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.

Facebook Bans Ads Questioning Safety Of COVID-19 Vaccines

The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.

And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.

“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in a blog post Tuesday.

Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against “mandatory vaccination,” which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in “bad faith” that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted “STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS”.

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San Francisco Will Pay Artists $1,000 a Month in Universal Basic Income

San Francisco will become the latest city to experiment with a universal basic income (UBI). Sort of.

In an effort to assist the city’s struggling arts community in bouncing back from the pandemic, Mayor London Breed announced last week that she’d be rolling out a cash transfer program for artists.

Under the mayor’s plan, 130 artists in the city will receive a $1,000 monthly cash stipend for a period of six months starting early next year.  It’s one of several arts-themed policies sourced from the city’s Economic Recovery Task Force final report released last Thursday, which also includes funding for “artists to paint murals with a public health theme on boarded-up businesses and deploy performance artists to promote COVID-safe behaviors in high foot traffic areas.”

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Why Did Leon Black Pay Jeffrey Epstein $50 Million?

Billionaire Leon Black gave his longtime pal Jeffrey Epstein $50 million dollars after the deceased financier got out of prison for pedophilia.

The transfer of funds was made in at least two payments, one of which Deutsche Bank flagged as unusual, according to the New York Times, citing ‘two people familiar with the matter.’

Epstein served as a director on the Leon Black Family Foundation for over a decade, and also accepted a $10 million donation for his Gratitude America foundation from Black’s “BV70 LLC” charity.

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Will All The Name-Brand People Who Pushed The Russian Collusion Conspiracy Get Off Scot-Free?

A year ago, the story dominating headlines was the allegation that President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. The idea of impeaching President Trump due to these allegations was gathering steam, with accusations from elected officials and beyond that the president of the United States was a Russian puppet, a Manchurian candidate installed by Vladimir Putin, and even an agent of a hostile foreign power for the last 30 years.

You don’t need to be a fan of Trump to be outraged about the Russian collusion conspiracy. But it’s a mark against your patriotism, your judgement, or your intellect if you aren’t. Beyond just being perhaps the most defining political scandal of our time, the hoax gets under my skin because I fell for it. And I’m enormously angry for having been duped.

Now that this narrative has been proven false and possibly influenced by actual Russian disinformation, it is time to revisit how it was created and dominated U.S. politics for so long, as well as demand justice for its perpetrators.

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Bill Gates says life will return to normal only after SECOND generation of Covid vaccines rolled out and virus eliminated globally

Technology tycoon Bill Gates said life can get back to normal only when a second generation of Covid-19 vaccines is widely available and the virus is eradicated worldwide – a higher bar than was set for any disease in history.

“The only way we’ll get completely back to normal is by having, maybe not the first generation of vaccines, but eventually a vaccine that is super-effective, and that a lot of the people take, and that we get the disease eliminated on a global basis,” Gates said Sunday in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press program. “That is where we can finally start taking all the problems that have been created — in education, mental health — and start to build back in a positive way.”

According to that standard, Americans might need to live for years, or for life, under social-distancing guidelines and other Covid-19 restrictions. It’s certainly gloomier than the assessment Gates gave in a Fox interview last month, when he said progress on vaccines might make it possible for a return to normalcy in the US by the summer of 2021. He said he expects several of the first generation of vaccines to get emergency approval by early next year.

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Why Are Political Journalists More Scared of Revealing Their Votes Than Baseball Writers?

Look, we know newspapers are going to overwhelmingly endorse Joe Biden. When political donations originating from employees of media organizations are eventually tallied up, we know they will tilt massively Democrat. Most people who are cognizant of the profession’s recent turn toward “moral clarity” over unattainable objectivity understand that that means those with non-lefty politics will be subjected to harsher adjectives.

And yet the very same media commentators who have long decried the so-called “view from nowhere” are absent in this battle for more journalistic transparency.

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The Covidian Cult

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative. Not a regular official narrative, like the “Cold War” or the “War on Terror” narratives. A totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts.

Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults and other sub-cultural societal groups. Numerous examples will spring to mind: the Manson family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Church of Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc., each with its own psychotic official narrative: Helter Skelter, Christian Communism, Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, and so on.

Looking in from the dominant culture (or back through time in the case of the Nazis), the delusional nature of these official narratives is glaringly obvious to most rational people. What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them (whether individual cult members or entire totalitarian societies) such narratives do not register as psychotic. On the contrary, they feel entirely normal. Everything in their social “reality” reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.

These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult’s ideology can save its members from. It makes little difference whether this antagonist is mainstream culture, body thetans, counter-revolutionaries, Jews, or a virus. The point is not the identity of the enemy. The point is the atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria the official narrative generates, which keeps the cult members (or the society) compliant.

In addition to being paranoid, these narratives are often internally inconsistent, illogical, and … well, just completely ridiculous. This does not weaken them, as one might suspect. Actually, it increases their power, as it forces their adherents to attempt to reconcile their inconsistency and irrationality, and in many cases utter absurdity, in order to remain in good standing with the cult. Such reconciliation is of course impossible, and causes the cult members’ minds to short circuit and abandon any semblance of critical thinking, which is precisely what the cult leader wants.

Moreover, cult leaders will often radically change these narratives for no apparent reason, forcing their cult members to abruptly forswear (and often even denounce as “heresy”) the beliefs they had previously been forced to profess, and behave as if they had never believed them, which causes their minds to further short circuit, until they eventually give up even trying to think rationally, and just mindlessly parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish the cult leader fills their heads with.

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