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.

Twitter’s ‘Birdwatch’ Community Fact-Checking Feature is Crowdsourcing Censorship

Now that Trump is out of office, many have been half expecting that mainstream media and Silicon Valley’s hyper-active ‘fact-check’ brigades might calm down, have a few wheat grass smoothies and bask in their momentous victory. Unfortunately, this new class of self-styled thought police are just getting warmed up. Jack’s got a plan.

Before we discuss Twitter’s latest dystopian add-on feature, let’s first establish a few important terms of reference as to the role which Big Tech has ascended to. The bottom line is that Twitter was caught directly meddling in the 2020 US Election and the mainstream press have worked hard to obfuscate this fact. When the Hunter Biden laptop scandal materialized prior to the November election, Twitter took the unilateral partisan decision to shutdown any information on the story, and even went so far as to shutdown the account of the New York Post who originally broke the story, and even suspended the White House Press Secretary’s account for retweeting it, as well as other high-profile staffers. Emboldened by Twitter’s bombast, Democrat leaders, mainstream media and even ‘the Big Guy’ Joe Biden himself – all clung to one singular narrative claiming the Hunter Biden story was somehow untrue, baseless misinformation planted by The Russians!™ to undermine candidate Biden. Not only were they all wrong, but we later learned that partisans at FBI had in fact been quietly sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop since autumn 2019, effectively keeping it on ice so as not to hurt Biden’s Presidential run. After the election, Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, then took what appeared to be coordinated action to pursue any users who dared to challenge the 2020 election result, in some cases prohibiting terms like “voter fraud” and “election fraud” on their platforms. This wave of censorship and fact-checking came into effect even before many of the court challenges. Regardless, the new ad hoc corporate ‘truth committees’ appeared omnipotent in their anointed role as information gatekeepers of the new digital public square. If that wasn’t enough, after Twitter and Facebook’s political purge, Big Tech cartel members and Democrat activists then conspired in the take-down an emerging competitor, Parler, taking the social media completely offline, and pressuring its vendors to abandon their service commitments with the new social media firm.

While this approached may have worked for them in the short-term, and indeed helped to achieve the election results they wanted, it won’t erase that fact Big Tech is guilty of the very crime which Democrats and media mavens spend 5 years trying to convince the world of when they floated the evidence-free conspiracy theory that the Russians ‘meddled’ and colluded with the Trump campaign in order to install The Donald in the White House in 2016.

Now, creative technocrats at Twitter appear to have devised a tangential escape route (and Section 230 workaround) from their own obvious culpability in election meddling and political censorship. It’s called “Birdwatch,” a new feature designed to supposedly combat the supposed omnipresent threat of ‘misinformation’ on their platform – by allowing users to add so-called ‘fact-check’ notes to peoples’ tweets. It’s supposed to allow ‘regular users’ (how are going to determine who is a ‘regular user’ is another question) called ‘Birdwatchers’ who will be allowed add to fact-check notes and provide ‘informative context’ for tweets.

Wait a minute. Call me old fashioned, but don’t Tweets already have a forum for discussion, context and debate? Isn’t that what the comment section below each Tweet is for? I used to think so.

Keep reading

The Internet’s War On Wall Street Did What Government Could Not—It United America

In the last three weeks, after the Trumpists were duped into thinking they could stop the election of Joe Biden by walking into the capitol and taking selfies with cops, the American technocratic police state has shifted into hyperdrive. In the name of stopping the “insurrection” that wasn’t, President Joe Biden and his team of neoliberal cronies have moved to criminalize speech, up to and including arresting people for trolling with memes as far back as 2016!

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the like have been unceremoniously creating tens of thousands of online unpersons since January 6. Establishment hacks, hungry for more power, have seized this moment to increase the surveillance state apparatus and push for the criminalization of everything and anything that is anti-establishment. A nightmarish police state is unfolding in front of us and because the Trumpists were the first to be sacrificed, the left has still been on their honeymoon ignoring the fact that “pro-democracy” Biden is quickly becoming a dictator, bypassing Congress and ramming through a record number of executive actions.

To put it mildly, since the onset of lockdowns last March, those of us who have been paying attention, have seen that the outlook is bleak, so long as the masses keep allowing their elected officials to take away their rights in the name of perceived “safety.”

