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.

Cop Who Killed Ashli Babbitt Cleared Without Formal Law Enforcement Interview

According to a report from RealClearInvestigations, U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd was cleared of any wrongdoing following the Ashli Babbitt shooting without being forced to conduct a formal interview with law enforcement.

Byrd made a point to note that he had been investigated by several law enforcement agencies and was exonerated by the federal government for his actions when he appeared on “NBC Nightly News” with Lester Holt.

“There’s an investigative process and I was cleared by the DOJ, and FBI and Metropolitan Police,” he told Holt this past August.

According to several sources and documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations, Byrd never conducted a formal interview with any law enforcement agency.

Byrd did answer questions about the shooting from Holt, alleging that he gave Babbitt a warning before firing. but these details were likely never shared with investigators because Byrd refused to answer their questions.

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Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

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The Age of Intolerance: Cancel Culture’s War on Free Speech

“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”—George Carlin

Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

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Maryland Parents Shocked to Learn Children Were Given Race and Gender Scorecards to Calculate Privilege

A mother in Carroll County, Md., reported that students, including her daughter, were recently given race and gender privilege scorecards to complete as part of their preparation for an upcoming reading assignment in English class. Accompanying the scorecards were other media elaborating on the concept of privilege.

When the daughter questioned her teacher on what privilege has to do with learning English, expressing concerns that the material seemed “racist towards whites” and that it “portrayed the police in a negative light,” the teacher reacted by saying it was actually good to have those feelings and that the purpose of the lesson is to foster uncomfortable conversations.  

The girl’s mother sees things differently, calling such topics in the classroom “absolutely appalling.” She continued: “They’re teaching our kids to view and treat people based on their skin color, rather than treating each other as individuals. How this belongs in an English class is beyond me.”

The Concerned Parents of Carroll County Maryland, a local group organized to remove political indoctrination in schools and promote common-sense COVID policies, were originally sent the classroom documents. The group has received similar reports from many students and parents throughout their community’s school system. 

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Study Finds Cannabis Compounds Prevent Infection By Covid-19 Virus

Compounds in cannabis can prevent infection from the virus that causes Covid-19 by blocking its entry into cells, according to a study published this week by researchers affiliated with Oregon State University. A report on the research, “Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants,” was published online on Monday by the Journal of Natural Products.

The researchers found that two cannabinoid acids commonly found in hemp varietals of cannabis, cannabigerolic acid, or CBGA, and cannabidiolic acid, also known as CBDA, can bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. By binding to the spike protein, the compounds can prevent the virus from entering cells and causing infection, potentially offering new avenues to prevent and treat the disease.

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Biden administration planning lists of employees seeking ‘religious’ vaccine exemptions

An obscure federal agency has proposed creating a database capturing the names and “personal religious information” of government employees who submit “religious accommodation requests” to be exempted from the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

At least seven other federal agencies, including five Cabinet departments, are apparently setting up similar “personal religious information” databases, according to an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in the District.

The federal Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency for the District of Columbia, or CSOSA, published a “notice of a new system of records” in the Federal Register on Tuesday.

The agency, which supervises defendants awaiting trial as well as parolees, aims to “reduce recidivism” and “integrate offenders into the community by connecting them with resources and interventions.”

The federal departments of Treasury, the Interior, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and Transportation, as well as the General Services Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission, have each published proposed rule-makings to implement “systems of records” tracking their workers’ religious accommodation requests.

While there is “some data collection that is likely and legally permissible under Title VII, when an individual at a covered agency requests a religious accommodation,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government, said, “we have not seen it on a broad scale like this ever.”

President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers took effect Nov. 22 under an executive order he issued Sept. 9. The executive order said its terms were “subject to such exceptions as required by law.”

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