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.

Federal Proposal Would Expand Hair Testing of Job Applicants and Employees To Make Sure They Are Obeying Drug Prohibition

A rule recently proposed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) revives the previously rejected idea of using hair tests in drug screening of federal employees and workers in federally regulated industries. The proposed rule, which was published last week, says “hair testing potentially offers several benefits when compared to urine,” including “a longer window of drug detection.”

If the aim of these tests is to identify workers whose job performance is affected by psychoactive substances, that “benefit” is actually a disadvantage. Metabolites do not show up in hair until after a drug’s effects have worn off and typically can be detected for up to three months. Depending on hair length and growth rate, the detection window can be as long as a year. In other words, hair testing does not detect impairment or even recent use. There is a similar problem with urine testing, but the detection period for urinalysis is much shorter—a few days after a single dose of marijuana, for example, or as long as a month for regular cannabis consumers.

Another widely recognized problem with hair tests is that their results are affected by hair color. SAMSHA acknowledges “scientific evidence that melanin pigments may influence the amount of drug incorporated into hair.” In one study cited by SAMSHA, for example, “codeine concentrations in black hair were seven-fold higher than those in brown hair and 14-15-fold higher than those in blond hair.” As the agency notes, such findings “have raised concerns that selective drug binding with the wide variation of color pigments distributed amongst the population may introduce bias in drug test results.”

The implication is that people with darker hair—blacks and Hispanics, for example—are more likely to lose their jobs or have their applications rejected as a result of a positive hair test. “It is mind-boggling that the federal government is revisiting this half-baked proposal now,” says Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “Given the heightened awareness surrounding the need for social and racial equity, the idea of proposing a testing procedure that will inherently deny more people of color opportunities than it would others who have engaged in exactly the same activities is beyond tone deaf and counterproductive.”

SAMSHA’s proposal, which would allow the use of hair samples in pre-employment screening and random testing by federal agencies, is also likely to be adopted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Transportation, which regulates industries such as trucking and railroads. SAMSHA projects that the rule would lead to 275,000 hair tests by federal agencies each year, plus 15,000 tests in the nuclear industry and 1.5 million in the transportation sector.

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DARK WEB VOTER DATABASE REPORT CASTS NEW DOUBTS ON RUSSIAN ELECTION HACK NARRATIVE

A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into question the narrative that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016.

A September 1 report in the Moscow daily Kommersant on a “dark web” site offering a database of personal information on millions of registered American voters undermines one of the central themes of the Russia hysteria pervading US politics.

Democratic politicians and corporate media pundits have long accepted it as fact that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016. But the Kommersant report shows that those state registered voter databases were already available to anyone in the public domain, eliminating any official Russian motive for hacking state websites.

Kommersant reported that a user on a dark web Forum known as Gorka9 offered free access to databases containing the information of 7.6 million Michigan voters, along with the state voter databases of Connecticut, Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina.

There are differences between the Michigan database described by Gorka9 and the one that the State of Michigan releases to the public upon request. Tracy Wimmer, the spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, said in an e-mail to Grayzone that when the Michigan voter registration database is released to the public upon request, the state withholds “date of birth (year of birth is included), driver’s license number, the last four digitals of someone’s social security number, email address and phone number….”  However, Gorka9’s description of the Michigan data includes driver’s license numbers, full dates of birth, social security numbers and emails.

In fact both un-redacted and redacted state voter files are obviously widely available on the dark web as well as elsewhere on the internet. Meduza, a Russian-language news site based in Riga, Latvia, published the Kommersant story along with an “anonFiles” download portal for access to the Michigan voter database and a page from it showing that it is the officially redacted version. The DHS and the FBI both acknowledged in response to the Kommersant story that “a lot of voter registration data is publicly available or easily purchased.” 

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Gorgon Stare: A “Persistent Eye in the Sky” May Be Coming to a City Near You

Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything. That same persistent eye in the sky may soon be deployed over U.S. cities.

At the time he made that comment about surveillance drones over Afghanistan, Maj. General James Poss was the Air Force’s top intelligence officer. He was preparing to leave the Pentagon, and move over to the Federal Aviation Administration. His job was to begin executing the plan to allow those same surveillance drones to fly over American cities.

This plan was ordered by Congress in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. It directed the Departments of Defense and Transportation to “develop a plan for providing expanded access to the national airspace for unmanned aircraft systems of the Department of Defense.” Gen. Poss was one of nearly two dozen ex-military officers who, starting in 2010, were put into positions at the FAA to oversee drone integration research. With little public scrutiny, the plan has been moving forward ever since.

If you’re thinking that this is a partisan issue, think again. This plan has been enacted and expanded under Presidents and Congresses of both parties. If you’re uncomfortable with a President Biden having the ability to track the movements of every Tea Party or Q-Anon supporter, you should be. Just as we should all be concerned about a President Trump tracking…well, everybody else.

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Victorian Government Pushes New Bill to Detain ‘Conspiracy Theorists,’ Anti-Lockdown Protesters, and Families

The Victorian government will debate a new bill in the State Parliament this week which would hand authorities the power to forcibly detain “conspiracy theorists” and people suspected to likely spread coronavirus, such as anti-lockdown protesters and their close contacts.

If passed, the Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill will allow the state to detain anyone they suspect of being “high risk” or likely to negligently spread COVID-19, either if they have the virus or have been in contact with an infected person.

According to The Age, a state government spokesman said the rule could be applied to “conspiracy theorists who refuse to self-isolate or severely drug-affected or mentally impaired people who do not have the capacity to quarantine.”

Those detained could then be placed in quarantine facilities, such as hotels, where they can be monitored by authorities.

On Sunday police fined 200 people and made 74 arrests during an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne. Could this bill lead to the mass-forced quarantining of similar anti-lockdown protesters?

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