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.

Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security

A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech’s power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech’s monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow.

While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the “hallmarks” of Russia disinformation (former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama CIA Director Michael Morrell, former Obama CIA/Pentagon chief Leon Panetta). Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security (Morrell, Panetta, former Bush National Security Adviser Fran Townsend).

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Judge approves Julian Assange’s extradition to US over spying charges

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is one step closer to facing espionage charges in the US after a British judge formally approved his extradition.

The case will go to Britain’s interior minister for a decision, and Assange, 50, still has legal avenues of appeal.

A judge at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday issued the extradition order in a brief hearing, as Assange watched by video link from Belmarsh Prison. He stated his full name and date of birth.

It is up to Home Secretary Priti Patel to decide whether to grant the extradition.

The order comes after the UK Supreme Court last month refused Assange permission to appeal against a lower court’s ruling that he could be extradited.

The move doesn’t exhaust the legal options for Assange, who has sought for years to avoid a trial in the US on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to WikiLeaks’ publication of a massive trove of classified documents more than a decade ago.

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What Proportion of Doctors Are Vaccine Hesitant?

Levels of vaccine hesitancy among physicians may be higher than expected, with 1 in 10 primary care doctors not believing that vaccines are safe, according to a new survey.

Among 625 physicians, 10.1% did not agree that vaccines were safe; 9.3% did not agree that vaccines were effective; and 8.3% did not agree that they were important, Timothy Callaghan, PhD, of Texas A&M School of Public Health in College Station, and colleagues reported online in Vaccine.

The high proportion of hesitancy among primary care doctors “was certainly a surprise for us,” Callaghan told MedPage Today. “We thought it might be a very small proportion of physicians who hold hesitancy about vaccines given that we have lots of evidence of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. However, once we dug into the data, we found that concerns about vaccines in general were far more widespread in the physician population than we might have expected.”

Confidence in vaccines among physicians was still higher than in the general public, as were rates of COVID-19 vaccination, with only 5.2% still unvaccinated at the end of the survey in May 2021. But high levels of vaccine uptake among doctors could have more to do with employer regulations or perceived risks of their workplace environment, Callaghan said.

Indeed, the research project was inspired by Callaghan’s own experience with one of his doctors who was not vaccinated and tried to dissuade Callaghan from COVID vaccination.

“It wasn’t my primary care physician, but another one of my doctors realized that I studied issues related to vaccine hesitancy, and over the course of multiple visits, tried to convince me that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t safe and weren’t worth it,” Callaghan said. “It made me question whether this was a one-off, or if we have an actual issue on our hands.”

Callaghan and colleagues conducted their survey from May 14 to May 25, 2021 among 625 physicians in family medicine, internal medicine, or general practice. They were asked how strongly they agreed with questions about safety, effectiveness, and importance of vaccines, among other factors.

Only 67.4% strongly agreed that vaccines are safe, just 75% strongly agreed they are effective, and only 76% strongly agreed they’re important, the researchers found.

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The Disappearance of Gonzalo Lira

The sudden disappearance of Chilean-America pundit Gonzalo Lira in Ukraine is now making global headlines. However, despite the volume of media coverage and pleas for information on his whereabouts, investigators have been unable to locate any hard leads about his current status.

Before he went missing, Gonzalo had stated repeatedly on social media and YouTube, that should he go missing for more than 12 hours online, that people should assume he has been abducted and detained (or worse) by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

Lira also publicly broadcast how the American mainstream publication, the Daily Beast and its ‘journalist’ Mark Hay had gone out of their way to publish an elaborate smear piece on Lira, and even go so far as to contact the SBU in order to alert them that he was broadcasting reports critical of the Ukrainian government from the city Kharkov, Ukraine.

This shameful and dangerous operation by the Daily Beast was complimented by other partisan US ‘journalists’ seemed to suggest that Lira was working as ‘Russia spy,’ an accusation which was certainly designed to bring harm to him.

Currently, no indication of his detention has been reported by authorities in Kiev, which has also led many of his supporters to fear for his life, in the event he was abducted by prison gangs which President Zelensky released in Kharvov to provide ‘security’ alongside the President’s Neo-Nazi battalions currently being supported by NATO.

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BLM silent when confronted with data showing massive 2020 spike in Black murder victims

The Black Lives Matter organization was silent when approached for comment on 2020’s skyrocketing number of Black murders and experts citing BLM and the defund the police movements for contributing to the deaths. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Black Lives Matter press team on April 14 inquiring if they had comment on FBI data showing there was a 32% increase in Black murders in 2020 compared to 2019, as well as a comment regarding experts such as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald arguing the BLM and defund the police movements contributed to the murder spike, not the coronavirus.

Fox News Digital also detailed the yearly numbers of Black murders from 2010 to 2020 within the inquiry but did not receive a response from the organization as of Tuesday morning. 

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Cognitive Biases: Three Common Types Illustrated

In a world of information overload, we can fall victim to all sorts of cognitive biases. Since they can lead us to generate false conclusions, Visual Capitalist’s Jamie Robinson notes that it’s particularly important to understand what these biases are and how they work, as the consequences can become quite drastic.

Confirmation bias, sampling bias, and brilliance bias are three examples that can affect our ability to critically engage with information. Jono Hey of Sketchplanations walks us through these cognitive bias examples, to help us better understand how they influence our day-to-day lives.

One of the most-commonly encountered and understood, you’re likely to have already heard about confirmation bias. This cognitive bias affects the way we test and evaluate hypotheses every day.

In simple terms, confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or interpret evidence in such a way that supports our own strongly-held beliefs or expectations. This means that, given access to the same set of data and information, different people can come to wildly differing conclusions.

Feeding into confirmation bias can lead us to make ill-informed choices or even reinforce negative stereotypes. For this reason, it is important to remember to seek out information that both confirms and contradicts your presumptions about a certain topic.

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Rhode Island Dems Submit Bill To Double State Income Tax For Parents Of Unvaccinated Minors

Rhode Island Democrats want to punish the parents of children who refused to submit to the COVID vaccine mandates.

If passed, the bill will financially cripple individuals by doubling their personal income tax and requiring them to pay a monthly fine of $50.

State Senator Samuel Bell is the lead legislator backing the bill, which mandates all Rhode Island residents, workers, and taxpayers receive a COVID-19 vaccine as well as any subsequent boosters that the state’s director of the department of health shall require.

The bill’s text can be read here.

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Jackboots Policing: No-Knock Raids Rip A Hole In The Fourth Amendment

It’s the middle of the night.

Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep.

Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

You die without ever raising a weapon or firing a gun in self-defense.

In your final moments, you get a good look at your assassins: it’s the police.

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a no-knock, no-announce SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us.

Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

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