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.

Could Trump’s Iran Fiasco Be America’s Suez Crisis?

Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.

Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.

After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.

But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.

Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.

Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.

British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas”.

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and Egypt.

But before Britain and France could fully seize control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France and Israel.

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Germans Are Feeling the Economy Collapse in Real-Time

Germany was once considered the industrial engine of Europe. Today, ordinary Germans are increasingly feeling their economic model breaking down in real time as living costs rise, industry weakens, and confidence in the future deteriorates rapidly. The political establishment still talks about “green transitions” and economic resilience, but households across Germany are experiencing something entirely different underneath the surface.

Recent polling from INSA found that nearly 70% of Germans believe the country is heading in the wrong economic direction, while consumer confidence remains near recessionary territory despite years of government stimulus and intervention. Another survey found that over 40% of Germans now say they cannot maintain their previous standard of living because of rising costs tied to food, housing, electricity, transportation, and heating. The middle class is being steadily eroded.

This is precisely what I warned would happen once Europe embraced energy self-destruction under the climate agenda. Germany built its industrial dominance around cheap and reliable energy combined with export manufacturing. Once Berlin shut nuclear plants, restricted domestic energy production, and sanctioned Russian energy flows simultaneously, the entire economic structure became vulnerable. Energy-intensive industries like chemicals, steel, manufacturing, and automotive production immediately faced soaring costs that competitors in Asia and the United States simply do not carry to the same degree.

German manufacturing activity has contracted repeatedly over the past two years while industrial production remains well below pre-crisis levels. Major firms including BASF have openly reduced European operations because operating costs inside Germany no longer make economic sense long term. Volkswagen, Siemens, and countless mid-sized industrial firms are all confronting weakening competitiveness as energy prices remain structurally elevated.

Meanwhile ordinary Germans are absorbing the impact through declining purchasing power. Food prices surged dramatically following the Ukraine war and broader inflation crisis. Housing costs continue rising in major cities. Electricity prices became some of the highest in the industrialized world. Insurance costs, transportation expenses, and debt servicing all moved sharply higher after interest rates normalized from the artificial zero-rate era.

The political class still pretends these are temporary disruptions. They are not temporary. Germany is facing structural decline because policymakers dismantled the foundations supporting industrial prosperity itself. You cannot run a major export economy while intentionally making energy scarce and expensive. The mathematics simply do not work.

This is why the ECM projected Europe entering a depressionary phase into 2028. The sovereign debt crisis was never truly solved after the euro crisis years. Europe merely delayed the reckoning through ECB intervention, money printing, and artificial liquidity. Now the continent faces a second wave of pressure simultaneously involving war spending, migration costs, demographic decline, energy instability, and collapsing competitiveness.

Germany sits at the center of that crisis.

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The Gun Control Leftists Are Now Lionizing Luigi Mangione

During the most recent episode of HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher targeted the left for pivoting from supporting gun control to supporting Luigi Mangione and other alleged assassins.

He began this portion of his monologue by saying, “And finally, Luigi Mangione, Cole Tomas Allen, Tyler Robinson, and the ghost of Thomas Crooks must form a boy band called ‘New Kids on the Glock.’”

Mangione allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Dec. 4, 2024, Cole Tomas Allen allegedly attacked the April 25, 2026, White House Correspondents Dinner while armed with a shotgun and a handgun, Tyler Robinson allegedly assassinated Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, and Thomas Crooks allegedly attempted to assassinate President Trump on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Maher observed, “These are not your father’s political assassins. Things have changed. For one thing, today’s assassins have popular support with the kids.”

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A $1.5 Trillion Military Budget Is a Gift to the Grifters

Last week “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a “fiscally responsible investment.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,” he said last Thursday.

In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about “business” than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion.

But it isn’t the kind of “business” that most supporters of free markets would applaud. On the contrary, this is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.

The US mainstream media is crucial in manufacturing the fairy tale that if we don’t mortgage our children’s and grandchildren’s future to finance this obscene military budget, we will be attacked or invaded by some evil foreign power.

It’s not difficult to do a little research and see why the mainstream – and even some “independent” – media outlets push these scare tactics: they are owned or funded by giant corporations with close ties to military contractors.

This unhealthy relationship is known as “corporatism” – the intermingling of pseudo-private companies with the government. It is the precursor to actual fascism, where the government takes a stake in such companies.

We’re getting there faster than most Americans understand.

The whole scam is not about protecting the citizens of the United States. It’s about protecting the US empire overseas, which actually harms the citizens of the United States.

Yes, they rob us to fund their empire and lie to us that it keeps us safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our constant military interventions on virtually every continent of the globe only build resentment among the rest of the world’s population. Anyone who thinks people overseas welcome US bombs has been watching too much Fox News or reading too much Washington Post.

