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.

Scotland Stops Publishing Covid Vaccine Death Statistics, Blames ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ For Raising Alarm

Public Health Scotland has announced it will no longer publish information about deaths and hospitalizations related to Covid-19 vaccination status, citing concerns the data is being “misused” by anti-vaccination campaigners.

Scotland’s public health watchdog announced the sudden change in policy last week in its most recent Covid-19 report, saying the frequency and content of the data would be reviewed.

Instead, officials will focus on publishing more complex data that promotes the idea of vaccine effectiveness.

Remarkably, Public Health Scotland officials admitted they will no longer publish the vaccination status of deaths in the country due to the activities of anti-vaccination campaigners.

The report published last week will be the last weekly publication to include data which includes information on death rates, broken down by the number of doses received.

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On This Presidents Day, Stop Worshiping the Imperial Presidency

Ah, Presidents Day: a much-needed moment to slow down and commemorate presidents past and present, because we definitely don’t have enough of that in this country.

I jest!

Walking around Los Angeles, you’d be hard-pressed not to pass someone sporting BIDEN-HARRIS merchandise—a shirt, a bumper sticker, a sweatshirt, a mask. Back where I grew up in Virginia, the same is true, though they have a different hero: For years, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” adorned the lawns, cars, and hats of those who wanted you to know they stood, and perhaps still stand, with former President Donald Trump.

That’s not news. Public displays of affection for the U.S. president have become standard in everyday American life, extending well past election cycles and rock-concert-esque inaugurations, as if who you voted for is a personality trait. That’s the conventional wisdom, it seems. So, on this fair Presidents Day, a reminder: Presidents aren’t saints. They aren’t monarchs. They aren’t celebrities. And they aren’t your friends! The executive leader is an employee of the country—someone whose job was, and still should be, limited in size and scope.

It has become something decidedly different over the years, with each president becoming more powerful than the last. That maybe explains, to some degree, why the political fangirling has grown in tandem. Though I can’t step back in time to the 18th and 19th centuries, I would venture to say Americans weren’t donning shirts with presidents’ faces or branding horse-drawn carriages with the names of current and erstwhile U.S. leaders. Nor do I think former President George Washington, whose birthday serves as the inspiration for this holiday, would have wanted that sort of hero worship, when considering that the bedrock of America’s founding specifically sought to create a new order—one without a king or king-like figure.

“The founders of our republic did not want to put that much [power] in the hands of a single leader,” Mark Rozell, the founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told The Christian Science Monitor. “America’s addiction to executive power has become dangerous for this country.”

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Bill Gates: ‘Sadly Omicron Has Done a Better Job Than the Vaccines’

During an event at the Munich Security Conference, Bill Gates said that “sadly” Omicron is a “type of vaccine” and has “done a better job getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”

The Microsoft co-founder made the remarks after being asked to assess where the world was at in its fight against COVID-19.

“Sadly, the virus itself, particularly, the variant called omicron, is a type of vaccine, that is it creates both B-cell and T-cell immunity, and it’s done a better job getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines,” Gates lamented.

The billionaire went on to point out that 80 per cent of Africans have either been vaccinated or infected with one of the variants (with the minority having been vaccinated).

“That means the chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection, exposure,” said Gates.

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 CDC Has Withheld COVID Data From Americans To ‘Prevent Vaccine Hesitency’

The New York Times reported this past weekend that the CDC has chosen not to publish huge amounts of COVID data, instead keeping it secret, because it fears that the information would cause ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among the American public.

The report notes that the withheld data includes information on boosters, hospitalizations, wastewater analyses, as well as critical information on COVID infections and deaths broken down by age, race, and vaccination status.

The justification for holding the information back?  Fears that the data would be “misinterpreted” and lead to “vaccine hesitancy,” according to the report.

In other words, it didn’t fit into the narrative that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted no matter who they are and what their situation is.

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The absurd ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post

“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest,” the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by The Washington Post and The New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.

It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy we now know never existed.

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Canadian Police Freeze 206 Financial Products, Including Bank and Corporate Accounts, Allegedly Involved in Ottawa Protests

Canadian authorities have frozen the financial assets of individuals and companies that are allegedly involved in the ongoing protests in Ottawa Mike Duheme, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) deputy commissioner of federal policing, announced on Feb. 20.

