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.

Nonprofits Cruelly Normalize Poverty for Climate Virtue

The last two decades should have been a period of accelerating economic development for Africa, South America and much of Asia. Discoveries of abundant oil and gas supplies offered a rescue from poverty, industrial stagnation and poor access to electricity and other basic services.

Instead, they got a man-made disaster, a deliberate slowdown of growth driven not by geographical disadvantage or domestic inefficiency but by a global campaign to divert affordable fossil fuels from poor nations.

Examples abound. At the United Nations’ COP26 of 2021, more than 30 governments and a number of public financial institutions committed to the so-called Glasgow Statement, also known as the Clean Energy Transition Partnership. The objective was to end new public finance for fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022 and instead prioritize “green” energy.

The European Investment Bank stopped financing all fossil fuel projects by the end of 2021, affecting billions in planned natural gas infrastructure. Major European pension funds and commercial institutions – BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale – reduced or eliminated support for development projects for oil, natural gas and coal, citing targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

The coercion was unequivocal: Pursue fossil fuels and lose access to Western capital. The opposition to hydrocarbons was embraced by Western nonprofit organizations and even by people who had made money from oil.

Just Stop Oil, a malicious anti-fossil fuel outfit, has been bankrolled by the Climate Emergency Fund and Hollywood filmmaker Adam McKay, maker of the alarmist movie Don’t Look Up. The fund draws heavily on contributions from Aileen Getty, heir to the Getty oil fortune, and other wealthy donors.

Rainforest Action Network, Sunrise Movement, Oil Change International, and 350.org are just a handful of so-called non-profit organizations that inject funds into domestic campaigns across the developing world. 

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Man arrested for online threats against ‘No Kings’ protest participants

A man has been arrested after authorities say he posted online threats to kill protesters ahead of the No Kings protest downtown this weekend.

According to an arrest affidavit, 66-year-old Robert Flores was arrested after investigators identified him as the person behind a series of violent posts targeting the No Kings protest.

Flores allegedly used Threads to threaten participants of the protest in downtown San Antonio. In the posts, Flores wrote about plans to “run over” protesters and encouraged others to arrive “locked and loaded.”

One of the posts reportedly said, “I’ll run you f****** over and then go have coffee and breakfast at Jim’s Some of you will not return.”

Another comment read, “Be locked and loaded tomorrow. Killing a Democrat is acceptable.”

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Microsoft: Sharp Increase in Ai-Aided Cyberattacks From Russia, China

Foreign adversaries are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) in their cyber influence campaigns, with operations picking up “aggressively” this year, Microsoft said on Oct. 16.

In July, Microsoft identified more than 200 instances of AI-generated content from nation-state adversaries, more than four times the number in July 2024, and more than 10 times the number in July 2023, the company’s annual Digital Defense Report shows.

AI can create increasingly convincing emails and generate digital clones of senior government officials or news anchors, according to the report. The sophistication of AI tools has made the operations “easier to scale, more effective, and harder to trace,” and it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate state- and non-state actors, the report stated.

For scammers, AI is making it easier to quickly create more convincing websites, profiles, emails, and IDs, the report said. Microsoft said it blocked 1.6 million fake account creation attempts per hour on the company’s platforms.

“Everyone—from industry to government—must be proactive to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated attackers and to ensure that defenders keep ahead of adversaries,” said Amy Hogan-Burney, Microsoft’s vice president for customer security and trust, who oversaw the report.

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‘Inactive’ Chicago Cop Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison For Sexual Abuse Of Minors

An “inactive” Chicago police officer has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he sexually abused minors, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced.

David Deleon, 32, pled guilty Friday to one count of criminal sexual abuse and two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse of victims under 18, Sheriff Tom Dart’s office announced. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the guilty plea.

Deleon’s conviction comes after his arrest in 2023, when officers with northwest suburb Norridge’s police department charged him with aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a minor. Norridge police seized Deleon’s phone, which included evidence that he sexually assaulted and abused minors and recorded lewd videos of himself with minors, according to the sheriff’s office.

Norridge police turned the evidence over to Chicago police, who forwarded it to the sheriff’s Internet Crimes Against Children unit.

Investigators found Deleon, who lived in Edison Park, met his victims while working as a Chicago police officer and would invite them to sleep at his home, the sheriff’s office said.

