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.

Trump Judge Denies Southern Poverty Law Center’s Bid to Toss Criminal Case

A federal judge on Friday denied the Southern Poverty Law Center’s bid to toss the criminal indictment on vindictive prosecution.

In May, the SPLC filed a motion arguing vindictive prosecution.

The hate group argued that the charges brought against them were a result of targeting by the DOJ and violated the organization’s right to due process.

US District Judge Emily Marks, a Trump appointee of the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, said it is just speculation that President Trump and Justice Department officials had a role in the criminal indictment.

“The SPLC has failed to offer some evidence tending to show animus on the part of the prosecutors involved in bringing this case and that such animus resulted in the prosecution, the showing required for discovery. Because it cannot satisfy that standard, it necessarily fails to satisfy the higher standard that would entitle it to dismissal of the indictment. Accordingly, the SPLC’s motion is due to be denied,” the judge wrote in a 36-page opinion reviewed by The Gateway Pundit.

The Justice Department in April indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts, including wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.

The SPLC was indicted for secretly funneling more than $3 million in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups, the DOJ said.

Keep reading

Flock Planned to Use 350,000 Uber, Lyft and Delivery Drivers as Mobile License Plate Cameras

A Flock presentation obtained through a public records request shows the surveillance company planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands of Uber, Lyft and delivery vehicles to collect license plate data for its network.

404 Media reports that the document provides new detail on Flock’s planned partnership with Nexar, a dashcam company. 404 Media first reported on the intended partnership last August based on information from multiple sources. The presentation shows Flock was actively pitching the partnership, and its plan to use Uber and Lyft drivers, to potential customers around the same time that reporting was published.

Flock told 404 Media in an email that it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still lays out the company’s plan to enlist rideshare and delivery drivers to gather license plate data for its surveillance network. It is not clear whether Uber, Lyft or drivers working for those apps would have known their vehicles were being used for this purpose.

“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the presentation reads. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.” Flock wrote the document to present to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August.

Jason Hunyar, a resident of Dunwoody, Georgia, obtained the presentation through a public records request and shared it with 404 Media.

Flock’s automatic license plate reader cameras are typically stationary, mounted on tall poles where they continuously scan the license plate, color, make and model of passing vehicles. The Nexar partnership would have made that data collection mobile. Axon, a law enforcement contractor that also sells license plate readers, sells cameras that can be installed in police cars. Vigilant Solutions and the Digital Recognition Network, two license plate reader companies now owned by Motorola, collect similar data through cameras mounted in vehicles used by repossession agencies.

Keep reading

23,000 Jobs Lost, but the Number Washington Hates Is 53,000

President Donald Trump got handed an ugly jobs headline Friday. The economy lost 23,000 payroll jobs in July, and revisions erased another 103,000 jobs from May and June.

Both nonfarm payroll employment (-23,000) and the unemployment rate (4.1 percent) changed little in July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment declined in local government education and retail trade. Employment continued to trend up in health care. This news release presents statistics from two monthly surveys. The household survey measures labor force status, including unemployment, by demographic characteristics. The establishment survey measures nonfarm employment, hours, and earnings by industry.

For more information about the concepts and statistical methodology used in these two surveys, see the Technical Note. Household Survey Data Both the unemployment rate, at 4.1 percent, and the number of unemployed people, at 6.9 million, changed little in July. These measures also changed little over the year. Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for teenagers (12.1 percent) and people who are Hispanic (4.6 percent) declined in July. The jobless rates for adult men (3.9 percent), adult women (3.7 percent), and people who are White (3.6 percent), Black (6.3 percent), or Asian (4.0 percent) showed little or no change over the month. 

Among the unemployed, the number of people on temporary layoff increased by 153,000 to 921,000 in July. The number of permanent job losers changed little at 1.7 million. In July, the number of people jobless less than 5 weeks edged down to 2.0 million and is down by 344,000 over the year. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) edged down over the month to 1.8 million but changed little over the year. The long-term unemployed accounted for 25.5 percent of all unemployed people in July.

That can’t be dressed up; a weak jobs report is a weak jobs report.

But buried one line deeper is a number worth noticing. Private employers added 30,000 jobs in July while government payrolls fell by 53,000. If government employment had simply remained flat, the headline number would’ve been a gain of 30,000 jobs.

