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.

U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban’s many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

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Disturbing Video Shows Cop Walk Up to Family, Shoot Their Happy Puppy as it Wagged His Tail

An utterly disturbing and outright infuriating video was released this week as part of a family’s lawsuit against the now-infamous Loveland police department. In the video, we see the cowardice of officer Matthew Grashorn on display as he shoots a 14-month old puppy in the face and body as it happily walked up to greet him.

The family is now suing after their complaints to the department fell on deaf ears and they were essentially ignored for over two years. The shooting took place on June 29, 2019 and the family has been seeking justice for their mixed boxer puppy “Herkimer” ever since.

On that fateful day, Wendy Love and Jay Hamm were running their firewood delivery company when they pulled over in a vacant parking lot to repair a box they use for the firewood. The owner of the building saw them on security cameras and thought they may be trying to use his dumpster, so he called 911 to have cops investigate.

When police asked the building owner if the family was near or had been near the dumpster, the business owner said, “no,” according to the lawsuit. No crimes had been committed yet the officer responded as if he had arrived to a hostage situation.

“It was an ambush, and Grashorn knew it. He didn’t care,” the suit says. “He suspected that they were poor and wanted to surprise them, to see if they were up to anything he might be able to get an arrest for.”

As Grashorn walked up to the family, he never announced himself but Herkimer, who, according to the suit is a happy dog who had never bitten anyone, trotted up to greet the officer. Unfortunately, however, Grashorn is a coward and instead of petting the dog, Grashorn shot it.

As Wendy approaches the officer crying in horror, Grashorn refuses to let her near her dog to help him.

During this, Hamm yelled at Grashorn, asking him why he had shot a “clearly friendly dog,” according to the suit. Grashorn responded that he had “no way of knowing” whether Herkimer was friendly, that he “wasn’t in the business to get bit” and he had no interest in “waiting to find out” if the dog was friendly.

In other words, he’s a coward who shoots first and asks questions later.

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Pentagon posts dog pics on Instagram while bombs explode at Kabul airport and Afghanistan disaster continues

At least two bomb blasts and gunfire erupted around the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, resulting in “a number of” U.S. troop deaths and injuries. Amid that chaos, the Pentagon’s Instagram account carried on posting pictures of dogs in celebration of National Dog Day.

The Department of Defense Instagram account posted seven different photos of dogs on Thursday morning, around the same time Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was publicly confirming the first explosion outside the Kabul Airport.

Up to 13 people were reportedly killed in the bomb blasts outside the Kabul airport, while others were reported injured. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby confirmed that “a number of U.S. service members” were both killed and injured in the attack.

CNN contributor Frida Ghitis tweeted that four or more U.S. service members had been wounded or killed in the attack, according to a State Department official. Other media outlets said four U.S. Marines were killed.

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Ancient Tablet Shows Pythagorean Theorem 1000 Years Before His Birth

An almost 4000-year-old clay tablet displays an early form of applied geometry practiced by the ancient Babylonians, thousands of years before the math was initially thought to have been discovered.

Did The Babylonians Have Geometry?

Trigonometry was largely understood to have been first discovered by the Greeks around the second century BCE. The word itself came from a combination of the Greek words for ‘earth’ and ‘measure.’

Prominent figures such as Euclid and Pythagoras created foundations and theorems that were instrumental in advancing the understanding of mathematics throughout the western world. Some of their work is still being used in current modern applications, such as Pythagoras’ theorem regarding right triangles.

While the Greeks may have had the greatest impact worldwide with their mathematical discoveries, it would eventually be revealed that they were not the first. In 2017, researchers at the University of New South Wales found a famous Babylonian tablet from 3,700 years ago, known as “Plimpton 322,” (seen below) that contained a trigonometric table inscribed on it. It had sequences of numbers that are known as Pythagorean triples, despite it being thousands of years before Pythagoras lived when the tablet was used.

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“War Is a Racket”: The US War in Afghanistan Validates General Smedley Butler

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” – Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) in his book “War is a Racket” (1935).

The ending of the 20-year-war in Afghanistan, the longest ever engagement in a single conflict by the United States armed forces, has been variously described as a “catastrophe”, a “disaster” and a “debacle”. Yet this national failure from which parallels have been drawn with the Vietnam War has not had the same ring of misfortune for some.

Indeed, long before the recent scenes of calamity and collapse in Kabul brought home with resounding finality the futility of a supposed nation-building exercise, the profit-motive for the initial US invasion and the preservation of an enduring occupation was an open secret to anyone who bothered to embark on the slightest inquiry.

The gravy train of American defence spending was in full effect, facilitated by the tentacles of what US President Dwight D. Eisenhower prophesied would become the Military Industrial Complex. For the last two decades have witnessed what has been described as a “wealth transfer from US taxpayers to military contractors”.  But the war, apart from confirming Afghanistan’s reputation as the “Graveyard of Empires”, also validates the phrase coined by US Major General Smedley Butler that war is a racket.

The blame game currently being played out in the United States media by the political class risks obscuring one fundamental issue: the centrality of money and the profit motive in the waging of America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

The invasion of that country had been planned well in advance of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the event which provided the impetus for mounting a military response including the country’s occupation. The United States has long coveted gaining access to the mineral and oil rich Caspian region and Central Asia, and the coming to power of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban movement was not seen at the time by US policy makers as an impenetrable obstacle.

As the French writers Jean-Charles Briscard and Guillaume Dasquie wrote in their book Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden, which was published in 2002, the American government had been prepared to accept Taliban rule on condition that they agreed to the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.

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UK Family Seeks New Inquest into Son’s Death on 9/11, Rejecting Claim that Airplane Caused Collapse

The family of Geoffrey Thomas Campbell, a British national who died in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, submitted an application today under the UK Coroners Act 1988 requesting a new inquest into his death nearly 20 years ago.

The Campbell family — which includes Mr. Campbell’s parents Maureen and Malcolm, two brothers Matt and Rob, and former fiancée Caroline Burbank — applied for the new inquest citing significant evidence not heard by the coroner at Mr. Campbell’s first inquest in 2013.

The family contends that the unheard evidence contradicts the coroner’s official finding that the impact of the aircraft into World Trade Center 1 at 8:46am and the ensuing fires are what caused the building’s total destruction at 10:28am, taking Mr. Campbell’s life. They allege that the unheard evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the destruction of WTC 1 — as well as the destruction of WTC 2 and WTC 7 — was caused by the use of explosives and incendiaries.

“For 20 years, my family has suffered because Geoff was taken from us long before it was his time,” said Matt Campbell, Mr. Campbell’s surviving brother. “Our grief was then compounded by the gradual realization that we did not have the full truth about his murder. Today, we are one step closer to knowing the truth.”

“Asking for this inquest is an important step,” said Maureen Campbell, Mr. Campbell’s mother. “We need the truth in order to heal.”

The Campbell family’s application includes letters of support from five other family members who lost loved ones in the destruction of the Twin Towers: Drew DePalma, son of Jean DePalma; Barbara Krukowski-Rastelli, mother of firefighter William Krukowski; Bob McIlvaine, father of Bobby McIlvaine; Iryna Upham, daughter of Iouri Mouchinski; and Kacee Papa, daughter of Edward Papa.

The application also includes witness statements from six scientific experts and from five eyewitnesses to the World Trade Center’s destruction, four of whom were first responders that day. All of the experts and eyewitness have offered to give testimony at the new inquest. Altogether, the application contains around 2,500 pages of evidence as well as select volumes of the official reports issued by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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