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.

Congress Thinks The Pentagon Is Not Taking UFO Reports Seriously After Latest Briefings

Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees are unimpressed with the classified progress reports on UFOs they received in a briefing Monday, according to Politico.

Though the office is not expected to be fully operational until June, members of the committees have said that national security agencies aren’t taking reports of highly advanced aircraft of unknown origins seriously enough, Politico reported.

Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act four months ago, which required the Pentagon to create an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office to thoroughly investigate and analyze UFOs or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” according to the legislation.

The creation of the office was spearheaded by Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who reportedly believes that the “DoD needs to take this issue much more seriously and get in motion,” one of her aides told Politico following the briefing. Her sentiments were mirrored by Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Rubio is reportedly “frustrated” that the office is “not moving fast enough, not doing enough, not sharing enough,” an aide told Politico.

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Black Secret Service Agent, Jailed for JFK Plot Warning, Cleared: The Full Story

On April 26, President Joe Biden pardoned Abraham Bolden, an 87-year-old who was the first Black man to join the presidential Secret Service security detail.

Bolden’s presidential pardon — for a ginned-up 1964 bribery conviction based on the testimony of witnesses who later admitted to lying — was the first introduction for many Americans to Bolden. The pardon statement characterized him as a brave and noble advocate for racial justice, who spoke out against the racist behavior of other Secret Service agents, and who maintained his innocence during his bribery trials and subsequent prison term. 

But neither Biden nor the international news media that briefly picked up on Bolden’s pardon mentioned the explosive core issue: the ex-agent’s role in trying to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

To this day, Bolden believes that it was his warnings about problems with the Secret Service prior to Kennedy’s death, his knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in an early November trip to Chicago, and his efforts to share what he knew with the Warren Commission that led to his being targeted with false charges. 

This crucial context was not included in the White House press release, nor in most of the press coverage.

“I think readers don’t understand at all,” Bolden told WhoWhatWhy. “They just understand that I was pardoned. 

“They don’t have the details of what occurred and what it had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, how I was treated, the reason for my incarceration, the effort to declare me insane. Or the fact that I wrote a book that explained everything. That’s not before the public.” 

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Anarchist Collective Shares Instructions to Make DIY Abortion Pills

With the Supreme Court poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, an anarchist collective that makes DIY medicine has released detailed instructions for making abortion pills. The group has previously released instructions for making a DIY Epipen and for making daraprim, the pill that made “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli infamous.  

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective first demonstrated how to make misoprostol tablets, which are used to induce an abortion, at the Please Try This at Home conference in Pittsburgh in 2019. Last year, after Texas passed a near total abortion ban, Mixael Laufer, who runs the collective, published a 17-minute video explaining how to make the pills at home.

“The first thing to mention is this has been put together with a little bit of haste,” Laufer says. “There’s been a great deal of panic because the Republic of Texas has gotten up to some shenanigans to benefit people who are in power and to keep a bunch of other people powerless.”

Laufer repeatedly shared the video again Monday night after a leaked court decision showed that the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would automatically trigger total abortion bans in nearly half of U.S. states. When a Twitter user asked if there was a writeup of their “hypothetical” abortion pill manufacturing process, Laufer responded with a link to the video.

“Not hypothetical at all. Go forth and rock it,” Laufer tweeted. 

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Algorithms are being used to help determine if kids should be taken from their parent

The limitations of algorithms today in terms of accuracy regarding context and nuance is evident even to a casual observer, most notably in the often blundering automated censorship on social networks.

Notwithstanding that state of affairs as far as limitations of the technology itself, without even taking into account intent of those behind it, social workers in the US have started relying on predictive algorithms in deciding when to investigate parents suspected of child neglecting.

The stakes are higher here than having a Facebook post deleted – these parents can eventually end up having their children removed, and the algorithm that is now in use in several US states, and spreading, is described by the AP as “opaque” – all the while providing social workers with statistical calculations that they can base their actions on.

Other concerns raised around the algorithms like the one used in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County – that was the subject of a Carnegie Mellon University study – are reliability, which is entirely expected, as well as the effect of “hardening racial disparities in the child welfare system.”

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NBC News says 11 articles written by politics reporter contained plagiarism

NBC News has ousted a politics reporter after uncovering evidence of plagiarism in at least 11 of her articles.

NBC News disclosed the incident in a note to its readers on Monday, revealing it had determined the 11 articles in question “did not meet our standards for original material” and “contained passages from other news organizations that were used without attribution.”

The note to readers did not name the reporter. But a source within the outlet told The Post that the reporter was Teaganne Finn, who joined NBC News last June to cover politics after a stint at Bloomberg.

The source confirmed that Finn is no longer with NBC News, though it’s unclear if she was fired or resigned.

Finn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The source at NBC News said editors first noticed an unattributed passage in one article with Finn’s byline during what was described as a routine editing process. The outlet found more examples of plagiarism after a more thorough review.

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What Happened When New Mexico Ended Civil Asset Forfeiture?

In 2015, New Mexico scrapped its civil asset forfeiture laws and replaced them with a criminal process requiring a conviction before forfeiture can commence. Law enforcement lobbyists warned that ending civil forfeiture would cause crime to skyrocket. So, what actually happened?

In a nutshell, nothing.

When the legislature was debating the 2015 reforms, law enforcement came out with dire warnings. The New Mexico Department of Public safety claimed that ending civil forfeiture would have “a negative impact on public safety” and could trigger a “reduction in criminal investigations.” In the bill analysis, the department testified, “This bill directly jeopardizes the most basic and fundamental key to successful narcotics investigations.”

The chair of the New Mexico Sheriff’s Association simply asserted, “You’ll get less law enforcement,” without civil asset forfeiture.

It didn’t turn out that way.

The Institute for Justice compared crime rates in neighboring Texas and Colorado for its Policing for Profit report and determined that “New Mexico’s overall crime rate did not rise following the implementation of strong forfeiture reform in 2015, nor did arrest rates drop.”

In fact, the overall trend in New Mexico’s offense rate was “even flatter than those for the control states.”

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Speed-Limiters Will Be Equipped In All-New EU Cars Beginning Next Month

On July 6, all new vehicles sold in Europe – including the UK – will be equipped with a speeder limiter as per new legal requirements to boost road safety. 

The new speed limit assist system “will become mandatory on new cars in 2022 uses a forward-facing camera mounted on the car and the vehicle’s satellite navigation system to identify the speed limit and, if the car is exceeding it, to restrict the fuel flowing to the engine until the vehicle is at the limit speed,” British automobile magazine Autocar said. 

Autotrader added: “The speed limiter will send haptic, audio, and visual warnings until you start driving within the speed limits.” 

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