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.

USPS Inspector General Confirms It: Postal Facilities Botched Mail Ballots in the 2026 Primaries — Wrong Dates in Pennsylvania, No Training on the Wall, and Delayed Ballots Headed Into a Midterm Fight

A new federal audit has exposed serious failures in the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of election mail during the 2026 primary season, including incorrectly postmarked ballots, missing tracking information, delayed deliveries and ballots shipped hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.

ProPublica first reported the audit on September 9. The watchdog’s report is public: Processing of Election and Political Mail for the 2026 Primary Elections.

The September 4 audit by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General examined nine mail-processing facilities and 73 delivery units across eight states between March and May.

While auditors found that most facilities generally followed election-mail procedures, and overall processing scores improved from the 2024 primaries, they also uncovered alarming breakdowns that could determine whether a lawful vote is counted.

The report found that management at 10 of the 82 facilities reviewed was unfamiliar with proper ballot-postmarking policies.

At five of nine mail-processing facilities, auditors discovered hand-canceling devices displaying incorrect dates.

At the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, processing center, a hand canceler being used on the May 19 primary election date was still set to March 19.

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Trump Announces $500 Obamacare Rebate Checks to Nearly 1 Million Americans “Wrongly Ripped Off” by Biden Administration

President Trump announced in a video statement on Thursday that rebate checks for families who were “wrongly ripped off” by the Biden Administration through the Obamacare exchange and healthcare.gov will be delivered ahead of the November elections. 

Checks to nearly one million Americans across 30 states will be delivered in “just a few weeks,” Trump said. The White House announced that checks will be sent to those eligible beginning in October.

Trump announced the initiative, dubbed the “Working Families Obamacare Refunds,” in a video statement.

WATCH:

Trump: Today, I’m very thrilled to make an important announcement on the cost of health care affecting hardworking families all across the United States. Our administration has discovered that under Sleepy Joe Biden, American households buying health insurance through the Obamacare exchange, which is a disaster, and the healthcare.gov were massively overcharged, to put it mildly.

They were forced to pay excessive fees, totaling at least $500 million. The last administration knew about this and they studied it, but they kept the money. They just kept it. They never let anyone know. Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off.

Nearly one million hardworking Americans in 30 states will soon be getting refunds of $500 each with a check sent to their home address. In many cases, these refunds will cover the entire spike in your insurance caused by Democrats, who solely work to protect big insurance companies. The big insurance companies own the Democrats.

Congress must now quickly pass the Great Health Care Plan. It’s called the Great Health Care Plan. Cost of healthcare for all Americans is coming down under my plan. We will stop all payments to big insurance and give the money directly to the people, who will then be able to buy better health care at a much lower cost and keep the money and keep the difference.

We’ll have maximum price transparency and require all prices to be posted in plain, beautiful English, and we will get insurance companies to disclose their profits and how many claims they deny, so that we know the good ones from the bad. But the relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged. The rebates are going out in just a few weeks. Thank you very much.

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Mamdani Blindsided by Fresh Lawsuit — The NYC Mayor Now Has to Fight in Federal Court

New York City Zohran Mamdani will soon have to defend his socialist schemes in federal court.

That’s because of a fresh lawsuit that accuses his socialist supermarkets of “unfair competition” against local grocers.

The National Supermarket Association and two of its members – City Fresh Market in Harlem and C-Town Supermarket in the Bronx – are taking the mayor to court for violating antitrust laws. 

The litigants are filing their lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, which is not exactly renowned for its concern over civil rights.

The association’s president, Anthony Peña, told The Post that the millions of dollars going to the government-backed stores are a form of “unfair competition.”

“We are arguing that everyone has to be able to access these subsidies,” Peña said. “It’s not about us being afraid of competition. We are against unfair competition.”

The group represents 450 independent grocery stores in New York City. It is filing the complaint with the America First Policy Institute, which is chaired by Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s former top economic advisor.

“Independent supermarkets have invested in our neighborhoods, created jobs, paid taxes and served local families for generations,” Peña added. “They deserve a fair and level playing field – not competition against a government-subsidized program operating under different rules.”

The Mamdani grocery plan is now facing two major legal offensives — an August state-court challenge consisting of two separate MBC filings, and a new federal antitrust lawsuit from independent supermarket operators.

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INSANE: “Fat Queer” Communist Activist Declares GLP-1 Weight-Loss Drugs “Fascistic” — Claims Society Is “Genociding Fat People”

The radical left has apparently discovered its latest form of “fascism”: Americans using medication to lose weight and improve their health.

During the four-day Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, self-described Black, fat, queer anarcho-communist activist Da’Shaun L. Harrison launched a bizarre attack on popular GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, claiming the drugs represent a new phase of so-called “body fascism” while delivering the remarks in a face mask.

