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.

California School District Promotes Segregated ‘Black Parent’ Meeting

A California school district is promoting a black-only parent meeting that calls for black parents to have a larger influence on the curriculum that is taught in schools. 

The Val Verde Unified School District is promoting a seven-part black-only event for parents to share their experiences and give input into how the district should alter its curriculum. The segregated events will take place throughout the spring 2021 academic year. 

According to fliers obtained by The Daily Wire, the first meeting allowed parents to air their grievances with the school district and explain their “lived experiences.” The second meeting focused on putting those feelings into attainable goals and change. 

“After a deep dive into the feel of our community and the challenges faced within the district, it is time to evaluate and share with the Cabinet and those in positions who can actually create change tailored to your collective needs and demands,” the flyer reads. “Let’s not sugarcoat what you need or want to see change.” 

The third event told parents that their input would help the school district make changes to the curriculum and programs currently being offered. “We also desire to learn about any specific programs you believe would be most effective to your child’s academic success or potentially adjust programs currently offered,” the flyer reads.  

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California Bill Requires ‘Gender Neutral’ Stores, Fines Retailers $1000 For Having Separate ‘Boy’ And ‘Girl’ Toy Departments

California’s Assembly is slated to consider a new bill requiring department store childrens’ sections to be largely “gender-neutral” in order to combat “prejudice” and “judgment” against gender non-conforming children.

“Large retailers that sell toys, clothes, and other children’s items in California would have to devote floor space to merchandise marketed to both boys and girls under a new bill,” Politico reported earlier this week. “Stores would be able to sell the same products they do now as long as they maintain some areas where shoppers can find all toys or clothes, regardless of gender-based marketing, under CA AB2826 (19R) from Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell). It would apply to department stores with 500 or more employees beginning in 2023.”

Lowe told Politico that the idea for the bill, which he also introduced last year to little effect, came from one of his staffers, who claims her daughter wanted an item in the “boys” section but felt slighted because she felt the toy was designated for a male child.

“This is an issue of children being able to express themselves without bias,” Lowe told the outlet.

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Amazon quietly ends sales of books it labels ‘hate speech’

Sometime before this week, when it removed from its digital shelves a book critical of transgender ideology, Amazon altered its content policy to explicitly forbid books that promote “hate speech,” a major rule change that could be used to rationalize action against a broader range of books sold by the digital retail giant.

Amazon this week yanked “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement” from its main web store, its Kindle servers and its audiobook lineup with no explanation, even as the book had been available on the site for three years with no apparent controversy. 

In the 2018 book, author and political philosopher Ryan Anderson draws on years of scientific research and data to criticize the prevailing approach to transgender issues in modern medicine. The book “exposes the contrast between the media’s sunny depiction of gender fluidity and the often sad reality of living with gender dysphoria,” according to its sales blurb. 

Anderson told Just the News that he had received no explanation for the ban.

Reached for comment by Just the News, Amazon declined to provide any explanation, offering instead a link to its book content policy. 

A review of those policies suggests that sometime in the last few months Amazon made a major change to the ways in which it moderates book content on its servers, imposing a much stricter standard on books than it had previously done. 

The link provided by Amazon this week claims in part that, where books are concerned, the company “[doesn’t] sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.”

Internet archives show that as recently as August of last year, Amazon’s book content policy did not include any mention of “hate speech.” At that time, the company stated only that “we reserve the right not to sell certain content, such as pornography or other inappropriate content.”

On the older page, the company directed users to “guidelines for other categories of products,” such as products featuring “offensive and controversial material.” That policy stipulated in part that Amazon “does not allow products that promote, incite or glorify hatred,” but the rule explicitly noted that the policy did not apply to books. 

The company did not reply to a followup query asking when the policy had been changed, and why.

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The Lies Aren’t Secret

Secrecy is the ultimateentitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. In Washington, deniability is prized far more than truth. 

At the end of the Trump era, the Deep State is triumphant at home and abroad. Trump’s epic clashes with federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies helped cripple his administration, and they illustrate the continued danger of Deep State secrecy. If all of the FBI’s shenanigans on Russiagate came to light, it would be far more difficult for the FBI to manipulate American politics and presidents in the future. If CIA records on Syrian rebels were exposed, the Biden administration would have far more difficulty dragging America back into the Syrian civil war. But both seem unlikely. Recent court rulings make clear how badly Trump failed to drain the swamp. 

On January 12, 2017, FBI chief James Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been “verified.” But on the same day, Comey emailed then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: “We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting.” That email was revealed last week thanks to a multi-year fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation based on ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. In late 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. 

If the FBI’s deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have been far less national outrage when President Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly followed by the appointment of  Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses roiled national politics for years. Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. The Bureau’s charade simply confirms the nearly boundless prerogatives of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

Absurd secrecy rationales also made mincemeat of Trump’s foreign policy. One of Trump’s biggest failures abroad was his failure to end U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war. Beginning in 2013, the Obama administration began covertly providing money and weapons to Syrian groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad. The program was a catastrophe from the start: CIA-backed Syrian rebels ended up fighting Pentagon-backed rebels. Much of the U.S. aid ended up in the hands of terrorist groups, some of whom were allied with Al Qaeda. Providing material support to terrorist organizations is a federal crime, except apparently when the weapons are sent by U.S. government agencies. 

