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.

Monopoly getting ‘long overdue’ socially conscious makeover, Hasbro says

The board game “Monopoly” will be the next classic entertainment brand to receive a socially conscious makeover, publisher Hasbro announced this week.

Hasbro will change all 16 of Monopoly’s “community chest” cards to remove outdated concepts. The company said the classic versions of the cards, which included prompts referencing beauty contests and holiday funds, were “long overdue for a refresh.”

New community chest cards will focus on topics that emphasize “community.” Hasbro asked the public to vote on potential replacements, with rewards for in-game actions such as rescuing a puppy or shopping local among the options. Other cards would penalize players for forgetting to recycle or blasting music too late at night.

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Jailed father fighting to block gender transition of his child denied bail

A father, Robert Hoogland, who is fighting in the family courts for the right to speak publicly in opposition to the medical and social gender transition of his child was denied bail in a hearing at Vancouver Supreme Court on Friday.

The court found him in contempt of previous orders which sought to restrain his speech with regard to the medical and social gender transition of his child by medical and legal authorities. Robert Hoogland opposes this process on the grounds that it is causing irreversible physical and psychological harm to his child.

This process of seeking to defend his child from iatrogenic medical harm—ordinarily something we would associate with positive parenting—has been characterised as “family violence” and harassment by the court and by the child’s trans rights activist legal advisers.

In Canada, protective parenting is a criminal offence.

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Democrats Ban White Farmers From Federal COVID Relief Program

Last week, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law. The bill, comprised of $1.9 trillion in the name of “COVID relief,” received no support from Republicans in the House or Senate, and it’s not hard to see why.

The legislation includes carveouts for dozens of leftist priorities, including a bridge in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s New York and a tunnel in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Silicon Valley. These items clearly have nothing to do with pandemic relief for the millions of Americans out of work or the businesses shuttered by blue state governors’ harsh public health regulations. To the hardworking Americans everywhere, this bill should reek of the far-left’s desire to shove their ill-conceived policy priorities wherever they can stash them.

What most don’t know about this bill, however, is the small provision known as “Section 1005” that authorizes the secretary of agriculture to make payments of 100 to 120 percent of the “outstanding indebtedness of socially disadvantaged farmers.” Under this provision, those included in the socially disadvantaged category are American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asians, Blacks, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics.

Putting aside all of the Washington jargon that makes little sense outside of a committee hearing room, this provision—specifically written into the American Rescue Plan by Democrats—pushes a blurred vision of so-called “social equity” by providing relief for farmers based on the color of their skin. Rather than offering much needed relief to all farmers, Sec. 1005 prioritizes race, just as it would ethnicity, sex, or any other factor.

It bears repeating: Sec. 1005 focuses debt relief on farmers based on their race, not based on how harshly the pandemic has affected them—the very reason for relief in the first place. Ironically, this racial discrimination is the very focus of what officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have worked so hard to combat.

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New York Times Writers May Have Deceived Readers in Stories About Project Veritas: Court

Writers for the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about the nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas, a judge ruled this week.

In stories from 2020 about Project Veritas videos, writers Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu inserted sentences that were opinions despite the articles being billed as news, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood said.

“If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion,” Wood wrote in a 16-page decision denying the paper’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from Project Veritas.

“The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to Astor’s and Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim,” he added.

At issue are five articles that Project Veritas alleges contained false and defamatory information. All five were about a 2020 video report from the journalism group on alleged illegal voting practices in Minnesota.

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“A Threat to American Democracy” – Federal Judge Warns About Dangers of Democrat Media Complex

“Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s,” Silberman wrote. “Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.”

Silberman then took on Big Tech:

He accused Silicon Valley of filtering news “in ways favorable to the Democratic Party” and fueling censorship, citing the suppression of the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

“It is well-accepted that viewpoint discrimination ‘raises the specter that the Government may effectively drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace,’” Silberman said. “But ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.”