All promise is not lost, however. There have been multiple glimmers of hope, proving and reasserting the power of the individual versus the establishment. Gavin Newsom, who has been compared to Hitler for his draconian and entirely arbitrary lockdown orders, likely reacting to a massive recall effort against him, suddenly reversed course on the lockdowns this week, allowing struggling businesses to hang on to their life’s work. But this was just the beginning.

On Tuesday, a paradigm shift took place unlike anything we’ve seen in history. A populist movement started on Reddit that threw aside their political differences and moved to take back some of this power and wealth that has been extracted from them particularly over the last year, but going back decades before.

Gamestop, stopped the game.

The rigged game that has paid for yachts with helopads belonging to the myriad of slime balls on Wall Street, whose job description entails betting (in a casino they own) that businesses will fail, and then ensuring their failure, was exposed. In the last few days, millions have witnessed — many for the first time ever — that the system is a rigged club, and they are not in it.

The coordinated effort by millions on the internet has shown the establishment that the people have power. It knocked them on their heels as kids with $500 in their bank accounts helped take down multi-billion dollar hedge funds. Predictably, however, like the establishment does every time it is threatened, it used its power and influence to attempt to stop it.

On Thursday, the Robinhood app ironically began acting like the Sheriff of Nottingham as it froze trading to protect hedge funds from rising stock prices of GME, AMC, and NOK. This was de facto market manipulation to protect Wall Street while screwing over the individual investor.

But this move did not go unnoticed. In fact, it was an act so egregious that it garnered the attention of political enemies who actually found a moment of solidarity to stand against it.

MAGA Congressman from Arizona’s 4th District, Paul Gosar, along with Ted Cruz, and Lauren Boebert, united with their perceived political foes across the aisle like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call out this coordinated effort by Big Tech to collude against private investors.

Keep reading

Avalanche Theory for Dyatlov Pass Incident is Bolstered by New Study

In what may be disappointing news to those who advocate for a more exotic explanation, an intriguing new scientific examination of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident supports the theory that the tragic event was the result of an avalanche. The 1959 case which saw nine hikers die under mysterious circumstances in Russia’s Ural Mountains has been the subject of considerable speculation and debate for decades with all manner of possibilities for what could have caused their demise being put forward by researchers. The latest look at the Dyaltov Pass incident comes by way of a pair of highly qualified experts who wound up coming to a rather familiar conclusion.

Learning about the curious case for the first time back in October of 2019, professor Johan Gaume, who heads the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, became fascinated by the mysterious event and enlisted Alexander Puzrin, chair of Geotechnical Engineering at ETH Zurich, to see if their considerable expertise could be used to solve the mystery once and for all. In a newly published paper authored by the two experts, they argue that the tragedy was, indeed, the result of an avalanche and, remarkably, that the unexpected torrent of snow was actually inadvertently caused by the hikers themselves.

Specifically, they theorize, the nightmarish chain of events began when the hikers cut into a snow slab on the side of the mountain in order to set up their tent and be protected by winds. “If they hadn’t made a cut in the slope, nothing would have happened,” mused Guame in a press release detailing the duo’s findings, “that was the initial trigger, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough.” As such, the two scientists propose that a downward airflow, known as a katabatic wind, likely caused an additional layer of snow to accumulate on the slope over the next several hours until the pressure became too much and the slab finally gave way in the form of an avalanche.

Keep reading

Pelosi says more security needed for U.S. Congress against ‘enemy within’

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday lawmakers would probably need more funding for security as the “the enemy is within” the House, following a warning by the Homeland Security Department of heightened threats.

Keep reading

Federal Secrecy Protects the Crimes of Every President

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Republicans and Democrats have conspired to keep Americans increasingly ignorant of what the federal government does. The number of secret federal documents skyrocketed, and any information that was classified supposedly cannot be exposed without dooming the nation.

Politicians and federal agencies recognize that “what people don’t know won’t hurt the government.” James Madison, the father of the Constitution, declared in 1798 that “the right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon … has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.” But this right has faded badly in recent decades. During the 2020 Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer warned that if the Senate did not vote to hear witnesses, “this country is headed towards the greatest cover-up since Watergate.”

Actually, “conventional wisdom” in the nation’s capital is often the result of cover-ups, ignorance, and servility. Daniel Ellsberg, who risked life in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers, observed in 2002, “It is a commonplace that ‘you can’t keep secrets in Washington’ or ‘in a democracy.’ … These truisms are flatly false…. The overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.”

Keep reading