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.

The Fantasy of Fanaticism

For a moment in time, it looked as if reality had managed to finally carve its way through the dense fog of propaganda-driven misinformation that had dominated Western media coverage of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.

In a stunning admission, Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and Intelligence Services, noted that the optimism that existed in Ukraine following Russia’s decision to terminate “Phase One” of the SMO (a major military feint toward Kiev), and begin “Phase Two” (the liberation of the Donbass), was no longer warranted. “The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now,” Danylyuk noted. “They are being much more successful. They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”

“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” Danylyuk concluded.

In short, Russia was winning.

Danylyuk’s conclusions were not derived from some esoteric analysis drawn from Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but rather basic military math. In a war that had become increasingly dominated by the role of artillery, Russia simply was able to bring to bear on the battlefield more firepower than Ukraine.

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Watergate at 50: Revelations From Newly Declassified Evidence

“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” By this admirable standard, no non-fiction writer of the 20th century fulfilled his duty to history – to the record of our times – more fully, more brilliantly, than Jim Hougan.

When Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA was first published by Random House in November 1984 – more than a decade after the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon – it presented such a large volume of new and revelatory information about a subject so widely considered exhausted that the book was greeted with the staggered astonishment typically reserved for apparitions.

“If even half of this is true,” wrote J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times Book Review, “Secret Agenda will add an important new dimension to our understanding of Watergate.” Lukas’ was an important voice. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, he had covered Watergate for the New York Times Magazine and wrote Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years in 1976. This critically acclaimed book was the first comprehensive account of Watergate. “But,” Lukas added, “it may be months before reporters can sort through this material, check Mr. Hougan’s sources and decide which of these revelations is solid gold, which dross.”

Now, 40 years after Secret Agenda appeared, the verdict is in. While some of Hougan’s analytic conclusions have come under challenge – including by me, an avowed acolyte of the author – the wealth of new facts and documentation he presented has stood the test of time. Where once it seemed impossible to reckon with the contribution Secret Agenda made to Watergate, it is now impossible to reckon with Watergate, even after the release of thousands more tapes and documents, without reference to Hougan.

Introducing his findings, Hougan described Secret Agenda as “an attempt to correct the record … and to suggest avenues of further investigation.” Several authors over the ensuing decades, including me, took him up on that challenge, and a couple of epic lawsuits unfolded, with the result that the book’s central thrusts were only strengthened.

Reckoning with Secret Agenda is hardly an academic matter. If Hougan and the other Watergate revisionists are correct, then the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon from power was about much more than a third-rate burglary attempt, the wiretapping of the opposing party, or even a series of covert crimes ordered by a paranoid president. Secret Agenda and its progeny force us, instead, to conceive of Watergate as a Cold War-era power struggle between a duly elected president and the national security state, with Nixon as much a victim in the affair as he was a perpetrator. In a time when legions of Americans believe in the existence of a “deep state,” getting the history of Watergate right takes on new urgency.

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California working on denying gun permits based on “ideological viewpoints”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen on Thursday didn’t simply shoot down New York’s onerous “good-cause requirement” in the gun permit application process. It set up similar laws in other states for likely revocation. One of those states is California, where they have their own requirement that applicants must show a “good cause” or “special need” before a carry permit is issued. State Attorney General Rob Bonta sent out a letter on Friday to law enforcement and government attorneys noting the change and saying that the state’s current “may issue” regime should be able to be converted to a “shall issue” regime with few modifications. So that’s good news, right?

Not so fast. As Eugene Volokh points out at Reason, Bonta pivoted from signaling compliance with the new SCOTUS ruling to identifying another way to deny permits to people with no criminal record. He claims that the ruling will not impact the existing requirement for applicants to be able to demonstrate that they are “of good moral character.” On that basis, the state can start snooping around to see if you hold any unauthorized opinions or are prone to demonstrate “hatred and racism.” And how would they know that? Well, by going through your social media accounts, of course.

