Ron Paul on the nanny state…
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.
NYC Subway Shooter and Black Supremacist Frank James Is Arrested in Manhattan
New York City subway shooter Frank James was still on the loose on Wednesday morning after shooting at least 10 people inside a Brooklyn subway station Tuesday. Officials say five victims are in critical condition but are expected to survive.
Frank James was a black nationalist and posted several videos on the oppression of black people.
Frank James was also previously on the FBI terrorist radar until 2019. Then they stopped watching him.
Earlier today Brooklyn subway shooter and black supremacist Frank James was arrested following the manhunt.
Muting your mic doesn’t stop big tech from recording your audio
Anytime you use a video teleconferencing app, you’re sending your audio data to the company hosting the services. And, according to a new study, that means all of your audio data. This includes voice and background noise whether you’re broadcasting or muted.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated “many popular apps” to determine the extent that video conferencing apps capture data while users employ the in-software ‘mute’ button.
According to a university press release, their findings were substantial:
They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular video conferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted.
They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.
Moscow Blasts US Genocide Label From Country That’s Committed “Well-Known” War Crimes
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to back Joe Biden’s Tuesday remarks which labeled what Putin is doing inside Ukraine as “genocide”. Biden had followed his use of the label for the first time, which marks a serious escalation in the United States’ rhetoric by explaining, “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian.”
Zelensky then said on Twitter: “Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil,” and made clear he agrees with the definition: “We are grateful for U.S. assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.”
The Kremlin has responded, on Wednesday calling the genocide label “unacceptable” and a distortion of the conflict, which the Kremlin has previously described as a battle against NATO expansion imminently threatening Russia’s legitimate security interests.
“We consider this kind of effort to distort the situation unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded, according to Reuters. He emphasized the hypocrisy of a US military machine which has committed “well-known crimes” in the recent past.
“This is hardly acceptable from a president of the United States, a country that has committed well-known crimes in recent times,” Peskov described.
20 Federal ‘Assets’ Embedded at Capitol on Jan. 6, Court Filing Says
At least 20 FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives “assets” were embedded around the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a defense attorney wrote in a court filing on April 12.
The disclosure was made in a motion seeking to dismiss seditious conspiracy and obstruction charges against 10 Oath Keepers defendants in one of the most prominent Jan. 6 criminal cases.
David W. Fischer, attorney for Thomas E. Caldwell of Berryville, Virginia, filed a 41-page motion to dismiss four counts on behalf of all Oath Keepers case defendants before U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington, D.C.
Caldwell is charged in the indictment, but is not a member of the Oath Keepers, he told The Epoch Times in March.
Straight Out Of Dr. Strangelove
Robert Kagan, neoconservative writer and husband to Deputy Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, wrote a piece called “The Price of Hegemony” in Foreign Affairs last week that was fascinating. If I’d written his opening, people would denounce me as a Putin-concubine:
Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.
Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe.
Kagan went on to make an argument straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Instead of doing what some critics want and focusing on “improving the well-being of Americans,” the U.S. government is instead properly recognizing the responsibility that comes with being a superpower. So, while Russia’s invasion may indeed have been a foreseeable consequence of a decision to expand our hegemonic reach, now that we’re here, there’s only one option left. Total commitment:
It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small…
John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, will play SOLD-OUT show in Brooklyn this summer after serving 35 years in psychiatric hospital
John Hinckley Jr., the man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in an attempt to ‘impress’ actress Jodie Foster more than 40 years ago, is playing a sold-out concert in Brooklyn this summer.
Hinckley, 66, tweeted on April 9 that he was ‘very excited about [his] upcoming show.’
‘Ticket sales are good. July 9, Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY.’
Tickets for the hotel show at 1140 Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick were selling for $20 on Venue Pilot. On April 12, the Oklahoman tweeted again, announcing that his show was ‘sold out!’ The venue has a capacity of 450 people but it’s unclear how many tickets were sold for the show.