Deleon was charged in August 2023 with criminal sexual abuse and assault as well as two counts of manufacturing child pornography, two counts of possession of child pornography and one count of unauthorized videotaping, the sheriff’s office announced at the time.

Deleon agreed to plead guilty to the sexual abuse and assault charges in exchange for prosecutors dropping the other charges, according to the Tribune. He has been in jail since his August 2023 arrest.

Deleon was stripped of his police powers following the 2023 charges, according to the sheriff’s office. He is considered an “inactive” employee with the Chicago Police Department, a spokesperson said.

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Cruz introduces bill to advance nuclear fuel recycling, research, safety

An advocate for developing nuclear energy in his home state, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has proposed a bill to advance nuclear fuel recycling, including research over its feasibility and safety.

The Advancing Research in Nuclear Fuel Recycling Act of 2025, cosponsored with Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, would require the U.S. Department of Energy to analyze the costs, benefits, and risks of recycling spent nuclear fuel compared to interim storage solutions.

“Spent nuclear fuel has the potential to dramatically increase America’s energy, economic, and national security,” Cruz said. “Domestic recycling can reduce the space we need for spent nuclear fuel, enhance energy independence, reduce our dependence on imports, and broaden the supply of rare elements and isotopes used in medicine and advanced technologies.

“Recycling solutions will also reduce the burden on individual states from nuclear waste accumulation, and accelerate progress on nuclear energy, which is our nation’s cleanest baseload energy source. I’m proud to work with Sen. Heinrich on this legislation and I urge my colleagues in the Senate to pass this bill.”

The bill would direct the DOE to analyze the “practicability, potential benefits, costs, and risks, including proliferation, of using dedicated recycling facilities to convert spent nuclear fuel, including spent high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel, into useable nuclear fuels, such as those for commercial light water reactors; advanced nuclear reactors; and medical, space-based, advanced-battery, and other non-reactor applications,” according to the bill language. Recycling would involve taking spent fuel already being held in storage sites nationwide to use as fuel or input for advanced nuclear reactors, existing reactors, or commercial applications, according to the bill language.

The bill also would direct the DOE to investigate the risks of aqueous (PUREX and its derivatives) recycling processes with the practicability, potential benefits, costs, and risk of non-aqueous (such as pyro-electrochemistry) recycling processes.

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Brussels wants to grab another €25B from frozen Russian assets for Ukraine

The European Union is about to use the cash value of €140 billion worth of frozen Russian state assets to finance a mega loan to Ukraine. But the European Commission still wants more, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

The bulk of the frozen assets sit in a Belgium-based financial depository called Euroclear. But an additional €25 billion lies in private bank accounts across the bloc, and the EU executive wants to discuss using those funds to issue loans to Kyiv as well.

“It should be considered whether the Reparations Loan initiative could be extended to other immobilised assets within the EU,” reads the document, which the Commission circulated to EU capitals ahead of a Friday ambassadorial meeting on the topic.

“The legal feasibility of extending the Reparations Loan approach towards such assets has not been assessed in detail,” the document continued. “Such an assessment would need to take place before taking a decision on further steps.”

The document outlines the “design principles” for the Ukraine Reparations Loan initiative that will be up for debate ahead of next week’s EU summit in Brussels.

EU leaders are expected to have a broad discussion on the initiative and to call on the Commission to present a proposal for the loan. EU officials expect the bill to arrive quickly, and to serve as a platform for further talks on the financial engineering needed to make it work.

Finance ministers will discuss the bill when they next meet in November.

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Criminal Illegal Alien Who Ran Des Moines Schools Registered As Maryland Voter

Ian Andre Roberts, the illegal alien ineligible for employment in the U.S. but hired in Iowa as superintendent at the Des Moines School District, is a registered Maryland voter.

By law, only U.S. citizens are allowed to register to vote in U.S. elections, but an election watchdog group, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), looked into voter registration in states where Roberts previously lived and found he registered to vote as a Democrat twice, once in 2011 and again in 2016.

It raises questions about how many other illegal aliens or otherwise ineligible people have successfully registered to vote. As AAF president Tom Jones told Fox 45, “We can’t rely on the honor system to hope that illegal aliens won’t lie to us.”

The only citizenship verification on the Maryland voter registration form is a tiny box next to the question “Are you a U.S. citizen?” where the applicant checks yes or no.

