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.

Israel adopts law allowing names of unvaccinated to be shared

Israel’s parliament passed a law Wednesday allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation.

The measure, which passed with 30 votes for and 13 against, gives local governments, the director general of the education ministry and some in the welfare ministry the right to receive the names, addresses and phone numbers of unvaccinated citizens.

The objective of the measure — valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over — is “to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them”, a parliament statement said.

Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to roughly a third of its population.

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Amid Capitol riot, FBI released files from Kennedy-era investigation into Nancy Pelosi’s father

While Washington, D.C. was riveted Jan. 6 on events at the U.S. Capitol, the FBI quietly released a trove of files from an “urgent” — yet seemingly controlled — investigation 60 years ago into Nancy Pelosi’s father.

The files reveal the results of an intense two-month investigation into Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Maryland politician who served in a long career as a member of Congress and mayor of Baltimore.

John F. Kennedy’s White House ordered the investigation after JFK planned to appoint D’Alesandro to a government post. A routine FBI name check revealed “allegations” against D’Alessandro, according to a Feb. 6, 1961 teletype from “FBI Director.” The director at the time was J. Edgar Hoover.

The “urgent” teletype seemed to signal the goal of ensuring that D’Alesandro would be appointed to a government watchdog board that reviewed defense contracts. 

“The White House has requested that we proceed with a special inquiry investigation but that if substantial derogatory information were developed, we should report this and discontinue any further inquiries because substantiation of any of the allegations would eliminate Mr. D’Alesandro,” the FBI director wrote in the teletype that is located on page 19 of the trove.

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“Deeply Unfair Move” – Baltimore Strippers Protest City’s COVID-19 Restrictions

Baltimore strippers showed up enforce at City Hall Wednesday to protest the mayor’s new coronavirus health measures that keep adult entertainment establishments closed, according to local television station WBAL. 

The announcement came from Mayor Brandon Scott earlier this week, who allowed restaurants to partially open with indoor capacity set to 25% and outdoor dining to 50%. He felt optimistic about current COVID-19 health trends in the city. 

However, strip clubs were not permitted to open; this triggered outrage among sex workers who protested the City Hall Wednesday afternoon. 

“This is a deeply unfair move, in our view,” an anonymous spokesperson for adult entertainment business owners in Baltimore said in a statement. “We’re being selectively targeted to stay closed. If you can open a gym or put on a stage show, you can have a gentleman’s club open. There’s some other agenda at work here, and it’s very insensitive to the not inconsequential number of people who make their livings through the adult entertainment industry.”

The statement also pointed out cooks, bartenders, janitors, security guards, and other tradespeople are also affected by the mayor’s harsh coronavirus measures. 

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27% Of All Household Income In The US Now Comes From The Government

Following today’s release of the latest Personal Income and Spending data, Wall Street was predictably focused on the changes in these two key series, which showed a surge in personal income (to be expected in the month when the $900BN December 2020 stimulus hit), coupled with a far more modest increase in personal spending.

But while the change in the headline data was notable, what was far more remarkable was data showing just how reliant on the US government the population has become.

We are referring, of course, to Personal Current Transfer payments which are essentially government sourced income such as unemployment benefits, welfare checks, and so on. In January, this number was $5.781 trillion annualized, which was not only up by nearly $2 trillion from the $3.8 trillion in December it was also $2 trillion above the pre-Covid trend where transfer receipts were approximately $3.2 trillion.

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End the ‘Systemic Racism’ of Affirmative Action

As the nation’s incipient racial reckoning following last May’s killing of George Floyd morphed into the summer’s riotous anarchy, the term “systemic racism” emerged as a fixture of our public discourse. What began as a somewhat arcane dialogue about purported police “militarization” and the “qualified immunity” legal doctrine soon took on a much more insidious tone. America, those like the New York Times‘ “1619 Project” fabulists told us, was rotten to its very core, blemished by the indelible taint of “systemic racism.”

In reality, as many courageously pointed out amid unprecedented “cancel culture” headwinds seeking to stifle all dissent, there is no such thing as “systemic racism” that afflicts all of America’s leading institutions. Despite the claim attaining mythological status, there is no factual basis to support it. There will, sadly, always be individual racists from all backgrounds and all walks of life, but American society in the 2020s simply does not have anything remotely resembling a legally enshrined regime under which its racial majority “systemically” oppresses its racial minorities. America in the year 2021 is not Germany in 1936; it is not South Africa in 1985; it is not—after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the Jim Crow South. This ought to be astoundingly obvious.

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‘We have a hint… it may be possible’: Controversial stem cell therapy repaired injured spinal cords in 13 patients

Using a somewhat controversial stem cell therapy, a joint team of Japanese and US-based researchers have successfully repaired some damage in 13 patients with spinal cord injuries (SCI).

SCIs can often cause permanent loss of movement and physical sensation from resultant nerve damage. While physical rehabilitation programs can partially improve outcomes, actual treatment and recovery of lost mobility and function is nigh on impossible. Until now, perhaps.

According to new results from a phase 2 clinical trial conducted in an experimental collaboration by scientists in Japan and the US, patients treated with an intravenous infusion of their own mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), harvested from their bone marrow, saw significant functional improvements.

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