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.

New York Post says Twitter is holding its account hostage as paper is told it must delete links to Hunter Biden email story even though site lifted ban on sharing bombshell report

The New York Post’s Twitter account remains locked as the social media giant demands the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid delete six tweets linking to its stories on Hunter Biden’s emails. 

As of Saturday morning, the Post’s Twitter feed shows that it has not posted a story since Wednesday.

A Twitter representative told the newspaper that while the site has lifted restrictions that banned users from circulating the link to the Biden story, the Post is still required to remove the tweets so that it could use its account.

‘While we’ve updated the policy, we don’t change enforcement retroactively,’ a Twitter rep told the Post on Friday in an email.

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Emails: Burisma Adviser Told Hunter Biden His ‘Ultimate Purpose’ Was to ‘Close Down’ Investigations

An adviser to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma suggested in an email in 2015 that Hunter Biden was expected to provide “deliverables” for the company, including the “ultimate purpose” of stopping “cases/pursuits into the company’s founder.

The email, contained in a batch published by Ken LaCorte at the Media Action Network, is reportedly from the same laptop that the New York Post claims is the source for source for a recent series of articles about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The authenticity of the emails has not been verified.

The batch includes an email in November 2015 from Burisma adviser Vadim Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden’s business partners (on which Hunter Biden was cc’ed), outlining a set of “deliverables.”

The emails make clear that Biden and his partners were expected to arrange meetings with U.S. and Ukrainian officials with the goal of “improving Nikolay’s case and his situation in Ukraine.”

“Nikolay” appears to refer to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, according to the Post.

Pozharskyi wrote that the “list of deliverables” included “the ultimate purpose” of stopping “cases/pursuits against Nikolay”:

My only concern is focus to be on the same page re our final goals. With this in mind, I would like to formulate a list of deliverables, including, but not limited to: a concrete course of actions, uncle. meetings/communications resulting in high-ranking US officials in Ukraine (US Ambassador) and in US publicly or in private communication/comment expressing their “positive opinion” and support of Nikolay/Burisma to the highest level of decision makers here in Ukraine :President of Ukraine, president Chief of staff, Prosecutor General, etc

The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay’s issue to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down for   any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.

Other emails in the trove show a keen awareness of Hunter Biden’s relationship to his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, who was leading U.S. diplomacy with regard to Ukraine.

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The cult of mask-wearing grows, with no evidence they work

A century ago, during the Spanish flu pandemic, authorities in many cities in this country passed mandatory mask ordinances, just like the ones we have now. Many Americans accepted them, but many others did not. In California, citizens rebelled. In January of 1919, 5,000 members of the newly formed Anti-Mask League of San Francisco gathered to call for the mayor’s resignation if he didn’t repeal his mask order. Five days later, the mayor complied.  Science vindicated that decision in the end. A year later, a study found that compulsory mask use likely had no effect on curbing the Spanish flu.

We live in a very different time. American society, of course, is far less cohesive than it was one hundred years ago, and Americans seem far more passive. Those who disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy have less power than they’ve ever had. Mass communications are now controlled by a tiny number of people, all of whom have identical agendas. There is no modern Anti-Mask League. There couldn’t be a modern Anti-Mask League. Facebook and Google would shut it down the first day. The governors of Michigan and New Jersey would indict its leaders.

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Facebook and Twitter’s Intervention Highlights Dangerous New Double Standard

The only thing that should matter, when it comes to stories like this, is whether or not the material is true and in the public interest. This disturbing new confederation of media outlets and tech firms is rewriting that standard.

The optics of a former Democratic Party spokesman suddenly donning a Facebook official’s hat to announce a ban of a story damaging to Democrats couldn’t be worse. Moreover, the Orwellian construct described in papers like the Times suggests that for tech executives, pundits, and Democratic Party officials alike, the lines between fake news and bad news, between actual misinformation and information that is merely politically adverse, have been blurred. It’s no longer clear that some of these people see a meaningful distinction between the two ideas.

The public can’t help but see this. While papers like the Times denounce the true Podesta emails as “misinformation,” and Facebook says the New York Post story must be kept out of sight until verified, the standard for, say, the Steele dossier was and is opposite. In that case, we were told “raw intelligence” should be published so that “Americans can make up their own minds” about information that, while “salacious and unverified,” may still be freely read on Twitter and Facebook, reported on in the New York Times and Washington Post, and talked about on NBC, so long as it has not been completely “disproven.”

As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post points out, even that last point is no longer true, but the Steele dossier and plenty of other products of what Axios calls “hack and leak” journalism continue to be embraced and freely distributed. The obvious double-standard guarantees that the tech platforms will henceforth be viewed by a huge portion of the population as political censors instead of standards enforcers, and moreover that mainstream press pronouncements about such controversies will be deemed automatically untrustworthy by that same population.

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