Statistics can tell very different stories depending on where somebody stops reading. The easiest headline is “23,000 jobs lost.”

It’s accurate, but so is “private employers added 30,000 jobs.”

So is “government employment fell 53,000.”

We deserve all three numbers because together they show what actually happened.

The government decline needs context, too. Of the 53,000 jobs lost, 50,000 came from local government education. Federal employment fell by only 3,000 in July. Giving Trump credit for all 53,000 would be just as misleading as pretending the private-sector gain never happened.

The larger federal trend, however, belongs squarely in Trump’s column. Office of Personnel Management data show the federal workforce has lost 272,283 employees since Trump took office on Jan. 30, 2025.

Keep reading

Dem senators rally behind El-Sayed but duck questions on progressive agenda

Senate Democrats are rallying around Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in the race to beat Republican Mike Rogers as the party scrambles to defend its seat in an effort to win back the Senate majority.

El-Sayed narrowly defeated moderate Rep. Haley Stevens after a bruising primary that exposed the party’s progressive-moderate divide, leaving Democrats with the task of unifying behind him ahead of one of the nation’s most competitive Senate races.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who endorsed El-Sayed, told Fox News Digital Friday that he believes El-Sayed will beat Rogers in November.

Several Democratic senators approached by Fox News Digital expressed confidence in El-Sayed, even after prominent Democrats chose to back Stevens during the primary over questions of whether El-Sayed could win in November.

“I am very confident we’re going to win in Michigan,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said.

But the same senators weren’t as quick to defend or back some of his more radical policies — like calling for defunding the police, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Medicare for all and his strong opposition to Israel.

“You can ask him,” Murray said after Fox News Digital followed up by asking for her views on his more extreme policies.

Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., also said she thinks El-Sayed will beat Rogers, but when Fox News Digital asked about her views on his policies, she walked away saying she was “looking for the ladies room.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said “time will tell” when asked if he could beat Rogers in the general election. He was the only lawmaker to tell Fox News Digital he actually disagreed with some of El-Sayed’s progressive policies.

“He’s got 90 days,” Warner said. “He brought a lot of energy. There are obviously places I don’t fully agree with him either.”

Keep reading

Trump Threatens To Jail Arms Shortage ‘Leakers’

President Trump on Thursday threatened “leakers” with jail time over reports about dwindling US military stockpiles as a result of the Iran war, and claimed the US had plenty of munitions available.

“The US has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types. Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the US as needed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history. The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down,” the president added.

Some of the most significant reports about the shortage of advanced munitions didn’t come from media reports but from analysis published by the think tank the Center for International Studies (CSIS), which used publicly available data to produce its estimates.

CSIS found that the US has used about 60% of its advanced Patriot air defense missiles and about half of its interceptors for the THAAD missile defense system, though sources told CNN that the US had actually used about 80% of its THAADs during the war.

While Trump says that US arms makers are working to produce more munitions, the current rate of weapons use far exceeds the rate at which they can be produced, and it will take years to significantly increase production.

Media reports have also said that the US has used up nearly all of its ATACMS missiles and Precision-Strike Missiles, which were both used extensively in strikes on Iran.

Keep reading

Ninth Circuit En Banc Delivers Massive Election Integrity Victory: Arizona Can Now Enforce Voter Registration Cancellation and Felony Provisions After Left-Wing Groups Lose Standing Battle

The full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction and cleared the way for Arizona to enforce two key 2022 election integrity provisions that left-wing activist groups had blocked for years.

The en banc ruling in Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v. Mayes hands a decisive defeat to the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, Voto Latino, and Priorities USA, the usual cast of Democrat-aligned voter registration outfits that sued to stop common-sense reforms aimed at preventing double voting and out-of-state voting schemes.

These groups claimed Arizona’s “Cancellation Provision” and “Felony Provision” somehow interfered with their “core” activities of registering and mobilizing voters. The full court wasn’t buying it.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1260, passed in 2022, strengthened the state’s ability to keep voter rolls accurate:

  • The Cancellation Provision requires a county recorder to cancel a voter’s registration in that county once the recorder receives confirmation (or confirms credible information) that the person has registered to vote in another Arizona county. This is basic list maintenance to stop people from remaining registered — and potentially voting — in multiple counties.
  • The Felony Provision makes it a crime to knowingly provide a “mechanism for voting” to someone who is registered to vote in another state. The statute gives the example of forwarding an early ballot.

