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.

SEC Issues Vague Threats Against Everyone Involved in the GameStop Stock Saga

The Securities and Exchange Commission broke its silence Friday morning on the populist investor uprising that has sent the stock price of beleaguered retailer GameStop “to the moon,”warning everyone involved that they are watching… and, for the time being, not doing a whole lot else, it seems.

“The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities,” the joint statement from acting SEC Chair Allison Herren Lee and the three commissioners.

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Two Toledo pastors sentenced for child sex trafficking, third awaiting sentence

Toledo pastor, Cordell Jenkins, 48, was sentenced to life in prison Friday, May 18 for sex trafficking of a minor.

Another Toledo pastor, Kenneth Butler, 39, was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison for similar crimes.

Both men pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to sex traffic children, sex trafficking of children and related charges.

Jenkins sexually exploited a female minor at his home, his office at Abundant Life Ministries and at a motel in Toledo.

According to court documents, Jenkins paid the minor and often recorded these interactions with his cell phone.

“These sentences for two men who abused their positions of authority to prey on children are richly deserved,” U.S. Attorney Justin E. Herdman said. “I remain in awe of the courage of the victims and the dedication of our law enforcement personnel in bringing these men to justice.”

A third pastor, Anthony Haynes, 40, was convicted earlier this year of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of a minor, sex trafficking, child exploitation and obstruction of a sex trafficking investigation following a trial. He is scheduled to be sentenced in June.

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Arizona High Court Misses Opportunity to Uphold Internet Users’ Online Privacy

It’s an uncontroversial position that EFF has long fought for: Internet users expect their private online activities to stay that way. That’s why law enforcement should have to get a search warrant before getting records of people’s Internet activities. 

But in a disappointing decision earlier this month, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected a warrant requirement for services to disclose Internet users’ activities and other information to law enforcement, a setback for people’s privacy online.

In a 4-3 opinion, the Arizona high court ruled in State v. Mixton that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information held by online services that record their online activities, such as IP address logs. According to the Court, that information is not protected by either the federal Constitution’s Fourth Amendment or the state’s constitution, because people disclose that information to third-party online services whenever they use them, a legal principle known as the third-party doctrine.

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Twitter’s ‘Birdwatch’ Community Fact-Checking Feature is Crowdsourcing Censorship

Now that Trump is out of office, many have been half expecting that mainstream media and Silicon Valley’s hyper-active ‘fact-check’ brigades might calm down, have a few wheat grass smoothies and bask in their momentous victory. Unfortunately, this new class of self-styled thought police are just getting warmed up. Jack’s got a plan.

Before we discuss Twitter’s latest dystopian add-on feature, let’s first establish a few important terms of reference as to the role which Big Tech has ascended to. The bottom line is that Twitter was caught directly meddling in the 2020 US Election and the mainstream press have worked hard to obfuscate this fact. When the Hunter Biden laptop scandal materialized prior to the November election, Twitter took the unilateral partisan decision to shutdown any information on the story, and even went so far as to shutdown the account of the New York Post who originally broke the story, and even suspended the White House Press Secretary’s account for retweeting it, as well as other high-profile staffers. Emboldened by Twitter’s bombast, Democrat leaders, mainstream media and even ‘the Big Guy’ Joe Biden himself – all clung to one singular narrative claiming the Hunter Biden story was somehow untrue, baseless misinformation planted by The Russians!™ to undermine candidate Biden. Not only were they all wrong, but we later learned that partisans at FBI had in fact been quietly sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop since autumn 2019, effectively keeping it on ice so as not to hurt Biden’s Presidential run. After the election, Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, then took what appeared to be coordinated action to pursue any users who dared to challenge the 2020 election result, in some cases prohibiting terms like “voter fraud” and “election fraud” on their platforms. This wave of censorship and fact-checking came into effect even before many of the court challenges. Regardless, the new ad hoc corporate ‘truth committees’ appeared omnipotent in their anointed role as information gatekeepers of the new digital public square. If that wasn’t enough, after Twitter and Facebook’s political purge, Big Tech cartel members and Democrat activists then conspired in the take-down an emerging competitor, Parler, taking the social media completely offline, and pressuring its vendors to abandon their service commitments with the new social media firm.

While this approached may have worked for them in the short-term, and indeed helped to achieve the election results they wanted, it won’t erase that fact Big Tech is guilty of the very crime which Democrats and media mavens spend 5 years trying to convince the world of when they floated the evidence-free conspiracy theory that the Russians ‘meddled’ and colluded with the Trump campaign in order to install The Donald in the White House in 2016.

Now, creative technocrats at Twitter appear to have devised a tangential escape route (and Section 230 workaround) from their own obvious culpability in election meddling and political censorship. It’s called “Birdwatch,” a new feature designed to supposedly combat the supposed omnipresent threat of ‘misinformation’ on their platform – by allowing users to add so-called ‘fact-check’ notes to peoples’ tweets. It’s supposed to allow ‘regular users’ (how are going to determine who is a ‘regular user’ is another question) called ‘Birdwatchers’ who will be allowed add to fact-check notes and provide ‘informative context’ for tweets.

