About that rally…
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.
‘Kid gloves are off today’: Liberal critics celebrate MASSIVE police response to Justice for J6 rally
Liberal critics have been quick to celebrate the “teamwork” of the US Capitol Police and multiple other law enforcement agencies, shown prepping for the Justice for J6 rally in Washington, DC en masse.
Ahead of Saturday’s rally – which reports have claimed could bring in as many as 700 Donald Trump supporters – the US Capitol Police Twitter account posted an image of hundreds of officers from multiple law enforcement agencies standing, ready to take orders from a Capitol police officer with a bullhorn.
“Teamwork,” the tweet read. National Guard soldiers are also on standby in case they are needed. Most officers called in for Saturday’s events are equipped with batons and safety vests.
While numerous conservative pundits have dismissed the rally and its potential fallout, liberal critics have been celebrating the massive police preparation for the event, tying it to the January 6 Capitol riot that led to multiple deaths, including a protester shot by an officer.
“Kid gloves off today,” one Twitter user wrote in response to the photo of the waiting law enforcement officers.
“Deal with them accordingly,” another cryptically added.
Mass. teachers union says standardized tests have allowed ‘white supremacy to flourish’
A teachers union in Massachusetts claim the state’s standardized testing has “allowed white supremacy to flourish.”
The Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to strip the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as a part of graduation requirements for students.
“The implementation of the MCAS and other standardized tests has had the exact opposite effect of what was supposed to occur when the system was introduced more than 20 years ago,” said MTA president Merrie Najimy in a statement.
The union is backing a bill to give students “multiple pathways” to show their educational competency apart from the MCAS standardized testing.
“Public schools in predominantly Black and brown communities have been taken over by state bureaucrats who have been using standardized testing as a tool not to improve opportunities for students,” continued Najimy, “but instead as one to pry public education from the hands of the families and educators who know best what their students need.”
Democrats block amendment mandating vaccines for immigrants flooding America’s borders
House Democrats blocked an amendment put forth by Republicans to mandate vaccines for immigrants trying to remain inside the United States, while tens of millions of Americans must comply with President Biden’s mandate.
During a hearing Tuesday scheduled for the Democrats’ 3.5 trillion budget reconciliation, Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) proposed an amendment to the package that would require vaccines for foreign nationals in the U.S. who are seeking to adjust their immigration status to remain in the U.S.
The amendment was voted down by a party-line vote. Every Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee voted against the amendment. Every Republican member voted for the bill.
Rep. Issa said the Democratic “hypocrisy” must end:
“The American people are more than aware that President Biden is mandating vaccines for Americans while exempting those illegally flooding our borders and being released into our communities without notice.
“And they want the hypocrisy to end.”
Covid’s Willing Executioners
Afew weeks ago, three friends on Facebook told me that they wished for my death.
One of them I didn’t really know. He freaked out when I calmly suggested there were viable treatment options for those with Covid. He responded: “Stay out of my life!! I hope you get Covid and die!”
The other two friends were people I knew in college 45 years ago, one was my freshman year roommate, and the other guy introduced me to my first wife. He suggested that I prove Darwin’s theory and perish from the virus, the other just basically said I deserved what was coming as a selfish unvaccinated science-denier.
Covid’s willing executioners.
I know Facebook is certainly not the ideal place for reasonable discourse. As a psychologist, however, I do find it an interesting sample of a certain extreme way of thinking and behaving.
I also believe my experience with “friends” wishing for my demise is not unusual amongst those on that side of the fence in this debate. At least not unusual in thought.
As we all know, Facebook is the place of no inhibition. However, that said, I do believe it is a grave concern that human beings can be manipulated into this dark manner of thinking and feeling.
The operative word here is “manipulate.”
I do have faith, that for the most part, human beings have evolved from a cave mentality when confronting “other” in the culture. In cave days our psychology was programmed for survival, and it didn’t take much coercion to view members from another tribe that wandered into territory that was not their own to be immediately met with suspicion and fear.