Duheme said at a news conference that the RCMP froze 206 financial products, including bank and corporate accounts, and disclosed the information of 56 entities associated with vehicles, individuals, and companies.

RCMP also shared 253 bitcoin addresses with virtual currency exchangers; and froze a payment processing account valued at $3.8 million, Duheme said.

It is unclear what will happen to the money that has been frozen by financial institutions.

“We continue to work at collecting relevant information on persons, vehicles, and companies and remain in daily communication with the financial institution to assist them,” Duheme said.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Feb. 15 that banks would be able to freeze the personal and corporate accounts of anyone suspected to be linked with the protests, and would not require a court order to do so.

Crowdfunding platforms and the payment services providers they use would now fall under anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws, with the changes covering all forms of transactions including those in cryptocurrencies, Freeland explained.

“The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act,” said Freeland.

Her announcement came as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada’s history to address the impact of the ongoing protests against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions by truckers and their supporters.

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Highly Decorated D.A.R.E. Cop Admits to Running Enormous Child Porn Ring That Abused Toddlers

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program should better be called an egregious exercise in how not to convince kids to keep away from substances the state deems illegal. As cops hopped on their high horses and had children pledge not to do drugs, the rate of drug use skyrocketed — thrusting the country into one of the worst drug epidemics in human history. The hypocrisy by the cops who pushed the D.A.R.E. program has been well-documented over the years, explaining, at least in part, as to why the program was such a failure from the start. Now, another cop who pushed kids to ‘just say no’ has pleaded guilty to disturbing criminal activity. 

Parents whose children participated in the D.A.R.E. program in Beavercreek, Ohio now need to question their children who may have had contact with former Beavercreek police officer Kevin A. Kovacs. In April 2019, Kovacs, 60, was arrested at his home for unspeakable crimes against children. This week, he admitted to all of it and it’s utterly horrifying.

“Videos featured the sexual abuse of children as young as toddler aged,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. “One video depicted a toddler lying on a diaper whose arms and legs were bound by black tape.”

In total, as of December 2019, Kovacs possessed more than 780 images and 5,100 videos of child pornography, according to the release. He had used online messenger, social media, cloud storage and email accounts to transport and possess child pornography.

This disgusting individual will now be spending up to the next 240 months in a cage, where he belongs.

“The conduct he is alleged to have committed is both disgusting and extremely disappointing,” said former Beavercreek Police Chief Dennis Evers at the time of Kovacs arrest. “As a former D.A.R.E. officer who received departmental and community awards for his work, he, of all people, knew this criminal activity to be exploitation of children and unlawful.”

Less than two years before this cop was arrested for running a child porn ring, Officer Kovacs received the “Law Enforcement Officer of the Year” Award. When presented with the honor, the Beavercreek police department praised him for his work with young children.

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New Zealand, amazingly, has gotten even more totalitarian about COVID

From practically the first day that COVID appeared, New Zealand’s government was on the front line of totalitarianism in terms of trying to keep the virus off its shores. The country’s lockdown was total. With every fanatic rule, it was hard to imagine the government topping itself. And yet that’s exactly what the government is doing. The newest initiative is to fine people for refusing COVID tests—and, if they ignore the fine, destroying them financially and imprisoning them in fortress New Zealand.

Beginning in March 2020, New Zealand closed its borders to the world and put the country (and its economy) in almost complete lockdown, with only occasional intermittent breaks from these national prison conditions — and of course, the government-mandated vaccine passports, which are effectively vaccine mandates for those who wish to function in the country.

The latest initiative is, apparently, enforced COVID testing.  Libs of TikTok tweeted out a Notice someone received for “COVID-19 Testing Non Compliance.”  The fine is NZD 330, which is USD 220.  If the person fails to pay the fine, another NZD 102 (USD 68) gets added to the fine.

But wait!  There’s more!

That additional $102 fee seems to be intended to cover the costs of the more serious consequences for non-payment of the fine (and, presumably, the continued refusal to have that swab stuck up your nose).

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The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.

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