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.

Why The Push Is On To Make Pandemic Life “Permanent”

One year after Americans were ordered to close down society for “two weeks to flatten the curve,” Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth warned, “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic.”

Because new variants of SARS-COV-2 are impervious to existing vaccines, says Kluth, and pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop new vaccines fast enough to keep up, we will never be able to get “back to normal.”

“Get back to normal” means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.

Covid-19 certainly wasn’t the beginning. Americans were told “the world changed” after 9/11. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the “new threat of terrorism.” Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probable cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest.

“Keep us safe,” they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.

Perhaps seeing how willingly the public rolled over for the political right during the “War on Terror,” authoritarians on the left turbocharged their own war on “climate change.” Previously interested in merely significantly raising taxes and heavily regulating industry, they now wish to ban all sorts of things, including air travel, gasoline-powered cars, and even eating meat.

Since Covid-19, however, even the freedom to assemble and see each other’s faces may be permanently banned to help the government “keep us safe.”

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Biden Stalls on Ending Capital Punishment

Seventy-five days since taking office, President Joe Biden has yet to issue a promised executive order on the death penalty. And criminal justice reform advocates working closely with the administration are growing tired of the delay, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Two of these sources said they had each received assurances from transition officials that Biden would sign an executive order on capital punishment very quickly or “imminently” after he entered office. But in recent weeks, White House officials and close allies of the president have been quietly signaling to frustrated activists that a more forceful push on this type of reform will likely have to wait until some unspecified point after the new president’s first 100 days in office.

“It is complete bullshit that they’re dragging their feet on this,” one of the sources said. “We have been pushing them on this and barely getting anywhere.”

This source noted that Biden came into office promising the American people that he would dramatically reverse course, especially after Trump’s “killing spree.”

“And we’re still being told to wait and be patient,” the source said.

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Biden To Reopen A Detention Facility Kamala Harris Protested Against.

Biden is facing major backlash from immigration activists as he weighs reopening a controversial migrant detention center in Florida.

Federal agencies are scrambling to expand capacity at detention facilities for unaccompanied minors who illegally cross the southern border, and one of those facilities may include the defunct Homestead Detention Center in Miami-Dade County, now called Biscayne Influx Care Facility.

In 2019, activist group WeCount published a report indicating that the Homestead detention center sits in close proximity to sites of hazardous chemical waste which are listed in the federal government’s toxic-waste cleanup program, Superfund. Amnesty USA called use of the facility “cruel and unlawful.”

That summer, more than a dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls visited Homestead to register their denunciation of the facility and pose for photos, including Eric Swalwell, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke (who shouted in Spanish “We see you! We love you! We are here with you!”), Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, John Hickenlooper, Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I will tell you, when elected, the first thing I’m going to do—one of the first things—is to shut down these private detention facilities. Just shut ’em down,” Harris said.

Biden skipped the photo op.

The privately-run Homestead center was shut down in August 2019 following reports that it had no hurricane preparedness plan. It was later revealed as well that staff were not vetted for prior child abuse records.

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