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.

The Chancellor, the Asset Manager, and the Missiles

There is a particular kind of arrangement that no law forbids and no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule. Friedrich Merz’s Germany is building one of these in real time.

Start with the weapons. In July 2025, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Washington that Germany wanted to buy the American Typhon launch system and Tomahawk cruise missiles — the system’s first foreign sale, the decision left entirely to the United States. Trade outlets, citing Politico, put the order at three launchers and some 400 Tomahawk Block Vb missiles, north of €1 billion. Nearly a year later, Washington has not answered. The request stalled after Merz criticized the American war on Iran and Trump pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and canceled a planned long-range-fires deployment. Europe’s would-be military leader, it turns out, cannot get deep-strike capability without American factories and a president’s goodwill. So much for sovereignty.

Now follow the money, because that is where the story actually lives. The Tomahawk is built by RTX, formerly Raytheon, where BlackRock sits among the largest institutional holders. The Typhon launcher is Lockheed Martin’s, where BlackRock has disclosed beneficial ownership above 5 percent in a Schedule 13G filed with the SEC. And BlackRock is where Merz spent four years before climbing back into politics: from 2016 to 2020 he chaired the supervisory board of its German arm. The man asking Washington to sell Germany missiles was, until lately, the public face of a firm that profits when the missiles are sold.

His time there was not quiet. In November 2018, while Merz chaired its supervisory board, prosecutors raided the Munich offices of BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland over cum-ex trades — the dividend-stripping fraud that drained the German treasury of tens of billions of euros. The conduct under investigation predated his arrival, prosecutors named him no suspect, and he called the practice “completely immoral” and ordered the firm to cooperate. Note the pattern all the same: this is a man who has spent his career adjacent to the machinery, never holding the smoking gun, always in the room.

Then came the policy. The fiscal lock came off before Merz was even sworn in. As leader of the election-winning CDU and chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — on March 18, 2025, weeks before he took office, and deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene — the amendment exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the constitutional “debt brake.” The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone, replaced by an open tap. German military spending rose 24 percent in 2025 to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe. Merz has pledged more than €750 billion for the armed forces.

And BlackRock holds the contractors cashing in. It disclosed a 6.91 percent stake in Rheinmetall, the tank-maker whose shares have soared since 2022, with the ownership chain running through the very German subsidiary Merz once chaired. It crossed the 5 percent threshold in the sensor firm Hensoldt. These are not idle positions. They are the firm collecting on a rearmament its former chairman set loose.

Merz, naturally, denies the whole framing. “I never accepted a lobbying mandate,” he told Die Zeit. The transparency group LobbyControl notes that BlackRock’s own description of his job included cultivating contacts with governments and regulators — which is what lobbying is, whatever euphemism rides on the business card.

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Self-Exiled Chinese Billionaire Guo Wengui Sentenced To 30 Years In U.S. Prison For Massive Fraud – “Let’s Take Down The CCP!”

Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese billionaire and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison Monday for orchestrating a sprawling financial fraud that prosecutors say defrauded more than 1,000 victims worldwide of hundreds of millions of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the sentence in a Manhattan courtroom filled with Guo’s supporters. She described how Guo preyed on investors who hoped to support democracy in China, using their money to fund a lavish lifestyle while showing no remorse, wrote Politico.

“You took advantage of people’s dreams,” Torres said, adding that Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.”

Before sentencing, Guo, also known as Miles Guo or Ho Wan Kwok, complained about his treatment in custody. He told the court through an interpreter that he had been ill and needed medical attention earlier that day. He briefly defended himself, saying his only goal in coming to the United States was “to destroy the CCP.”

The judge ordered Guo to forfeit $889 million in restitution. Victims who wrote to the court described losing life savings, suffering severe anxiety, and facing family shame over the failed investments.

One victim who testified at trial, Wei Chen, told the judge that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and that of her family.

From tycoon to fugitive

Guo fled China about a decade ago and rebranded himself in the U.S. as a prominent critic of the Chinese government. He cultivated ties with American conservatives, most notably forming a close alliance with political strategist Steve Bannon. In 2020, the two announced plans to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Before his arrest in 2023, Guo lived extravagantly in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, owned yachts, race cars, and designer goods, and was a member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Prosecutors said Guo raised more than $1 billion from investors between 2018 and 2023 through fraudulent schemes involving his media company GTV Media Group, the Himalaya Farm Alliance, and the Himalaya Exchange. Much of the money allegedly went to support his opulent lifestyle rather than the promised projects.

A federal jury convicted him on nine of 12 counts after a seven-week trial, added Politico.