Oddly, the documents AAF received from Prince George’s County Maryland concealed his answer. The Federalist asked the Prince George’s County  election office why it redacted that information. It did not respond.

The instructions tell applicants who answer “No” on the citizenship question to not complete the form, so we may assume Roberts lied and claimed to be a citizen since he completed the form, but as an illegal alien, Robert’s has a history of not following instructions. Because of the county’s redaction, we can’t be certain how he answered, so we can’t know if he lied or if he told the truth and the county overlooked it.

The form advises that lying on a voter registration is perjury punishable with up to five years in prison, if he is ever charged for it. Roberts is already incarcerated for his illegal immigration status; he is currently being held at the Council Bluffs, Iowa main jail in Polk County, the U.S. Marshals Service told The Federalist. As previously reported, Roberts has a criminal background, but was promoted through woke school systems.

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Microsoft OneDrive Limits How Often Users Can Restrict Facial Recognition Setting

Microsoft is quietly testing a new facial-recognition feature in OneDrive that automatically sorts photos based on who appears in them.

The experimental version is being rolled out to some early-access users, and it turns on by default while placing strict limits on how often it can be disabled.

Those with access will see a new privacy notice in the app stating: “OneDrive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos.”

Microsoft’s support page, which still labels the option as “coming soon,” explains that “Microsoft collects, uses, and stores facial scans and biometric information from your photos through the OneDrive app for facial grouping technologies.”

The company says this is intended to “help you quickly and easily organize photos of friends and family.”

Microsoft insists that the face groupings remain private even when users share albums. It also claims that “Microsoft does not use any of your facial scans and biometric information to train or improve the AI model overall.”

When asked why the system is enabled by default instead of requiring consent first, a company spokesperson told Slashdot that “Microsoft OneDrive inherits privacy features and settings from Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, where applicable.”

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Patriot Act supporting senators are mad when they are the targets

When it was reported this week that former President Joe Biden’s FBI may have targeted the cellphones of eight Republican senators in the “Arctic Frost” investigation related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the Republicans that were supposedly surveilled were not happy about it.

One was Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who posted on X Wednesday, “We need to know why (ATT) and (Verizon) did not challenge the subpoena for the phone records of eight United States senators when the Biden FBI spied on us during an anti-Trump probe.”

“There needs to be a reckoning for this,” she declared.

On Thursday, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) explained to Blackburn why this might have happened, “It’s called the Patriot Act, FISA, and CISA.”

“Please vote no next time,” he insisted.

During her tenure in the House, Blackburn voted for the Patriot Act each time it came up for renewal since it was passed in 2001 and numerous other federal surveillance measures since that time too.

The Patriot Act was first hastily signed into law in the politically charged days and weeks after 9/11, significantly expanding the federal government’s spying and law enforcement powers. Section 215 allows the F.B.I. to obtain secret court orders and to collect any business records the agency deems vital to national security.

This Act supposedly designed to target potential terrorists has since been used to go after drug dealers, track website users, parents at school board meetings, and more.

Perhaps even spying on Republican senators.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has long been a vocal champion of the Patriot Act. He was also one of the Republicans reportedly surveilled — and he’s very mad about it.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Graham roared to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Can you tell me why my phone records were sought by the Jack Smith agents?” — Smith being the J6 investigation special counsel.

“Why did they ask to know who I called and what I was doing from January 4th to the 7th?” Graham wondered loudly and aggressively.

In May 2015, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) attempted to block an extension of the Patriot Act with a ten-plus hour filibuster, Sen. Graham famously rolled his eyes over Paul’s efforts.

Paul warned that the Patriot Act undermined civil liberties. Then and now, Graham has always appeared to have full faith in the government handling power responsibly.

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WHO and European Commission Launch AI System to Monitor Social Media and Online “Misinformation” in Real Time

The World Health Organization has introduced a major overhaul of its global monitoring network, unveiling an AI-powered platform that tracks online conversations and media activity in real time.

Known as Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources 2.0 (EIOS), the system is being presented as a new step in “pandemic preparedness,” but its reach extends well beyond disease surveillance.

The upgrade is part of a growing merger between health monitoring, digital tracking, and centralized information control.

Developed with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), the new version of EIOS is designed to scan the internet for signals of emerging health threats.

According to the WHO, it now automatically analyzes social media posts, websites, and other public sources to detect possible outbreaks.

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