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.

South Korea Election Officials Suspected of FORGING Vote Tally Sheets and COVERING UP Discrepancies — Special Prosecutor RAIDS Election Commission Offices

What was dismissed as a simple clerical mistake in June has now escalated into a criminal investigation involving allegations of falsified election records and an attempted cover-up inside South Korea’s National Election Commission (NEC).

South Korea’s election system is facing another explosive controversy after a special prosecutor announced Tuesday, November 10, that investigators had uncovered evidence suggesting an election commission employee concealed and forged official vote tally sheets during the June 3 local elections.

The allegations involve the election for superintendent of education in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea’s most populous province.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the special counsel team led by independent prosecutor Lee Tae-han suspects an employee of the Gwangju City Election Commission in Gyeonggi Province manipulated election records, resulting in discrepancies between the reported vote totals and the actual count.

Even more troubling, investigators are examining whether officials within the local election commission attempted to conceal the suspected wrongdoing.

On Tuesday, investigators executed court-authorized search-and-seizure operations at the Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission and the Gwangju City Election Commission.

The searches were conducted as part of an investigation into suspected violations of South Korea’s Public Official Election Act.

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Three Former Trump Admin Officials Launch $1 Billion Company That Puts a New Spin on Data Centers

A new company led by former members of the Trump administration is hoping to make artificial intelligence big by going small.

The AI sector is currently at a stalemate over data centers. AI companies need the processing power to be faster and faster in the highly competitive market. Residents of towns in which data centers are planned fight them tooth and nail over potential environmental and quality-of-life issues, as well as the drain on the local power grid.

Three former Energy Department staffers believe a different approach could work, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The concept behind a company they founded called Mavria is to make modular data centers, which are individually smaller units than the massive centers currently on the drawing boards.

The company has reached a $1 billion valuation as it approaches the first tests of its products next year.

Adam Blake, Nick Poradek and Seth Cohen met while working on nuclear energy issues at the Energy Department.

“Our power infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and supply chains are nowhere near ready to meet the demand from AI,” Blake said, calling that a “strategic vulnerability”

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In Major Win For Nuclear Energy, Nearly Half Of Senate Democrats Join GOP To Advance Permitting Overall

The Senate voted 73-25 on Monday evening to invoke cloture and open debate on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), the sweeping permitting overhaul written by Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee with Democrats Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse.

Supporters were hoping for 15 to 20 Democrats, good for around 70 votes, and TD Cowen had cut its odds of success to about 25% from 40%.

Instead, 51 Republicans, 21 Democrats and one independent voted yes. That’s 22 of the 47 senators who caucus with Democrats, nearly half, backing a bill Trump has endorsed.

Piper Sandler’s policy team boils the nearly 500-page bill down to four parts: permit deadlines and limits on yanking permits, a narrower NEPA, more FERC power over transmission lines and data center rules:

  • Including a limit of no more than 2 years for federal decisions on environmental approvals and restraints on agencies’ abilities to withdraw permits once granted.
  • Amending the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by reducing the scope of its applicability, i.e. who can sue and on what grounds, and shortening the litigation window.
  • Accelerating the buildout of transmission lines by enhancing FERC’s backstop authority, which gives the federal government more authority to approve major lines and helps projects move through the permitting process much faster.
  • On data centers, the bill is a step up from the Ratepayer Protection Act in that it forces more energy behind the meter and establishes rules to ensure data centers are responsible for energy costs until all incremental costs are fully recovered (even after contract terminations).

Shutting the courthouse door

One of the most important changes involves stripping environmental activist groups of their favorite weapon.

Today, most NEPA challenges have six years to be filed. BAAJA cuts that to 150 days, and only people who commented during the review and can show direct harm get standing.

Even a winning NEPA challenge gets a remand “without vacatur or issuance of an injunction,” per the Bipartisan Policy Center, so the project keeps moving while the agency fixes its paperwork.

Sue-and-delay activists don’t need to win in court, and they often know they won’t. They just need to tie a project up until financing costs pile up and investors walk away. A 150-day window with no injunctions takes that weapon away.

Data centers get the bill, again

Data centers already agreed to this in an informal way with the Ratepayer Protection Pledge pushed by Trump.