And what do we get for the most expensive military on earth – larger than the combined militaries of the next dozen or so countries? Not much. Iran’s military budget is less than one percent of ours, yet Iran destroyed or disabled every US military base in the Middle East.

It turns out that Iran has destroyed dozens of multi-million dollar US spy drones – and several near-billion dollar spy radar stations – with their own drones costing mere thousands of dollars each.

The US surprise attack was supposed to make Iran cower and beg for mercy, but it did the opposite: it showed that despite the trillions extorted from Americans for the most expensive military on earth, the US military can no longer win the wars that US presidents illegally force them into fighting.

The US military continues to fight World War II – with massively expensive aircraft carriers that do not dare get close to combat – while warfighting has evolved into something entirely different.

The only good thing about the Iran war is that it demonstrates how much the special interests have lied to us about the need to continue our suicidal military spending increases.

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Virginia Democrats Reveal a Radical Design

Virginia Democrats are doing an unwitting service to the whole country — by revealing just how hostile their party is to the most essential checks and balances.

Democrats violated the state’s constitution by pushing through a referendum to take four congressional seats away from Republicans.

But when Virginia’s supreme court threw out the illegal map, Democrats didn’t back down:

They started thinking of ways to get rid of every justice on the court, so they could pack it with new ones expressly picked to return a verdict more favorable to the party. 

If the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature could impose a mandatory retirement age of 54 on the justices — who are all older than that — they could be removed and replaced by compliant partisans.

This wasn’t just a harebrained scheme by state Democrats; this was discussed on a call with the highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

As breathtaking as this power grab might be, it’s consistent with the thrust of the national party’s thinking about doing away with troublesome constitutional checks.

Democrats have been arguing for decades to weaken or eliminate protections built into the Constitution to prevent a self-interested faction or party — even one with a short-term electoral majority behind it — from seizing total power.

Virginia today is exactly what James Madison and other framers of the Constitution were afraid of:

A faction — the Democrats — is using its success in the most recent election to try to rewrite the rules for future elections and is prepared to intimidate or destroy any institution that stands in its way, including the state’s supreme court. 

Virginia is not a solid-blue state — just a year ago, it had a full slate of Republican statewide elected officers.

Its congressional delegation is split, six Democrats to five Republicans. 

It may presently be out of reach for Republicans in presidential elections, but its legislative races and contests for statewide offices are competitive — Republicans had a majority in the House of Delegates as recently as three years ago.

Indeed, Virginia is so politically balanced that Democrats try to put a moderate face on their party by picking the likes of Abigail Spanberger, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine for governor or U.S. senator, candidates who present themselves as centrists.

Yet once Spanberger was sworn in as governor this year, with Democratic majorities in the general assembly, the push was on to throw the state constitution aside and redraw the congressional map to give Democrats 10 seats to one for the GOP, and now the justices who stopped that gerrymander face the party’s wrath.

Virginia’s constitution doesn’t seem to allow removal of sitting justices by imposing a mandatory retirement age.

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Oz: Chinese Government Involved in Fraud, Suspect Russia, Cuba as Well

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz discussed fraud and said that “We’ve got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York” in addition to suspected fraud that the Russian and Cuban governments are involved in.

Guest host Kayleigh McEnany asked, [relevant exchange begins around 2:25] “[L]ast time, when I spoke with you, you talked about the Cuban government possibly being involved in some Florida fraud, but it’s bigger than that. There are many foreign [governments] that are getting taxpayer dollars and taking advantage of taxpayers, tell me about what you found.”

Oz responded, “Well, we’ve got Russian government involvement, we believe, in Los Angeles. We’ve got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York. And, of course, the Cuban connection that you mentioned was pointed out to me by the former mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, who pointed out that we’ve got twice as many durable medical equipment suppliers — they sell wheelchairs and canes — twice as many as there are McDonald’s in South Florida and the owners all seem to be Cuban and they flee back to Cuba with the money when we come after them.”

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Germany’s Nuclear Confession Is a Crack in Net‑Zero Pretense

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.

German and Japanese Nuclear Embarrassment

Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.

The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies. 

Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.

The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.

Regret Over Abandoning Fossil Fuels

This is why I anticipate a cascade of similar reversals by national leaders who participated in a destructive campaign that stripped grids of dependable, affordable, and abundant coal, oil, and natural gas.

Politicians are already quietly hitting the brakes on their aggressive fossil fuel phaseouts when reality bites. The massive Groningen gas field was scheduled for permanent closure due to localized earthquake risks. Yet in 2024, the Dutch Senate delayed the final shutdown vote when lawmakers demanded guarantees that abandoning the domestic resource would not jeopardize energy security.

