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.

COVID Numbers Inflated 600% Due to False Positives among University Athletes: Report

A rash of false-positive coronavirus tests has led the University of Arizona to issue an apology to student-athletes who it claimed had the virus but did not.

The university reported Thursday that 13 student-athletes had tested positive for COVID-19 — a single-day record for the school.

Three days later, however, Arizona athletics said in a statement that the actual number of positive tests was just two. That means the initial numbers inflated the total by more than 600 percent.

“On Thursday, Arizona Athletics reported a single-day high of positive COVID-19 test results for student-athletes,” the university said Sunday. “After concluding an exhaustive contact-tracing protocol, the medical director for Arizona Athletics requested additional testing of the samples, stating that the contact history reports did not support the positive test results.

“After further review, Arizona Athletics Director of Medical Services Dr. Stephen Paul said conflicting information prompted a rerun of the test samples. The retest showed that false positive results were previously reported.

“On Sep. 3, the athletics department reported 13 positive test results for athletes, after a rerun of those tests, two came back positive,” the university said.

Better safe than… accurate or effective.

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Netflix Star and Biden Surrogate Jerry Harris Raided By FBI For Allegedly Soliciting Photos and Sex From Minors

Jerry Harris, star of Cheer on Netflix and former Joe Biden presidential campaign surrogate, has been raided by the FBI for allegedly soliciting photos and sex from minors.

FBI agents executed a search warrant at Harris’ home in Naperville, Illinois, on Monday afternoon.

The investigation was launched after allegations made against 21-year-old Harris by 14-year-old twin brothers.

USA Today spoke to the boys, who described a pattern of harassment, both online and at cheer competitions, that started when they were 13 and Harris was 19. It continued for more than a year. “Harris is accused of asking one of the brothers to have sex with him in 2019 at two Varsity cheerleading competitions,” the newspaper reports.

“The FBI is conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity in the area,” Siobhan Johnson, FBI special agent and public affairs officer, told USA Today.

Harris, 21, is known for his role in Netflix’s recent “Cheer” docuseries, which followed a cheer team working to make it to the National Cheerleading Championship. USA Today reports, “In February, Harris stood on a Dallas stage beside Oprah Winfrey, who handed him her microphone and asked him to pump up the crowd with his signature ‘mat talk.’ The same month, he interviewed celebrities on the red carpet of the Oscars for ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show.’ In June, he filmed a short video with former Vice President Joe Biden, encouraging young Black voters to turn out on Election Day.”

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Nearly two decades after 9/11, the parallels between the post-terrorist attack ‘New Normal’ & that of Covid-19 can’t be ignored

Both the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic have dramatically shaped Western society. But the changes they wrought were devastating and unnecessary, pushed through by control-hungry governments who saw opportunity in crisis.

While both the worst terror attack in US history and the deadliest pandemic in a generation were immediately hyped as the defining elements of the era, the uncomfortable reality is that neither terrorism nor the novel coronavirus pose any risk more severe than taking a bath.

However, the media hype – fueled by think tanks and governments drooling over the possibility of adopting controls that would normally spark popular revolt – has created the same climate of fear that allowed the imposition of the post-9/11 police state, paving the way for a post-Covid regime that will make the Patriot Act look cuddly.

The shocking changes to the American “way of life” that have followed both events were in no way required, or even logical, responses to the crises in question. It took an unlikely series of what the government described as “intelligence failures” for the events of 9/11 to fall into place, and the Trump administration scrapped completely adequate pandemic response plans to adopt a regime of lockdowns and economic shutdowns that will likely end up doing more harm than the virus itself. Had governments followed their own procedures, neither catastrophe likely would have happened.

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A bug in Joe Biden’s campaign app gave anyone access to millions of voter files

A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s  official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found.

The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone’s contact lists to see if their friends and family members are registered to vote. The app uploads and matches the user’s contacts with voter data supplied from TargetSmart, a political marketing firm that claims to have files on more than 191 million Americans.

When a match is found, the app displays the voter’s name, age and birthday, and which recent election they voted in. This, the app says, helps users “find people you know and encourage them to get involved.”

While much of this data can be already public, the bug made it easy for anyone to access any voter’s information.

The App Analyst, a mobile expert who detailed his findings on his eponymous blog, found that he could trick the app into pulling in anyone’s information by creating a contact on his phone with the voter’s name.

Worse, he told TechCrunch, the app pulls in a lot more data than it actually displays. By intercepting the data that flows in and out of the device, he saw far more detailed and private information, including the voter’s home address, date of birth, gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation, such as Republican or Democrat.

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‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center

Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.

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