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.

Forced adoption redress scheme to offer compensation for impacted Tasmanians

Tasmanian mothers who were subjected to historical forced adoption practices will be able to seek compensation under a redress scheme, the state government has announced.

As many as 250,000 forced adoptions have taken place across Australia since the 1950s, with several state and federal inquiries having highlighted the trauma suffered under the practice.

In 1969, Tasmanian mother Robyn Cohen gave birth at the age of 18.

She said she was denied a chance to cradle or kiss her baby before they were put up for adoption without her consent, a move that laid the ground for years of major trauma and depression.

Ms Cohen said while the scheme “will go one step in my journey towards healing”, she was concerned extensive consultation would delay it.

“I’m 75, many [of the] other women are older than I am,” she said.

Keep reading

SHOCK: Top House Democrat Says the Quiet Part Out Loud on Govt Shutdown: Families will “Suffer” But “It is One of the Few Leverage Times We Have”

Today is day 22 of the Schumer Shutdown.

The Schumer Shutdown began on October 1, and the Senate has voted 12 times – and failed 12 times – to reopen the government because Schumer wants to give illegal aliens healthcare.

Instead of working with Republicans to responsibly extend funding until November, Schumer and the Democrats chose a shutdown.

The House has been out of session for a month.

Layoffs of federal employees officially began a couple of weeks ago as the U.S. government shutdown entered another tense phase, according to Trump administration budget chief Russell Vought, who confirmed the sweeping reductions in a social media post.

President Trump on Tuesday held the line and said Republicans will not be “extorted” as the Democrats demand taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens.

House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (MA) said the quiet part out loud on the Schumer Shutdown during an interview with Fox News Congress reporter Chad Pergram.

The interview with Katherine Clark was published by Fox News last week but it was making the rounds on Wednesday.

“Fighting for healthcare is our defining issue,” Clark said.

“The marketplace, the ACA marketplace, open enrollment takes place on Nov. 1,” Clark whined.

“People are receiving their premium notices that they’re going to go to that marketplace and say, ‘I can’t afford this.’ That is a real crisis for American families. And it drives up the cost of healthcare for every single person, no matter where you get your health insurance from,” she said.

Then Clark said the quiet part out loud.

“Shutdowns are terrible and, of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer,” she said.

“We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage items we have. It is an inflection point in this budget process where we have tried to get the Republicans to meet with us and prioritize the American people,” Clark said.

Keep reading

Wall Street Journal Weeps for Murderers Trump Sent to Supermax

Shortly before he left office, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers. Those convicts, all on death row, were now facing life behind bars.

Two of those convicts, Norris Holder and Billie Allen, killed bank guard and former police officer Richard Heflin in a 1997 bank robbery. Other family members of murder victims were outraged and hurt by Biden’s move.

Alex Snell, the brother of Amanda Snell, was one of those people. Amanda, 20, was strangled by Jorge Avila-Torrez in 2009. “I’d rather see it go back to the way it was, where he was sentenced to death,” Snell said. “He should have gotten that penalty.”

President Biden said he commuted the sentences (save for three convicted of terrorism or hate crimes) because he had a change of heart on the death penalty, and the Wall Street Journal says he found it “needlessly cruel, as well as impossible to administer fairly.”

It seems the Wall Street Journal believes those commutations somehow absolve the convicted murderers from facing consequences for their actions, and they’re appalled that President Trump hasn’t made their lives behind bars easier.

Here’s more:

Among the last actions by former President Joe Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers.

Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered the life sentences of these men be made, in effect, a living hell.

With that guidance, officials canceled plans to transfer most of the inmates to mainline prisons. Instead, Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, ordered all but a handful requiring specialized medical treatment be housed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colo., the harshest institution in the federal system.

Inmates at the Colorado prison—intended for the nation’s most violent—typically spend 23 hours a day alone in their cells. At a meeting in May with Attorney General Pam Bondi for families of loved ones killed by the 37 convicts, some officials said they wished conditions at the prison, known as ADX, were even worse.

Aaron Reitz, a former assistant attorney general, held a roundtable with victims’ families. “If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell,” Reitz said in an interview.

There is little sympathy for these convicts outside of the Wall Street Journal editorial room.

