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.

WHO: COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab. Also WHO: Maybe it did

The mission concluded that the second hypothesis, that the virus jumped from one species to another before infecting people, is “the most likely pathway.” While the mission reported that the direct spillover and food-chain ideas needed more investigation, Ben Embarek said the team had dismissed the idea that a lab-leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” and said it wouldn’t be pursued any further.

But days after the presser, the remarks by Ben Embarek and the team were undercut when World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said no hypotheses had been ruled out: “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.” Where the WHO investigators go from here remains to be seen.

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Texas Republicans Give Massive Taxpayer Handouts to Big Tech, Effectively Financing Censorship of Their Voters

Texas Republicans have financed Big Tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars using the Texas Enterprise Fund.

The report from the Texas-based Current Revolt exposes the Texas Enterprise Fund, showing how Republicans in the Texas Legislature have backed the diversion of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of the Big Tech companies that engage in the censorship of their very own constituents.

The aim of the TEF, as disclosed on the Texas government website, is to award “deal closing” grants to companies in order to persuade them into choosing Texas as the location for their new site, whatever that may be. “The fund serves as a financial incentive for those companies whose projects would contribute significant capital investment and new employment opportunities to the state’s economy,” the website states.

However, the TEF, supported by a large list of Texas Republicans, gives money to Big Tech corporations, who regularly engage in the censorship and attempted cancellation of conservatives.

Facebook, who regularly bans conservatives from their platform and recently permanently banned President Donald Trump, were awarded $1.4 million.

Apple, who recently kicked conservative social media platform Parler off their App Store, received $46 million.

Uber, whose employees gave 97% of their political donations to Democrats, and who permanently banned former Republican Congressional candidate Laura Loomer from their service, were awarded $24 million.

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UK Government Could Grant Vaccine Exemptions to Ethnic Minorities

The UK government could grant vaccine exemptions to people of color while simultaneously mandating vaccine travel certificates for everyone else in order to avoid accusations of racism, according to a report in the Spectator.

Despite repeatedly promising that ‘vaccine passports’ would not be required in order to fly, the government has been actively planning for their introduction.

After more than 324,000 people signed a petition opposing immunization passports, UK vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi said that vaccines would not be compulsory and that, “We have absolutely no plans for vaccine passporting.”

That turned out to be a complete falsehood.

As the Spectator reports today, “Responsibilities have already been divided up between government departments to look at the idea. If approved, the Department for Transport will be told to draw up plans for a certificate infrastructure. And the NHS will be told to prepare to let people access their vaccine status when preparing for international travel.”

Sky News reports that Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has already signed off on the proposal but that there’s a “nervousness” within government about when it will be announced publicly.

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Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

Larry Flynt, the publisher of the sexually explicit Hustler magazine whose legal battles turned him into a flamboyant crusader for free speech rights, has died at 78. Flynt’s famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — were memorialized in the 1996 film The People Versus Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson. Flynt’s death was first reported by TMZ and his brother Jimmy Flynt confirmed the news to The Washington Post. A cause of death has not been revealed.

Larry Flynt was a Navy veteran who built a small empire of nude adult clubs in the late 1960s. He took those strip clubs and built them into one of the world’s most successful sex-based brands, transforming a newsletter about the clubs into Hustler magazine in 1974, publishing adult entertainment that critics frequently lambasted as obscene and degrading to women. The magazine once published a photo illustration of a nude woman being passed through a meat grinder. The feminist Gloria Steinem famously described Flynt as “a violent, sadistic pornographer.”

Always brash and opinionated, in his later years, he traveled most places in a gold-plated wheelchair. But he prided himself on being a self-made man who came from very humble beginnings. Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. was born in Lakeville, Kentucky on Nov. 1, 1942. His father was a sharecropper and he grew up in poverty; in his 2004 book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth, Flynt cited his meager beginnings as an influence on his attitude toward sex. “I’m a hillbilly, and people like me come to sex without all the hang-ups imposed by the hypocritical, ‘you must maintain proper appearances’ morality of the middle class,” he wrote. “When good Christian folk tell me that sex is dirty, I say, ‘Yeah, when it’s done right.’ For me, sex has always been a way of saying, ‘I am outside the reach of your power.’ “

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Tour Group Visiting Dyatlov Pass Sparks Panic After Going Missing for Hours

A well-intentioned journey to Russia’s Dyatlov Pass honoring the hikers who perished at the site inadvertently sparked a small panic this week when the group of tourists taking part in the excursion went missing for hours and conjured concerns that the infamous incident had somehow happened again. The strange case began on Wednesday morning when Russian media reported that eight people had traveled to the remote location specifically to pay tribute to the victims of the mysterious 1959 event and had subsequently lost communication with relatives back in Moscow. Worries about the group were compounded when they failed to return from Dyatlov Pass at the time that they were expected and had missed their scheduled train.

These circumstances understandably alarmed both their family members as well as the authorities and, as one might imagine, drew comparisons to the case which had brought them to Dyatlov Pass in the first place. Fortunately, the matter was resolved fairly quickly and had a much less tragic ending than what occurred in 1959 as it was later determined that the group, which actually consisted of six hikers and three guides, had successfully departed the site and managed to make their way back to a nearby airport unnoticed and unscathed, albeit approximately 12 hours after their trip was supposed to have ended.

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