On March 30, 1981, Hinckley seriously injured then-President Reagan and three others when he fired six shots outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. White House press secretary James Brady was shot in the head and permanently disabled, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy was shot in his side, and D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty was hit in the neck.
The president was shot in the left lung – the .22 caliber bullet missed the 70-year-old’s heart by just inches. Regardless, Reagan walked out of the hospital under his own power, and famously quipped to his wife that he ‘forgot to duck’ after his surgery.
In a note that was found soon after the attempted assassination, Hinckley – who was 25 at the time – stated that he committed the unthinkable crime to get the attention of actress Jodie Foster after stalking her for years.
Hinckley would send letters and even call the actress at Yale after developing an unhealthy obsession with her when he saw ‘Taxi Driver.’ Hinckley reportedly described the shooting as the ‘greatest love offering in the world’ shortly after the shooting took place.
He was found not-guilty by reason of insanity, and spent 35 years in a psychiatric hospital after the assassination attempt. There, he was diagnosed with narcissistic and schizoid personality disorders.
On the campaign trail in 2016, the year Hinckley was released, Donald Trump said the would-be assassin should remain institutionalized.
Since he was granted the right to produce music under his own name in 2020, Hinckley has released songs on YouTube and streaming services, and even intends to release a 14-song LP under his own record label, Emporia Records.
Hinckley’s YouTube channel, where he began posting covers and such original songs as ‘Everything is Gonna’ Be Alright in 2020, has more than 26,000 subscribers. Most of those he has written are love songs.
BLM Co-Founder Says She Gets ‘Triggered’ by Charity Transparency Laws
Patrisse Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder who cashed out and got millions of dollars in media contracts, says that the recent scrutiny of BLM’s “charitable” finances upsets her.
Black Lives Matter is embroiled in several scandals involving the $90 million they raised in 2020 to end police brutality and racism. The most recent eyebrow-raiser was the revelation that the group purchased a $6 million mansion in California that has rarely been used for the purposes they say.
There’s also the matter of the $60 million in funds that no one at BLM Global appears to be in charge of.
Cullors says she gets “triggered” when anyone mentions the IRS form 990 — the form charities must complete that reveals donors and sources of money.
“I actually did not know what 990s were before all of this happened,” Cullors said, an apparent reference to the Washington Examiner’s reporting in January about BLM’s lack of financial and leadership transparency that led multiple states, including California, to order the charity to cease raising funds until it discloses what it did with the $90 million it raised in 2020.
Cullors said activists suffer trauma and that their lives are put at risk when charities under their control are required to disclose publicly what they did with their tax-deductible donations.
“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure,” Cullors said. “This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”
The system that was designed to prevent fraudsters like Cullors from fleecing people is “deeply unsafe”? Isn’t that sort of like a bank robber complaining that it’s too difficult to open the safe and questioning why the cash can’t just be laid out in the open so it can be easily grabbed?
Hospitals Make $120 Billion While Skirting Federal Transparency Law
Three of the largest for-profit hospital chains in the U.S. made a combined $120 billion in 2021, while violating federal transparency laws, according to an investigation by Patient Rights Advocate.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2021, the Affordable Care Act required hospitals to be transparent about what they charge patients.
The Hospital Price Transparency Rule requires providers to post prices for their medical services online in a “machine-readable standard charges list for all items and services for all payers and plans” as well as a “standard charges list or price estimator tool for the 300 most common shoppable services,” according to the report.
The idea was to promote competition between hospitals, thereby lowering prices.
The Patient Rights Advocate report found that only 14 percent of the 1,000 hospitals reviewed were compliant with these regulations, and only 0.5 percent of hospitals owned by the three largest U.S. hospital systems – HCA Healthcare, CommonSpirit Health, and Ascension – were compliant.
None of the HCA Healthcare system’s 118 hospitals were compliant, the report found, and those three large systems made a combined $120 billion (page 3).
The Nation’s Top Scientists Lied
CDC Director Robert Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23, 2020, immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.
The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.
First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.
Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.
You must be logged in to post a comment.