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.

Biden Minimum Wage Czar Demands Federal $15 Wage, But Students Under Him As Dean Make $13.50

While President Joe Biden’s nominee for Wage and Hour Administrator at the Department of Labor frequently calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, the nominee has not called for students at the university he works at to receive the same.

David Weil, who Biden announced as a federal nominee last week, has backed a $15 an hour wage while not instituting such a policy at Brandeis, where he is a dean and professor. The group that alerted The Federalist to this contradiction is the American Accountability Foundation.

According to the Office of Student Financial Services, the minimum wage at the private school in Massachusetts is $13.50 an hour, the same minimum wage set by the state. Given the dean’s influence and position as a staunch progressive, it is curious why he would work at a school that does not provide the same compensation he seemingly determines is necessary.

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CIA Seeks Bases For Spying, Attacks In Afghanistan Despite Hyped “US Exit”

20 years into the US war in Afghanistan, the troops are going to leave, and the CIA is going to stay. The question right now is how that’s going to happen, and where exactly the agency is going to be basing its operations from.

There is no question that the CIA will be spying, and carrying out strikes in Afghanistan, but after decades mostly doing things out of US bases in Afghanistan, they’re going to need to find a new base, and there is no obvious choice.

Officials are describing “last-minute” efforts to find bases to operate from, which probably shouldn’t be so last-minute since the pullout has been a deal in place since at least early 2020, and could be seen coming well before that.

Pakistan is seeing consideration, as the CIA used to have a base there for their drone war. The US and Pakistan aren’t on such good terms now, however, and Pakistan reportedly wants to be able to sign off on who the CIA is attacking from their territory.

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Biden To Mothers: You’re ‘Birthing People’

In addition to costing taxpayers $6 trillion, President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget proposal insults women all across the country by replacing the term “mother” with “birthing people.” 

“The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, with an unacceptably high mortality rate for Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and other women of color,” according to the budget plan. After using the terms “maternal” and “women of color,” the plan suddenly switches to gender-neutral terminology.

Biden’s proposal seeks over $200 million in funding “to help end this high rate of maternal mortality and race-based disparities in outcomes among birthing people.”

The phrase “birthing people” previously drew controversy in May when it was used during a House Oversight Committee hearing on black maternal health. Some Twitter respondents argued the term reduced women to nothing more than baby-makers. Others questioned if Mother’s Day will soon no longer exist.

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Ex-FBI Agent Indicted For Accepting Bribes Paid by Lawyer Linked to Armenian Organized Crime Figure

A former FBI agent who retired after 20 years as a special agent has been arrested and indicted on a federal criminal charge alleging he conspired to accept more than $200,000 in cash bribes and gifts.

The Department of Justice said Babak Broumand accepted the bribes and gifts in exchange for providing sensitive law enforcement information to a lawyer with ties to Armenian organized crime.

Broumand was charged with filing false financial disclosure forms to cover up bribes he allegedly received from an attorney with ties to organized crime.

The indictment alleges that Sargsyan was a criminal and “associated with a criminal organization” when he bribed Broumand, who was still working at the FBI at the time. He allegedly bought Broumand a $36,000 motorcycle and paid him $30,000 for a down payment on a second home in Lake Tahoe.

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WHO Advisory Board Member Says China Still Engaged In ‘Massive Cover-Up’ Involving Destroying Samples, Silencing Scientists

A World Health Organization advisory board member said Monday that China even now continues to operate a “massive cover-up” on the origins and spread of the coronavirus that caused the global pandemic.

“The Chinese have engaged in a massive cover-up that is going on until this day, involving destroying samples, hiding records, placing a universal gag order on Chinese scientists and imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists asking the most basic questions,” Jamie Metzl said Monday on Fox News.

“The more that China stonewalls, the more suspicious that it looks,” Metzl added. “We can’t give China a veto over whether or not we investigate the world’s worst pandemic in a century and then do everything we can to make everybody safe.”

Investigators are probing whether the coronavirus could have been leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Meanwhile, China is reportedly planning on launching 25 to 30 biosafety level three labs and one biosafety level four lab, the kind operated by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, over the next five years.

The idea that the virus could have escaped from a lab was largely dismissed last year as a conspiracy as the pandemic tightened its grip on the U.S., but the theory has been revived in recent weeks after a U.S. intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms that resembled COVID-19 symptoms. China previously told the World Health Organization that the first person with symptoms similar to COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan the next month on December 8, 2019.

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