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.

County in Virginia Votes to Give $2,000 in Taxpayer Dollars to Illegal Immigrants Detained by ICE

Members of the county board in Arlington, Virginia have voted to give $2,000 in taxpayer dollars to illegals who have been detained by ICE.

Is this even legal? And why would taxpayers put up with it? Can anyone imagine another country in the world where this would even happen?

People who were arrested for being in the country illegally are being rewarded with cash that has been taken from citizens as taxes. Does anyone believe this is what the founders had in mind?

Breitbart News reports:

Virginia County Board Votes to Pay $2,000 to Families of Illegal Migrants Arrested by ICE

The Arlington County Board has voted to pay $2,000 in tax money to the families of illegal migrants who are arrested by immigration enforcement officers.

The leaders of the Virginia county created a $50,000 fund of tax dollars to dole out to family members for “basic needs” such as housing, food, and utilities.

“We stand with our immigrant families, and we will not stop doing so,” Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said after the unanimous vote, according to ARLNow. “We are valuing the families of those that have been displaced and removed.”

“This investment in our families is about the urgency we have seen in our community in the last month,” de Ferranti added. “And we are going to respond with care. and we are going to respond proudly. That’s what this $50,000 is toward with Thrive.”

The board also voted not to require family members to prove that their detained wage earner was legally allowed to work in the U.S.

The government funds will be distributed by left-wing organization Arlington Thrive, an NGO funded by the likes of Washington Forest Foundation, the Kaiser Foundation, and the United Way, among others.

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25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on federal agencies and Congress to defund the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), charging that the organization had used taxpayer dollars to produce reports that supported plaintiffs in climate lawsuits against energy companies.

In an Aug. 27 letter, the state attorneys general urged the federal government to “end grants to an organization [NASEM] that uses taxpayer money to prop up litigation theories that have been rejected by courts from Maryland to Mississippi to California.”

Much of the conflict stems from a chapter on climate science in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was written by NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC).

This manual provides essential background and technical information for judges who are presiding over thousands of lawsuits in which states and cities across the United States are seeking billions of dollars in damages from energy companies as compensation for alleged harm from global warming.

Allegations of Bias

Critics allege that information NASEM produced for the manual supports the plaintiffs’ claims while ignoring contrary views that favor the defense.

President Donald Trump stated in a July 19 Truth Social post that NASEM had “published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change” and that “taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it.”

In January, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told the FJC in a letter that the manual appeared to include “biased programming” with the “underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs who allege injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.”

In response, the FJC removed the chapter from its manual. Initially, NASEM kept the chapter on its website but removed it on Aug. 7, pending an internal review.

“That chapter has received considerable scrutiny,” NASEM stated. “[NASEM] has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”

However, attorneys general from the group of 25 states, led by Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say they have concerns regarding that review process.

“Now, over five months later, after presidential criticism and increasing public scrutiny, NASEM has temporarily removed the chapter from its website for an ‘independent review’ of the ‘processes used to develop the chapter,'” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “This review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM’s secrecy around all aspects of the review process.”

The attorneys general charged that the chapter in the reference manual that NASEM helped write “materially misquotes the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual’s statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants.”

One of the co-authors of the Reference Manual’s climate chapter, Columbia Law School professor Jessica Wentz, defended the work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, stating that it had undergone a rigorous review process, that Michael Burger had not contributed to it, and that it was “objective and rooted in settled science.”

In addition to the chapter in the reference manual for judges, NASEM produced a report in July titled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026,” which critics say bolstered plaintiffs’ arguments that harm from extreme weather events could be attributed to energy companies’ production of fossil fuels.

That NASEM report supported “extreme event attribution” (EEA), the legal theory underpinning climate lawsuits, which claims that damage from extreme weather can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, as plaintiffs assert. NASEM stated in a summary of the report that “the scientific tools, observational datasets, and methods developed and used for EEA have advanced considerably over the past decade and increased the confidence in EEA results for some types of weather events.”

“[NASEM says] that these attribution studies have more prominence in the press and in legal proceeding and they say attribution methodology is getting better, but saying something is getting better is nowhere near the same as saying it’s any good,” Steven Koonin, physicist at Stanford University and former undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, told The Epoch Times. “You would expect to see graphs throughout the report comparing the results of attribution with what the actual data is, and there is virtually none of that in the report.”

The NASEM report also provides a methodology and causal link between greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate, extreme weather, physical impacts on communities, and societal and economic harm.

Among the climate lawsuit cases currently moving through the courts is a pending Supreme Court case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which could set a precedent for many other similar cases.

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Billionaires Are Buying Into Psychedelic Companies

Putting aside my skepticism of SpaceX for a moment, there is something worth paying attention to in the latest report about the people who made fortunes backing the company: they are now putting serious money into psychedelics.

