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.

Global Freedoms Hit ‘Dismal’ Record Low Amid Pandemic

The state of democracy worldwide fell to a record low in 2021, largely due to pandemic restrictions that have led to many nations placing a public health emergency of arguable severity over personal freedoms, according to a new report released Thursday which rated 167 countries based on various measures including civil liberties and electoral processes.

According to the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), less than half the world’s population live under some form of democracy.

Overall, the world’s score fell to 5.28 out of 10, setting “another dismal record,” with the EIU’s lowest rating since they began the index in 2006, according to the Washington Post.

The annual decline was the largest since 2010, with the survey finding that just 6.4% of the world lived in a “full democracy” last year, while over 1/3 lied under authoritarian rule – with much of that coming from China.

The decline did not start with the pandemic, but it has compounded negative trends. From lockdowns to travel bans, the coronavirus led to “an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike,” the report said. -WaPo

“It has led to the normalization of emergency powers, which have tended to stay on the statute books, and accustomed citizens to a huge extension of state power over large areas of public and personal life,” reads the report, which adds that the pandemic has exposed inequalities in health care, government mismanagement, and weaknesses in economic ‘safety nets.’

The pandemic has also opened the door for governments to exploit the health crisis in order to suppress political participation.

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Another Banner Year For The Military-Industrial Complex

Twenty twenty-one was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste—from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

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Proposal: Just Run All Western News Media Directly Out Of CIA Headquarters

I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they picked up from “sources”.

I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about “intelligence” which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the “intelligence”, and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we’re simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government. We’re not even reminded by the publishers of these CIA press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we’re certainly not informed that Kyiv appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.

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Biden Administration Urges Court Not to Allow Release of ‘Secret Report’ on Dominion Voting Machines

Top officials at a U.S. federal cybersecurity agency are urging a judge not to authorize at this time the release of a report that analyzes Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Georgia, arguing doing so could assist hackers trying to “undermine election security.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was recently provided an unredacted copy of the report, which was prepared by J. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society.

The report discusses “potential vulnerabilities in Dominion ImageCast X ballot marking devices,” or electronic voting devices, according to the government.

While CISA supports public disclosure of any vulnerabilities and associated mitigation measures with election equipment, allowing the release of the report at this point “increases the risk that malicious actors may be able to exploit any vulnerabilities and threaten election security,” government lawyers said in a Feb. 10 filing in the case.

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‘Nothing More Grotesque Than a Media Pushing for War,’ Says Edward Snowden

Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden on Friday joined global critics who are decrying news outlets for encouraging war with their coverage of rising tensions between the United States and Russia—where he has lived since 2013—over Ukraine.

“There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war,” Snowden tweeted.

After a flood of responses—some highlighting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has stationed over 100,000 troops near his country’s border with Ukraine and is conducting military exercises in Belarus—Snowden doubled down on his anti-war message.

“When you see snide quote-tweets of this from the boot-licking think-tank crowd, look at the ratio and remember that even if they’re loud, they are in the minority,” he said. “Being pro-war is not smart, cool, or sophisticated, and their performative outrage doesn’t change that.”

Snowden is far from alone in blasting a media march toward war that has been compared to the lead-up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“Here we go again,” Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, wrote in a Friday fundraising email. “With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums.”

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DHS says COVID misinformation is inspiring terrorism, but won’t provide any evidence

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refused to provide evidence to support its claims that COVID-19 “misinformation” and “false or misleading narratives” inspired violent terrorism during 2021.

DHS issued a terrorism advisory bulletin Monday warning that of the dangers of online misinformation, which the agency said has been exploited by “threat actors” and to inspire acts of terrorism.

“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors,” DHS said in the bulletin. “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”

The agency specified COVID-19 misinformation and false claims about election fraud in particular as contributing to violence.

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QAnon Decoder Says Half of What Conspiracy Theory Says Isn’t True

Dave Hayes, who’s become a prominent figure in the QAnon movement, recently dismissed skepticism about unfulfilled promises from the movement’s leader, known only as “Q,” because he believes part of the strategy of the movement is to put out disinformation.

Hayes is an influential interpreter of the writings of Q, who inspired the QAnon conspiracy theory that believes prominent people, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will be arrested for various crimes. While he acknowledged that many have spent the last three years waiting for the arrests, which never came, he argued the disappointment was part of the plan all along.

Speaking with Patrick Gunnels on the Reading Epic Threads webcast on Thursday, Hayes said Q warned people he would put out a lot of “disinformation.” It was designed to “make the bad guys make wrong moves,” according to Hayes.

“If you’re going to buy on to the Q thing, you have to know upfront that half of what Q is going to tell you is not going to be true,” Hayes said. “It’s for the purpose of psychological operations and that’s just what it is.”

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Senator Who Took Donations From Big Pharma Blocks Vote on Bill to Lower Drug Prices

Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho blocked Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attempt Wednesday to force a vote on legislation that would slash prescription drug prices, thwarting the Vermont senator’s effort to fast-track the new bill as the pharmaceutical industry rushes to hike costs in the new year.

Sanders, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, requested unanimous consent to proceed to debate and a vote on the Cutting Medicare Prescription Drug Prices in Half Act, a measure he introduced earlier Wednesday alongside Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

If passed, the bill would bring the prices of drugs covered by Medicare into line with what the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) or the Federal Supply Schedule pay for the same medications.

According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office study, the VA “paid an average of 54% less per unit than Medicare” for a sample of hundreds of brand-name and generic drugs.

But Crapo — a major recipient of pharmaceutical and insurance industry donations — objected to Sanders’ request to advance the legislation, claiming it would usher in “more bureaucracy.”

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