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.

University Of Kentucky Segregated Residential Assistance Training By Race, Sent White People To ‘White Accountability Space’

Whites and non-whites training to be Residential Assistants at the University of Kentucky were segregated according to their race and put through different presentations.

The separate trainings were provided to Young America’s Foundation through the organization’s Campus Bias Tip Line, which included emails and documents about the training. White RAs were sent to a “White Accountability Space” where they were given a document that listed 41 “common racist behaviors and attitudes of white people.”

Number one on the list states that white people “believe they have ‘earned’ what they have, rather than acknowledge the extensive white privilege and unearned advantages they receive” and “believe that if people of color just worked harder …” The list also includes claims that white people don’t “notice the daily indignities that people of color experience; deny them and rationalize them away with PLEs (perfectly logical explanations),” “resent taking direction from a person of color,” and tend to ask “people of color to repeat what they have said.”

Brandon Colbert from the university’s Bias Incident Support Services offered a presentation for the training allegedly talking about “microaggressions and microinvalidations in the workplace and the harm that they cause.”

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Judge’s Son Gets Zero Prison Time After Pleading Guilty To Child Pornography

A 34-year-old man who had been found guilty of possessing 25 counts of child pornography has walked away with an extremely smaller sentence because he happened to be a sitting judge’s son. The incident occurred in Butler County, Pennsylvania where locals are alleging that John Paul Doerr III only received a six-month house arrest, five years of probation, and 15 years on Megan’s Law registry because the accused’s father was a powerful man in the community, reports WPXI-TV. Normally, the maximum sentence for a crime such as this easily goes up to more than 250 years in prison.

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CDC Study Finds Overwhelming Majority Of People Getting Coronavirus Wore Masks

A Centers for Disease Control report released in September shows that masks and face coverings are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19, even for those people who consistently wear them.

A study conducted in the United States in July found that when they compared 154 “case-patients,” who tested positive for COVID-19, to a control group of 160 participants from the same health care facility who were symptomatic but tested negative, over 70 percent of the case-patients were contaminated with the virus and fell ill despite “always” wearing a mask.

“In the 14 days before illness onset, 71% of case-patients and 74% of control participants reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public,” the report stated.

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Virus Could Push 150 Million People Into Extreme Poverty

The World Bank suggested upwards of 150 million people could be pushed into “extreme poverty” due to the virus pandemic, erasing nearly three years of progress in global poverty reductions. 

According to the report, for the first time in two decades, the virus pandemic, compounded by the effects of climate change, are slowing poverty reduction progress, resulting in an additional 88 million to 115 million people falling into extreme poverty this year, with total estimates of 150 million in 2021, depending on the economic recovery shape. 

The biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report defines “extreme poverty” as living on less than $1.90 per day, which is likely to affect between 9.1%-9.4% of the world’s population this year. With the world’s poverty rate expected to rise this year, it would mean extreme poverty is at 2017’s 9.2% level, marking the first rise in the poverty rate in two decades. The rate was expected to drop to 7.5% by 2021 before the coronavirus pandemic.

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Not News But A Juicy Collection Of Narratives – How The New York Times Failed Its Readers

The striving for ‘juicy narratives’ is the biggest mistake of current news media. Their attempt to copy the success of Hollywood dramas by creating narratives has destroyed their credibility. It has put incentives on the wrong aspect of a reporter’s work. Instead of requiring well checked facts the editors are now asking for confirmations of preconceived tales:

What is clear is that The Times should have been alert to the possibility that, in its signature audio documentary, it was listening too hard for the story it wanted to hear — “rooting for the story,” as The Post’s Erik Wemple put it on Friday.

Callimachi is far from the only one guilty of creating fake news to fulfill her editors demand of narratives. The four year long coverage of ‘Russiagate’, the fairytale collection of made up connections between Donald Trump and Russia, was full of such. The editorial push towards narratives is rooted in the desire to create clickbait and to generate a social media echo around the reporting. That may be profitable in the short term but it is also a guarantee for a long term failure.

False of hyped narratives will over time get debunked. People then lose trust in the media that provided them with the fake news. That again will cause a long term loss of readership.

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As World Plunges Into Poverty, Super Rich Top Unprecedented $10 Trillion Net Worth Thanks to COVID-19

Make no mistake, the government’s reaction to COVID-19 — shutting down business, forcing people to state home, all the while granting monopolies to massive chains like Amazon, Walmart, etc. — has decimated the middle class and pushed the already-struggling poor that much deeper into despair. But you won’t see the owners of those monopolies complaining as they have seen their wealth soar to unprecedented highs.

As the rest of the country struggles to pay their mortgages, has their businesses shut down, and descends into poverty, COVID-19 for the super rich has been a record setting windfall. Four of the most controversial billionaires on the planet, have seen their wealth increase by over a combined $100 billion in just the last 10 months.

Since the COVID-19 lockdowns began, Jeff Bezzos has seen his net worth shoot up by nearly $70 billion. Bill Gates, who has been embroiled in controversy and has somehow become the mainstream media’s go-to “expert” on COVID-19, has seen his net worth increase by nearly $10 billion. As his platform censors any information that challenges the establishment’s narrative on COVID-19, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth increased by $20 billion. And, as his platform also censors information like Facebook, Larry page has seen his profits from Google add $5 billion to his net worth.

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Facebook bans Holocaust denial content

Facebook has announced it will remove all content on its platform that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.” The company says this expansion of its hate speech policies is a response to what it calls “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.” Facebook has previously faced strong criticism for letting Holocaust denial content spread freely on its platform.

In addition to removing content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, the company says that, starting later this year, it will direct anyone searching on Facebook for terms related to this topic to “credible information” supplied by third-party sources.

“Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” said Facebook’s VP of content policy, Monika Bickert, in a blog post.

Earlier this year, Facebook said it would ban anti-Semitic stereotypes that depicts Jewish people as “running the world or its major institutions.” But a report a week later by a UK counter-extremism group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), found that the company’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content.

Removing content that denies or distorts the Holocaust may seem like an obvious decision for a company that is frequently accused of enabling hate speech. But in the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, has presented the company’s tolerance of Holocaust denial as an example of its commitment to principles of free speech.

In an interview with Recode in 2018, Zuckerberg said that Facebook wouldn’t remove content from Holocaust deniers because he believed these individuals weren’t “intentionally getting it [the Holocaust] wrong.”

“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” said Zuckerberg. “I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.’” (Zuckerberg later added: “I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.”)

In a Facebook post today, Zuckerberg said his thinking on the matter had “evolved,” in part in response to a climate of “rising anti-Semitism.”

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SPACEX IS BUILDING A MILITARY ROCKET TO SHIP WEAPONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD

SpaceX and the Pentagon just signed a contract to jointly develop a new rocket that can launch into space and deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world — in just one hour.

Tests on the rocket are expected to begin as early as next year, Business Insider reports. It’s expected to shuttle weapons around the world 15 times faster than existing aircraft, like the US C-17 Globemaster.

“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” General Stephen Lyons, head of US Transportation Command said at a Wednesday conference.

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