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.

Contrary to What the Media is Telling You, Freedom Does Not Come from a Vaccine

“It’s science based. It’s sensible. You can hug your grandkids again. If you’ve been waiting to get a haircut, see the dentist, you can do that,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden told CNN.

The idea that people have refused to hug their children and grandchildren over the fear of contracting the COVID-19 virus is heartbreaking. But even more worrisome is the fact that the CDC thinks it can grant or revoke that “freedom” to folks based on whether or not they take the shot.

“We know that people want to get vaccinated so they can get back to doing the things they enjoy with the people they love,” said CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, in a statement last week. “There are some activities that fully vaccinated people can begin to resume now in the privacy of their own homes.”

Aside from the obvious problems of people thinking the government can tell them when and where they can see and hug their children and grandchildren, there is the underlying principle of freedom. Requiring a vaccine for “freedom” is exactly the opposite of “freedom.”

Whether or not you agree with an individual’s choice to vaccinate themselves is irrelevant. While there will likely be many folks cheering on the state in these situations of forced medication and the silencing of critics, how you feel personally about vaccines should never lead to a loss of freedom — for anyone. No person should be forced by government regulation or societal pressure to receive any medication or treatment, including vaccines, against his or her will. This is the very foundation of freedom.

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As Saudis Suck Up Weapons, US Accounts for Over 1/3 of All Global Arms Sales

A new analysis of global weapons sales published Monday revealed that the United States now accounts for well over a third of all arms exports worldwide over the last half decade and nearly half of these weapons of war were sold to nations in the Middle East—a region beset by war and conflicts unleashed and exacerbated by American foreign policy.

According to the new data on global arms transfers compiled and analyzed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a decrease in arms sales between 2016 and 2020 by Russia and China—the second and fifth exporters overall, respectively—was offset by increasing sales made by the other top five weapons exporters: U.S., France, and Germany. And while the sales remained steady compared to the 2011–2015 period, the report shows that the past decade still saw the highest levels of weapons sales worldwide since the height of the Cold War in the 1980s.

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Italy opens manslaughter case after teacher dies hours after getting AstraZeneca vaccine

Prosecutors in Italy have launched a manslaughter investigation after a music teacher there died hours after getting the controversial AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

Sandro Tognatti, 57, got jabbed in his hometown of Biella on Saturday afternoon and went to bed that night with a high fever, his wife, Simona Riussi, told Italian media.

She called an ambulance the next morning but the clarinetist could not be saved, she said.

Prosecutors in the northern Italian region of Piedmont opened the probe into his death later that day, according to the Italian wire service Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA).

They also seized nearly 400,000 shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the same batch.

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Journalist Proclaims She Would “Love to Die” From the AstraZeneca Vaccine if it Helps Others

A Norwegian journalist bizarrely claimed she would “love to die from the AstraZeneca vaccine” if it meant other people in Europe were not discouraged from taking it.

The statement was made in the headline of Linn Wiik’s article, which literally translates as “I would love to die from the AstraZeneca vaccine.”

The AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has been temporarily pulled by numerous countries across Europe, including Spain, France, Portugal, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Slovenia and Norway, due to reports of blood clotting and several deaths of people who took the jab.

In response to the news, Wiik defiantly suggested that she would be prepared to die from taking the vaccine if it meant others were not discouraged from taking it.

“Some must be sacrificed in the war against the corona,” she wrote. “That’s the way it is in all wars. This time it may well be me.”

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How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

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US “COVID Relief” Was Enough To Give Every Taxpayer $41,870 But We Got Peanuts Instead

President Biden just signed his sweeping $1.9 trillion spending package into law. Once this bill hits the books, total taxpayer expenditure on (ostensibly) COVID relief will hit $6 trillion—which, roughly estimated, comes out to $41,870 in spending per federal taxpayer.

Did you see anywhere near that much in benefit?

The sheer immensity of this spending is hard to grasp. For context, $6 trillion is more than one-fourth of what the US economy produces in an entire year, according to Fox Business. The COVID spending blowout is at least eight times bigger than the (inflation-adjusted) price tag of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

Moreover, the COVID spending bills have all lost huge sums of money to unrelated carve-outs, politician pet projects, corporate bailouts, fraud, waste, and worse.

In the latest $1.9 trillion package, more than 90 percent of the spending is not directly related to containing COVID-19. Only 1 percent of the money, about $15 to $20 billion, is spent on vaccines. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions go to bailing out poorly managed state governments’ budget holes that predate the pandemic and $86 billion rescues failing pension plans. Meanwhile, billions more go to Obamacare expansion and subsidizing public schools long after the pandemic.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

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