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.

YouTube CEO says content censorship is “consistent” for all creators, contradicting previous statements

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has defended the company’s moderation and censorship decisions in an interview as being consistently implemented for all creators in the same way – but that sits at odds with the reality of the platform’s policy which promotes what it considers “authoritative sources” over independent creators.

Wojcicki herself in the past admitted that legacy media are allowed to post content that would otherwise fall into the “hate speech” category because they provide their own “context” for it. This would mean that the same moderation rules therefore do not apply to all.

But speaking for Marketplace, Wojcicki claims that censorship (“moderation”) decisions are not taken lightly, and are applied in a consistent manner that doesn’t discriminate between creators.

She also used the fact both sides in the US political divide criticize YouTube (one side saying there is too much censorship, deplatforming and other kinds of restrictions, while the other believes there isn’t enough) as proof that YouTube is getting it right and “striking a balance.”

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New Brunswick begins allowing essentials like grocery stores to ban those without a vaccine passport

Since Saturday, grocery stores in New Brunswick have been allowed to ban those who do now show a vaccine passport. Authorities are trying to justify the measure as a way to keep Covid infections down.

Announcing the “winter action plan” the government of New Brunswick allowed all businesses, businesses that provide essentials such as food, to require proof of vaccination from clients.

The province’s health minister Dorothy Shephard justified the move by saying the rise in the number of cases was “very concerning.”

Critics are already seeing the plan is a potential violation of human rights, because it would allow stores to discriminate based on vaccination status and bar people from accessing food, which is a basic need.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Canada has been the subject of controversy over restrictive measures. The federal government recently banned those without a vaccine passport from traveling domestically and internationally via air and trains.

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To Deny the “Lab Leak” COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

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Britain may outlaw catcalling

Pestering women on the street and in bars could soon become an offense as part of an overhaul of laws to protect women against violence.

Loopholes in current laws mean there is no specific offense for sexually harassing women verbally in the street.

Now a Government-commissioned review will next week call for public sexual harassment and inciting hatred against women to be made criminal offences, reports The Telegraph.

The proposed change is part of a push to outlaw “public sexual harassment”.

However, calls for misogyny to be made a hate crime will be rejected — as it’s thought it be ineffective, according to sources.

A Whitehall source told the paper: “The Law Commission is not going to class misogyny as a hate crime because it would be ineffective and in some cases counterproductive.

“But it will call for a public sexual harassment offence which doesn’t currently exist.

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Government watchdog agency can’t figure out where 20% of federal election grant funding went

An audit by the Government Accountability Office could not account for a significant portion of Election Assistance Commission grants provide to states to assist with voting last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Congress approved the CARES Act, which was designed as a pandemic relief measure, the commission received $400 million in grants, but thus far, the GAO has only accounted for $326 million of that money, meaning the watchdog agency does not know where or how roughly 20 percent of that money was spent, according to a November report.

Republicans in the House first voiced concerns about the election grants in September 2020 in relation to an item of expenditure in California. According to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the GAO’s analysis and findings provide validation for Republicans’ concerns that the problems are not limited to a single state.

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China moon rover to investigate cube-shaped ‘mystery house’ object

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It’s been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019, as part of China’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance.  

Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to “mystery house.” 

The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object.

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