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.

There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests

The popularity of GLP-1 weight-loss medications continues to soar—and their uptake is helping to push down obesity rates on a national scale—but a safe, evidence-based way off the drugs isn’t yet in clear view.

An analysis published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine found that most participants in a clinical trial who were assigned to stop taking tirzepatide (Zepbound from Eli Lilly) not only regained significant amounts of the weight they had lost on the drug, but they also saw their cardiovascular and metabolic improvements slip away. Their blood pressure went back up, as did their cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c (used to assess glucose control levels), and fasting insulin.

In an accompanying editorial, two medical experts at the University of Pittsburgh, Elizabeth Oczypok and Timothy Anderson, suggest that this new class of drugs should be rebranded from “weight loss” drugs to “weight management” drugs, which people may need to take indefinitely.

Some studies have found that about half of people who start taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss stop taking it within a year—for various reasons—and many people think they can stop taking anti-obesity drugs once they’ve reached a desired weight, Oczypok and Anderson write. But that’s not in line with the data.

“It may be helpful to compare them to other chronic disease medications; patients do not stop their anti-hypertensive medications when their blood pressure is at goal,” they write.

In the trial, researchers—led by Eli Lilly scientists—followed 670 participants with obesity or overweight (but without diabetes) who were treated with tirzepatide for 36 weeks. Then the participants were split into either continuing with the drug for another 52 weeks (88 weeks total) or getting a placebo for that period of time. Both groups were told to continue a reduced-calorie diet and an exercise plan.

In all, 335 participants were randomized to switch to a placebo, and the researchers monitored changes in their weight and cardiovascular health metrics after the switch. Not everyone in the first phase of the trial lost significant amounts of weight on the drug. So, the researchers only closely tracked the 308 of the 335 who lost at least 10 percent of their body weight on the drug.

Of the 308 who benefited from tirzepatide, 254 (82 percent) regained at least 25 percent of the weight they had lost on the drug by week 88. Further, 177 (57 percent) regained at least 50 percent, and 74 (24 percent) regained at least 75 percent. Generally, the more weight people regained, the more their cardiovascular and metabolic health improvements reversed.

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Canadian Muslims Take to Streets in Anger After Quebec Pushes Forward With Ban on Public Prayer

The Canadian province of Quebec is planning to ban all public prayer as part of an aggressive push toward secularization.

Quebec’s secularism minister, Jean-François Roberge, said the laws were designed to accelerate his push toward secularization.

The Guardian reports:

Quebec says it will intensify its crackdown on public displays of religion in a sweeping new law that critics say pushes Canadian provinces into private spaces and disproportionately affects Muslims.

Bill 9, introduced by the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on Thursday, bans prayer in public institutions, including in colleges and universities.

It also bans communal prayer on public roads and in parks, with the threat of fines of C$1,125 for groups in contravention of the prohibition. Short public events with prior approval are exempt.

CAQ has made secularism a key legislative priority, passing the controversial Bill 21 – which bans some public sector employees from wearing religious symbol – in 2019.

It plans to extend that prohibition to anyone working in daycares, colleges, universities and private schools. Full face coverings would be banned for anyone in those institutions, including students.

Quebec’s secularism minister, Jean-François Roberge, said the laws were designed to accelerate his push toward secularization.

“It’s shocking to see people blocking traffic, taking possession of the public space without a permit, without warning, and then turning our streets, our parks, our public squares into places of worship,” he explained.

He added that schools are “are not temples or churches or those kinds of places.”

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Trump pardons convicted narco-trafficking pol amid plot to rig Honduran election

Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party. Now, he’s even pardoned the last party member to rule the country, who was convicted in 2024 of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the US.

On November 28, US President Donald Trump Trump declared he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in a New York prison in 2024 for his role in helping smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US in a drug-running scheme linked to the Sinaloa cartel. Hernandez, Trump wrote, had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

While Hernandez was President of Honduras, he initiated contracts worth over half a million dollars with Republican lobbying firm BGR Group, after his brother, Tony, was sentenced to life in prison for cocaine smuggling. In the time since, BGR has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Marco Rubio, the Cuban American former senator who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of State.

As The Grayzone reported, the US Department of Justice indictment of Hernandez contained explicit and often shocking details of his role in transforming his country into the Western hemisphere’s premier narco-state. The US-backed president “wielded incredible influence and partnered with some of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in Honduras, allowing them to flourish under their control,” a DOJ prosecutor stated.

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Will Trump’s autopen executive order de-bench 237 leftist federal judges (including Ketanji Brown Jackson)?