And while I can’t necessarily get behind backing Elon Musk’s idea of elephants performing Les Miserables on the moon, or whatever other “lofty” goals are in the SpaceX S-1, I can get behind these follow up investment ideas.

Back in January when absolutely no one was talking about the sector, I officially hung my balls out there and name it my “Best Idea” sector for 2026. I was writing about these stocks years ago ago, first in January 2025, calling the psychedelic names “stocks to watch” for the year. Then, in July 2025, urging patience in these positions.

In April, after the administration’s executive order supporting psychedelic research, I reiterated my bullish stance and argued that we were moving from the phase where these therapies were ignored into the phase where institutions would be forced to engage with them seriously. That transition appears to be underway.

So far, the group has wildly outperformed the market, with the AdvisorShares Psychedelic ETF (PSIL) beating the S&P 500 by about +32% this year. Other individual companies I pointed out at the beginning of this year are beating the market by about +79% and +171%.

That doesn’t mean every name is going to work, or that the easy money hasn’t already been made in some of them. But the broader thesis continues to get validation, and the latest evidence suggests that capital is still finding its way into the space.

The biggest validation came in July, when Eli Lilly agreed to acquire AtaiBeckley for approximately $2.8 billion upfront, with another $1 billion contingent on development and regulatory milestones.

That is not a small biotech taking a flyer on an experimental treatment. That is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world committing billions of dollars to a psychedelic-derived drug pipeline. Lilly’s interest is centered on BPL-003, a treatment being developed for treatment-resistant depression.

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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects New York Healthcare Workers’ Bid to Revive COVID Vaccine Mandate Lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined for a second time to take up a case brought by New York healthcare workers who lost their jobs after the state denied their requests for religious accommodations from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, SCOTUSblog reported.

The justices rejected a petition asking them to reconsider their June decision not to hear Does 1-2 v. Hochul, the lawsuit healthcare workers brought against the state. The court denied the request without asking New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to respond.

“This ruling is definitely a sad day for the workers who stood up and said no,” said Michael Kane, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) director of advocacy and member of New York’s Teachers for Choice, which also challenged New York’s vaccine mandate in the courts.

Kane said he was “not surprised” by the decision.

The plaintiffs represented a handful of healthcare workers, he said. “But over 30,000 were fired in New York state because of this horrendous policy from Gov. Hochul. The policy didn’t allow for any religious exemption from vaccination. On its face, it is illegal. It is unconstitutional, but the politics of the thing seems to be playing out instead.”

The workers filed their lawsuit in 2021, challenging a now-repealed New York state law mandating that workers in some healthcare-related positions get the COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2022, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit, and in 2024, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal. In 2025, the workers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an unusual move, the Supreme Court asked the U.S. Department of Justice solicitor general to weigh in. In May 2026, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote an amicus brief recommending the court deny the appeal.

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Ads Featuring Real Children’s Faces in Sexual AI Videos Persist on Meta’s Platforms

Researchers say more than 250 ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have appeared on Meta’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram since early August, weeks after the company removed dozens of similar ads following reporting from Wired.

Wired reports that the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project says that in early August, Meta deleted roughly 53 ads across Facebook, Instagram and Threads that contained child sexual abuse material, telling the outlet at the time that most of the abusive ads predated the rollout of new AI tools designed to “better detect and block” harmful content. Now, the same watchdog group says ads containing sexual imagery of children are back, some of which are identical to those previously removed.

The problem didn’t stop there. Researchers say Meta has published more than 350 abusive video ads since the end of last year. Many link to so-called “nudification” apps tied to Chinese developers. Unlike the initial batch of 53 ads, the new ones used images of real children, not stock or generic photos.

One ad used an official photograph of a minor from a European royal family, transformed into a video depicting a graphic sex act. Researchers declined to name the royal in order to protect the victim.

“Researchers identified the real-world identities of four minors used in the ads,” according to TTP, whose director is Katie Paul. Three of the four are from the United States. One is a teenager who runs a social media influencer account on a Meta platform. Another is a teen influencer with a public account. The third is a stock photo model, a real person, labeled as “pre-teen” on stock photo websites.

The ads typically open with an innocuous photo of a preteen or teen girl (only one involved a boy), paired with text claiming the image is “not just a photo” and that “there are no restriction” on how it can be used. The videos morph the children’s faces into explicit sexual content, often depicting sex acts. Clicking the ads sends users to download AI face-swapping or video apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Many carry the tagline: “This is the AI that men actually use.”

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Supreme Court Denies Missouri’s Emergency Appeal to Use State’s New GOP-Favored Congressional Map in Midterms

The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Missouri’s emergency appeal to use the GOP-favored Congressional map in this year’s midterm elections.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied Missouri’s emergency application without comment.

Missouri will now have to use its 2022 Congressional map.

The Missouri Supreme Court last Thursday threw out the state’s new congressional map that favored the GOP and eliminated one Democrat seat.

