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.

False Flags Suddenly No Longer A Crazy Conspiracy Theory

In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.

“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday. “We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”

“Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby told the press on Friday. “In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives, to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people, or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, as an excuse to go in.”

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Retired BBC producer caught with over 800 child abuse images spared jail time due to ‘poor health’

76-year-old Victor Melleney, a retired BBC producer, was caught with 832 indecent images of children stored on a range of devices.

Melleney, who worked on top shows such as Question Time and Panorama, was spared jail time Friday after a judge decided a prison sentence would be “particularly challenging” for the septuagenarian in “poor health.”

Melleney admitted he is addicted to legal pornography, but maintained he had no interest in indecent images of children, the Kingston Crown Court heard.

According to the Daily Mail, when Melleney was arrested in 2018 at his west London home, National Crime Agency officers found 612 of the 832 images on a hard drive, but he insisted he had no idea how the illegal material got there.

The officers also found illegal stun guns at the time belonging to Melleney, and he admitted to four charges of possession of prohibited weapons for discharge of noxious gas, namely three Tasers and CS gas spray, at an earlier hearing.

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Obama Adviser Pleads Guilty to Stealing Over $200,000

Seth Andrew, a former adviser to 44th President Barack Obama, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges after stealing $218,000 from a charter school he founded.

The US Department of Justice announced on Friday that Andrew had pleaded guilty to transferring the money from the school to his own private bank accounts, which were being used to acquire a mortgage for a multi-million-dollar New York apartment.

Andrew could face up to 20 years in prison for the crime and is set to be sentenced on April 14. The former White House education adviser has agreed “to pay restitution to the Charter School Network from which he stole,” according to the DOJ.

“Seth Andrew, a former White House adviser, admitted today to devising a scheme to steal from the very same schools he helped create,” said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “Andrew now faces time in federal prison for abusing his position and robbing those he promised to help.”

Andrew – who served as an education adviser to the Obama White House between 2014 and 2016 – was arrested in April 2021 and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements.

At the time, FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. accused Andrew of stealing the school’s money to get “the lowest interest rate” while applying for the Manhattan apartment loan.

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Al-Qaeda Terrorist’s Brother Allegedly Takes Hostages at Texas Synagogue, Demands Release

Muhammad Siddiqui, the brother of an al-Qaeda terrorist being held in Texas, has reportedly stormed into a Dallas synagogue while armed and has taken hostages while demanding his sibling’s release.

The crisis situation is unraveling at Congregation Beth Israel, a synagogue in Clleyville, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The gunman reportedly entered the synagogue during Saturday service and took at least four hostages, including a rabbi.

The suspect also claims explosives have been planted at the scene.

Apparently, the services were being live streamed to Facebook when the suspect entered.

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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’

For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.

Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.

This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.

A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.

A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.

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NYT Warns of ‘Right-Wing Threat’ to Democracy, Calls to ‘War-Game’ Insurgency, Secession, Civil War

The U.S. may be on the verge of collapse due to right-wing threats on democracy, according to a recent New York Times piece that called to intensify “war games” for scenarios concerning the 2024 presidential elections such as “insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war” in order to avert “political decay” of the country.

A Thursday New York Times essay, titled “We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country,” begins by deeming the U.S. perhaps “even more alarmingly fractious and divided” one year after the January 6 Capitol riot. 

“Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for [former President] Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms,” it continues.

The essay was penned by Jonathan Stevenson, a former National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration, and Steven Simon, a former staffer in the State Department and on the National Security Council in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

Speculating that the next presidential election “will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested,” the authors warn of a “politically existential” threat to the country due to right-wing preparations for a potential 2024 “power grab.”

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In Reporting Shift, Associated Press Tells Staff to ‘Avoid Emphasizing’ COVID-19 Case Counts

The Associated Press (AP), a wire service used by numerous news outlets, told staffers recently to “avoid emphasizing” COVID-19 case counts in stories after the Omicron virus variant began infecting large numbers of vaccinated people.

The AP has written dozens of stories about cases surging in certain areas but has decided to shift its focus due to the rise of the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, and the lack of inclusion in case counts among people who test themselves at home, the service said.

The shift means the wire will produce “no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable,” AP reported.

COVID-19 case records have been set across the country and the world in recent days.

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Don’t Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech

Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.

The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.

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