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.

White House COVID Team Struggles to Explain Why We Need Masks Outside

As the nation passes President Joe Biden’s ambitious goal of 200 million vaccinations in his first hundred days in office with more than a week to spare, and as the “dark winter” the president forewarned gives way to summer, more and more vaccinated Americans are itching to get back to some imitation of normalcy. And for many of them, “normal” looks like being able to go outside without wearing a mask.

But despite a growing scientific consensus that the risk of infection outdoors is negligible in most realistic settings, the White House’s COVID-19 task force has remained publicly adamant that the public keep wearing masks outside—at least for now.

“Let’s get to the 100 days,” Andy Slavitt, the White House’s senior advisor for COVID-19 response, told reporters on Monday when asked whether the president’s call for 100 days of mask-wearing might be reconsidered anytime soon. “You know one thing about President Biden: He follows the science, he listens to his scientists, and we’ve got 12 more days to go until we get there. So please mask up, everybody, because it does save lives.”

At this point, nearly all of us have thought it. It’s first thing in the morning or late in the evening. After a brutal winter and an unending March 2020, you’re enjoying a break from the inside of your home by taking a stroll outside, enjoying the increasingly tempting spring weather by walking your dog or sipping a “walktail.” Slowly, you realize two things: there’s hardly a person in sight, much less within six feet of you, and that you’re still, somehow, wearing a mask.

Twenty-six states require people to wear masks in public to one degree or another, as well as the District of Columbia, where the National Park Service has recently erected all-caps signs in public parks tut-tutting residents for gathering outside without masking up. But the public health consensus has shifted around how and where a person is most likely to contract the not-so-novel coronavirus—the days of spraying takeout pizza boxes with Everclear are mercifully behind us—and outdoor spread is extremely unlikely.

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The Problem with “Just Do What the Cops Say and You Won’t Get Hurt”

It’s not hard to imagine the predictable reaction to this video from those who reflexively defend police abuse. She “should have complied,” they’ll say. Some might insist that if she had her arm broken and her tiny body thrown to the ground, she was “asking for it” because, well, she may have tried to steal the equivalent of thirteen dollars.

Indeed, defenders of police abuse and incompetence often attempt to console themselves with the idea that they would always comply with police orders, and therefore would never have to worry about being shot dead, beaten down, or otherwise abused by police.

This might seem plausible for someone who has no family members with severe autism, mental illness, dementia, hearing impairment, lack of fluency in English, or any other condition that might be inconvenient to police officers.

But for many people, the reality of “compliance” isn’t nearly as neat, clean, and black and white as defenders of police want to believe.

Moreover, many innocent and unarmed victims of police shootings aren’t even given a chance to “comply.” They’re just shot dead without warning.

Admittedly, these facts will do little to persuade the “Back the Blue” crowd from changing their slavish devotion to the well-paid, nearly impossible-to-fire, legally immune, and unionized government employees in police departments.

But let’s review some of the evidence anyway.

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Why The Main Argument Against Withdrawing US Troops Is Bogus

Former National Security Advisor and literal psychopath John Bolton has a new opinion piece out in Foreign Policy titled “‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy“, which should surprise no one and enrage everyone at the same time. The fact that this reptile continues to be elevated on mainstream platforms after consistently revealing himself to be a bloodthirsty liar is all the evidence you need that we are trapped inside a globe-spanning empire fueled by human corpses.

John Bolton has pushed for deranged acts of mass military slaughter at every opportunity. He not only remains one of the only people in the world to continually insist that the Iraq invasion was a great idea, but has actually argued that the destabilization and chaos caused by the invasion cannot be attributed to Bush’s war because you can’t prove that “everything that followed from the fall of Saddam Hussein followed inevitably, solely, and unalterably from the decision to overthrow him.” There are harrowing accounts of Bolton threatening, assaulting and intimidating anyone with less power than him if they got in his way; he once threatened to harm the children of former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani because Bustani was interfering in attempts to manufacture consent for the Iraq war.

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Questions Surround Canadian Shipment of Deadly Viruses to China

Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory shipped Ebola and Henipah viruses to Beijing on March 31, raising suspicions from experts in biochemical warfare, who say they think China may use the pathogens to develop offensive biological agents. 

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report that the incident has not introduced any known risk to public health, according to the Winnipeg Free Press. 

The same lab is the focus of an ongoing investigation by the RCMP. The inquiry began following the recent dismissal of the head of the National Microbiology Laboratory’s (NML) Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program, virologist Xiangguo Qiu. Qiu, her colleague and husband Keding Cheng, and a number of her international students lost security clearance to their lab on July 5.  

In 2018, Govenor General Julie Payette presented Qiu with an innovation award for her helping to lead the development of the Ebola vaccine ZMapp, according to the Winnipeg Free Press. There are no reports as to whether she was involved in the March shipment.

Ebola and Henipah viruses—classified as Category A and C bioterrorism agents by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, respectively—pose a threat to national security because of their potential to be easily disseminated, cause high morbidity and mortality rates, and deliver lasting blows to public health. They are also categorized as Risk Group 4 pathogens, meaning they can only be handled in a lab with the highest level of biosafety control, according to CBC News.    

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