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.

US approves new $330m arms deal for Taiwan

Washington has cleared a $330-million package of aircraft parts and maintenance support for Taiwan on 13 November, marking the first US arms sale since President Donald Trump returned to office. 

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the approval and thanked Washington for continuing what it described as a policy of regularized arms sales.

The State Department decision includes equipment, spare parts, and repair services for Taiwan’s fleet of US-made F-16 and C-130 aircraft, as well as components for its domestically produced Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF). 

The Pentagon said the proposed sale “will improve the recipient’s capability to meet current and future threats by maintaining the operational readiness of the recipient’s fleet of F-16, C-130,” and other aircraft.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the package will help maintain fighter readiness, bolster air defenses, and strengthen the island’s ability to respond to China’s “gray-zone” incursions. 

President Lai Ching-te’s government has vowed to ramp up defense spending amid China’s continued military pressure around the island. 

Taiwan’s presidential office called the deepening security partnership with Washington “an important cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.”

Beijing expressed anger at the sale, repeating its claim that Taiwan is part of its territory. 

China’s Foreign Ministry said “the Taiwan question is the core of China’s core interests and the first red line that must not be crossed in China–US relations,” and warned that China will do what is necessary to defend its “sovereignty, territorial integrity and security.”

Taiwan requested the package earlier this year, seeking “non-standard components, spare and repair parts, consumables and accessories, and repair and return support for F-16, C-130, and Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF) aircraft,” according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Trump has said Chinese President Xi Jinping told him he would not invade Taiwan while Trump is in office, a remark made after the two leaders met in South Korea as trade discussions continued. 

Reuters reported there had been “fear in Taipei that there could have been some sort of ‘selling out’ of Taiwan’s interests,” which did not materialize as Washington proceeded with the sale.

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Hemp Provision in Spending Bill Could Kill Legit Industry

The hemp industry is gearing up for a lobbying effort following a provision in the recent government funding package meant to stop the sale of intoxicating hemp products but could inadvertently destroy a legitimate $28 billion industry and kill 300,000 American jobs.

The provision in the bill bans hemp products like gummies, drinks, vapes, and topical pain relief applications that contain low doses of THC — the part of the cannabis plant that can create intoxication in users at higher levels.

Hemp was legalized in the 2018 Farm Bill. It “required the FDA to establish a regulatory framework for hemp products, but it never did, allowing intoxicating hemp products to be introduced in the marketplace without oversight or standardization,” the Hill reported.

The new ban tucked into the spending bill prohibits products containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container and is aimed at stopping the sale of intoxicating products often sold in gas stations and convenience stores.

However, the trade group U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates the move would wipe out 95 percent of CBD products used to treat pain and other health issues, shut down small businesses and farms nationwide, and cost states $1.5 billion in tax revenue.

According to the trade group’s statement:

Despite misleading claims this language protects non-intoxicating CBD products, the reality is that more than 90% of non-intoxicating hemp-derived products contain levels of THC that are greater than the proposed cap of .4 mg per container. As a result, seniors, veterans, and many other consumers who depend on hemp for their health and well-being would be violating federal law to purchase these products, disrupting their care and leaving them scrambling for potentially harmful alternatives.

In Texas, for example, voters overwhelmingly supported the sale of legal hemp-derived products when properly regulated, according to Breitbart News’s reporting of a statewide poll in July. In June, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) vetoed a THC ban bill that had passed the Texas Legislature.

While the spending bill was still in the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) unsuccessfully offered an amendment to remove the language, but the Senate voted overwhelmingly to table it. Paul warned on the Senate floor that the measure would “eradicate the hemp industry” and “couldn’t come at a worse time for America’s farmers.”

Supporters of the provision in the bill argued it was long overdue.

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Virginia Democrat Ibraheem Samirah Who Infamously DISRUPTED President Trump Sentenced in Explosive COVID Fraud Scheme

In a delicious twist of irony, Ibraheem Sabri Samirah, the Palestinian-American Democrat who infamously disrupted President Trump’s 2019 speech in Jamestown with a “Deport Hate” sign, has been nailed for wire fraud in a blatant PPP loan scam.