Left-wing groups sued, claiming these measures would force them to divert resources and chill their registration drives. A district court judge obliged them with a preliminary injunction. A three-judge panel later vacated that injunction, but the full court took the case en banc.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Anthony D. Johnstone, delivers a clear message rooted in the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine: organizations cannot manufacture Article III standing simply by spending money to oppose a law they dislike or by claiming their “mission” is frustrated.

Under Hippocratic Medicine, an organizational plaintiff must show the challenged law “directly affect[s] and interfere[s] with [its] core business activities.” Mere diversion of resources to educate people about a law or to advocate against it is not enough.

Keep reading

Scientists Warn Of Urgent AI Biosecurity Threat

For the first time, artificial intelligence has designed complete, functional viral genomes from scratch.

Oh dear.

Stanford University and Arc Institute researchers used generative AI models to produce 16 novel bacteriophages that successfully infect and kill bacteria in the lab.

Officials insist the viruses “pose no threat to people,” yet biosecurity experts are already sounding the alarm that the same technology opens the door to inventing dangerous pathogens.

The breakthrough, published in the journal Science, marks the first time generative AI has written entire viable viral genomes.

Researchers trained genome language models known as Evo 1 and Evo 2 on millions of natural genetic sequences. They then tasked the systems with designing complete bacteriophage genomes based on the well-studied ?X174 template that infects E. coli.

Of 302 synthesized designs, 16 proved fully functional: they assembled into virus particles, replicated inside bacterial cells, and in some cases outperformed the natural virus, even overcoming bacterial resistance when used as a cocktail.

Oh dear.

Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford who led the work, called it new territory. “This is a next step in the complexity that’s designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it’s something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us,” he told the BBC.

The team deliberately excluded genetic data from viruses capable of infecting complex organisms and conducted the work in a secure laboratory. The resulting phages target only specific bacteria.

Patrick Cai, a synthetic biologist at the University of Manchester not involved in the study, called it “an important milestone.”

Yet the same experts who celebrate the medical potential for phage therapies against antibiotic-resistant infections are issuing blunt warnings.

In an accompanying commentary in Science, Dr. Thomas Inglesby and Dr. Moritz Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security wrote that the findings raise “urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions.”

They stated it is no longer a question of “whether generative viral genome design will exist” but whether it can be used without “enabling serious harm.”

Oh dear.

Keep reading

Planned Parenthood Comes Up With Sick New Euphemism for Abortion

One of the left’s favorite fronts to fight the culture war is language.

They have seen great success in sowing confusion and disharmony by manipulating words, distorting words from their original meaning, and striking words from the vernacular deemed offensive or politically incorrect.

A new development on that front comes from the pro-abortion organization Planned Parenthood.

It was not bad enough that this is arguably the most prominent advocate and culprit in carrying out child murder in history. They now have a more benign term for doing it.

On Monday, the Planned Parenthood official page on social media platform Facebook posted a message which reads, “Reproductive freedom means every person gets to decide what’s right for their own body. No exceptions.”

An image was also posted saying, “Abortion is gender-affirming care.”

That’s certainly a new one. “Gender-affirming care” usually relates to bodily harm done to people — who are often mentally ill — believing they are members of the opposite sex.

Among those practices are barbaric procedures like double mastectomies or outright genital mutilation.

How does Planned Parenthood believe this euphemism relates to child murder?

The rhetoric from abortionists seeks to empower women. Are women affirming their gender by killing their children? To try to understand the message is to try to understand madness.

The comments are highly critical of the organization.

One Facebook user asked, “What does that even mean?”

Keep reading

Britain’s Hybrid Threats Directorate: Whitehall’s Ministry for Manufacturing Enemies

A British government operation established to counter Russian disinformation has expanded to Iran, China and Gaza, according to leaked Foreign Office files examined by David Miller, a British political sociologist and investigative researcher specialising in the study of propaganda and political influence.