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Is THIS where NYPD’s subway resources are going, Mayor Eric? Outrage as beloved busker with his dancing toy cats is taken down by six cops while serious crime soars and terrified commuters REFUSE to take train

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he was stunned by how bad Big Apple subway riders had it until he rode the subway himself last week and realized how poorly cops were being used to crack down on crime underground.

As subway crime continues to spike – rising nearly 40 percent from the first half of last year – Adams, in an exclusive interview with the New York Post, said he patrolled the transit system himself late at night for three hours and didn’t care for what he saw. 

‘Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,’ Adams told the Post.

Days before the mayor touted his awakening on the hazards of subway travel, a video emerged of at least six NYPD officers arresting busker John Ajilo, a saxophone player with the catch phrase ‘Dancing is Happiness.’

‘I was shut down, handcuffed and taken to the police station for performing in the same spot 34th Herald Square I have been performing [in] on and off for about five years,’ he said on his GoFundMe page, which has already collected over $30,000. 

Mayor Adams said he first knew he had to do something about subway crime about three weeks in office.

‘It was probably, the third — third or fourth week in January. I spent a lot of time in the office,’ he said.  ‘And I started peeling back layers and what it started to unveil to me is how we just had this good shell, but underneath — it’s bad.’

The New York City subway is run by the New York City Transit Authority, which falls under the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, controlled by the chairman, Janno Lieber, who was appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and confirmed by the state Senate in January.

The mayor appoints several members of the MTA board, but has little control over the operation and maintenance of the system.

Ridership on the subway is just under 60 percent of what it was pre-pandemic, with roughly 3.4 million daily commuters using the system.

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Socialist Reddit group posts home addresses of Supreme Court justices, discusses hunting them down at their churches. TikTok user hint at using pipe bombs in retaliation to Roe v. Wade reversal.

One of the top posts in a socialist subreddit featured the addresses of Supreme Court justices that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Reddit users in the anti-capitalist group discussed hunting down Supreme Court justices at their churches and possibly sending them mail bombs.

The alarming threats were made in r/WorkersStrikeBack – a self-described “leftist, anti-capitalist, socialist subreddit that is dedicated to support worker strikes, protests and unions all over the world, address the obvious problems related to an average worker’s workplace, offer advice to a fellow worker struggling with their workplace problems and mock or satirize any kind of anti-worker sentiment.”

The post broadcasted the home addresses of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch.

At the time of publication, the post doxxing the Supreme Court justices had been allowed up in the subreddit for more than 22 hours. What is most concerning is the post received nearly 27,000 upvotes in the online socialist community of 97,000 users.

There were over 2,000 comments to the doxxing post – some suggested violence in retaliation for overturning Roe v. Wade.

A Reddit user urged people to hunt Supreme Court justices at their churches.

“Find their churches. The area they live in is super wealthy and they all definitely are part of local bloated churches. Find their churches, they can never be free, because you can track when they’re home by when they they go to their local church.”

One Reddit user asks, “Where are the 2nd homes?”

A mail carrier appears to request that domestic terrorists don’t use the mail service to deliver bombs to Supreme Court justices, but instead called for “more direct action.”

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BBC staff told there are more than 150 genders

The BBC hired “trans and nonbinary inclusion” consultants to tell its staff that there are more than 150 genders and instruct them to police each other’s use of gender pronouns, the Telegraph reported on Saturday. 

According to the report, the BBC emailed its radio producers and program editors urging them to attend several training sessions last year organized by Global Butterflies, a group that describes itself on LinkedIn as offering “Trans & Non-binary Corporate Inclusion Training and Consultation.”

During the sessions, staff were reportedly told that “people can self-identify themselves in over 150 ways, and increasing!” They were shown examples of newly-invented gender pronouns such as “xe, xem, xyrs,” and told to include their own pronouns in their email signatures to be more “inclusive and welcoming” and to further their “trans brand.”

Those opting to go by traditional “he/she” pronouns were told that these descriptors “can create discomfort, stress and anxiety” for trans and non-binary colleagues, and that “using correct pronouns and names reduces depression and suicide risks.”

