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.

The Washington Post Memory-Holed Kamala Harris’ Bad Joke About Inmates Begging for Food and Water

When The Washington Post published a 2019 campaign trail feature about then-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’ close relationship with her sister, it opened with a memorable anecdote in which Harris bizarrely compared the rigors of the campaign trail to…life behind bars.

And then proceeded to laugh—at the idea of an inmate begging for a sip of water.

It was an extremely cringeworthy moment, even by the high standards set by Harris’ failed presidential campaign. But now that Harris is vice president, that awful moment has seemingly vanished from the Post’s website after the paper “updated” the piece earlier this month.

Here’s how the first seven paragraphs of that article, published by the Post on July 23, 2019, and bylined by features reporter Ben Terris, originally appeared:

It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.

She’d been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.

“I actually got sleep,” Kamala said, sitting in a Hilton conference room, beside her sister, and smiling as she recalled walks on the beach with her husband and that one morning SoulCycle class she was able to take.

“That kind of stuff,” Kamala said between sips of iced tea, “which was about bringing a little normal to the days, that was a treat for me.”

“I mean, in some ways it was a treat,” Maya said. “But not really.”

“It’s a treat that a prisoner gets when they ask for, ‘A morsel of food please,’ ” Kamala said shoving her hands forward as if clutching a metal plate, her voice now trembling like an old British man locked in a Dickensian jail cell. “‘And water! I just want wahtahhh….’Your standards really go out the f—ing window.”

Kamala burst into laughter.

It should go without saying that choosing to run for the most powerful political office in the world is absolutely nothing like being behind bars—and getting to squeeze in a morning SoulCycle session before sitting down for an interview with a national newspaper is not remotely the same as dying of thirst. None of this is funny.

Keep reading

This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos

WHEN HACKERS EXPLOITED a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.

Keep reading

Feds Ask Travel Companies (Hotels, Car Rentals, Bus Companies) To ID Suspected Capitol Rioters

The War on Terror has officially crossed the line by using the Capitol riot to destroy what little is left of our civil liberties.

Bloomberg News reported that the House Oversight Committee has asked travel companies to help law enforcement ID suspected Capitol rioters.

“The committee sent letters to hotel chains, bus lines, car rental companies and online travel agents, asking them to retain all records regarding reservations and services for the entire month of January for potential use, if necessary, in future law enforcement or Congressional investigations.”

When the feds openly ask travel companies to help them ID suspected rioters EVERYONE’S privacy is at risk.

As Forbes noted, the Feds sent letters to more than two dozen travel companies, including nine bus companies.

Keep reading

Right On Cue For Biden, WHO Admits High-Cycle PCR Tests Produce COVID False Positives

Were the ‘conspiracy theorists’ just proven right about the “fake rescue plan” for COVID?

Did the ‘science-deniers’ just get confirmation that it was political after all?

The short answer to both of these questions regarding the COVID-19 ‘casedemic’ and the fallacy of asymptomatic PCR testing is YES and YES!

Keep reading

PRESIDENT BIDEN MOVES TO END FEMALE-ONLY SPORTS AND SERVICES ON HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE

One of the first acts of Joe Biden’s presidency was to gut sex anti-discrimination laws and eliminate critical protections for women in the federal government. On Wednesday afternoon, only hours after being sworn into office, Biden signed an executive order that “builds on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) and ensures that the federal government interprets Title VII of the the [sic] Civil Rights Act of 1964 as prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” according to the Biden transition team website. 

The order also ensures “that federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.” Federal civil rights offices will also be required to enforce this interpretation in any matter that comes before them, likely including siding against women’s rights in court cases.

With this action, Biden is bypassing the legislative process to implement the most controversial provisions of the Equality Act—changing the definition of sex in federal anti-discrimination regulations so that female people are no longer a discrete class with protected status under the law. As we predicted, the new administration is relying on the Bostock decision to do so.

This executive order directs federal agencies to do two things. First, federal agencies are now required to interpret “sex” as also including “sexual orientation and gender identity” in their own internal regulations and workplace policies.  Second, agencies are directed to perform a comprehensive assessment of all regulations under their purview, and create a plan with 100 days to “revise, suspend, or rescind such agency actions, or promulgate [propose] new agency actions”  that will impose this interpretation onto all American employers, institutions, and individuals, with no exceptions. 

The Supreme Court was clear at the time of the Bostock decision that the ruling was only meant to be applied to hiring and firing discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, in advancing their novel reasoning that “transgender status” meant that a male employee should be allowed to identify into the otherwise lawful sex-based rules for female employees. While we strongly support protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation, the Biden administration has grossly expanded the application of the decision with far-reaching implications for women’s rights in nearly every aspect of public life, including Title IX.

Keep reading

STATE LEGISLATURES MAKE “UNPRECEDENTED” PUSH ON ANTI-PROTEST BILLS

Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills, which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local governments from defunding police.

The pushes by close to a fifth of state legislatures are part of a pattern that began to pick up speed after the summer’s uprisings in response to the police killing of George Floyd, which in many communities included significant property damage. In a handful of states, lawmakers did what they often do: introduced new legislation — however unnecessary — to show that they were responding to their constituents’ concerns.

Keep reading

Twitter Being Sued for Telling Child Porn Victim That Images of Him at 13 Years Old Didn’t Violate Their Terms of Service

Twitter is being sued by a child pornography victim for refusing to remove images of him at 13 years old that were posted by predators who blackmailed him.

Twitter allegedly told the victim that the child pornography did not violate the platform’s terms of service.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in California on Wednesday on behalf of the now 17-year-old from Florida, who is identified only as “John Doe.”

The National File reports that when Doe was 13 through 14, he was targeted by sex traffickers posing as a 16-year-old female classmate, who blackmailed him to share nude content.

“After initially exchanging nude content, the victim was then forced to share more, otherwise the material would be shared with his ‘parents, coach, pastor,’ and others, the traffickers threatened. Doe first complied under duress, the lawsuit notes, but then managed to block the traffickers. However, at some point in 2019, the child porn was then shared to Twitter from two accounts that were known to share this material,” the National File report explains.

Doe’s lawsuit says that he reported the accounts sharing the images to Twitter no less than three times, but Twitter claimed that they had “reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation” of their policies.

The images of the very young Doe racked up over 167,000 views on the platform.

“What do you mean you don’t see a problem?” Doe replied to Twitter. “We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.”

The content was not removed until an agent from the Department of Homeland Security contacted Twitter.

“This is directly in contrast to what their automated reply message and User Agreement state they will do to protect children,” the lawsuit states.

National File reported last  year that Twitter’s Terms of Service explicitly allow people to openly talk about child rape on their platform, despite claiming to have “zero tolerance towards any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation.”

Keep reading