Wait a minute. Call me old fashioned, but don’t Tweets already have a forum for discussion, context and debate? Isn’t that what the comment section below each Tweet is for? I used to think so.

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The Internet’s War On Wall Street Did What Government Could Not—It United America

In the last three weeks, after the Trumpists were duped into thinking they could stop the election of Joe Biden by walking into the capitol and taking selfies with cops, the American technocratic police state has shifted into hyperdrive. In the name of stopping the “insurrection” that wasn’t, President Joe Biden and his team of neoliberal cronies have moved to criminalize speech, up to and including arresting people for trolling with memes as far back as 2016!

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the like have been unceremoniously creating tens of thousands of online unpersons since January 6. Establishment hacks, hungry for more power, have seized this moment to increase the surveillance state apparatus and push for the criminalization of everything and anything that is anti-establishment. A nightmarish police state is unfolding in front of us and because the Trumpists were the first to be sacrificed, the left has still been on their honeymoon ignoring the fact that “pro-democracy” Biden is quickly becoming a dictator, bypassing Congress and ramming through a record number of executive actions.

To put it mildly, since the onset of lockdowns last March, those of us who have been paying attention, have seen that the outlook is bleak, so long as the masses keep allowing their elected officials to take away their rights in the name of perceived “safety.”

All promise is not lost, however. There have been multiple glimmers of hope, proving and reasserting the power of the individual versus the establishment. Gavin Newsom, who has been compared to Hitler for his draconian and entirely arbitrary lockdown orders, likely reacting to a massive recall effort against him, suddenly reversed course on the lockdowns this week, allowing struggling businesses to hang on to their life’s work. But this was just the beginning.

On Tuesday, a paradigm shift took place unlike anything we’ve seen in history. A populist movement started on Reddit that threw aside their political differences and moved to take back some of this power and wealth that has been extracted from them particularly over the last year, but going back decades before.

Gamestop, stopped the game.

The rigged game that has paid for yachts with helopads belonging to the myriad of slime balls on Wall Street, whose job description entails betting (in a casino they own) that businesses will fail, and then ensuring their failure, was exposed. In the last few days, millions have witnessed — many for the first time ever — that the system is a rigged club, and they are not in it.

The coordinated effort by millions on the internet has shown the establishment that the people have power. It knocked them on their heels as kids with $500 in their bank accounts helped take down multi-billion dollar hedge funds. Predictably, however, like the establishment does every time it is threatened, it used its power and influence to attempt to stop it.

On Thursday, the Robinhood app ironically began acting like the Sheriff of Nottingham as it froze trading to protect hedge funds from rising stock prices of GME, AMC, and NOK. This was de facto market manipulation to protect Wall Street while screwing over the individual investor.

But this move did not go unnoticed. In fact, it was an act so egregious that it garnered the attention of political enemies who actually found a moment of solidarity to stand against it.

MAGA Congressman from Arizona’s 4th District, Paul Gosar, along with Ted Cruz, and Lauren Boebert, united with their perceived political foes across the aisle like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call out this coordinated effort by Big Tech to collude against private investors.

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Avalanche Theory for Dyatlov Pass Incident is Bolstered by New Study

In what may be disappointing news to those who advocate for a more exotic explanation, an intriguing new scientific examination of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident supports the theory that the tragic event was the result of an avalanche. The 1959 case which saw nine hikers die under mysterious circumstances in Russia’s Ural Mountains has been the subject of considerable speculation and debate for decades with all manner of possibilities for what could have caused their demise being put forward by researchers. The latest look at the Dyaltov Pass incident comes by way of a pair of highly qualified experts who wound up coming to a rather familiar conclusion.

Learning about the curious case for the first time back in October of 2019, professor Johan Gaume, who heads the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, became fascinated by the mysterious event and enlisted Alexander Puzrin, chair of Geotechnical Engineering at ETH Zurich, to see if their considerable expertise could be used to solve the mystery once and for all. In a newly published paper authored by the two experts, they argue that the tragedy was, indeed, the result of an avalanche and, remarkably, that the unexpected torrent of snow was actually inadvertently caused by the hikers themselves.

Specifically, they theorize, the nightmarish chain of events began when the hikers cut into a snow slab on the side of the mountain in order to set up their tent and be protected by winds. “If they hadn’t made a cut in the slope, nothing would have happened,” mused Guame in a press release detailing the duo’s findings, “that was the initial trigger, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough.” As such, the two scientists propose that a downward airflow, known as a katabatic wind, likely caused an additional layer of snow to accumulate on the slope over the next several hours until the pressure became too much and the slab finally gave way in the form of an avalanche.

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