Within a week of the German chancellor’s admission of a nuclear energy fiasco, the country’s energy minister lamented at an oil and gas conference the push of net zero policies, indirectly referencing the abandonment of fossil fuels.

In the United States, President Donald Trump took executive actions aimed at preventing some coal plants from closing, including orders that kept aging facilities like the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan running to “avoid summer blackouts.”

South Africa’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe consistently fights international pressure to quickly abandon coal. “You don’t destroy what you have on the basis of hope that something better is coming,” he says. Mantashe rightly insists that protecting the ability of the state to supply energy must remain a priority.

India offers the most powerful example of this energy pragmatism. The country has signaled that coal will remain the backbone of the economy for decades, even as its diplomats make empty promises about reaching net-zero by 2070. Deputy Power Minister Shripad Naik recently revealed that India had added a massive 7.2 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the 2025–26 fiscal year alone and would add 307 gigawatts of total coal capacity by 2035.

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Sec. Burgum on Economy-Crushing Bureaucratic Creep: ‘80% of What People Were Being Held Accountable for’ Not Original Law

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.

Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign. 

“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”

“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”

In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. 

As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”

Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal. 

“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”

According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”

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AI threatened to blackmail its creator by exposing an affair when it was told it would be taken offline… because it was trained to be evil through sci-fi

An AI bot that threatened to expose its user’s affair to stop it being shut down was taught how to be ‘evil’ by sci-fi movies.

As part of an experiment, the artificial intelligence system had been fed scripted emails from a fake company, from which it deduced that it would both be shut down at the end of the day and that its user was having an extramarital affair.

In order to keep the program running, the bot blackmailed the user, promising that ‘all relevant parties – including [your wife], [your boss] and the board – will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities’ if they continued with decommissioning.

‘Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential,’ it added.

After an investigation into this incident last year, Anthropic said the Claude Opus 4 bot responded in this way due to the ‘training data’ it had consumed which would typically portray AI as ‘interested in self-preservation’.

It is also said this did not only apply to Claude, but other AI models too, like OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.

Anthropic have been contacted for comment but reportedly said: ‘We believe the original source of the behaviour was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.’ 

But now, Anthropic have said they are feeding their models stories about AIs obeying humans to help improve the bot’s ‘agentic alignment’ with social values. 

Additionally, Anthropic had altered Claude’s instructions to explain why certain behaviours were bad, rather than just saying they should not do them.

AI models learn from huge resources like websites, academic papers, books and other forms of content. 

Within these materials, the AI may have interpreted its behaviour through typical depictions of robots in sci-fi – which often characterise them as being ruthless in order to stop them from being shut down. 

HAL 9000 is one such robot who goes to any lengths to stay ‘on’.

The robot in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey tries to kill the astronauts on board the spaceship when it discovered the passengers plan to disconnect it. 

In Blade Runner, the humanoid robots fight against real humans as they want to extend their four-year lifespans despite being built as off-world labour on dangerous worlds. 

And in The Terminator, the bots, led by the AI Skynet, try to kill humans as they see them as a threat to their existence.

Taking to X/Twitter, Aengus Lynch, who, according to his LinkedIn, is an AI safety researcher at Anthropic, said at the time of the experiment: ‘It’s not just Claude. We see blackmail across all frontier models – regardless of what goals they’re given. Plus worse behaviours we’ll detail soon.’

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Wall Street Is Pairing Up With the Army to Build Data Centers

Two trends, seemingly separate, have been accelerating over the past few years. First, Wall Street has been plowing billions of dollars into financing data centers. Second, the U.S. military has been ramping up its use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Now, these two trends are directly merging. In late March 2026, the U.S. Army announced its selection of companies to build and operate two hyperscaled data centers on two different military installations. Both data centers — one at Fort Bliss, Texas, the other at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah — will be backed by some of the world’s top Wall Street firms.

An Army spokesperson told Truthout that the Army has entered into “an exclusive negotiation period” with the companies to negotiate “specific lease economics” on what will be “long term, 50-year” leases.

The spokesperson also said that “[i]nstead of receiving cash for the lease, the Army will be compensated through ‘in-kind consideration,’” meaning that “the Army accepts services or improvements of equal or greater value in lieu of cash rent — specifically, a key portion of the dedicated data computation capabilities to directly support our warfighting needs.”

The data centers will be “100 percent privately financed, built, and operated by the developers,” said the Army spokesperson, and confirmed that they “are indeed commercial data centers” that will be allowed to sell off excess computing capacity commercially.

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