Keep reading

Ohio House Passes Bill To Remove Voter-Approved Marijuana Legalization Protections And Restrict Hemp Market

The Ohio House of Representatives has passed a bill that would make significant changes to the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law by removing several protections for consumers while also adding a series of new restrictions on hemp products that are intended to align the two sectors of the cannabis industry.

After moving through several House committees this week, with substantive amendments, the full chamber approved the legislation from Sen. Stephen Huffman (R) in a 87-8 vote on Wednesday.

While the measure previously passed the Senate in earlier form it will need to return to that chamber for concurrence, or go to a bicameral conference committee, before potentially heading to the governor’s desk.

Certain controversial provisions of the bill as passed by the Senate were scaled back by the House, but advocates are concerned that it would still make major changes to the marijuana law voters approved in 2023.

Rep. Brian Stewart (R), who has shepherded the legislation through the House, argued ahead of the floor vote that the legislation effectively reaches a “carefully crafted compromise” between lawmakers with differing perspectives on cannabis issues.

“This bill has been very difficult to wrangle, but most of our substantive bills usually are. Rather than being some kind of mushy muddle of weak sauce tie-breakers, this bill does what we all claim that we wanted to come to Columbus to do,” he said. “It tackles the issue head-on. It makes tough decisions. It respects and implements the feedback from residents and advocates across the affected industries. This bill wisely balances between Ohioans’ individual liberties, their safety, the financial wellbeing of our local communities and the need to protect the health and safety of Ohio’s children.”

Rep. Jamie Callender (R), who sponsored marijuana legalization legislation ahead of voters’ approval of the reform at the ballot, said the bill is “not perfect” but argued that lawmakers “have to act” to address intoxicating hemp and other pending issues.

“This is the revised code we’re writing,” he said. “I anticipate there will be numerous other bills on these topics in the near- and long-term future, as there should be… I’ll keep working with everyone to make it better.”

While its supporters have described it as a less heavy-handed approach compared to the original Senate bill, the measure would make substantive changes to the existing legalization law—with several provisions that advocates say directly contradict the will of voters and represent overreach on the part of lawmakers.

For example, the proposal would eliminate language in current statute providing anti-discrimination protections for people who lawfully use cannabis. That includes protections meant to prevent adverse actions in the context of child custody rights, the ability to qualify for organ transplants and professional licensing.

It would also recriminalize possessing marijuana from any source that isn’t a state-licensed dispensary in Ohio or from a legal homegrow. As such, people could be charged with a crime for carrying cannabis they bought at a legal retailer in neighboring Michigan.

Additionally, it would ban smoking cannabis at outdoor public locations such as bar patios—and it would allow landlords to prohibit vaping marijuana at rented homes. Violating that latter policy, even if it involves vaping in a person’s own backyard at a rental home, would constitute a misdemeanor offense.

Karen O’Keefe, director of states policies at the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), said in a letter to House lawmakers on Wednesday that SB 56 as currently drafted “eliminates essential protections from the voter-enacted law and recriminalizes innocuous conduct that voters legalized.”

“Please reject this erosion of freedoms enacted by voters,” she said.

Keep reading

Judge Orders Tech CEOs to Testify in Case Using Algorithmic Design Rules as a New Avenue for Indirect Online Censorship Pressure

Three of the tech industry’s most recognizable leaders, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Evan Spiegel of Snap, and Adam Mosseri of Instagram, will be required to testify in court early next year.

The order came from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who ruled that their participation is essential in a lawsuit alleging that social media platforms were deliberately designed to harm young users’ mental health.

Attorneys for the companies had tried to prevent the CEOs from appearing, arguing that earlier depositions and other executive testimonies already provided sufficient information.

Judge Kuhl disagreed, stating, “The testimony of a CEO is uniquely relevant, as that officer’s knowledge of harms, and failure to take available steps to avoid such harms could establish negligence or ratification of negligent conduct.”

She also noted that their testimony would be “unique,” since the claims center on design features built to “be addictive” and “drive compulsive” use among minors.

Meta argued that compelling both Zuckerberg and Mosseri to testify would disrupt their ability to manage the business and “set a precedent” for future cases. Snap’s lawyers said the decision to call Spiegel to the stand was an “abuse of discretion.”

