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.

Top Biden communications aide has history of sexist Twitter posts

Joe Biden’s head of strategic communications, Kamau M. Marshall, has repeatedly posted sexist messages on social media over the past decade, beginning with a Christmas Eve 2011 tweet in which he expressed his affection for “power women” – as long as she “know[s] her place” and he can “where [sic] the pants.”

The social media posts are the latest example of a top Biden staffer undercutting the former vice president’s public messaging. On Friday, Fox News reported that a supervising videographer on the campaign, Sara Pearl, openly called for defunding the police and tweeted a meme mocking officers as worse than “pigs” – even as Biden says he only wants some money redirected from police departments.

Within minutes of this story’s publication, Marshall deleted many of the tweets cited in this article, but Fox News retained screenshots. The Biden team has declined to offer any comment on the posts by either Marshall and Pearl, and Marshall did not respond to an emailed request for comment prior to this story’s publication.

Unlike Pearl’s messages, Marshall’s posts are from a senior campaign official – and appear to be part of a long-running pattern.

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US hired psychics to spy on Iran during mission takeover: CIA files

The CIA has released documents showing that US spy agencies resorted to psychics to help conduct espionage against Iran during the time of the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran.

According to the newly published files, a secret team of half a dozen military-trained clairvoyants met over 200 times in a building in Fort Mead, Maryland, as part of an operation code-named Grill Flame.

The psychics were employed to gather intelligence on where the American hostages were being held and how closely they were being guarded.

The psychics officially worked for US Army intelligence, but their activities were monitored and supported by several government intelligence agencies as well as top commanders at the Pentagon.

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian university students took over the US embassy, which they believed had turned into a center of espionage aimed at overthrowing the Islamic Republic in Iran following the Islamic Revolution. Fifty-two Americans from the mission were held for 444 days until January 20, 1981.

Documents found at the compound later corroborated claims by revolutionary students that the US had been using its Tehran embassy to hatch plots against Iran.

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12 Videos Prove Police Use Drones To Ticket And Surveil The Public

Here is a nice compilation of the high-tech police state in action. One can only imagine when this gets combined with facial recognition, health databases, social distancing, contact tracing and all the rest – oh, wait, they’re already doing some of that in these videos.

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DHS Goes Full Gestapo In Response To Ongoing Protests In Oregon

Looks like we finally have some secret police to call our own. Ongoing protests stemming from a Minnesota police officer’s brutal killing of an unarmed Black man have provoked a federal response. In some cases, the National Guard has been called in to quell the more violent and destructive aspects of some demonstrations. Others — like the 50+ days of continuous protests in Portland, Oregon — have been greeted with something far more frightening.

Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson of Oregon Public Broadcasting were the first to break the news of unidentified federal officers yanking people off the street into unmarked vehicles and disappearing them for a few hours of interrogation.

In the early hours of July 15, after a night spent protesting at the Multnomah County Justice Center and Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, Mark Pettibone and his friend Conner O’Shea decided to head home.

[…]

A block west of Chapman Square, Pettibone and O’Shea bumped into a group of people who warned them that people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.

“So that was terrifying to hear,” Pettibone said.

They had barely made it half a block when an unmarked minivan pulled up in front of them.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.’”

Pettibone was grabbed by the unidentified officers, who wore nothing indicating which branch of the federal government they worked for, and shoved into a van with his hat pulled down over his eyes. He was taken to the federal courthouse (something he wasn’t aware of until he was released), patted down, photographed, and had his belongings searched. After all of this, he was put into a cell where he was finally read his Miranda rights. He refused to talk to the officers and they released him about 90 minutes later. At no point was he told what he had been detained for, nor was he given any paperwork documenting his detainment.

No one appears to know for sure which branch of the federal government is taking people off the street and detaining them without probable cause. The officers performing these sweeps use unmarked vehicles and dress in camouflage uniforms that contain no identfying info that might indicate what agency they work for.

The federal government has deployed a mixture of federal agencies to cities with ongoing protests, including the US Marshals Service, CBP, ICE, and Bureau of Prisons riot officers. Presumably the DEA is in the mix as well, since it invited itself along for this anti-free-speech ride.

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THE SAME COMPANY 3D PRINTING KFC’S MEAT NUGGETS IS PRINTING HUMAN TISSUE IN SPACE AS WELL

It’s been a wild weekend for Russian startup 3D Bioprinting Solutions.

First, the company announced a partnership with fast food chain KFC as part of an effort to create the “world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets.”

Now, the same company is ready to announce that it’s been hard at work bringing similar tech into orbit as well.

In an experiment on board the International Space Station that took place in 2018 but has only now been published, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononoenko was tasked to 3D print human cartilage cells in near-zero gravity using a machine called “Bioprinter Organ.Aut,” as Space.com reports — a machine assembled by, you guessed it, 3D Bioprinting Solutions.

The goal was to investigate ways to reverse some of the negative effects of spending prolonged periods of time in space, in particular evidence that parts of the human body can atrophy over time — something we’ve known about for quite some time.

The eventual hope is to give astronauts the ability to print entire body parts in space, according to the researchers — just in case something goes catastrophically wrong during a mission.

A paper about the research was published in the journal Science Advances last week.