Finally, Silberman took on the current one-party control of the press and media:

“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news. It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy,” the judge continued. “It may even give rise to countervailing extremism.

“The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas. But a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its willingness—if not eagerness—to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power.”

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What Is The Internet Of Bodies? And How Is It Changing Our World?

What is the Internet of Bodies (IoB)?

When the Internet of Things (IoT) connects with your body, the result is the Internet of Bodies (IoB). The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is an extension of the IoT and basically connects the human body to a network through devices that are ingested, implanted, or connected to the body in some way. Once connected, data can be exchanged, and the body and device can be remotely monitored and controlled.

There are three generations of Internet of Bodies that include:

·        Body external: These are wearable devices such as Apple Watches or Fitbits that can monitor our health.

·        Body internal: These include pacemakers, cochlear implants, and digital pills that go inside our bodies to monitor or control various aspects of our health.

·        Body embedded: The third generation of the Internet of Bodies is embedded technology where technology and the human body are melded together and have a real-time connection to a remote machine.  

Progress in wireless connectivity, materials, and tech innovation is allowing implantable medical devices (IMD) to scale and be viable in many applications.

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Oregon Health Officials Propose Making Mask Mandates Permanent

Oregon state health officials unveiled a new proposal in January which seeks to make temporary mask mandates permanent.

The current order, passed in November by the state’s workplace safety department, which requires all employers to implement state-imposed guidelines for social distancing and mask compliance, is set to expire on May 4. Oregon health bureaucrats are now seeking to make the rules permanent.

“Although the rule must be adopted as a permanent rule, its purpose is to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” the proposal reads. “Oregon [Occupational Safety and Health] intends to repeal the rule when it is no longer necessary to address the pandemic.”

No threshold for what constitutes when the mandate is “no longer necessary” however, is offered in the proposal.

New COVID cases in Oregon meanwhile, are averaging less than half what they were when the temporary order came into effect last fall. The state saw 769 new cases with a seven-day average of 603 positive tests the day to order was announced on Nov. 6 as they began to rise going into the Thanksgiving holiday.

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The War on Porn Is Back

“If you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column bluntly headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.”

In this, as in many things, Douthat was ahead of the conservative intellectual curve by a year or two. And in this, as in many things, he was dangerously wrong.

In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year’s manifesto, “Against the Dead Consensus,” a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject “economic libertarianism” and “the soulless society of individual affluence” and add that they “respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism.” Which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn around and immediately kneel before the scolding ghost of Ed Meese.

As attorney general, Meese sought to deliver on Reagan’s 1987 threat to “purveyors” of obscene material that the “industry’s days are numbered.” It was Meese who pulled together the first National Obscenity Enforcement Unit. (One surprising and familiar name also crops up in the tale: then–assistant attorney general and recent Libertarian Party vice presidential pick William F. Weld, who was given the task of bringing together various agencies for the task force.)

Meese’s bill of grievances against the relatively constrained pornography of his day—which he credited in a speech to a report from a federal Commission on Pornography convened the previous year—will sound alarmingly familiar to readers of Douthat and First Things. He asserts “that violence, far from being an altogether separate category of pornography, is involved with almost all of it; that there are empirically verifiable connections between pornography and violent sex-related crimes; that the pornography industry is a brutal one that exploits and often ruins the lives of its ‘performers’ as well as its consumers, and that the ‘performers’ often include abused children and people plied with hard drugs; that whether or not it is directly imitated by those who consume it, pornography has a deleterious effect on what its consumers view as normal and healthy.”

The effort was, in some sense, successful. By 1990, the Department of Justice had managed to use obscenity statutes to force seven national porn distributors out of business. But the decades that followed were boom times for porn as the industry moved into new forms of distribution, so the success was far from permanent.

In a rare moment of sanity in 2011, the Justice Department shuttered what had come to be known as the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, resulting in the delightful Politico headline “Holder accused of neglecting porn” and a harrumph from peeved conservatives, who vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s decision as soon as they could.

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