Judge Kuhl rejected both arguments, saying that those in charge must directly answer questions about their companies’ conduct instead of delegating that responsibility.

After the ruling, Meta declined to comment.

Keep reading

3I/ATLAS is Leaving a Mysterious “Hidden” Trail of Particles in Its Wake—Now Scientists Have a Plan to Intercept It

While comet 3I/ATLAS and its dusty tail remain far out of the reach of Earthly spacecraft, astronomers say the unusual interstellar object has produced a secondary “hidden” trail of charged particles marking its path through our solar system.

Now, a pair of scientists with the European Space Agency (ESA) has proposed a bold idea: it may be possible to sail a pair of NASA and ESA spacecraft through the mysterious visitor’s “ion tail.”

The idea was advanced by a pair of researchers in a new paper, which argues that the trajectory of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera spacecraft could allow them to pass directly through the trail of ions left in 3I/ATLAS’s wake.

Doing so might offer astronomers a rare opportunity to collect samples of material from other worlds, which the odd interstellar comet has ejected during its unprecedented visit.

Mission Into an Interstellar Object’s Odd “Ion Tail”

Between October 30 and November 6, 2025, the trajectories of the Europa Clipper and Hera space missions may briefly align with the ion trail left by 3I/ATLAS, allowing their instruments to collect information through detections of charged particles carried outward from the object by the solar wind.

“During the period 30 October – 6 November 2025, it is predicted that Europa Clipper will potentially be immersed within the ion tail of 3I/ATLAS, providing the opportunity to detect the signatures of an interstellar comet’s ion tail, write authors Samuel Grant and Geraint Jones in their paper, which appeared on the preprint arXiv.org server on October 15, 2025.

“Characteristic changes to the solar wind are also expected to be observed,” the authors say, which will likely include what they characterize as “a magnetic draping structure” potentially emanating from the comet.

Even prior to Europa Clipper’s potential passage through the mysterious ion tail of 3I/ATLAS, Grant and Jones believe that the ESA’s Hera spacecraft “will possibly be immersed within the ion tail of 3I/ATLAS during the period 25 October – 1 November 2025.”

Neither spacecraft will be endangered during their potential transit of the interstellar comet’s tail of charged particles, although the implications of doing so could end up being profound, in that they may offer the first opportunity to make indirect observations of material samples from another star system.

Keep reading

‘I am melting, help me’: The 30-year-old drug website that transformed psychedelic research

Thirty years ago, drug users flocked to a website called Erowid to describe experiences on everything from Advil to LSD. Today it’s become a goldmine for researchers and governments.

“I am melting, help me.” This is not only an unusual plea for assistance. It’s also the title of a “trip report”: one person’s experience with the powerful dissociative drug phencyclidine (known as PCP). And it’s just one of many thousands of mind-bending anecdotes filed to Erowid, a website that, since the early days of the internet, has built one of the world’s most influential records of drug use and its effects.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the scrappy, grassroots project, which hosts data on everything from caffeine to cannabis to paracetamol (also known as Tylenol) to heroin, like a Wikipedia on all things pharmaceutical. Users post information about purifying street drugs, rolling joints and the health implications of drug misuse. Visitors to the site can find information about drug toxicology and interactions between chemicals. They can even wade through the archives of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide – or LSD.

But perhaps most intriguing of all are the 45,000-plus trip reports in the “Experience Vault”. These hallucinatory tales, with titles such as “Tripping Alone on 1.5 Grams From Hell”, “The Weekend At The Edge Of The Universe” and “The Thumbprint”, where an unfortunate soul loses their mind on a drug related to LSD called AL-LAD, do not just make for idle internet fodder. They have become vital for academic research, especially for esoteric and illegal substances where clinical data does not exist or is challenging to obtain.

“People publishing their personal experiences and experimenting outside of the legal and academic bubble has led to the science, in many ways,” says David Luke, associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich in the UK who studies psychedelics and has conducted clinical trials using microdoses of LSD. “There was so little published academic research and so few resources for exploring the use of psychoactive drugs that Erowid was invaluable for research, and to understand issues around safety and experiences.” 

