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.

US lawmakers reach deal on gun control

Members of the US Senate have announced an agreement on a bipartisan deal that could mark the nation’s most significant gun control legislation in three decades. The news comes as lawmakers are facing increasing pressure to find ways to reduce gun violence amid a series of mass shootings.

The legislation will include funding to help states implement ‘red flag’ laws, which enable police to take weapons away from people who are deemed to pose a risk to others or themselves, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), one of the lead negotiators, said on Sunday. It also will feature billions of dollars in new funding for mental health services, including a nationwide network of clinics, as well as school safety initiatives.

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PayPal and Etsy ban evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright

Dr. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, has been banned from PayPal and Etsy. The online financial service and e-commerce platform did not specify why he was banned.

At the end of May, Dr. Wright provided an expert declaration for the Women’s Liberation Front, which is working to protect single-sex prisons.

“The only factual, objective meaning of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are as references to adult human females, and adult human males, respectively,” Wright wrote in the declaration.

“From an objective standpoint, a person’s subjective feelings do not define or change their sex, which is factually and statically either male or female, determined before birth, and defined by objective reproductive anatomy.”

Dr. Wright announced the PayPal ban on Twitter, saying that he used the service to receive both recurring and one-time donations from his supporters.

PayPal wrote to Dr. Wright that, “after a review, we have decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

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‘Squad’ Dems spend thousands on airfare while demanding others go ‘green’

Democratic members of the House who pushed “Green New Deal” reforms to overhaul the energy sector spent roughly $13,000 in tax dollars combined on airfare, according to the latest House disbursement records reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Jamaal Bowman of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Cori Bush of Missouri expensed the “airfare commercial transport” charges between October 2021 and March 2022, according to the records. The new disbursements are intended to be for the months of January and March 2022, and one ethics expert familiar with the situation said lawmakers often report transactions late.

These same members, who are often referred to as the “Squad,” have emphasized that “climate change” is an “existential” or “emergency” crisis.

The “Squad” members notably co-sponsored a bill introduced by Ocasio-Cortez in 2021 calling for the creation of a “Green New Deal.” The bill, which was roundly opposed by Republicans and many Democrats, allocated $8.1 billion to a “climate corps,” among other proposals.

Carbon dioxide emissions from flying are said to increase pollution, according to a study by the left-wing think tank Brookings Institution. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution in 2019 sought to overhaul “transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and 19 greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

“The hypocrisy of the Green New Deal crowd is endless,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told TheDCNF. “They seem to view themselves as part of an elite that is exempt from the energy poverty policies they pursue.”

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Ex high-ranking Seattle cop who displayed Nazi insignia to get $1.5M from city

A suburban Seattle city will pay more than $1.5 million to settle a dispute with a former assistant police chief who was disciplined for posting a Nazi rank insignia on his office door and joking about the Holocaust.

Former Kent Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell, who had been with the department for nearly three decades, was initially given two weeks of unpaid leave after the 2020 incident. Outraged residents and members of the Jewish community prompted Mayor Dana Ralph to put Kammerzell on paid administrative leave and demand his resignation.

The city’s attempt to essentially discipline Kammerzell a second time led to a dispute between his lawyers and the city that appeared headed for litigation. But interim city Chief Administrative Officer Arthur “Pat” Fiztpatrick, who is also the city attorney, said Friday the city had resolved the matter through negotiation, The Seattle Times reported.

Ralph, in calling for Kammerzell’s resignation in January, acknowledged that the decision to revisit the discipline issue would likely “come at a high cost.” The city said Friday it would pay him $1,520,000 to resign.

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Why the FBI Dismissed Claims of Secret Trump–Russia Link

FBI agents, just weeks before the 2016 election, opened an investigation into allegations of a secret communication channel between Donald Trump and Russia. The bureau closed the probe after several months but did not make public that it had dismissed the claims, which came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a group of researchers.

Details of the FBI’s analyses, and CIA treatment of the claims, emerged during the trial of ex-Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann.

‘Jumped to Conclusions’

The white paper and data handed over to the FBI by Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, asserted there was a “secret email server” used by the Trump Organization that was communicating with Alfa Bank in Moscow through “another unusually-configured server” at Spectrum Health in Michigan.

“These servers are configured for direct communications between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank to the exclusion of all other systems,” researchers wrote. “The only plausible reason,” they claimed, “is to hide the considerably recent email traffic occurring between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank.”

Scott Hellman, an agent who specializes in investigating cyber crimes, took the first crack at the allegations with Nathan Batty, a colleague. The pair spent inside of a day examining the data, and quickly concluded that whoever penned the white paper “had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” Hellman testified.

The allegations were based on purported “look-ups,” or Domain Name System requests, between mail1.trump-email.com, the server allegedly controlled by Trump’s business, and servers belonging to the Russian bank. DNS lookups are a way for a computer to find another computer’s Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique number needed for communication between computers.