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The Islamabad Memorandum and the Decline of the Paradigm of Absolute Victory

Almost every war produces the same immediate question: who won? Yet the more consequential question is whether either side can convert battlefield pressure into a political order it can sustain. The Islamabad Memorandum, signed by the United States and Iran on June 17, brings that distinction into sharp relief. It is a 60-day framework linking an end to military operations and navigation through the Strait of Hormuz to negotiations over sanctions, Iran’s nuclear program, and a broader political settlement. Its importance lies less in the document’s promises than in the reality that produced it: neither Washington nor Tehran could credibly claim that continuing the war would deliver the political outcome each sought.

This does not mean military power has ceased to matter. In conflicts where both sides can impose serious costs and frustrate the other’s objectives, the ability to damage an adversary is not the same as the ability to compel it. The Islamabad Memorandum is evidence of power’s limits when it cannot be translated into a durable political order.

The framework reflects those limits. It envisages commercial navigation through Hormuz, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, temporary sanctions relief, and talks on Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile under international supervision. Each element acknowledges that neither side achieved its preferred end state through force. The United States did not secure a stable regional order by military pressure alone; Iran did not compel Washington to abandon every demand merely by raising the costs of escalation. Security, nuclear questions, economic restrictions, and maritime access must instead be negotiated together.

For Washington, this is the central strategic lesson. The United States has never lacked the capacity to strike Iranian targets or impose material costs. The question was whether that superiority could produce a political arrangement that reduced risk without drawing America into an open-ended regional war. Iraq and Afghanistan offered a familiar warning: tactical success can destroy infrastructure and degrade capabilities, but it cannot settle rival security claims or force an adversary to accept a political future it regards as intolerable. In the Iranian case, additional strikes could have increased pressure, but they also risked higher energy costs, disruption to shipping, wider instability, and a conflict with no clear endpoint.

Diplomacy, then, should not be described simply as American retreat. It is an admission that an objective becomes less attainable as the cost of pursuing it rises. A strategy that can keep escalating but cannot define a credible political end state is not a strategy of victory. The memorandum gave Washington a way to pursue verification and regional stability without assuming that force could resolve every issue on American terms.

Iran reached a parallel conclusion from a different position. Tehran demonstrated that it could not be excluded cheaply from the regional security equation. Its capacity to impose costs on shipping, energy markets, and U.S. interests made a purely coercive settlement difficult. But resilience is not identical to the ability to impose one’s full political will. Iran could raise the price of war; it could not assume that prolonged confrontation would automatically produce sanctions relief, economic recovery, or a stable security environment. Negotiation therefore offered Tehran not capitulation, but a route to protect core interests while reducing pressures that military endurance alone could not remove.

This convergence of limitations gives the Islamabad Memorandum its historical significance. The document does not resolve decades of disputes, and it would be premature to treat it as the beginning of a settled regional order. Its provisions remain vulnerable to disagreement over sequencing, verification, sanctions implementation, and the future of nuclear talks. The recent suspension of Iranian participation in technical discussions and the subsequent agreement to halt mutual strikes show how fragile the arrangement remains. A fragile agreement is not yet a strategic transformation.

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“White Time”: Dutch Professor Argues That Time Itself Is Racist

We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before time itself was declared racist.

Zakia Essanhaji, a professor of “organizational ethnography” at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the latest to make the case against “white time.”

Her recent paper titled “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia” builds on prior work condemning time as racist.

Rutgers Women’s and Gender Studies/Africana Studies Professor Brittney Cooper has also written about how time is racist. Mainstream media has positively cooed at the suggestion, including an interview with NPR. Cooper claimed that “white people own time” after framing the concept of time in “histories of European and Western thought.”

There is also apparently black time: “Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn’t have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland.”

Likewise, in “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Jamaican academic Charles W. Mills described the  “Euro-chronometer” as a Western-centric, linear timeline.

These works are often heavily laden with jargonistic narratives. In one study from Brazil, academics argue that “thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies.”

Professor Essanhaji continues this scholarship by “drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time.” She applies with earlier work “to academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes.”

“White time is not simply the time of the privileged, but the power to define temporality and progress itself. It is the colonization of time, known as the system of modernity/coloniality. As Vazquez […] argues, this system is maintained by erasing cyclical or relational understandings of time, ensuring that time is perceived as racing towards unattainable, more modern futures. In that sense, white time is both prescriptive and pre-emptive, foreclosing alternative futures and experiences of the past by delegitimizing other temporalities.”

Academics have long argued that non-white histories and figures are often “erased’ in scholarship. Such arguments have led to a move away from Western works or classics in favor of non-Western sources in higher education. However, the time scholarship suggests that the very construct of time has been shaped and furthers white domination and privilege.

