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.

Social media company Minds and Daryl Davis tell Joe Rogan about new anti-censorship project

Minds.com co-founder Bill Ottman and activist Daryl Davis went on the “Joe Rogan Experience” to unveil their #ChangeMinds deradicalization initiative.

The team at blockchain-based social network Minds and Davis published a research paper outlining how “deplatforming actually intensifies extremism,” and argue how a new approach to online moderation is necessary.

One part of the discussion had Davis outlining his experiences on having debates with others on the Minds platform. While Rogan brings up how Davis convinced members of the KKK to change their viewpoints on race—as explored in his previous appearance—here the longtime activist refines his main point.

In explaining how a hypothetically intense discussion plays out, Davis highlights the importance of having the other person’s “walls come down.” That is to say, if Davis and a racist who hates black people can listen to each other’s viewpoints, at all whatsoever, it can have a significant impact on the racist in the long run.

Internet entrepreneur and Minds CEO Bill Ottman builds off the “walls coming down” point by adding how neuroscientist Sam Harris previously studied people’s actual brain waves with regards to how an individual subconsciously reacts to being presented with ideas or concepts they don’t like.

The key to #ChangeMinds, according to Ottman and Davis, is building long-term relationships between people of opposing viewpoints as its own main objective.

In describing the research paper, Minds staffers stated that their “paper examines the adverse effects of social media censorship and proposes an alternative moderation model based on free speech and Internet freedom.”

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As America Slips Deeper Into Authoritarianism, State Brings Back Executions Via Firing Squad

As TFTP reported, the Justice Department quietly amended its execution protocols in December 2020, no longer requiring federal death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection and clearing the way to use other methods like firing squads and poisonous gas. The following year Arizona followed suit and began preparing to execute death row inmates with the same gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz — Zyklon B. This month, South Carolina raised their hand at the execution table and asked for firing squads and have approved just that.

According to a report from Reuters, the state Department of Corrections said it alerted the Attorney General’s office that it has developed protocols and completed renovations at a correctional facility in Columbia, the capital city, which allows for the execution of inmates via a three-man firing squad. According to the report:

A state law passed in May 2021 authorized the death penalty policy changes, giving condemned persons the option to choose death by rifles or lethal injection when available. It also made the electric chair the state’s primary mode of execution.

South Carolina joins Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah in allowing firing squad executions. Those states use lethal injection as their primary method. Three executions, all in Utah, have been carried out by firing squad since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Ronnie Lee Gardner, a 49-year-old convicted killer, was the last person in the United States to be executed by firing squad in 2010.

The move is touted by officials as a good thing because it now gives inmates a choice of three different ways to die but they are missing the elephant in the room.

While the various methods of death are certainly shocking, the idea of capital punishment seems to be taking a back seat to all of this. For the state to claim the responsibility of justly ending life, it means that the state must never be wrong. Even the most ardent of statists will have to concede that an infallible state is but a terribly written fiction.

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CDC Promotes Another Misleading Mask Study 

The CDC clearly disgraced itself during the pandemic.

At this point, that’s not particularly newsworthy — it’s become an expectation that the CDC will release a new flawed “study” every few weeks in an effort to promote their policy goals.

The interventions and policies championed by the CDC haven’t worked, both domestically or globally. The policy failings are so extensive they could quite easily fill a book.

Their MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality weekly report) releases, or as they should be known, policy advocacy dressed up as “science,” have caused incalculable damage. Politicians and teachers’ unions have been given complete authority to enforce mask mandates and other policies designed to continue indefinitely during seasonal surges.

Based on the CDC’s extensive track record, it’s possible that the latest bit of scientific propaganda from NIH is merely their best attempt to grab some of that power for themselves. After witnessing the incredibly poor work by the CDC, they must have thought to themselves, “We can’t let them show us up like this! We can conduct absurdly bad ‘studies’ meant to ensure endless masking too!”

And that’s exactly what they did.

It should come as no surprise given how unimaginably horrendous former NIH director Francis Collins was at science, which of course earned him a promotion to the White House. But if you haven’t already come across the organization’s attempt at mask advocacy, it’s important to break down just how contemptible it is.

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How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

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As Los Angeles Comes Apart From Soaring Crime, Demand For Safe Rooms Skyrockets

As Los Angeles comes apart with soaring crime, wealthy homeowners have surged in their demand for “safe rooms” so they can be protected from potential invaders of their homes.