The researchers said they tried to connect with the Trump server and that the server would not accept mail from their IP address, or returned what was essentially an error message, Hellman said. The researchers used that, among other data, to suggest the Trump server would only communicate with certain devices, such as those linked to Alfa Bank.

“That didn’t make sense to me. It was sort of like if I knocked on your door, and you told me to go away—I don’t want to talk to you—I’m then going to assume that you’re only willing to talk to other people. I can’t make that assumption. I don’t know if you’re willing to talk to anybody. But that’s what they had done,” he said. “When they received an error message, they assumed that that computer wasn’t willing to talk to them, but it was willing to talk to others, and there was no evidence to suggest that. So assumptions like that is what I was referring to.”

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“Queer” Academic Suggests Pedophilia Be Taught in Schools as an Innate Sexuality

A professor of Ethics at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway has called to legalize AI-generated child pornography, claiming that pedophilia should be seen as an innate sexuality that requires destigmatization.

Ole Martin Moen, a gay man who identifies as “queer,” currently serves as a member of the advisory board on Norway’s Patient Organization for Gender-Incongruence (PKI), a social and political lobby group for trans rights. According to their official website, PKI’s purpose is to provide access to “gender-affirming treatment” to the public “regardless of factors like non-binary identity, sexual practice or having other diagnosis.” Moen has also served as academic council at Civita, Norway’s largest liberal think tank, since 2015.

Recently, Moen targeted Christina Ellingsen, a Norwegian feminist who is facing a police investigation and a potential sentence of three years in prison for tweets in which she stated that men cannot be lesbians.

Moen has repeatedly harassed the Twitter account of Women’s Declaration International Norway, making false claims about the nature of the investigation against Ellingsen.

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Mysterious drone attacks on US war ships solved

A mysterious series of attacks on US Navy warships off the coast of California in 2019 have been revealed to be caused by a cluster of drones launched from a Hong Kong cargo ship, a new report says.

The bizarre incidents, which were reported between March 30 and July 30, 2019 on seven warships and had led to speculation that they were caused by unidentified aerial phenomena or UFOs, came to light Friday after the publication of previously classified US Navy memos and ships’ logs, obtained by The Drive under Freedom to Information legislation.

The drone attacks caused high-level concern because they took place near a sensitive naval training area near the Channel Islands. Nearly two years after the attacks, Marine General Kenneth McKenzie Jr. called them “the most concerning tactical development since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq.”

Among the revelations in The Drive’s cache of documents were that on July 15, 2019, Navy warships reported drones that they suspected were being launched from a Hong Kong civilian cargo ship, the MS Bass Strait. The initial report of the drone clusters was reported by sailors on the USS Bunker Hill, which recorded 11 drone attacks, according to the newly released documents.

The US ship called in a special team known as SNOOPIE — Ship Nautical or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation — to document the drones. Sailors also radioed the nearby Bass Strait, but the crew did not respond, according to the logs obtained by The Drive.

Another US Navy ship — the USS Paul Hamilton — which was on its way to Long Beach, California, also summoned its SNOOPIE team to document drones above their ship. The crew noted in their internal report to the US Navy that “MV Bass Strait likely using UAVs (unidentified aerial vehicles) to conduct surveillance on US Naval Forces.”

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Democratic Philly Mayor Wants To Arrest Man for Defending Himself During Mass Shooting

Democratic Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney, who during last year’s historic crime wave cut police funding, wants to throw a man in jail for defending himself during a mass shooting, even as the city’s far-left district attorney admits the man was acting in self-defense.

Prosecutors told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Gregory Jackson, 34, shot Micah Towns, 23, leading Towns to return fire and kill Jackson. In the melee that followed, a third man, Quran Garner, 18, pulled a gun and began firing into a nearby crowd. While police told the Inquirer that “the precise sequence of the confrontation was unclear” and that more gunmen might have been involved, the incident left 3 people dead and 12 wounded.

Kenney said during a virtual gun-violence briefing that “anybody who fired a gun that day should be locked up.” The mayor said Towns, who remains hospitalized in critical condition, is partially responsible for escalating the shooting because he didn’t walk away from the fight.

Kenney’s call to jail Towns comes as mainstream media sources claim that “a good guy with a gun” is “a myth” and “a deadly American fantasy.” Towns is far from the only armed individual to try to stop a mass shooting, however. Just weeks earlier, an armed off-duty Border Patrol agent helped evacuate Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, during the May 24 mass shooting at the school.

Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.), a soft-on-crime prosecutor who has received more than a million dollars from liberal megadonor George Soros, blasted the mayor’s words, saying Towns was acting in self-defense.

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The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truth

The FBI knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was utter bunk even as it suggested otherwise to Congress, the courts and the public early in 2017. Evidence revealed by special counsel John Durham proves it beyond dispute.

At RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry lays out the case.

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job. 

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.  

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit. 

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