In Professor Essanhaji’s work, this scholarship is used to challenge the demands placed on minority academics in publishing and other measures of academic achievement. Again, the work is heavily layered with jargonistic language. Here are her findings:

“The analysis identifies three mechanisms of academic time theft. First, prolonged uncertainty operates through racialized precariousness that keeps academics of colour in a condition of academic probation through insecure contracts and housing precarity. Second, ongoing disruption emerges through everyday racism that fragments attention, diverts emotional and intellectual labour, and interrupts academic continuity. Third, recursive evaluation operates through the continual resetting of inclusion and promotion criteria, producing perpetual states of “not yet” recognition and deferred academic futures. Together, these mechanisms sustain racialized temporal regimes in which academics of colour are positioned as perpetually “almost there” while white institutional time remains uninterrupted.”

These authors largely cite each other with little attention to countervailing viewpoints. It becomes a closed, self-perpetuating system as academics invite one another to speak at their universities and feed off one another. Few academics are willing to challenge such scholarship. Indeed, as we have discussed, departments have largely purged their ranks of conservative or contrarian voices.

As shown in this latest scholarship, the work in this area jettisons such “colonial” or “white” forms of analysis in favor of storytelling:

“I depart from a critical race perspective, employing counter-storytelling to construct (counter)narratives grounded in the lived experiences of people of colour. This method recognizes the connections between the historical impacts of colonialism and contemporary exclusions within organizations. By highlighting the experiences of people of colour navigating the university’s racism, I seek to provide rich accounts that reflect on how time is racialized and experienced in Dutch universities.”

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Elite Strategy 101: Stoking the Culture War, Reinventing the Enemy

Comedian Tim Dillon recently expressed bafflement at the strategy of shoving Pride™ propaganda down every orifice of the body politic, fervently employed by the tranny activist corps with the purported aim of improving public relations for the alphabet people:

“It makes more people angry. That’s why gay marriage has lost 11 points in support. More people are annoyed… They’re like, why is my bank gay? When did my bank come out as gay?… What are we doing? This doesn’t make anybody’s life better. It is just virtue-signaling horse-shit that ends up doing the exact opposite of what they want. They think it increases acceptance. It decreases it. Because you’re shoving a worldview down someone’s throat.”

What Tim Dillon, who is otherwise savvy, apparently doesn’t appreciate is that consistently generating resistance to the machinations of the social engineers, rather than an inadvertent byproduct, is actually the entire point of the exercise.

The tranny lobbyists love the defiance from the Basket of Deplorables, as Hillary Clinton infamously described the segment of the populace opposed to her neoliberal identity politics dogma, because it generates more fodder that they then use to generate donations to combat the transphobia they themselves created.

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Labor Union Leader: Execute Democrats Who Break with Graham Platner via Firing Squad

Andy O’Brien, the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of 160 local unions, posted on social media, suggesting Democrats who refuse to support Democrat U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner should face execution after a “revolution.”

O’Brien shared a link to a the Hill opinion piece titled, “I’m a Democratic Strategist. I Won’t Stay Silent About Graham Platner,” by Democrat strategist Laurie A. Watkins. Watkins wrote that a career spent fighting for Democratic causes does not mean blindly supporting every candidate with a “D” by their name.

O’Brien’s response was brutal, saying political consultants like Watkins would be “first up against the wall when the revolution comes.”

Before supporting Platner, O’Brien was known for publicly calling out people he accused of holding extremist or neo-Nazi views.

After facing backlash, O’Brien said the post was meant as a joke referencing a science fiction novel, not a call for violence. He apologized to anyone offended and said he never intended to suggest harming people over their political views.

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The US Economy In A Nutshell: Privatize The Gains, Socialize The Costs

In my post Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World, #3 is the distribution of risk, costs and consequences to a diffused populace while concentrating the gains into the pockets of insiders/owners:

Those seeking to reduce their private risks and increase their private gains seek to concentrate the gains generated by control structures and distribute the risks and costs to others. Pull the strings that diffuse the costs and risks over a large populace and gather the gains into the hands of the insiders that manage the control structure, typically some form of monopoly, either public or private, or a fusion of public-private rackets.

So corporations face low risks while the gains are extremely enticing. This diffusion of risk and concentration of potential gains establishes perverse incentives to increase extractive, exploitive, well-hidden rackets that impoverish and immiserate the many, but in doses small enough to avoid triggering push-back.

In a system that concentrates gains and diffuses risk, the “rational actor” seeks to maximize rackets that distribute impoverishment and immiseration to the many in small doses over time that attract little attention and are not significant enough to trigger an emotionally potent resistance.

