solar Panels

Critics absolutely roasted Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm after she suggested that lower to middle class Americans could fight the rising cost of living by investing thousands in solar panels and other green energy initiatives.

Granholm made an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” to explain how the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act — which has since been touted as a tax, energy, and health care bill — would impact everyday Americans who are struggling with record-high inflation, food, gasoline, and energy costs.

“If you are low income, you can get your home entirely weatherized through the expansion from the bipartisan infrastructure laws, a significant expansion — you don’t have to pay for anything,” she said, adding, “”If you want heat pumps, insulation, new windows, that is covered,” she said. “If you are moderate income, today you can get 30% off the price of solar panels. Those solar panels can be financed, so you don’t have to have the big outlay at the front … If you don’t qualify for the weatherization program, you will be able to, starting next year, get rebates on the appliances and equipment that will help you reduce your monthly energy bill by up to 30%. That is all about reducing costs for people.”

But as critics quickly pointed out, people who were struggling to feed their kids or wondering how they’d afford the gas to get to work were not just waiting on a 30%-off sale to make the jump to solar — they were just doing what they could to get by.

“GOP just needs to run ad after ad of Granholm telling the poors to buy solar panels and electric cars to save money,” Erick Ericksen tweeted.

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Google continues editorializing searches by adding “content advisories” to search results

It has hardly ever been enough for Google just to be able to censor content on YouTube and apps in its store – “curating” and, critics say, essentially editorializing what users can see when they use Google Search has been high on the list of priorities for a while.

(Article by Didi Rankovic republished from ReclaimTheNet.org)

Coincidentally or not, in the year of US midterm elections, the giant is ramping up this effort to make sure the search engine isn’t simply returning results – like people might still expect it to do – but what Google decides are “trustworthy results” as opposed to “falsehoods and misinformation.”

Google’s self-styled standard of what passes the trustworthiness test is described in the vaguest of terms, ostensibly so that a lot of things can fit that definition: it’s when the behemoth’s systems “don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results.”

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British Columbian Government Forces Unvaccinated Mothers to Repay $50,000 Maternity Leave Benefits

The government of British Columbia, Canada plans to make mothers who work in the public sector who refuse vaccinations responsible for paying back their maternity leave.

According to the BC government, birth mothers who work for the British Columbia Public Service are entitled to 17 weeks of paid leave and may also qualify for the federal government’s Employment Insurance (EI) maternity benefit and the province’s own maternity leave allowance.

But now, those working in the BC Public Service who are pregnant and have not been completely vaccinated against COVID-19 will have to pay back their whole maternity leave top-up benefit and may also lose their jobs.

A statement from the provincial government told My PG Now: “The vaccination policy stipulates that BC Public Service employees who do not receive two doses of vaccination against COVID-19, or refuse to disclose their vaccination status, and do not have an approved exemption request, are to be placed on a leave without pay for a period of at least three months, after which they may be terminated.”

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