The BAAJA bill pushes for harder requirements to actually enforce it, considering some recent pushback data center operators have exhibited with actually paying for the associated grid upgrades.

The September text made data centers and crypto miners drawing 20 MW or more pay the full cost of the generation, storage, transmission and distribution built to serve them. The weekend rewrite “expands ratepayer protections to data centers of all sizes,” per BPC.

They’d also pay for the existing grid on top of new upgrades, a “double tap” that FERC’s 1994 pricing policy doesn’t allow, and stay on the hook even if they exit a contract early.

Behind the meter until the grid catches up

Piper’s read is that the bill “forces more energy behind the meter,” and states could even require data centers to bring their own generation.

Pay twice for a grid that can’t connect you for years, or build your own power plant?

Goldman already sees behind-the-meter supplying 25% of all data centers by 2030. The median power project built last year waited more than five years from interconnection request to operation, per Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

As we reported in March, PJM said the Three Mile Island restart might not get full deliverability until 2031, at a plant that fed the same grid until 2019.

Fully connecting a large data center “can take 5 to 10 years,” a16z’s Ryan McEntush wrote last month, but “every site I’m aware of intends to connect to the grid as soon as it can.”

Until grid owners and operators can bolt on new plants and big loads in under five years, behind-the-meter will be the default for anyone who can afford it.

Four House nuclear bills along for the ride

The weekend rewrite also added a nuclear title folding in four of the six bills that cleared House Energy and Commerce in September without a single “no” vote, per a summary from Heinrich’s office.

They scrap the mandatory hearing on uncontested reactor and enrichment licenses, let enrichment plants start building before getting an NRC license, raise senior NRC pay and make DOE announce nuclear facility actions.

Fuel recycling (the REFUEL Act) and an NRC advisory committee bill didn’t make it.

The House didn’t wait. On Monday night it passed the REFUEL Act 397-2 and the enrichment bill 394-3. As we wrote earlier, nuclear is the one energy source Washington still agrees on.

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Beijing’s alleged police stations in Canada jump from five to 18 — Ottawa has laid no charges

Four years ago, Canadians learned that Beijing was allegedly running five police stations on our soil. My colleague David Menzies went to one in Markham. Nobody came to the door.

Nobody was charged, either.

Now the group that found those five says there are at least 18. And the foreign influence registry, the one the minister points to when he’s asked about this? Not one of them is on it.

The report, A Formula for Repression, comes from Safeguard Defenders, the Spain-based human rights group. It alleges at least 18 overseas Chinese associations in Canada are acting as police monitoring stations, part of a network of nearly 1,250 in 91 countries. CTV calls that a 12-fold increase over what the group found four years ago. It says the network exists to watch and police the Chinese diaspora.

CTV News, which reported the findings on November 6, put them to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree.

He said foreign interference won’t be tolerated. He also said “they are allegations and have not been investigated.” Some of the associations are sports or book clubs, he said, and mislabelling them could frighten communities for no reason.

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Egypt Seeks Death Penalty for Christian Convert Who Refused to ‘Renounce Jesus’ as U.S. Sends $1.3 Billion in Military Aid

Egyptian prosecutors have asked a terrorism court to impose the maximum penalty on Said Mansour Rezk Abdelrazek (also spelled Saeid Mansour Abdulraziq and known as Said Abu Mustafa), a Christian convert from Islam on trial before Egypt’s First Criminal Terrorism Circuit in Badr, in eastern Cairo.

In a November 3, 2026 statement, the Office of Said Fayez – Lawyers and Legal Consultants said the Public Prosecution presented its closing arguments and requested “the maximum penalty prescribed by law.” Abdelrazek’s fiancée, who provided the statement to The Gateway Pundit, said prosecutors are seeking 25 years in prison or death.

The court adjourned the case to December 8, when the defense will present its final arguments. According to the statement, the defense team will respond to the prosecution’s submissions, examine the evidence, and outline “the legal and substantive grounds of the defence.”

Under Article 12 of Egypt’s Anti-Terrorism Law (Law No. 94 of 2015), anyone who founds or leads a terrorist group faces death or life imprisonment. Article 13 sets the death penalty for financing a terrorist group. A life sentence in Egypt is 25 years in prison.