Harrison made the remarks during a September 5 panel titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State.”

Harrison: “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic, not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people.

A shot that helps diabetics, heart patients, and obese Americans lose dangerous weight is, in this worldview, a tool of genocide.

Harrison did not stop there. The author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, a self-described Afropessimist, anarcho-communist, and trans theorist who uses they/them pronouns, tied the entire obesity debate to race, slavery, and “colonial surveillance.”

“This is a structural critique that asks what happens when the conditions produced by capitalism, by public health, by the state apparatus, and by anti-black desire align around a single bodily ideal that leaves little to no room for divergence and punishes any body that does.”

And then the academic name-drop:

“But to understand why the deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic requires turning to Frantz Fanon’s account of black flesh under colonial surveillance.”

BMI charts. Diet culture. Doctors telling patients they are overweight. All of it, according to Harrison, is “body fascism” built on the policing of “Black fat flesh.”

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D.C. Gas Ban Gets Favorable Hearing In Federal Appeals Court

A federal appeals panel appeared inclined Tuesday to let Washington, D.C.’s restrictions on natural gas in certain new buildings stand.

The case turns on the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, or EPCA, which gives the Department of Energy authority to set efficiency and energy-use standards for appliances including furnaces, water heaters, dryers and stoves. Industry groups argue that D.C. cannot accomplish through a building code what federal law prevents it from doing directly to an appliance.

The challengers include the National Association of Home Builders, Restaurant Law Center, National Apartment Association, Maryland Building Industry Association, Washington Gas and two labor unions.

D.C.’s Clean Buildings Act requires certain newly constructed or substantially improved buildings to operate at zero energy beginning in 2027. The building standards effectively prohibit natural-gas appliances in covered properties.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes upheld the law in March. Her ruling found that EPCA regulates how much energy covered appliances consume, not whether a local government permits those appliances to be installed in a particular building.

Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday that the D.C. Circuit panel appeared similarly unconvinced by the industry groups’ preemption argument during oral arguments.

Federal appeals courts are already split on essentially the same question.

The Ninth Circuit struck down Berkeley, California’s natural-gas piping ban in 2024, finding that a city could not evade EPCA by eliminating the fuel supply needed to operate federally regulated appliances. That ruling covers nine Western states.

The Second Circuit went the other direction in June. It upheld New York City and New York State restrictions on fossil-fuel appliances, finding that EPCA preempts appliance energy-conservation standards but does not prevent governments from prohibiting certain appliances altogether.

Washington’s case gives the D.C. Circuit the same statutory language and two competing appellate interpretations.

For builders, restaurants and gas utilities, the result determines whether D.C.’s 2027 requirements stand. For the natural gas industry, another ruling against preemption would leave Berkeley increasingly isolated – and gas appliance rules dependent on which federal circuit a building happens to sit in.

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Federal prosecutors defend job posting that placed white, heterosexual applicants last

The Public Prosecution Service of Canada is defending an internal hiring process that gave priority to applicants from selected racial, disability, Indigenous and LGBTQ groups.

According to reporting by Blacklock’s Reporter, an internal call letter for an $81,000-a-year recordkeeping position at the Nunavut Regional Office said candidates who self-identified as members of specified groups would be considered “before others.”

The position involved supporting complex and high-priority cases, including homicide prosecutions and dangerous-offender applications within Nunavut’s circuit court system.

“We will consider employees who self-declare as being a Black person, a racialized person, a person living with a disability, a First Nation, an Inuit, a Métis or a member of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community for this opportunity before others,” the notice reportedly stated.

Applicants were instructed to include their self-declared identity in their résumés.

Prosecution Service spokesperson Alessia Bongiovanni denied that the preferential process violated anti-discrimination provisions in federal collective agreements.

Bongiovanni said the Employment Equity Act permits measures intended to address historical disadvantage and under-representation. She argued that workplace equality may require proactive hiring measures in addition to equal treatment.

The policy effectively placed white, heterosexual applicants without disabilities behind candidates belonging to one or more of the preferred groups.

The Treasury Board reported in July that representation of all federally designated employment-equity groups increased between 2010 and 2025.

Women now account for 59 percent of employees in the federal government’s core administration. Visible minorities comprise 24 percent, employees with disabilities nine percent and Indigenous employees 5.5 percent.

Ottawa maintains that preferential employment measures are necessary to create what it calls a “diverse and representative public service.”

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A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.

The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program.

“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them,” he added.

Predictive policing is a highly controversial practice that police departments and federal agencies are increasingly turning to. The practice is designed to find people who may have committed crimes, but at the moment, no evidence of them doing so exists. Broadly, law enforcement may analyze data — such as a person’s movements, where they are at a certain time, or the roads they drive — then create or find another pretense to pull them over.