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US solider pleads guilty to plotting rampage with neo-Nazi occultists

An Army paratrooper with ties to a neo-Nazi occult group pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he aimed to ignite a race war beginning with a plot to massacre fellow U.S. soldiers in his platoon.

Ethan Melzer was arrested in June 2020 after sending sensitive information about the location, movements and security measures of his regiment in encrypted messages to members of a group called Order of Nine Angles.

The Counter Extremism Project says the Order of Nine Angles is full of neo-Nazi-Satanists whose nihilistic ideology “supports violent jihadist terrorism, in line with its accelerationist philosophy to support the destruction of the current world order.”

Facing possible life imprisonment on eight counts., the 24-year-old Army private from Louisville, Kentucky, was set to go to a jury trial after the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Melzer had pleaded not guilty in 2020 but changed his tune Friday afternoon, offering guilty pleas on three counts in connection with leaking his Army unit’s overseas location to an occultist fascist group that has deep ties to neo-Nazism, with the intention to facilitate a “mass-casualty” attack against his comrades.

The three counts to which Melzer pleaded guilty are attempting to murder U.S. service members, providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists, and illegally transmitting national defense information.

Melzer’s indictment says he communicated with members of his neo-Nazi group through the Rapewaffen Division Channel on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, plotting an attack on U.S. soldiers in the 173rd Airborne Brigade when it was set for deployment from Camp Ederle in Vicenza, Italy, to a base in Turkey.

It was Melzer’s hope, authorities say, that in transmitting the sensitive location, strength and weaponry details of the troops to Islamic extremist terror cells in the region, that the ensuing attacks would spark war in Muslim-majority countries.

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Pfizer Vaccine Impairs Sperm Count—Conspiracy Theorists Were Right

A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Andrology on June 17 vindicates another dark suspicion about COVID-19 vaccines: they harm male fertility. Specifically, researchers find declining sperm counts for up to five months after the second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 jab.

Previously, any legitimate questions about COVID-19 vaccination affecting fertility were dismissed using the perverse rhetoric of “there’s no evidence” (it’s dependent upon the advocates of a universally distributed medical product to prove it’s safe, not the other way around). Then, there was a published study that seemingly disproved any male fertility concerns.

“We now have evidence that should reassure you that the risk of immunization compromising your sperm count is extremely low,” Dr. David Cohen, a reproduction expert, told CNN.

“Because the vaccines contain mRNA and not the live virus, it is unlikely that the vaccine would affect sperm parameters,” stated study author Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy, director of the Reproductive Urology Fellowship program at the University of Miami.

After the publication of the study and positive support from the scientific community, all male fertility concerns were brushed aside. Anyone who dared question the parameters of the study or the longer-term effects was now relegated to a conspiracy theorist. As someone who generally doesn’t like to engage in speculation, I was not one of these people—but I vividly recall it happening.

There was one severe limitation of the study: it only looked at sperm counts before the first dose and 70 days after the second. What happens after two months remained a mystery, but a mystery not worth worrying about as we were told.

The new study published in Andrology tested beyond 70 days and tested sperm counts from men who donated sperm to three fertility clinics in Israel. The study had four phases: a pre-vaccination baseline control, and a short-term (15–45 days), intermediate (75–120 days), and long-term (>150 days) test.

In the first phase (15–45 days), no significant change in sperm concentration or motility was found.

However, the intermediate evaluation (75–120 days) showed a temporary 15.4 percent sperm concentration decrease, which led to a total motile count (TMC) reduction of 22.1 percent compared to the pre-vaccination baseline control. The study authors concluded that the immune response induced by the Pfizer vaccine “is a reasonable cause for transient semen concentration and TMC decline.”

This study isn’t without its limitations. There was no control group of unvaccinated sperm donors to compare to. Moreover, only relative reduction rates were given rather than absolute sperm counts. If the broader data paints an even darker picture, it’s possible it was obscured given the tremendous amount of public and institutional pressure to support the unchallengeable holy biotechnology (see the backlash Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg and colleagues faced for publishing the vaccine myocarditis studies).