Samirah, 34, a dentist by trade, cooked up fake payroll records for his clinic, Nova Healthy Smiles PLLC, claiming four employees and $33,333 in monthly wages back in early 2020.

But as court documents reveal, those “employees” – including himself – weren’t paid a dime until after the loan came through in May 2020.

He even wrote checks to these phantom workers, only for them to funnel the money right back to him.

When it came time for loan forgiveness in August 2021, Samirah lied again, swearing the funds went to legitimate expenses like payroll and utilities.

In reality, the only “permissible” use was a pittance in employer taxes remitted to the IRS, the rest lined his pockets.

Samirah, who built his political career on railing against “systemic oppression” and championing Palestinian causes, apparently saw no issue with exploiting a Trump-era relief program designed to save jobs.

His actions echo the entitlement we’ve come to expect from far-left Democrats who preach equity while grabbing whatever they can.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia laid it out plain in the July 2025 information: Samirah devised a scheme to defraud Sonabank (now Primis Bank) and the Small Business Administration, transmitting false wires across state lines to secure and forgive the loan.

He waived indictment and pleaded guilty in July, avoiding a trial that could have exposed even more dirt.

Come October 30, a judge sentenced him to three years’ probation and ordered $88,000 in restitution, a light slap considering the felony conviction strips him of voting rights and bars him from future office.

In 2019, President Trump was interrupted by Samirah, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, during a speech marking the 400th anniversary of the first meeting of the Virginia legislature in Jamestown in 1619–the first representative legislative assembly in the Western Hemisphere.

Democrat Ibraheem Samirah stood near the front of the stage facing the audience, holding several signs strung together and yelling, “Mr. President, you can’t send us back, Virginia is our home!”  Supporters of the President booed and chanted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The messages on the signs read, “Go Back to Your Corrupted Home”, “Deport Hate” and “Reunite My Family And All Shattered by Systemic Discrimination”.

Ibraheem interrupted the president to scream about his deported Palestinian father.

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Why the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Possess the Power to Bestow Individual Rights

The national anxiety over Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States seems disproportionate to size of the footnote he will occupy in history.

Why does it matter that one federal judge will retire?

An Elite Judicial Body

Robert Jackson was Solicitor General of the United States, Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. For his education, Jackson spent about a year at Albany Law School, reading the law, and passing the bar examination.

His story is an inconvenient truth in the era of big student loan debt. As debt soars, income stagnates, housing skyrockets, and 30-year olds bunk with roommates (or parents), a generation now awakens to a looming higher education crisis. Many are losing faith, looking to alternatives, or simply opting out.

Then again, when the Supreme Court issues its opinions each June, and 5 billion social media users morph into Robert Jackson, I am reminded that law is indeed a trained profession.

I know the government schools told us we are each entitled to our opinion. But there is a simple reason the Supreme Court does not poll the American public before stating its opinions. That is because it is, by definition, elite. It is nine lawyers rendering legal judgments about legal arguments, raised to them by other lawyers (all of whom studied law, and passed a bar examination).  

The Court is also not merely nine typical practitioners of an elite profession. To be on the Court you need to be exceptional.

A Robert Jackson, for example.

The Egalitarian Myth

Yet, it happens every year. Social media erupts with opinion every June—opinions for, or against the Court’s decisions. When Obergefell v. Hodges recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, the White House lit up with rainbow colors. Major corporations responded by altering their logos to include rainbow colors.

So, is the legitimacy of a Supreme Court decision now measured against its popularity? Must we wait for the Court to catch up to popular opinion, or must popular opinion catch up to the Court?

In 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Division, Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority: “Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights.”

It may be that “society” has come to these conclusions. But is it not bizarre that nine elite lawyers, sitting on the most elite court in the world, seem to speak on behalf of society?

Is that how self-government works?

Because no matter how egalitarian the Court’s decision is, anyone who thinks individual rights come from nine elite lawyers is about the furthest thing from being egalitarian. That person surely recognizes that popular approval is irrelevant to some legal questions.