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Democratic Party turns a popular repudiation of Trump into a call for “moderation” and austerity

Just days after the 2026 midterm elections delivered a major popular repudiation of inequality, war and attacks on democratic rights, the Democratic Party has launched a campaign to redefine the election as a mandate for austerity, accommodation with Trump and opposition to socialism.

The New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, set out the program in an editorial published Monday. Under the headline “This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics,” the Times claims that Democratic candidates won in states Trump carried in 2024 because “they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.” This combination, it writes, “meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.”

The editorial praises Democratic candidates for adopting right-wing positions on what it calls “hot-button culture issues.” On immigration, it highlights candidates who attacked the Biden administration as lax on the border, including Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, who credited Trump for the fall in crossings.

But the assault on immigrants is not a “cultural” issue. It is the spearhead of the Trump administration’s war on the Constitution, including mass roundups and detention camps, deportations carried out in defiance of court orders, troops deployed in American cities and federal agents who have shot and killed citizens in Minneapolis. Its architect, Stephen Miller, took over as White House chief of staff the same morning the editorial appeared.

Nor is the epidemic of police violence a matter of “culture.” Yet the Times hails Democrats who embraced law-and-order demagogy and “well-funded police departments.” It applauds support for voter ID requirements, which disadvantage the poor and elderly and have been at the center of the administration’s efforts to delegitimize the elections.

The Times’ model candidate is Adam Hamilton, the Kansas senator-elect, whose campaign ad declared, “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders.” The Times says this “captured the mood.” It praises another winner, Josh Turek in Iowa, for boasting that he voted with Republicans “more than 700 times.” The Democratic victors, it concludes, showed “an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy.”

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Report: US, Israel in Talks To Extend Military Aid Through 2033 Despite Trump Saying It Would End

The US and Israel are negotiating a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that would extend US military aid to Israel through 2033 and increase US funding for Israeli missile development, despite President Trump claiming he would end the aid by 2027, according to a report from the Israeli news site Ynet.

The US currently provides Israel with a minimum of $3.8 billion in military aid each year under an MoU negotiated under the Obama administration that expires in 2028. It includes $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing, a State Department program that provides foreign governments with funds to purchase US arms, and $500 million through the Pentagon for missile defense funding.

The Ynet report said that the plan would be to halve the 10-year MoU term to five years and keep the FMF funding at $3.3 billion per year while increasing the $500 million missile fund to an unspecified amount. The idea would be to phase out the aid after the five years, which aligns with a plan backed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift the US-Israel relationship “from aid to partnership.”

The purpose of the Netanyahu plan is to further intergrate the US and Israeli military industries, and it is being advanced through Section 219, an amendment tucked into the House’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The Senate’s version of the NDAA includes a similar amendment, though so far the two chambers haven’t negotiated the final bill.

Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute recently warned that if the integration moves forward, Israel could “end up getting WAY more” than the $3.8 billion it receives annually from the US and that the funds would “just be buried in the DoD budget.” Freeman made the comments after Trump declared on Election Day that he and Netanyahu agreed the US would end military aid by the end of the year.

The Ynet report said that the US and Israel are hoping to finalize the new MoU before the new Congress is sworn in this January and that the negotiations have involved representatives working on behalf of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and officials from Israel’s Defense Ministry and its embassy in Washington.

Since October 7, 2023, the US has provided significantly more military aid than the annual $3.8 billion package to support its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its other various wars in the region. On top of the direct financial aid, the US has also fired $11 billion worth of interceptors defending Israel from missile attacks during the wars with Iran, and has reportedly deployed an additional Patriot missile defense system to Israel to prepare for the next potential escalation.

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Jill Biden Says Fauci and Covid Vaccines “Saved the World”

Dr. Jill Biden appeared over the weekend on “Get Real with Jim Weiss” to discuss a variety of topics, including Joe Biden’s presidency.

Jill Biden also promoted her book, “View from the East Wing,” and discussed life after the White House.

During the interview, Jill Biden recalled traveling the country with Dr. Fauci and Vivek Murthy to force the jab onto Americans.

“I traveled the country with Dr. Fauci and Vivek Murthy to try to get shots in the arms,” Jill Biden said.

“So my company worked with Pfizer and the vaccine launch…we did a lot with the vaccine…. and how that kind of saved the world and got us out,” Jim Weiss said.