The biggest unanswered question from this study is the reproductive side effects associated with a booster shot. Study participants were given a third dose, but data collection ended after the second shot. Moreover, this data is only for the Pfizer vaccine. As we’ve seen with myocarditis, the Moderna vaccine has severalfold (approximately three to five times) higher rates of myocarditis compared to Pfizer. If the differential vaccine damage for myocarditis in any way aligns with sperm count impairment, this would be a medical disaster.

Vaccine fanatics have always dismissed concerns as “conspiracy theory.” That vaccines are wildly ineffective at preventing transmission was once a conspiracy theory. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson was kicked off Twitter for making this claim, alongside other “misinformation.”

Robust evidence showing vaccines cause an unacceptably high rate of myocarditis in men has also been bizarrely challenged, ignored, and distorted (see Dr. Sanjay Gupta on The Joe Rogan Experience).

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Police State Madness — Man Given Traffic Ticket for Not Having a Seatbelt ON HIS DOG

In the land of the free, if law enforcement witnesses you driving your personally owned vehicle with dark window tint or without your seatbelt on, they will pull you over and issue a citation, otherwise known as extortion. If you refuse to acknowledge this extortion, or attempt to resist it, you will be kidnapped and caged. If you refuse to be kidnapped and caged, you can and will have violence brought upon you, and can and will be killed. The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous traffic citations over the years, which started over victimless crimes and ended with someone getting beaten or killed.

While there is no shortage of videos of people being killed over seatbelt violations — or even dogs being killed by cops — we’ve never seen an incident in which someone was given a ticket for their dog not wearing a seatbelt. 

All that has changed this week, however, as the infamously ticket-happy police department in Washington, Louisiana has made news once again for issuing a ticket to a resident because his dog wasn’t buckled up. Seriously.

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Merrick Garland: Drop the Charges Against Julian Assange

I turned on the news yesterday and there was Attorney General Merrick Garland somewhere in Ukraine, talking about being part of the effort to prosecute war crimes charges against the Russian invaders. Coincidentally, the night before seeing our chief prosecutor in Ukraine, I had finished reading Nils Melzer’s recently-published book, the Trial of Julian Assange, which is an eloquent and devastating exposé of endemic political corruption deep within the state apparatuses of the US, the UK, Sweden, and other countries.

The unmistakable fact is that Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is still actively pursuing the extradition of Julian Assange, in order for him to face charges under the Espionage Act and spend the rest of his life in prison. This is the same Espionage Act that the Nixon administration considered using against Daniel Ellsberg, for leaking what became known as the Pentagon Papers, which were published in the New York Times and elsewhere.

Unlike Ellsberg, Assange did not himself steal, hack, or otherwise make off with secret documents that exposed US war crimes. He only facilitated the leaking of these documents, and the eventual publication of redacted parts of them by Wikileaks, the New York Times, and most of the rest of the world’s media. But unlike with Ellsberg, the government is going ahead with prosecuting someone — a journalist and editor named Julian Assange — under the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act is one of these laws that is on the books but is not generally considered particularly useful by prosecutors because the law is so blatantly an outrageous, draconian relic of the Red Scare, an example of the most authoritarian responses to the militant labor movement of the post-World War 1 period. Enforcing the Espionage Act makes a complete mockery of all of the most fundamental democratic institutions. It’s obviously in total conflict with the First Amendment and many other elements of the Bill of Rights. The possibility that other journalists who expose war crimes might go to prison for the rest of their lives for violating the Espionage Act is a terrifying prospect. But Garland’s prosecution of a journalist for exposing war crimes under the Espionage Act continues.

While Garland makes plans to help prosecute war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, the war crimes committed by US forces in Bagram, Kama Ado, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Fallujah, Haditha, Baghdad, and on and on and on, go almost entirely unprosecuted and unpunished, and generally unacknowledged, except when the media spotlight is temporarily impossible to ignore, and a few crocodile tears must be shed to maintain appearances. But even while occasional noises are made by officials to half-heartedly acknowledge some of the shortcomings of the US military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the person most responsible for bringing the knowledge of these shortcomings to the global public is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

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