Today, the social stigma around some types of drug use has softened to the point that Ayahuasca ceremonies, mushrooms and ketamine have even become a fixture in some corners of the business world. While these substances are still illegal in many countries, a growing number of places are choosing to decriminalise drugs that were previously subject to extensive crack downs. In recent years, psychedelics have also gathered renewed interest from the scientific community as a potential approach for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Their use, however, remains controversial and in some places unregulated therapeutic use of these drugs has led to tragedy.

Back in 1995, when Erowid was founded, psychedelics were very much of the underground. This was a hostile time for drug reform, just over a decade since US president Ronald Reagan had expanded the war on drugs. 

Keep reading

Ukraine, US finalizing deal for 25 Patriot systems, Zelensky says

Ukraine and the U.S. are finalizing a deal for Kyiv to secure 25 Patriot air defense systems, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday, a push that would boost the Ukrainian military’s ability to defend against Russian aerial attacks. 

“The difficulty lies in the production queue — a line of countries that have signed relevant contracts. We will be receiving these 25 systems over the years, with different quantities each year,” Zelensky said during a meeting with reporters in Kyiv, according to multiple news outlets. 

The Patriot system, which includes launchers, missiles and radar, can cost around $1 billion, and is one of the rare weapons that can intercept Moscow’s ballistic missiles, a necessary component as Russia continues to hammer Ukraine with aerial attacks. 

Ukraine will not receive the systems all at once, as it will have to wait for other nations to get the defense system that is in high demand. 

Zelensky said on Monday that Ukraine is working with the U.S. to “ensure that Ukraine still can receive the necessary number of Patriot systems. This is not an easy task, but it is one of the security guarantees for Ukraine — and it will work in the long term.” 

The long-term arrangement comes days after Zelensky’s trip to Washington, where he met with President Trump. During their meeting, which was reportedly tense at times, the two leaders discussed ways to end the Russia-Ukraine war. While in the U.S., Zelensky met with top U.S. defense contractors, including Raytheon, which produces the Patriot systems. 

Keep reading

State Department Employee Arrested For Stealing Thousands of Pages of “Top Secret” Classified Documents Released to Home Confinement

As previously reported, State Department contractor stole thousands of pages of “TOP SECRET” classified documents and met with Beijing officials.

Ashley Tellis, an expert on India and South Asian affairs, removed the top secret documents from secure locations and met with Chinese officials.

The classified documents were located in Tellis’s Virginia home during a raid.

“On Sept. 25, he allegedly printed U.S. Air Force documents concerning military aircraft capabilities. Federal prosecutors allege that he met with Chinese government officials multiple times over the past several years,” Fox News reported.

Prosecutors said in September 2022 that Tellis brought a manila envelope with him when he met with Chinese officials in a Virginia restaurant.

Tellis has been in jail since October 11.

He was charged with one count of retaining national defense information.

Tellis’ attorneys insist their client did not disclose any classified information to a foreign government and claimed government investigators are interpreting his “routine professional duties” as something sinister.

“Regrettably, investigators appeared to interpret his routine professional duties, such as liaison work and international travel, as clandestine activity, reading something sinister into what were standard think-tank and scholarly foreign policy engagements,” Tellis’ attorneys wrote in a court filing, according to The Washington Post.

Newly sworn in US Attorney Lindsey Halligan charged Tellis.

Keep reading

U.S. ranchers oppose Trump’s plan to import more Argentine beef, experts doubt it will lower prices

President Donald Trump’s plan to cut record beef prices by importing more meat from Argentina is running into heated opposition from U.S. ranchers who are enjoying some rare profitable years and skepticism from experts who say the president’s move probably wouldn’t lead to cheaper prices at grocery stores.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association along with the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America and other farming groups – who are normally some of the president’s biggest supporters – all criticized Trump’s idea because of what it could do to American ranchers and feedlot operators. And agricultural economists say Argentine beef accounts for such a small slice of beef imports – only about 2% – that even doubling that wouldn’t change prices much.

South Dakota rancher Brett Kenzy said he wants American consumers to determine whether beef is too expensive, not the government. And so far there is little sign that consumers are substituting chicken or other proteins for beef on their shopping lists even though the average price of a pound of ground beef hit its highest point ever at $6.32 in the latest report before the government shutdown began.

Keep reading