The new map will only go into effect in 2028 if voters approve it during the 2026 midterms.

Last year, the Missouri House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, passed a sweeping new congressional map that would reduce Democrat representation to just one seat.

The “Missouri First” map promised a fierce partisan restructuring ahead of the 2026 midterms.

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25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

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New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

“An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings,” the Times reported Monday.

“That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers’ footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks.”

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

“I don’t understand hiding it to begin with,” Verzi told the Times. “That was horrific. But 25 years in, there’s people that are still getting sick.”

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A New Cold War for a Dying World Order

Washington is more united than is often thought. Despite the ruptures with an imagined past that have been said to have been caused by the chaos agent in the White House, the foreign policy consensus (underwritten by the national religion of American exceptionalism) has shown itself to possess a remarkable resiliency in the three and a half decades since the end of the first Cold War (1946-1988). There today exists a broad consensus across the American political spectrum that it is Washington’s duty (to say nothing of its ability – now for the first time being seriously questioned thanks to Trump’s ongoing debacle in Iran) to suit up and take the field in a global fight to defend ‘democracy’ which, as we have been incessantly informed for a decade starting in 2016, is ‘under attack’ (the starting point of the great ‘democracy panic’ is hardly a coincidence). As the progressive standard bearer Bernie Sanders put it back in 2017, “in the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.”

The architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, George F. Kennan, once observed that “there is nothing in nature more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” And the elected (and, perhaps more importantly, unelected) leaders of our own “embattled democracy” with over 2 million men and women under arms; over 5,000 nuclear warheads; surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean to the east and 12,000 miles of ocean to the west, is widely thought to remain vulnerable to coercion by an ‘Axis of Authoritarianism’ led by China and Russia – with a supporting (and growing) cast made up of Iran, North Korea, and occasionally, depending on the politics of the analyst, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and certain political parties in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and France.

The prevailing narrative has a shapeshifting quality to it: some days we are informed that the global authoritarian threat is driven by shadowy agents of disinformation employed by the Kremlin; at other times, the threat comes in the form of authoritarian oligarchs and authoritarian kleptocrats. But at all times, our democracy – and the right of our “allies” such as Ukraine to practice democracy – is said to be under threat by the authoritarian axis. This, then, is the narrative, and in Washington, as in America at large, it is the narrative that counts, never mind the substance. As the essayist and president of the Simone Weil Center, Paul Grenier, has elsewhere observed, to the extent that there is a debate over foreign policy in this country, “what we universally observe is the substitution of narrative for reality.” Such preferred narratives “either advance the interests of this or that segment of the power elite, or advance the careers of this or that sector of the national security bureaucracy. That these narratives typically ignore what is true and what is in touch with reality turns out to be of little concern.”

Cold Wars, New and Old

The Cold Wars, both new and old, by which I mean those wars of ’necessity’ waged by Washington on behalf of the Western democracies against, respectively, ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘communism,’ have been, from the first, a project of the American elite dating back to the administration of Harry S. Truman.

On January 31, 1968, at the very moment US troops were under furious assault half a world away in Saigon and Hue, a German academic named Hans Magnus Enzensberger was composing a letter of resignation from his position at Wesleyan University in the rather more congenial environs of Middletown, Connecticut. He had seen enough of America; it was time to move on. Enzensberger felt that “most Americans have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world.” And Vietnam was not, as many believed, “an unfortunate accident” made by otherwise well-intentioned men; it was, rather, “the most visible outcome… the bloodiest test case of a coherent international policy which applied to five continents.” It was a project of an American “ruling class” which he considered to be “the most dangerous body of men on earth.” “In one way or another,” wrote Enzensberger, “this class is a threat to anyone who is not part of it… its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world.”

Same as it ever was.

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Democrat NJ Mayor’s Wife Injured After Fleeing Illegal Alien Crashes into Her Vehicle During High-Speed ICE Escape

New Jersey’s sanctuary-state disaster has delivered a brutal dose of reality to one Democrat family.

An illegal alien fleeing federal immigration officers reportedly sped through a red light and slammed into a Tesla driven by Dr. Penelope Cohen, the wife of East Brunswick Democrat Mayor Brad Cohen.

Dr. Cohen suffered a leg injury and was transported to a hospital following the September 2 wreck in North Brunswick, according to News 12 New Jersey.

The mayhem began at approximately 7:30 a.m. near Route 130 and Washington Place, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation.

According to ICE, officers stopped the Acura and ordered the driver to exit. The illegal alien allegedly refused repeated lawful commands, prompting agents to attempt to remove him from the vehicle.

Instead of complying, the driver reportedly hit the gas, barreled through a red light and crashed into the rear of Cohen’s Tesla.

CBS News New York reported that both occupants of the Tesla were transported to a hospital with minor injuries. Mayor Cohen declined to discuss the crash, saying only that he was caring for his wife.

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