Today, many thousands of years later, I think it takes a bit of manipulation to view “other” as fatally dangerous—but not much coercion, so it seems.
In this regard it appears we have lost any scintilla of common sense. How can a government (or more likely an even higher organization of authority) convince the masses so easily that the unvaccinated are the mortal enemy with not a whiff of science in the argument? This clearly is a case of the emperor’s new clothes, but it isn’t going to take only a small innocent child’s exaltation that the emperor is naked to make everyone see what is true.
Why is this?
I’m afraid it is human nature — at least a small part of human nature — that these days needs a little coercion to come out in full bloom. For me, as a psychologist, it is more proof that there is an organized agenda, a “psyop” if you will, driving this whole debacle. When humans are put into this sort of psychological environment, their reaction is very predictable.
My what a difference…
Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?
The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.
In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:
“The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”
Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.
Study Finds Unvaccinated Unwelcome Among Vaccinated Friends
You’ve been through the worst of the pandemic together, but things just aren’t the same anymore. Can you still be friends?
According to a survey by public relations/marketing agency OnePoll, the answer is often no when it comes to friends who refuse to get the COVID-19 shot.
The survey of 1,000 Americans, conducted on Sept. 2, found that 16 percent of respondents had “axed three pals from their lives” since the pandemic began in March 2020.
“Of those who ended a friendship, 66 percent are vaccinated and 17 percent don’t ever plan to receive the shot,” according to OnePoll. “Fourteen percent of vaccinated respondents said they parted ways with friends who didn’t want to get inoculated.”
However, it wasn’t just the unvaccinated who were getting the cold shoulder from their erstwhile vaccinated friends, the survey found.
Having different political views (16 percent) was another reason for ending a friendship, followed by dating or sleeping with an ex partner (15 percent), spreading false information about a friend (12 percent), and lying (7 percent).
“A vast majority of vaccinated people [97 percent] consider their ex-friends to be ‘full-blown anti-vaxxers’ and said they could never get them to understand the importance of the vaccine,” OnePoll said on their website.
“Those respondents shared why their former friends didn’t want to get vaccinated—from not believing in vaccines to claiming the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t work.”
Compartmentalization…
Facebook Aided In Recruitment Of Modern Day Slaves, Cartel Hitmen Internal Documents Show
It seems like the WSJ’s entire San Francisco bureau has been preoccupied lately with churning out a series of stories sourced from “leaked” internal Facebook documents exposing embarrassing internal reports on everything from Instagram’s deleterious impact on the mental health of its twentysomething and teenage users to political divisiveness to – today’s entry – how Facebook’s products are abused to facilitated human trafficking and terror recruitment in parts of the emerging world.
The gist of the piece is this: Facebook has a small staff dedicated to combating human trafficking around the world, particularly in countries where the rule of law isn’t as robust as it is in the US and Europe. In the Middle East, Facebook is used to lure women into sex slavery (or some other form of exploitative labor).
In Ethiopia, armed groups use the site to recruit and to incite violence against other ethnic minorities.
Facebook’s monitors have also sent reports to their bosses on everything from human organ trafficking, pornography and child pornography, and government’s cracking down on political dissent.
The documents leaked to WSJ show that while Facebook removes some pages, many continue to operate openly.
While some might sympathize with Facebook’s inability to whack every mole (after all, they’re fighting a never-ending torrent of misconduct). But the sad truth is that Facebook could do more to stop its platform from being abused by traffickers, criminals and abusers – particularly in the emerging world (we all remember what happened in Myanmar).
The reason it doesn’t is because that would be bad for business”, according to a former chief executive who resigned from the company last year. Facebook treats harm in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business” in those places, said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who oversaw partnerships with internet providers in Africa and Asia before resigning at the end of last year.
Facebook has focused its safety efforts on wealthier markets (like the US) where powerful government and media institutions can help keep it accountable. But in smaller countries, Facebook answers many problems with a shrug.
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