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.

Wuhan lab was to get $1.5M in federal grant money for bat study, emails show

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars more in federal grant money than chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci indicated to lawmakers last week, newly released emails show.

The messages, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, show that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) allocated $826,277 to the lab over a six-year period ending in 2019 via the New York City-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.

But Fauci, the longtime NIAID director, told a House Appropriations subcommittee on May 25 that the funding commitment “was about $600,000 over a period of five years, so it was a modest amount.”

US funding of the lab has come under scrutiny amid the ongoing controversy over whether the coronavirus leaked from the research hub into the 11 million-strong city of Wuhan, triggering the worst global pandemic in a century.

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Jeff Bezos’ Fake News in the Newspaper He Really Owns

Media criticism sometimes involves reading between the lines, assessing the layered meanings of journalistic rhetoric, or considering what’s left unsaid in a given conversation. But we shouldn’t be numb to all the times media problems hit you like a sock in the jaw.

That was the case when readers opened the Washington Post online recently to find a full page “native” ad—that’s the kind designed to look like news—from Amazon (Jacobin, 5/27/21). Whose owner Jeff Bezos owns the Post and soon MGM (Washington Post, 5/26/21), among much else.

Blended in with the Post‘s banner and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline, readers got text about how Amazon supports a raise in the federal minimum wage and has been paying its workers $15 an hour since 2018. A big picture showed an African-American employee and her child talking about how Amazon‘s generosity is allowing them to move to a bigger home.

Never mind that, as many could tell you, the company was dragged kicking and screaming to that wage increase (Jacobin, 10/2/18); that they continue to fund groups that strenuously oppose a $15 minimum wage (Jacobin, 5/27/21), like the US Chamber of Commerce; that they have vigorously and vehemently opposed union organizing (New York Times, 3/16/21)—and that no wage can justify the dangerous and degrading conditions Amazon is reported to subject many of its workers to (Intercept, 3/25/21).

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Bing Censors Image Search for ‘Tank Man’ Even in US

Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not displaying image results for a search for “Tank man,” even when searching from the United States. The apparent censorship comes on the anniversary of China’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“There are no results for tank man,” the Bing website reads after searching for the term. “Tank man” relates to the infamous image of a single protester standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the crackdown.

China censors and blocks distribution of discussion of tank man and Tiananmen Square more generally. This year, anniversary events in Hong Kong have dwindled in size after authorities banned a vigil.

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Barack and Michelle Obama Creating Netflix Animated Series to ‘Reframe’ Children’s Understanding of Government

Barack and Michelle Obama are creating a Netflix animated series designed to “reframe” how children think about government and civic engagement, with musical performances by artists including Adam Lambert, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Janelle Monáe.

Netflix announced the ten-episode We the People is set to debut July 4. The Obamas, who have an ongoing production deal with Netflix, are serving as executive producers on the series, along with Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee and ABC’s Black-ish creator Kenya Barris.

In a press release sent to multiple news outlets, the streamer called the show “an exuberant call to action for everyone to rethink civics as a living, breathing thing and to reframe their understanding of what government and citizenship mean in a modern world.”

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California — a state that never practiced slavery — moves forward with slavery reparations plan

On Tuesday, a first-of-its-kind task force charged with studying the issue and developing proposals for redress convened for its inaugural meeting, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The task force is the result of a bill signed last year by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that required members to draft a formal apology to black Americans and come up with various financial remedies for the lingering effects of discriminatory practices in the country.

“As our country reckons with our painful legacy of racial injustice, California again is poised to lead the way towards a more equitable and inclusive future for all,” Newsom said at the meeting.

California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta added, “Although the horrors of slavery may have begun in the past, its harms are felt every single day by Black Americans in the present.”

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China’s Advanced ‘Artificial Sun’ Fusion Reactor Just Broke a New World Record

China has achieved a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to harness the power of the stars.

On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) and clung onto this for 101 seconds.

The last time EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) held onto a writhing loop of plasma for so long was in 2017, but the temperature only reached a mere 50 million °C.

In 2018, the reactor held gas heated beyond the 100 million degree benchmark regarded as crucial for generating power, but could only sustain the plasma for around 10 seconds.

Now that it’s held plasma at eight times the temperature of the Sun’s core of 15 million °C for such a long period, the new record has nudged the world ever slightly closer to this elusive, yet highly sought-after clean power source.

“The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time,” Southern University of Science and Technology physicist Li Miao told the Global Times.

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US military report for Congress says UFO sightings by Navy pilots could be aliens or new hypersonic technology from Russia or China – but are not a secret US government project

Government officials have leaked details about the highly anticipated classified report on UFO sightings expected to be released this month, noting that there is no evidence to support that they are alien spacecraft.

But the report does not rule aliens out either, senior administration officials who were briefed on the report told The New York Times. 

The report also theorizes the objects could also be new weapons developed by Russian or China – and definitively says the phenomena are not a part of a secret project from within the United States government.

The report looks at more than 120 incidents of unidentified objects seen by U.S. Navy pilots in the past 20 years.

The UFOs were observed moving in patterns that remain difficult to explain, including their acceleration, ability to change direction and ability to submerge underwater.  

Senior officials told the outlet that the objects could be evidence of Chinese or Russian hypersonic technology – which means the countries may have ‘far outpaced’ the US in weapons development.

Hypersonic weapons are aircraft and missiles that can reach atmospheric speeds faster than Mach 5, or or about 4,000 miles per hour – making them almost impossible to intercept.

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New Liberal ‘Truth Brigade’ Has Ties to Billionaire Who Peddled Disinformation

A leftwing initiative launched this week aimed at monitoring conservative “disinformation” has ties to a progressive billionaire linked to several of the sort of disinformation projects he is now trying to combat.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman’s investment fund donated an undisclosed amount to Indivisible, an advocacy group launching the new effort to track conservative disinformation. The fund, Investing in US, has also financed a group that created fake social media personas to suppress Republican voter turnout in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate election. Indivisible thinks its “Truth Brigade” can help flag misinformation better than social media algorithms, according to Forbes.

Social media platforms have increased their efforts to contain “disinformation” in recent months, often with mixed results. Until recently, Facebook flagged posts claiming the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, even as the theory gained traction in the scientific community. LinkedIn, the only American social network in China, recently censored a China critic based in the United Kingdom who referred to the Chinese government as an “oppressive dictatorship.”

Critics say Hoffman’s involvement casts doubt on the Truth Brigade’s ability to effectively police disinformation. “A man who invests in social media projects aimed at hardball political disinformation is not one whose allies can be trusted,” said Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, which tracks liberal dark money groups.

The Alabama special election wasn’t Hoffman’s only run-in with disinformation. Facebook investigated whether a Hoffman-backed initiative called News for Democracy published misleading information targeting Republican voters during the 2018 election.

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Fauci Email Shows NIH Dr. Claimed DeWine Would Create Demand for Global COVID Response Corps

Over 3,200 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci emails contain at least one reference to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. A National Institutes of Health (NIH) doctor – Peter Kilmarx – sent an email in April 2020 stating that DeWine would be part of a group of Republican governors who would be “most interested and helpful” to “encourage implementation and create demand” for a COVID-19 Response Corps.

The email was sent after an Op-Ed written by Congresswoman Susan Brooks (R-IN) and Congressman Ami Bera (D-CA) was published on the Centers for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) website.  The email reads like a tactical command to tap U.S. governors, among others, to drum up demand for a global COVID response force.

The Op-Ed is here.

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