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.

Finally! Colorado Grants Full, Unconditional Pardons to Thousands with Past Marijuana Convictions

Those members of government who are willing to challenge the status quo and stand against injustice are few and far between. Those members of government who not only stand against injustice but take action to reverse it are all but entirely mythical. Colorado Governor Jared Polis is not very mythical, however, he made a mythical move this week ande signed an executive order Thursday which grants a full, unconditional pardon to everyone convicted of possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.

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California Law Requires Diversity on Corporate Boards; Members Can ‘Self-Identify’ as Black

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law on Wednesday that requires corporations to have a minimum number of board members from “underrepresented communities” — as defined by race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity.

Newsom signed the new law, AB 979, along with other laws aimed at ending “systemic racism,” including a law establishing a task force to study reparations for slavery. (California never had slavery and was admitted to the Union as a free state.)

The new bill comes on top of existing legislation, signed into law in 2018, requiring that companies have a minimum number of board members who are female, or who at least identify themselves as female.

According to the legislative counsel’s digest, AB 979 requires public companies to have “a minimum of one director from an underrepresented community, as defined.”

It will also “require, no later than the close of the 2022 calendar year, such a corporation with more than 4 but fewer than 9 directors to have a minimum of 2 directors from underrepresented communities, and such a corporation with 9 or more directors to have a minimum of 3 directors from underrepresented communities.”

The text of the law defines a member of an “underrepresented community” as “an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.”

The law does not indicate how to distinguish someone who “self-identifies” as black from someone who is actually black, for example.

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Israel Has Officially Banned Fluoridation of Its Drinking Water

On Tuesday of this week (Aug. 26), Israel officially stopped adding fluoride to its water supplies. The decision has “been lauded by various rights groups, but criticized by many in the medical and dental communities as a serious mistake,” as the Times of Israel put it.

The tasteless, colorless chemical is put into water for the purpose of reducing cavities, but critics say that it amounts to mass medication, and forces people to consume the substance whether they want to or not.

By law, fluoride had been added to public drinking water supplies of large Israeli towns since the 1970s, and until this week about 70 percent of the country was fluoridated. (For comparison, 67 percent of Americans receive fluoridated tap water.)

Health Minister Yael German announced last year that she planned to end the practice, but faced a wave of backlash. Undeterred, she said earlier this month that she had nevertheless decided to end the process effective Aug. 26, and to not even allow optional fluoridation in communities that support it.

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Cattle Mutilations in Oregon Continue

The mysterious cattle mutilation phenomenon continues to vex ranchers in Oregon as three more curious cases have now been reported. According to a local media outlet, the latest incident occurred earlier this month on the property of rancher Fee Stubblefield near the community of Ukiah. As he was checking on his cattle one evening, he spotted a dead cow that sported unusual injuries which “didn’t look right.”

Specifically, the creature’s tongue and sex organs had been removed by way of a bloodless cut described by Stubblefield as unusual. Additionally, in a rather odd detail, one of the animals ears had been severed and inexplicably placed upon its neck. The rancher’s misgivings about the manner in which the cow died were subsequently confirmed by local authorities who examined the creature and noted that it bore all of the telltale signs of a cattle mutilation case.

The determination was particularly worrisome to Stubblefield as “now that we’ve identified this as a mutilation kill, we’ve actually discovered we had two other ones.” Those cases, he said, took place earlier this year under similarly puzzling circumstances. Stubblefield’s most recent lost cattle comes on the heels of an odd cattle mutilation that took place in Oregon back in July as well as a highly-publicized incident last summer in which five mutilated bulls on a different ranch in the state.

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CRUMBLING CASE AGAINST ASSANGE SHOWS WEAKNESS OF “HACKING” CHARGES RELATED TO WHISTLEBLOWING

BY 2013, the Obama administration had concluded that it could not charge WikiLeaks or Julian Assange with crimes related to publishing classified documents — documents that showed, among other things, evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan — without criminalizing investigative journalism itself. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department called this the “New York Times problem,” because if WikiLeaks and Assange were criminals for publishing classified information, the New York Times would be just as guilty.

Five years later, in 2018, the Trump administration indicted Assange anyway. But, rather than charging him with espionage for publishing classified information, they charged him with a computer crime, later adding 17 counts of espionage in a superseding May 2019 indictment.The alleged hacking not only didn’t happen, according to expert testimony, but it also couldn’t have happened.

The computer charges claimed that, in 2010, Assange conspired with his source, Chelsea Manning, to crack an account on a Windows computer in her military base, and that the “primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information.” The account enabled internet file transfers using a protocol known as FTP.

New testimony from the third week of Assange’s extradition trial makes it increasingly clear that this hacking charge is incredibly flimsy. The alleged hacking not only didn’t happen, according to expert testimony at Manning’s court martial hearing in 2013 and again at Assange’s extradition trial last week, but it also couldn’t have happened.

The new testimony, reported earlier this week by investigative news site Shadowproof, also shows that Manning already had authorized access to, and the ability to exfiltrate, all of the documents that she was accused of leaking — without receiving any technical help from WikiLeaks.

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