Miller’s investigation for MintPress News draws on internal government pages and an organizational chart naming officials, specialist teams and private contractors. The documents expose part of a state apparatus that operates with little public scrutiny while monitoring and countering narratives deemed threatening to British interests.

At the centre of the files is the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Information Threats and Influence Directorate. Its teams covered Russia, China and Iran, while another structure worked on Israel and Gaza. Miller reports that the directorate was later absorbed into the Cyber, Information and Tech Threats Directorate. Its functions now appear to fall within the broader Hybrid Threats Directorate.

Iran was not merely added to a list of foreign concerns. Miller reports that leaked charts place the China and Iran desk under the same official who led a semi-detached team focused on Israel and Gaza, with personnel developing proactive campaigns alongside regional and communications departments. The documents therefore place work concerning Iran, Israel and Gaza within an overlapping institutional structure, showing how the same Foreign Office information-threat structure could be directed across related geopolitical issues.

The Gaza operation emerges amid an unprecedented crackdown on Palestine solidarity in Britain. The government proscribed Palestine Action under terrorism legislation in July 2025. Since then, more than 3,300 people have been arrested and over 1,200 charged with terrorism-related offences, many for peacefully opposing the ban. The UN human rights chief warned that the proscription misused counterterrorism law and threatened freedom of expression, assembly and association.

The leaked files expose another layer of state power behind that visible police response. Government analysts monitor political narratives and trace how they circulate, while intelligence agencies, communications teams and contractors develop measures against activity classified as foreign manipulation. Ministers have already portrayed pro-Palestinian demonstrations as having been “hijacked” by people seeking to sow division. Within the information-threat apparatus described by Miller, such rhetoric can recast opposition to British support for Israel as something imported, manipulated or dangerous rather than a genuine political response to the destruction of Gaza.

Once dissent enters that system, official assessments can shape government messaging, engagement with online platforms, funding decisions and how people are treated across public institutions. The machinery exposed by Miller allows officials to define the threat, identify its alleged carriers and intervene without disclosing the evidence behind those judgments.

Parliamentary oversight has not kept pace. The Intelligence and Security Committee has warned that security functions transferred into policy departments have escaped its scrutiny. The government blocked attempts to extend the committee’s remit to bodies including the Counter Disinformation Unit and the Foreign Office’s intelligence policy department, preventing what the committee called “effective scrutiny by Parliament.”

Keep reading

Communist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Given a New Nickname as Details Emerge Regarding His Remarkably ‘Thin-Skinned’ Behavior Behind Closed Doors

It turns out that Marxist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who presents himself as a smiling, smooth-talking salesman, is quite a different person behind the scenes. And it has spawned a new nickname which he won’t like.

The New York Post dropped a remarkable story on Thursday night, which extensively describes a mayor who becomes a nasty bully when things do not go his way.

The paper notes that Mamdani is easily angered not only by press criticism but also by people who dare to utter unflattering words toward him in public.

Mamdani even places personal phone calls to politicians he thinks will back off their attacks and eventually bow to him.

From the Post:

Social media-savvy Mayor Zohran Mamdani is developing a reputation IRL as “thin-skinned” and hyper-sensitive to public criticism, despite hyping himself online as a smiling and unflappable politician, scores of insiders spilled to The Post.

Behind the scenes, Hizzoner huffily badgers critics who dare question him publicly, harbors petty grudges against prominent pols, and often only responds to texts when he’s miffed about bad press, according to interviews with more than a dozen elected officials, consultants, and other politicos.

“I see more and more he cannot handle criticism, but mainly from elected officials who he thinks he can push around,” one political consultant said.

“The mayor personally reaches out when electeds criticizes him publicly. If they speak, then he cares. He cares because he doesn’t want bad press. It shows a sensitivity.”

A major sore spot for the narcissistic mayor is when he hears Jewish New Yorkers taking issue with his attacks on Israel. As we all know, Mamdani despises the Jewish State and has threatened to have Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu arrested.

Sources said the mayor personally called at least one elected official who attended the news conference, complaining about being told to tone down his rhetoric — and upset that their exhortation was connected to his video branding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal,” which was posted days before the attack.

NYC Democrat operatives and politicians went on to describe Mamdani as someone who uses his phone as “a security blanket” while obsessing over how many lies he gets on an X post.

Keep reading