So which questions? Is there any limit to what the Supreme Court gets to decide?

If only, there was some written framework. Like a sacred scroll or some tealeaves we could read.

Plain English

Surely, we do not believe that non-lawyers are incapable of understanding their own civil rights. To the contrary, that is exactly the point of a Constitution, written in plain English.

The question is not whether the Supreme Court ought to conform its decisions to popular will; it is whether the Court has stepped outside its authority altogether.

We cannot expect every person to become trained lawyers, or to read every Supreme Court opinion before opening a bakery, falling in love, or getting pregnant. Yet in 2018, the Court spilled gallons of inks telling more than a quarter-billion people about the existential meaning of cake.

Cake.

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Data centers encounter local pushback amid major growth

At least 16 data center projects, worth a combined $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed as local opposition mounts to the developments, according to a new study.

Research collected by Data Center Watch shows that residents and politicians across seven states have stopped or stalled the data center projects.

In Arizona’s West Valley, development company Tract withdrew plans for a $14 billion project after city officials declined to approve required rezoning. Tract eventually announced a similar project in Buckeye, Ariz., where the development is proceeding.

In Peculiar, Mo., and Chesterton, Ind., residents and local officials also blocked data center developments worth billions.

In total, the study found that six data center developments have been fully blocked since May 2024. The backlash has also delayed 10 other data centers, including two from Amazon.

Nine of the documented data center blockages and delays have occurred in Virginia, the world’s unofficial data center capital, according to the research firm.

The study’s authors also found growing bipartisan aversion to the behemoth data center projects: about 55 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in districts with large data center projects have taken public positions against the developments, according to the study.

“This cross-party resistance defies expectations and marks a rare area of bipartisan alignment in infrastructure politics,” the authors wrote.

The report also found that data centers were becoming an intensifying issue in local politics. As energy costs soar and affordability takes center stage, it’s likely more candidates and elected officials will take sides on the projects.

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Swalwell Threatens Trump Officials After Federal Housing Director Pulte Criminally Refers Him to DOJ For Mortgage Fraud

Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell threatened investigators after NBC News reported that he had been criminally referred to the Justice Department.

Federal Housing regulator Bill Pulte referred Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution over mortgage fraud.

According to NBC News, Pulte is alleging that Swalwell, a Democrat Congressman representing a district in California, took out millions of dollars worth of mortgage loans based on his declaring his primary residence as Washington, DC.

Swalwell’s $1.2 million DC home is now a target of the Justice Department.

As TGP contributor Joel Gilbert recently reported, despite serving as a Congressman from California’s 15th District and claiming Hometown: Livermore on his official House profile, Swalwell has declared his Washington, DC property as his “principal residence.”

A public Deed of Trust for Swalwell’s DC home at 209 S Street NE, dated April 18, 2022, confirms the property is designated as his “principal residence” as a condition of the loan, Joel Gilbert reported.

Pulte is alleging that Swalwell made misleading statements during the purchase and refinance of the DC property.

The FHFA’s Inspector General is also investigating Swalwell’s mortgage fraud.

Swalwell, of Fang Fang fame, lashed out at Trump and threatened investigators during an appearance on MSNBC.

“When we are the majority, we will have subpoena power and accountability will happen. Bill Pulte and any other lawless official who is carrying out these political prosecutions on behalf of Donald Trump, they should familiarize themselves with the Judiciary Committee room because they’re going to be spending a lot of time there answering questions and I sure hope everything they did there was above board,” Swalwell said.

Article III Project founder and attorney Mike Davis said Swalwell’s statements threatening investigators sounds like obstruction of justice.

“Well, I would say this first off with Eric Swalwell, that sounds like obstruction of justice when you are threatening to go after federal investigators for investigating you for federal crimes so maybe that’s another charge that the Justice Department should tack onto this investigation,” Mike Davis said.