Dean Cryer, the vice-president of international operations at Building Consensus/Panic Room Builders, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Our influx of inquiries has increased more than 1,000 percent over the past three months. … It’s gone insane.”  He added, “Hidden rooms are definitely trending right now.”

“Building Consensus/Panic Room (which consulted on the 2002 movie Panic Room) builds various safe spaces ranging in security levels from one through eight. Safe rooms at level three may be protected with Kevlar, while a level eight is encased in thick steel,” The Hollywood Reporter noted. Cryer explained, “Just the doors can be 2,000 to 3,000 pounds. And then we’re installing steel within the room. So, we’re generating up to 10,000 pounds in a room. … You could kit out a small closet for about $100,000, $150,000. And then it’s north of there. We’ve done one in London that had two rooms, full suites … and that was over a million dollars.”

To enter the rooms, biometrics such as a finger or retina scan are primarily utilized; they can be hidden behind a bookcase or hidden wall and include panic buttons that automatically call security services.

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Drug Users Are Losing Their Fingers and Toes After Shooting ‘Tranq Dope’

Bill’s hands are so disfigured that he can no longer fit gloves over them. 

About two months ago, his right ring finger was amputated. In a matter of weeks, he could lose the middle finger on his left hand, which was swollen with a large, maroon-colored sore covering the knuckle when VICE News met him on a recent morning in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. 

The lesions are markers of a drug Bill said he never intended to consume. Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer known on the street as “tranq” or “tranq dope,” has infiltrated Philly’s illicit opioid supply. The 59-year-old, who did not share his last name with VICE News, shivered as he hunted for mittens at an outreach event for drug users in Kensington. 

“Boy, this is angry,” said a nurse who volunteers with the harm reduction group Savage Sisters, while examining a wound on one of Bill’s fingers at a pop-up wound care clinic at Kensington’s McPherson Park, known locally as Needle Park because of its open-air drug use. 

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The UN Is Warning That We Are Heading Into The Worst Global Food Crisis Since World War 2

The executive director of the UN’s World Food Program is saying that we are now facing “a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.” Unfortunately, he is not exaggerating.  The global price of food was skyrocketing even before the war on the other side of the globe erupted, and now many of the countries that are extremely dependent on agricultural exports from Ukraine and Russia are going to have to turn elsewhere for answers.  Meanwhile, severe drought is threatening production in the other major “breadbasket” of the world.  We are being warned that the winter wheat harvest in the U.S. could be “disastrous” this year, and that is very unwelcome news.  Because if some sort of a miracle does not happen, we will soon see hunger and famine on a scale that once would have been unimaginable to many people.

We really are facing a “perfect storm” as far as global food production is concerned.  The following comes from a recent New York Times article…

Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.

China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world’s dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.

The new global energy crisis just keeps pushing fertilizer prices higher and higher.

This is something that I have been warning about for months, and now the mainstream media is finally acknowledging that we have a truly historic challenge on our hands.

In fact, they are not openly admitting that fertilizer prices have “more than doubled or tripled in price over the past year”…

In another ominous signal to fertilizer customers, earlier this month European fertilizer producers said they were slowing or halting production because of soaring energy prices. Many fertilizers are made with natural gas.

The world’s major fertilizers have now more than doubled or tripled in price over the past year.

Actually, in some cases fertilizer prices have actually quadrupled.

How are the poorer parts of the world supposed to deal with that?

It is easy to tell them to use less fertilizer, but using less fertilizer will mean less food is grown.

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New copyright bill appears to push for internet upload filters

You might have thought there is something fundamentally wrong and overarching with the (infamous) DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in dire need of comprehensive reform? Well, two US senators think what it needs is to be implemented much more vigorously.

A bipartisan legislative proposal is now emerging in the US to further shore up the country’s efforts to protect copyright and go after those designated as infringers.

The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022 is the “brainchild” of US Senators Thom Tillis, a Republican, who has long-championed corporate interests when it comes to copyright, and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and the main goal is to make sure the burden of developing what are described as effective and widely available measures would going forward, be on tech companies.

The proposal is supposed to be an update to the DMCA, which is now a quarter-century old. The way Tillis and Leahy phrased it while announcing the draft bill is that it will be better suited to combat what they repeatedly call “copyright theft” and “piracy” – in conditions on the internet that have since changed dramatically.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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