“Of course it saved the world!” Jill Biden said of Covid vaccines and her Covid vaccine tour.

Over the summer, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first batch of text messages from Dr. Fauci’s Covid-era iPhone.

The text messages revealed that Fauci privately knew that the Covid vaccine caused miscarriages in pregnant women.

Fauci covered up the data that revealed an 82% miscarriage rate in women vaccinated during the first trimester.

Last year, seven states accused Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and others of heinous crimes, including murder, medical coercion, and even terrorism stemming from their COVID-era policies and decisions.

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The BBC Once Again Misleads Readers Over ‘French’ Drug Gangs

The BBC is misleading readers once again, this time telling its audience that “French drug gangs” are recruiting children to carry out acts of violence, including murder. There’s one problem with this: the gangs — surprise, surprise — are not French. They are Algerian.

Here’s more:

One boy had been tasked with handling money, the other worked streets around the Frais-Vallon estate. Soon though, bosses had accused them of being responsible for “shortfalls” in takings.

What followed were regular beatings, the court was told, and being forced to dance naked in front of a camera as a form of blackmail. One of the boys was also raped.

Hours after the woman was passed the note, the two teenagers had tried to escape from a second-storey window, injuring themselves in the process. One managed to get away, while the other was caught, beaten and stabbed, but survived.

Arrests were made. Photos on the phone of one of the boys’ alleged torturers showed several other young men in a similarly distressed condition. Six men have since been handed hefty sentences for what happened to the two teenagers.

The boys’ story highlights the grip that drug gangs hold over parts of France’s second city.

It takes 15 paragraphs for the BBC to even mention that the gang, DZ Mafia, is affiliated with Algeria and that one of its founders, Mehdi Laribi, was detained under a French arrest warrant earlier this year.

They did get the Community Note treatment for it.

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Government Official Behind Nation’s ‘AI Arms Race’ Poised to Profit From Personal Investments in AI Companies

The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb.

The White House’s point person on the effort, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation.

“AI is manufacturing intelligence, and, if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company and every industry,” he said during his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.

But advancing the administration’s AI objectives also could benefit Burgum’s own finances.

Much of his wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to his 2026 financial disclosure form, which has not been previously reported.

Between $18.1 million and $64.4 million of those investments are in AI companies, according to an analysis of the companies’ marketing materials shared with ProPublica by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks. (Government financial disclosure forms allow filers to report wide ranges instead of the specific value of their investments.)

Burgum made his fortune 25 years ago when he sold a software company to Microsoft and has remained heavily invested in technology. In the year before joining the administration, when he was North Dakota’s governor, he made between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments, Save Our Parks’ analysis showed.

In 2025, he sold millions of dollars of stocks and equity in AI companies, bringing in capital gains worth between $2.5 million and $15.1 million.

In the ethics agreement Burgum signed as part of his Senate confirmation, he agreed to resign from his positions at Arthur but not give up his financial interests there.

“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.

“Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”

Officials across the Trump administration also stand to profit from the White House’s support for AI and data centers.

For example, 380 of President Donald Trump’s political appointees or their spouses hold stocks or have other financial connections to Nvidia, which has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to the data center boom.

More than 320 have ties to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which plans to spend at least $195 billion this year building data centers and AI-related technology.

And more than 240 are invested in or otherwise have financial ties to Meta platforms, which is developing a “fleet” of data centers. This is according to an analysis of records added last week to the Trump Team Financials database developed by ProPublica to make accessible the financial disclosures of administration officials.

Federal officials’ activities are governed by a criminal statute that sets a high burden of proof for potential wrongdoing — for example, approving permits for a company in which they are substantially invested, multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica. They said that Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under this law.

But ethics rules that do not carry criminal penalties also apply, explained Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.

These rules, she said, “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

She said this would include Burgum’s support for data centers on federal land while holding investments in AI.

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, agreed that Burgum should avoid making decisions benefiting an industry in which he is heavily invested.

“I, as the ethics lawyer, would insist he stay away from it,” Painter said. “In the Bush administration, the answer would’ve been ‘he has to recuse,’ I can guarantee you that.”

A review of recent DOI secretaries’ financial holdings suggests it’s common to have some potential conflicts, but Trump’s appointees are more heavily invested in the industries they oversee than their predecessors.

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