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.

Hugo Boss Vows to Buy Slave Cotton in Chinese After Denying Purchases in English

German fashion house Hugo Boss assured its Chinese buyers on Thursday that it will continue to “purchase and support” Xinjiang cotton, a product of Chinese state-supported slave labor by Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities, extensive reporting has revealed.

“Xinjiang’s long-stapled cotton is one of the best in the world. We believe top-quality raw materials will definitely show its value [sic]. We will continue to purchase and support Xinjiang cotton,” a verified Hugo Boss account wrote in a statement posted to the Chinese social media platform Weibo on March 25.

A Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reporter reached out to Hugo Boss on Thursday for comment on its Weibo statement supporting Xinjiang cotton and received a contradictory response.

“[I]n an emailed response to HKFP, the brand linked to a statement on its website saying it has never used Xinjiang cotton: ‘So far, HUGO BOSS has not procured any goods originating in the Xinjiang region from direct suppliers,’” the luxury fashion house wrote on its official Western website.

“Hugo Boss did not respond to HKFP’s questions as to whether it is sending different messages to Chinese and Western customers,” the newspaper noted.

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Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study

Android handsets and iPhones share data with their respective companies on average every 4½ minutes, with data being sent back even when idle in a pocket or handbag, according to a new academic study.

The Trinity College Dublin research has raised fresh privacy concerns about smartphones, with the research claiming there was little difference between Apple and Google when it came to collecting certain data.

The study, which was published by Prof Doug Leith at Trinity’s Connect Centre, claimed iPhones offered no greater privacy than Google devices.

However, the study noted that Google handsets collected “a notably larger volume of handset data than Apple” with 1MB of data being sent from idle Google Pixel handsets every 12 hours, compared with 52KB sent from the iPhone.

Among the data potentially sent back by the handsets were the insertion of a SIM and handset details such as the hardware serial number, IMEI, Wifi MAC address and the phone number.

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Federal Bump Stock Ban Blocked by Divided Appeals Court

The federal ban on bump stocks—devices that increase the rate of fire for semiautomatic weapons—is likely unlawful and must be put on hold, a divided Sixth Circuit said Thursday.

Bump stocks harness a gun’s recoil energy to rapidly move the firearm back and forth, bumping the shooter’s stationary finger against the trigger. In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, in which a gunman using semiautomatic rifles with bump stocks killed 58 people, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to quickly ban “all devices that turn legal weapons into machineguns.”

Federal law generally bans civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after May 1986, including any parts used to convert an otherwise legal firearm into an illegal machine gun. It defines a machine gun as a weapon which fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule reinterpreting the terms “single function of the trigger” and “automatically” to ban bump stocks.

The group Gun Owners of America and others sued, claiming the rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, and the 14th Amendment’s right to due process.

A lower court should have granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction against the rule, because they’ll likely be able to prove that the bump stock ban is unlawful, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said.

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Biden: I Don’t Have Any of the Facts on Colorado, But We Definitely Need a Gun Ban

Speaking from the White House Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden admitted he doesn’t know or have all of the facts about the shooting that took place in Boulder, Colorado Monday night. Regardless, he called for additional infringement on the Second Amendment rights of law abiding Americans. 

“I want to be very clear. This is the one thing I do know enough to say on in terms of what’s happened there. While we are still waiting for more information regarding the shooter, his motive, the weapons he used, the guns, the magazines, the weapons, the modifications that apparently have taken place with those weapons involved here, I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps to save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Seante to act,” Biden said. “We can ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in this country once again. I got that done when I was a Senator. It passed, it was the law for the longest time…we should do it again.”

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Utah Passes Law Requiring Porn to Be Blocked on All Cellphones, Tablets in the State

The free thinking argument, that blows away the notion of illegal prostitution, is that of pornography. Pornography, or porn, is nothing more than prostitution that has been state-sanctioned, taxed, filmed, and distributed. However, because it is taxed — politicians have generally left it alone — until now. Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill Tuesday that calls for all smartphones and tablets sold in the Beehive State to have adult content filters.

If one is truly for freedom, outlawing consensual acts between adults should be resisted — even if these acts involve the swapping of bodily fluids. And, although the state claims the right to kidnap and cage people for engaging in these consensual acts, it does not mean they are somehow immoral.

The Free Thought Project has long objected to the prohibition of sex work as it creates crime, sends sex workers into dangerous situations, and outlaws one of the oldest professions in the world. While the prohibition of sex work is bad enough, the governor of Utah passing a law that will filter out legal pornography on all tablets and smartphones sold in the state is outright tyrannical.

If someone wishes to access porn on their device, they must first get permission from their cellphone provider and they will be put on a list of people allowed to view porn.

According to House Bill 72, the so-called filter would “prevent the user of the device from accessing material that is harmful to minors on the device; enable certain users to deactivate the filter for the device or for specific content; and notify the user when content is filtered.”

Cox said the move would send an “important message” about preventing children from accessing explicit content on the Web.

“We really want to empower parents,” Cox said. “If nothing else it sends an important message.”

But blocking pornography on 100 percent of devices in the state does absolutely nothing to “empower parents.” There are already programs and filters available to empower parents to block porn on devices and they are free. All this law does, as the ACLU of Utah put it “infringes upon the general public’s First Amendment rights to freely access the internet.”

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