Correspondent Simons Chase (x.com/slchase and Selflet.ai) insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs. Here is Simons’ explanation:

“Junk food is a kind of leveraged recapitalization — short-term gains privatized, long-term costs socialized as horrific health outcomes: pay a little now and a shortened, diseased life later. Dan Munro folded that framing into his Forbes piece tying roughly a trillion dollars a year in U.S. healthcare spending to sugar: Sugar Linked To $1 Trillion In U.S. Healthcare Spending (forbes.com, 2013). The mechanism is the point: privatize the gain, socialize the cost. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The receipt is real–Credit Suisse put 30%-40% of U.S. healthcare spending at the feet of excess sugar, and the 2012 Global Burden of Disease report found obesity a bigger global threat than hunger. That last fact is the whole thesis in a line, and I put it on X more recently: obesity is a form of starvation — understand that, and you grasp the U.S. economy:

Abundance, not scarcity, is the adversary now. The economy has already filed the invoice: the top employer in most states flipped from manufacturing to health care in a single generation. We stopped making things and started billing the disease. The damage became the GDP.

Debt is the same recapitalization run on the whole economy–today’s abundance privatized, tomorrow’s cost socialized onto a future that didn’t vote. And the defining project of my lifetime has been that operation run on foreign policy: borrowed against what we couldn’t pay for at home, the costs socialized onto people far from the ledger, each chapter sold as help.

AI is simply the newest instance, and the most intimate. Cheap, fluent, frictionless cognition now; the homogenization bill later. The engagement is privatized; the flattening of the culture is socialized onto all of us– and, exactly as you say, nobody notices the loss because nobody knows how to look for it.

Thank you, Simons, for this illumination.

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CNN Host Complains Declaration of Independence is ‘Soiled’ With ‘Racism’ and a ‘Slur’ Ahead of Nation’s 250th Birthday

CNN anchor Victor Blackwell used his Saturday morning show to attack one of America’s most sacred founding documents, calling the Declaration of Independence “soiled with a slur” against Native Americans.

The segment aired as Americans prepare to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

Blackwell focused on a specific passage in the Declaration’s list of grievances against King George III, which states that the king “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

The host told viewers it is important to remember that the Declaration contains this “slur.”

Blackwell admitted he was not familiar with that section until recently and stressed the need for more people to acknowledge what he described as historical racism against Native Americans.

Native American activist and writer Rebecca Nagle joined the segment as a guest and criticized the idea of celebrating the Declaration’s “lofty ideals” without also confronting what she called the founders’ “deep hatred for indigenous people.”

Nagle suggested that many Native Americans have difficulty embracing the anniversary because of the country’s history with indigenous tribes.

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Sadiq Khan Said There Were No Grooming Gangs In London; Police Investigating 4,000 Cases

The London mayor who once insisted there was “no indication” of grooming gangs now faces explosive new scrutiny after a police review uncovered thousands of previously sidelined child sexual exploitation files.

The Metropolitan Police has identified more than 4,000 potential child sexual exploitation cases across London that may require reopening.

These stem from roughly 12,000 reports dating back to 2010, with about one in three previously closed after police or prosecutors took no further action.

The cases have now been referred to the National Crime Agency under Operation Beaconport for urgent assessment.

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Zohran Mamdani Vows To Protect Illegal Aliens Ahead of 2026 Midterm Elections

New York City Commie Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling that allows the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, warning it had “sparked one of the largest attacks on immigrants in modern American history.” The decision in Mullin v. Doe gives immigration authorities broad, court‑shielded power to strip deportation protections from TPS holders, clearing the way for many illegals to face removal from the United States.

In a statement and subsequent public appearances, Mamdani said thousands of Haitians and Syrians now “risk losing the right to live and work in the country they call home” and vowed that New York City “will not turn our backs” on them. He pledged that his administration would “stand alongside immigrant New Yorkers today, tomorrow, and every day that follows,” framing the city’s response in terms of solidarity and defiance of the Trump administration.

Mamdani urged worried residents to contact the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and promoted a free immigration legal support hotline number for those seeking advice about their status and legal options. In a clip that went viral on X, Mamdani said it was “something that we will not ever accept” for people’s freedom to be put into jeopardy by “the actions of a Supreme Court and a federal administration,” as he promised to keep people in their homes and families together.

Social media responded in backlash and accused the mayor of defying federal law, using taxpayer resources to aid illegal aliens, and embracing a “radical” sanctuary agenda that undermines immigration enforcement. Some users mocked the hotline promotion as an invitation for “illegal aliens” to seek help evading deportation, while others demanded that federal authorities investigate whether Mamdani was obstructing immigration officers.

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