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True scale of America’s mutant meat scandal sparks alarm in government

Advisers to Robert F Kennedy Jr. fear cloned meat and animal breeding could become a divisive issue inside the Make America Healthy Again movement.

The Daily Mail understands that the use of cloned animals in the US food supply is seen as a ‘complex problem’ among Kennedy allies.

The topic gained renewed attention this week when Canada announced it would allow cloned meat products to be sold in supermarkets without any disclosure – a practice the US has quietly permitted for nearly two decades.

Some close allies of the health secretary worry the issue could spark tensions within the movement, particularly among its tech-forward members who align with Elon Musk and view cloned breeding as a potentially valuable tool for boosting sustainability and environmental outcomes, the Daily Mail understands.

For now, the Trump Administration’s Health Department (HHS) has taken no official stance on cloned-animal products in the food supply. 

Sources close to Kennedy say the department is not ruling out weighing in later on what they describe as an ‘interesting issue.’ 

HHS is currently deferring all policy authority to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sits under Kennedy’s leadership.

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Chatham House hosts notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi mob leader

London-based think tank Chatham House has hosted notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi Yevhen Karas as a speaker at an event called ‘War in Ukraine: The battleground for the future of Europe’.

The think tank presented Karas as the commander of the 413th Separate Battalion of Unmanned Systems ‘Raid’ of Ukraine’s armed forces, failing to mention his colorful neo-Nazi background.

Karas is known as the founder of the notorious S14 far-right paramilitary group, created in 2010 as a youth offshoot of the far-right Svoboda party. The name of the group is a stylized form of the Ukrainian word ‘Sich’, referring to an administrative and military center for Cossack proto-states, and contains the number ‘14’, widely used by assorted white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations worldwide.  

The number refers to a 14-word phrase by American white supremacist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The S14 itself, however, has insisted its name refers to the date it was created and denies being a neo-Nazi organization, but merely a “Ukrainian nationalist” group.

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D.C. Appeals Court STRIKES DOWN Trump DOT’s Safety Rules — Allows Immigrants to Obtain Commercial Licenses Again Despite Fatal Florida Truck Crash

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked the Trump-Vance administration’s emergency safety rule, a rule designed to keep America’s highways safe from unvetted foreign drivers.

The court sided not with public safety, not with the families of crash victims, but with activist groups, blue-city governments, and unions who argued that asylum seekers, refugees, and DACA recipients should continue holding commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) despite major questions about identity verification, training standards, and foreign driving histories.

The stay halts the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) new rule limiting CDLs to individuals on verifiable, trackable visa categories, H-2A, H-2B, and E-2.

The rule excluded categories where driving and identity records cannot be confirmed, including asylum seekers, refugees, and DACA recipients.

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CEO of Palantir Says He Spends a Large Amount of Time Talking to Nazis

While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.

This was the startling admission made by Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, a company that’s come under increasingly heavy scrutiny for its growing role as a provider of AI-powered surveillance technology to the military and government.

In an interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea published this week, Karp, who has Jewish heritage, was discussing German culture and his time in the country before going on a tangent about how outrageous it is that people online “laud the Nazis.” Then he fessed up to something even more eyebrow-raising.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Nazis,” Karp said, implying that this is an ongoing pastime of his. “Like, real Nazis,” he emphasized.

Karp explained that it was his way of “understanding what made them tick,” before making an ironic observation.

“Part of the crazy thing about people who laud the Nazis nowadays is there’s not a single Nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps!” he chuckled.

He then pulled off the smoothest segue of all time.

“Uh, but, um, and uh, and it’s like, it’s uh but” — the interview mercifully jumps cuts —  “the thing that’s crazy unique about America,” Karp began to muse.

Beyond his role as Palantir’s head honcho, Karp is known for his philosophical ramblings, his “eccentric” personality, and his affinity for German culture. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt, and draws on his background to defend Western values — in particular American ones — as especially good for the world.

This year, for instance, he published a book about how the US needed to embrace having the most technologically advanced weapons possible to preserve its dominance. An excerpt of that book was published online as an essay under the headline “We Need a New Manhattan Project.”

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