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.

Why the Feds Intentionally Poisoned Americans During Prohibition, Killing Thousands—and Why You’ve Never Heard about It

I was recently invited to speak to a student group about alcohol prohibition. During the course of my talk, I shared with them perhaps the most chilling historical account of America’s failed experiment to ban the sale of alcohol.

The Prohibition Era (1920 -1933), which began with the passage of the Volstead Act, had many problems. Virtually overnight, millions of Americans became criminals for the “crime” of having a drink. Instead of people trading money for a jug of beer or a bottle of gin, they had to make their own or turn to the black market. It resulted in a surge of organized crime and the rise of many of the most notorious gangsters in history, including Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

“In the absence of Prohibition, we wouldn’t have had the kind of syndicated criminality that occurred. Prohibition was the catalyst,” explains Howard Abadinsky, professor of criminal justice at St. John’s University and the author of the book Organized Crime.

One might think the surge of organized crime—which resulted in a corresponding surge of law enforcement to suppress it—would be the darkest consequence of Prohibition. It was not.

Keep reading

Fauci’s Colleague Offered to Secretly Erase a COVID-19 Paper Containing Data Hidden By China. It Happened During an ‘Extremely Contentious’ Zoom Call Which Saw Scientists ‘Yelling at Each Other’.

Kristian Andersen – an Anthony Fauci confidant who has received research grants worth millions from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director – reportedly offered to secretly delete a research paper exposing the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s erasure of a database containing information relevant to the origins of COVID-19.

Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, made the suggestion during a Zoom call with Fauci himself, alongside former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, and the paper’s author Jesse D. Bloom.

Bloom, an evolutionary biologist, had recovered a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences, which were erased by the NIH at the request of Chinese Communist Party researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Zoom call – the details of which were revealed by Vanity Fair – was arranged two days after Bloom had sent a preprint of the report to Fauci and Collins.

Collins is reported to have subsequently invited two outside scientists – Andersen and virologist Robert Garry – to participate. Both men have received millions in funds from Fauci’s agency. As his guests, Bloom invited Sergei Pond, an evolutionary biologist and Rasmus Nielsen, a genetic biologist, to the call.

Keep reading

Biden Responds to Sacramento Mass Shooting by Pushing More Gun Laws

President Joe Biden said that more gun laws should be passed in Congress after a shooting in Sacramento left at least six people dead and more injured over the weekend.

In response to the shooting, Biden said that Congress needs to “ban ghost guns,” although there is no evidence that a “ghost gun”—an unserialized and untraceable firearm that can be assembled after purchasing components online—was used during the Sacramento incident.

“Require background checks for all gun sales. Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” he also said, without elaborating on what he means by an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine.

Some elected officials have suggested a high-capacity magazine is one that holds 10 rounds or more, but others say it’s seven rounds or more.

Meanwhile, some firearms proponents have said the term assault weapon is intentionally misleading and vague, while others have said that a ban on “assault weapons” would entail banning nearly all semiautomatic rifles and pistols. Fully automatic firearms haven’t been available for purchase in the United States since 1986 when Congress passed the Firearm Owners Protection Act.

“Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. Pass my budget proposal, which would give cities more of the funding they need to fund the police and fund the crime prevention and intervention strategies that can make our cities safer. These are just a few of the steps Congress urgently needs to take to save lives,” Biden said.

The state of California, meanwhile, has among the strictest gun laws in the United States. The state already enacted a ban on ghost guns, it requires background checks for all gun sales, the state has also banned “assault” weapons—which applies to many semiautomatic firearms—for decades, and it has a ban on magazines that contain 10 or more rounds. A court in 2019 deemed California’s magazine ban unconstitutional, although that ruling was placed on hold while the case is being appealed.

Keep reading

Catholic University Speaker Says White Students Should ‘Crucify Their Whiteness’

The Atkins Center for Ethics at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hosted an event titled “Rejecting White Christianity” on March 3. A guest speaker at the event, Miguel De La Torre, called for White Christians to “crucify” their “whiteness.”

“Eurochristian nationalism has been used to justify white supremacy. Many within communities of color, with colonized minds, seek to assimilate to a Euroamerican version of Christianity which is detrimental to their being,” reads an event description. “This presentation will explore what it means to see through the eyes of the dominant culture, how one rejects the Christianity of the dominant culture, and how one begins to create a different cultural foundation upon which to base one’s faith.”

The discussion was also billed as an “indigenous Latinx” lens through which one can conduct “ethical analysis” of Christianity. During his speech, De La Torre, a professor of “Latinx studies” at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, said white Christians should “crucify” their “whiteness”, according to The College Fix.

Keep reading

Pundits Who Advocate Hot War With Russia Are Enemies Of Humanity

In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”

Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.

To be clear this isn’t just some arms industry-funded think tanker saying this; The Modern War Institute is part of the Department of Military Instruction for the United States Military Academy, which is operated directly by the Pentagon.

Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”

Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.

“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”

“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”

Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”

“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.

Keep reading

Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle

Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.

Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.

The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.

The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.

The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.

Keep reading