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Fact-Checkers Hammering Biden and Cuomo? No.

CNN host Brian Stelter asked a big question on his Sunday show. “What’s the future of fact-checking now that Trump is out of office?” He proclaimed it was “fraught with complexity, and allegations of bias and shouts of false equivalence.”

This is not complex. In 2016, a Rasmussen poll found that only 29 percent of the public trusted the media’s “fact-checking” of presidential candidates. There’s not just “allegations” of bias but easy and daily confirmation of bias.

Stelter tried to insist — on behalf of his network — that the fact-checking focus is now on President Joe Biden. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained, “(I)t’s basically more like a smattering of falsehood than the daily avalanche we got from Trump, but he’s not perfect.” Dale has tried to demonstrate that he’s checking Biden, issuing an online report on 40 of Biden’s statements from his first month in office.

But there’s a catch. Dale’s becoming less visible. Mediaite noted on Feb. 20 that this CNN fact-checker was featured on air or mentioned by name on average more than once every other day since June 2019. But exposure dipped noticeably after the election, and “since President Joe Biden’s inauguration … Dale has only appeared on the network once. And that appearance, last Friday, was to fact-check Donald Trump’s lawyers.” Dale showed up with Stelter just three days after the Mediaite piece was published.

Stelter also interviewed PolitiFact editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan. Is PolitiFact obsessed with fact-checking Biden? No.

In the first four weeks after Biden took the oath, PolitiFact issued two Biden fact-checks — two! Last week, it fact-checked three of Biden’s statements from the CNN town hall, since that was apparently a little too prominent to ignore. It added one more on Feb. 22. That’s six fact-checks of the president so far.

Let’s compare that to fact-checks defending Biden. In the same time frame, PolitiFact issued 19 fact-checks of Biden’s critics, and all but one of them were proclaimed “Mostly False,” “False” or “Pants on Fire.” (There was one “Half True”). There’s apparently no such thing as a “True” Biden critique.

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Reparations Don’t Buy Justice, Dignity or Freedom

The problem with the idea of reparations is it redirects attention away from exactly where attention is needed: on individuals’ personal responsibility for their own unique lives.CARTOONS | MICHAEL RAMIREZVIEW CARTOON

And it redirects attention in such a way to encourage individuals to believe that some abstract, collective entity from the past is the cause of all their individual problems in the present.

Compensation for damages is a basic legal principle.

It’s about personal responsibility. Individual A sues individual B for damages caused. Exactly what the damages were and exactly how B injured A must be shown in a court of law.

Today, only a small fraction of our population has ancestors who were around before 1865 when slavery was legal. The idea of collective guilt, with no specific individual identified as causing the damage and no specific individual showing how he or she was damaged, doesn’t fly.

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BIDEN COMMITS TO FOREVER WAR ON AFGHANISTAN

The forever war on Afghanistan will continue.

The U.S. and its NATO proxy force have spent nearly 20 years and a trillion dollars to “do something” in Afghanistan. What that something was to be was never clear. There were attempts to impose some kind of enlightened model of governance on the Afghan people. But anyone with knowledge of that country knew that this would never work.

Bribes were handed out left and right and Afghan warlords, many of whom hold government positions, enriched themselves by scamming the occupation forces. They naturally do not want that to end. There are also Afghans who do not want to live under the heel of corrupt warlords and ignorant occupation troops. They are called Taliban and get support from Pakistan and Arab countries which the U.S. calls ‘allies’. The occupation forces tried to fight them but after nearly 20 years of wars the Taliban again rule over half of the country. Even while the warlords still have military support from the occupation forces their troops are losing in nearly every engagement.

Militarily the war against the Taliban has long been lost. Even with the 100,000 ‘western’ troops the Obama administration had sent there was no way to win it.

President Donald Trump made efforts to end the useless war on Afghanistan. He negotiated with the Taliban to remove all ‘western’ forces by May 1. The agreement also commits the Taliban to not attacking those forces and to negotiate with the warlord government in Kabul on power sharing. They agreed to that after the U.S. promised that Taliban prisoners of war, held by the Afghan government, would be released.

The Afghan government had and has of course no interest in losing power. At least not as long as still gets sponsored by ‘western’ money. It also did not want to let prisoners go as those would just turn around and again fight against it. A year ago the Trump administration threatened to withhold money should the Afghan government not follow the negotiated terms:

Facing collapse of Afghan peace talks before they even start, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold up to $2 billion in aid unless President Ashraf Ghani and his main rival put aside their political differences and open negotiations with the Taliban.
…
The threat was the sharpest sign yet that the Trump administration is distancing itself from its Afghan ally and moving closer to the Taliban. The longtime U.S. adversary has in effect become a wary partner as President Trump seeks to withdraw thousands of American troops before the November election and end America’s longest war.
…
The Kabul government is heavily dependent on international assistance. U.S. aid was expected to total $4.3 billion this year, all but $500 million of which was earmarked for training and equipping the Afghan army.

The threat worked as expected. But when it became clear that a new management would take over the White House the Afghan government again tried to stall the process.

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