On Thursday, I wrote that leftist judges on the bench are creating a form of tyranny, for they have arrogated to themselves the constitutional power of the Executive branch of government. There is no more balance. According to the Democrat appointees on the bench, none of Trump’s actions are solely within the discretion of the democratically elected chief executive. Instead, all are subject to judicial review and approval.

The day after I wrote that essay, Trump issued a statement via Truth Social voiding every document that was signed with an Autopen during Joe Biden’s presidency and threatening Biden along the way:

Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect. The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United

States. The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him. I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Some have pointed out that this order is merely performative, since one president can always undo another’s executive orders.

As an aside, that line of argument is untrue. As we’ve seen, district courts have repeatedly held that Donald Trump cannot reverse the executive orders of previous presidents. That’s the special unwritten Donald Trump rule. Their rulings are always dressed up in fancy language and erroneous legal arguments, but the net result has been that what other presidents do, Trump cannot undo. (ChatGPT struggles with this concept, but you can get the idea of what’s going on here.)

More important than that argument’s inaccuracy is a practical reality: Voiding all of Biden’s Autopen signatures doesn’t just end policy Executive Orders. In theory, it also ends every judicial nomination Biden made, from Ketanji Brown Jackson on down.

This matters a great deal, not just because of Jackson, but because Biden was able to nominate the largest number of federal judges in a single term since the Carter administration, 235 in all. Most of them have proven to be distinguished only by their “diversity,” not their intelligence, legal acumen, or fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law.

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Male Baltimore High School Teacher Exposed for Posting Disturbing Kink Videos Wearing Fake Pregnancy Belly and Massive Fake Boobs – Parents and Critics Demand Immediate Firing

In yet another shocking example of radical left ideology infiltrating public schools, a “non-binary” Baltimore high school English teacher has come under intense fire for sharing explicit kink-related content on social media, including videos where he role-plays as a pregnant woman with enormous prosthetic breasts.

James Roman Stilipec, 50, who goes by “Jay Aress” online and teaches ninth-grade students at Reach! Partnership School, has been blasted by parents and conservative groups for flaunting his fetishes publicly, raising serious questions about his fitness to be around impressionable teens.

Stilipec, a former U.S. Navy veteran with 36DDD breast implants he proudly calls his “hooters,” regularly posts bizarre videos on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube, which were uncovered by Reduxx.

In one compilation shared by outraged citizens, he dons a fake pregnancy belly and cradles it tenderly, using hashtags like “#jayandthetwins.”

Another clip shows him strutting with a $400 36M breastplate prosthetic, similar to the infamous Canadian teacher Kayla Lemieux who wore oversized fake boobs in class, amplifying his already enhanced chest for what appears to be fetishistic role-play as a woman.

While Stilipec doesn’t seem to wear the prosthetics in school, one profile photo shows him in a low-cut shirt exposing cleavage next to a classroom bulletin board, blurring the lines between his personal kinks and professional life.

Outraged TikTok users confronted him in a heated video conference, accusing him of “roping in the public to participate in their fetish”—a charge he denied—while demanding he be fired to protect students.

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CIA cut deal bringing Afghan ‘Zero Unit’ fighters, including accused guardsman killer, to the U.S.

The Afghan national who has been charged with shooting two members of the West Virginia National Guard this week was reportedly a member of the elite Afghan “Zero Unit” forces backed by the CIA — with the U.S. spy agency apparently having struck a 2021 deal with these Afghan commandos to bring thousands of the fighters and their families to the United States.

The CIA appeared to have quietly cut a deal with thousands of its paramilitary-style Zero Unit forces in Afghanistan in August 2021 as the Taliban took over the country and its capital of Kabul. According to a former intelligence officer who spoke with Just the News who declined to be identified, the terms of the deal were that if the Zeroes helped secure Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) during the chaotic non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) then, in exchange for that and for their years of coordination with the U.S. spy agency, the fighters and their families would earn an airlift to the U.S.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a former member of the National Strike Unit (NSU) forces, which were tied to the CIA and to the former Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), reportedly assisted in securing HKIA during the NEO and arrived in the U.S. with his family in September 2021. The Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021 following then-President Joe Biden’s April 2021 go-to-zero directive ordering the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

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Afghan national from Operation Allies Welcome arrested, charged for threatening to bomb Texas city

An Afghan national was arrested this week after he claimed he was building a bomb and intended to target a building in Fort Worth, Texas, authorities said.

Mohammad Dawood Alokozay was apprehended Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security after posting a video to his TikTok profile with the alleged threat. He is being charged at the state level.