At around 9:30pm one night in May, Kyle William Olson was driving his black Chevy SUV on Interstate 90, with his dog Ducky in the backseat, according to police reports and an interview Olson gave to 404 Media. In Olson’s vehicle were marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil. He works on a licensed cannabis farm in California, where he had picked up the weed, and was transporting it home to Wisconsin, he told 404 Media.

Olson drove past Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol who was sitting in his police car along with a colleague. When Olson passed, Beck noticed the vehicle’s license plate was obstructed by what he described as a tinted cover and the luggage holder, according to a police report. Beck pulled out, caught up to Olson, and pulled him over.

“Nothing major,” Beck said once he approached the passenger side window and exchanged pleasantries with Olson, according to bodycam footage. Beck said Olson’s license plate was “a little bit obstructed.”

“Just so you know, that’s our reason for stopping you,” Beck said. In the end, the officers demanded Olson step out of the vehicle, they tested his blood and charged him with a DUI. Authorities later charged Olson with possession with intent to distribute because of the marijuana in his vehicle, Olson told 404 Media.

But that wasn’t the real reason for stopping Olson.

During discovery in his case, Olson was provided a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document that explained how Border Patrol instigated his traffic stop. Written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, the document said Phelps was assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID) — Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).” Olson shared the document with 404 Media.

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University Of Washington Settles Case Against Professor Disciplined For Mocking Land Acknowledgment

Land acknowledgments have become standard at academic and political events, including the opening of the Obama Presidential Library and a recent Michigan Democratic event. While supporters insist it merely shows respect for original inhabitants, critics argue it is the ultimate virtue signaling and is increasingly being forced on both speakers and audiences. One critic is Professor Stuart Reges, who teaches at the computer science and engineering school of the University of Washington. He has now received a settlement from the University of Washington, which spent a significant amount of time and resources in response to his mocking of the school’s land acknowledgment.

We previously discussed the case of Professor Reges, who was disciplined because he refused to post the school’s “land acknowledgment” and instead posted an alternative statement. Professor Reges sued the university and various officials in 2022. Professor Reges has declared “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court.”

The defendants included Nancy Allbritton, the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, UW President Ana Mari Cauce, and the Allen School’s Vice Director Dan Grossman.

After the university encouraged faculty to add a prewritten “Indigenous land acknowledgment” statement to their syllabi, Reges decided to write his own statement. He has now been told that, while the university statement is optional, his statement is unacceptable because it questions the indigenous land claim of the Coast Salish people.

The school provided a recommended statement for all faculty to post and/or read to their students at the first of every course:

“The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.”

Professor Reges disagreed with that statement and expressed his doubts to the faculty while also noting that “Magda” did not want the faculty to discuss such reservations on the email system. That may refer to the Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Magdalena Balazinska.

Reges’ alternative statement read:

“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

The labor theory (which I teach) generally refers to John Locke’s theory. In his Second Treatise, Locke laid the foundation for property as a divine gift of God that began in the state of nature, where all was created in common by God. Reges declared that these tribes, indigenous people, “can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land and that the claim of the university land was not sufficiently used or developed to bestow a claim upon the Coast Salish people. That acknowledged group is a broad collection of different groups with ethnic or linguistic associations.”

In his lawsuit, Professor Reges says that, after he stated his own views, the university moved against him.

“On January 4, 2022, the day after Professor Reges’s Computer Science and Engineering 143 class met for the first time, Defendant [Magdalena] Balazinska, Director of the Allen School, sent Professor Reges an email ordering him to remove the statement from his syllabus because it was ‘offensive’ and created a ‘toxic environment.’“

Reges noted that the university allowed other professors “to include modified statements in their syllabi that were more consistent with the University’s recommended statement.” The operative point is that “other faculty at the Allen School continue to include land acknowledgment statements in their syllabi that differ from the University’s own statement, so long as they express a viewpoint consistent with the University’s recommended version.”

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ANOTHER PAXTON WIN: Ken Paxton Announces 7 MILLION FREE EGGS Will Be Distributed to Struggling Texas Families Following Trump DOJ and State’s Antitrust Crackdown

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that more than seven million free eggs secured through antitrust settlements with three major producers are being distributed to food banks across the Lone Star State.

More than 1.7 million eggs have already reached Texas food banks, while another 5.322 million are scheduled for delivery in the coming weeks, according to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

“BIG NEWS: After securing 7 million eggs for the people of Texas, I am excited to announce that Texans will now have an opportunity to receive cartons of free eggs in communities across the state,” Paxton announced on X.

The massive food distribution resulted from settlements Paxton secured in June with Cal-Maine Foods, Centrum/Versova, and Hickman’s Egg Ranch.

The agreements resolved claims brought by President Trump’s Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general over an alleged scheme to manipulate an influential egg-price benchmark between 2022 and 2025.

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