He was arrested a day before Rahmandullah Lakanwal, 29, also an Afghan national who came to the US as part of Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, shot two National Guard troops in Washington, DC, on Nov. 26.

A Homeland official could not confirm any connection between the two Afghan men, and it was not immediately known how Alokozay got his immigration status through the Biden era program.

Alokozay (inset) came to the US in the wake of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan as part of the Biden policy, according to DHS. He was made a lawful permanent US resident on Sept. 7, 2022, Fox News reported.

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‘No easy explanation’: Scientists are debating a 70-year-old UFO mystery as new images come to light

More than 70 years ago, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California photographed several star-like flashes that appeared and vanished within an hour — years before the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit.

New peer-reviewed research revisiting those midcentury sky plates reports that these fleeting points of light, called transients, appeared on or near dates of Cold War nuclear weapons tests and coincided with a spike in historical UFO reports. Could these things all be related? Researchers are trying to find out.

While such flashes can sometimes be traced to natural phenomena such as variable stars, meteors or instrumental quirks, several of the Palomar events share distinctive features — including some sharp, point-like shapes that appear to line up in straight rows — that the authors of the new research say defy known natural or instrumental causes.

“We’ve ruled out some of the prosaic explanations, and it means we have to at least consider the possibility that these might be artificial objects from somewhere,” study co-author Stephen Bruehl, an anesthesiologist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee who is interested in UFOs, told Live Science. Bruehl co-authored two recent papers with Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden.

“If it turns out that transients are reflective artificial objects in orbit — prior to Sputnik — who put them there, and why do they seem to show interest in nuclear testing?” Bruehl added.

Not all researchers agree with this interpretation of the images, however — with some experts noting that technological restrictions of the time make this data very hard to interpret with any certainty. Michael Garrett, director of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in the U.K. who was not involved with the new studies, praised Villarroel’s team for their creative use of archival data but cautioned against interpreting these results too literally.

“My main worry is not the quality of the research team but the quality of the data at their disposal,” he said. Before Sputnik, the data are poor — especially the anecdotal UFO, or UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon) reports, which Villarroel’s team acknowledges it did not assess for validity.

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Missouri Locks the Web Behind a “Harmful” Content ID Check

Starting November 30, 2025, people in Missouri will find the digital world reshaped: anyone wishing to visit websites containing “harmful” adult material will need to prove they are at least 18 years old by showing ID.

This new requirement marks Missouri’s entry into the growing group of US states adopting age verification laws for online content. Yet the move does more than restrict access; it raises serious questions about how much personal data people must surrender just to browse freely.

For many, that tradeoff is likely to make privacy tools like VPNs a near necessity rather than a choice.

The law defines its targets broadly. Any site or app where over one-third of the material is classified as “harmful to minors” must block entry until users confirm their age.

Those who do not comply risk penalties that can reach $10,000 a day, with violations categorized as “unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful practices.”

To meet these standards, companies are permitted to check age through digital ID systems, government-issued documents such as driver’s licenses or passports, or existing transactional data that proves a person’s age.

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Tennessee Officials Reach Agreement With Hemp Industry To Temporarily Allow THCA Sales

Tennessee’s hemp industry has reached an agreement with state agencies, dismissing a lawsuit and enabling some businesses to keep selling hemp-derived products such as THCA for a short time after new restrictions take effect.

The Tennessee Healthy Alternatives Association announced it entered an order with the state Agriculture and Revenue Departments allowing businesses with licenses issued before December 31, 2025 to continue using a 2023 regulatory framework until their licenses expire June 30, 2026. Such a move allows stores to keep selling many products that will be banned after a new law takes effect January 1.

Because of the agreement, a pending declaratory judgment against the Agriculture and Revenue departments has been dismissed, the association said in a statement.

Part of the new law adopted by the legislature this year transfers regulatory authority over hemp products and beverages from the state Agriculture Department to the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

The new law also bans the hemp derivative, THCA, which converts into delta-9 THC–an illegal substance in Tennessee in greater than trace amounts–when smoked or heated. The synthetic cannabinoid, THCP, is also banned under the law.

Hemp industry representative Clint Palmer, who testified before lawmakers this year, said about 75 percent of the market will be considered illegal under the new ban, which includes THCA flower and vapes. The new law will push consumers to synthetic cannabinoids, he said.

“If you ask your typical consumer, they’re gonna say gross,” Palmer said.

Palmer told lawmakers early this year hemp businesses will be forced to shut down despite spending millions of dollars to comply with state regulations.

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